Two innocents in the holy wild, the pair stood gaping at the hairy heap of body on the trail. What terrified them most, the boy told us, was the silence of the pursuit. In the bright afternoon, when she first saw him digging roots across a flowered field and they set off to intersect his course, he was dumb. In the dimming light of dusk, when he turned upon their looming curiosity, he made no sound. And through the long dark, as they wove among the trees not even an exhalation of his breath reached their ears. A grunt or a low growl, they said, would have buoyed their spirits, rallied them, and made him, somehow, less than what he was, more human— comprehensible. They knew him only as the other, as something that did not value them as they valued themselves. We cannot know if what he did, he did by choice, or if he simply stalked them like a simple beast scenting simple prey. Nor can we know, if choosing, he governed what he did by some blunt morality of kinship that reduced the pair to meat, or if in anger or desire he trespassed bounds and rose to sin. The hikers can tell us nothing except how it seemed. Some consciousness, they said, some grim intelligence, seemed to herd them forward, then stand off to watch and wait, to observe before hounding them again.
He had no weapon. His body, a mossy boulder with arms and legs rolling through the trees, was weapon enough. Death, they knew, if it were to come from him, would come as a brutal embrace or a ripping of bone from bone. His presence, overbearing, turned the holy wild to wilderness, changed the innocents from pilgrims to refugees.
Through the night, they said, their only life was language. No hurled stone or branch, no threatening gesture slowed the beast. Words, however, whether shouted at his shape or spoken softly to each other, kept him off. They babbled in the dark, found their camp, their cell phone, and their GPS. While the dumb cold circled, they called and called. At dawn the troopers arrived, the bullet, and the human wild.
—John Leax is professor of English and poet-in-residence at Houghton College. His book Grace Is Where I Live: The Landscape of Faith & Writing has just been reissued in an expanded edition by Wordfarm.
Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
