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I took a deep breath, willing myself to be calm. I could figure this out. I’d been heading north. All I had to do was find the sun and I’d know where east was and then I just had to go south. Easy enough. But when I peered into the woods I couldn’t see farther than a few feet. The honeysuckle shrubs and vines formed a dense underbrush that I couldn’t see through to the sky. I was in an enormous thicket.
And I wasn’t alone.
Something was moving in the underbrush a few feet off the trail. I could hear it thrashing against the dry branches.
“Hello?” I called…and then felt stupid. I pushed a branch down to see better. The branches and vines were so intertwined that when I moved one branch the whole shrubbery creaked and moaned. It was like a wicker basket, I thought, or a nest…
Just as I thought the wordnestmy fingers grazed something soft and furry.
I snatched back my hand, imagining I’d found a mouse nest in the branches, but if it was a mouse nest it was a long-abandoned one. Tiny bones fell to the ground at my feet.
The thrashing in the underbrush quickened. Something was trapped. I felt a sickening drop in my stomach. This nasty thicket was sucking the life out of some poor defenseless animal.As it would you, an insinuating voice whispered in my ear.
Angry now, I tore at the vines and branches, some of which had thorns, tunneling into the underbrush. The trapped creature thrashed harder at my approach, whether because it sensed help was coming or thought the hunter had arrived, I didn’t know. Not knowing made me more frantic to reach it—to free it. An awful apprehension that it might be wounded came over me, mixed with the fear that it might strike at me when I reached it. A logical voice in my brain told me that I was crazy to approach a trapped wild animal, but I didn’t seem to be listening to that voice.
I pulled an armful of prickly, berry-heavy vine out of the way and something flew past me. It startled me so badly that I plopped down on my rear, but it was only a bird…a small black bird that flew a few feet before crashing to the ground. Could this little thing really have caused so much noise? But the thicket was quiet now so I supposed it must have been. It had thrashed so hard that it had injured its wing. I moved toward it to see if it could fly and it turned and looked at me with keen yellow eyes. We stared at each other for a long still moment and then it hopped a few inches away from me, flapped its wings, and took off. At the same moment I noticed that sun was slanting across the path, coming from the hole in the shrubbery on my right.
That was east. The bird had gone north. I looked down the path in the direction it had gone, but it had vanished into the trees. Then I turned around and headed south.
