Taggart
His shirt was pretty well soaked through with sweat, and the wind had him shivering without his jacket. It wasn’t just the cold that had him shaking—his body wanted another fix as well. He kept plodding forward, one step at a time. His legs and feet were ready to give out from under him—he’d put some serious mileage on his body for the last few hours. Taggart stared down at his watch—an old Sector watch that the wife had given him on their tenth wedding anniversary. Almost five o’clock. Seven hours without a drink. He knew. He’d been counting the hours.
All he could see were trees in every direction. He swatted at a low-hanging tree limb, and a blanket of snow powder shook off and fell onto his face and neck. As the cold touched his skin, he found that he didn’t feel the anger or any form of loathing against the wilderness he stood in anymore. All that hostility got swept away with the wind that just wouldn’t let up.
Part of him wanted to sit down and rest; the other part of him wanted to keep walking. With every new step, he felt a little more clarity seeping in. He had probably been walking in circles for the last seven hours. Just like his life for the last twenty years—walking in circles. But all this—the lack of sleep, the hours of hiking, and the absence of booze—had brought with it a distorted sense of lucidity.
The coyote had not only spared his life but had given him something as well. A simple, primitive message. He didn’t want to die. Didn’t want to give up on this life just yet. Maybe it could be fixed. Others had done it before him, and others would do it after.
He stopped in his tracks as his movement scared up a white-tailed jackrabbit, and the animal bounded up and over drifts of snow and fallen trees with easy grace and little effort. He heard its paws thumping on the snow, and the sound grew softer as the jackrabbit slipped deeper into the trees.
When he started walking again, his boots got tangled up with each other. He stumbled, almost fell, but caught himself against a tree that was as big around as he was. His body craved rest, his mind some sleep, but if he stopped now, he’d never get himself moving again. Can’t fall asleep out here. He’d end up sleeping through the night and freezing to death.
Muscles burning and bones aching, Taggart kept forward momentum.
From all his reading over the years, Taggart knew a little bit about Native American vision quests and Inuit peoples participating in sensory-deprivation rituals—long periods of walking in mountainous areas with no food or water, the body needing some sleep. He knew that he still had booze coursing through his system and that his spirituality paled in comparison to most, but somehow he seemed to be inching his way out from the dark cloud he’d been walking under for far too long.
If he could somehow find his way out of these woods, he convinced himself that he could find his way out of his addiction.
Get me out of these woods and I’ll change. I swear I’ll change. Just get me out.
