Spirit Run:
by
Kenneth Alexander
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Kenneth R. Alexander on Smashwords
Spirit Run:
Copyright © 2007 by Kenneth R Alexander
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Spirit Run
“Mow the grass Ken” my father echoed as I pretended not to hear, creeping around the edge of the garage and onto the road before he could repeat himself. I was going to run; nothing else mattered for the next hour, just me and the plodding of my Red Ball tennis shoes on the dirt trail. It was more than just the running; the woods were like a home to me with boundless spaces and pristine views. I could be free when I ran along the winding lake trails. I believe the spirit of the woods was in and all around me that day. I was about to be introduced to one such spirit I would never forget.
There are things that make running in a northern Minnesota woods challenging. Enough speed to outrun the mosquitoes is assumed, it is the deer flies that are the real challenge, it is hard to run and extract biting flies out of your hair without losing your balance, it takes wind-sprints to lose them then they seem to always find you again. The three minute sprint start along the gravel road is an attempt to get to Chastain’s field before a passing car bellows a choking cloud of dust. Today I meet no cars, only a few flies, it is a good day to run.
I can smell the recently cut hay and that late summer promise of fall in the air and hear the always present blue jays yakking to one another along the edge of the field. I am starting to feel pretty good now that the endorphins are being churned out. Running faster down the first hill and onto the trail along the lake into the domain I love, the wild-woods. Lake Clear Water is only partially obscured from the trail and I can see the sun on the water, the floating lily-pad leaves, blackbirds are chirping their distinctive calls in the waving cattails. A lone loon floats in the nearby bay but he is silent now, loons really only get talkative in the evening or early morning.
We named the campsite along the trail as kids, “Cow Skull Camp” it was just around the next bend; someone had taken the time to find a cow’s skull and place it on a limb below the camp at the edge of the lake, it stayed there for years as we grew up, bleached bone at the lake edge. My pace was steady as I passed through the campsite, it was empty, its most common state.
Next was the low area before the footbridge which crosses over the narrow creek beside the ever present beaver dam that feeds one side of the lake. The landscape changes to bumpy bog and mounds of six foot high cut grass, the kind of grass that hacks at your legs if you are dumb enough to approach without long pants. You have to keep your eyes on your feet to run in a bog, or you could be there with a broken leg until somebody misses you. Not knowing how the moving ground will respond under your step, you concentrate and keep your head down, miss this lump, jump that one, zig and then zag.
Half way through the bog I look up for a second to check the path ahead “Oh my God!” an eight point buck standing in the middle of the footpath not fifteen feet away, facing me, and I am running full tilt right at him! My heart stops but I keep going another step and then another finally remembering to stop. Now his huge antlers are less than five feet from my face, his deep black eyes looking right into my soul, my heart pounds in my ears and my mouth moves but nothing comes out. He lowers his head shortening the distance between us even further and seems to be contemplating the best way to react just like I am. He is powerful in appearance, the muscle of his forward legs and neck rippling through that tan hide, black wet nose, and I can hear his breath. We look at each other for what was most likely only a second or two, both of us not quite sure what to do, he with the upper hand but unaware of that fact. Finally I react by turning my back on him and running like a scared track star for a good two hundred feet, bog or no bog. I glance once over my shoulder, and he is no longer on the trail. He made a slight splash as I heard him jump the creek and then nothing. He was gone.
Running back the way I had come I thought about what had just happened. The look in the buck big eyes, he could have attacked and made real mess of me, of course he did not. Maybe he is representing something or someone from the spirit of the woods, perhaps the souls of all who have gone before me. I know American Indian cultures believe that a person’s soul can come back through animals; maybe this buck was from my past or from my future and was here to influence me. He achieved that goal; I remember this incident like it happened yesterday with all the vivid details I have just described, clear and fresh in my mind even though this happened to me thirty-three years ago when I was only fifteen.
Many of my friends are hunters and routinely kill that bucks brethren, I had never joined them. I always thought killing such animals a waste and should not be classified as a sport. Perhaps if my hunter friends would came face to face with a buck like I did, unarmed and at their mercy, they would reconsider the idea of sport hunting. I have thought for a long time now that hunting would be fair sport only if both sides had even odds. This does not go over well with most of the sportsman I know. After this incident I did not kill so much as a squirrel again. It just no longer made sense to kill animals. On that day I felt the spirit of the animal, a mixture of power, fear and peace all at the same time. Maybe animals can’t speak with a voice by but they can say a lot in the right situation.