Guts by Gary Paulsen Page B

they weren’t so loud, and my feet were still relatively dry and even retained a slight warmth. But the boots were only calf high and the water in the swamp was sure to be deeper than that. I would probably flood my boots.
    But there were deer tracks all over the swamp.
    And I did have matches to light a fire and there were plenty of dead birch trees around for tinder—birch bark is the quickest way to get a fire going in wet weather. If I got wet, I could dry out.
    So I nocked an arrow to the string to be ready, stepped off into the swamp and found I had underestimated the difficulties.
    On my first step I sank through the muck on top and both boots filled with cold, muddy water. I had been looking down on the swamp from a small hill but now that I was in it, I could see that the grass was much taller than I had originally thought. Once I had sunk into the mat beneath the vegetation, the grass was about four inches over my head and I was soon walking down a narrow almost-tunnel with water pouring into my boots. I could see only about four feet in front of me.
    Nobody could call this hunting. Inside thirty yards I was simply trying to keep moving, and in another thirty I just wanted out. I won’t say I panicked—I wasn’t in any danger. But I was becoming intensely uncomfortable and most decidedly not in control of my situation and decided that if I didn’t come to higher and drier ground in a very short time I would turn and go back.
    I took one step, then heard the first strange sound.
    There are many different aspects of sound in the woods. Birds sing; small things—usually sounding like very large things—scurry through the grass and underbrush and make rustling noises; sometimes heavy things crash down, maybe a dead limb at last falling off a rotten tree pulled apart by a bear looking for grubs or ants to eat.
    But all the sounds have reason to them, a sense of belonging. There are only two things that stand out and cause the hair to go up on the back of your neck. One is a sudden silence; during day and night, during rain, even during snow, there is some sound, and when it quits it almost always means that something not good is happening. Perhaps a wolf is moving through, looking for something to kill, or a hawk or an owl is hunting over the place where you are standing. Recently I talked to a man who was attacked by a great white shark while diving and he said that just before he was hit, the ocean, which is usually deafening, grew strangely quiet. “I should have listened to the silence,” he said, shaking his head. “I’d still have my right leg.”
    The second kind of auditory alert is sudden or very loud sound, and the combination of the two when it is completely unexpected can be a life-altering experience. I was once in a tent half-asleep when what I took to be a tree limb poked me through the tent material, and I angrily kicked out at it, only to find that I had just kicked a bear in the backside. It had leaned against the tent while smelling around the dead campfire for bits of food. The ensuing snort did wonders for waking me up and changing my whole attitude about kicking bear in the butt.
    Now, in the swamp, I heard a great bounding noise, as if something large had jumped in the air and landed on the swamp grass just ahead of me.
    And then, half a second later, another one, then another, all coming closer, straight at me.
    All of this in about two seconds. Automatically, I raised the bow and drew the arrow back, until the back of the three-sided broadhead rested against the belly of the bow just over my hand.
    Another bound.
    All was in slow motion now. I had a fleeting thought that it had been raining hard and that the feathers on my arrow were wet. I wondered how it would affect the flight or accuracy of the shot. Then another bound and the grass in front of me parted, and coming at me, at a full run, was a twelve-point buck (six on each side, counted