Closeness

The mornings were usually filled with birdsong. Those songs would wake her while the sun was little more than colour splashed along the horizon. It was a gentle way to wake, and it made her appreciate the thinness of her tent walls, the closeness of nature.

But this morning was different. Instead of song, she woke to silence. A deep, total silence.

Silence seemed an odd thing to notice, but it chilled her. She sat up slowly, cautiously. The screen of her tent hid nothing of the forest around her. Evergreens and aspens stood as they always did, but their branches seemed strangely empty. Where were the birds who sang, the squirrels who chittered and scurried? Wherever they were, they knew better than to be found.

Like them, she felt a bone-deep instinct for stillness. She held her breath, somehow certain she was not alone. There was nothing to see, but she felt it: the patient presence of a predator.

What could she do but wait? She willed herself to be as small, as silent as possible. She saw nothing, yet she heard the slow, heavy sliding of something just beyond her walls. No footfalls, no scuffling. Nothing like the searching snout of a bear or the sniffing nose of a wolf. But larger, larger by far. And close. Closer.

For the first time, she regretted the thinness of her tent walls, the closeness of nature. Nature—or something like it.

∼ Miriam H. Harrison