A lot of us are having a hard
winter this year & would like to be over it. We’ll get there. Trying to
hold back from pushing time. But thinking a spring story might serve as a
mid-winter spring break, of sorts. A short detour to Dreamtown while the roads
clear.
The Temptation of Lilith
I suppose you could say the
kid’s fishing pole is a bad idea. A Snoopy pole – picture of Charlie Brown and
Snoopy on the package, fishing. I don’t know. It might not be that great of an
idea for a gift. Even if there is a kid, it would only be three years old and
no three year old can operate a Snoopy pole, not without help anyway. But
there’s really nothing I can provide, realistically, so I guess the gift is
just my way of being a dad, if by chance I am a dad, and a way to show my
appreciation on the anniversary of our meeting.
I didn’t get her name. Not
sure she had a name, she never spoke.
Not in the way most of us speak. Yet no denying she was a master of body
language able to get her point across. I call her Lilith.
*
Winter had recently gone from
the low country along the river; the newly exposed mast beneath the pines still
snow-damp. The spate hadn’t begun, the major portion of snow still holding on the
high country, so the river was low and in good shape to fish. It’d been warm
the past few days, triggering a hatch of grannom sedges; and it seemed like the whole world was hopping to a swinging
rhythm. It was palpable along the river where the critters make the first big
showing at getting down to the procreation business. Sedges flying around
hooked together. Love was in the air alright. Such a sweet day I couldn’t quit
hiking and ended up four or five miles upstream of the trailhead before
starting to fish. Wild, lonesome, it felt good to be in the back country.
I sing when I feel good and
don’t think there’s anyone around to hear, and I sang out loud: “Do not
for-sake meee O0o0ooh my daarrrlin…. Oh don’t e-verrr let me gO000o …” Hey. Nobody around to be offended. Right?
The fishing was good, but,
weird, after awhile I started to get the feeling I was being watched. I chalked
it up to the energetic nature of the day working senses that’d been shut in the
cabin most of a long winter and now a bit overwhelmed by Mother Nature’s
unfolding charms. I concentrated on casting the wee soft-hackle and minding the
drift.
Like I said, the fishing was
good. Leaning over the water releasing a nice cutthroat, I caught a flash of
movement in the brush.
I stood still, scanning the
woods.
There – a patch of auburn showing
through a break of scrub cedars. Fur. A big animal, I was sure. Then, higher,
another patch of fur showing through the greenery. It jiggled.
No. It wasn’t an elk. An elk
would make a mad dash out of there with a nose full of human at this range, I
reasoned. A bear. Had to be a bear. Okay no big deal, outfitting, I encounter
them all the time. Not grizzlies. Black bears. Unlike grizzly bears, black
bears are fairly shy and will avoid you if you respect their space, usually.
The jiggling color patch was a concern. I estimated it to be about seven feet
above the ground, which meant the critter it belonged to was taller than any
standing black bear. I figured: yup, shit, a grizzly, and a big one,
stalking me, standing over there behind that bush inhaling my scent and licking
its teeth.
“HEY YAH YEEAH!” I made a two
step false charge toward it waving the flyrod over my head.
I held my breath. Thought I
saw it move a bit but my yelling and stomping hadn’t come close to producing
the affect I wanted, which was to get it to flush and run. At this point the
smart thing to do would’ve been to ease back out of there, but I’d already
thrown down a territorial challenge, so I figured the stalking bear might
interpret my retreat as a sign of weakness, inspiring it to more aggressive
stalking. While I swirled in the conundrum, the cedars quivered and out into
full view stepped Lilith.
She was fully eight feet
tall, and not thirty feet away, looking at me.
My mind couldn’t allow it. No.
This was a thing that did not fit my reality frame. I turned my head and looked
toward the stream, considered making another cast and just carrying on with the
fishing, then looked back to see her still standing by the cedars.
Obviously female. She stood
straight, not bent forward like an ape. Other than being eight feet tall and
entirely covered with red fur except for her pink face, she looked human. Well,
closely related to human. A ‘kissing cousin’, forgive the pun. The gold, almond
shaped eyes possessed a considered intelligence and, something else I couldn’t
immediately read. The mouth was straight and broad, showing just a hint of lips
spread across the slight protrusion of a muzzle – not much of a muzzle – but a
muzzle, no getting around it and… not altogether unattractive. Her breasts
weren’t the shoe-sole breasts of an ape, but round, glorious basketballs capped
with distended pomegranates. Her head was crowned with a maelstrom of red hair,
a shade redder than the auburn tone of her fur, matted to dreadlocks, looping to
below her waist. She was striking. Magnificent, really.
I was in shock and off guard
when she rushed me –
Stupidly, I tried to fend her
off with the antique Granger, and even though the old rod was imbued with the
mojo of a hundred rivers and easily worth a thousand dollars, it proved
useless, a limp reed disintegrating to splinters against Lilith’s swift charge.
She snatched me up, tucked me under her arm like a football and ran upstream
covering impossible lengths of ground in a stride. I kicked and flailed like a
crazy man – which served to bring rib-breaking pressure from the giant arm,
forcing me to stop. Caught, crushed, terrorized, I flopped and dangled like a
half-dead carp fated for the canning jar. Hooking up a spur canyon she
proceeded uphill never breaking stride.
This was a bad dream and I
couldn’t wake up. I pissed my waders.
Lilith stopped at a rock
overhang near the top of the ridge. A
bower of cedar branches arranged like a large nest had been laid on a level spot
beneath the overhang. She dropped me into the center of the nest then scrambled
back to study me, the prize.
I didn’t move.
She squatted there for a long
time, watching me.
I observed her while
carefully avoiding direct eye contact. Something in her attitude convinced me
that she didn’t plan to kill me. If that’d been her intent she could have
easily done it by the creek. Still…
Then, slow, deliberate, never
taking her eyes off me, she rose to full height, stretched her arms to the sky
and put her palms together. She smiled. I think. I interpreted the expression
to be a smile. Then she swept her arms out to the sides, each hand assuming a
strange, delicate mudra, and she began to dance, graceful as any hula girl, her
hands like bird wings opening and closing, shifting through a series of
mysterious poses. Something about her… she was entrancing, magnetic. I couldn’t
look away. She was seducing me. I’m not completely thick, I know when I’m being
seduced. The notion was terrifying, yet, the urge to jump up and run was
dissolving, somehow.
Then a thought struck me and
I tensed, imagining a ten foot tall jealous buck sasquatch busting from the
bushes in full-cry fury, grabbing me between his thumb and forefinger and
pulling off my arms and legs and all the other grippable appendages, easy as
plucking petals from a daisy – he loves me… he loves me not… then pinching my
head off. Any sparking aspiration to
romance I might have been entertaining, maybe somewhere in some secret backroom
of my mind, was iced.
Lilith began to sing as she
danced, a song without words, melodic inhalations and exhalations of breath and
rhythmic sighs punctuated with low whistles: “Hih hih hih sweeeeeee,” – all the while her eyes pinning me.
I tend to reason in phases.
First, the reactive, presumptuous monkey-mind phase: I was past that one. I
figured she wasn’t going to kill me, at least not right away.
Then the pragmatic phase: I
reasoned that the beguiling Lilith was under the influence of her biological
clock, ‘in season’, if you will, and there was no male sasquatch available in
the territory, so I was to be That Guy.
That, leading to some
considerations regarding taxonomic boundaries, transitioning me to the meeting
house filled with severe Puritan ancestors who stood me on the precarious
fulcrum between a sense of Darwinian duty, rooted in the pragmatic phase, and a
moral dilemma, which always precedes the final phase: In which I transcend
reason and surrender to The Flow.
Lilith ceased her song,
stopped dancing and stood giving me the soulful eye. Then she stepped to the bower demure as a
maiden, turned her back to me and sank to her knees on the cedar bed, her twin
haystack bottom looming inches from my face. She smelled like a honey-glazed
baked ham. The pink yin-yang between her legs blossomed to a chaotic rose
before my eyes. This girl was good to go no doubt about it.
My call. I possessed the key
to my own salvation. My only hope was to place it into the slot and do my level
best. And I did need to get out of those wet waders…
*
There’s no good reason to
relate the intimate details. I’ve probably divulged too much already. For those
dying of curiosity, I offer that it is an actual fact, the higher primates
really do practice every type of pleasuring enjoyed by folks. We shared the
granola bars from my fishing vest. I was secretly proud when the energetic
Lilith, at the end of my second day of captivity, succumbed to sleep. That’s
when I made the getaway.
I hike in every year on the
anniversary. This year I’m bringing the Snoopy pole and the usual bags of
frozen berries and granola bars. I know she likes granola bars. I’ll leave the
stuff at the old bower under the ledge. Never seen any sign of her since that
time.
Love? Well. You feel something.
~Steven Bird
