Blair Witch The Secret Confessions of Rustin Parr

Chapter Eleven It didn't take me more than ten minutes to know I was in trouble.As I said before, I'm a city boy. Set me down at nine in the morning in Miami or Baltimore -- or any big metropolis, for that matter -- and by lunchtime I'll not only have found the best lasagna in a twenty-mile radius, I'll be on my second helping.I can speak the language, is what I'm saying. But in the great wide open...Well, maybe Davy Crockett could navigate without a compass or find an old Indian path by looking at the way the grass bent in the wind, but the only way I could get around was by paying close attention to the big blue splotches of paint splattered on the trees along the trail.My usual routine was, pick up the trail at Black Rock Road and follow it into the forest for maybe fifteen minutes. That's how long it took to come to my little hideaway -- a patch of grass on a gentle rise, with a nice view of the town below. I'd sit, unpack my lunch, and eat, hoping for a little wildlife to come along: a deer, a rabbit, even a squirrel would do. I'd share a little of my meal, then pack up and head back to my car.Only this afternoon, as I walked down the rise, it didn't level off. It just kept going down. The trees got a little taller, the undergrowth a little thicker, and at some point, the blue splotches of paint vanished.And then I came to a stream. In the half dozen times I'd been out in these woods, I had never seen a stream before."This is not good," I recall telling myself.I hiked back up the hill, following the exact route I'd taken down, looking for those blue splotches of paint. Only when I got to the top, nothing was even remotely familiar about the terrain.I took a deep breath.Panic, I knew, was not an appropriate response. It wasn't that big a forest: I'd seen maps. All I had to do was get my bearings, and I'd be fine.My biggest problem was that I was equipped for a picnic, not a hike.I had no water in my knapsack. The first time I had told him I was going out in the forest, Burt Atkins had marched me into the general store (which, it turned out, he owned as well), and pulled a canteen down from the shelf"Buy it," he said.I checked the price and told him that on a cleric's wages, a canteen was not an option at this time."I'll buy it for you, then," he said, and pulled out a wad of bills from his pocket.I refused: the sin of false pride, in retrospect.But now that I thought of that canteen, and the water that I didn't have, I remembered something else about water that John Flynn had told me once while we were hiking: "If you get lost, find running water and follow it. The towns in these hills grew up around the streams and rivers: they'll lead you back to people."So I hiked back down the hill and started following the stream.Going back to the stream also had one immediate plus: it gave me a ready source of drinking water. Which I took advantage of more than once as the hours passed and the shadows lengthened and the forest around me showed no signs of petering out.Flynn had shown me a map of the Black Hills, and I wouldn't have thought I could've hiked for so long and not come to the edge of them. Still, not the end of the world. It was summer, warm enough even at night that, even if worse came to worst and I had to sleep out in the woods, I would be nothing more than a little sore when I made my way back to civilization, as I surely would the next day.I undid my Roman collar, unbuttoned my shirt, and set off again.My stomach was the part of me most upset at the thought of not returning home: it had been hours since lunch, and I had little hope in my ability to find anything remotely edible in the wild.But just as I was getting ready to give up and seek shelter for the night (and I would have been asleep in minutes, my body exhausted from a full day's worth of hiking), the stream took a sharp bend to the left, the undergrowth suddStern, D. A. is the author of 'Blair Witch The Secret Confessions of Rustin Parr' with ISBN 9780743411530 and ISBN 0743411536.