From “Atalanta: An Anatomy”
A decade ago, a search party found her after three long, hot summer days in northern Iran: sixteen-months old, asleep in a bear’s den, shadows furring her face. Flashlights aimed at the threshold made her blink. A few cubs trailed behind her. Some in the search party saw her bearskin and some saw her human frock. She toddled out of the cave into time, which stopped briefly so she could move through it into their uncertain embrace.
Thirty years earlier, the girl, age five, wandered into a forest near her village in Yugoslavia. She was already lost when two bear cubs struck up a game of chase with her. They climbed trees and tagged one another. She followed them into the dark until their breathing became a warm nest. The mother bear shared three sets of functioning nipples. The rhythm of latch and let down kept her alive until a farmer brought her home months later.
In the early spring of 1935, the girl attacked hunters after they shot a bear on a mountain in Turkey. From the shadows of a forest stand, she rushed them making an indescribable sound. As a two-year-old, she had gone missing from her village. The bear’s den became the girl’s. Scars shagged her knees. Her nails had grown into dirty claws. Her voice backed into her throat like a swarm of black bees. Once out of the forest, motherless, she sat on her bed for hours, gazing in a mirror. On the mirror’s iridescent surface, she tried to gather a face, to condense what she saw into a girl.
***
The dark-haired girl interrupted the sun coming through the oak leaves in my backyard. Dress smeared through her skin, she shifted through the tree’s silhouette, walking as if she were the boy her father had wanted. In his failure and half-heartedness, her father had not killed the baby girl himself, but left her for dead on a mossy rock in the mountains. He would not be father to this. He would be generalissimo, he would rule men. The baby screamed at the forest canopy until her voice molted, a ghostly mew piling softly around her body. It was impossible to be near. A brown bear, looking for her cubs, followed that infant noise. She picked up the baby and licked her human face. She licked and licked that face until all its nerves lay flat like fur. She shaped Atalanta with her own smooth tongue, held her by her scruff, suckled her, and did not put her down.
***
Shadows move like waves on the land, bringing and taking her dreams. The woods vanish into a hole in the ground where she spends the night inside night. The sky screeches and responds. She trembles on soft needles; breathing presses her from all sides. Her skin has not yet given up its lanugo. She has learned to lick her own hands and feet, to become a vanishing point. Furtive involuntary pleasures form in her mouth. A body hovers, hesitating over her. If there’s one thing the woods do not need to tell her, it is what a body standing over her at night means. She pretends to sleep, chews her nails into points. Everything changes though nobody announces that it is night. An aurora singes stellar light, its magnetic plasma rewiring her synapses. One life bleeds into the next, where she is lost. Because she cannot imagine herself here, she imagines her father as a child in the woods. If she could be here without him, she would.
***
In Greece, a hunting party spotted the girl in the den. What on earth? They captured her. They rescued her. Whose story do you want to hear? Was the girl lost or found? These hunters trapped her, named her, and raised her in their own lodge, but she was twice foreign to them. Running ahead of them on the trail, she might have been leading the hunters like a guide, or she might have been their quarry, just out of range. Either way their weapons were ready. When I say hunters, I mean fathers. As they walked further in the woods, she ran in and out of their world. Bears had taught her to shuttle herself into the place she wanted to be. When afraid, she knew to turn to stone, then vigorously shake off the feeling. From the hunters she learned that prey reek when chased. She did not question the facts of the forest; she was the shared understanding between hunted and hunters.
***
A gang of hill-men spot her on the road. They drop their picks and shovels and slowly surround her. She breaks through their circle and speeds away on all fours. Within an hour, they rope her, tie her hands and feet, and take her to the hospital in a large basket. This is in India, 1914. A nurse names her Goongi, which means “Dumb,” after she growls and bites the nurse’s hand. Maybe the girl is being social; maybe the gesture is an opening volley, a playful nip. There’s a mutation of language at work, an excess brimming over. Her eyes do not meet anyone else’s. She climbs trees and eats raw meat. When she sleeps, her ankles make small circular movements, bones discharging. No one can explain the scratches on the girl’s shoulders and chest, though a forest ranger recalls seeing her earlier at the heels of a bear, who he shot dead.
***
Atalanta puts a root in her mouth and sucks colors out one by one. Wildflowers hold her in their gaze. “What made me white, that makes me red,” she tells the hunters. She chokes the bear tints from her voice; human hues feather and circle one another behind her eyes. Atalanta chases herself, piling moment upon moment upon moment trying to reach the present. She senses me here and hides us both in her story, my girlhood lost in her woods. I hear her voice needling like pine in my brain. In thinking about her father, Atalanta hunts for memories of herself. Are any of those images still enough to capture? Atalanta is not a fossil; she is a red streak melting luminously into the disorientating brightness of noon. Her speed blurs worlds. I try to run past. There may be two ancient Atalantas but their stories share the same picture; they memorize the same disorderly forest where her reds disarray. No father would stop at that.
***
In one breath of alarm, the girl flees through the woods into blank memory. She gallops through the mountainside on all fours. Short trees sprout up, delicate leaves, fiddleheads, woodland poppies. Currents whip the paths through the grass. She walks until a cliff breaks her thought. She hears the cave snoring, her blood marching through it. She hears an arrow shot. The birdsong stops. Finches sip the open ass wounds of blue-footed boobies. A tree has a hundred mouths. In her confusion, she kisses a rock. The sun she can pinch between her fingers, and day unrolls through her skin. She could always go nowhere. Her voice skids, a ripple, a gust, a swarm so fully part of her world—to hear it, you have to listen for it.
***
I see her mirage before me as if the moon could mirror us. I chase her through Pennsylvania State Game Land: tangled and deep. I run these woods in a trance at midnight, trying to exhaust myself enough to sleep. I bolt ahead of my thoughts and try to be loud about my approach. Dark shapes up ahead propel me within eyeshot: not a hermit, not a bear, not a hunter, not a lost child. I run out of breath but keep moving. At the mountaintop, I run past a rusted tower covered with graffiti and piss. Governor Dick, we call it. I run past rotting trees, past ferns and mushrooms, through months of woods. I run past small dirt mounds where we buried the beer we bought from little kids who stole it from their parents; past the holes I made in the ground looking for it, past vines covered with poison ivy, and the sound of snapping branches. Woods are a kind of night, like the space of late childhood itself, where, behind a hollow felled tree, we outwait whoever we imagine searches for us.
***
Atalanta thinks she could just as easily grow up into an adult, bear, man, wind, dog, or wife. She looks at her small hand, a plasma and hemoglobin relief map. She looks at her mother’s hirsute paw. She does not think: Light performing an optical trick. She does not think about the deception of surfaces. Blood is bright inside a body. Even if it is always red, not all blood is the same. The Greeks fed the sun live human hearts—believed to be fragments of the sun—to fuel its continual orbit. When I say Greeks, I mean ancients, as in the past becomes a foreign country. Looking up at the sky, Atalanta fell and smashed her head. Her hand instinctually rose to the gash. The first touch is a wet, dizzy shock. When she looks at her fingers, they have turned into pure color. Or, since color is never absolute, she looks at her bloody fingers and understands: something hidden becoming a pulsing fragment of the sun.
***
The mind takes place in blood. Its blood is a lit branching, a capillary action she climbs to disappear. Into the shades scraped by bark, into a green condensary, barefoot and drunk on the heady scent of cherries, she climbs the tree. Sun dapples her face; light hums under her skin. She can lift the whole sky, deer paths, a hill descending into brambles. Her eyes zoom onward, but her body feels unbearably heavy, focused in the crook of a branch. Her limbs magnify. Branches touch her hair. To branch is to digress—limbs diverge of their human body. Lumbering around the rough bark, she cuts her arm. As tree’s depth expands, as a sweet, warm, thick taste cherries her mouth, distance warps into a pulse. The wind trembles; pale blossoms storm around her. She learns speed by keeping still, by waiting out the scrimmage of appetite. An ant crawls over her knee. She swallows cherry meat. She rolls the pit over her tongue and spits, but she does not watch as it falls to the ground.
***
The girl walks in shadows balancing on river stones. For a long time, she can’t make anything out. She feels nothing, and the opaque river is receptive to her blankness. Atalanta had impersonated her blue shadows walking down that bank years before. I make space for them inside me, inside my blank memory of childhood. Not blank exactly. Stories migrate, meaning migrates through a labyrinth, which is the path sound travels to enter our bodies. There is no way to be unchanged. I unwind a red thread. Atalanta had a word for “blood” long before she had one for “red.” The hunters track her bloody footprints through the pass they think no human before them has walked. They follow the foil to a bear’s den, where they find the dark, lanky teenage girl.
***
Walking along the river that day, her listening exceeds the powers of listening and transforms into thought. She walks in a stream of sensorium and memory. Sentences pursue each other out of the caverns of her mind. She tries to walk off into her words, but they are not infinite. She reaches the river’s far bank and looks for a new opening. Only what’s missing like a father is infinite. In far-flung distances, stars burn themselves out as fast as they can. She follows a sentence, follows a shooting star, an animal path, a sonic thread out into the open. One wolf howl travels 140 miles, its edges humming. The circling voices of hunters, their flute-stopped vibrato that bear cubs chew in their den. Suck of mud in a bog a mile away. Crack of a branch, and the flies stir upward. The sadness she swallowed as a child flares. Lights her path. She sets a snare. She raises her face. The sky is so blue, she wants to kill it.
***
The cub-child pushes her snout into the potential world. Wooly fur and hazel eyes, she rollicks at the border, animated by wonder. When I think of the past, it feels like I am recalling a dream, but one from a time when I might be or see a human-bear offspring. Beowulf is the son of a bear and a woman. Male bears routinely loved and sometimes raped human women, in the imagination and in the early world. Their offspring were invincible warriors who founded noble lines. Bear clans are widespread in Native American tribes and Danish royalty began with a bear. Whoever mothers you transmits her nature. The thirteenth-century intellectual William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris, contended that bear sperm is almost identical to human sperm. He said that bear meat tastes like human flesh. These affinities were enough for him to lay down our moral obligation to bear-human hybrids, and for decades, he advocated for the rights of cub-children. The question wasn’t if but how to regard a strong mutant. He insisted they be acknowledged, accepted, and raised as fully human, which is only one form among many that the world repeats in everything alive or drawn on stone.
***
Atalanta lives in a deep mountain cave that faces a sheer cliff backed into woodland. Vines climb the exterior rock and oak hangs like a curtain over the entrance, a twilight cast over the opening. When she’s inside, she hums as she moves by instinct and memory. Its dark festival of green scents lets no sky enter. Outside, sightings of her—darting like a star, she flashes like lightning—become legend. She exposes miles of rolling speed. In sunlight on the soft high grass, laurels, grapes, hyacinths, and crocuses, her afterimage duplicates itself wherever I look: The sun had reddened her face so that it looked just as if she were blushing. But she did not blush; she met the eyes of humans and animals directly. She had a fiery, masculine gaze… the result of having been nurtured by an animal. To look at her is to understand the role that retreat into the forest plays in our thoughts. If my thoughts wander, if Atalanta wanders, we were out of place to begin with.
Christine Hume is the author of an experimental memoir in the form of three interlinked essays, Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2021), as well as three books of poetry and six chapbooks, most recently a collaboration with Jeff Clark, Question Like a Face (Image Text Ithaca), a Brooklyn Rail Best Nonfiction Book of 2017, and A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story (PANK Books). She curated and introduced two special issues the American Book Review: on #MeToo and on Girlhood. Find her prose in Harper’s, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Architecture and Culture, Journal of Narrative Theory and many other journals. Since 2001, she has been faculty in the interdisciplinary Creative Writing program at Eastern Michigan University.