north of Altadena

When I first reached the high-mountain campsite, it was just me and the host. He was in Ranger digs but his badge said volunteer. He was a troll, or as close to a troll as any person I’ve ever seen.

Looking up periodically from the book I was reading, I’d find him lurking behind a tree, his car, or the cinder-block outhouse, facing my way but never really making eye-contact.
He’d ignore hikers clearly in need of guidance but then harangue anyone who managed to track him down with a stump speech about his ‘hybrid’ religion, which boiled down to him mentioning, repeatedly, things like heaven, and heavenly father, and Jesus.
Talk of how all religions contain the golden rule.
Praise of a life lived in virtue, warnings about one lived in sin.
An email newsletter for his non-profit.
He’d address men as ‘brother’ in what seemed to me an unconsciously racist manner. He was an Internet troll come to life. He even looked like a troll, all chubby and red-faced, his hair so blond it was almost white.


After the first day, I learned to simply walk away from him whenever he got to talking. I felt bad about treating him like that, but I had recently started practicing being conscious and respectful of my own time - even if it meant hurting a few feelings, here and there.

The site next to mine was occupied when I crawled out of my tent on the morning of my third day.
A couple of attractive girls.
A few cool dudes.
I helped them get set up. We became friends quickly.
The drugs we’d brought soon became communal property. Except for the troll stopping by randomly every couple of hours to remind us of rules we weren’t breaking, the day progressed smoothly.
Things took a turn when one of the girl’s boyfriend showed up with a sack of cocaine in one pocket and a handgun in the other.


A bunch of us were enjoying an early evening campfire, laughing and telling stories, sparking blunts, snorting lines, sipping beers. A cellphone was playing upbeat music.
“Hey, man,” the campsite host said to me, yelling over from the road before walking uninvited toward us. Someone grabbed the bong and hid it from view. “I’d like to talk to you about what we spoke about yesterday, about the futility of existence.” I stood up and headed him off a dozen feet from the paraphernalia-strewn picnic table, enduring his sophomoric rant for long enough that my beer got warm.
He kept looking past me while talking, staring at the bikini-clad young ladies dancing near the fire. As soon as they realized he was watching, they put on shirts and sat down in a protective huddle.
I eventually removed him by backing away from him until we were standing next to his tent.

After the third such intrusion into our friendly congress, the boyfriend said, “If motherfucking Bobby Hill comes over here again for no reason, trying to creep on my girl and her friends, I’ll… fuck… I’ll kill him.” I glanced over at the troll and couldn’t help but laughing out loud - his resemblance to the son in TV’s ‘King Of The Hill’ was uncanny.
The boyfriend had arrived drunk that morning and hadn’t stopped drinking, since. During a dinner of burnt sausages and cold beans, he had placed his automatic pistol on the table in front of him.


The sun was just starting to set when the mountain above us caught fire, blocking our only exit route. We had enough water and food to last us for a couple of days, and our campsite sat near a running stream in a moist hollow. This knowledge, and the stupefying drugs, calmed our fears.
Often, when fire destroys a region’s upper vegetation, its fauna escapes the flames by heading downhill. Soon, the underbrush around us was thick with small animals, rodents fleeing and snakes crawling past us, headed for the nearby stream. Then, the animals got bigger. We saw a desert fox. A small herd of deer. A mountain goat. The rising plume of smoke caught the sun’s dying rays, scattering them downward to bathe our campsite in a fading, ethereal glow.

“I hate to break up the party, but everyone has to get ready to evacuate,” the troll called over to us from the road, adjusting the straps on his oversized hiking backpack. Pots hung from it, clanking loudly. A radio sat at his waist, crackling. Although there was still light in the sky, his headlamp was turned on full blast, causing those of us facing him to wince.
“My friend just texted me that the only road out of here is blocked, bro,” the boyfriend said, yelling drunkenly over his shoulder. “So relax. Nobody’s leaving here anytime soon.”
Bobby Hill stood there for a moment, shocked.
“I said get ready to move out,” he hissed through clenched teeth, his voice shaking with rage. He stepped over the rocks that bordered our campsite. As his light played over the ground in front of him we could see that his hands were balled into fists.

The boyfriend fluidly shifted position to face him, picking up the pistol in the same motion. He fired three shots, two of which hit the troll in the torso. Bits of cloth shot from the backpack as the rounds exited Bobby’s body and kicked up tufts of dirt on the embankment behind him.
Before any of us could speak, a brown bear came crashing through the underbrush near the cinder-block outhouse. The apex predator turned our way and focused in on the troll, who was stumbling backward, geysering blood, and making a strange, burbling, screaming sound.
Behind the bear came two cubs scampering.
She hit Bobby in the chest with a massive paw, knocking him clear out of his backpack, then pounced. As we ran for the nearby food pantries that were big enough to fit a full-grown human and strong enough to resist a bear attack (according to the manufacturer’s sticker), she started to chew his face off, throwing chunks of meat back at her mewling cubs.

In the shelter next to mine was the boyfriend. He was breathing heavily but didn’t seem too upset.
“Is everybody alright?” he shouted, once the sounds of dragging and snarling had stopped and the night had once more grown silent.
I cracked the door to my shelter and peered around carefully.
“I think we’re good,” I said. “As far as I can tell, she’s gone.”
The boyfriend crawled slowly from his own pantry.
“This shit stays between us, right?” he said, getting to his feet and wiping dust off of his pants with the hand not holding the pistol.
The troll’s backpack was still there, but his body was gone. The boyfriend followed the trail of Bobby’s blood with a tactical flashlight attached to his sidearm. It led downhill, disappearing into the stream’s gloomy, gathering shadows.
We looked at each other, then shrugged.
“All I saw was the bear attack,” I said, whereupon the boyfriend tucked the pistol into his waistband, threw his arm over my shoulder, and walked me back to the picnic bench.
“I knew you were the homie,” he said to me.
Everyone had a good laugh as we cracked open fresh beers and the boyfriend cut up thick lines of blow. Then he stood, gathered up the three spent shell casings, grabbed Bobby’s backpack, and spent the next hour carefully burning every bit of it and its contents in a distant fire-pit.

“As long as we make it out of here alive,” his girlfriend said, “you guys wanna do this again, uh, next month?”
I was the first to nod.

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or individuals is purely coincidental.]
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© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥