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Grade 9

110.32.b.6 

from WILD
by Cheryl Strayed

1. I am technically fifteen days older than the Pacific Crest Trail. I was born in 1968, on September 17, and the trail was officially designated by an act of
Congress on October 2 of that same year. The trail existed in various forms long before that-sections of it having been forged and pieced together since the1930s, when a band of hikers and wilderness enthusiasts first took interest in creating a Mexico-to-Canada trail-but it wasn't until 1968 that the PCT was designated and not until 1993 that it was complete. It was officially dedicated almost exactly two years before I woke that first morning among the Joshua trees that had stabbed me. The trail didn't feel two years old to me. It didn't even feel like it was about my age. It felt ancient. Knowing. Utterly and profoundly indifferent to me.

2. I woke at dawn but couldn't bring myself to so much as sit up for an hour, lingering instead in my sleeping bag while reading my guidebook, still drowsy,
though I'd slept for twelve hours-or at least I'd been reclining that long. The wind had awakened me repeatedly throughout the night, smacking against my
tent in great bursts, sometimes hard enough so the walls whipped up against my head. It died down a few hours before dawn, but then it was something else that woke me: the silence. The irrefutable proof that I was out here in the great
alone.

3. I crawled out of my tent and stood slowly, my muscles stiff from yesterday's hike, my bare feet tender on the rocky dirt. I still wasn't hungry, but I forced
myself to eat breakfast, scooping two spoonfuls of a powdered soy substance called Better Than Milk into one of my pots and stirring water into it before
adding granola. It didn't taste better than milk to me. Or worse. It didn't taste like anything. I might as well have been eating grass. My taste buds had
seemingly gone numb. I continued to press the spoon into my mouth anyway. I'd need the nutrition for the long day ahead. I drank the last of the water in my bottles and awkwardly refilled them from my dromedary bag, which flopped heavily in my hands. According to The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume I: California, I was thirteen miles away from my first water source: Golden Oak Springs, which, in spite of yesterday's poor showing, I expected to reach by day's end.

4. I loaded my pack the way I had the day before in the motel, cramming and wedging things in until nothing more would fit, then attaching the rest by
bungee cords to the outside. It took me an hour to break camp and set off. Almost immediately I stepped over a small pile of scat on the trail, a few feet
from where I'd been sleeping. It was black as tar. A coyote, I hoped. Or was it a mountain lion? I searched the dirt for tracks, but saw none. I scanned the
landscape, ready to see a large feline face among the sagebrush and rocks.

5. I began to walk, feeling experienced in a way I hadn't the day before, less cautious with each step in spite of the scat, stronger beneath my pack. That
strength crumbled within fifteen minutes, as I ascended and then ascended some more, pushing into the rocky mountains, walking switchback after
switchback. My pack's frame creaked behind me with each step, straining from the weight. The muscles of my upper back and shoulders were bound in tense, hot knots. Every so often, I stopped and bent over to brace my hands against my knees and shift the pack's weight off my shoulders for a moment of relief before staggering on.

6. By noon I was up over 6,000 feet and the air had cooled, the sun suddenly disappearing behind clouds. Yesterday it had been hot in the desert, but now I
shivered as I ate my lunch of a protein bar and dried apricots, my sweat-drenched T-shirt growing cold on my back. I dug the fleece jacket out of
my clothing bag and put it on. Afterwards, I lay down on my tarp to rest for a few minutes and, without meaning to, fell asleep.

7. I woke to raindrops falling on my face and looked at my watch. I'd slept for nearly two hours. I hadn't dreamed of anything, hadn't had any awareness that I'd been sleeping at all, as if instead someone had come up behind me and knocked me unconscious with a rock. When I sat up I saw that I was engulfed in a cloud, the mist so impenetrable I couldn't see beyond a few feet. I cinched on my pack and continued hiking through the light rain, though my whole body felt as if it were pushing through deep water with each step. I bunched up my T-shirt and shorts to cushion the spots on my hips and back and shoulders that were being rubbed raw by my pack, but that only made it worse.

8. I continued up, into the late afternoon and evening, unable to see anything except what was immediately before me. I wasn't thinking of snakes, as I'd
been the day before. I wasn't thinking, I'm hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail. I wasn't even thinking, What have I gotten myself into? I was thinking only of
moving myself forward. My mind was a crystal vase that contained only that one desire. My body was its opposite: a bag of broken glass. Every time I moved, it hurt. I counted my steps to take my mind off the pain, silently ticking the numbers off in my head to one hundred before starting over again. The blocks of numbers made the walk slightly more bearable, as if I only had to go to the end of each one.

9. As I ascended, I realized I didn't understand what a mountain was, or even if I was hiking up one mountain or a series of them glommed together. I'd not
grown up around mountains. I'd walked on a few, but only on well-trod paths on day hikes. They'd seemed to be nothing more than really big hills. But they were not that. They were, I now realized, layered and complex, inexplicable and analogous to nothing. Each time I reached the place that I thought was the top of the mountain or the series of mountains glommed together, I was wrong. There was still more up to go, even if first there was a tiny slope that went
tantalizingly down. So up I went until I reached what really was the top. I knew it was the top because there was snow. Not on the ground, but falling from the sky, in thin flakes that swirled in mad patterns, pushed by the wind.

10. I hadn't expected it to rain in the desert, and I certainly hadn't expected it to snow. As with the mountains, there'd been no deserts where I grew up, and
though I'd gone on day hikes in a couple of them, I didn't really understand what deserts were. I'd taken them to be dry, hot, and sandy places full of snakes, scorpions, and cactuses. They were not that. They were that and also a bunch of other things. They were layered and complex and inexplicable and
analogous to nothing. My new existence was beyond analogy, I realized on that second day on the trail.

11. I was in entirely new terrain.

VOYAGEURS
by Scott Russell Sanders

1. In morning mist on a northern river, a slab of stone tumbled from a boulder into the water, where it came to life and floated, turning into a sleek black head that swam in circles dragging a V of ripples behind it. A beaver, I thought, as I
watched from shore. But no sooner had I named it than the creature bobbed up and then dove, exposing a long neck and humped back and pointed tail. Not a beaver, I realized, but an otter. I was pleased to find a label for this animate scrap, as though by pinning the right word on the shape-shifter I could hold it still.

2. Presently a second otter, then a third and fourth broke free of the boulder and slithered down into the mercury sheen of the river. They dove without a splash, their tails flipping up to gleam like wands in the early sunlight, and they
surfaced so buoyantly that their forepaws and narrow shoulders lifted well out of the water. Then one after another they clambered back onto the rock and dove again, over and over, like tireless children taking turns on a playground slide.

3. My daughter Eva came to stand beside me, the hood of her parka drawn up against the cool of this July morning here in the north woods, on the boundary between Minnesota and Ontario. We passed her binoculars back and forth,
marveling at these sleek, exuberant animals. 

4.  "Wouldn't you love to swim with them?" she whispered.

5. "I'd love to sit on that boulder and let them do the swimming," I answered.

6. "If only they'd let us!"

7. Always quick to notice the flicker of life, Eva had spent the past two summers studying birds with a research team, and now, halfway through college, she had become a disciplined as well as a passionate observer. Science had complicated
her vision without lessening her delight in other creatures.

8. "What do you suppose they're doing?" I asked.

9. "The technical term for it," she said, "is goofing around."

10.  "I suppose you've got some data to back that up."

11. "I'll show you the graphs when we get home."

12. Drawn by our whispers and watchfulness, the others from our camp soon joined us on the granite bluff, some bearing mugs of coffee, some with plates of steaming blueberry pancakes. We had been canoeing in the Boundary Waters
Wilderness for several days, long enough for the men's faces to stubble with beards, for the women's faces to burnish from wind and sun. When all ten of us were gathered there beside the river, intently watching, suddenly the otters quit diving, swiveled their snouts in our direction, then ducked into hiding beneath some lily pads. After a couple of minutes, as though having mulled over what to do about this intrusion, they sallied out again and resumed their romping, chasing one another, bobbing and plunging, but farther and farther away, until they disappeared around the next bend.

13. If our scent or voices had not spooked them, then our upright silhouettes, breaking the glacier-smoothed outline of the shore, must have signaled danger to the otters. There was no way of knowing what else, if anything, we meant to them. What did the otters mean to us? What held us there while our pancakes cooled, while acres of mist rode the current past our feet, while the sun rose above a jagged fringe of trees and poured creamy light onto the river? What did we want from these elegant swimmers?

14. Or, to put the question in the only form I can hope to answer, what did I want? Not their hides, as the native people of this territory, the Ojibwa, or the old French voyageurs might have wanted; not their souls or meat. I did not even want their photograph, although I found them surpassingly beautiful. I wanted their company. I desired their instruction-as if, by watching them, I might learn to belong somewhere as they so thoroughly belonged here. I yearned to slip out of my skin and into theirs, to feel the world for a spell through their senses, to think otter thoughts, and then to slide back into myself, a bit wiser for the journey.

15. In tales of shamans the world over, men and women make just such leaps, into hawks or snakes or bears, and then back into human shape, their vision enlarged, their sympathy deepened. I am a poor sort of shaman. My shape never changes, except, year by year, to wrinkle and sag. I did not become an otter, even for an instant. But the yearning to leap across the distance, the reaching out in imagination to a fellow creature, seems to me a worthy impulse, perhaps the most encouraging and distinctive one we have. It is the same impulse that moves us to reach out to one another across differences of race or gender, age or class. What I desired from the otters was also what I most wanted from my daughter and from the friends with whom we were canoeing, and it is what I have always desired from neighbors and strangers. I wanted their blessing. I wanted to dwell alongside them with understanding and grace. I wanted them to go about their lives in my presence as though I were kin to them, no matter how much I might differ from them outwardly.

Measures 1 skill from
Grade 9
ELAR (2009)
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)

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Measures 1 skill fromGrade 9ELAR (2009)Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)

Our brand new solo games combine with your quiz, on the same screen

Measures 1 skill from
Grade 9
ELAR (2009)
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)