by Paul Greci
CHAPTER
33
“IT COULD’VE BEEN AN ANIMAL,” Max says. “Maybe a fish jumping.”
“Or maybe a branch from a birch tree fell into the water,” Tam says. She jumped up right after the splash.
“Or Dylan,” I say.
The willows crowd the creek, making it the dimmest spot in the fissure.
I listen, but all I hear is the rush of water.
“This fissure or canyon or whatever it is, it’s pretty narrow,” Max says. “It’d be a hard place to hide from someone if they wanted to find you.”
“Dylan,” I yell. “Dylan. Come on out.”
Jess springs into a sitting position. “My turn for watch yet?”
“Everyone’s on watch now, sis. We heard a splash in the creek.”
Jess stands up. Her coveralls are huge on her. She’s like a mouse wearing clothes cut for an elephant.
“I think we should take a look.” I pick up my knife. I wish I had a gun or a spear. I remember that Mike chucked his spear down from above. If we hunt around, we should be able to find it. Plus, we have all those stone spearpoints. And now we have tree branches to cut shafts from.
“I’ll go, too,” Max says. “If it’s Dylan, I’ll be able to handle him.” She smiles. “You know, calm him down.”
I rub my sore shoulder. “Only if he didn’t overhear you while we were talking.”
“Whispering,” she says. “We were whispering.”
“I heard everything,” Tam says. “And I was on the other side of the fire ring. So if he was behind you, and just as close, he would’ve heard, too.”
“Maybe there’s other people down here,” Jess says. She glances over her shoulder.
“Could be,” I say. “We just don’t know. All we know is that we heard a big splash.”
* * *
“Just because we didn’t see any footprints doesn’t mean there was nobody there,” I say, then add more sticks to the fire until the flames are waist-high. It’s light out and we want to finish drying our mud-caked clothes.
Tam puts some salmon in the water-filled pan and sets it on some coals. “If Dylan is down here, we need to find him. If he’s around, I want him in my sight.”
“If he’s around, he has to have seen the smoke from our fire,” I say. “So why wouldn’t he approach us?”
“Maybe he’s hurt.” Jess stretches her arms over her head and almost disappears inside her coveralls. “Maybe he can’t walk.”
I fold down the collar of my coveralls so it won’t poke me in the neck. “It seems like I would’ve run into him on my hike to find you three. It just doesn’t make sense. I bet he didn’t even come down here. I hope he didn’t come down here—if he really pushed Mike, that is. I mean, no way could we trust him then.”
“Of course he pushed him. He’s whacked-out.” Tam yanks the pot from the coals. “Dig in. It’s just hot enough.”
We all pull pieces of lukewarm salmon out of the pot, then take turns drinking the oily broth until it’s gone. But the small meal barely puts a dent in my hunger.
Sunlight plasters the south wall of the fissure, turning it golden. In a few hours it’ll probably be bouncing off the treetops and then reaching all the way to the bottom.
We douse the fire with creek water, then kick dirt on it. We pack the loose salmon into the pot, then tie my spare T-shirt around it. It’ll leak some oil, but that’s our only option. We decide to take everything with us because we don’t know if we’re coming back to this spot. Our first task is grimmer than grim: taking care of Mike’s body.
CHAPTER
34
WE HEAD WEST, DOWNSTREAM. THE ground is more solid by the stream and doesn’t suck my feet into the mud with every step like it did at the base of the fissure wall yesterday.
At the second ravine we turn toward the north wall. “If we walk the base of the wall, we’ll come to his body.”
No one says anything in response. I feel my stomach tightening. We haven’t even talked about what we’re going to do. I know Jess has a shovel in her backpack, but digging a grave will take hours, hours that we could be using to keep moving south. Could we just leave him? Or would that be disrespectful? I know we’re going to take the food and anything else useful in his pack, so shouldn’t we do something with his body to honor him?
After a couple of minutes we run into my tracks from yesterday, so all we have to do is follow them.
I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies the past couple of years but it’s always a shock, especially if they don’t have many surface injuries. The charred bodies I encountered after the fires—it was obvious they were history.
But bodies that look mostly normal, you think there would be some way to breathe life back into them. To fix them and get them working again. They have all those cells and nerves and organs and muscles that were working one moment, then idle the next. Like someone flipped a power switch that can’t be reversed even though the machine still appears to be in good condition.
“He was right here,” I say. We’re staring at the outline in the mud where Mike’s body landed. Inside the outline are bits of blue nylon and shards of glass. And heading toward the trees is a drag path.
“Dylan?” Tam says.
“Who else could it be?” Max says.
“Look at this.” Jess is pointing down just a few feet from the body outline.
I feel a chill travel up my spine. There, in the drying mud, is a pad print. Like a circle that has been stretched, or a triangle rounded at the edges. And on the wide side—the base of the triangle—are five distinct toe prints. And beyond those, little dots where claws must’ve pressed into the ground.
“Grizzly,” I say.
Tam limps over and studies the track. “Maybe that’s what we heard in the creek last night.”
“Bears cache their food,” Max says. “You know. They eat some and bury the rest for later. But they guard it. We need to be careful.”
“Why didn’t we see any tracks by the creek last night?” I ask.
“Maybe it stayed in the water for a while or walked on some rocks.” Max glances back the way we came. “Maybe if we’d crossed the creek and walked a little ways, we would’ve seen some tracks on the other side.”
Tam limps around in a circle. “That bear had to come from somewhere to get here, but I don’t see a trail.”
We all start looking around, studying the ground. I wonder what could support a bear in here. We still don’t know the size or extent of the fissure. From the top it appeared to go on forever, but I know that on flat ground you can only see so far in any direction. Maybe it widens into an actual valley downstream or upstream. Or maybe it’s tiny and ends in sheer walls in every direction, and the stream disappears underground. I hope that isn’t the case.
“Here’s another one,” Max says. She’s standing about ten yards down the drag trail.
“Maybe it dragged Mike on the same path it took to come out of the trees,” Tam says.
Fragments of glass and pieces of blue nylon dot the drag trail, and stray bear tracks point in all directions along the trail, some more distinct than others.
“This track is shorter,” Tam says. “And wider. Are a bear’s front paws smaller than the back ones or vice versa?”
We all look at one another, shrugging.
“I’ve never heard that they were,” I say. “But I’ve never heard that they weren’t.” Just a few years ago, I could’ve looked that up in a book or on a website. Now all we have as a data bank is whatever each of us remembers. And we’ve just lost Mike’s knowledge.
“Our hands and feet are different,” Jess says.
“True,” Max says. “But a bear has four feet. We don’t.”
“It’s obvious that this bear has different-sized feet,” I say. “Unless there’s more than one bear.”
We keep going west, downstream, but stay close to the fissure wall, not wanting to surprise a bear in the willows. I remember the slugs and arrows we
put into that other grizzly and how it just kept coming.
When I first looked down at the green ribbon in this fissure, I thought that if we never made it any farther than this, at least we could live out our lives in a living place.
I wasn’t counting on Mike dying and then having his body dragged off, and Dylan disappearing.
Besides looking for a missing person who probably killed his brother and a missing dead body and trying to figure out how many bears are roaming around this fissure, today has been a normal day. Jess is hanging close to Max. And, I’ve got to admit, it’s a relief not to be constantly worrying about Dylan’s influence on Jess. But it still troubles me that we don’t know where he is. I’d rather see him and deal with him than have him surprise us.
* * *
“You’d think if there was a bear or two bears in this fissure, that we’d see tracks all over the place,” I say.
“And piles of bear poop,” Jess says. She takes another piece of salmon from the pot and leans into Max’s shoulder as she eats it.
“Good observation,” Tam says to Jess.
“My mom taught me about animal poop,” Jess goes on. “About how you can tell what animal has been here and, if you’re willing to examine it, what the animal has eaten.” Jess scrunches up her face. “Sometimes it stinks.” She holds her nose and then laughs.
Tam smiles. “Yes, sometimes it does.” The scratches on Tam’s cheek have turned red and puffy, and she’s been limping around on her ankle all day, but says it doesn’t hurt that much. “A bear would roam all over this fissure. If we cross at any spot from one wall to the other, we should see some tracks, at least old ones.” Then Tam looks straight at Jess. “Or some of its poop.”
Jess smiles and says, “Right.”
Max says, “We need to move off this wall and see what we’re dealing with.”
I take a piece of salmon. It’s pasty and oily, and has a sharpness to it that I’m not used to. Maybe it’s going bad from being out of the jar too long, or maybe the T-shirt covering the pot had something on it. But I’m so hungry I’d eat rotten salmon if that’s what I had. We all would.
“Let’s zigzag from side to side,” I say, “and see what we see.”
We head toward the south wall. First we hit some thigh-high fireweed and wild rose, and some kind of silky green plant we used to call dinosaur grass. I’m sure there’s more plant variety sprouting up around us, maybe even edible plants, but right now we’re focused on finding tracks or bear scat and not letting anything surprise us. What would I do if a grizzly charged? All I have is my knife. And playing dead, like we’ve all been taught, I don’t think that would work for a bear with a taste for human flesh.
Under the birches, we stop and look up. The branches start maybe forty feet up the trunks. The biggest ones must be sixty feet tall, but I can almost fit my hands around the trunks. It’s more like a field of birch trees than a forest. Like they’re blades of grass on a long, narrow lawn.
The willows that line the creek are more bushy than the birches, but still spindly. The creek gurgles along a mostly smooth surface at this spot. We splash through knee-deep water to the other side and pick our way through more willows and birches all the way to the south wall.
We do this three more times, slicing our way back and forth at forty-five-degree angles to the creek, but turn up no tracks of any kind. No bear scat either.
“Let’s head back upstream,” Tam says. “But we’ll stay along the south wall and look for a way out.”
I take my pack off and rub my shoulder. It’s been aching steadily all day, like a giant is pressing its thumb into the spot where my arm attaches to my body. Jess hasn’t complained about her hand one bit.
“We never saw Mike’s spear,” I say. “Remember, he tossed it over the edge.”
Max nods. “I don’t think a bear would walk off with that. Maybe we missed it.”
And his body and pack. If a bear cached it, we should’ve seen evidence of digging and scraping. We didn’t follow the drag trail very far, but why would a bear drag the body all that far anyway? Wouldn’t it feed on the body where it found it and then cache it nearby? And that brings me back to Dylan. Maybe, I think, Dylan chased the bear off the body and hid it.
I feel a tug on my arm and turn. “Earth to Travis, do you copy?” Tam asks.
“Sorry,” I say. “Spaced out.” I sigh. “Tell me again, Tam.”
“It’s going to get dark soon. Or at least dusky. That’s when bears are more active. Let’s search the south wall for a way out all the way back up to where we camped last night. If we don’t find a way out, we can build another fire there. We know the bear stayed away from there, so it’s as safe a place as any. Maybe safer.”
CHAPTER
35
WE’RE BACK AT OUR ORIGINAL campsite. Smoke drifts upward from the fire. At my insistence, we take everything out of our packs to see what we have.
Tam’s bow, which somehow wasn’t trashed on the trip down
Sixteen quart jars of salmon
One one-quart cook pot
One stinky T-shirt full of oily salmon strips
One one-hundred-foot length of rope
Two fire-starting tools that spray sparks
One small folding shovel
One knife
A pile of broken glass and jar lids we’d left here this morning
A jar filled with stone spear and arrow points
We each have a pair of insulated green coveralls, a green knit cap, green pile gloves, a green T-shirt (except I’d sacrificed mine for the salmon), and a pair of thick green socks.
Tam picks up her bow. “I’ve never tried to make an arrow. Jason gave me the ones I had. And they were metal. I’ll need narrow, straight branches a little bigger around than a pencil.” She shakes her head. “It’s not going to be easy.”
“At least there’s some arrowheads in the jar,” Jess says.
“I know,” Tam says. “But attaching them to the shafts. Cutting a notch so I can nock it onto the string. Then finding feathers for the fletching. I—”
“Wait,” Max says. “Remember, I saw birds flying when we first looked down into the fissure. But it was downstream quite a ways. There was a spot where warm air was rising. Dylan noticed it.”
“We need a way to protect ourselves,” Tam says. “From Dylan and whatever else.”
“Why not cut a bunch of branches the right size for arrows?” Jess asks. “And just carry them with us, and we can work on them along the way?”
Max smiles at Jess. “Smart girl.”
“And,” Jess continues, “we can take a few larger sticks for spears.”
“Okay,” I say. “Before dark, we cut arrow and spear sticks. Tomorrow we head down the fissure in search of a way out.”
“Why down?” Tam asks.
“Downstream is west. We want to make sure we cross the mountains more to the west than the east because we’re trying to get to Anchorage, or at least where Anchorage used to be.” I glance at the jars of salmon, wishing we had more. “We might even travel parts of the old Parks Highway. Even though it’ll be more risky, it’ll be faster. Given how much food we have, we might not have a choice.”
* * *
We’re in our insulated coveralls. The willows shake in the breeze blowing down the fissure. The sliver of sky above looks almost dark enough for stars. Max and Jess are lying down. Me and Tam are on watch, sitting across from them by the fire.
I think about my conversation last night with Max about her life and turn to Tam and say, “I know you lived in that group home with Max, but where did you live before that?”
She turns toward me, our eyes meeting in the firelight for a long moment, and I feel my heart racing.
“That’s a loaded question,” Tam says. She picks up a stick and pushes some coals around in the fire. “I lived with my mom until I was six. Until she died. Breast cancer. I have no idea who my dad is. After that, I was shuffled from foster parent to fost
er parent, never managing to stay in one house for more than a year.”
“Why?” I ask. “Why couldn’t one set of foster parents just keep you?”
“I would wear people out,” Tam says. “I always wanted to be running or walking or playing something active. I wasn’t very good at sitting still. And I’m still not very good at it.” Tam keeps pushing the coals with her stick.
I think about the bear we killed and say, “When you shot that bear, you had to be still and concentrate.”
“That’s different,” Tam says. “That kind of concentration is like movement. You are planning movement, waiting for movement, and you have to shoot at just the right time. But my foster parents couldn’t or didn’t want to handle someone so intense; that was the word they always used when they gave me back to the system. So I lived in like seven homes in eight years. The last place, my foster brother cornered me and put his hands all over me and tried to kiss me. I punched him in the balls. Hard. He ended up having to go to the doctor.”
“He got what he deserved,” I say.
“He was pretty aggressive. He just grabbed me out of the blue.” She sighs. “If I’d known they were going to put me in the group home because of that, I wouldn’t have punched him so hard.” She breaks the stick that she’s holding in half and tosses it on top of the coals and turns toward me. “My foster home was a few houses down from the group home, and my foster brother would walk by our yard after they caged us in and call me a bitch and laugh at me.” Tam picks up another stick and rams it into the coals. Then she swallows once and says, “The last time I saw him I watched through the fence as he boarded a bus to get out of here with my old foster parents.”
CHAPTER
36
“MORE BEAR PRINTS,” TAM SAYS. We’re all at the creek drinking some water. A sliver of blue sky is visible through the willow and birch leaves.
“A bear was this close and we didn’t hear it,” I say. “How can that be?”
I glance upstream and then downstream. A few prints head out of the creek and then back into it. Like the bear was walking in the water and decided to veer toward our camp and then veer back.
