“How will you find out if he likes you?”
She made it sound so straightforward. Maybe it was. Maybe I just had no idea how to be a person. “I have no idea,” I said.
“Well, you might want to think about it.”
She had a point, but it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
Saturday morning finally arrived, and we all met in front of the statue of Gardner Academy’s founder, Jacob Hawthorne Gardner. He was an imposing man on a bucking horse who looked like a Revolutionary War hero but who was really just a wealthy dilettante whose parents had bought him a school. Fitting, given what kind of institution Gardner had turned out to be. The woods stretched out behind us, the ground covered with red and orange leaves, making it appear to be on fire, which paired well with the smoky smell that filled the air.
Wyatt stood before the statue, bouncing with joy and anticipation, as it seemed he always did, his hair flying everywhere in the wind, his backpack in place. He could use a haircut, really, but we didn’t yet have the kind of relationship where I could tell him that. I was surprised Jo or Chloe hadn’t; they both seemed far less inclined to hold back their criticism. “I’m so excited we’re finally starting!” he shouted, as if the wind were loud enough to require shouting, which it wasn’t. “I’m going to teach you some things about the woods here and then we’ll start?” He had this habit of turning statements into questions that I knew came from insecurity about speaking, not from the contents of what he was saying. But I saw some of the others frowning, and I knew they weren’t all convinced Wyatt knew what he was talking about. I was tempted to remind them that he’d literally grown up in the woods, but whatever—perhaps I could use my faith in him to win the game.
We followed Wyatt as he moved away from the statue and onto a path leading into the woods. “As you all know from orientation, Gardner’s been around for over two hundred years, and the surrounding land has belonged to the school the whole time, so there are lots of paths in and out of the woods. I’m going to teach you some techniques for finding your way out if you get lost, but as long as you haven’t taken too many turns, most of the time all you need to do is turn around and go back the way you came and you’ll end up at school.”
This was only somewhat comforting given how directionally challenged I knew myself to be. The others looked equally skeptical, except for Jo. It was hard to imagine her seeming not confident. I wondered what, if anything, she was afraid of. I wondered whether the lock on the bunker door was a clue.
The path started out wide, so at first we could all walk next to each other, with Wyatt just ahead. Jo walked on one end next to Chloe, with Hunter on Chloe’s other side and me next to him. That meant that, on the one hand, I got to be near Hunter, so close I could smell his grassy green scent, but on the other hand, I couldn’t see him and Chloe with us in a horizontal line like that. I tried to just enjoy the feel of him walking next to me, the occasional brush of his jeans against my leggings, sending the hairs on my arms into military formation.
Wyatt walked backward so everyone could see him, impressing me with his apparent ability to see what was behind him and to avoid treacherous situations, like fallen tree branches or roots growing in the path with leaves covering them up. He was in his element. “Today we’re going to talk about the basics: how to tell where north is when you don’t have a compass, how to find good places to camp out, how to find things to eat.”
“How do you know so much about the woods in Vermont?” Hunter asked. “Aren’t you from California? I may be just a lowly Texan, but the trees are different here, right?” He’d let a little drawl slip into his voice, like he had back when I’d learned where he was from.
Wyatt’s ears and cheeks turned pink. “I’ve been doing a lot of hiking since I got here,” he said. “And yeah, some of the trees and stuff are different, but north is still north.”
“Good point,” Chloe said. “Hunter, don’t be a jerk.”
“Wasn’t doubting your skills, bro,” Hunter said.
“It’s fine,” Wyatt said, and I wanted to give him a high five. “Follow me and I’ll show you how to find north.” As we continued traipsing through the woods, he showed us how to read the position of the sun, how to look at trees and gauge north by the dense patches of moss and south by looking at where the flowers grew. He identified trees by their bark and their leaves: spruce, whose leaves looked like rosemary but lacked the distinctive smell; red oak, identifiable by the presence of acorns, especially now that the leaves had begun to fall; aspen, nearly heart-shaped but with almost razored edges. He’d put a lot of time into this.
“I used tricks like this in Chicago,” Jo said, and we all stopped to listen to her, since by my count it was the first time she’d volunteered something personal about herself. I hadn’t even realized she was from the Midwest. She seemed more like a New Yorker to me, though admittedly that was based on my stereotypical impression of New Yorkers. “I used Lake Michigan to orient myself. It was always east, even if it looked like a different body of water every day. The lake was east, and the airport was west, so if I couldn’t find the lake I could watch for planes and check their direction against the streets, because they were mostly in grids. I guess with all that I could find north if I wanted to.”
We stared at her as if she were saying the most fascinating thing in the world. Wyatt, of course, got all bouncy. “That’s totally right! You’d definitely be able to find north if you had an eastern anchor like that. We can use stars for that stuff too. We should do a night hike sometime.”
Personally, the idea of a night hike bordered on the terrifying, but no one else seemed all that fazed. Wyatt chattered on as we kept walking, quizzing us on what we’d just learned, showing us how bugs, like flowers, wanted to stay warm, so things like anthills also indicated south. After we’d walked long enough that I was starting to get hungry, we reached a clearing where the main path widened briefly before branching off into multiple smaller, narrower trails. Wyatt stopped walking and reached into his backpack to pull out a tightly folded roll of fabric. It turned out to be a very thin, soft blanket. He spread it on the ground and motioned for us to sit. We formed a circle around him as if by instinct, sitting in the same order we’d walked.
Either Wyatt was an incredibly efficient packer or his backpack was bigger on the inside than on the outside, because he kept pulling things out of it until there was a pile on the blanket in front of him. “First, and most important: nutrition,” he said, passing out energy bars and bottles of water. He’d packed enough for everyone, and it must have been heavy carrying all that around. He was a very thoughtful guy, I realized, as I gratefully bit into my makeshift snack.
“Second, shelter.” He’d somehow brought another blanket, one that looked like aluminum foil, as well as some twine and a roll of duct tape. “These are the three things you’ll want to have so you can build a really simple shelter. There are a million kinds, and they get more and more complicated depending how long you think you might have to camp and what you expect the weather to be like, but for now we just want to keep the rain off our heads overnight.”
Wyatt had only asked for the day, so I felt pretty confident that we weren’t actually going to be camping tonight, but I was relieved when Jo piped up. “Hey, Shaggy, I thought you said this was a day trip.”
“It is,” Wyatt said. “But this is still something worth knowing?” The uncertain tone had crept back into his voice. He’d been growing increasingly confident as his expertise became apparent, and I hoped that confidence would return soon.
As he showed us how to pick two trees that were the right distance apart, how to use pebbles to create weights around which to tie the cord and to weigh down the bottom of the blanket, and which kinds of knots to use to secure the blanket to the trees, his voice lost its querulous tone. “The bottom of the blanket should be at about a forty-five-degree angle from where it’s tied to the trees, with the rocks keeping it from blowing around. It’s even b
etter if there are other trees so you can tie down the bottom of the blanket too, but that’s not always possible. Either way, you’ve got some coverage so you can sleep, and if you make sure to check wind direction, you can build a fire that will keep animals from coming into the open side of the triangle.”
“Animals?” I asked. The night hike grew less appealing by the minute.
“It won’t stop a bear, but rabbits will probably leave you alone,” Wyatt said cheerfully, as if the prospect of bears ripping through our pathetic tinfoil blankets wasn’t completely terrifying.
“Please, please, please promise me we will never have an overnight game outdoors.” I clasped my hands together as if in prayer, trying to sound as if I were joking when I was most definitely not joking.
“We’ve got you,” Chloe said, and the others nodded.
Wyatt looked a little sad, but he moved on. “We’re going to talk plants now. Like, there are a ton of plants in Vermont that you could live on if worse came to worst and you ended up stuck in the woods. I’ll show you some of the ones that grow out here in the summer into the fall, but there are lots more that grow in the other seasons that we can talk about later on, if you want.” He explained that the most important thing was to learn how to recognize the good plants and to know the characteristics of the bad plants. The ones with milky sap, thorns, an almond scent, or a three-leaf pattern tended to be bad. “Ready to wander and start finding examples?” He looked at us hopefully, and I knew he wanted to see enthusiasm, but I was pretty sure we all wanted the same thing, which was to get on with the game.
“Sure,” Hunter said. “Do we need to pack up here first?”
“No, we’re coming back,” Wyatt said, and began once again walking backward down one of the paths. He showed us patches of clover and dandelions. “Late summer and early fall are all about the green plants. And I know dandelions have a terrible reputation but they’re really pretty great for survival food. They’ve just gotten a bum rap.”
Chloe wrinkled her nose, but Wyatt convinced her to try a small dandelion leaf. “The big ones can be bitter if you don’t mix them with other stuff, but the flowers are kind of sweet. The roots taste gross, but some people boil them with tea.”
“Only because I trust you,” Chloe said, and popped a tiny leaf into her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully, then spit it out. “I’m sure I could keep it down after doomsday, but there’s a whole dining hall of food I’d rather eat.”
“Let’s come back to that,” Wyatt said. “First we’re going to talk about mushrooms. They’re around from spring through fall, though different varieties show up at different times. We missed morel season, which is a bummer because morels are ridiculously good. But there’s also lobster mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, some kinds of chanterelles . . .”
“Which ones can get you high?” Hunter asked.
I glared at him—it was such a dude thing to say, and I hadn’t expected that from him. But he looked completely sincere, and Chloe and Jo seemed curious too.
Wyatt was with me, though. “None of them,” he said. “But if you identify them wrong, they might kill you.” It was the first time I heard his voice have an edge.
Hunter held his hands in front of him. “Whoa, I was just asking. I wasn’t going to try to find any of those for myself, I swear.”
“I was just saying, it’s really easy to eat the wrong plants out here and get sick, and if things are really bad and there’s no doctors or medicine, we have to be really careful.” Wyatt went on to explain how mushrooms that looked like they had pores (like morels) were better than those that looked like they had gills (like portabellas, though those were edible). As we walked around he found some examples to show us, and I was grateful we didn’t have to do any more taste tests—I’d never been a fan of mushrooms, poisonous or not.
Just when I was about to interrupt Wyatt and ask if we were ever going to play, I saw that we’d circled back to where he’d left the blanket. “It’s time to get started with the game, everyone,” he said. “Have a seat.”
We obediently sat back down in the same order we’d chosen before. Wyatt reached into his magical backpack and this time took out a handful of plastic grocery bags. “Here’s how this is going to work,” he said. “You have one hour to hunt for edible plants. You don’t even have to guess whether they’re edible or not—you can just grab whatever you find and I’ll check it when you come back. Whoever finds the best stuff wins. I’ll use what you find to put together a late lunch and we can see how it tastes.”
If I were a nicer person I’d have found some way to keep my face from scrunching in disgust, but I wasn’t, and I wasn’t alone, either. Hunter looked horrified, Chloe curious; only Jo seemed intrigued. I raised my hand. “Are you sure we won’t die?”
Wyatt laughed. “I’ve been doing this forever, and I promise I know all the plants here cold. I won’t take any risks with anyone’s health. But if our goal is to learn how to survive out here, we’ll have to know how to eat. Besides, we’re not far from the infirmary.”
“Not funny, Davy Crockett,” Jo said.
Wyatt, to his credit, was learning to ignore her. “Does one of you have a phone I can borrow?” After what he’d told us about the commune, none of us were shocked he didn’t have a phone of his own.
Hunter handed his over without question, and Wyatt set a countdown timer for one hour and showed it to us. “You’ve got one hour to bring back whatever you can find. Winner is the one who brings back the best edible stuff. I’ll be the judge. You ready?” We nodded.
“On your mark . . . get set . . . go!” Wyatt threw his arm up and down like he was starting a race, and maybe that made us feel like it was one—we all ran to choose our own path away from the clearing, into the woods.
I’d already decided my strategy would be to only bring back edible plants—Wyatt had said the best plants would win, not the most, so there was no point in just throwing as much as I could find into my bag. I would be methodical, strategic. I figured Jo would bring back a whole mess of stuff just to see what everything was; Hunter would find a lot of one thing and overload himself with it, thinking quantity mattered; and while I wasn’t sure what Chloe would do, I figured she’d either go with the most aesthetically pleasing collection, in which case I could totally take her, or she’d be strategic like me, in which case she was my competition. Of course, I could be wrong about any of them—it’s not like I knew them all so well yet—but I felt pretty good at the top of the hour.
After forty-five minutes in I felt less certain of my approach. Perhaps I’d chosen a bad path, or maybe I just hadn’t been paying enough attention to Wyatt, focused as I was on Hunter’s closeness and whether he was watching Chloe. Either way, I hadn’t found much, other than a patch of berries that was either edible or toxic, and I wasn’t willing to take my chances. In my last fifteen minutes I found some green stuff that looked promising and just went for it, but my bag was only half full.
I kept searching right up until the very last minute, which meant I was the last person to arrive at the clearing. “Empty your bags in front of you,” Wyatt instructed, and as soon as we did I knew I was doomed.
My pile was sad and pathetic compared to everyone else’s. I hadn’t even found anything all that colorful. Wyatt went through it, separating the different things. “Purslane, a little red clover. Not bad. All edible, for sure.” He was trying to be nice. I’d bombed this one. At least I’d get to see whether my predictions about everyone else were correct.
I’d been totally right about Hunter. He’d found a crabapple tree, taken a bite of one and found it acceptable, and filled up not just his bag but his pockets and his T-shirt, which he’d turned into a basket by holding the bottom out as far away from his body as possible. There were enough apples in front of him to make each one of us a pie, and they kept rolling away as Hunter tried to count how many he’d brought back. “The numbers don’t matter,” Wyatt said, but I could tell Hunter wasn’t convinced.
I’d been totally wrong about Jo, though. I don’t know why I’d assumed she’d be so casual and haphazard when she’d turned out to be precisely the opposite. She’d done better than I had in terms of quantity, and she’d destroyed me on variety, plus she’d somehow found the time to package all her different plants into bundles, tied up with long blades of grass and arranged on the ground in front of her in rows. In addition to everything I found, she’d tracked down burdock, dandelion greens and flowers alike, amaranth, and juniper. “These would even taste good if we were really going to eat them,” Wyatt said, and I could tell he was trying not to sound surprised at what a good job she’d done.
“So no scavenger salad?” Chloe said. “Thank goodness. I was absolutely petrified.”
“We all were,” Hunter assured her.
I didn’t know what to think about Chloe’s strategy. She hadn’t gone for the pretty things, as I’d thought she might, and as far as I could tell she hadn’t considered whether what she’d found was edible. Instead, she’d brought back a massive amount of mushrooms, as many varieties as she could. She’d divided them into pore and gill categories with a side pile for ones she wasn’t sure of; Wyatt picked up one in the side pile and practically squealed with delight. “Teeth! That’s a whole other category I wasn’t even going to get into.”
“Mine’s the most interesting, right?” Chloe said. “So I should win?”
Wyatt kept working through the mushrooms, making his own piles. “These are the ones we might consider eating,” he finally said, pointing at a small pile. “And the rest are the ones that might kill us.” He indicated the much larger pile.
“You said we didn’t need to distinguish ourselves,” Chloe reminded him. “You said we should just bring back whatever we found and sort it out from there. I’ve still got lots of variety.”
This was interesting. She didn’t just want to win; she was willing to fight for her victory. But Wyatt wasn’t going to make it easy. “You’re the only one who brought back anything poisonous. Hunter’s got you beat for quantity, and Jo’s got everyone destroyed for quality. She’s the only one who found anything I’d actually want to eat.”
How to Pack for the End of the World Page 7
