Hostile Territory

by Paul Greci

  Or maybe it’s the smell of Theo’s blood.

  Whatever’s driving it, the bear just keeps on coming like it’s set on autopilot.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE THREE OF US KEEP yelling. I pick up the orange wand that used to hold the green flag—the pole that Theo’s hand was clutching when the landslide buried him—and start waving it in front of me. It’s flexible but it’s also strong; it will bend a lot but not break easily.

  The bear pulls up about thirty feet from us and stands on its hind legs. It wags its head back and forth a couple of times, drops back down on four legs, comes forward about ten feet, and then stands up again.

  We’ve all stopped yelling because the bear obviously knows we’re here. If it weren’t for Theo, right now we would all take a step or two backward, and if the bear stayed put, we would continue to slowly back away. If the bear advanced, we would stop retreating so we wouldn’t look like prey.

  “Don’t look it in the eye,” I whisper. Standing our ground is definitely challenging it, but staring it down could make the situation worse. The end of the wand is bouncing gently. I’ve stopped waving it, but it’s still extended toward the grizzly.

  I hear some rocks clattering, and so does the bear because it turns in the direction of the noise. Derrick is at the edge of the landslide now, where the bear had been tearing through one of our food bags.

  I don’t know if he sees the standoff we’re in, but now he’s yelling, “Hey, bear,” just like we were.

  My mind is a confused fog. None of the bear encounter training has prepared me for this. Do we continue to shout? Do we remain quiet? Do we wait to see what the bear does now that Derrick is yelling? But if we wait and the bear charges, it’ll be on us in less than a second.

  I wonder what Shannon and Brooke are thinking. I glance at each of them and raise my eyebrows.

  “Rocks,” Shannon mouths, then points down. I don’t know if Brooke can see what Shannon said, but she definitely saw where she pointed because she quickly bends forward and picks up a fist-sized stone. Shannon and I do the same. Now I’ve got the wand in one hand and a rock in the other.

  Do we throw them while the bear is focused on Derrick? Is that Shannon’s plan? Or do we use them only if the bear advances on us?

  Shannon cocks her arm back and waits for us to do the same. Derrick is still yelling, “Hey, bear,” and the bear continues to look in his direction. And the wind is still blowing in our faces.

  Shannon lets her rock fly, and Brooke and I follow with ours. Shannon’s rock hits the bear square in the back, and as the bear turns, Brooke’s rock nails it in the side of the head and my rock hits its shoulder.

  The bear drops to all four legs and scrambles straight over the rock slide toward the lake. When the bear gets to the edge of the lake, it splashes into the water and starts swimming toward the opposite shore, which is steep and shaded, with pockets of last winter’s snow still present.

  I drop the wand and let out a breath that I didn’t know I was holding. Brooke takes a couple of steps in Derrick’s direction.

  Then I hear Shannon’s voice behind me. “Theo. Theo. Stay with us.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “HEY,” DERRICK SAYS.

  I look up from where I’m kneeling next to Theo and shake my head. Shannon and Brooke are sitting on either side of me.

  Shannon says, “We lost him.”

  Derrick takes off his pack and sets it down. “Did a bear get him?”

  “The avalanche did,” I say. “It might’ve gotten everyone”—I pause because I can feel my voice starting to crack—“except us.”

  The wind is still blowing, and now that we’re just sitting and not moving around, I’m starting to cool off. A shiver runs up my spine.

  “What do you mean, everyone?” Derrick asks.

  “Look around,” Brooke says. “The whole camp is buried under tons of rock. It took forever to dig Theo out. And it was all for nothing. We almost got mauled by a bear, too. You chased it right toward us.” Brooke frowns.

  “I didn’t know there was a bear until I saw the mess down there.” Derrick points to the edge of the landslide where the bear tore into the food bag. “Even then, I didn’t know it was still around. Don’t blame me.”

  “No one is blaming you.” Except maybe Brooke, I think but don’t say. “I—”

  “We have to bury him,” Shannon says softly. “Or else scavengers will get him. Ravens. Wolverines. Bears.”

  “No way. We just unburied him,” Brooke says. “I don’t want—”

  “You are so sick,” I shout. “Don’t you care about anyone but yourself?”

  “I worked for hours moving rocks when he was barely alive,” Brooke shouts back. “I stayed here when the bear approached. I put his life before mine just like you did. But now that he’s dead, what’s the point?”

  “The point,” Shannon says softly, “is that the more scavengers are attracted to this spot where the camp used to be, the more likely that we’ll keep having encounters like we just had.”

  “Plus,” I say, “it’s the respectful thing to do. Eventually his body is going to get hauled out of here. His parents are going to see it.”

  “Dudes,” Derrick says, “let’s quit wasting time and energy arguing and get the job done.” He sets his bear spray down. “Now, how do we want to do this?”

  We decide to cover Theo with small rocks and use the wand as a marker for where he’s buried. As we work, Derrick recounts what happened to him during the earthquake, which is pretty different from what happened to the rest of us.

  “I was finally asleep after being awake most of the night when the quake rolled me around and threw me up toward the ceiling of my tent,” Derrick explains. “I thought maybe a bear was batting me around. I was fighting to get out of my sleeping bag so I could reach for my bear spray. Then I thought I should just stay in my bag because it’d offer a layer of protection against the bear, so I curled up and pulled the drawstring tight. The ground kept rolling under me, and that’s how I figured out it was an earthquake.”

  After the rolling stopped, Derrick stuck his head out of the tent and then stood up. The ground hadn’t gotten all split up around his campsite like it had at mine and Brooke’s. Through his binoculars he saw that all three of our flags were still flying green. Since he was dead tired from last night, he went back to sleep for a while. He remembers hearing some jets and maybe some helicopters while he tried to get back to sleep. When he finally got up and hiked to the spot where he could see the camp, he saw the monstrous collapsed mountainside of rocks, so he packed up as fast as he could and headed down.

  We are all sharing a moment of silence around Theo’s temporary grave when it starts to rain lightly. Derrick is the only one with his pack and bear spray.

  “We need to get our supplies,” I say, “before we freeze.”

  Brooke points across the lake and up toward her camp. “I’m beat. I don’t want to hike all the way back up there right now. Besides, someone will rescue us. Our parents will make it happen.”

  I think about having Brooke stay here while we pack up her camp, but we’ve got one canister of bear spray among the four of us and we know there’s at least one bear in the area. Plus, with the rain, it’d be easy to freeze to death even in the summer if the temperature dropped.

  “We all need to go,” I say. “You stay here with nothing, and they could be recovering your body instead of rescuing you.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Brooke responds. “You live to run.”

  “He’s right,” Shannon says. “Right now, without any of our gear, we need to move to just stay warm.”

  “Let’s do it this way,” Derrick says. “We all hike to Brooke’s camp. Once we have her bear spray, two of us hike to Shannon’s camp and two of us hike to Josh’s camp. And then we all meet back here.”

  “I’m game for that.” I nod once. The rain is starting to chill me, and I want to get moving.

  “Good idea,”
Shannon says. She stands up.

  “Whatever,” Brooke mumbles. “Like any of us have a choice.”

  We are about halfway across the rock slide when a set of jets screams across the sky. Then in the distance both to the left and right of the jets we see squadrons of helicopters. They are far enough away that we can’t see how many there are, but they make that unmistakable whop-whop-whop helicopter noise. Then another set of jets flies overhead.

  “The quake must’ve been pretty widespread,” Derrick says, “for the military to be getting involved.”

  “See,” Brooke says, “we’re going to be rescued. They’re already out looking for people.”

  “Maybe my dad is flying one of those choppers,” Derrick says. “But if he is, that means they’re already coming back from somewhere, because they’re flying west to east.” Derrick takes his pack off, wrestles out his binoculars, and scans the horizon. “They’re too far away for me to tell what kind they are, but they don’t look like the kind my dad flies.”

  CHAPTER 10

  WE REACH THE EDGE OF the landslide and walk single file on the narrow trail along the lakeshore in the spitting rain. After a mile or so, we start heading up the ridge toward Brooke’s campsite.

  The pain in my calf is knotted, and stings with every step. If I were home, I’d need to rest it for a few days to let it heal so I could be at my best for cross-country races, but now I’m probably doing more and more damage, not that I have a choice. Even with the pain, I could go for miles and miles. I’m starting to outdistance everyone on the climb, so I stop on a flat spot and wait. With one canister of bear spray among the four of us, we need to stay close to each other.

  When we’re all together, Shannon says, “When we get back down to the landslide, we should try to find the satellite phone. Then we could just call for help.”

  “How are we going to know where to dig?” Derrick asks.

  “We know where the flag was. And, thanks to the bear, we know where the kitchen was,” I say. “So, we should be able to map it all out. Plus, they put our cell phones in with the satellite phone. Maybe they would work, too. You know, from a high spot.”

  “I doubt it,” Shannon says. “We are way out here. Hundreds of miles from nowhere.”

  “Then why would they collect the phones from us?” I ask. “If they didn’t work, then they wouldn’t have bothered collecting them.”

  Derrick responds, “They didn’t want us listening to music, looking at pictures, playing video games. All the crap my parents said it’d be good for me to get away from.”

  Brooke hasn’t said anything for a while. The rain has washed most of the blood off her face, exposing the scratches that were bleeding. They look like they sting. Maybe because she can tell I’m looking at her, she turns toward me.

  Then she says, “Cell phones.” She brushes her hair out of her eyes. “I’ve still got mine.”

  “You snuck it back?” I ask. “Gutsy.”

  “I never turned it in,” she responds. “Well, I turned in a phone, it just wasn’t my phone. And they only work up high, and even up there”—she nods toward where we are going—“just barely.”

  “Bringing two phones,” Derrick says. “I wish I’d thought of that.”

  “My dad,” Brooke says. “He made me do it. Told me to use it just for emergencies. He gave me a solar charger, too.” She shakes her head and says softly, “My dad. The gadget guy—that’s what he calls himself—comes through.”

  The rain lightens up as we pick our way toward Brooke’s camp. A pale outline of the sun shows through the thinning clouds, but the wind is still blowing.

  We top the first ridge above the lake and stop again.

  “Too bad they didn’t let us use this ridge,” I say, staring up to the next one, where Brooke’s camp is.

  “Self-reliance,” Derrick says. “They didn’t want us so close that we could just run back to camp if we got scared or whatever.”

  Shannon turns to Brooke. “Did you use your phone? Did it really work?”

  “One bar. I sent my dad a text last night,” Brooke says. “It was delivered, but I never heard back from him.”

  Another squadron of jets screams over us, just specks in the sky. “Can you call a jet on a cell phone?” I ask.

  Derrick laughs. “Only if you know someone on the jet and their number.”

  “What about the satellite phone? Can you call a jet with that?” Shannon asks, looking at Derrick.

  “I don’t know.” Derrick shrugs. “Just because my dad’s in the military, it doesn’t mean I know everything.” He looks away. “He barely talks to me.”

  “Who cares,” Brooke says. “When we get to my tent, I’ll just text my dad again. He’ll know what to do.”

  “I just hope all of our parents are okay,” I say.

  Everyone nods and we keep walking.

  I picture our house in Fairbanks. If the quake could crumble the rocky slope above Simon Lake, it could easily collapse a house.

  I just hope it wasn’t as strong in Fairbanks as it was here.

  When we get to the ridge with Brooke’s tent on it, there’s a series of cracks in the ground. I turn to Brooke. “The exact same thing happened on my ridge.” I point across the lake to land approximately on the same level as where we’re standing.

  “At least your tent didn’t get swallowed,” Brooke says.

  In the distance we can all see her green flag, but there’s no sign of her tent. I try to imagine what it would’ve been like to be inside my tent and have the ground open up and swallow me. Maybe that’s why she was so much more freaked out than Shannon and me. Maybe that’s why she was acting so selfish, like she didn’t care if Theo lived or died and didn’t even want to try to save him.

  Maybe.

  Or, maybe that’s the way she is.

  “The ground split right below me,” I say. “After I was tackled by the first tremor, I rolled onto my back to get away from the split. But being in a tent, that must’ve been scary.”

  “I was like a cat in a bag that had been tossed into a lake.” Brooke pauses. “I was drowning. At least that’s how it felt.”

  No one says anything for a few seconds, but then Shannon says, “It’s hard to believe the quake just happened this morning. It already feels like a long time ago. I mean, so much has gone on since then.” A tear spills down her cheek and she wipes it away.

  We all nod in silence. With digging Theo out and then facing the bear, we haven’t really dealt with the reality that there are probably a lot of dead people down there. People we were living closely with until this morning. It just as easily could have been one of us, or all of us, buried down there. Everyone had a couple of days for a solo experience, and ours just happened to fall when the quake struck.

  “After we get our supplies, so we can, you know, not die,” I say, “we need to keep searching for survivors. Just because Theo died”—I can feel my voice starting to crack—“doesn’t mean everyone else did.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “YOU WERE IN THAT THING when the ground opened up?” Derrick points to Brooke’s tent, which is sitting on its side at the bottom of a crack that opened up during the quake. “Unbelievable. What are the chances?”

  Brooke nods. “Climbing out wasn’t easy.” She touches the bruise on her forehead.

  “Let’s haul it out of the hole,” I say, wanting to keep us moving since we have my camp and Shannon’s to dismantle after this one.

  I lie down on my stomach at the edge of the hole. I can feel moisture being absorbed by my shirt and pants from the wet ground, but I’ve got a set of rain gear at my camp so I don’t care. I reach into the hole but can’t quite make contact with the tent.

  Derrick takes his pack off and lies next to me, which is good, because out of the four of us, he’s got the longest arms. He reaches down and grabs a corner of the tent and starts pulling. “Josh, as soon as you can, grab part of it,” he says.

  “I got it,” I say. And togethe
r the two of us keep pulling.

  Shannon and Brooke, who’ve each knelt on either side of Derrick and me, grab the sides of the tent as it gets higher, and before you know it, we’ve got Brooke’s tent on the ground next to us.

  We roll it over so it’s sitting the way it’s supposed to, and Brooke sticks her head in the unzipped door. After a few seconds she comes out with her cell phone.

  She peers at the screen. “My dad never wrote back. Or if he did, the message didn’t get to me.” She types something with her thumbs, then frowns. “It didn’t go through.”

  “Maybe the system is overloaded,” Shannon says. “You know, because of the earthquake, people are probably calling and texting their families all over the state to see who is okay and who needs help.”

  “I guess.” Brooke types something else and hits send. “It still won’t go through.”

  “People will come for us anyway,” Derrick says. “This whole leadership-camp thing was supposed to be over in like two more days. Even if we have to wait that long, they’ll come.”

  Brooke takes all her stuff out of her tent. While she starts loading her pack, Shannon and I take the tent apart and Derrick goes to get Brooke’s food, which is stashed nearby.

  “I know you and Theo were close,” Shannon says. “Maybe if I had kept the pressure on his wound instead of standing up and helping keep the bear away, he would’ve made it.”

  “Shannon, we all did what we had to do. He wouldn’t have lasted as long as he did if it weren’t for you.” I keep stuffing the tent into its bag. “I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “I think he was with us.” Shannon stops breaking down the tent poles and looks me in the eye. “The way he would squeeze your hand when you talked to him. I think he could hear you. And that probably brought him some peace. He didn’t die alone. You gave him that.”

  A tear runs down my cheek and I wipe it away. “Thanks,” I say. “His parents are going to be devastated.” I think about all the others down there, and my stomach clenches up. They all have parents. “Let’s finish this so we can get back and search for more survivors.”