by Kaz Morran
“Roll Call! Roll Call!”
They were all safe and present, though soaked.
The simultaneous thunder and lightning forced a compromise. “Leeward side,” Taiyo yelled, and they followed him ninety meters back down the way they’d come. There, on the side trail, they found a flattish spot to shelter their tents among a cluster of burly, stunted oaks and maples.
They gathered stones and gravel to spread as a foundation. Then Taiyo tossed Walter one end of a rope, and Kristen another, and told them to run lines around the tree trunks. “We’ll need a retaining wall,” Anton said, and they scavenged for branches to spike into the ground as supports for horizontal boughs. Thy filled the foundation in with more gravel and debris, then pitched the pair of tents side by side and tied them together, to the retaining wall, and to the trees.
“Perimeter secure,” Commander Walter Tate declared, and they retired to their storm-ravaged tents—Nel, Walter, and Taiyo in one; Ronin, Kristen, and Anton in the other. After a supper of granola bars, and a round of ghost stories, they double-checked the knots and supports, entered their logs, and closed their eyes to a backdrop of groaning, knocking trees, rolling thunder, howling wind, and pelting rain.
Taiyo woke up drenched again—from the knees up in his own sweat, and from the knees down in a pool of rising water.
They’d secured the perimeter a little too well.
With barely a word between them, Taiyo and Nel sprung into action. Before Walter even got his headlamp on, they’d drained the tent and begun to hand-dig a trough to funnel water away from the campsite. Within minutes of discovering the flood, they'd fixed the problem and gone back to sleep, confident they could face whatever nature had to unleash.
Pre-dawn, Taiyo woke to the sounds of the mountain’s resurrection from the storm. Between the eerie whistles of wind and knocking trunks of tangled trees, he heard the forest floor around the tent coming to life; the sounds of the last drips of rain on the thin canvass shelter, of awakening creatures rustling in the decay, of a million tiny legs scratching at the dry, dead leaves …
***
The whup-whup-whup of a helicopter drew Taiyo’s focus up through a gap in the branches that overhung the tents. Clad in his underwear, head tipped back to the morning mist, he watched the aircraft pass in and out of the fog.
He imagined being a tribesperson, unaware of the outside world except through legends, and seeing witnessing for the first time an aircraft or giant ship coming over the horizon. He’d have only those legends to draw on to try and discern the level of the threat and weigh it against any possible benefits of making contact with whoever, or whatever, was propelling such an imposing vessel.
He recalled a news item some years back about an American missionary who set out on a solo crusade to spread the gospel to an uncontacted tribe. He was impaled by the arrows of the indigenous islanders before he even got to shore. A harsh lesson in natural selection, Taiyo supposed. And in discernment as well.
Discernment, Taiyo had long ago realized, was the most valuable skill a human being, or tribe, could possess. Tribes, like teams, came and went; some storms they could weather, some they could not. Taiyo and company had weathered their first, which implied they had it in them to weather another.
Of course, survival also depended on the nature of the storm.
The copter cut low across the overcast sky and circled back over the AsCans’ heads. The Doppler shift of the beating rotors must’ve hit a familiar frequency, because at once the noise made Taiyo’s gut shoot a lump into the back of his throat—a snapshot of the past he could taste. A replay of being plucked from the roof of his house and drawn up into the rescue copter. The frequency of the rotors stretched further, and he felt that same wretchedness as when he’d looked down out the window and found he’d been whisked right back to the schoolyard he and Sakura Kawashima had disobediently, and regretfully, fled.
After breakfast, the candidates ventured forth on their mission. The downpour had eased to a drizzle, but the trail remained slick and perilous. They made it up and over the crest, pausing to remark that the charred rock should’ve alerted them of the spot’s role as a lightning rod, and descended toward the checkpoint.
At around where Taiyo had wanted to set up camp the night before, they came to a creek. If not for the unseasonal rain of yesterday, the crossing might have been a leisurely stone-to-stone hop. It cut right across the trail, ten meters wide and growing, as evident by the crumbling banks.
“Go ahead, sir,” Walter told Ronin and playfully nudged him with his elbow. “Jump on in.”
Without a moment’s contemplation, Ronin slid down the steep, meter-high bank on his heels. The others yelled for him to stop, but he’d already waded into the black water. “I’m coming out the other side with one of those twenty-footers,” he called without pausing or looking back.
From the top of the bank, Taiyo watched the lumps of dark debris, some of which loitered at the edges in the shadows, and some of which drifted past Ronin with the languid current. Most could be identified as logs; others were more ambiguous.
The water reached Ronin’s waist, and he hoisted his pack onto his head, but if the storm hadn’t soaked through the waterproofing then neither would the creek. The others watched and waited. Walter giggled to himself, Anton shook his head, Kristen cursed under her breath, and Nel snapped pictures. Taiyo kept his eyes trained on the surface of the water in case any of the logs became animate. One looked suspicious, moving faster than the current. It turned in Ronin’s direction. But if it had been a threat, it missed its chance, because Ronin reached the other side and was now sticking his ass out at everyone.
“What are you sackless agnostics going to do when you’re screaming in through the Martian atmosphere and the bulkhead sheers open? Will you …” Ronin trailed off, his voice lost in the sound of the water and the forest.
Kristen came and stood beside Taiyo. He felt her looking at him and glanced to see her twist her mouth into a sour expression. She looked about to speak, then jerked her head away and muttered something to herself. Taiyo didn’t catch her words, but the tone made him feel the weight of the air.
“I know,” he said to her. He felt the ground pull at his gaze. “I know he can be difficult.” He rolled a stone beneath the toe of his boot and nodded agreement with himself.
“Oh, so you noticed?” Kristen said.
“Look, I’m sorry about—” He looked up and saw her shaking her head.
“Don’t apologize. You’re not his babysitter.” She might have meant it, but he still felt accused. Taiyo had felt the consequences of having Ronin as a mentor, lab professor, and thesis advisor, but he’d never had to answer for Ronin’s behavior. And why should he? As fellow Americans, would Kristen or Walter be held accountable for the other’s failings?
A near-subsonic trumpeting arose from the forest. Taiyo jolted to attention. His focus darted side-to-side. The others, too, spun in confusion, trying to locate the source. The rumble sounded again, closer; splitting the veil of fog and mist with a reverberation so unnerving it felt as though the land itself had taken to haunting its inhabitants.
Ronin staggered and fell backward. From the dirt, he interrupted the skin-crawling ballad with a cry in his native tongue: “Ittai kore … ?” What the … ? He jumped to his feet. Poised like a crab, back to the other candidates, he faced the path where the invisible trumpeter was advancing from the shadows.
Mud squished, and branches snapped underfoot of the beast as it came forward.
“What is it?” Anton called across the creek.
Fingers of overhead foliage still hid whatever had come to confront Ronin.
Ronin backed up. The drop down the bank loomed just a few steps behind him. “What the shit is that?” he yelled to the others without daring to take his eyes off it. He slipped at the bank but regained his balance.
Out of the shadows emerge a giant bird. A cocked, crested head atop a long slender neck, bobbed with
jerky, chicken-like motions as it studied Ronin. Then the prehistoric biped stalked closer, claw over claw, scratching the mud with each trident foot.
“Yabai! Yabai! Yabai!”
Composed and purposeful, it honed in on its prey.
“It’s a cassowary,” Anton called to Ronin.
“Thanks, doc,” Ronin yelled without taking his eyes off the threat.
The thing looked as cartoony as it was hellish—a turkey crossed with a velociraptor. A few meters from Ronin, it paused its advance and flipped its periscope of a head sideways and then upside down as it sized up its adversary.
Taiyo’s legs twitched, but he pulled back the urge to run through the creek to help. He’d never seen Ronin scared before.
“Check if its male or female,” Walter cupped his hands over his mouth and called. “Don’t break eye contact,” offered Kristen, and then immediately asked Taiyo if that was right.
He shrugged. “You’re the biologist.”
The AsCans heckled and laughed, but if what Ethan had said was right—the part about a cassowary having a habit of ramming prey with its head crest and eviscerating people with its claws; not the part about jamming a finger in its anus to force the penis to extrude—then laughter was probably not an apt response to Ronin’s predicament. Still. It was pretty funny.
The cassowary pawed the ground like a bull about to charge. Ronin slowly crawled backward down the bank, and the bird reversed a step as well.
“It’s retreating,” Nel shouted to Ronin. “Just hold still and keep quiet.”
“Okay.”
“I think it’s doing the mating dance,” Anton whispered.
“A male then,” said Taiyo.
Kristen squinted. “Unless … Um, I think it’s bending over for him.”
“So, a female then.”
But it neither danced nor thrust out its swollen vagina. Instead, it looked back over its shoulder at Ronin one last time and back-kicked mud at him as if burying its waste. Then it wandered about twenty meters up the trail where it stopped at a puddle to examine the reflection of a stray sunbeam. Everyone, including Ronin, stayed motionless. They watched the cassowary bend down for a drink as the clouds parted and the Sun illuminated the bird in all its metallic-blue feathery glory. It plodded over to the edge of the trail. There, it picked up a coconut in the claws of its right foot and, in one astonishing feat of acrobatics and might, smashed the shell open on its head. For a moment, it looked stunned but soon began to peck at the exposed coconut flesh.
That, unfortunately, gave Ronin his chance. He grabbed a branch off the ground and ran full speed at the cassowary.
“Gyaaaaa!”
Midstride, ten meters away, as the bird raised its neck in witness, Ronin javelined the branch, striking his fleeing prey in the rump. He chased it into the bushes but emerged shortly after empty-handed. As if that weren’t enough, he picked up one of the coconut halves and raised it to the sky like he’d torn out the victim’s still-beating heart, gnashed out a bite, and chucked the remains into the forest in the direction the cassowary had run. Bits of coconut fell from his mouth as he turned to face his teammates and shout some unintelligible self-promotion before stroking his ponytail and taking a selfie.
In the distance, the molested bird’s mournful trumpeting faded as it fled into the maternal embrace of the wilderness. The others, unable to find words, shared a round of contorted facial expressions and then climbed a dozen meters upstream. There, the ravine narrowed, allowing them to hop over to the other side of the creek without laying siege to any endangered species.
Of course, Ronin wasn’t the only one among them to have close encounters with the hostile creatures of the wild.
14
Ronin led the march forward, and Taiyo and Walter brought up the rear. No one said much, but Taiyo could feel Walter glaring down and inspecting him even as they hiked. Then Walter made a tsk sound and huffed on ahead, preferring to get away from Taiyo than speak his mind. It made Taiyo’s stomach hurt—real physical pain.
Taiyo promised himself that before dinner he’d say something to Ronin.
Up the guts of the tropics, through sinuous gullies and over spiny ridges, they made it to the base of a cliff. So enclosed by the forest and rock face was their camp, that four o’clock resembled night.
A single pocket-sized burner hooked up to a butane canister, and some collapsible cookware acted as their kitchen. Taiyo filled a pot with creek water and brought it over to Nel, who set it on the burner. Kristen knelt down beside her, pressed the switch, and a blue flame whooshed to life.
Kristen said, “Didn’t NASA invent Teflon for heat shields?”
“Maybe,” said Nel.
“LASEK, for sure,” Kristen added and pointed at her eyes. “Smartphone cameras, too.”
Nel and Kristen listed NASA spin-offs and Anton showed Walter photos of his two grown daughters while everyone waited for the water to boil. Taiyo let his mind run adrift. He wondered if all the oxygen in the rainforest had any effect on air pressure and if that would make water boil faster than elsewhere. He also wondered, as he often did, if the spot he was currently occupying was once the site of an epic life-or-death battle between two giant dinosaurs.
“Hey gnashnabs,” Ronin called from his seat on a nearby log. “More cooking. Less chatting. We’re hungry over here.” Nel brought her finger to her lips, then whispered something to Kristen, probably telling her to let it go.
A minute later, Ronin stuffed his hands in his pockets and sauntered over to the kitchen. He poked his head over the women’s shoulders for a peek. “Using a pan as a lid. Hm. Smart girl,” he said to Kristen. He tucked his ponytail into his collar then took a step back to look Nel up and down. “Tell me, how the shit does someone like you go from hunting polar bears to chasing a seat on a spaceship?”
Nel had kneeled down to eyeball the blue flame beneath the pot. “Well,” she began, showing no offense. She stood and turned toward Ronin. “It’s a long story, but—”
“Ah, never mind then,” said Ronin, and he turned around and left. The others looked back and forth at each other and at the patch of dark forest Ronin had vanished into. They waited, but he didn’t reemerge.
“What the heck?” said Walter, but not about Ronin’s behavior. “You’re a hunter?”
“That impresses you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Because I’m a girl?”
“No, ma’am. I knew you were a girl. I didn’t know you were a hunter.”
Nel shook her head and explained that at one time she’d been a guide.
“Gosh,” said Walter. Then with a harmless smirk, he added, “Is there much skill transference between polar bear hunts and space exploring?”
“Yes.”
Walter scrunched up his face. “Ever come nose to nose with one?”
“Not on a hunt.” It took some prodding to get Nel to elaborate, but once spaghetti was served, she did:
“In the cemetery outside of town. I was fourteen and was supposed to take some visitors down to the edge—to the ice, to show them the walruses and seals that come around during spring breakup. It would’ve been my first time guiding anyone alone, so I was really stoked. Nervous, but excited. I’d prepped and rehearsed for weeks.” She paused to drop her head and smile at herself. “But at the last minute, the people canceled and— I wasn’t very mature back then. It really pissed me off that strangers from down south—white people—could just take that away from me. So, I went down to the edge anyway... Alone. And on foot, not with a skidoo.
“I found out later the tour got called off because of weather. You might think it snows all the time up there, but it doesn’t. There’s snowpack in spots almost all year, but—”
“You got caught off guard.”
“It started snowing, but only a bit. No big deal. And the wind picked up. Gusts you can lean into. I kept walking along the shore but moved a ways inland, away from the jumble of ice flows, just in case. It s
nowed harder. Blowing sideways and taking away visibility. It’s April, so it’s basically twilight all day, but I know sundown is approaching—at about o’clock. Already, I can’t see a thing, though. Total white out. What bit of light is left looks like it’s coming from the way I just came, which doesn’t make sense because the direction of the snow drifts indicate the opposite.
“I get to a small bluff I sort of recognize, so instead of crouching down behind the rock to ride out the blizzard, I turn and keep moving farther. But after a while I can’t find any of the other bluffs I should have run into, and it’s getting dark fast. The snow and wind are only getting stronger. My coat’s not the big warm one—that’s at home—so the wind is really biting into me.
“Then I almost break my ankle falling in a hole. A pit in the snow. And I’m down inside it on my ass, the walls are up to my shoulders and just wide enough to hold me. Right away, I know where I am, because of all the fresh blood spilled everywhere and trailing off across the snowpack.
“I’m in a hole where a bear just killed a seal. That’s okay with me at first. At fourteen an Inuk girl isn’t scared of anything. She’s invincible. So, I think I’m going to stay there in the pit and wait out the storm, probably until morning unless I get a good aurora or moonlight, but then I get thinking about the polar bear that killed the seal in this hole, and about all the things it might do to me if it comes back. And my head is sticking up right at surface-level like a seal popping out of the ice.
“I find the bear’s tracks. They’re big. Fresh. I follow the trail of blood and paw prints away from the hole, thinking the bear probably kept going down to the ice. It can’t be far. If I can find the edge, I’ll know which way to go, and I can follow it until I see the lights of town.
“With the blowing snow and fading sun, it’s hard to follow the tracks, but they’re leading me uphill and not toward the ice. I must be heading off in the direction of the old dump. At least now I know which way town is, but since I’ve probably come more than halfway to the dump already, logic says keep going instead of going back. I need shelter before dark, and there’s some old shipping containers there I can hide in.
