by Jeremy Bates
I heard a snapping sound from somewhere behind me and spun around.
I searched the trees, half expecting to be confronted by a crazy man barreling down on me, but all I saw was green and green and more green.
Deciding what I’d heard had been a falling acorn or pinecone, I returned my attention to the dilemma at hand.
Neil or John Scott?
It was 2:37 p.m.
I told Mel and Nina I needed help with something back at camp and led them away from John Scott and Neil. When we were out of hearing distance, I stopped and said, “We can’t waste any more time. We have to leave now if we’re going to have any hope of getting out of the forest by nightfall.”
“The three of us can’t carry both John and Neil,” Mel said. She was stone-faced, and I couldn’t tell if she was still bitter because of the way I’d treated her, though I suspected she was.
“That’s the problem,” I agreed. “And it leaves us with only one option.” I hesitated. “We leave one of them behind.”
She blinked. “Leave one behind?” She lowered her voice. “There’s no way we’re leaving anyone behind.”
“Yes, I agree,” Nina said. “We cannot.”
“What other choice do we have?” I said. “Keep waiting for the police? We have to seriously consider the possibility they’re not coming, at least not today. You want to stay another night in this forest with some crazy killer out there?”
Mel chewed her lower lip. Nina pulled compulsively at a lock of her hair.
“It’s not right,” Mel said softly.
I held up my hands. “If you have any better suggestions, I’m open for them, please.”
“One of us can go,” she said. “You, me, or Nina. It’ll be faster, just one person—”
“I’ve thought of that. But there’s no way I’m letting you or Nina, or even both of you, run off on your own with this guy in the forest. Nor am I leaving you two behind.”
“So you won’t leave us, but you’ll leave Neil or John?”
“What the fuck do you want me to do, Mel?” I said, the last of my patience gone. “I wouldn’t leave anyone behind if it could be helped, but it can’t. Now, if we get lucky, and get out of here quickly, we could be back within a matter of hours.”
“And if we’re not lucky? If we get lost?”
“They will die,” Nina stated. “At least Neil will. He is already dying.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Neil’s dying. Whether we stay here, doing nothing, or we attempt to leave and get lost, he’s a goner. Our only hope is we don’t get lost. We get out of here. We bring help back.”
“How do we find the way back here?” Nina asked.
“We’ll make a trail. Two of us will carry the litter, the third will leave a trail of branches or something.”
“How do we decide which way to go?” Mel said.
“I’m going to climb the tree,” I said.
“You will?”
“It’s the only way.”
“You’re scared of heights!”
“Mel, unless you want to climb the fucking tree, then quit it, because there are no other options—”
A loud noise cut me off midsentence. Nina sprang straight to her feet while Mel and I made it into half crouches—a freeze frame of three people about to run for their lives.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered. It had sounded like someone banging a baseball bat against the trunk of a tree.
No one replied.
I grabbed my spear, which was beside me.
Knock-knock-knock.
I started toward the banging, wondering what I was doing. My spear seemed absurdly insubstantial. What if the guy had a pistol or machete or crossbow—
KNOCK-KNOCK.
I stopped in my tracks and almost melted with relief.
Twenty feet up the trunk of a nearby cypress was a bright green woodpecker. Its gray head swiveled toward me, revealing a red mustache and yellow bill. The head ticked this way and that, then returned its attention to the hole it was excavating.
Knock-knock-knock.
I pointed and said, “It’s just a woodpecker.” I wanted to laugh, but my nerves were too jacked up.
“I will kill it!” Nina said, stepping out from behind the tree where she had hid. “It almost gave me a heart attack.”
Mel picked up a small branch and threw it, though it came nowhere close to the bird. “So there is life in here,” she said.
“I saw a deer too,” I admitted.
“When?”
“This morning, right after I woke up.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“You were still sleeping. Then we realized Tomo was missing…” I shrugged. The deer didn’t matter. “Anyway, look, it’s already three o’clock. We’re running out of time. We have to get going.”
“We cannot abandon someone!” Nina said stubbornly.
“Christ, Nina, are you listening? There is no choice! If we stay here, Neil’s going to die, then John Scott, then us. Yeah, us too. You think you feel bad now? Imagine how you’ll feel this time tomorrow without any water? That’s if we don’t find you hanging somewhere in the morning.”
She blanched. I shook my head.
“I’m sorry, Nina. But every second we waste debating this is a second less daylight we have. Okay? So the question isn’t whether we stay or not. We are leaving. The question is: who do we take with us?”
“I suppose you want to leave John then?” Mel said.
“I think Neil’s condition is more critical.”
“You don’t want to take John because you don’t like him.”
“My personal feelings have absolutely nothing to do with any of this right now.”
“I want to take John then.”
“Now you’re choosing based on emotion.”
“I am not.”
“Then tell me why we should take John Scott over Neil?”
“John’s in pain. Neil’s not. And we don’t know how bad John’s leg is. It’s still bleeding. If his blood pressure drops too much he can pass out or go into cardiac arrest.”
“Nina?” I said.
“I will not choose.”
“Stop fucking around, Nina! John Scott or Neil?”
Her eyes brimmed with tears, and I didn’t think she would answer. Then, very softly, she said, “John Scott. I think we should take John Scott.”
“Why?” I asked.
“He’s younger,” she said simply.
I wanted to argue with them, tell them they were making a mistake, they were risking Neil’s life, but we had to leave. The choice had been made.
I went to explain to Neil what we were doing while Mel explained to John Scott. Neil’s skin was papery, his mouth slightly open. He made that wet, phlegmy sound with each brittle breath.
“Hey, Neil. It’s Ethan. Can you hear me?”
He didn’t respond.
“Neil. You hear me?”
He opened his eyes, stared vacantly at me for a moment, then closed them again.
“Listen,” I said. “John Scott’s had an accident. He fell from a tree. His leg is pretty bad. Anyway, we’re going to take him out of here right now so he can get some help. But then we’re going to come straight back for you. Do you hear me? We’re coming straight back.”
He didn’t respond.
“It might get dark,” I went on. “But you’ll be fine. Just stay beneath your sleeping bag. And don’t go anywhere. This is the most important thing. Don’t go anywhere at all, otherwise we might not be able to find you.”
I didn’t think Neil had the strength to go even a dozen feet in any given direction, but I wanted to make sure he stayed put if he experienced a miraculous recovery while we were gone.
“Neil? You hear me?”
He didn’t respond.
I found his hand beneath the sleeping bag and gave it a squeeze. “I’ll see you soon.”
I got up and went over to the others. Mel seemed to be arguing with Jo
hn Scott.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“John’s not thinking clearly,’ Mel said. “He wants us to take Neil.”
I looked at John Scott in utter surprise.
“He’s worse off than me,” he said, his voice firm. “I can manage on my own for a night.”
“Don’t be a fool, John,” Mel said. “You’ll bleed to death if you don’t—”
“Then you better stop dicking around and get a move on.”
“We’re not going to—”
“You heard me.”
“John—”
“This is my choice!” he snapped, and that ferocious determination was back in his face. “My fucking choice. Okay, Mel? Mine. Not yours. End of discussion.”
For a moment Mel seemed about to defy John Scott’s altruistic assertion of free will, but the blaze in his eyes—a cocktail of intensity and pain and resolution—made her reconsider.
“Yo, Ethos?” he said, turning those feverish eyes on me.
“Yeah?” I said.
“You really going to climb that tree?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded in what might have been approval. “Don’t fuck up.”
CHAPTER 30
We stood at the bottom of the fir John Scott had attempted to climb, looking up, way up. He fell from it, yes, but it was still the best candidate around. This time Nina made the stirrup with her hands, and with Mel pushing me up by my rear, I was able to surmount the lowest branch on my first attempt.
I raised myself into a semi-stance, holding onto nearby branches to brace myself. The trunk was a foot from my face. It was thick and scaly with deep furrows and scarred with resin blisters. These emitted a sharp, spicy odor that mixed with the rosemary aroma from the matte-green needle leaves.
I began to climb.
From the ground looking up the branches had appeared to grow evenly from the trunk in a ring-like fashion. But it quickly became apparent they were produced in a series of whorls, spiraling upward. I might be a big guy, but like John Scott I was fairly agile and able to bend in and out of the branches to progress at a decent pace. My hands quickly became sticky with resin while several small twines protruding from the branches like nails punctured my flesh, drawing blood. I noticed all kinds of gnarls, knots, holes, and other imperfections in the bark that had been invisible from far away, and for whatever reason these made me think of the old red oak I used to climb as a kid back in Wisconsin. I had spent hours at a time in the oak, collecting acorns to use as weapons against imaginary intruders, peeling back bark to watch the metallic blue and green shield bugs go about their business, or just gazing at the panoramic view of my family’s fifty acres and the Victorian farmhouse on the horizon, all gingerbread, turrets, gables, and shingles.
Before I knew it I had ascended at least forty feet through the forest understory. I wasn’t sure because I refused to look down. In fact, I didn’t look up either. I focused only on the branches within my immediate vicinity, making sure to carefully spread my weight among four separate ones at any given time, pushing with my legs rather than pulling with my arms to save strength and energy. It helped, I found, to visualize Spider-Man climbing a glass building, left hand/right foot, right hand/left foot, over and over.
Up until this point I’d felt relatively safe. The branches were solid, and they cradled me within their embrace. Yet once I approached sixty feet or so they began to thin out in both volume and thickness—and my fear of heights kicked in. I suddenly second-guessed what I was doing. This was not natural. I was not a fucking monkey. And even though I wasn’t looking down, I nonetheless was hit by an extreme wave of vertigo. This created the sensation of spinning, throwing my balance off.
Abruptly terrified I was going to fall, I hugged the trunk of the tree with both arms and waited for the symptoms to pass.
“Ethan?” Mel shouted, her voice small and concerned. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah!” I called back. My chest was so tight I barely got the word out, and even had I wanted to elaborate I wouldn’t have been able to.
For a good minute I remained frozen in place. My heart was pounding, I was breathing too fast, and all I could think was: I’m stuck. Fuck going any farther. I can’t get back down. I’m stuck up here.
I tried to tell myself this was all in my head. I’d gotten this far without problems. I could keep going. But this failed to psych me up. The vice-like grip of fear had paralyzed every inch of my body and wouldn’t let go.
“Ethan?” Mel shouted. “What’s wrong?”
I opened my mouth but my tongue felt thick and I couldn’t respond.
“Ethan!”
“Resting!” I managed.
My breathing continued much too fast. I felt a numbness in my lips. I figured this was because my cheek was pressed hard against the trunk, then I realized the tingling was also in my hands and feet.
Was I hyperventilating?
What if I fainted?
I closed my eyes and tried to forget where I was. I told myself I was in the red oak on the farm, only ten feet up, no biggie, I could jump down if I wanted. I thought of the warm summer afternoon when I had spent hours in the tree flipping through the May 1987 issue of Playboy magazine I’d discovered hidden away at the bottom of Gary’s box of baseball cards. I had been looking for a Kenny Griffey Jr. rookie card to trade with my friend Danny Spalding, who said he would give me one of his GI Joes for it, but instead of Kenny Griffey Jr. I found Vanna White staring up at me. This was the first time I had seen nude photographs of a woman—and a famous one at that—and I tore free a half-naked picture of Vanna White sitting at a window, hid it in the metal tackle box in which I kept all my other favorite stuff, and returned the magazine to the bottom of the box of baseball cards before dinner.
Gary realized the picture was missing a week later, but he couldn’t tell our parents on me unless he wanted to admit his pubescent fascination with naked women. Instead he strolled into my room one evening and in his affable way told me he knew I had the picture and wanted it back. When I denied taking it, he wrestled me to the carpeted floor and put me in the Million Dollar Dream, a submission move Ted DiBiase had used on the Macho Man Randy Savage in Wrestlemania IV’s main event. But when I wouldn’t submit he got creative and began pulling my hair out one strand at a time while telling me it wouldn’t grow back and I’d go bald—
“Ethan!” It was Mel again. “Come down right now! You’re scaring me!”
I blinked, remembering where I was.
“Why aren’t you moving?”
Jesus bleeding Christ, move! I told myself.
I released the trunk and gripped a branch above my head with my left hand. I felt around with my right foot for a new purchase, found one twenty inches higher than the last, and eased myself upward, my stomach brushing the rough trunk.
I continued in this fashion for another ten feet, then fifteen, then twenty-five. Mel and Nina encouraged me from below. I barely heard them. Their voices seemed a million miles away right then. I had one thought on my mind only.
Climb.
As I progressed the branches became thinner still, so much so they bent beneath my weight. This freaked me out, but I had come too far to turn around: I was almost above the canopy.
To my left, a broken branch was intertwined with a live one. The end where it had snapped off was pulpy and jagged. This would be the branch John Scott had broken. I saw him falling, toppling ass over tits on an express trip to the ground…and I pressed onward and upward.
Soon I came to the severed limb. It jutted two dozen inches from the trunk. Moving as deliberately as a mime feigning slow motion, I inched up another ten feet. The crown of the fir had begun to narrow into a conical shape, and the branches had reduced in density enough I could finally see through them—and the view took my breath away. An emerald landscape stretched away to the horizon. Honda had said Jukai translated to “Sea of Trees,” and I now I knew why—
The branch beneath my le
ft foot gave way with a sickening crack. My foot plummeted. I kicked wildly until it landed on another branch.
Mel and Nina were yelling at me. I wanted to tell them to shut up, but my heart was pounding out of control, and I had no breath.
Mt. Fuji, I noticed, was not ahead of me. I turned my head slowly to the left, afraid that even the simplest shift of weight could send me to my grave. Not there. I rotated it to the right. Nadda.
Behind me?
Wrapping my arms around the trunk—it had narrowed to the circumference of a utility pole—I turned and saw Fuji directly behind me. It seemed to be impossibly far away, one of those distance shots you see on postcards.
Nevertheless, that didn’t matter. All we needed to know was the direction, because then we could figure the way back to the parking lot.
I marked the direction of the mountain with a couple of nearby pines, so even if I got disorientated on the way down I would know the correct way we had to travel.
I was about to begin my descent when I noticed, perhaps two miles away, three at the most, a curlicue of gray smoke trickling up through the canopy.
CHAPTER 31
The climb down was just as harrowing as the climb up had been, only with each branch I passed I was comforted by the thought I was getting closer to the ground.
I remained facing the trunk the entire way, and soon I was back to sixty feet, then forty, then twenty. Then, thank God, I stood on the lowest branch, a paltry ten feet from the ground. Nina and Mel were directly below while John Scott was a few feet away, where he had crash landed, laying with his head on his rucksack, watching me.
“I am never, ever letting you do that again!” Mel said. “I was scared half to death.”
“Piece of cake,” I said, sitting on the branch, dangling my feet.
“Did you see Fuji?”
“That way.” I pointed toward one of the large pines I had made a mental note of.
