by Scott Fowler
But this looked like it would be a good snow – it was already sticking on the road and in the trees’ branches. Mom loves to take pictures, especially of us. It would have been a great place to shoot our annual Christmas card – the one I try hard never to smile for – except for what we had to do.
“What’s going to happen to Mom and Dad?” London asked from the back. “Will the snow make them too cold?”
“They’ll be fine,” I said, trying to act more confident than I really felt. “They’re going to be warm enough to be OK with all those blankets. The top of the van is OK. And they’ve got water.”
“But what if they don’t wake up?” asked Salem, drawing alongside me.
“They will,” I said. “We just need to get them to a hospital. They have all kinds of medicine there that can wake them up.”
But how were we going to do that? I kept wondering to myself. I knew that my dad told me once that a grown man walking normally could go three miles an hour. I figured we were going slightly slower than that – maybe two miles an hour. So it had been an hour. We had walked two miles and seen nothing but woods. No signs at all that any human lived around here, or for that matter had even gone down this road for a long time.
“I don’t want to see any bears,” London said. “I’m scared of bears.”
“We’re not going to see any bears,” I said.
“OK,” London said. “But I’m hungry.”
I was, too, and I figured the baby might be. “OK,” I said. “Salem, stop for a second. Open your backpack. Everyone can have one snack and we’ll share one of the bottled waters, too.”
We had four bottled waters altogether – we had started this trip off with a 12-pack, which I knew because I had to lug it out to the car when we left home. But we had already drunk five of those on the car trip. Of the seven remaining, I had decided we would take four and had left the other three for Mom and Dad.
“I want some Combos,” Salem said.
“Ritz Bits,” London said.
“Candy,” Georgia said. She had been listening. Then she said it again, to make sure we understood. “Caaan-deee.”
“OK,” I said to all of them. “We’ll eat and walk at the same time.”
Salem and I passed out the treats. We gave Georgia a sucker – the flat kind Mom always gave to her, so she wouldn’t choke. “Bank suckers,” we called them, because they were the kind the lady at the drive-thru bank window always passed out.
“How many do you need?” she would ask Mom, holding up the suckers and trying to look back through the window to see how many of us were in there. The lady always seemed slightly startled when Mom asked for five – she liked bank suckers, too.
Not as much as Georgia, though. We handed her the sucker – it was green – and she gladly went to work on it.
“Mmmm,” she said. “Mmmm.” Of all of us, she was the happiest one. She didn’t know what was going on. She just knew she was getting candy, and a walk, and a lot of attention from her three brothers.
“Does she need changing?” London asked.
I should have thought of that, but I hadn’t. “She probably does,” I admitted. “I don’t think Mom changed her at the gas station. Let’s stop for a second.”
I took the backpack off and then lifted Georgia out. Salem shrugged off his coat and put it on the ground. And London, true to his word, got Georgia out of her snow pants and pink boots, took off the wet diaper and put on a new one. I didn’t have to help him at all. He did a good job with it. I have a hard time with compliments sometimes, though, especially if it involves something one of my brothers do well. So I just patted him on the shoulder as he zipped Georgia back up.
“Londy!” Georgia said. “Londy! Tank! Tank!”
“She’s saying ‘Thank you,’ London,” Salem said, and London smiled. Salem helped me get Georgia back into the backpack. And we headed on.
CHAPTER 6
By 5 p.m., we had all put on our gloves – I had to bend down so Salem could put on Georgia’s without me having to take off the backpack again. I started to wish that we had put on our snow boots, too, back at the van, instead of sticking with our tennis shoes.
You could still see, but it was starting to get dark. We had maybe an hour of light left. Or less. It was also getting colder. And the snow was getting heavier – there was probably 2-3 inches of it on the road by now. And we didn’t have a flashlight. Dad may have had one in the car, now that I thought about it, but I didn’t know where it was and it was too late now.
I wondered how long we could walk in the dark. Since it was so cloudy, the moon and stars probably wouldn’t help us much.
My brothers were dragging a little, so I tried to interest them in a game we sometimes played in the car. It’s called “Would You Rather?” The point is to give the other person two terrible alternatives and make them choose one – my Dad said grown-ups would call it the lesser of two evils.
“OK,” I said… “Would you rather eat a black banana that you found at the bottom of a sandbox or eat two handfuls of mud from the bottom of a pond?”
“The mud,” London said, “because it wouldn’t be so rotten.” He thought for a second.
“Would you rather jump off the top of the Empire State Building or stand on top of Mt. Everest in only your underwear?”
“The Empire State Building,” Salem said, “because I’d bring a hang glider with me. Now…. let me think…”
I knew what was coming. Salem’s “Would You Rathers?” always involved bodily functions.
“OK,” he said. “Would you rather sneeze out your butt or fart out your nose?”
“Sneeze out my butt,” London said, and we all laughed. “Now it’s my turn again. Would you rather…”
We went on like that for awhile until we climbed to the top of a pretty steep hill. Then London asked: “What’s that?”
He was pointing to something on the side of the road in a ditch.
It looked like a long, straight, silver sheet of metal. If you had stood it on one end, it probably would have been about the size of a door, but a little skinnier.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But unless it can help us, we’re not stopping.” I kept walking.
“No no,” Georgia said. “Londy! Londy!”
I glanced over my shoulder at her in the backpack, and London hadn’t moved. Not only that, but Salem had stopped and was looking at the metal sheet, too.
“Maybe this can help us,” Salem said slowly, and you could almost see the idea form above his head, like it was in a cartoon bubble. “Do you think we could all ride it down the hill?”
“Awesome!” London said. “Like a sled!”
I looked at the hill we were about to walk down. It was long and gradual – maybe three football fields worth of distance in all. “No, I don’t…” I started to say, because it is my habit to disagree with most ideas my brothers have. I know I am disagreeable sometimes. I just can’t seem to help it.
But then I stopped. They had been walking a long way. We hadn’t seen any signs of another person yet, and it wouldn’t hurt us to maybe have a bit of fun if it didn’t take but a minute. Enough snow now covered the road that maybe the makeshift sled would work. Georgia still had her helmet on, too, which I was glad of because it was keeping her warm. I walked back a few steps to take a closer look at it. Maybe Salem and London actually had a good idea here.
“I think maybe it’s supposed to be part of a tin roof,” I said. “I don’t know what it’s doing here. Maybe it fell off a truck.”
“Who cares what it’s doing here?” Salem asked. “Let’s ride it – just down that hill. For fun.”
“All four of us?” I asked, still doubtful.
“Yes,” he said. “The four of us. The Fowler Four. C’mon, Chapel. You know it will be faster. Aren’t you tired of walking?”
“Yeah, yeah!” London chimed in. “The Fowler Four! On a sled! If you don’t do it, Chapel, I’ll get you immediately in trouble!” H
e jumped while he told this small joke, the bangs of his red hair bouncing against his forehead.
“OK,” I said. “We’ll try. But if it goes too fast, I’m putting my feet down and stopping us.”
We all worked to pull the sheet of tin out of the ditch and onto the top of the hill. It had a lot of dirt caked on it – it had been there awhile. While we were pulling it out and brushing it off, I looked at the large pine tree that part of the piece of tin had leaned up against. Three parallel lines sliced down the center of the tree’s trunk, a little higher than I could reach, maybe six feet up. They were deep cuts, too. I wondered briefly what could have made them. And it looked like there were a couple of jet-black woolly worms or something stuck to the bark of the tree, too. Maybe it wasn’t worms. Maybe it was hair. Or feathers. Or fur. I didn’t have time to think about that, though – not with everyone so hot to ride our homemade sled.
I got on first, sitting at the very back, with Georgia still in the backpack behind me. She was patting my back over and over – she does that sometimes when she is excited or nervous. London got on next, right in front of me, and then Salem got in the very front, since he wanted so much to do it. I was surprised that he did, really, because he never wants to ride the rollercoasters at Carowinds.
“Here we go,” I said, pushing off with my hands and feet.
At first, I didn’t think we were going to move at all. The front of the sled was digging right through the snow and into the road instead of sliding over the top of it. But then Salem figured something out.
“I’m going to lean back and try to pull the front of the sled up just a little,” he said. “Everyone lean back a little with me.” Quickly, that’s what he did.
We started to pick up speed. The wind whipped our faces. And then we really began to move. You could feel every bump in the road, and there seemed to be a lot of them. I could hear Salem shouting “Wheee!” at the front. London wasn’t saying a word right in front of me. Georgia was quiet behind me, too, but still patting me on the back.
The metal sheet worked amazingly well as a sled. It never skidded off into a ditch. I never had to put my feet down. We built up just enough speed to go down that entire hill at medium rollercoaster speed – straight and fast, a whole lot faster than we could have walked the same distance.
Our sled coasted to a stop at the bottom of the hill, in a clearing where there weren’t nearly as many pine trees. We all sat there for a second, breathless and still excited from the ride.
Georgia broke the silence. “Again!” she said.
“She’s never said that before,” Salem said delightedly. “She’s learned a new word!”
“That’s great, Georgia,” I said, happy about the ride myself. It had been great. For a moment, I had forgotten that Mom and Dad were trapped in our van somewhere, hurt and bleeding, and that we were trying to save them. “Georgia, can you say ‘again’ again?”
But before she said anything, London had climbed off the sled. He stared off to the right side of the road through the snow, pointing.
“Look,” he said. “Over there!”
It was a bear cub – jet black, with a brown muzzle. It seemed to be almost exactly the size of London. It was on all fours, its ears pricked up.
And it was walking right toward us.
CHAPTER 7
We all stared in silence at the bear cub walking through the snow. It wasn’t in any hurry – it kept lifting its snout to sniff the air. It was still about 30 yards away from us.
“Prippy!” Georgia said. That was the way she said “pretty.”
“What kind is it?” Salem asked in a whisper.
“It has to be a black bear,” I said. “We studied them in school. They’re about the only kind of bears left in North Carolina.”
“I thought bears all hibernated in the winter,” Salem said.
“Maybe it’s looking for its Christmas presents,” London said. You could tell he was very happy about the bear, and also liked the fact he had spotted it first.
“We read about that,” I said. “Up north, where it snows all the time, they can hibernate for five or six months. But in North Carolina, because they can find food almost all the time, they don’t hibernate nearly as long. Some of them don’t even hibernate at all.”
The cub suddenly plopped down beside a bush that had some red berries on it and started eating them.
“Can we get closer?” London asked. “I want to see what it’s eating. Do you think we can keep it for a pet, Chapel?”
“No, that’s not a good idea,” I said. “Whenever you see a bear cub, you can bet the mother is around.”
But the bear cub almost seemed to hear London’s wish to get a better look. I think it was curious about us, too. It got back on all fours and walked a slow half-circle around us, getting a little closer with every step. Then it stopped again, this time directly on the road in front of us, only about 20 yards away now. Then it just stared at us. I could see the cub’s soft brown eyes.
“Kitty?” Georgia asked from behind me. She thought most animals were kitties.
“No, Georgia, not a kitty,” Salem said softly.
As I looked at the bear, I remembered what I had seen on that pine tree beside our homemade sled. Those parallel lines must have been claw marks – a bear marking its territory. And the woolly worms? Those had probably been bits of bear fur. I had seen on TV on a nature show once about how bears would back up to a tree and scratch themselves in places their paws couldn’t reach. It had seemed funny then. Not now. Those little fur balls had been way, way too high for this cub’s back to have made them.
“OK,” I said, my voice low. “That cub is in our way. We’ve got to keep going down this road. But I bet if we start walking toward it, the bear will run off. Black bears are supposed to be shy.”
Then Salem got one of his ideas – the kind you can’t talk him out of because he acts on them so quickly. He’s not just our family athlete. Mom says he is our family extremist.
“If we can’t keep him as a pet, then I’m going to scare him off for us,” Salem said. “He’s not any bigger than me.”
And before I could stop him, he started running directly at the bear cub, his hands held high in the air, yelling: “Roar! Roar!”
“Salem!” I yelled.
“Kitty!” Georgia yelled.
But he didn’t hear either one of our screams, because just then the bear cub let out a yowl. It sounded amazingly human, like the way Georgia cries when she’s upset. If she wasn’t still in the backpack, calling a cub a kitty, I would have thought it was her.
The bear backed up a few steps, but not very far. Salem tried to skid to a stop a few feet before he got to the bear, but for once his athletic ability let him down. Instead of stopping gracefully like he always did on the soccer field, he slipped on the snow and fell.
We all watched Salem tumble down about 10 feet from the bear cub, and we were studying the two of them so closely that it took us a few seconds before we saw what happened next.
Coming out of the woods, obviously alerted by her cub’s cry for help, was a much larger black bear.
While the bear cub was cute, the big bear was not. It was enormous. And scary. The mother bear was bigger than my dad, and he’s 6-feet-2 and weighs 200 pounds. She was black, too, like her cub, but she had a white patch on her chest that the cub didn’t have. The mother bear was walking fast on all fours, and you could see her teeth. She was making a loud noise that sounded like the “Woof, woof!” of a large dog. This was a strange bear family, I thought in the midst of my terror. The cub sounds like a baby, and the mother sounds like a dog.
It took the mother bear only a few seconds to catch up to her cub. She got right beside the cub, which nuzzled its way back under her front legs until it was almost completely hidden. The mother bear was now only 10 feet away between her cub and Salem.
“Run away, Salem!” I said. “Run!”
I was more scared than I’ve ever been. I did
n’t want to get Georgia anywhere near a huge bear, and it took too long to get the backpack off. But I needed Salem to get away from there fast. I didn’t know what to do.
But Salem didn’t go anywhere. Still on the ground in his snowsuit, he looked up at the bears. I didn’t know if he was paralyzed by fright or just curious, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I looked around the side of the road for some sort of weapon that maybe could scare the bears away.
And then I saw London. he had found a pine tree branch at least as tall as he was. He was holding it straight out like a sword. And he was charging – charging! – right at the bears.
“Go away!” London yelled. The hood of his snowsuit flew off his head because he was running so fast. His red hair trailed behind him like a flame. “Leave my brother alone!”
If London was running toward the bears, I figured I better be his backup. I thought maybe throwing something wouldn’t be a bad idea. The snow was deep and wet enough now that you could make a decent snowball. So I scooped two handfuls up while running a few feet behind London.
The mother bear saw us coming. She lifted off all fours for a second and stood up to her full height, glaring at us. Her ears were laid back onto her skull. She opened her mouth wide and this time, instead of a woof, let out a tremendous “ROOOOOAAAR!!!!”
But London didn’t stop. He just kept running at the bears and screaming. “Go away! Go away!”
The mother bear lifted her right paw and swung it at London’s pine tree branch. The blow connected and knocked the smallest third of the branch off the top, splitting the branch so you could see the white wood underneath.
