Wild Child

by Katie Cross

  "They certainly don't frolic, do they?"

  A giggle bubbled out of her as the moose advanced one slow plod forward. His ear twitched when I laughed, but he just shook his giant head and kept searching the water. The laugh echoed in my chest until we both lay back in the sun-warmed earth, clutching our sides.

  For the first time in a while, things didn't seem quite so bleak.

  17

  Ellie

  My legs and feet moved as if numb through the forest while we walked. The break of speaking after so much being said felt like a reprieve. Whatever burden Devin had gotten off his chest now felt like it lingered on mine.

  His ownership over his decision to leave stirred me up. It didn't surprise me—Devin had always been reliable and straightforward that way.

  But it did affect me.

  He moved into his emotions so easily. Like they were always present and entangled and he didn't mind holding them up and saying, "Look what I found!" Meanwhile, I kept mine boxed away, locked up tight, in a place I didn't like to go. And maybe that was part of the problem.

  His visceral response to the story of my roommate's boyfriend also didn't surprise me, but it did warm me. Also, it made me frustrated. Why weren't you there? I wanted to ask. You should have been.

  At the back of my mind, Mama kept whispering.

  Men leave.

  Love dies.

  You take care of yourself.

  But what if they came back? I asked, and her voice pieced away into nothing.

  Besides, it was one thing for Devin to hold an opinion on what we should do, and another thing that he took matters into his own hands. Why couldn’t we just talk about the potential for resentment issues? Resentment built when people didn’t communicate, not just when they disappeared without explanation.

  Which, consequently, meant we didn't communicate and resentment had built after all.

  Men were dorks.

  Then again, he’d been eighteen. On some level, he seemed frightened of something at the time. Like he’d been running away from something instead of running toward something better.

  But what had he run away from?

  Devin's comment about finding ourselves made me roll my eyes at first, but the idea had been slowly puzzling together the more my feet moved. Was it Devin's job to be my security guard? It had been in high school. We'd both accepted his protection as part of our relationship and that had meant so much. But would he have wanted to do that forever?

  Would I want him to?

  No, of course not. I held my own power, and isn’t that what I found? When the security left, I created my own. What if he had found a girlfriend—what would have happened then? The idea of Devin dating another girl had never really taken root in my mind because I'd always seen him as mine. My Devin. My escape. My safety.

  But his departure made it very clear that he wasn't mine.

  Devin belonged to Devin.

  Perhaps that had been the hardest lesson of all. The one that was the most difficult to accept and the hardest to articulate. Best friends or not, Devin always had his choice at the end of the day. He could choose me, or he could choose his own life.

  If he'd just chosen me, I thought, we could have been . . .

  That thought died away too, because I saw what he meant more clearly now. We could have been something, but for how long? The dependence would turn to resentment. Hadn't that been Mama and Jim? Jim relied too much on Mama. To get rid of him, she'd cheated on him. Used him.

  Resented him.

  The truth lay in ugly paths before me. But I couldn't face this now, so I swept it all into its own box and set it aside to think about later. Later, when I wasn't so hungry and wildly emotional. Later, when a drug dealer and his cronies weren’t hunting us down in the forest. Or maybe they weren’t, and we were just that far gone to fatigue and hunger.

  If nothing else, catching up with Devin in such an easy way had been a gift. I missed just being with him, and it seemed like we sidled closer to that easy dynamic every day. Now wasn't the time to grapple with what we would be after this. Best friends . . . from a distance? Friends that reunited when we could, but lived our separate lives?

  As good as it felt now to pick back up, what would it feel like when he left again? And again?

  And again?

  Bigger questions lay behind all those. Questions I'd been stuffing back in the boxes they kept sneaking out of. Questions like when will I see the world? And If not guiding, then what will I do? Who am I if not this?

  I turned my attention to our destination to get my mind off the heavier weight of Devin and Ellie. Of adulting and decisions and futures. Right now, we needed to get home. The rest could unbox itself then.

  The ridges overhead shifted every now and then, revealing new rock formations or wooded hills. Canyons funneled here and there, hiding behind other mountains as we approached. In general, the landscape didn't look familiar, but I hadn't hiked this far up this stream before. Besides, a mountain looked distinct from one direction and completely different from another. The most familiar places could be completely changed in the space of only a few steps.

  Still, I couldn't help but wonder if this was the right stream.

  My footsteps were slower today, held back by hunger. We slipped to the stream several times to keep drinking, but my empty stomach became more offended. The water slipped away from my belly too quickly and left me ravenous. Not only that, but the stream narrowed in size.

  "Dev," I said with a croak. I cleared my throat. How long had I been lost in thought? "I'm not sure we're in the right canyon."

  He paused. "Me either."

  That troubled me more. "Why didn't you say something?" I asked, and it came out sharper than I intended.

  "I wasn't sure."

  I rubbed a hand across my forehead. So much for him taking a backseat and letting me control this ride. "Maybe I didn't understand the ridges the way I thought. I could have sworn . . ."

  In vain, I tried to draw up a mental picture of the map, but it was too complicated to pull from memory. My instinct told me to head south a little more, maybe circle that way to get back to our original campsite, and then the truck. But what if we were too early? We couldn't have gone that far south the night we'd escaped.

  Could we?

  Devin glanced overhead, then crouched down, braced a stick between two rocks, and marked the tip of the shadow with a rock. Mac used to make a shadow compass in the same way, as a method of gauging what direction was north and south. Dev straightened again.

  "Let's make sure we're still heading the right way," he said. “Might be a good time for a break, anyway. We'll give it thirty minutes, then make sure we're in the right direction.”

  "Good idea."

  We took a moment to rest. Sweat dried on my arms. I brushed off the gritty white powder that remained on my skin and tried not to think about how delicious a box of crisp, salty fries would taste right then. My legs ached. Despite frequent drinking, my head still felt dizzy and my mouth was dry.

  Devin grimaced every now and then if he moved his head too quickly, and I wondered if he'd have lasting effects from such a nasty blow to the head. I leaned back on a rock and closed my eyes. He put a gentle hand on my shoulder that jolted me awake a few minutes later and gestured toward where the shadow had moved on the ground.

  "We're still heading west."

  I frowned. Then why did this look so unfamiliar? Perhaps I didn't know the mountains as well as I thought. Our options weren't great. If this wasn't the right stream, at least it headed down. But where we'd land, I wasn't quite sure. Some streams just disappeared into the ground, and then we could really be stuck. Others kept trickling through the mountains until they dried out. Eventually, if we kept walking to the west, we might run into some ranches or farmlands. But if we were too far south, we'd just keep walking into the forest.

  That couldn’t be right, either.

  If we were that far south, we should have been walki
ng all night to make up the same distance we'd covered all that day. I couldn’t recall we’d hiked that long. No, we just needed to keep going.

  "Well." His forehead ruffled as he glanced up at the sun. "We're definitely not heading farther into the mountains east of here, which means we have to intersect with something else eventually."

  I pointed behind us. "Not those mountains. But this range winds around a lot. We could skirt basins or inadvertently turn up the wrong canyon. It would take us deeper into the forest.”

  He nodded reluctantly. "True."

  I sighed and pushed my frustration back. This wasn't Devin's fault. My short temper was probably more hunger and dehydration than anything else. Still, it rankled me that we couldn’t find our way. Me, the adventure guide. Him, the Marine.

  "Keep following the stream?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Let's see what happens. If it's the right stream, we may be able to find another hiker by nightfall."

  The onset of twilight—and a dwindling stream bed with no lake or familiar landscape to be found—brought the simmering grumpiness in both of us to an ugly point. Cool air descended as the sun disappeared. My sweat-soaked clothes would be miserably chilly in no time at all.

  Dried sweat, salt, and dirt made my shirt stiff as the sun melted beneath the trees and pulled darkness in her path. No longer did I fear Kimball or Steve. They were long gone from my mind, because who could have followed us here? We were in the middle of nowhere. Now, I feared only myself.

  Had I been arrogant enough to think that I knew all of these mountains? That I was ready to be an adventure guide at twenty years old? All the quiet trudging and silence had given me more than enough time to think about why I insisted this be my life. I still hadn't figured it out, and that seemed like an uglier conclusion.

  What was I trying to prove?

  Mountains had always been tricky. Terrain that looked familiar could change within a few steps and a different angle. Ravines were always deeper, or ridges higher, or summits hid other bigger summits. But getting knocked down a peg didn't feel great—not on an empty stomach. It spurred bigger questions I wanted to answer even less.

  Did I really want this for the rest of my life?

  Devin stood at the edge of the narrow stream we’d followed all day, hands on his hips. Deepening lines of concern cluttered his face now. At some point, it seemed like one of us should have pointed out the obvious—this stream wasn’t going to empty into a lake. Looking back, I couldn’t pinpoint a single moment that seemed like the best time to make that call.

  "We're going to run out of water," I said.

  My throat felt dry from the hot air all day long. It baked off the rocks and surrounded us in a sticky, hot embrace. We'd slowed significantly the past several hours, and I tried to convince myself it was to conserve strength, not for utter lack of energy. The last time we'd eaten had been at lunch yesterday, so we wouldn’t die of starvation soon.

  It just felt like it.

  Devin didn't say anything, just changed his gaze to stare out at the trees. Usually, by now, we could expect to see some sign of the reservoir in the distance. That alone would tell us where to go, but all we faced now were hills of craggy rocks and a thick forest.

  Where had we gone wrong?

  The question lingered in the air between us, which had grown with tension the last several hours. Perhaps he blamed himself while I blamed myself and, meanwhile, neither of us really knew where to go. While we didn't argue, our friendly questions and banter had long since quit, and we spoke in single-word replies more often than not. Devin's occasional mumble to himself set me on edge. Was he slipping into a hallucination the way he warned me? But when I tuned in, it always ended up a mutter about a shoelace that wouldn’t stay tied.

  "I think we should stay here," I said as I struggled to sit on a boulder. I put my head in my hands and relished the lack of movement. "We sleep and recover for the night, then make the decision on what to do next in the morning."

  His jaw tightened. “That is one option,” he said in a diplomatic tone that meant he didn’t like it. “But if you can push through, I think we should go farther. There's a chance . . ."

  He faded away. A chance that we’d find something other than this? The same backdrop we’d stared at for days now? Not knowing what to say, I let the conversation drop. We sat there for several more minutes before he dropped next to me on the boulder like a bag of rocks.

  "I just want to get out of here," he said.

  "Me too."

  "Then let's keep walking on this path and see where it takes us."

  I groaned. My feet already felt like splitting apart and so did my legs. Sleep would at least take me away from the gnawing hunger and anxiety of our unknown location. Another hour of walking would only take us into the exact same terrain and hopelessness we'd wandered into all day.

  “Disagree,” I said with equal firmness. “We're tired, lost, and I don't think we should make decisions right now."

  "We're going to be tired and hungry in the morning."

  "We're hungry now," I snapped.

  He let out a forced breath. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have snapped. We're both tired. I just . . . I don't know what to do anymore. We should have backtracked and found our original camping spot. It was the freshest path in our mind and might have been the smartest.”

  "That way didn't have water, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that in the middle of the night while running for our lives. We couldn't have scaled that ridge. The path we took was our only option.”

  His voice remained tense, like a thin veneer of politeness held him together and threatened to break at any moment.

  "It had some water,” I said. "But mostly it had familiarity. We could have been back to the old campsite by now where there’s plenty of water.”

  "Without water on the way,” he ground out. “We have no containers to hold it in, like we did yesterday.”

  All my patience evaporated in a heartbeat. I shot to my feet. "Yes, Dev,” I retorted. “Without as much water on the way. But at least we would have enough water and a path back to the truck now."

  "With no keys! Remember? You kept the keys with you.”

  The words Instead of leaving them hidden in the truck remained unsaid between us. I recalled our conversation before we’d left with gritted teeth. Growing up, we’d always ditched the keys near the truck just in case we did something unexpected—like jumping off a small waterfall—and lost them. But as an adult and a professional guide, I hadn’t expected a posse of drug dealers to steal our stuff after tying me up and almost killing Devin.

  My mouth opened to reply, but snapped shut because he was right. The truck keys were in my bags. Which could be burned to a crisp for all I knew, along with hundreds of dollars of camping equipment—some of which I'd grown very fond of through the years. The thought sent another frisson of annoyance through me.

  "I did," I replied. "I took my keys with me and now we're locked out. But the truck had a road and a road leads to something and it's far easier to walk through than this."

  He closed his eyes, his face a mask of frustration that I understood. But heat rolled through me now and I couldn't have tempered it if I wanted to. After keeping my boxes stowed away all day while our known path dwindled into territory we'd never seen before, the boxes hummed with the force of my frustration.

  They were about to explode.

  "Well, it's too late to backtrack now," he said evenly, with an obvious attempt at patience. "I think we should just keep going while we have light. We might run into someone or something and not have to stay here."

  My mind spun as I attempted to cobble a plan together. We could backtrack, but we'd lose almost all day getting to the point where we could resume our previous trail to the first campsite. We'd have water access, but no food. No animals except for rodents and skittish deer found us today, but every hour we remained out here increased our odds of an encounte
r. If we did make it back to the right spot easily, we'd still have to cut farther south through rough terrain, with little water, and find the campsite again.

  It wasn't a great plan, but neither was his.

  “I want to sleep on it and decide in the morning,” I said through gritted teeth. “That’s my proposed plan. Unless you can tell me where we are and exactly where you want to end up tonight?”

  His expression hardened, and I hated myself for being more attracted to him than ever. “You can't tell me where we are either,” he replied.

  "I never said I could."

  "Then why are you putting that on me?"

  "Because you want to keep walking in the dark and I think that isn’t wise. If movement is your desire, it’s responsible enough that we prove the plan out first."

  "We don't have time for this!" he cried.

  "We don't have time for anything, Dev!"

  Our voices rang through the trees in an unnerving way. We'd spent the whole day being carefully quiet just in case Kimball did follow. Now, it seemed absurd. No one could have followed our erratic trail, and we'd given up trying to be sneaky long ago. We’d trekked next to the stream for the past four hours.

  Neither of us had truly shouted just now, but the intensity was far greater than our usual conversations. His cheek twitched like an errant tick. I couldn't fathom what must be running through his mind right now.

  "I just . . ." I hesitated. "I don't think it's our best plan, Dev. Not when we’re this tired, even if there’s still daylight to burn.”

  "Fine." He threw his hands in the air. "We sleep here. We wake up in the morning. We backtrack and try to map our trip home. Then when you find out that we were going the right way all along and just needed to give it more time, you'll feel really dumb."

  "That's not going to happen! We would have found Red Lake by now." I gestured to the stream, only two feet across now and burbling in a shallow run of rocks that was hard to even get a cupped hand underneath. "The stream is dying! Even if we keep going, we'll lose our water then, too. We need sleep, Dev. Will you just trust me?"