I know the drill from last time. It’s over-the-head willows for the first stretch, and then smooth alpine tundra walking after that. It’s the tundra part that I love—the green spongy ground that carpets the earth and makes it soft.
“Hey bear, hey bear!” I say. Grizzlies don’t usually bother humans, but today everything feels like it could go wrong. Maybe the lady at the Wilderness Access Center was onto something when she called the two of us “alone.”
After yelling “hey bear” twenty-three times, I’m tired of it, so I start our family bear-scare game, even though it makes me feel like a little kid.
“In my grandma’s dogsled, I pack an extra-sharp ice ax,” I say.
Sophie must be scared of bears too, because first she shakes her head, but then she continues. “In my grandma’s dogsled, I pack an extra-sharp ice ax and a chocolate mousse cake.”
We go on to pack ten things. I pack what Dad needs: an extra-sharp ice ax, a rope, crampons, a rescue helicopter, and a goose-down parka. Sophie packs what Dad loves: a chocolate mousse cake, a frosty mug of beer, Robert Service poetry, Mom’s mac and cheese, and dry socks. I’m about to add the eleventh item when Sophie yells, “Whoa!” Then: “Hey! Whoa!” She claps her hands above her head, and I know this can only mean one thing.
A bear.
The rustling gets louder. Sophie’s talking toward the bushes to her right, and I’m waiting for the bear to emerge. I’ll drop and play dead, because that’s what you do for a grizzly.
“Heads up!” Sophie yells, and the rustling gets louder.
“Hey!” Sophie yells again, and I see it.
A brown beast.
But it’s not a bear. It’s smaller and prickly.
A porcupine.
He weaves clumsily past Sophie and on through the willows. He comes slowly right for me.
Porcupines don’t charge, I tell myself. They don’t eat humans. They’re harmless.
Phew.
At the last second, I step aside to make way for the porcupine. It totters by at a clumsy crawl, and I don’t expect it to veer close. But it does.
And it flaps its tail.
Thwap.
“Ouch!” I say, but it’s too late. I’ve got needles pricking, pinching, aching through my right hand.
“Some bear,” Sophie says, chuckling, from the willows ahead.
“Help!” I say.
“It’s just a porcupine,” Sophie says. “Calm down.” But then she sees my outstretched hand and the quills stuck in it.
“What did you do, pat it?” she asks.
“Not funny,” I say, and the prickling gets stronger. “His tail got me.”
“What now?” Sophie says, grimacing at the sight of the needles.
“I’ve only seen quills pulled out of dog noses,” I say, thinking of when our old dog Snuffy pounced a porcupine a few summers ago.
“Mom used pliers to pluck out those quills,” Sophie says.
“Pliers?” I ask. The thought of pliers makes me queasy.
I feel like the stupidest hiker on earth. I know exactly what to do for all the other wild animals. Play dead for a bear. Run from a moose. Throw rocks at a wolf. But a porcupine? I’ve never heard of humans quilled by porcupines.
Dad never told me what to do for a porcupine. I guess it’s obvious—get out of the way. How hard would it have been to step aside?
Sophie’s standing like a statue now. “Can you help me or not?” I ask her.
Her face turns white when she looks down at my hand. The quills are tan with dark tips on the ends.
“You know I don’t like blood or needles,” she says.
“Well, I can’t exactly do this myself right now. It feels like I’m getting a flu shot over and over again.”
“Okay, okay,” Sophie says. “Hold on.” She takes off her backpack and rubs her hands together to convince herself she’s up to the task. After all, she is trained in wilderness first aid.
At least I brought my Leatherman along. To yank. The quills. Out of my hand.
“Sophie. We have to get these out. Now,” I say, handing over the Leatherman.
She clamps down on the first needle. “One, two, three, go,” she says, and she rips the needle out.
“Ouch!” I say.
“Ack!” Sophie yells back, at the sight of blood.
I don’t cry. I’m tough. I’ve got bigger problems than quills.
“Keep going, Sophie,” I say. “Keep. On. Going.” Once she gets started, I’m desperate to be through with it.
Sophie stops after the third quill. She runs to the tall willows and vomits her chili. Yuck.
“That’s going to attract bears,” I say.
“Thanks a lot,” she says.
Blood continues to pool up from my quill wounds.
“One left,” Sophie says, but that last quill is the worst. Sophie yanks back and somehow loses her grip, and the quill is halfway in, halfway out—bent—and jabbing into my skin.
“Get it out,” I say. “Now!”
It hurts even more when Sophie rips the halfway-out quill from my hand.
Tears start coming and don’t stop, and I don’t even bother to wipe them away. They are salty tears, not sad tears, and they sting when they drip into my quill wounds. Everything feels like salt in wounds.
“Thanks for your help, Sophie,” I say, meaning it. I wrap my bandanna around my hand, and we continue.
Blisters form on the outer sides of my big toes as we hike up Healy, and my quill wounds throb. I’m sure Sophie’s getting blisters too, especially because of the green high-tops, but she’ll never admit it. She’s walking faster now, like somehow the porcupine incident brought her back to her old self.
The bushwhacking ends, and we pop out into the wide green carpet of earth. That’s when I smell it for the first time this trip. Wet tundra. Lichens and blueberry bushes and damp spongy ground. If I could bottle up the tundra and turn it into perfume, I would. It’s not sweet like roses. Tundra is earthy and gritty, the smell of adventure—and the smell of Dad.
There are dozens of wildflowers, too. I can’t identify all of them, but I definitely know some. Dark white windflower. Yellow frigid arnica. Pale blue weaselsnout. White Labrador tea. And my favorite of all, the cream-colored alplily.
It’s always hard to believe that these flowers pop up every spring after winters with temperatures as cold as negative fifty degrees Fahrenheit. But if these flowers can survive winter, surely Dad can last more than four days out here now.
After a while, Sophie stops for a bathroom break. When she heads off for the perfect divot in the tundra to squat, I reach into my vest pocket for my tiny flower book.
When Dad gave me the flower book for my fourth birthday, he attached a magnifying glass to it on a pink ribbon. On the first page of the book, he wrote:
HAPPY 4TH BIRTHDAY TO MY ALPLILY.
HERE’S TO HELP YOU SEE THE DELIGHTS OF THE TUNDRA.
THE MAGNIFYING GLASS IS YOUR TICKET TO TINY.
LOVE, DAD
When I was four, I was in love with tiny. I liked runts, dwarfs, mice, ladybugs, dollhouses, miniature books, and fun-size candy bars. I liked tiny in the wilderness, too: dryas, blueberries, spiders, pebbles, shrews, and chickadees. I liked watching squirrels stash mushrooms in treetops more than gaping at a gangly old moose. I liked the way small streams trickled, quieter than wide rivers. Mom always said that when I got bigger, I would be less obsessed with tiny, but she was wrong. I like tiny too much.
Tiny flowers, especially, like forget-me-nots. Forget-me-nots were tiny enough to sit on the kitchen table in my dollhouse. And I sat in patches of them when I climbed Healy Ridge with Dad a few years ago.
We didn’t see sheep that day. No bears, either. Not even a hoary marmot. But there were forget-me-nots everywhere. It was like a raven had spread a million seeds over the mountain. We weren’t supposed to pick flowers in a national park, but Dad winked and let me press a clump of them inside my book.
<
br /> When I flip through the weathered pages of the flower book now, I get to the blue flower section and find the tiny pressed forget-me-nots. I set the magnifying glass over them, and more details come back.
I see Dad walking up Healy. He limps slightly, since his right leg is longer than his left. Tufts of long brown hair stick out from his ball cap. I see us sitting in a huge patch of forget-me-nots while we eat gummy bears. I see the peak above, and the Savage River below.
Tiny brings back Dad.
“All set?” Sophie asks, and I close my book and stuff it back in my vest pocket. We start walking, walking, walking again, but I can’t get forget-me-nots and tiny things and Dad out of my mind.
When we’re nearing the summit, I spot a man ahead, walking his final steps to the tippy top.
Plaid shirt. Tan pants. A slight limp.
“Dad!” I holler.
“Wait!” Sophie says.
But I know it’s him.
“Dad!”
I scramble up the rocky slope.
He’s there. Dad’s up there.
So close.
“Dad,” I say again. I can’t believe this is happening.
When I finally hurl myself up to the top, I yell one last time. “Dad!”
He turns around.
I run toward him, arms outstretched for the hug.
But this man is not Dad.
“Hello?” the man says, a question more than a greeting, and he squints as if to be sure that I’m a real person. “Having a nice hike, young lady?”
I shake my head up and down, but it’s only out of habit. The man takes one last look, turns, and keeps on hiking over the back side.
I collapse onto the scree.
The bright blue sky arcs above me, and everything is wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Are you crazy?” Sophie asks when she reaches me.
“I really thought it was him,” I say.
“Lily, you can’t chase hikers hoping that they’re Dad.”
Sophie’s right, but she doesn’t know how real he was to me. The shirt. The pants. The limp. The spirit.
Why couldn’t that man have been Dad?
It’s late when we finally get back to the Savage River Campground. Sophie and I eat king-size Snickers bars for dinner, and then we crawl into the tent.
It’s nice at first, being so close to the earth. No pavement. No floor. No bed. Lying here, I almost feel the pulse of the land, like I’m in the earth’s rocking chair.
But once I’m in the tent, I start thinking, thinking, thinking. About Dad and the mountain and how long it will be until I get to them both. I wriggle my way into my sleeping bag, but it doesn’t feel caterpillar cozy like usual. The tent is damp, and there’s a tree root underneath my sleeping spot in just the wrong place so I can’t get comfortable.
Sophie’s sitting up in her sleeping bag. She’s holding the silver chain and moving the charm back and forth along it. She must also feel how weird it is to have two of us in the tent—not four.
“What’s with the necklace?” I ask.
“Oh, just a chain,” she says, and quickly tucks it beneath her wool shirt.
“No, it’s not. Let me see it,” I say, reaching out.
Sophie shakes her head.
“Is it something fancy from Clint?”
“No. Not from Clint,” she says, pulling the chain out from her shirt. “Dad gave it to me for my birthday.”
My hand aches from the quill wounds, so I shake it and open my fingers and then ball them back into a fist. Open, close. Open, close.
“It’s a silver feather,” Sophie says. Sophie’s birthday was in January, and I don’t remember the gift. It must not have seemed important at the time.
Sophie grips the feather between her thumb and index finger so I still can’t see it.
“I hated this feather when he gave it to me,” Sophie continues. “I wanted the necklace to be from Clint. And I didn’t want a feather. I wanted something with more sparkle.”
Sophie stops talking and lies back like she wants to disappear into her mummy sleeping bag.
“Is that what’s up with the sneakers, too?” I ask.
Sophie nods. “I don’t even like the green sneakers, but Dad was so excited when he gave them to me. He thought they were hip.” It’s true. Dad always tries to do things to make Sophie happy.
“I don’t think Dad wanted you to wear them camping,” I say.
“You’re not kidding,” Sophie says. She opens her palm and lays the charm on top of her wool shirt in full view.
The feather is small and shimmery.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, and it is. In that moment—looking down at the silver feather necklace—I wish that I had my own silver feather from Dad. A shiny little emblem of hope.
It’s only ten minutes later and Sophie’s asleep, burrowed deep in her sleeping bag so that the silver feather and her face are totally covered up.
In the silence of the tent, I can almost hear Dad whisper his favorite poem by Robert Service. He always reads it aloud on Denali camping nights, a little section from “The Call of the Wild.”
Let us probe the silent places,
let us seek what luck betides us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There’s a whisper on the night-wind,
there’s a star agleam to guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling . . . let us go.
I open up Dad’s map, the one folded in the back of his journal. I smooth it out on top of my sleeping bag, and that’s when I see them—stars at different landmarks near the mountain. The stars must be all of Dad’s important stops on his climb.
A lump forms in my throat, like I swallowed an ice cube whole. These are stars to guide us. I’ve heard the names of many of the places before: McKinley River. Turtle Hill. Clearwater Creek. Muldrow Glacier. McGonagall Pass. The Great Icefall. Karstens Ridge. These are the main stops on Dad’s trip. These are all the same places that Dad wrote about in his journal.
I’m ready to know these stars for myself. On the map, it looks like we’ll have a twenty-mile hike to McGonagall Pass and the Muldrow Glacier. I know we’ll have rivers to cross, tundra to hop, and animals to encounter.
There are a few stars with dark circles around them. They are not camping spots, because who camps in the McKinley River or Clearwater Creek?
These circled stars must be warning stars. Danger stars.
Maybe they’ll keep us from making mistakes?
Good thing I’m better in the wilderness than I am in a school classroom. I’m a survivor. Just like Dad. All we need to do now is get to Wonder Lake and set out for McGonagall Pass and the glacier tomorrow. When we get to McGonagall, we’ll find Dad and bring him home.
Simple as sunrise.
His tiny stars will guide us along the way.
The next day, we board the bus at eight a.m. after eating a not-so-delicious gloppy oatmeal breakfast. The bus smells of sweaty feet and rotten apples. I want to hop off as soon as I get on. But I don’t, because we’re finally on our way to Dad.
The bus driver stops for views along the way. There are Dall sheep on the rocky part of Cathedral Mountain that look like white dots from so far away, and a group of seven caribou cross the road near the Toklat River. Normally I love watching the animals and searching with binoculars to find grizzly bears camouflaged in the tundra, but today all I feel is the tick, tick, tick of the clock. I don’t want to stop for anything until we find Dad.
Then I’ll be ready for wildlife watching again.
I’m twitchy from all the sitting and waiting, so I eat gummy bears until I slip into a sugary sleep.
I wake up when my head bonks the seat in front of me.
“We’re here,” Sophie says. Here. Wonder Lake Campground.
I shake my head to get rid of the groggy. My watch says two p.m., and I can’t believe I slept through so much of the drive. I have a horrible gummy taste in my mouth.
Getting off the bus sounds like a lot of work, and I still haven’t told Sophie about our big trek to find Dad.
The sign makes it official: WONDER LAKE CAMPGROUND. MILE 85. DENALI NATIONAL PARK. When we step out of the bus, the sun is out of sight. Clouds hang low like fog, hiding the mountain. I slip my hand into my vest pocket to make sure I still have Dad’s journal and map, and my flower book. Yes.
“Ready?” Sophie asks, looking down the dirt road toward the campground. But just a glimpse at the road takes away my readiness. This road leads to our family spot. I think of beautiful autumn nights with Mom and Dad and a different Sophie. Blueberry picking. Mountain gazing. Ranger talks. Reading poetry in sleeping bags at night.
It’s not the same road today.
I buckle my pack straps, groan, and put one boot forward. Then another.
“Let’s do this,” I say, trying to feel ready.
At least it’s not raining. But there are mosquitoes everywhere!
Zzz. Thwap. Zzz. Thwap.
I’m not sure what’s worse—the reality that we’re here just the two of us, or the constant buzz and bite of these skeeters.
We’re almost to the campground when I spot Ranger Collins and her wide-brimmed hat.
“Welcome back to Wonder Lake, Lily and Sophie,” she says. She looks nervous as she walks closer, like she’s afraid of talking to two girls who are on a trip to remember their father. Little does she know why we’re really here.
“Good to see you again,” Sophie says, and she reaches out her right hand to shake a proper greeting. Even though we’ve seen Ranger Collins every summer, she feels like a stranger today, not a friend.
“Hi.” That’s all I can manage. I keep on swatting the mosquitoes, and it feels like they’re biting me inside and out.
“There are lots of good tent sites open,” says Ranger Collins, “and tonight we have a new ranger giving the talk.”
Lily's Mountain Page 4
