Alone in the Woods

by Rebecca Behrens

  “Yeah, just unbalanced or something.” Maybe it was because we were so cold—and so hungry. Moments passed, and I still hadn’t stood back up. I wasn’t sure I could. I really wanted to lie down flat, press my cheek onto the ground—even with all the dirt and sticks and leaves and grubs and webs—and take a long nap.

  Alex melted to a seat next to me. “So let’s just take a li’l rest for a minute.”

  “That sounds good,” I murmured. Alex leaned against a tree trunk. I rested my head on a bed of ferns and needles, looking up at her. I watched Alex’s eyelids start to flutter, and I don’t remember anything after that.

  Sixteen

  I woke to the sound and vibration of my teeth chattering. My cheek still pressed against the forest floor; I could feel the prickly imprint of pine needles. I blinked my eyes open, expecting Alex next to me. But she wasn’t leaning against the tree trunk anymore. I had no clue as to how long I’d been asleep, except it was still daytime. The sun had lowered a lot, though, and it was already dim in the forest.

  “Alex?” My voice was rough and hoarse. I shifted and realized my stomach still had a strange, stabby, too-full feeling, despite us not having eaten anything lately. I winced and rose to my knees. “Alex?”

  Then I heard her, off to my right. Throwing up. “Alex!” I staggered to standing and hobbled in her direction. She crouched on her hands and knees, a few feet away from the edge of the stream. I dropped down next to her and, instinctively, put my hand on her upper back. I could feel her shaking and shivering. “It’s okay,” I said, because I could tell that she was not. Her shoulders tensed, and I knew what was coming next. I pulled her matted and burr-strewn hair back, holding it in a gentle ponytail. I squeezed my eyes shut as she vomited again. With my free hand, I rubbed her back, like my mom always does when I’m sick, and made a comforting shushing noise. “It’s okay,” I repeated.

  After that, she dry-heaved twice. When it seemed it was all over, she sat back on her heels, like she was doing child’s pose in a yoga class.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “My stomach,” she moaned. “All I threw up was water.”

  Not surprising—there was nothing else in our stomachs to throw up. “Did you have anything to eat?” I was worried about what had made her sick and whether it would make me sick too. When the energy bar got hot and melty, had it gone bad? I pressed my hand to my stomach, which still felt off. It also could have been from drinking too much too fast, or from contaminated stream water…

  “Only a nibble,” she said very quietly.

  “Of what?!”

  She shrugged, then winced. “A mushroom. I couldn’t help myself. You know I love mushroom pizza the most.” She looked like she was going to start crying. “It was that or I was going to try to eat my body spray.”

  That probably would’ve been safer. But telling Alex that wouldn’t help now. Neither would getting mad. “Hopefully you got it all out of your system,” I said. “You’ll be fine.” But I didn’t know that. She might’ve poisoned herself. “Do you think you can walk?”

  Alex wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her whole body was speckled with bug bites, welts, and the rash—her skin was crusted with traces of blood. Her bloodshot eyes looked glazed. She nodded and attempted to stand up, wobbling.

  “Careful!” I reached for her elbow to keep her steady. Then my stomach churned. I was really surprised that I hadn’t thrown up too. Normally the sight or sound of anyone else vomiting makes me feel like I’m about to do the same.

  We started off again. I had Alex walk next to me or slightly ahead, in case she was going to faint or something. If Alex passed out behind me, I might not notice until I was too far away to run back and find her. My head felt kind of spinny, like I was on the merry-go-round they used to have at the playground before it got removed for being too dangerous. It felt like my brain had been replaced by cotton balls. At least we had a stream to follow, because otherwise I had no idea which way to go.

  “I’m still sleepy,” Alex mumbled next to me. Her syllables blended into one another in a funny way—like when people are slurring in movies or on TV.

  Sleepiness after waking up from our accidental late-afternoon nap—the second of the day—wasn’t a great sign. “You didn’t eat any other plants, did you?” I asked, listening closely to my own voice, to see if it sounded weird like hers.

  “What? No. I wish.” Alex was irritated again, but only because she narrowly missed tripping on a tangled root. “I’m still sleepy.”

  “You just said that,” I muttered. It was kind of hard to get out the right words. My mouth was numb from the cold.

  We kept bumping into each other, mumbling apologies at first, eventually giving up. My feet and fingertips ached like in wintertime. I didn’t realize for several steps that my towel-skirt had fallen off again, till Alex stopped, scratched furiously at her arm, and then pointed at it crumpled on the forest floor behind us. “Your…” She paused, frowning while she thought. Hard. Finally her eyes flickered. “Towel.” She hadn’t remembered what it was called.

  I shuffled back to grab it, noticing on the way that there were strange dark spots on my legs, too. I bent, swaying from the dizziness of changing position, for a closer look. I ran my wrinkled, pruney fingertip over my calf, where one spot was. It felt like a bump. I bent even closer, despite the pounding blood inside my head.

  “Oh no, I think I have a tick.” The Northwoods are full of them—that’s why long pants, tucked into socks, and plenty of bug spray are necessary while hiking. My mom even has a special scarf that was treated with permethrin, a repellant that lasts through many washes. She wraps it around her head to drive the bugs away when she’s out in the garden.

  That’s when I realized the half-dozen dark spots on my legs were not scabs from bug bites or flecks of dirt. They were ticks, and they were literally eating me alive. I clutched at my stomach, the queasiness suddenly back and even stronger.

  Get them off me. But you need tweezers to get rid of ticks—you can’t just brush them away. They latch on tight.

  “What’s-going-on?”

  The way Alex said it, it sounded like one long, sloppy compound word.

  “I have a tick. A lot of ticks.” I picked up the towel and shook it out, although I was too weak to make it snap. I didn’t want to put it back around myself—I was afraid of what else might crawl up my legs to hide underneath it.

  “Oh gross,” Alex said.

  I decided not to tell her that the spots on her ankles and forearm were also probably ticks, and who knows what was under her towel.

  “You can’t get them off without tweezers,” I said, shuddering.

  “Then you’re in luck.” Alex struggled to pull her tote bag in front of herself so she could dig around in it. “Ta-da.” She held out a small hot-pink pouch. It was strange to see it in the forest, something so bright and plastic and unnatural. Everything around us was muted, organic, able to camouflage.

  She tossed it to me, and I caught it but then immediately fumbled and dropped it to the ground. When I picked it up and unzipped it, I found a nail kit inside: clippers, clear polish, file, and a tiny tweezers. “Sweet.”

  “Always be prepared or whatever,” Alex mumbled, with an attempt at a grin, but it looked more like a grimace.

  I sat down on a smooth green log and moved the tweezers to one of the black spots. I’d seen my mom and dad remove ticks before, after gardening or hiking. The trick is you put the tweezers as close to your skin as you can get, and when you pull up, you make sure not to twist or jerk too much or you might break the tick while it still has its parts stuck in you. I shivered, whether from being cold or from the absolute grossness of what I was trying to do, I don’t know. Probably both.

  With a deep sigh, I yanked up with the tweezers. Got it. I found the next spot.

  “Should we, like, ke
ep walking?” Alex slumped on an adjacent log, still watching me, although her eyelids looked dangerously heavy.

  The sun was sinking fast—it was definitely late in the afternoon. Alex was right. As horrifying as it was to walk around with parasitic bugs clinging to your legs and literally sucking your blood—and as dangerous as ticks were, in terms of stuff like Lyme disease—we couldn’t afford to waste daylight. Once darkness fell, we’d have to face another night in the forest.

  “I guess you’re right,” I said, putting the tweezers back in the case and zipping it up. I placed it back in Alex’s tote bag, and then I shouldered my backpack, wincing as it touched me. I felt worse than the day after I’d gone on a rock-climbing trip to Devil’s Lake State Park, which had been really awesome, but apparently I’d used all sorts of muscles that don’t normally do much in my daily activities. The morning after climbing, my hip and butt muscles had been so tight that I could barely walk down the stairs to breakfast. After a day and a half in the forest, so cold and damp, everything from my pinkie finger to my jaw to the bottoms of my feet throbbed and twinged.

  Alex stood with a groan. We stumbled through the trees again. I put all my energy into focusing on one foot in front of the other. Each step took everything I had.

  The trees cast shadows on the forest floor—ones that confused us at times, when we mistook those shadows for branches and logs we needed to step over or around—and I started to have this strange sensation that we were being watched. That something was in the woods with us, at a distance. I’d stop momentarily and look around, thinking that maybe I’d seen a flash of brown or gray. Maybe it was a stealthy deer. Or a fast-moving squirrel. I wondered, though, if it might be a wolf. They were in these woods, somewhere. At the ranger station in Lakewood last year, they’d said wolf packs lived at Archibald Lake and Ada Lake. Both weren’t far from where we’d started tubing. It had been my great hope that while we were on the river, I’d see a wolf. Now that we were lost—trapped—in the forest, it seemed only fair that I’d at least get my sighting out of it.

  At points, the promise of a wolf was the only thing keeping me walking. As much as I longed to find the river and a way back to our families, back to the cozy cabin alongside the starlit lake, it was starting to feel like that was never going to happen. Like we were in a new reality where those things didn’t even exist anymore; only the forest around us did. The closer the sun dropped to the horizon, the more my hope of walking out of the woods faded with the light.

  “Ow!”

  Alex’s shout startled me because neither of us had made a sound in the last half hour or so, other than the crunch of our footsteps.

  She’d tripped on a root. Alex sprawled on the ground, her tote bag lying on its side. I dropped to my knees to gather her stuff. “Are you okay?”

  She raised her palm, which held a fresh red trickle. “Sliced my hand.”

  I winced. “Ouch.”

  She stared at the blood like she was being hypnotized. “Is it going to attract the bear?”

  “No,” I said, although I’d shared the same initial worry. I grabbed her elbow to guide her back up. Alex wavered once we were both standing. I was wobbling too. Were those fireflies around us? I blinked again, only to realize that they were spots in my vision, from standing up too fast. Or maybe from not drinking enough water. I wanted a drink so badly. But I didn’t think we should have any more stream water—including what was left in my bottle—because we didn’t know if it had made Alex so sick and my stomach so stabby.

  When I looked back down to the ground, I couldn’t see well enough to distinguish the shadows from twigs and rocks. If we kept walking, we would trip and fall every few feet. It was too dim. “Let’s stop for the night.”

  Alex let out a soft groan. I understood. We were going to be spending another overnight in the forest. Without food, without a real shelter, without proper clothes to keep us warm. Without drinking water, unless we actually started licking it off leaves.

  We picked a random spot a short distance from the stream. I unrolled the tube and placed our bags next to it. Then we shook out our towels. My fingers were so numb it was hard to curl them around the fabric for a good grip. I could barely lift my arms high enough to flap off the needles and leaves. I struggled to pick off the burrs clinging to the tiny loops of terrycloth fabric. Eventually, I gave up. We silently crumpled to the inner tube.

  Somehow the plastic was still damp, and it felt so cold against our bare skin. But kind of good on all the bug bites and scratches and welts—almost like an ice pack on a bruise. I’m sure we had plenty of those too. Alex and I lay side by side. Our heads rested on the life vest atop the dry bag. I stared up at the tree canopy, dark branches stark against the periwinkle twilight. Occasionally a bat flitted across the patch of open sky, and I debated whether I should protect my head with my towel, before deciding it was more important to keep it covering my body. I tried to ignore the hollow pangs in my stomach, the sharp aches in my legs and back, and the panic in my head, at the thought of another night spent like this. Cold. Defenseless. Hungry. Bleeding. Sick.

  Lost.

  Seventeen

  Even in Madison, night only gets so dark. It’s not a big city, like Chicago or New York, but it’s big enough that there’s plenty of ambient light. In summertime, during the Perseid meteor shower—which happens every August—you might be able to see a few shooting stars in the backyard or if you walk deep into the arboretum. You’d need to drive into the country, twenty minutes along Highway 12 or something, to really see the night sky and enjoy the show. Up north, night is deep-dark everywhere—the stars shine bright, especially against the mirrorlike surface of Buttercup Lake. When the water is still, you can stargaze without even looking up. Until a loon passes by, leaving a ripple.

  The darkness in the forest that night was like nothing I’d ever experienced. It spread through the trees, shrouding everything in velvety blackness. The afternoon’s puffy rows of clouds had never faded but grown thicker. I couldn’t look to the constellations for comfort; the clouds tucked away all the starlight and even the moon. This was a darkness so intense, you could almost touch it, feel it. I imagined it having the same texture as the sea-foam candy my grandma used to make for Christmas—light but still solid.

  The nighttime chill seeped into my bones. So frozen and numb, I didn’t think I could move, not even if something jumped out of the trees and onto us. Bobcats are nocturnal. I worried about every crackle, every crunch, every whisper of the breeze, every…howl?

  Not close to us, but somewhere in the not-too-far distance, howls carried softly but clearly through the trees. I managed to raise myself onto my elbows to listen, which shifted the towel that was covering me like a blanket. Next to me, Alex stirred.

  “What is it?” she whispered. Her voice still sounded strange, soft and thick. “Oh my God, is that a wolf?”

  “Shh.” I shushed her both because I wanted to listen and also because I was kind of afraid of making our own noise, afraid of what it could attract in the forest at night. “Um, I think so,” I whispered back. It didn’t sound like a coyote. They bark and yip. Wolf howls are long and drawn out, like a song.

  I know I’d been hoping to see a wolf. But the thumping in my chest was from fear more than excitement. I didn’t want to encounter one like this, at night when I couldn’t actually see it, and while we were lying on the ground, half conscious, and so totally vulnerable. Like a pair of sleeping baby bunnies. You can’t blame an animal for acting on its instincts. And if it mistook us for prey…

  Alex curled toward me and tucked her head underneath her towel. She was shivering as hard as the swimsuit-dryer machine shakes at the pool. I touched her shoulder. Like ice, even through her shredded cover-up.

  I began shrugging out of my wolf sweatshirt, even though as each inch of my skin got exposed to the cold air, I had to fight the impulse to tug it back down and pull
the fleecy fabric tight against my body. Once the sweatshirt was off, I lay down next to Alex and spread it equally over both our torsos. Alex snuggled toward me and mumbled what I think was a thank-you.

  I was really happy we were back to being together.

  The howling stopped. But there was another noise, a loud shuffling sound. Something moving through the forest. I held my breath, trying to decipher whether the something was coming toward us. It stopped, then started again. Stopped, then slowly faded away. I squeezed my eyes shut, afraid of seeing what it might be. Remembering those yellow eyes during the storm.

  It was probably something small, like a raccoon. Or a possum. But I wondered—weren’t bears nocturnal? Even if they aren’t strictly active at nighttime, I know they root around in garbage—and pillage bird feeders—after dark, when there aren’t humans to scare them away.

  My heart beat faster. I curled closer to Alex. With my ear practically next to her lips, I could hear that she was muttering something in her sleep. “Yesssss…doughnut. I wannanother doughnut. Mmm.” Then my stomach growled. It’s not that I hadn’t been starving before—hunger was a constant gnawing, twisting feeling. I understood why Alex had said she wanted to eat the mango body spray—by that point I would eat anything that remotely resembled food. It’s just that other things, like movement sounds that could be bears or bobcats or even a transient mountain lion approaching our sad, slapdash not-really-a-shelter, made me sometimes forget that the hunger was there. But hearing the word doughnut seemed to activate the juices left in my stomach and brought the hunger roaring back so strong that it and food were the only things I could think about. I really would eat anything. I would eat meat, even though it goes against everything I believe in. I would eat caviar, even though the concept of fish eggs is extra disgusting to me. I would eat sweetbreads, which I’d once tried to order the single time Mom and Dad took Nolan and me to a fancy restaurant, when I saw it on the menu and assumed it was something like a cheese Danish or kringle—you know, a bread that is sweet. Dad had stopped me and explained that, no, sweetbreads are actually meat: the pancreas or thymus glands of a calf or a lamb. I was so shocked I dropped my fork onto the floor and almost knocked over my glass of water. I ended up ordering the one vegetarian option, which was a surprisingly delicious cauliflower “steak.”