Alone in the Woods

by Rebecca Behrens

  But I would, in all seriousness, eat sweetbreads right now. Anything the guy eats on that bizarre foods TV show: Hand it over. Gimme a fork. I was that desperately hungry. And the combo platter of hunger and the fear—of what was lurking around us, or what was happening to our cold and starved and dehydrated and tick-covered bodies, or what struggles we might face in the morning—made it really hard to fall asleep.

  Next to me, Alex managed to rest, but fitfully. Every so often, she’d startle awake, let out a whimper, and then eventually her breathing would slow and settle, and she’d fall back into light sleep. I was kind of jealous that she was able to at all, but I also wondered if that was because she was worse off, physically, than I was.

  Far away, I heard the howling again. I think. It’s possible I might’ve been imagining it. I squeezed my eyes closed, even though there was barely a difference between having them open or shut. I couldn’t see anything around me. It was too dark for my eyes to even adjust.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, Alex’s right leg jerked and her ice-cube toes kicked my calf. I let out a muffled shriek.

  Half awake, she flopped her hand over to pat my arm. “So sorry, accident,” she mumbled.

  “S’okay,” I whispered back.

  “Is it, though?” Alex said, still patting me.

  “Huh?” Her voice had the same drowsy tone as earlier, and I wasn’t sure whether she was actually awake or still talking in her sleep.

  “Like what I did…what I said…all that Laura stuff.”

  I was quiet next to her, just listening.

  “Y’know, I didn’t mean for things to get weird this summer.”

  She was awake.

  I took the bait. “How exactly did that happen?”

  Alex was quiet for so long, I thought she’d fallen back asleep. “We were in this tiny cabin together. The second I walked in, tired…homesick…Laura was super friendly. Then we were together, like, all the time. And kind of bonded? If it weren’t for camp, we’d probably never be friends because she’s so popular. But now we are.” Alex yawned. “Funny how stuff works out. Thought that camp would ruin my summer.”

  “Yeah, I remember. Funny.” It wasn’t actually funny to me. But I was glad we were finally talking about it.

  “Just wanted you to know,” Alex mumbled as she pressed her face into the sweatshirt, which was mostly around her by then. “Not like I planned it. So I didn’t really know how to deal. And I…feel bad. Just feel so, so bad.”

  A warm tear slid from the corner of my eye, and I quickly wiped it away. “Thanks,” I finally said, my voice catching on the word. “I feel bad too. I didn’t mean what I said; you’re not dumb. I was just trying to say something that would…hurt. Because of how I’ve been hurting.”

  I’m not sure if Alex heard me or if she’d already drifted back to sleep. But her hand was still on my arm. I scooted closer because we needed to share body warmth. Last night, we’d slept far apart like parentheses. That night, we were double quotation marks.

  Eighteen

  It felt like a miracle that I ever fell asleep; even more of a miracle that I eventually woke up. I struggled to blink open my eyes—so swollen they were almost sealed shut, and the energy it took to lift my hand to wipe at them felt like the same level of effort the champions on those ninja-warrior TV shows have to use to scale a rock wall. My fingers were so puffy and numb, I fumbled in touching my own face.

  The forest looked fuzzy, like someone had applied a filter with soft lighting, blurred edges, and a lot of haze. Apps should call it “fairy forest” or something like that. Everything seemed kind of dreamy, like I wasn’t fully awake. I blinked hard, swearing that I saw something in the distance, a structure like a fire tower or a deer stand…but it was just another copse of pine trees. I pinched my arm—it was impossible to find a spot that wasn’t already bruised, scratched, sunburned, or bitten—to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I felt the pinch, although maybe not as hard as I should’ve. All my senses were dulled.

  Next to me, Alex lay on the tube, staring up at the sky. Her big brown eyes were wide and her mouth open—as much as her swollen, bleeding lips would allow. Burrs dotted her hair like they were barrettes. She stared without blinking, which was starting to freak me out.

  “Are you okay?” The words came out in a whisper-croak, and forcing my mouth to form them felt like stabbing my throat with a sharpened pencil. I rubbed my neck and winced. The skin was sunburned, like everywhere on my body.

  It seemed exceptionally cruel to be both freezing cold and also sunburned.

  “Alex?” I croaked again. Is she… I swallowed hard, which stung.

  Then she blinked and focused her gaze on me, or at least she tried to. Her eyes couldn’t quite fix on me or anything else as she stared off in the distance like she’d been mesmerized. “Yeah?” Her voice had the same rasp as mine.

  “Is morning,” I said, then cleared my throat. “It is.”

  “Yeah,” she said again.

  “We should start walking,” I said, even though the thought of standing up and moving around seemed impossible.

  “Yeah.” Her eyelids began to flutter, like she was falling back asleep.

  “C’mon.” I rolled to my side and willed myself to sit. It took three tries. The headache once I forced myself up was really bad; a pounding inside my skull like the thudding footsteps when Nolan and his friends play tag in the attic space above my bedroom in Madison. Times one thousand.

  Slowly I began to shrug on my backpack while looking around. There was nothing else to gather; all my stuff was still in my pack. I just had to roll the tube and tie my towel around my waist. With my arms bare—Alex was still snuggled beneath the sweatshirt—I could see that they too were covered in bites, bloody welts, and a few more ticks. Disgusting. I avoided looking at my legs.

  I stood up in stages, like when you roll up slowly in a yoga exercise, one vertebra at a time, bringing your head up last. I kept my eyes squeezed shut for a few moments, to avoid the dimming head rush I knew I’d get otherwise. When I finally opened them, Alex had managed to work herself into a cross-legged seat on the tube. Even though she was convulsing with shivers, she held out my sweatshirt to me.

  “You can wear it,” I offered.

  “You’re shivering too,” she mumbled.

  “We’ll take turns,” I said, before I took the sweatshirt from her and threw it on. I hadn’t fully realized how frozen I was till the fleecy lining blanketed my skin.

  When Lucy started driver’s ed last year, she told us that the weirdest part was when they brought in “intoxication goggles,” these science-lab safety goggles modified so they apparently show what it feels and looks like to be impaired by drugs or alcohol. Everyone in Lucy’s class had to try them on, then walk from the back of the room to the whiteboard, stumbling and disoriented. She said when you had the goggles on, everything was blurry and warped and kind of like if you’d wiped hand lotion across your sunglass lens by accident. Not fun.

  It felt like we were walking through the forest while wearing those goggles. I was light-headed and dizzy, and it was hard to follow the path of the stream, even when there wasn’t much stuff in our way. And it was still cold, even if the sun shined brighter than the day before. I wanted to hug my arms across my chest, for warmth, but the only way I could do that would be to abandon the tube. Do we really need it at this point? I kept it, though, because if I’d already dragged it this far…plus the whole littering thing.

  We’d stopped to rest on some large rocks when I spotted the green bushes only a few feet away. The berries hanging down were plump and a dusty deep blue, just like the blueberries I’d picked in the wild before when Nolan and I were visiting my grandma, who loves to go berry picking.

  My stomach growled louder than a bear. I stumbled over to the bushes. The hunger in my belly grew stronger with every step. Seeing food—a
t least what I thought was food—was unbearable. I reached out my hand and plucked a fat berry from the bush. I rubbed the bloom off to inspect it more closely. Identical to the blueberries Mom buys in the cartons from the grocery store. It couldn’t hurt to try one—even if I were wrong and it was poisonous, could one toxic berry kill me?

  I mean, starvation could also kill me.

  I took a deep breath, then popped it into my mouth. I bit down and blueberry flavor, full of overwhelming sweetness, exploded across my tongue. It tasted better than anything I’ve ever eaten in my life. I grabbed another, and another. “Alex,” I croaked. “I found food.”

  She was next to me in seconds, grabbing at the bush. August is the tail end of blueberry season, so these were late bloomers, and the bush wasn’t very full. We got only a handful each before we’d picked it bare. “Maybe there’s another bush?” I wondered out loud.

  Alex and I began wandering the immediate area, trying to find more. “Here!” she called after a few minutes. The second bush had even fewer berries dangling from its leaves.

  “Don’t eat too fast,” I said. “Or you might get sick again.”

  “So hard not to,” Alex murmured.

  “We can pick off the berries, put them in the dry bag. Ration them, for the rest of the day.” It was amazing how much easier it was to think with a quarter of a cup of berries in my belly.

  We cleaned the bush of all the fruit, and then Alex carefully tucked the berry bag into her tote. We continued walking, with our heads slightly clearer. At least mine was. Alex, next to me, was awfully quiet. Except for her raspy breathing.

  “Are you feeling okay?” A couple of flies circled her, and she wasn’t even trying to swat them.

  “So cold, so tired,” she mumbled. “Can we go inside the house now?”

  My stomach tightened, and it wasn’t from eating the berries. “There’s no house, Alex.” I paused. “You know that, right?”

  “Isn’t that a house over there?” She limply pointed at a rock formation, the opposite direction from the stream.

  “No, that’s not a house.” There are plenty of reasons why someone in our situation might develop confusion: dehydration, hunger, sleep deprivation, anxiety. But the one that worried me the most was hypothermia. I saw a science video about that once, and it was harrowing what hypothermia does to a person. It can even make you hallucinate, in later stages. I watched Alex closely to see if she was still shivering. When a very cold person stops shivering, that’s actually a really bad sign—it means their body has quit trying to regulate temperature. Alex was perfectly still. So maybe she was hypothermic and hallucinating a house.

  “Why don’t you wear the sweatshirt for a while?” I pulled it over my head and helped her work her arms into it.

  It was still funny, considering everything, to see her wearing the label “Lupine Lover.”

  “This is the best sweatshirt in the world,” Alex muttered, and that’s when I knew she was really in tough shape.

  As we kept walking, the stream was fading to a trickle, going from a width we could cover in three big steps to one that we could hop across. Which made me doubt it was going to lead us to a larger body of water, like the Wolf River or a nearby lake. The stream seemed about to peter out in the forest. When that happened, we’d be without a plan again. And it’s not like it was a trustworthy source of drinking water. We really were going to have to start licking leaves for their moisture. But what if we licked the wrong ones, like poison sumac…

  “So, the stream is drying up,” I said to Alex. “We have no idea if it’s going to lead us to the river. I think we should go back to heading in the direction of the sun.”

  “Whatever you decide,” she mumbled, dropping her tote bag to the ground while I stared up at the sky, plotting our next move. But I didn’t know which was best. Follow the sun, or follow the stream? I was too exhausted to make a decision.

  Something flashed into and out of my peripheral vision. I sucked in my breath, thinking about that bear. But when I squinted toward the movement, I didn’t see anything but trees, endless trees. The sunlight’s playing tricks again.

  My stomach was back to aching. Whatever sustenance the berries had provided was fading, fast. I glanced at Alex. She wavered with the breeze. As I turned to look forward, my head spun. Then I glimpsed that flash of movement again. I think that is an animal. Probably a squirrel. Or a deer. I was surprised we hadn’t seen more white-tailed deer in the forest. They’re almost as common as mosquitoes up north.

  I turned my head slowly, tracking the movement. Then I saw it. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  A wolf.

  It had stopped suddenly, its front left leg poised in a bend, and its head turned to stare at me. It wasn’t gray, actually. Its fur was a beautiful blend of colors: downy white, soft nutmeg brown, and gray tipped with silver. Its ears were perked up, and its amber eyes watched us intently.

  I held my breath as I stared, afraid that any movement from me—even a tiny exhalation—would send it running away. I let myself blink, hard, in case I was imagining it. If Alex was hallucinating, I could be too.

  “Alex,” I whispered to her. “Do you see that?” My heartbeat pounded inside my ears.

  “See what?” She swiveled in my direction.

  “The wolf.” Afraid to point, I nodded at it.

  “No?” she answered groggily, then squinted as she took a step toward me, cracking a stick beneath her feet.

  The noise broke the wolf’s stillness. It began to trot away, along the stream. My camera. I reached for the pocket of my backpack and pulled it out to begin snapping pictures of the wolf. I pressed and pressed the shutter button without even looking at what was on the display screen. I didn’t want to take my eyes off the wolf. Even as it ran, it was still eyeing me, almost like it wanted me to follow. Like it was beckoning us. Now or never, Lupine Lovers.

  I glanced ahead at what was left of the stream. I’d been ready to walk away.

  Except the ranger had said the wolf packs lived near two lakes—where people boated, fished, and camped. Maybe the stream fed into one of those lakes. Maybe the wolf was following the stream home. In that case, it would be smart to stick by it.

  The wolf hadn’t approached us, so I didn’t think it meant us any harm. I’d read stories about animals—including wolves—saving humans who were sick or hurt or lost in the wilderness. Maybe that’s why it had paused and kept looking back at me, like it was saying, “Hey, come along. I’m going your way.” Maybe it actually appreciated my sweatshirt. I pressed to take another photo, and my camera beeped. Out of battery. Its lights shut down, and the display went blank. The noise must’ve startled the wolf, because it was moving again. So far, the stream hadn’t led us to the Wolf River, but finding an actual wolf seemed like a good sign. Good enough, anyway.

  Decision made.

  I grabbed Alex’s hand so she wouldn’t wander off or fall into another nap, and then we followed downstream.

  Nineteen

  We moved much faster than before because I was trying to keep up with the flashes of silver and gray fur ahead. The shape of the wolf was a blur, and I really began to wonder if it was even there, or if I was too tired to distinguish a wishful daydream from reality. Maybe we hadn’t gobbled up blueberries after all, but something else—some kind of psychedelic berry. If—when—we got out of the forest, my recharged camera would tell me if I’d even seen the wolf at all.

  But we’d heard howling the night before. I knew wolves lived in the forest. That I was following the trail of a real, live gray wolf was a less-bizarre explanation than that I was chasing a hallucination through the forest.

  Until, suddenly, it disappeared into the pines. We stopped beside the stream, which flowed much wider and faster at this spot. I was glad we hadn’t abandoned it. Looking at the water, I licked my lips. I felt so thirsty—but still afraid t
o drink from the stream. I saw a maple leaf on the ground and picked it up. Three raindrops rested on top of it. Desperate, I licked them. Then I scanned the forest again, searching for a bit of silver-gray amid all the tawny cedar bark and fir green. Our wolf friend was gone.

  I picked up another maple leaf, this one with four drops. “Lick this,” I said. Alex did so without question.

  “Where’re we,” Alex mumbled through a yawn. Her lips were even more swollen, which hardly seemed possible. She tilted backward, then caught herself by slamming her palm onto a nearby tree trunk.

  Now that we were standing still, I felt woozy too. While we’d been walking fast, I’d been able to ignore the dizziness, the hunger, the thirst, and the worry. And the cloud of tiny flying insects surrounding us. “Alone in the woods, again,” I finally answered. I closed my eyes, unsure what to do.

  The wind in the trees was back to making that waterfall sound. Except—the breeze had died. The air was still. The noise continued, louder and stronger than our burbling stream. It sounded like the river.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked Alex. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. I still couldn’t see which direction the sound was coming from.

  “Like a waterfall,” she murmured, trying to lick her lips. “Yeah.”

  “Follow me.” We continued farther downstream, stumbling over rocks and logs and around trees, fiddlehead ferns tickling our limbs. One branch almost impaled me after I bent to adjust the cover-up bootie still tightly knotted around my foot and then stood up without making sure nothing was in the way. The rushing-water sound grew louder—really loud, like we actually were approaching a set of falls. And then, through the trees, I caught sight of sunlight glinting on the surface of water. I brought my hand to my mouth, stifling a yelp of joy. I didn’t want to jinx it. I didn’t want this to be a mirage.