by Zoe Wildau
Her goal was usually to pick the trails least travelled. That was going to be hard if they were taking it easy. The easier trails were well-populated by sightseers and inexperienced hikers. After twenty minutes of study, she thought she might have come up with a route that would actually be quite nice. Just enough of a challenge to scare off the novices.
The height elevation would be strenuous but nothing that she and Jake shouldn’t be able to handle. Except for the wildlife, there was nothing hazardous and there were two campsites near what looked to be some beautiful high country lakes. Lilly marked the map and then looked down the street where she was pretty sure she’d seen a park visitors’ station. She looked in the window of the store, caught Wil’s eye and pantomimed walking down the street until he got her drift and nodded.
At the ranger’s desk, she went over her route and with a few adjustments for closed trails, had the new plan. The ranger even commented that it was going to be a beautiful walk and since the hike wasn’t described in the park guide, should be fairly unpopulated.
Jake and Wil were at the open rear of the SUV repacking her pack when she returned. She watched as the last few items went in. She was about to insist on pulling everything out so she could be sure she had what she wanted and needed for the trip, but just then Jake shut the back door of the SUV and turned to get in. Passersby and some of the store’s customers had recognized Jake and a cluster of fans had started to accumulate around the Explorer. If they didn’t move, it was going to be a mob scene in a few minutes. At least she’d seen the cooking gear and knew her sleeping bag and sleeping pad were included.
In the car, Lilly looked over at Jake, who looked like an advertisement for Marmot. Before she could chastise him for rooting through her pack, he cut her off, “Where to, Ranger Rose?”
“If Wil could take us to Jenny Lake, we’ll hit the trailhead there. It’s a two-day hike in a circular route. He can pick us up in the same spot Sunday midmorning.”
At the trailhead, to her surprise, Jake declined her offer to review the planned hike and with a simple nod of his head, said, “Lead the way.”
“Okay, let me know if you need a break. We’ll stop every hour, and more if you need it. Drink plenty of water even when you’re walking. Since we’ve been here a week, we shouldn’t get altitude sickness, but being well-hydrated at this height will keep you from getting sick if you do. Also, keep your eyes peeled for moose antlers,” she said.
She had talked to the ranger about bear sightings on the trail and was consoled that they were not likely to meet the “big boys,” as the rangers called them. This time of year, most bears had begun to hibernate. However, they could meet up with moose, which could be just as dangerous.
About a half hour into the hike, Jake asked, “Aren’t you supposed to sing? I thought singing alerted the bears to our arrival and made them more likely to move off before we get close.”
“No,” she snorted. “I mean, yes, you are, but the ranger I spoke with said we’re not likely to meet up with bears. He did warn us to be wary of moose, and not to approach if we saw them.”
Lilly looked back at Jake, who was pursing his lips at her, not convinced.
“Did he say there were no bears?” he asked contrarily.
“Well, no.”
“Then I think you should sing. You’re the guide after all. Isn’t it your job to keep us safe?”
She narrowed her eyes at Jake, knowing he was toying with her. Deciding to give him a taste of his own medicine by playing along, she turned back around and broke into a round of “Jingle Bells,” then “Deck the Halls,” then “Silent Night.” After twenty minutes, Lilly had exhausted her repertoire of Christmas carols.
Apparently Jake was done with them too, because he didn’t ask for more. But after a few minutes of silence, she heard him softly begin “Wassail”. He had a beautiful voice, another talent overshadowed by his sinister looks and evil characters.
When they arrived at the campsite, Lilly checked the GPS to be certain, but there was no mistaking the beautiful lake setting the ranger had described. There was a shelf overlooking the lake with loads of aromatic pines and soft beds of needles. She dropped her pack and Jake followed suit. After five hours of hiking, on top of a long week, she felt tired and exhilarated at the same time.
Taking a big swig of water, she looked Jake straight in the eye for the first time since the bus departed. He looked at her, too, and for a moment she felt a connection and peace she didn’t remember ever feeling with anyone. Jake’s expression was softened by the late afternoon sun and the whisper of a smile played around his lips. When he did smile wide, instead of his trademark smirk, he had dimpled cheeks. She wondered how often he smiled wide to let them show.
“Let’s set up camp then walk down to the lake,” she suggested.
At play or work, she liked to get the hard work over with first, so she could relax. Jake didn’t protest when she started pulling items out of her pack, then his. She laid them out in the center of the campsite. She was looking for the ground sheet, which provided a barrier between the tent bottom and the moist, rough ground, when she realized there was just one tent.
Just one tent. Lilly tried to wrap her mind around it. What was she going to do when she woke screaming in the night from her repeated nightmares featuring Jake, only to find him lying there beside her? Trying to keep down rising panic, she ventured, “Um, what happened to my Clip Light?”
She was referring to the one-person tent she had packed when Mike bailed on her. Lilly continued to look around as if another ground sheet would magically appear. Finally, she just glared at Jake, who had the audacity to walk away, down to the beautiful lake, leaving her to set up the tent that they would be sharing for the night.
Fuming, she snapped together the tent poles. It was an expensive tent at least: roomy and stupidly easy to set up. It practically popped up by itself. She pushed in a few stakes to anchor it against any unexpected bad weather and then she was done. Stewing over her predicament, she thought, how could something as simple as a desire to commune with nature have gone so wrong?
Lilly set off to walk around the lake in a direction opposite from Jake’s, to regain some sense of peace. She had to admit it made more sense to pack just one tent. When hiking in the thin mountain air, what to pack was measured in ounces. An extra tent would have taken up space and added several pounds to their packs. She and Mike would have shared a tent and they weren’t romantically involved, although Mike had made a few half-hearted passes over the years. She’d easily deflected him with no hard feelings.
She stopped in her tracks and stood with her mouth open, “catching flies,” her mother used to say, as she pictured Jake making a move on her. She had expended so much energy squelching her attraction to him, she was afraid what she might do if it was reciprocated.
Resuming her trek, she reached the opposite side of the lake where she saw a young couple just setting up camp. She waved at them, feeling a small sense of relief. At least she wasn’t completely alone out here with Jake.
Still a good distance away from their campsite, Lilly rounded a bend to find Jake coming toward her. He’d obviously been checking on her because as soon as he saw her, he turned on his heel and walked back the way he’d come. She followed slowly, and it dawned on her that with his extremely long stride he could have easily outpaced her on the trail, but he had let her walk in front to set the pace for the hike.
By the time she made it back to camp, she was feeling more kindly toward him. But when she saw him sitting on a log scrolling through messages on his smartphone, she frowned automatically. To her, the woods were not for electronics. Jake looked up at her and frowned right back.
Lilly had two choices: she could give in to the miserable mood that started when he horned in on this trip, or she could change things right now starting with that damn phone. Jake’s schedule was grueling. And she started well before him, and stayed long after. Before he even arrived on set every m
orning, she had already been at it for an hour, setting up. After he left at the end of each day, she worked at least another hour, and often two to three hours, cleaning and prepping for the next morning. Much of what she did was so that he wouldn’t have to be in the makeup chair any longer than absolutely necessary.
She needed this break. She did not intend to spend it worrying about work, and she couldn’t let it go with a tent mate constantly checking his cell phone.
Choice made, she marched to stand right in front of Jake, who had turned his frowning face back down to the tiny screen. She glared a hole in the top if his thick, dark hair until he looked up.
When his frown deepened, and she was sure she had his full attention, she said, “You have as many minutes as it takes me to pull the pots out, walk down to the lake, filter some water and walk back here to send however many messages to your top people telling them that you will take care of everything on Monday morning, and then turn that phone off. If the power is still ‘On’ on that thing when I come back, I’m going to throw it in the lake…. I estimate it will take me about fifteen minutes.”
Lilly continued to stare at him, determined to prevail. When he just sat there frowning at her, she put her hands on her hips and gave him her best glare, reserved only for her brother’s cantankerous six year old.
“I don’t make idle threats,” she said sternly.
Jake slowly raised his phone and took her picture, making a show of forwarding the pic to someone as he typed and sent some humiliating message. Without looking up again, he resumed scrolling through his messages, picking up where he left off when she walked into camp. When she continued to glare at him, he looked up again.
“Come on,” she said, “it’s not like you’re the prime minister.”
“No. But I own seven production companies with twenty current film and TV projects, a restaurant chain, a tech company, a record label, a pro football team, about eight resorts around the world and thirty-five other smaller businesses. But I’ll have it off when you get back, so stop glaring at me, and go start dinner.”
Irritated at the dinner comment, but exhilarated that she’d won the war, she beamed at him, then let out a yip and jumped back as he suddenly growled and grabbed at her with his free hand, barely missing her. Heart in her throat and realizing she was playing with fire, she chastened and grabbed the pots and filter and headed back down the trail to the lake.
She was filling the second pot when she heard Jake, whose steps behind her she’d come to know, walking down the steep path. He stopped to kneel beside her and watch as she finished pumping the water and took apart and stowed the filtering system. When she was done, Jake stood, taking the full pots with him, and headed back up the hill.
As she started the WhisperLite stove, Jake pulled out two apples, handed one to her and then pulled out two packages of freeze dried, cook-in-the-bag, backpacker’s lasagna, handing them to her, too.
While she watched for the water to boil and ate her apple, she piped up to Jake between bites, telling him about the couple across the lake. Jake had also seen them and had actually spoken with them. They were just married and honeymooning and thrilled to have another story to put in their scrapbook about meeting Jake Durant on the trail.
“Nice kids,” he said.
“Did they get your picture?”
“Yes.”
Lilly smiled, “That was nice of you.”
When the water boiled, she opened the packages of lasagna. Jake offered to hold them, but she declined – it was too dangerous, much safer to stand them up on a rock and risk losing dinner rather than risk scalding each other. Closing them up to let them steep, she looked up to find Jake staring at her.
“Tell me about your family,” he said.
So she did. Lilly talked through the bag lasagna, which wasn’t so bad, and made some hot chocolate, pulling on a down jacket as the air chilled. She talked about her brother and his wife and their little girl, who was a beautiful monster and threatened to wreck their lives as much as she enriched them. She talked of her mom, who had died too young. Lilly’s aunt, her mother’s sister, fell asleep at the wheel when they were coming back from a girls’ trip and flipped the car. Her aunt survived but was so guilt ridden by what happened that Lilly hadn’t seen her since childhood.
She spoke of her dad, who was older when he had her and her brother and was now getting up there, but still in good health. He still kept a few cows in Kansas on his parent’s old dairy farm and rarely left. He lived with his second wife, who Lilly liked well enough, even though she always seemed to overdo it, offering to do things and give things to her as if she needed to buy her affection. It could be exhausting. She worked her way back around to talking about her brother.
“We look nothing alike, except for our coloring. He’s only eleven months older than me. He snuck in first and stole the egg with the tall genes.”
She’d always been small, but she was truly tiny until she was about nine. When she was six, she was the size of most three year olds. People tended to baby her. She grew to hate it. She liked sports and the outdoors, but her classmates put her aside when it came time for the real fun. As a result, Lilly was always getting herself into scrapes trying to prove how tough she could be. Her brother had had to rescue her on more than one occasion, like when she climbed much too high in the town center old oak tree.
Because she was so lightweight, she had gotten much higher than anyone else, and even her brother had trouble getting her down because he couldn’t climb on the slender branches. With her brother standing three branches below her, she’d had to drop to his arms, trusting he would catch her.
As she got older, the scrapes got riskier to her record, if not her health. She was small and slippery and was often used by her classmates as a natural lock pick. She could climb under or over just about anything, which provided access to a lot of backyard pools, locked marinas and water towers. Somehow she made it through her early teens, but not without her brother’s help.
And then she’d met Kyle. A true friend to both her and her brother, as they were to him in return. After that, she channeled her frustrations in a different, more practical, direction. To study, school and art.
Smiling ruefully at how long she’d talked, she began sorting the pack items to secure for the night. Anything with a smell that might attract bears had to be bagged separately and hung from a tree a fair distance away from camp. When everything was put away, she interrogated Jake for contraband, until he turned over a toothbrush and toothpaste.
That’s it. No more stalling. Time to get in the tent. Her fingers were becoming stiff with the cold. She tried to find her bravado from earlier, but it had deserted her. Sitting on the threshold of the tent trying not to look at Jake, she undid her boots to leave them in the vestibule. Then she ducked into the tent, scooted into her sleeping bag, choosing the side away from the door, and rolled over to face the back of the tent so she wouldn’t have to pretend not to watch Jake as he got in.
Jake’s broad back blocked the moonlight as he sat on the threshold taking off his boots. For such a large man, he moved gracefully and with little noise. As the tent zipper closed on the nylon cocoon, she tried not to think about the fact that she was in bed with him in in the middle of nowhere.
Jake slid into his sleeping bag and lie on his back. Lilly couldn’t tell if he was looking at the roof of the tent or had closed his eyes for sleep. While she wondered, she felt her mind drift into that half-sleep/half-awake state where her thoughts didn’t make sense, until she realized she was falling asleep despite everything and let it go.
She dreamt of her mother standing in the surf at a beach she did not know, smiling and kneeling down to pick a shell or something out of the shallow water …. She dreamt of her brother, fourteen or so, riding his ten-speed at breakneck speed on the loose gravel of the farmhouse road…. She saw her mother sitting on the porch, strumming a guitar, then realized it wasn’t her mother but her niece Anna, all grown u
p. She watched as her father shuffled slowly across the barnyard. He must have been tired, because he wasn’t picking up his feet and his muck boots were making a loud shuffling sound that distracted from the music on the porch. The sound was unsettlingly loud, so loud that she woke up.
It took a moment to realize where she was. In a tent, with Jake. Although the dream was gone, the shuffling sound was still there. She started to sit up, but a strong arm moved across her chest, pinning her in place. Instinctively realizing this wasn’t a come-on but something else, she stopped and just listened. It wasn’t a shuffling but a snuffling sound that was so loud, and it was just on the other side of the nylon wall of the tent.
Jake turned his head silently toward her and raised a finger to his lips. Lilly’s eyes were as wide as saucers as she tried to make sense of the situation. For just a second, the horizontal view of Jake’s face was so disorientating, she thought she might be still dreaming. The moon was bright and filtered through the thin material of the tent so that it wasn’t completely dark but played wild shadows over his multi-facetted face, making him look fierce, resembling the Jake of her nightmares.
She must have looked as frightened as she felt, because Jake shook his head and slid the arm that had been across her chest over and behind her neck and shoulders to pull her close to his face.
She knew all the rules for bear encounters in the wild, all of which were running through her head simultaneously. Frustratingly, they seemed to conflict: some said make lots of sound; others said don’t provoke an already interested and too close bear. Some said run and leave your stuff; others said stand your ground.
She could feel her stomach clench and her legs go all noodley.
Quietly, next to her ear, he whispered, “Herbivores.”
It took her thirty seconds to make sense of what he’d said, that he meant elk, moose or mountain goats, not bears. Goats would be no problem, although they might eat their boots and chew on anything with salty sweat left outside. Elk and moose might be problematic if they left the tent, but if they stayed quiet inside the tent they were probably safe. As this last thought crossed her mind, she sagged with relief.
