Lost in the Backyard

by Alison Hughes

  Mom and Dad were fascinated by this house in off-the-gridland and were asking a lot of questions. This worried me. I didn’t want them getting any ideas. Living in the middle of nowhere was fine for Joe and Ellen. They wanted to get away from everything; they liked that German feeling of being alone and lonely in the woods. They seemed to enjoy the absolutely eerie silence. Me? It creeped me out. Completely. When there was even a slight lull in the conversation, there was total silence. Dead silence.

  I’d never realized how much background noise there is in a city. Car noise. Furnace noise. People. Sirens. Dogs. I reached for my cell phone in my hoodie pocket. It was dead, and even if it weren’t, there would be no service out here, but somehow it made me feel better just holding it.

  While the adults talked, I looked out the big windows at the backyard. There was a little clearing with a few benches and a fire pit, and then the trees started. A thick wall of trees as far as you could see. A darkening forest on a dark, cold, silent day. Did anybody else find this depressing? Ominous? Apparently not. Mom and Dad were talking and laughing, their faces happy and excited. My spirits sank. I could almost hear them thinking in their clued-out way, “Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if our family lived out in the woods away from all civilization in the middle of nowhere? If our family lived off the land? It would be a great experience for the kids. They’d love it. Kids need fresh air and exercise. Especially Flynn.”

  I began to ask Joe and Ellen some hard questions, hoping to highlight some drawbacks, problems, hassles and disadvantages of this rustic paradise.

  “So, Joe, Ellen, you have any annoying neighbors around here? I mean, uh, out there, beyond the dark forest?” I asked. Why was I talking like I was narrating a fairy tale?

  “No, no. No neighbors at all. Pretty isolated,” said Joe.

  “Ah, isolated,” I repeated. “Sounds lonely.”

  “We don’t find it lonely. That way leads to the provincial park”—Joe gestured like an air-traffic controller—“that way to the river, and that way is forest almost all the way to the city limits. Occasional hunter, and that’s it. I love it.” Joe was a retired police officer who had probably seen enough of people and their problems.

  “Okay, complete and total isolation. Wow. Now how about animals? Bear trouble? Wolves? Other predators?”

  “Of course there will be animals, Flynn,” Joe said. “Just look around. Forest. It’s their home, not ours.”

  “Exactly! You put it so well. This is their home, not ours,” I said, shooting a look at Mom and Dad. Mom rolled her eyes at me, which was annoying. I thought I was being subtle.

  “Oh, it’s been so exciting, Flynn,” Ellen said. “Moose! Deer! Right there in the backyard! We haven’t seen any wolves or bears or cougars or anything like that yet. But let me tell you, the coyotes can be a nuisance. I don’t so much mind the howling, but I have to be pretty careful if the cats are in the garden with me.”

  “You mean they could get—eaten? Wow, dangerous! That’s pretty shocking, hey, Mom and Dad?”

  “It’s just nature, Flynn.” Dad shrugged. “That’s part of the beauty of it.”

  Sometimes that man could be incredibly frustrating.

  After probing the problems of being snowed in, accessing emergency medical attention, and the lack of a local Starbucks (the last being directed straight at my mom), I gave up.

  Everyone was annoyingly determined to look on the bright side of this middle-of-nowhereness, this vast and endless wilderness.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Great Outdoors

  “So do you want to look around outside?” asked Joe.

  I opened my mouth to say “Are you kidding?” but Dad beat me to it.

  “You bet we do,” he said, gulping the last of his coffee.

  Seriously? I looked around at them all. There’s a roaring fire right here, and the idea is that we wander around outside?

  “Yeah, good idea, before it gets dark,” said Mom, reaching for her coat. Ellen grabbed a huge hand-knitted sweater.

  “You guys go. I’ll look after the fire,” I said, pulling my chair nearer and stretching my feet out toward the cheerful blaze. No way was I going to wander around outside in the bleak dusk, freezing and pretending to be interested in septic tanks and sump pumps.

  “Flynn,” Mom said warningly as the others headed for the door, “I think we can take a quick look outside. Joe and Ellen are very proud of this place. And it’s interesting. Here.” She handed me a baby-blue fleece jacket. A woman’s jacket. “I knew you wouldn’t dress for the weather, so I brought in an old fleece I keep in the car for emergencies. Just put it on under your hoodie.”

  Mom zipped up her winter coat.

  “C’mon, it’ll be fun! Let’s see what kind of evening Cassie has for her camping trip.”

  Ellen turned at the door. Her friendly face was creased into an expectant smile.

  I sighed and hauled myself out of the comfortable chair by the fire.

  Now normally, obviously, I wouldn’t be caught dead in my mom’s clothes. That goes without saying, I hope. But out here, with nobody to see me, what did I have to lose? My choices were “freezing” and “less freezing.” I put on the fleece under my hoodie. It was too small and too short, but whatever. I quickly zipped up my hoodie.

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming,” I called to Ellen. Then I whispered to Mom, “But can we go soon? There’s a game on, and it would be nice to catch the last, oh, three minutes of it.”

  Joe marched us around the perimeter of the house, pointing out obscure little things that made their life at this edge of the world possible. Solar panel this, geothermal that. A lot about being “net zero,” whatever that was. I wasn’t really listening. But Joe and Ellen were so obviously enthusiastic and, really, were such great people that I tried to mask my desperate boredom.

  “Energy efficiency relies mostly on one thing,” Joe continued. “Insulation. That was the biggest thing we learned. Extra-thick insulation in the walls, tight seals on triple-glazed windows, southern exposure…”

  A whole lot of hassle, I thought, when you could just buy a house on a city street and get heat, Wi-Fi, malls and pizza delivery. I reached for my cell phone, then remembered (again) that it was dead.

  We looked at some outdoor furniture Ellen had made out of willow branches.

  We were shown some large rocks Joe had hauled in from the forest for a rock garden in the spring.

  After we had examined in minute detail the shed they had built and the huge woodpile Joe had “split,” we exclaimed over the large, flat, empty patch of dirt that would be Ellen’s vegetable garden in the spring.

  “…lettuce there, then beans, peppers, carrots, tomatoes…” Ellen sketched out the plan of the garden for us, gesturing at imaginary rows. Even while I was literally dying of boredom, I smiled at her enthusiasm.

  “And now,” Joe said with a laugh, looking like a huge outdoorsman in his padded, checked flannel jacket, “the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The one, the only, state-of-the-art…septic tank!”

  Okay, Joe, I’m out.

  I hung back, looking around at the gray forest surrounding the house. It was one of those forests where none of the trees are huge; in fact, all of them seemed to be spindly and tall, but there were about nine billion of them. Mostly leaf trees. Deciduous, I surprised myself by remembering. But there were patches of dark spruce and pine, which were cone-bearing. Coniferous, in fact. My grade-six “Trees” unit was coming in handy. There seemed to be an undergrowth of bushes and a thick carpet of dead leaves. It was bleak but kind of ruggedly beautiful. Mysterious.

  “Wow, it looks so much like Skyrim,” I breathed.

  “Or nature,” Dad said, passing me on his way to view the disgusting plumbing.

  I’d had enough of Mom and Dad and this whole thing. I’d done my duty, stumbling around out here on the frozen ground, faking interest in every miserable bush and rock that Joe and Ellen had, for some reason, hauled to the midd
le of nowhere. I liked them, they were nice people, and they’d done a good job of being pioneer types when they didn’t have to be, but enough.

  I just wanted to be alone. This was unusual for me. Usually, I had a friend over or was over at a friend’s or was texting friends or bugging Cassie. But right now, alone seemed to be the best option.

  “Hey, guys, I’m just going to go for a little walk in the backyard,” I said, gesturing at the forest. Mom was getting on my nerves with her nagging about staying warm and being polite, and the taunting about me being soft and clueless. I would spend a little time out in the forest and show her that I could appreciate nature like anyone else.

  “Sure, okay,” Dad said, looking pleasantly surprised.

  “Hope you find waldeinsamkeit, Flynn,” called Joe.

  Yeah, that was the word. That word for feeling at peace alone in the woods.

  Okay, I was up for trying this walmartkenshdat thing. I usually had a good feeling playing Skyrim. How different could it be?

  “Just be a little careful, Flynn,” called Ellen. “The path peters out after a certain point, and there’s a steep—”

  “Ellen,” interrupted my mom, laughing, “this is Flynn we’re talking about. Flynn. It’s cold. It’s nature. Believe me, he won’t go far. Have fun on your big hike, honey!”

  Joe, Ellen, Mom and Dad turned away, laughing and talking, and disappeared around the side of the house.

  I stalked straight into the forest.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Alone

  I followed the winding path into the trees until I couldn’t see the house anymore. It was a relief to get away. I thought I’d walk until the path stopped, like Ellen said, then turn and come back. There was only one path, which Ellen and Joe must have cleared themselves, so there was absolutely no danger of taking a wrong turn.

  I walked. It was slightly warmer here in the woods, with the trees blocking the cold wind that had come up since we went outside. I looked around. The forest was completely still. I tried to think about what kind of trees surrounded me. Some were birch—that whitish bark was a dead giveaway. But the others? No clue. Who really cared?

  See, that was my big problem with nature: it’s boring. Like a museum. Nothing ever happens. You walk, you look at it sitting there, you maybe exclaim at how beautiful it all is (whether you really think that or not) and then you leave. What is the point?

  After about ten minutes of walking, I came to the end of the path. It ended pretty suddenly, as if it just got tired and said, “Okay, enough. We’re done here.” I stood at the end of the path and looked up. The trees were leafless and spiky against the sky. They soared above me, some of their branches meeting overhead.

  Okay, I thought, closing my eyes. This is when I should be feeling that whatchamacallitshmidt. Peace, oneness with the woods. I breathed in the dead-leafy, earthy, pineconey smells. I opened my eyes and did a full 360. I listened. Underneath the silence I began to hear small sounds. The last of the fall leaves rustling in the wind. A slight creaking of branches. One lone bird. My own breathing.

  I felt very alone. Was this a good feeling? A peaceful feeling? A German-word feeling? I didn’t think so. It was creepy here. I wondered if there was a ridiculously long and difficult-to-remember German word for the feeling of the forest not really wanting you there, of being in no way one with nature, of being a complete stranger in the woods.

  I grabbed my phone to check on this. Oh, yeah. Still dead. I’d look it up later.

  I looked around at the bleak, silent, hostile forest.

  Whatever, I thought. I tried. We can’t all be nature freaks.

  I turned to go back down the path. Back to people, a house, a fire. Back inside, where people belonged.

  And that’s when, in a split second, everything changed.

  I heard a sudden rustle and snapping branches very, very close to me. I whirled around.

  Something huge and brown crashed through the bushes on my right and charged out of the forest, landing on the path right in front of me in a blur of brown hide and animal smell. It all happened so fast, and it was so loud and so sudden, that I don’t even know what it was. Moose? Deer? Something that ate meat? Cougar? Anyway, some wild animal was within a few feet of me.

  I turned and ran. Okay, full disclosure: I gave a muffled shriek, flailed my arms, stumbled into a tree, fell, cracked my knee and leaped back to my feet. And then I ran.

  I bolted away from the beast, off the path and into the woods. I ran faster than I’d ever run before, even with sharp branches and prickly shrubs tearing at my clothes and smacking me in the face. Terror, I discovered, is a great motivator. Crashing, slipping and sliding, I ran and ran. I stopped once, my heart pounding out of my chest, and listened. Something was still moving through the woods.

  I ran again, until all I could hear was my ragged breathing. I was running so frantically that I didn’t even see the steep drop into a ravine until I was over the top and crashing down into it.

  When Cassie and I were little, we used to roll down a grassy hill near our house. We’d lie down, tuck in our arms and push off. The rolling started slowly and then picked up, until grass and sky all blurred together in an exhilarating whirl and we ended up, sprawling and breathless and triumphant, at the bottom. Then we’d run up the hill to do it again.

  This wasn’t like that. At all. This was a dirty, painful, out-of-control, thumping, thwacking roll. Sharp tree branches and stumps dug into my legs and back, and prickly bushes stung my face. I gritted my teeth and tried to shield my eyes as the breath got knocked out of me. It seemed to go on and on for hours. Endlessly. It didn’t, of course. In fact, if somebody had been there timing it (or, worse, filming it), I probably would have been astonished to find that it had only lasted about thirty-two seconds or something like that. I would have said, “Are you serious? Did you see that fall? No way was that thirty-two seconds!”

  Anyway, it was a miracle I didn’t get brained or blinded by a tree, because I bounced off plenty of them on my way down. But all hills have bottoms, right? Even steep death ravines in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere. I finally reached the bottom a winded, huddled, torn, scratched mess.

  “I’m down…I’m stopped…I’m at the bottom… It’s over,” I muttered to myself.

  I lay there groggily waiting for the forest to stop spinning. I was grateful, so grateful, for having stopped. I stayed motionless for a while just to appreciate the stillness. I was also afraid. I was afraid that the shooting pains all over my body meant I had sustained all manner of injuries and/or scratches and/or contusions (whatever they are).

  Because Cassie was right. I am not good with blood.

  I had to have a blood test once, and I almost fainted. Just the thought of blood makes me woozy. I can’t even watch crime shows on TV. And don’t get me started on horror movies. Most people shriek when the main character insists on walking into a dark room to investigate. Me, it’s the blood. I can tell myself, “Food dye, food dye, ketchup, ketchup, la la la” all day long, but it always—always—makes me completely sick to my stomach.

  So I lay there, more afraid of my own blood than of the monster animal, saliva sliding down its huge canines, that might at this very minute be assessing my meal potential from the top of the ravine.

  “Stop!” I said out loud. “Stop it!” I said again. I didn’t know if I was talking to the animal or to myself.

  I looked down at my right hand.

  “Okay, right hand, let’s start with you. Let’s very gently…move…each finger…” They moved. The left-hand fingers wiggled too, but I didn’t watch them, because when I’d glanced down at my left hand, it was covered with blood.

  “Only scratches, probably. Most likely just a scratch or two. Arms? Legs? You ready?”

  I tried moving my arms and legs. They moved. Painfully, and not very well, but they moved. This seemed a good sign. I sat up slowly, feeling my head for any gashes or bumps. A big lump on the back of my h
ead seemed to be it. Of course, it’s not like I had a mirror. I could feel the scratches all over my face, and one of my eyes was starting to swell.

  I looked down at my white hoodie, smeared with dirt and dead leaves, then let my head flop back onto the ground.

  Wait—when did it get so dark?

  A warning bell went off in my sluggish brain. I’d better get back to that path. Yeah, that path. That path is very, very important. That path leads to the house that leads to the car that leads to home. I hauled myself to my aching feet and almost fainted, my head was pounding so hard. Can you get a concussion if you aren’t actually playing hockey or football? Probably.

  I stood there, swaying. From what I could see, I was at the bottom of a long ravine, the sides sloping sharply up all around me. Trees everywhere, ominous-looking in the gloom.

  Where had I fallen? I looked for a swath of broken branches and flattened bushes. There had to be some evidence of my spectacular death-slide to the bottom of this ravine. But there wasn’t. There were fallen branches, scraggly bushes, dead leaves and leaning trees everywhere I looked. I hadn’t made a dent in the forest at all; it just seemed to have swallowed up my pathetic little trail and settled into calmness again.

  I stood still, trying to clear my foggy, shaken-up, possibly concussed brain.

  Did I recognize anything? Anything that would lead back to the path? Think, Flynn, think. I hadn’t exactly been taking notes during my rolling fall into the ravine, but did that one bent tree look familiar? I thought it did.

  Later I would realize there are a million bent trees that look kind of familiar in the forest. And they’re all ones you haven’t seen before. But I didn’t know that then, and the sight of the tree made me hopeful.

  I stumbled toward it, my whole body pulsing with pain.

  Out of the gloom a sound broke the silence.

  A faraway, thin, yip-yap kind of sound.