The Speed of Souls

by Nick Pirog

  I’m heading back for a second drink when one of my back paws slips off the log. I scramble to hold on with my front paws, but it’s too late, and I fall into the water.

  I’ve been in rivers before, so I don’t panic. I paddle against the current. But my tiny paws don’t work well as paddles and the river sweeps me away from the log.

  Now I panic.

  I turn around in the water. I can see the bubbling white water ahead. I paddle as hard as I can toward the rocks, but the mighty river doesn’t care.

  The white water comes fast. I slide over rocks and then I’m underwater. I get my head back above water and cough in a breath, but then there’s more white water and I’m back under. I try to get my head back out, but I can’t. I’m flipping and spinning. I don’t know which way is up. My chest begins to burn. I need to breathe. I need air.

  I’m going to die.

  I feel a sharp pinch behind my neck and then I’m free of the water. I suck in air and cough, cough, cough.

  What happened?

  How did I get out of the water?

  I’m dizzy from all the spinning, but I can feel myself floating in the air. And I still feel a pinch on my neck. I think back to when I was a baby cat. The Big Cat, holding me in her teeth.

  This is the same.

  Something has me in its teeth!

  I whip my body from side to side and fall to the ground. I flip over and look upward.

  There’s a giant cat gazing down at me. It’s gray and tan with black spots, light green eyes, a short tail, and is three times the size of any cat I’ve ever seen.

  And then I remember. I remember Cassie telling me about these giant cats that live in the Mountains. She’d seen one before. When she was hiking with Jerry. Before I came along.

  Not a cat.

  A bobcat.

  ~

  I’m about to thank the bobcat for pulling me out of the river when he puts one of his giant paws on my chest. He leans down, until his green eyes are nearly touching me, and says, “You’re in my territory, kid.”

  Territory?

  “What’s, uh, a territory?” I mumble.

  “My area,” he snorts.

  He slowly takes his paw off my chest and I scramble to my feet.

  “Get moving,” he says.

  “Wait, what’s your name?”

  The bobcat opens his mouth wide, revealing two large fangs, and then he growls, “Scat!”

  I turn and run.

  After a few minutes, I stop and sit down on a rock.

  Why was that bobcat so mean? All I wanted to do was thank him for pulling me out of the river. I didn’t know I was in his area—sorry, territory. I didn’t even know animals have territories. And if he was so mad that I was in his territory, then why did he save my life?

  Mean old bobcat.

  There’s a shallow pool of water near where I’ve stopped and I go and take a long drink. With my thirst quenched, I realize how hungry I am. It’s been nearly three days since I’ve eaten anything.

  I resume my journey, looking for anything that might be edible. I find a few green berries on the ground and I eat a couple. They are tart and they make my eyes water as I swallow them. Still, they quiet my rumbling stomach and I eat a few more.

  Energized from the berries, I climb farther up the mountain. It’s getting late in the day and the sun is starting to dim behind me. And another thing: my belly is starting to hurt. Maybe eating those berries wasn’t such a good idea.

  I’m only able to walk for another few minutes before I have to stop.

  I’m sick.

  I was sick a few times when I was a dog. Most of the time it was because I ate one of my tennis balls. But I usually felt better right after I barfed it up. I would try to wait until I was outside, but sometimes those things can’t wait. Jerry would look at my big pile of orange barf and say, “I was wondering where all those balls went.” Then he would clean it up and wipe off my chin with a paper towel.

  I can tell this is different. This is like the time when I couldn’t stop barfing and I couldn’t stop pooping. Jerry said that I must “have gotten into something,” though I’m not sure what this meant. I slept in the bathroom that night because the floor was nice and cool and Jerry grabbed a couple of pillows off his bed and he slept right next to me.

  That’s how I feel now.

  Only worse.

  All I want is for Jerry to rub my belly and tell me I’m going to feel better soon.

  I barf and poop until the stars come out. Then I curl up in a ball and moan. At some point, the moaning gives way to sleep.

  ~

  My belly still hurts when I wake up in the morning. I force myself to take a drink from the river, but it makes my stomach hurt even worse. I get sick a few more times and then I start to feel better. By the afternoon, I’m able to drink from the river and I’m ready to continue my journey home.

  I continue through the trees, picking my way up, over, and through the thick brush. I have no idea how far away the Lake is from where I am, but I’m guessing it’s a long way. And walking in the Mountains is so much slower than walking next to the road or in the grass. It could take me weeks to make it back to the Lake at this rate.

  I try to pick up the pace, but my body is still weak from being sick and I slow back down. That’s when I smell a familiar smell. A smell I know from when I was a dog.

  Bear.

  I turn around and see him, a large black bear. He’s fifty yards behind me, crashing through the brush. I think about racing toward him and barking my head off, but that won’t work. I’m not a dog anymore. And this bear doesn’t look like he wants to eat our trash. He wants to eat me.

  There’s a tree nearby and I dart toward it. I jump and try to dig my claws into the bark, but my claws aren’t sharp enough and I slide down the trunk and roll to the dirt.

  I turn and glance up. The bear is rumbling toward me on all fours, his head swaying back and forth. He’s going to wrap his enormous mouth around me in a few seconds.

  I close my eyes. I’m going to die. I’m going to become a star (hopefully).

  I feel jaws sink into my flesh and then I’m yanked upwards. I wait for darkness, long darkness, like what happened after I died the first time, but it doesn’t come.

  Instead, I hear snarling and a loud tearing. But it’s not me that’s being torn into, it’s the tree. Below me, the bear is attempting to climb the tree, his large claws biting into the thick trunk, then climbing a few feet, then falling back down.

  I’m lying on a thick branch fifteen feet above him.

  I turn.

  Next to me on the branch is the mean old bobcat.

  “Xanthus,” he says. “My name is Xanthus.”

  ~

  “Thank you for saving me,” I say, then add, “Twice.”

  Xanthus shakes his head but says nothing.

  After a few minutes, the bear gave up and Xanthus and I made our way down from the tree. Then he told me to follow him.

  “You aren’t from the mountains, are you, Hugo?” Xanthus asks, his butt rocking as he takes long strides through the bramble.

  “No,” I tell him. “I used to live near the Mountains, but not in the Mountains.”

  “I thought perhaps you were kidding at first about not knowing what a territory was. But you are unlike any cat I have seen before. And then I saw you eat those green berries and I knew you must really know nothing.”

  “You watched me eat those berries? Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Sometimes nature is the best teacher.”

  Xanthus leaves me to think about this for the duration of our walk.

  A bit later, we reach a large tree with a hole near the bottom. “We’re here,” he says.

  I sniff at the musty hole and say, “You live here?”

  “Sometimes,” he says. “I have many dens scattered throughout my territory, but this is my main den.”

/>   “Do you live all alone?”

  “Yes.”

  I want to ask him where all his friends live, but I already know, he has no friends.

  I ask, “Were you following me the whole time?”

  “No, but your scent was easy to pick up.”

  I’m set to ask about the bear, when Xanthus asks, “How did you come to be in these mountains, Hugo?”

  I consider telling him my entire saga, but something tells me that he won’t understand. He may never have seen a human before in his life. So I tell him, “I’m trying to get home.”

  “Is this where you used to live near the mountains, but not in the mountains?”

  “Yes, it’s next to a large Lake.”

  “I have heard of this territory.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes, though I’ve never been there. It’s many, many days’ travels.” He doesn’t say it, but I can tell by the way he’s looking at me—it was the same way Calandia looked at me—he thinks I will never make it. That I will never survive.

  And maybe he’s right.

  If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be alive now. I would have drowned in the river, or I would have been mauled by that bear.

  “Are you hungry?” Xanthus asks.

  I nod. I’ve never been so hungry in my life.

  Xanthus motions for me to follow him. We walk a short ways from the tree, then he begins digging in the dirt. He digs for a few moments then uncovers a small carcass. He picks up the carcass and drops it at my feet. It’s half eaten, but I know the smell.

  Squirrel.

  When I was a dog, I killed a few squirrels, but I never ate one. In fact, I’ve never eaten anything I killed.

  “Go ahead,” Xanthus says. “Eat.”

  I bend my head down and open my mouth. Part of me doesn’t want to eat this animal. This squirrel could have been a cat or even a dog. But then again, Calandia said my case was rare, that it almost never happened. Still, this squirrel had to have a soul at some point.

  Right?

  But its soul is gone. Gone to wherever squirrels’ souls go.

  I decide that while I will never kill a squirrel, it would be foolish not to eat this one. So I do. I rip away a small piece of the squirrel’s flesh and I swallow. It’s no bacon, but it’s pretty good.

  After I eat my fill, I glance up at Xanthus and ask, “Do you think I can make it? Do you think I can make it to the Lake?”

  “There are many dangers in these mountains. Many things that would like to make a meal of you, just as you made a meal of this squirrel. You have many things you must learn in order to survive.”

  He gives me a light cuff on the head with his paw and then says, “And I shall teach them all to you.”

  Chapter 19

  “CAMPING”

  Jerry

  “This looks like a good spot,” I say, pulling my car into a flat section of dirt among the tall pines. There’s a wooden picnic table and a circular pile of rocks surrounding a mound of black ash.

  For the past hour, we’ve been driving on one of the many dirt roads that wind through the forty-mile-wide stretch of mountains west of Tahoe. It’s the last weekend of August, but camping season is still in full bloom and all the campgrounds I called were reserved (some we would learn, you had to reserve a year in advance). Even most of the campsites off the beaten path, tucked back deep in the Eldorado National Forest—where we’ve been searching for the past hour—are filled.

  “Perfect,” Megan says, her dimples flashing, relieved to have finally found a vacant spot.

  A moment later, we’re parked and Cassie and Wally are off inspecting every inch of the campsite. I watch as Cassie trots to the picnic table, sniffs one of the legs, then pees on it. A moment later, Wally walks over, sniffs, then lifts his leg and does the same.

  I pop the hatch on my compact SUV and slide out the blue husk of a tent. I carry it thirty feet to what I deem an appropriate location to set it up and toss it to the ground. A puff of dust, half from the ground and half from the thick layer covering the tent bag, wafts in the light breeze.

  When Megan first broached the idea of going camping, I was tempted to rush to the nearest sporting goods store to drop a few hundred dollars on a new tent, some sleeping bags, and an assortment of other camping goodies, but I lacked the funds.

  After careful consideration, I used the money Avery’s father sent me to repay my parents for the eight months they’d been letting me live in their house rent-free. (They only charged me $500 in rent, a fraction of what they could be renting the place out to an actual tenant.) Then after a few unexpected expenses—a new car battery, a trip to see Dr. Josh for Cassie’s semi-annual ear infection, a pair of running shoes, and the biggie, a new laptop (my old one basically self-destructed)—plus a couple expensive dinners out with Megan, and my savings was running on fumes.

  So I rummaged around my parents’ house for the old tent that Morgan and I would set up in her backyard. I finally found it crammed in the attic near two sleeping bags that I’m guessing also hadn’t been used in over twenty-five years. (I’d never once heard of my parents going camping and my brother Mark was far from the camping type.)

  “This is going to be so much fun,” Megan says, tossing the two sleeping bags next to the tent. She’s wearing khaki shorts, a light green T-shirt, sneakers, and a red “Tah ho” hat. As for me, I’m clad in full lumberjack: jeans, flannel rolled up at the sleeves, and hiking boots. I would be baking at the lake, but tucked back twenty miles into the forest and at an elevation of around 7,500 feet (1,200 higher than lake level), the temperature is in the high sixties.

  Megan lunges toward me and pulls me into a long kiss, then breaking away, she says, “Camping!” She claps her hands a few times. “We’re camping!”

  “Well technically, right now, we’re just standing in the dirt, but—”

  She gives me a soft slap on the shoulder, then we spend the next few minutes pulling all our camping gear—firewood, lantern, cooler, backpacks, dog paraphernalia—out of the car.

  Megan sets the cooler near the picnic table and pulls out two beers. She hands me one of the cold cans and we cheers. I take a long swig then locate Cassie and Wally. Cassie is busy digging a hole at the edge of the tall pines and Wally is barking at a large pinecone.

  “So what do we do first?” Megan asks. “Fire? Tent? S’mores?”

  We spent far longer than we anticipated on the road and it’s closing in on six o’clock. The sun won’t set for another hour and a half, but it’s already darting behind the mountain behind us.

  “Let’s get the tent up while we still have the sun,” I say.

  It takes us twenty minutes to get the blue, four-person tent up and tethered. The tent is in better shape than I suspected, save for two tears in the nylon. One tear is only two inches, but another is eight inches long.

  “A couple tears,” I say. “But it will work.” Then I add, “Unless it rains.”

  On this note, I couldn’t find the rain tarp for the tent. But thankfully, the forecast didn’t call for any rain, though there are a few clouds making their way in from the west that could be threatening.

  Megan grins, then opens up her backpack and extracts two large rolls of duct tape. One yellow. One green.

  “What color do you prefer?” the Queen of Duct Tape asks.

  “What? No blue?”

  She smiles. “My blue roll is holding up the bumper of my car.”

  “Oh, right. How could I forget?”

  We decide on yellow and after a couple minutes and much more duct tape than is necessary, Megan has covered both tears in a large yellow asterisk.

  “Good as new,” she proclaims.

  ~

  “I’m getting hungry,” Megan says.

  There’s a hiking trail leading away from our campsite and we’ve spent the last hour exploring the area.

  We encountered several other campsites, many of
which had dogs, and Cassie and Wally were eager to say hello. All the dogs were friendly except for a little Chihuahua who nipped at Wally when he went in for a sniff.

  After maybe a mile, the trailhead came to a small stream. Both Cassie and Wally splashed around, while Megan and I snuggled up on a warm rock. We let the dogs tire themselves out, then we headed back.

  “I’m hungry too,” I say as we round the final bend and our tent comes into view. We’d picked up sandwiches before heading into the mountains, but that was four hours earlier.

  “You build a fire and I’ll get the food prepped,” Megan says, then gives my butt a light slap.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  I stack several pieces of firewood on top of the ash and crumple up a handful of pages from the San Francisco Chronicle I’d purchased. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Megan pull a tupperware container of homemade potato salad from the cooler, a pack of hotdog buns, a giant package of jumbo hotdogs, then an assortment of condiments. (Megan was insistent we eat hotdogs on our camping trip.)

  I light a match and ignite a corner of newspaper. It doesn’t take long until the fire is blazing.

  Megan nestles up beside me and says, “I can’t find the hotdog skewers. Are you sure you packed them?”

  The hotdog skewers are actually telescoping pitchforks that you can use to roast hotdogs and more importantly, marshmallows. My mother bought the skewers for Morgan and me three decades earlier.

  I suck air between my teeth and say, “Bad news...I think I left them in the dishwasher.”

  “That’s okay,” she says, shrugging. “I think it will be even better using a good stick.” She claps twice. “So rustic!”