The Wild

by Owen Laukkanen

  Dawn rolls her eyes. “What about a flashlight?” she asks, because Amber is leaving and taking the flashlight with her, leaving Dawn to tough it out with the tarp in the dark. “Can I have a little light, at least?”

  Christian laughs again, from somewhere in the dark. “Gotta earn that, too,” he says, and then he and Amber are gone, and Dawn’s feeling around for her tarp like a blind person, wondering how she’s supposed to earn anything if they won’t let her see the way.

  * * *

  Dawn struggles with her tarp and it’s shitty and frustrating. She gets dirt all over her sleeping bag and the rest of her stuff, and she scratches her hands and her arms feeling around for bigger rocks in the bushes to hold the tarp down. It’s almost completely dark now, and she can hear Christian and Amber telling the rest of the Pack it’s time for lights-out. Dawn can’t find any big rocks, and her tarp’s flapping all over the place—

  (and she’s just about to give up and sleep out in the open and hope Amber doesn’t notice and it doesn’t rain in the night)

  —when something rustles beside her

  and Dawn nearly screams in terror, thinking it’s a cougar—or worse, Christian—but then that something whispers her name and tells her to be quiet and it’s actually Lucas, and he holds his flashlight up to his face and gives her a goofy grin so that she knows it’s him.

  “I thought you could maybe use a little help with that tarp,” Lucas says.

  “I DIDN’T ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING WRONG,” Lucas tells Dawn as he helps her retrieve her tarp from the tangle of bushes where it’s been blown by the wind. “My dad signed me up for this because he thought it would be good practice for the army.”

  Dawn stares at him, squinting in the glare of his flashlight. “Wait, what? You don’t, like, have to be here?”

  “Oh, I have to be here,” Lucas says, laughing. “You never met my dad. He didn’t exactly give me a choice.”

  “Yeah, but.” Dawn looks back toward the ring of tents, barely visible in the flickering firelight. “You’re not here because you’re bad, or whatever. You’re not, like, a criminal.”

  Lucas laughs again. “Are you?”

  Dawn hesitates. She’s not technically a criminal; at least, she’s never been arrested. But she’s not really a LAW-ABIDING CITIZEN, either. She doesn’t want to make any confessions to Lucas, not now that she’s heard his story.

  Lucas reads her nonanswer for the answer it really is, though. “You don’t have to be ashamed or anything,” he tells Dawn. “We’re freaking teenagers. Nobody’s perfect.”

  It sounds funny, coming out of Lucas’s mouth. He’s kind of got a golden-boy thing going on, always friendly and helpful and usually pretty happy, like a Labrador retriever or something, with his tousled blond hair and blue eyes and easy smile. He might not be perfect, but he’s a lot more perfect than Dawn, anyway. She wonders what Lucas would think if she told him she was sleeping with a thirty-something drug dealer. Wonders if he’d still look at her the same.

  She shakes her head clear. Reaches for the tarp, pulls it out of the bushes. “Help me with this,” she tells Lucas. “Before Amber and the ghoul come back and see us.”

  They get the tarp repositioned and mostly pinned down, and then Lucas reaches into his pocket and pulls out something metallic that jingles.

  “Tent pegs,” he says, grinning, shining his light down so Dawn can see. “Mine came with eight, but I really only need four. You might find they work better than those rocks you’ve been using.”

  Dawn looks at them. Four brand-new pegs; they’ll fit perfectly in the little holes in each corner of her tarp. “Won’t the counselors be mad?” she asks.

  Lucas shrugs. “Probably,” he says. “Just hide them under those rocks and make sure you take them out in the morning before Amber comes around to check on you. You’ll probably get your tent in a few days anyway.”

  “I hope so,” Dawn says. “It’s supposed to start raining soon, right?”

  “Inevitably.” Lucas holds out the pegs. “So don’t get caught.”

  A gust of wind takes hold of Dawn’s tarp again, pulls it out from under the rocks and sends one end flapping wildly in the breeze.

  “Shit.” Dawn jumps up, grabs the tarp, and pulls it back down again. Realizes the stupid rocks aren’t ever going to work.

  Lucas helps her tamp the tarp down. Holds out the pegs again, smiling that golden-boy smile of his.

  “Thanks,” Dawn tells him, and when she takes the pegs from his hands, she can feel the warmth of his body, and it lingers on her skin longer than she’d care to admit.

  AN AVERAGE OUT OF THE WILD DAY goes something like this:

  Wake up at sunrise. Morning chores (clothes, personal hygiene, pump water, build a fire, cook breakfast). Eat breakfast (never enough food). Pack up. Hike. Water break. Hike. Lunch (still not enough). Pump water. Hike. Water break. Hike. Make camp. Evening chores (set up tents/tarp, find firewood, build fire, cook dinner—you guessed it—pump water, tidy dinner stuff, personal hygiene, hang food). Lights-out. Lie under tarp listening for wild animals and trying not to think about how hungry you are.

  Sleep, eventually, maybe.

  Rinse.

  Repeat.

  They have to hang all of the food and their toiletries overnight from the tallest tree they can find, which is always a huge pain in the ass, but otherwise the bears will be drawn to the campsite and might even get into your tent/tarp.

  Christian has a knife, and Amber has a bear spray canister, and Evan and Brandon have this rumor going that Christian even has a gun somewhere, which Dawn can’t really fathom but kind of hopes is true, given how the Bear Pack is, like, marooned in the middle of nowhere, miles from any civilization and close to all sorts of scary wildlife.

  (She’s only seen one bear so far—one real bear—but it was far away down in a grassy meadow, and besides, Amber said it was a black bear and probably just as scared of humans as humans were of it.)

  Christian and Amber are supposed to have a radio, too, and an emergency beacon so that if something goes terribly wrong they can contact the home base and alert the proper authorities. According to Lucas, Out of the Wild leases a thousand square miles of terrain that they use for these programs, and it all backs onto some national park, which is like another million acres of mountains and forest and nothingness.

  “So if we get lost or go the wrong way, we’ll probably die,” he says, cheerfully.

  Dawn rolls her eyes, but it’s actually pretty scary. They’ve been hiking for five days now, and she hasn’t seen another human being besides the other kids in the group. She hasn’t even seen any sign of humanity besides the occasional piece of fluorescent flagging tape stuck to a tree to tell the counselors where the trail’s supposed to go, and the occasional jet trail from an airplane high in the sky, a reminder that life’s going on, somewhere, far from this forest.

  Dawn wonders if anyone misses her.

  She wonders if it matters.

  * * *

  According to Kyla, who’s been here the longest, Out of the Wild has seven or eight different trails through the backcountry that they use to keep Bear Packs moving.

  “Each one takes six days,” Kyla tells Dawn. “It’s like a big circle. We go out for six days and then we come back and get more food and supplies and go out again. Over and over, until you go insane or you graduate.”

  “Whichever comes first,” Lucas says.

  They don’t know if there are other Bear Packs, or if they’re the only one. No one’s ever seen another person out here, so they must keep the groups far apart, if there are other groups. Christian and Amber won’t say.

  “You’ve been here for, like, months,” Dawn tells Kyla. “If there’s only seven trails, you must have done this one before, right? Do you recognize it?”

  Kyla gives Dawn a look,
like Oh, sweetie.

  “I recognize rocks and these big-ass trees,” she says. “And the back of Christian’s stupid-ass head. Otherwise, I keep my eyes on the ground.

  “I don’t know where we are, and neither do you,” Kyla says. “And neither does Lucas or anyone else. We’re totally lost.” Kyla blinks at her. “And that’s exactly how those asshole counselors like it.”

  TOTALLY LOST.

  Kyla is right. Dawn’s been hiking for nearly a week now, and if the rest of the Pack dropped off the face of the earth right this instant, she’d be dead within days, if not hours.

  Christian has a map and a compass and the radio—but Dawn’s from freaking Sacramento. Suburban Sacramento. She isn’t exactly proficient with a compass. And anyway, all the rocks and trees look identical.

  (That’s not totally true. Sometimes the Pack hikes through the rain forest, which is damp and dark and smelly and choked with ferns and bare roots to trip you and big towering trees with branches that claw at your face and your clothes and rip things from your shitty tarp knapsack as you pass. And sometimes they climb up so high onto ridges that they’re out of the big trees and it’s mostly just stunted, runty evergreens and a lot of bare rock, and you can see for miles and miles and it’s just more trees, millions of them, and distant, lonely mountains. Up there, there’s barely a trail, and Christian leads them by following cairns instead, little piles of rocks every thirty feet or so that lead the way across bare rock, up over craggy peaks and down into steep gulches. Sometimes, Christian misses the next cairn, and they all have spread out and search for the way forward, except it’s usually just Lucas and sometimes Dawn who help Amber look; Warden and Evan and Brandon and Kyla hang back and make fun of the counselors and throw rocks off the mountain, and Brielle stays quiet and keeps to herself.

  It’s windy on the ridges, and cold, and the emptiness and the height and the barren, alien landscape kind of freak Dawn out, which is why she helps Lucas help the counselors look for the next cairn. It’s like she hears a voice inside her head saying You aren’t supposed to be here, and the sooner they can get back down into the rain forest, the better.

  Dawn doesn’t like the ridges. They give her a bad feeling. But the rain forest isn’t much better, or the rough rivers they have to balance across on fallen tree trunks, the cliffs they have to scramble their way up and down, tottering for balance with their heavy packs, the marshy meadows with their sticky, stinky mud and their lingering mosquitoes and blackflies, the loose rocks and slippery bare roots on the trails that give out from under you, twisting your ankles, then uneven ground under your sleeping pad that hurts your neck when you’re trying to sleep, the too-cold night and the too-hot daytime, the taste of the lake water even after you filter it, the dirt on your clothes and your smelly, unwashed body, your limp, stringy hair, the blisters on your feet and the bug bites on the rest of you, the way Christian makes fun of you and how Evan and Brandon whisper to each other when they look at you, the weird sounds in the forest at night, and the wondering what you’d do if Christian and Amber suddenly died or you got separated and had to survive by yourself and,

  above all,

  the loneliness.

  DAWN HAS A LOT OF TIME to think while she is enduring the Out of the Wild forced march regimen and the sensation of slowly starving to death.

  Most of the time, she’s pretty homesick. Not so much for Cam, of course, and she’s still mad at Wendy, too, because any mom who’d kidnap her daughter and send her out into this bullshit doesn’t deserve to be missed.

  She misses Bryce, though, her little brother. And her nana, her grandmother on her dad’s side, who lives in Chicago and who Dawn doesn’t get to see very often but who she loves more than anyone else in the world, except maybe Bryce.

  Dawn tortures herself, thinking about her nana.

  She thinks about how she went to visit her nana in Chicago the summer before this one, how she always used to visit her as a kid and it was the most fun ever, how they’d walk along the lakeshore and go to the museums and eat pizza and just, you know, hang out.

  And she thinks about how she didn’t visit Nana this summer because she bailed on her parents and was crashing at Julian’s and she kept meaning to find a way to get in touch with Nana and go visit without her mom finding out but there was always something else more important and she just never got around to it and now it’s too late and she wasted her summer.

  And then Dawn thinks about how her nana isn’t sick or getting frail or anything crazy, but she is getting older, and Dawn won’t see her until next summer at the earliest, probably, and what if Dawn gave up her last chance to spend time with her nana because she was too busy getting stoned and hooking up with Julian and sneaking into clubs and more or less causing mayhem?

  And maybe it’s the hiking and the fatigue or the trauma of the whole experience, or maybe it’s just general loneliness, but that whole line of thinking makes Dawn VERY SAD.

  Which is probably the whole point of all this hiking in the first place.

  * * *

  Dawn thinks about Bryce, too.

  She thinks about how her little brother just started high school this month and how he’s probably scared out of his mind and has nobody to talk to.

  She thinks about how her whole family has known Bryce is gay pretty much from birth but how Bryce hasn’t officially, you know, come out or anything, and she hopes the kids in high school aren’t being assholes about that.

  She thinks about how lonely and scared she was when she started high school and how it was only her dad who really helped her get over the loneliness and the fear and how Bryce doesn’t have their dad to turn to, and he doesn’t even have Dawn anymore, either.

  She thinks about the last time she saw Bryce, when she made Julian drive her home so she could pick up a dress she wanted to wear to Post Malone that night, and Cam and Wendy were supposed to be not at home but they were at home anyway, but Dawn was pretty stoned and really wanted that dress, so she tried to sneak in and grab it without anyone noticing, and the whole plan backfired when Cam came out of the bathroom and saw her and said her name and then Wendy came rushing out into the living room to try to stop her from leaving, and a scuffle ensued and a loud altercation, and Wendy grabbed Dawn’s arm and Dawn wrenched it away, and then Wendy grabbed the dress and Dawn screamed something mean at her and Wendy screamed something just as mean back, and there was Cam trying to step in between them, trying to break it up, Cam sticking his nose into family business where he wasn’t welcome, as always. And then Dawn broke loose and just as she ran out the door she caught sight of Bryce in the corner, looking up from the book he’d been trying to read on the couch, and he was staring at Dawn with such, like, sadness and distress that it nearly stopped Dawn dead, shocked her so bad that she wanted to turn around and go running to him and wrap him up in a hug and apologize for being such a bitch and for messing up the family so much; she wanted to tell him she was coming back home and she was staying this time, and everything was going to be fine, was going to be wonderful again like it was when they were kids.

  But she didn’t, of course. She turned her back on her brother and ran out the front door and down the steps to where Julian was waiting in his Jeep, and Julian peeled off as Cam and Wendy watched from the doorway, and Dawn settled into the shotgun seat with the dress in her lap and she didn’t look back.

  And the worst part: somehow when Wendy and Dawn were fighting they’d torn the fabric, so Dawn didn’t even get to wear the dress to the show that night. She’d thrown it in the back of Julian’s closet instead and never looked at it again, and it’s probably still there now, buried under trash and dirty laundry, waiting to never be worn again.

  * * *

  Dawn thinks about a lot while she’s hiking. But she never thinks about her dad.

  She just can’t.

  AFTER SIX DAYS OF HIKING, a million bug
bites, and too many blisters to mention, Dawn and the rest of the Out of the Wild Bear Pack follow Christian and Amber out of the rain forest and into a clearing. At the far end of the clearing are a couple of buildings and, beyond, a long gravel road.

  Dawn recognizes these buildings. This is where Steve brought Dawn after she got off the plane, where Tanya strip-searched her and stole her phone and gave her the tarp. This is Out of the Wild HQ.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” Christian says, watching the glint of recognition take hold on Dawn’s face. “We’re just here to resupply, nothing else.”

  He’s lying, a little bit. As the Pack comes out of the woods, Steve emerges from one of the buildings and waves to Christian and Amber and unlocks a big sliding door, and inside Dawn can see piles of food and supplies stacked up like in a warehouse.

  And shirts. Lots of colored Bear Pack shirts.

  “Kind of a slacker week for this pack,” Christian says, picking up a red T-shirt from a pile and handing it to Evan. “Evan’s the only promotion, guys. Better luck next week.”

  Evan snatches the red shirt from Christian’s hands. He peels off his orange shirt and mimes wiping his ass with it, standing there shirtless and skeleton skinny, whooping at Brandon like he’s just won the lottery.

  “Suck it, Brando,” he crows. “Black Bear, what?”

  Brandon shoots Evan the finger. “Get dressed, faggot,” he says. “Nobody wants to see that.”

  As Christian says, there are no other promotions. Dawn remains a Bear Cub. Brandon’s still a Brown Bear, and he doesn’t look thrilled about it. Lucas and Brielle are still Black Bears, but they don’t seem to care.

  The Polar Bears, though, are pissed.