After seeing the man shoot one of Hazar’s soldiers, and hearing what they were going to do, the president and I both knew we had to get out of there. Fast.

Staying on our stomachs, we slithered quickly and quietly through the undergrowth. Hazar was ordering his men to pack up the camera and lights, so their noise covered any sounds we made, and by the time Hazar took out his radio and called for the helicopter to return, we were on our feet and had begun our escape.

We hurried through the trees, putting as much distance between them and us as we could. Behind me, the president was breathing heavily and making enough noise to wake every animal in the forest. If he kept that up, those men wouldn’t have any trouble finding us. They’d just have to follow the noise of his puffing and panting, and then we’d both be dead.

I didn’t want to end up like Patu or the man in the clearing just now, and tears welled in my eyes as I ran. A desperation was building up in me: the sense that everything was lost, that I was going to die out here. I had come into the forest to find my trophy and I was going to die instead. I should have gone back when I saw Hazar shoot Patu. I should have returned to the Place of Skulls, but I had made the wrong decision and tomorrow Dad would come looking for me and he’d find nothing. No trace. Or maybe he’d find my body, lying dead among the fallen branches. Either way, he would be alone. He would have lost both Mom and me.

No. I stopped and looked back, waiting for the president to catch up. No. I am not going to die.

This wasn’t about hunting anymore. It wasn’t about making Dad proud. It was about survival. It was about staying alive and not leaving Dad alone.

I am not going to fail.

“Stop,” I said, holding up a hand.

“What? No. We need to —”

“We’re making too much noise,” I said. “Leaving too many tracks.”

The president came to a halt and put his hands on his hips, looking back into the darkness. We had almost reached the place where the scar cut across what had once been the path.

“I don’t see anything.” He was panting hard. “We need to keep moving.”

“They will have lights,” I said. “The helicopter has lights.”

“So what do you suggest? We can’t stay here; you saw what they just did.”

I scanned the area, seeing the small fires still burning in places along the scar ahead. My mind was working clearly now that I had something to focus on. No more thinking about dying or hunting. All I had to concentrate on now was escape. That was all.

“We follow the scar,” I said. “Everything’s a mess already; they won’t see our tracks.”

The president looked at me, a glint of fire sparkling in his eyes. He thought for a moment, then nodded. “All right, kid. That sounds like a good idea.” He started to move, but I put a hand out.

“I’ll go first,” I said. “Put your feet where I put mine, and don’t step in any mud.”

“That’s going to be hard in this rain.”

“The rain is our friend now. It will help to cover our tracks.” I started to move but stopped again, the president bumping into me. “Avoid the ash, too, and don’t walk in the ferns. The leaves will drop and wilt, and if those men know how to track, they’ll see it. Step on the fallen needles — the brown ones. And step lightly.”

“Anything else?” He put his foot down and there was an explosion of movement and sound from the undergrowth beside him. He jumped back in fear as a partridge burst out from the ferns and flew up with a clatter of wings.

I turned to stare at him. “Yes. Keep quiet.”

I gripped the bow tight and moved carefully through the forest toward the scar. We crept through the last of the trees, keeping to the animal tracks and natural paths among the ferns, avoiding the puddles and soft mud. Coming to the scar, I climbed up onto the trunk of a fallen spruce and turned to see if the president needed help. He didn’t seem like much of a woodsman to me, but I guessed he was more used to sitting in a warm office, getting people to do everything for him.

“Keep going,” he said. “I’ll be fine.” As he tried to pull himself up, though, his shoe slipped on the tree bark, and he only just managed to reach out and grab a branch in time to stop himself from falling.

“Come on,” I said. “We haven’t got time for this.”

The president said nothing. He just glared at me, then tried again, hauling himself up onto the tree trunk. Standing tall, he looked down at me as if to say, See, I can do it, and in that moment, I understood that we had something in common. Both of us had something to prove.

“All right, but we can’t leave any trace, remember.” I crouched and reached down to wipe away the muddy smear where his foot had slipped.

“What the hell is going on?” the president said, gasping for breath as he looked along the scar, shaking his head at the splintered trees and patchy fires. “What happened? One minute I’m in my plane on the way to —”

“I think those men shot you down. I tried to tell you that before.”

“But how? It doesn’t make sense. Air Force One is virtually indestructible.”

“Air Force One? That’s the president’s plane, right? Your plane?”

He nodded.

As we moved on, I told him everything I could: about the moment I first heard the helicopter, about Patu, about the rocket launchers and the streaks shooting up into the sky.

“Some kind of shoulder-mounted missile?” he said. “They’d have to be powerful, though. Something high-tech and … wait a minute, we’re on a mountain. They must have fired them from here so they’d be high enough to shoot Air Force One out of the sky. It’s the only thing that makes sense. From down on the ground, they’d never have reached. But why didn’t the countermeasures work? Why didn’t the plane protect itself? Only way that would happen is if …” He went quiet.

“Do you know who they are?” I asked, remembering how the president had seemed interested in the suited man.

“Terrorists?”

“What about the one who came out of the forest? The man in the suit? He said he did something to the pod so you couldn’t get out. How did he even know you’d be in the pod? How did he know you wouldn’t just die in the plane? You sure you don’t know him?”

The president stopped, but when I did the same and turned to look at him, he didn’t seem to see me. He just stood there, lost in thought for a moment before he blinked and looked back into the forest.

I had a strong feeling there was something he wasn’t telling me.

“I can’t believe this is happening to me,” he said. “Shot down, hunted, and climbing halfway up a damn mountain. And to make matters worse, I’ve only got one shoe and my foot is wet and it’s killing me.”

I glanced down at his feet, seeing one black shoe that was now mostly brown, and one wet sock. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a plastic bag, then crouched at the president’s feet and opened the bag. “Put your foot in here.”

“What?”

“Put your foot in the bag.”

He wiped the rainwater from his face and sighed. “I can’t believe this is happening to me,” he said again as he stuck his foot in the bag.

I twisted it tight, wrapped the handles around his ankle, and tied them together. “There. Now you have a shoe.”

“Yeah. Kind of.” His face softened. “Thanks, kid.”

“Oskari.”

“What?”

“My name is Oskari.”

“Oh, right. Oskari. Well, you can call me William. Or Bill.”

“Bill? Why not Alan?”

“I guess my mother preferred ‘Bill.’ ”

“Bill.” I said the name again, testing the sound of it, but somehow it didn’t feel right. “No. I’ll call you President. It’s more interesting.”

“Yeah, I guess it is.” He put out his hand. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Oskari. Thanks for coming to my rescue.”

I nodded and shook his hand. “Welcome to Finland.”

His grip was firm, but not crushing, and when he let go, we stood facing each other while the drizzle fell on and around us.

“Come on,” I said. “We need to keep going.”

“You’re right. You first.”

I hurried along the tree trunk, arms out for balance, until I came close enough to jump across to a different tree. Moving like that, from tree to tree, we followed the scar for half a mile, passing small fires and steaming chunks of hot metal.

The drizzle was still coming down, but the clouds had parted in the distance, and the moon was shimmering over the mountain. On the scar, with no tree cover, there was just enough light to see. In the distance, though, the forest was black. That was where we had to go. Once we were in there, they would never find us.

“This must be where it came down,” the president said as we scurried along the fallen trees. His breathing was still heavy, as if he was having trouble sucking air into his lungs. “My plane. Or one of the planes, anyway.”

“How many planes do you have?”

“A few.”

“Not anymore,” I said.

The president made a sound that was something like a laugh, and I stopped once more to look back at him.

He stopped, too, and bent over, with his hands on his hips. “What the hell is wrong with me?” he asked. “I mean, I know I’m not the fittest guy in the White House but, y’know, I thought I was fitter than this. When I get back I’m going to have to spend more time in the gym.”

“We’re high up,” I said. “The air is thin and you’re not used to it.”

He nodded.

“Don’t worry. I’ll look after you.” It was unreal, like some kind of weird dream. Here I was, leading the president of the United States through the wilderness, trying to escape from crazed hunters, and I was beginning to realize that I was going to have to be the strong one. “I’ll keep you safe.”

“Well, kid, I gotta say, you seem to know what you’re doing.”

“Oskari,” I said. “Not ‘kid.’ ”

“Yeah. Oskari.”

We continued along the scar, moving from tree to tree, leaving almost no trace that we had ever been there. The broken branches, the rain, the debris and the fires meant that it would be impossible to track us along this route. When we came to the end, we jumped down and jogged into the darkness of the forest that stretched out ahead as if it never ended. Only a small amount of moonlight made it through the canopy.

“Stop here.” I held up a hand, but the president bumped into me anyway, knocking me forward.

“Sorry.”

“Pay attention,” I said, thinking how much I sounded like Dad.

“What are we stopping for?”

“We need to wait a few moments for our sight to get used to the dark. Let your eyes unfocus.”

“What?”

“Unfocus,” I said. “Use your splatter vision.”

“My what vision?”

“Shh. Never mind.” I allowed my eyes to relax and not focus on anything. Dad said hunters had been using this trick for years, and it worked best in the open, but was good in the forest, too. By focusing on nothing in particular, letting my vision go a little fuzzy, unusual movements seemed to jump out, demanding attention. I had used it to spot all sorts of animals, but now I was using it to look for a very different kind of animal. I was looking to see if there was anybody waiting for us, out there in the darkness.

Seeing nothing unexpected, I cupped my hand behind my ears and turned my head this way and that, scanning for sounds. An owl hooted, something scurried in the undergrowth … and there was something else.

“Helicopter’s coming back,” I said.

“I can’t hear anything.”

“Cup your hands behind your ears. You’ll hear like a rabbit.”

“Really?” The president copied me and turned in the direction of the scar. “I’ll be damned.”

“We need to keep moving.” I scooped a handful of pine needles and decaying leaves from the ground and sprinkled them over the place where we had been standing, covering the marks we had left. “And remember — put your feet where I put mine.”

“Do you actually know where you’re going?” he asked, glancing around at the forest, which I supposed looked all the same to him.

“Of course.”

So we moved on, deeper and deeper into the trees, walking for more than an hour, leaving the helicopter to sweep the wilderness in our wake as we headed up the mountainside toward the secret hunting ground marked on Dad’s map. It was the best thing to do — the only place for us to go. When I didn’t come out of the forest tomorrow, Dad and some of the other men would come looking for me, and that was where they would head. They would be armed, and they were expert woodsmen. Hazar’s men might have had automatic weapons, but I didn’t rate their chances against a group of hunters like Dad.

“You need to be quieter,” I said. “Walk carefully.”

“I’m doing my best.”

“Well, you sound like an elephant.”

“I’m not making that much —”

“Keep your feet flat. People think they should roll from heel to toe, but that’s two points of contact and it’s wrong. Everything you stand on will snap. An animal has only one point of contact and it moves like mist. You have to do the same. And try not to breathe so loud.” It felt strange to be in control for once, but it made me feel good, too. Like a man instead of a boy.

Behind us, the helicopter buzzed over the forest, its searchlight moving backward and forward. There would be men on the ground, following its instructions, and I wondered where Hazar was. Would he be in the forest, or riding in the helicopter with his rifle at the ready?

Mostly the helicopter moved around the forest behind us, skimming the treetops, but there was a moment when the thud of its rotors grew louder and it came zipping toward us, as if it had spotted something and was rushing over to investigate.

“Get down!”

We dived for cover, throwing ourselves into the dirt at the edge of a narrow stream.

“Over here,” I hissed, crawling toward the built-up wall of the bank. “Slowly.” Any sudden movements would be much more visible.

The president followed me and we lay side by side and facedown, squeezed into the side of the muddy wall.

“Don’t look up at it,” I said. “Our faces will reflect the light.”

“This is turning out to be a really crappy day,” the president muttered.

“For me, too,” I said.

We covered our faces as the helicopter hovered overhead, battering the treetops with its downdraught. The powerful beam of the searchlight flashed back and forth, cutting through the branches, glittering off the water and pouring over the rocks and undergrowth. The noise was tremendous, vibrating through my head and making my whole body tremble, but we remained completely still, as if we were part of the forest.

Eventually the helicopter moved on, but I decided we should wait a while before it was safe to continue our escape. We sat by the stream, listening to the musical tinkle of the water playing over the rocks.

“Makes me want to pee,” the president said.

“So pee,” I told him.

He stood up and went into the trees close by, making me feel the urge, so I did the same thing. When we were done, we washed our hands in the stream and set off again.

“We’re lucky it’s still spring,” I said as we walked. “A few more weeks and the sun won’t set at all. It would be much harder without the darkness.”

“The season of the midnight sun,” the president said.

“You know about it?”

“It’s your summer, isn’t it?”

“Kind of. We have three summers. Early summer, summer, and late summer, except we call them Departure of Ice, Midnight Sun, and Harvest Season.”

“That’s kind of beautiful,” the president said.

“Is it?”

“You don’t think so?”

“I never thought about it — it just makes it difficult to sleep.”

We changed direction from time to time, never traveling in a straight line. We backtracked and zigzagged and even used low branches to stay off the damp soil and confuse any tracks we might be leaving. Wherever I could, I stepped on rocks that jutted from the soil. Behind me, the president complained every time he put his bagged foot on one and felt the sharp edges bite at his skin.

Late in the night, we came out of the thickest part of the forest, moving higher up the mountain where the trees were thinner and the ground was harder and more uneven. This is where I would have had to leave the ATV before the final trek to the secret hunting ground.

“They could never track us here,” I said, climbing up onto a rocky shelf and turning to offer my hand. “They won’t even think we’ve come in this direction.”

The president looked at me. “Up the mountain instead of down, you mean? You’re a smart kid, Oskari.”

“We should be more or less safe.”

“More or less?” He declined my offer and hauled himself up, grunting with the effort.

“They have a helicopter,” I said.

The president managed to get one knee up onto the shelf but struggled to get any farther, so I grabbed the back of his jacket and pulled hard. He half fell, half rolled onto the rocks and lay on his back for a moment, breathing hard. “Helicopter. Yeah. Good point.”

When he was ready to go again, we traveled in silence for a while, both of us exhausted, and I cast my mind back over everything that had happened.

“What is Morris?” I asked. “You were saying it when you came out of the pod. Is it a person?”

“Morris is my personal bodyguard.” The president was still breathing heavily, but not as much as before. “He’s saved my life more than once.”

“He must be very brave. Is he a hunter?” We entered a small brake of scrawny pines and I held back a whiplike branch, waiting for the president to follow.

“Not really.” He nodded thanks. “Morris puts himself in harm’s way for me, though.”

“What does that mean?”

He stopped just inside the trees and put his hands on his hips. “Well, it means that when I was in Seattle and made the mistake of deciding to meet-and-greet a crowd, and someone came at me with a gun, Morris was the man who stepped in the way. He was shot right here.” The president tapped his chest. “Still has a fragment of the bullet this close to his heart.” He held his forefinger and thumb less than an inch apart. “It was too dangerous to remove it, they said, but apparently one day it will work its way right into his heart and kill him.”

“So it’s like he’s already dead?” I asked, turning to look at him.

“In a way. I wanted him to retire but he wouldn’t listen. Maybe it’s just as well — he’s the one who saved me by getting me to the pod before …” His voice trailed away and he stopped as if something had occurred to him.

“What is it?”

He put a hand to his mouth and stared at the ground.

“President?”

He looked up. “Hmm?” There was a distant look in his eyes, like he was seeing right through me. It was the same as before, when I’d asked him about the man in the suit. “Oh. Nothing. Nothing.” He shook his head and continued walking. When he spoke again, there was still a hint of something in his voice, though, and it seemed to me that his mind was somewhere else. “Anyway, one good thing about being president is that I know the greatest resources on the planet are being disposed to facilitate my rescue.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means that a lot of people will be looking for me.”

“In the wrong place.”

“Hmm?”

“The man in the suit said he got rid of your … what did you call it? The signal thing.”

“Transponder.”

“Yes. So everyone will be looking in the wrong place.”

“They’ll realize soon enough,” the president said. “Then they’ll come looking here.”

“But not until dawn. At least, that’s what the man said.”

“I know what he said.” The president sounded annoyed. “I heard him, too.”

“Well, then I guess it’s good I found you. I mean, if I hadn’t, those men would have you now. And even if you had gotten out of the pod, you’d have no chance of survival out here without me. I understand the wilderness; it’s my home.” I felt a small sense of pride. “With this bow, I can catch us food and keep us safe. And there are bears in these mountains,” I told him. “I’ll keep you safe from them, too.”

“There are bears here?” He sounded worried and looked around us.

“Many.”

“And you could kill one with that bow you’re carrying?” There was doubt in his voice.

“Of course. This is a very powerful bow.”

“Have you done it before?”

“Yes. Well — no. But my dad has. When he was exactly the same age as me.” I put a hand in my pocket and felt the photograph between my fingers.

“And how old are you?”

“Twelve,” I said. “Thirteen tomorrow.”

“Wow. Okay. My son is thirteen,” the president said. “I have a daughter, too. She’s eleven.”

“What does your son like to hunt?”

The president laughed. “Umm … we don’t really hunt.”

“You don’t hunt?” I looked back at him with suspicion.

He shrugged and shook his head.

“Well, the brown bear is the most sacred animal,” I said. “So after Dad killed it, they had a huge feast in its honor so its spirit wouldn’t be angry, and then its skull was put on the highest pine pole so its spirit could enter the heavens.”

“Your dad sounds like quite a guy. I guess you want to be just like him, right?”

“He has taught me everything he knows.”

“Does that include telling you about a safe place somewhere out here?”

“Yes. We’re going to Dad’s secret hunting ground. We’ll be safe there.”

But with the helicopter and all those men searching the forest, I couldn’t stop the doubt from creeping in.