After about an hour, Wyatt stopped suddenly. “Hold up.”
“What?” Tanika asked.
“I’m pretty sure we’re going in circles,” Wyatt said.
Tanika looked around. “Everything looks the same in these woods. How can you be sure?” she asked.
Wyatt pointed to a shallow cut in the bark of a nearby tree. “I’ve been using my pocketknife to mark trees every once in a while.”
“Like a trail of bread crumbs,” Tanika said.
“Exactly,” Wyatt said grimly. “And we’ve passed by this tree before.”
“How did we get turned around?” Tanika asked, annoyance ringing in her words. “I swear we were heading in a straight line.”
“There were a couple times that we had to go around fallen trees, and we kept going left. Our turns must have added up until we ended up right back where we started.”
“But how can we stop it from happening?” Tanika asked. Clearly his theory wasn’t doing much to comfort her.
“What if we alternate between turning right and left around obstacles? That should help balance us out.” Wyatt said.
Wyatt laid out a strategy about how to keep track of their direction and how to check at points along the way, but Tanika didn’t seem at all interested in the details of his plan—or his lengthy explanation.
Once he finished talking, Tanika raised a bored eyebrow. “Did it really require that much explanation?”
“Uh.” Wyatt didn’t know what to say.
“You really need to learn how to get to the point, Wy,” Tanika muttered.
She folded her arms across her chest, and Wyatt couldn’t tell if it was out of annoyance or because she was cold. Probably a little bit of both. He knew she was probably just snapping at him because she was starting to get freaked out about the situation, but Wyatt thought it was a bit bold of her to be annoyed. Especially since Wyatt was the only one coming up with any real plans to get them out of the mess.
It’s not my fault you have the attention span of a goldfish, he thought meanly.
They set out again, this time trying to be more aware of their surroundings and keeping an eye out for the marked trees as Wyatt had suggested. Wyatt was shivering a little bit.
Wyatt noticed that it was getting progressively darker as the sun sank lower in the sky and the clouds thickened. The weather had seemed great when they were on their bikes, but now it wasn’t so nice, especially when the wind whipped through the trees and sent drops of cold water splattering down on the backs of their necks. Wyatt was tired and cold. And all of a sudden it struck him that he was also incredibly thirsty.
His mouth was dry and he wondered how he could be this thirsty when the forest around them was so damp and foggy. He kicked the ground in frustration—his shoes were caked with mud.
Wyatt swung his backpack around and reached in for his water bottle. The inside of his bag was still sopping wet, and when he pulled out the bottle her understood why. The tire patch hadn’t worked to fill the hole, and the rest of his water had slowly drained out of the bottle. Wyatt glared at the water bottle, as though that would somehow bring the water back. He felt his stomach clench as he thought about how much longer they would be able to last without water.
All the while, Tanika didn’t notice a thing and kept up her nonstop chattering. Wyatt was more of the type to enjoy being around friends, but he didn’t really feel a need to talk to them constantly. Usually he was grateful that Tanika could pick up the slack in their conversations, but at the moment the constant buzz was starting to get on his nerves.
“So,” he interjected when she paused for breath. “What should we do about water?”
“Right?!” Tanika exclaimed. “I have been so thirsty for the past hour, but I didn’t really want to bring it up because obviously you’re in the same boat, and complaining about it didn’t seem like it would help much.” She indicated her empty water bottle hooked to her bike and frowned. “I mean, we already used my portion. But you still have some left.” Then she spotted Wyatt holding up his empty water bottle. “Wait, what happened.”
“Your patch didn’t actually stop the water bottle from leaking. I’m completely empty as well.” Wyatt tried and failed to keep the accusation out of his tone.
Tanika looked at him cautiously for a moment but didn’t take the bait. “If we can find a way to get water, we can fill up my water bottle and share,” Tanika offered.
“But how do we find water?” Wyatt asked, exasperated.
“I guess we look for some sort of body of water, like a pond or a creek,” Tanika said, scanning the woods around her. “And just hope we stumble across one?”
Another drop of cold water hit Wyatt’s neck and slithered down his back. He realized that it wasn’t just the water blowing from the trees—it was actually sprinkling. Great, he thought. Just what we need. But then an idea came to him. “I guess we could try to tie up my poncho between the trees and use it to catch rainwater,” he suggested.
Tanika held out her hand. “It’s hardly even drizzling. It would take us ages to collect enough water that way. Being thirsty is terrible, but I don’t know if we’re that desperate yet. Wouldn’t it be better to keep moving and try to find a way out of here? The longer we wait around, the more likely it is that we won’t make it back before it gets dark.”
Wyatt tried to swallow, but his throat felt too dry. He had to agree with Tanika. “Okay, then we keep moving, but we try to find a source of drinkable water.”
Tanika gasped. “I just realized,” she said, her words coming out in an excited jumble, “there was that creek. Back near the park entrance, like a five minute bike ride along the main road from the visitor center.”
“Yeah, I remember it,” Wyatt said. “We had to go single file to pass by those hikers that had stopped to take pictures on the bridge going over the creek. But how does that help us out here?”
Tanika continued, “If the creek has its source further up the mountain, and then flows south to eventually ends up near the visitor center . . .”
Suddenly, Wyatt understood. “Then we would just need to follow the creek and it will lead us back to the bridge,” Wyatt finished. “That is genius, Tanika! But which direction do we go? I have no idea where the creek is in relation to where we are now.”
Tanika bit her lip. “I know you’re not going to want to hear this, Wy, but I think we need to turn your phone on. If we can consult the trail map—”
“But if my phone is still wet then there’s a good chance that it will be busted entirely,” Wyatt interrupted her. He knew it was unreasonable, but he felt his face flush with anger. How was it fair that Tanika could forget her phone in the car and then expect him to ruin his own phone?
“But if your phone works then we have a chance to look at the trail map and maybe find our way out of here,” Tanika snapped.
“And if it doesn’t work, we’re back to square one,” he shot back.
Tanika scowled. “Do you mean if your phone doesn’t work because it’s broken, or if your phone doesn’t work because you’re too stubborn to try turning it on?! We need to try something, Wy!”
Wyatt fumed but couldn’t think of anything to say. Deep down he knew she was right.
He would feel like an idiot if they had to spend the night in the woods only to discover that his phone had been working the whole time. He dug it out of his backpack pocket.
There was no way to tell just from looking at it whether it had dried out enough to turn on. He held his breath as he as he held down the power button and let it out as a sigh of relief when the screen lit up.
“Thank goodness,” he muttered.
“Should we call for help first?” Tanika asked.
Wyatt shook his head slowly. “I have absolutely no service out here. And I don’t have data access either, so I can’t message anyone.” He opened the screenshot of the trail map.
The map wasn’t detailed enough to figure out exactly where they were just by looking, but if they could figure out where they had left the intermediate trail, maybe they could work their way backward.
“Okay, here is the trail,” Wyatt said, tracing the blue line with his finger. We must have left the path before we reached the black diamond trail, because we never saw a sign for it.” He pointed to the yellow line that branched off from the blue one. “We had biked pretty far from the overlook up here,” he said, pointing to the symbol on the map closer to the top of the mountain. “So we were somewhere in between those two landmarks.”
Tanika peered over his shoulder. “Look!” she said, stopping just short of jabbing the screen with her finger in excitement. “This spot here, where the trail twists left, goes back to the right, and then there’s a chain of three jumps. I definitely remember that part, and it was right before we ran into the part of the trail that was washed out. So we must have left the trail somewhere around here.” She pointed to a bend in the blue line.
Wyatt grimaced when he saw how close they had been to the actual advanced trail. If they had just walked their bikes a little farther . . . but it didn’t do them any good now to think about that.
“And there’s the creek,” Wyatt said. “You were right, it starts higher up in the mountain, then snakes down and around before crossing the bridge here, near the visitor center. So assuming we’re somewhere in here”—he indicated the large gray “off limits” area—“we just need to head south until we hit the creek, then follow it east until we reach the bridge. From there we can join up with the main road until we hit the visitor center.”
Tanika froze suddenly. “Wy, look, you have a bar,” she whispered, as though she were afraid the cell service would bolt like a frightened animal if she spooked it.
Wyatt’s heart skipped a beat. If he could make a call, they might be able to get out of this mess without even having to find the creek. The number for the park ranger was listed at the bottom of the trail map.
Hands shaking, trying not to move the phone too much in case it could only pick up the signal in this one square inch of space, he dialed the number.
Just as he pressed “call,” the low battery warning flashed, and the phone started to shut down.
“No, no, no, no!” he muttered. How had he not noticed that the battery level was critical when he turned it on? He desperately tapped the screen, but the phone powered off anyway.
He pressed the power button again, but there was no sign of life. “No, no, no, oh please, c’mon, please work.” But he knew it was no use. He tried to resist the urge to chuck his phone against the nearest tree trunk.
Tanika’s eyes were wide. “Look, Wy—” she started quietly.
“I don’t want to hear it, Tanika, okay?” Wyatt snapped. “We have a better idea of where the creek is, sure. That’s great. Doesn’t change the fact that now we have absolutely no working phones. If we had waited, maybe we could have gotten to some place with better signal and actually called for help.”
“I didn’t think—” Tanika started.
“Yeah, well maybe you should have done some more thinking before you forgot your phone in the car,” Wyatt said. “Again.”
Tanika’s mouth pressed into a flat line. Her eyes flashed, but there was hurt mixed with the anger.
Part of Wyatt wished he could take back what he said, but another overwhelming part of him was too tired and thirsty to care.
“We go south to the get to the creek, right?” Tanika said through clenched teeth.
“Yeah,” Wyatt muttered. “Then we follow it east.”
“Let’s get going then,” she said. “Before we die of thirst, preferably,” she added bitterly.
“We should stay quiet so we can listen for sounds of running water,” Wyatt said, unable to bring himself to meet her eye. “We might be able to hear the creek from a distance.”
“Good,” Tanika fumed as she grabbed her bike and started walking. “I wasn’t planning on talking to you anyway.”