In the harsh light of day, it was clear the night insects had definitely mugged poor Declan. There were angry bites on his arms and legs, raised and sore protrusions where his blood was heartily feasted upon and he had a number on his face that he scratched until they bled. It was obvious to both teens he wouldn’t be able to continue to sleep outside.
Declan led Calli down to the stream to wash up, laughing at her as she slipped and put her left foot fully into the icy water. Her boot was soaked and it may have been ok but for the fact that her foot went in so deep the cold, fresh current poured over the top and pooled in the bottom of her shoe. “Ugh!” she cried crossly and glowered at him as though it was his fault. It was truly wretched and Calli felt grumpy as they packed up the tent, knowing she would have to walk for hours with a wet sock. Breakfast was a few pieces of fruit each and Declan made sure there was little trace of their ever having camped, setting off decisively in a southerly direction.
Calli felt unsure of herself against Declan’s confidence and she grew increasingly morose as they trudged along, her following the backs of his hiking boots and only rarely looking up. It was inevitable that when he stopped suddenly, she would run up the back of him.
“Sorry, sorry!” Calli leaped backwards and overbalanced, ending up on her backside on the rough track, dragged down by her rucksack and the tent poles which she tied precariously to the bottom. Declan pulled her up with one strong arm, his muscles bulging underneath his tee shirt, not doing a very comprehensive job of hiding his smirk. “Where are we going, anyway?” Calli asked, irritated, brushing leaves and mud the shade of ochre and loam off her bottom and knowing her cheeks had gone a betraying pink.
“The clearing we stayed in was a junction for three different tracks. There’s the Bell Track, which is the longest track to the summit and the hardest. There’s rain forecast tonight and when Dad and I used to come, it got swampy in wet weather. I thought we might come back that way because there is an old hut site and a huge kahikatea tree people like to see. Then there’s the Te Araroa Track,” Declan counted them off on his fingers as though Calli was Jase’s age, “that joins the main track which serious hikers and tourists use to walk from one end of the country to the other, Cape Reinga to Bluff. The other track is the Nikau Loop, which follows the stream around, but what most people don’t know, is that it hides a decommissioned track up to the top of the Bell Track, like a short cut. It used to be called something beginning with ‘S’, but I can’t remember the name anymore. I thought we’d use that one to the top as it’s quicker. Then we can camp longer at the summit. What do you think?”
Faced with a decision, Calli felt lost. The word ‘decommissioned’ didn’t fill her with quite as much enthusiasm as it did Declan, but it was his holiday and she was just marking time until she could make her way south. Somewhere in the bottom of Calli’s sense of romanticism, she hoped Declan could teach her enough about the bush to survive out here alone, for as long as she dared. Last night hadn’t been as bad as she expected and she slept surprisingly well. She contemplated asking if he would sell her his tent before he went home if she promised to send him the money as soon as she could get some. Realising he waited for an answer, Calli smiled demurely. “Hey, I’m happy to trust your navigation. I have no idea where we’re headed.”
Declan seemed pleased and resumed the trudging motion, although his gait was much lighter than Calli’s.
She clearly remembered leaving the perfectly comfortable track, with its dusty upwardly sloping surface and easily recognisable orange markers, neatly pinned to tree trunks to help trampers find their way. But once they plunged into the deep, green canopy of the bush, with its tricks of the light and misleading landmarks, Calli could recall little. She doggedly followed the back of Declan’s walking boots, knowing the shape of the heel and the wearing of the leather intimately by the time they finally stopped. Calli’s arms and hands were ripped to shreds by the spiteful hooky thorns of bush lawyer and she had been legged up a million times by the irritating supplejack vine. It snatched at her ankles at the worst possible times, appearing out of nowhere just as she was about to step over another obstacle. Calli lost count of the number of times she found herself flat on her face or kneeling in the undergrowth. “I hate this!” she yelled out in temper.
Declan, on the other hand, bounced along quite happily, navigating with a compass and an ordinance survey map. The blue sky was hardly visible through the dense canopy and the world was strangely silent this deeply inside the bush. Calli gave up trying to recognise which direction they were going in. Every time they trekked around an immovable object such as rock, a clump of trees or an area of bog, she would instinctively return to their previous trajectory, only to find Declan had checked the compass and set off in a different direction.
At lunchtime, or at the time Calli assumed must be around lunchtime, Declan found a log to sit down on and dug around in his rucksack. Calli sank to the ground with a huge sigh, not even bothering to take her pack off. “Don’t you want to sit here?” Declan asked her in surprise as he pulled out a loaf of bread and indicated a space on the log next to him. Calli shook her head. She spent so much time grovelling around on the bush floor she figured she might as well be down there by choice. Declan pulled out a foil sachet of tuna paste and threw it into Calli’s lap. Then he held out the bag of bread.
Calli shook her head and offered him the tuna back. “I’m not hungry. I don’t want to eat all your food.”
“It’s gluten free bread,” Declan said to reassure her. “When I knew you were coming, I grabbed some of Levi’s out of the freezer. It’s nice. Mum made it.”
“I just don’t get famished,” Calli said apologetically. “I’m still full from the fruit you gave me this morning.”
Declan looked at her hard and then raised his eyebrow. He reached inside his pack and retrieved a mandarin. Calli looked at it, not understanding, until he said, “This fruit?”
Knowing she was rumbled, Calli put her head down. She hid it behind the tree they camped next to. She might have guessed Declan would sweep the area for rubbish so thoroughly he would find it.
“If you’re staying with me, you need to eat properly,” Declan said to her firmly. “Some of this is going to be tough going and if you get sick and I have to call for help, it’s game over for sure. We’ll both be in big trouble, me more than you - and you promised.”
Declan held the loaf of bread out to her again with a look of determination. He hadn’t imposed any rules on Calli as yet, but it was clear this was non-negotiable. She waited a beat out of sheer stubbornness and then reached into the open bag and dragged out a single slice of the white bread, glaring up into his brown eyes with a glint of danger in her blue ones. To add to her feelings of helplessness, Calli struggled with the sachet of tuna, finding it impossible to open and having to let Declan help her. He made no comment as he tore the heavy foil with his teeth and handed it back, getting on with his own lunch. Calli squirted the mixture out and folded the bread in half to encompass it. It had that familiar cardboard quality to it, but it wasn’t as bad as the corrugated stuff Marcia bought and Calli managed to finish it. Her stomach protested at the unusual volume of content pushed into it and she fought feelings of sickness.
She was glad when they were able to get moving again and Calli could pace behind Declan, allowing the food to painfully digest. His dark hair stirred in front of her, creating in the girl, a sense of confusion. Part of her reacted badly to his authority, resenting and rebelling against the sheer strength of it, while another bigger element delighted to be told what to do, especially when it was ultimately for her own good. Since the age of fourteen, Calli had mothered Jase and been left with the day to day running of the house while Simon and Marcia effectively abdicated from the responsibility of parenting their children amidst the pretence of earning the family income. Both parents worked full time and they toiled exceptionally hard, but not out of necessity. Since Danny’s death, they each receded into their careers as a diversion from life and reality, avoiding the need to deal with the sadness and wrenching emptiness of burying a child. Calli stepped up and filled a gap in the family but along the way, lost her status as a minor in need of nurturing and became a child in a parent’s shoes. Declan didn’t simply care that she hadn’t eaten, he took the trouble to investigate her subterfuge and enforced a fixed boundary. Calli smiled to herself as she tramped along behind the boy, feeling cossetted for the first time in years. “You’ll make someone a lovely wife one day,” she smirked at him and he chortled and waved a hand back at her.
Good Friday passed in a blur of green, brown and alluring patches of blue sky. Calli’s wet boot and sock dried, but her foot felt sore and chaffed inside and she suspected a blister had begun on her heel. She had no idea where she was, where she was headed and whether or not she would ever make it, but the numbing pain messages in her body had fused that part of her brain, so she no longer cared anymore. The rucksack rubbed a welt into her shoulders and she had fallen backwards onto the tent poles twice, meaning her lower back was in agony also. Declan forged ahead, evidently familiar with the rigors of the bush, stopping occasionally to check his compass and map, now used to Calli tramping straight into the back of him. “Sorry about the track,” he commented as he stopped to unfold the crumpled map. “It wasn’t this bad when I did it a few years ago with my dad.”
“Fabulous,” she answered under her breath. To Calli, the landscape looked wild, unchanging and monotonously filled with the same native greenery as far as the eye could see.
Sighing at yet another stop, she flopped down on the trunk of a fallen tree, screaming as her backside went straight through. “No, no! Oh my gosh, there’s things in here!” She came face to face with a disgruntled family of woodlice and a terrifying crew of wetas, who looked at her for a second before scattering. The woodlice moved on in an instant; their home now wrecked, but the wetas observed Calli’s prone body for longer, before beginning to venture curiously towards her. She screamed again as six pairs of lengthy antennae wavered towards her face and the brown and honey coloured bodies crept in her direction. Declan retrieved his companion from the devastated tree trunk, holding Calli still as she stamped and cavorted, convinced whilst some of the creatures had calmly inspected her, others of their company had entered her clothing. “Get them off me!” she screamed, her shrieks disturbing the birds. The sound of wings came down through the canopy as the bush occupants scattered.
“They’re just tree wetas,” Declan repeated, firmly brushing his fingers through Calli’s messy curls and whacking the back of her sweatshirt in an attempt to calm her down. “They won’t hurt you.”
“They nip!” Calli squealed, responding to another crawly sensation down the back of her tee shirt. She hurled the rucksack onto the ground and danced around it, verging on hysteria.
“For goodness sake!” Declan showed unmistakable signs of frustration. “They will if you carry on like this.”
It was not a comforting thought and visions of long antennae, facial claws and a glossy striped body with a cricket’s legs, kept wafting across Calli’s mind and setting her off again. Declan was forced to check every single item of clothing in order to persuade the girl that none of the creatures had attached themselves to her. It was all he could do to stop Calli stripping off in the middle of the bush to check her underwear. “No, keep them on!” he insisted, his cheeks reddening with embarrassment. “They didn’t have time to climb in there.”
By the end of the episode, Calli was hot, overwrought and miserable, jumping at every sound. To add to the disaster, she noticed her abandoned rucksack was still near the broken tree and imagined that whilst she had ardently inspected her clothes, the two insect families had relocated inside it. “Leave it here,” she declared stubbornly. “I’m not touching it!”
After arguing he couldn’t manage both packs, Declan became fed up and stated calmly, “Fine, leave it then,” and walked away. Calli felt torn. The rucksack contained everything she owned and couldn’t be realistically abandoned, but nor did she want to carry it on her back with creatures inside. She stamped and complained and knew she was leaving even Sadie’s Oscar winning performances on the cutting room floor, but eventually a harried Declan returned to her side, although he was not in good humour. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, irritation leaking out through his tone.
Calli stamped and looked about eight years old, in keeping with her Sadie-like behaviour. Her mouth was downturned and her brow creased and the truth was, she didn’t know what she wanted him to do. Finally, she launched herself at the boy, hiding her face in his chest and winding her arms around his waist in an appeal for help. “I don’t know, I don’t know!” she wailed.
Calli heard Declan tut and felt his taut muscles relax as the huge sigh exited his body. She knew he regretted his decision to let her accompany him and the fact frightened her. She couldn’t cope in this environment and the romantic notion of survival in the bush alone, was hopelessly snuffed out once and for all. Disappointment washed over her and Calli sniffed. Reluctantly Declan held her and Calli stiffened as she felt his fingers pulling chips of the punga trunk out of her long, dark hair. “Keep still,” he said softly. Calli shut down the involuntary fear he was finding bush bugs trapped in her locks, reassuring herself as she watched the crusty, brown flakes of tree bark flutter to the ground next to them.
“I’ll check your gear with my torch,” he relented finally and Calli broke her tight hold on his torso. As a hero of old, Declan ditched his own heavy pack and searched Calli’s rucksack for stowaways, removing several items just to make sure nothing had crawled in and taken up residence. He found nothing and Calli was only mildly mollified as she watched from a safe distance. When Declan moved quickly, she screamed again and hopped back. “What?” he asked in alarm.
“You found one!” Calli’s face was a picture of misery as she pointed shakily toward the pack, now in his hand.
“No, I didn’t,” Declan said, obviously confused.
“You jumped back,” Calli argued and he shook his head.
“No, I got up. You need to stop this. You’re starting to freak me out now!”
Calli felt wretched, knowing this was the last place on earth she wanted to be. It had started to feel like a horror movie and even the thought of going home was preferable to being peered at by creatures with multiple glassy eyes. “I feel sick,” she said suddenly, clapping her hand over her mouth as tuna mixed with bile started to rise into her gullet.
Declan picked Calli’s pack up one handed and threw it easily over his shoulder, despite the fact it had weighed the slight girl down for hours. “Come on,” he said, his tone comforting, “We’ll stop for the night soon.”
Calli concentrated on inhaling deep breaths, hoping he wouldn’t expect her to eat a whole dinner again tonight as the thought of more food sent the nausea pounding into her brain to confirm its intentions. Calli stood for a moment with her hands on her knees, hoping the feeling would pass, surprised to feel Declan’s hand gently rubbing her back. “Oh, crap!” he said with feeling and Calli’s nerves were put on red alert again as she jerked up. “Keep still,” Declan said and lifted the bottom of her sweatshirt with gentle fingers. Imagining the curious face of the weta again, Calli panicked and Declan held her tightly to prevent her running blindly into the bush. “You’re bleeding! Keep still,” he ordered her, finally exuding the customary authority which stopped Calli in her tracks. “The pack’s rubbed against your spine and taken the skin off. Didn’t you feel it?”
Calli nodded miserably. “It’s from when I fell backward. I think it was the tent poles that started it. And I’ve got blisters on my foot too.”
“Idiot!” Declan exclaimed, masking his frustration by pulling the girl into him and tutting as though he was her father. “You should have said something.” He patted her back and rested his cheek affectionately against the top of her head. A thought occurred to him and he asked, “Does anything else hurt?”
Calli nodded sadly and pointed to her shoulder, upon which, Declan pulled the neck of her sweatshirt open and whistled. “The straps have chaffed your shoulders badly. Are you sure you’re wearing it properly? It’s a good brand; they don’t usually do this.”
Calli shrugged. “I just left it how Danny set it, I didn’t want to change anything.” Her voice sounded tiny and distraught and Declan relented.
“It’s ok for now,” he said gently and with a final pat on her back, released her from his hold. Declan fixed his own pack onto his back and then to her amazement; put his arms through Danny’s rucksack and carried it across his chest, back to front.
“You don’t have to do that...” she began and the boy reached for her hand, silencing her.
“Yes I do,” he said and walked again, trailing Calli to the side of him where possible and keeping his hand outstretched behind him when it wasn’t, his fingers firmly entwined with hers.