At first the trail was wide enough for all of us to walk side by side, me, Bernie, Turk. Then it narrowed and steepened, and Turk took the lead, with Bernie following. As for me, I sometimes handled the leading part, also sometimes I did the following, and sometimes I kind of did both, hard to explain how, exactly. Being outdoors in the wide open spaces: this was the life.
Turk was a fast hiker for a human, maybe the fastest I’d seen. A smaller guy than Bernie, and carrying a bigger pack, but as the trail got gnarlier—that was hiking lingo—the distance between the two of them grew and grew. Turk wore shorts, the muscles in his strong legs swelling with every step. Bernie had strong legs, too, except one of them had gotten wounded in the war. The wounded leg looked just about as strong as the other one, unless you happened to see the scarred part. Bernie didn’t wear shorts much, mostly just around the house; right now he wore jeans, the real faded pair, his favorite. He wasn’t limping—I checked every now and then—but he kept falling farther back. Maybe we should all just slow down? That was my thought.
No slowing down happened. Trees with whitish trunks appeared: I’d never seen that before. They smelled great, a bit like the red bark mulch Leda had made Bernie return to the garden store, back in the day, but with a hint of something close to lemon. One or two had been marked by coyotes. I laid my own mark on top, just sending a message.
Meanwhile we were switchbacking up and up, and also sometimes down and down, just part of the fun of hiking. Love switchbacks, myself, although once or twice I didn’t bother, and tore straight through. A big black bird circled high up in the sky, not over us but way ahead. Birds bother me, I admit it. I dropped back to be with Bernie. “How’re you doing, big guy?” he said.
Tip-top, of course. Bernie himself was huffing and puffing a bit, and even though the air was pretty cool and getting cooler, there were sweat beads on his forehead. I wanted to lick them off, but this probably wasn’t the time. He stepped over a big rock poking up through the ground and said, “Our buddy Turk’s really motoring.” Huff puff. “Feeling guilty, or just showing us how good he is?” Huff puff.
I didn’t know the answer, didn’t really understand the question. I hopped over a thick tree root that crossed the trail and rounded a corner. No sign of Turk—unless you included his scent, of which there was plenty, that very penetrating scent given off by a human male who has broken a fresh sweat after he was already coated in dried-up sweat—but up ahead lay a pool of golden light, meaning we were about to leave the woods and enter some open country. I sped up.
And soon came to a beautiful meadow, full of tall golden grass, with brightly colored flowers poking up here and there in all that gold. Bernie says we’re all together on this planet, fact one. There’s also a fact two, slipping my mind at the moment, but going back to fact one, the point is I wouldn’t be anywhere else for the world. Maybe a bit confusing, now that I thought about it, which I didn’t do for long. Instead I raced into the meadow, the trail widening and flattening out, and soon caught up to Turk.
He was sitting on a rock at the top of an easy rise. What else? I smelled water, lots of it. And Turk was smoking a joint. Turk looked at me. I looked at him. A lot of humans will say something to you at a time like that, just being friendly. Turk did not. He took one last drag, then dropped the butt and ground it into the earth. You run into potheads in this business—Bernie’s had fun conversations with some of them—but Turk was way more energetic than any pothead I’d ever met. I went over and sniffed at the remains of the joint, then got to work on digging it up out of the little hole Turk’s heel had made.
“What the hell?” Turk said and sort of kicked out at me. Whoa. I backed away and barked. At that moment Bernie came in sight, moving much better now on the flat ground, that tall golden grass waving slightly, and Bernie looking sort of golden himself. He strode up the rise and stopped beside us.
“You two getting acquainted?” he said.
Turk glanced at me. “I guess.”
I barked again, not my real scary bark, but lower and more rumbly, the bark that lets you know the real scary one is on the way, unless something you’re up to or not up to changes pretty damn quick. Why I was doing it now was a bit of a mystery. But the next moment, Bernie shot a real quick look directly at the ground-up butt of Turk’s joint, more like his gaze sweeping right over it, so if you didn’t know Bernie, you would have missed the whole thing. But I knew Bernie.
“Been meaning to ask you something, Turk,” he said, leaning against a tree. “You’re going so fast I thought I’d never get the chance.”
Turk glanced at the sun. Hey! It had sunk pretty low in the sky when I hadn’t been watching. “This ain’t fast,” he said. “What’s your question?”
“Devin must have had a pack,” Bernie said.
“Sure,” said Turk.
“Where is it?”
“I left it at the campsite in case he came back.” Turk rose. “With food and water inside, plus a note telling him to stay put.”
“That was smart,” Bernie said.
“I know my job,” Turk said. He gave Bernie one of those down-the-nose looks. “Had enough rest?”
Bernie pushed himself away from the tree. We moved on.
The smell of water got stronger and stronger and then the sight itself came into view, a lovely smooth sheet of blue, darker than the sky.
“Whiskey Lake,” said Turk.
Wasn’t whiskey a kind of bourbon, or bourbon a kind of whiskey? I tried to remember the details of a discussion—if that’s what it was, with all the yelling and shouting and broken glass—about this very subject at the last Police Athletic League social. But the point: whiskey was a kind of golden brown, not dark blue. So was this lake full of whiskey or not? I sniffed the air for whiskey, detected none.
Bernie has some beliefs. One is you don’t bring a spoon to a knife fight. Another is don’t overthink. We’re on the same page about that one, me and Bernie. The next thing I knew I was swimming in Whiskey Lake. Not whiskey at all, but cool, delicious water. Turk and Bernie followed the path around it, appearing and disappearing through a screen of tall cattails. I’d seen cattails once before on a riverbank down on the border. The name bothered me, but I tried and succeeded in not thinking about it as I swam straight across the lake. Love swimming—it’s just like trotting, only in the water—which I don’t get to do nearly enough in the Valley, where we have aquifer problems, a bit of a mystery but one of Bernie’s biggest worries.
The far shore was steep and rocky. I scrambled out, ran onto the trail just ahead of Turk and Bernie, and gave myself a good shake, the kind that starts at my head, ripples down to my tail and all the way back again—can’t tell you how good that feels—maybe spraying them just the slightest bit. Bernie laughed. Turk raised his hands to block the tiny water drops and said, “Christ almighty.”
Bernie stopped laughing.
We climbed a steep ridge, saw rocky mountaintops streaked with white in the distance. The sun sank behind those peaks and the sky turned purple. I’d never smelled air like this, so fresh and pure. A funny kind of air: I wasn’t panting or anything—how could hiking with a couple of humans bring on panting?—but I seemed to need more of it. Bernie was huffing and puffing again, but now he didn’t fall behind, even seemed about to go into the lead once or twice. That was Bernie: there’s something inside him.
Time passed. We were in the trees again, not those white-bark trees: these looked more like Christmas trees. The going got rougher, the trail almost disappearing as we worked our way along a narrow crest. I was in the lead now, and starting to pick up human scents, faint but there: by a tall spiny bush, I found Preston’s smell, for sure. Not long after that, I glanced back. Hey! Bernie and Turk had put on headlamps. I checked the sky: dark, with twinkling stars. No headlamp for me: night or day doesn’t make much difference. I turned and trotted on, not my fast trot, but the go-to trot, as Bernie calls it, the trot I can keep up as long as I have to. More scents now: Preston’s again, Tommy’s, and Turk’s. Plus just a trace of that strange locker-room-laundry-hamper scent I’d first picked up at the trailhead. Locker room laundry hamper, yes; human, no.
Kind of puzzling, but then I caught sight of the white streaks on the mountaintop. I couldn’t see the mountain, just the white streaks, a new and beautiful sight, and I forgot all about whatever had been puzzling me. Other questions arose, like: Was the moon coming tonight? Stars came out every clear night, which was just about every night in the Valley. The moon was trickier, appearing some nights but not others, and often changing its shape. Bernie had explained the whole thing to Charlie at the dinner table, and I’d gotten that feeling in my head when I come very, very close to understanding; a nice feeling, almost as good as actually understanding. What a life!
Up and up I went, and then the ground leveled out, and I heard trickling water. A few more steps and I could see a gurgling little stream, sparkling with starlight. The great outdoors—that’s what humans call it, a perfect name—and at night: hard to beat. I leaped onto a broad flat rock in the middle of the stream and lapped up more delicious cold water. I wasn’t thirsty, but what a treat, all this tasty water around. We’d have to cross the state line more often, if that was in fact what we’d done.
The two headlamp beams bobbed up in the distance, moved closer and closer in a jerky kind of way, and then shone on me. I heard their voices.
“There’s your dog,” said Turk.
“Uh-huh,” said Bernie.
“Stiller’s Creek,” Turk said. “Weird how it ended up here—the camp can’t be more’n a hundred yards away, just on the other side.”
“Not it,” Bernie said. “He.”
The headlamp beams both swung around, turning on each other. Light shone on both their faces, Bernie’s and Turk’s. They looked squinty, tired, annoyed. That was a bit of a surprise. I couldn’t remember feeling better, myself. Okay, there was the time Bernie and I went on vacation to San Diego, and I surfed. But other than that.
I hopped over to the far side. Bernie and Turk crossed the stream, both stepping on rocks to keep their feet dry. That’s not something I worry about.
Turk walked up a little slope toward a shadowy grove of low trees. Bernie and I followed, side by side. Bernie has a kind of walk for when his leg hurts but he’s trying not to show it; he was doing it now.
We reached the top, moved into the grove. I smelled ashes, plus chocolate, the way it smells when hot chocolate gets burned in the pot, and then Turk’s headlamp beam illuminated a small circle of stones: the remains of a not-too-long-ago campfire. I knew fire pits, of course, went over and took some closer sniffs. Burned hot chocolate, yes. There’d also been Spam and something eggy. I stuck my nose just about right into the ashes. They were cold.
“Where did you leave the pack?” Bernie said.
“Huh?” Turk said.
“Devin’s pack.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
Turk took off his headlamp and shone the light carefully around a tree stump outside the circle of stones.
“That’s funny,” he said.
“What is?” said Bernie.
“This is where I left his pack—leaning against the stump.”
I sniffed at the stump, didn’t pick up Devin’s smell, although I did detect the scent of burned marshmallow. Marshmallows: you can have them—just way too sticky. Same for cotton candy.
We walked around the clearing, the two light beams poking at trees, rocks, bushes. No pack in sight. “Tent was over here,” Turk said.
Bernie looked around. “And where did you sleep?” he said.
“Under the stars, like I told you,” said Turk.
“I asked where,” said Bernie.
Turk pointed with his thumb, back toward the fire pit. I’d slept next to fire pits, too; if you make a roaring fire, those stones stay warm almost till dawn.
“Maybe the kid came back and headed out with the pack,” Turk said.
“But your note said to stay put,” Bernie said. Meanwhile, he was crouched down, sweeping his light slowly back and forth over the place where the tent had been. I crouched beside him, picked up the scents of Preston and Tommy, plus those two other boys, their names escaping me.
“Maybe he didn’t read it,” Turk said.
Bernie rose. “Turk?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“That’s enough theory. Have you got any facts for us?”
Turk gave Bernie a hard look, said nothing.
Bernie turned away from him. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Devin! Devin!” louder than I’d ever heard him. Turk jumped right off the ground. So did I, kind of, even though it was Bernie.
“Devin! Devin!”
The night was silent.