I CAN’T QUITE comprehend what happened here. I know it but don’t feel it, feel it but don’t understand what I feel. Maybe writing it down like this will help. It doesn’t feel like a story, the same way that before does. It feels like it’s still happening. That even now I’m waking on the shore, smoke and fog mingling together until I can’t tell one from the other.
It’s morning, though the sunlight is weak and thin through the thick gray mass of clouds, which hang so low they shroud the jagged tops of the trees. The forest has never looked so much like teeth. It’s never seemed to stretch so far.
I’ve slept all night curled on the shore while the cabin burned. The fire is out, but the timbers still smolder, shedding smoke and steam. I sit up and hunch against the rain. It’s getting harder, pelting against my shoulders and hissing on the lake behind me. The noise is like static, and it drowns out any other sound—a kind of crowded silence that leaves no room for thought. Every living thing with any sense is hunkered down, sheltered among the dark, endless trees. Waiting out the rain. Waiting out the cold. Still I can’t move, can’t think at all.
My mind refuses to retrace my footsteps, to go further into the past than the night, the fire. I know only that I am alone, that I am hungry, that my tongue is like sandpaper in my mouth.
I tip my face up, closing my eyes. The rain spatters my cheeks, my eyelids. You’re alive, I tell myself. I won’t, can’t, think about what happened, but I know that being alive is a miracle in itself. Stay that way.
But how?
My thoughts move reluctantly. There are too many places they can’t go, like pockets of burning embers too hot to approach. Thinking about Dad burns worse than all the rest, but I force myself to seize on to the thought of him, hold it in my mind until I feel as if my skin will blister and crack from the pain of it.
Dad would know what to do. Somewhere in my smoke-shrouded, too-painful memories, he must have showed me what to do.
He told me cold will kill you quickest—so build a shelter. Thirst will kill you in a day or two—find water. Hunger won’t kill you for a long time, but it’ll make you weak—so find food. Fire is supposed to be last. Fire is warmth and food and clean water, but it’s hard and time-consuming, and people die because they spend all their time making the fire and no time finding water or building a shelter.
So shelter first. But the cabin’s gone. Everything’s gone. I have nothing, I—
No. Stop. I don’t have nothing. I have the rain. The rain, which kept the fire from spreading to the trees, which I can gather and drink without boiling (no way to boil the lake water, not yet, not without fire).
I have what I’m wearing: good boots, warm clothes, a rain shell.
I have everything I grabbed from the cabin before the fire. Not much—my duffel and backpack, the hatchet, a can of peaches, a can of salmon.
I have the rifle and the bow with all its arrows, and a box of ammunition.
And I have Bo. He’s down by the lake, pacing, sniffing. Looking up sometimes like he’s waiting and watching. Waiting for Dad? I’m not sure. But I’m not alone, not completely. Bo is here.
No one is coming for me. For us. If I’m going to live, I have to move.
Easier said than done. My body is still a map of pain, from the soles of my feet to my pounding head. But better than sitting here with nothing but the flame-scorched past, waiting to die.
One thing at a time.
I grab for my duffel and rummage in it until I find what I’m looking for: a pill bottle. I rattle it. Five pills. Painkillers, the powerful kind, left over from my prescription. I haven’t taken them in weeks, but I shake one out now and swallow it dry. Just one, even though I long for two, for the complete blanketing numbness that even when it doesn’t muffle the pain makes me not care about the pain.
But there are only four left, and I have to stay sharp, so I cap the bottle and tuck it safely back in the bag.
One thing at a time, and the next thing is to feed myself. I twist the lid off the jar of salmon and pop a greasy piece in my mouth. Bo must smell it, because seconds later he comes loping up to me, his pink tongue hanging between his teeth and his breath fogging the air. He halts two feet away and licks his chops. Waiting for permission.
“Nuh-uh,” I say. “I need this.” The salmon and peaches won’t last long. A few days if I stretch them. Less if I split them with a hundred-pound dog.
Bo whines and ducks his head. And then I remember the jerky treats. I grabbed them this morning when we were heading out, and they’re still crammed in my pocket. I dig in my pocket, get a handful, and toss them to Bo. He snatches one out of the air, then snuffles around the ground collecting the rest.
I don’t know what kind of dog Bo is. Neither does Dad. Neither did Dad. He’s mostly black, flecked through with gray, lighter around his muzzle. He looks like he’s got some husky in him, some malamute, and almost definitely some wolf. He’s got that wildness to him. Dad said that you can’t tame a wolf-dog, just make an ally of him. Bo’s never been on a leash in his life.
I chew slowly. Even though I’m starving, I feel queasy, an odd churning in my stomach. It takes me a minute to recognize it. I had the same feeling after the accident, when they told me Mom was dead. For two, three days, things swung between horrible, clawing grief that hurt more than my injuries and a pinched numbness. That pinching was awful, but it meant I didn’t think about Mom. Her death didn’t feel real to me, not for a long time.
That’s how I feel now. Numb. Numb is good. Numb means I can think, can figure everything out, before the grief comes.
Shelter, I think, forcing down another bite of salmon.
The fifth or sixth night I spent here, my dad called me over to the fire. If you ever get stuck away from the cabin at night, you’re going to need to know a few things, he said. That’s when he told me about the cold, the water, the food, the fire. I was only half listening. I didn’t think I’d need to know any of it. Didn’t want to need to know any of it.
Did he teach me anything about building a shelter? I can’t remember, or else it hurts too much to remember. I reach further back, find a safe memory, one that doesn’t burn. A “field trip” in fourth grade. A field trip all the way out to the trees behind our school. “Wilderness day.” They taught us to stay where you are if you get lost, use white clothes as a signal because they’re easy to spot, things like that.
They taught us how to build shelters, which was the fun part. We made them with one big branch propped up against a log or a rock like a spine, then we laid smaller branches and evergreen boughs across like ribs. The branches and needles layered over each other to keep rain out, and then we filled the shelters with dead leaves and stuff from the forest floor, which they said would keep us warm.
I laugh, choking laughs halfway to sobbing. I’ve had weeks with my dad, the king of the wilderness, and I was so busy being angry that I didn’t listen to a thing he said. Instead I’m remembering some stupid field day with a bunch of suburban kids who’d never spent a night out in the open in their lives.
The grief almost finds me, teeth and claws at my throat. I make a strangled sound as I remember—the terror, the sound of it, the way that second stretched out and out and out and then snapped back into an instant that was too short, too fast to do anything about.
My dad is dead.
However much it burns, I can’t escape that knowledge.
I didn’t know him. I didn’t like him. But he was my dad, and I loved him.
I don’t know how to live without him. Literally. When Mom died it was like the grief squeezed everything out of me, breath and blood and feeling. I didn’t know how I would live, then, but I knew that I would.
The grief is different now. Not as bad, maybe. But the living part is so much worse. I don’t know how to survive out here. I don’t know if I can.
“That’s enough,” I snap. “That’s enough. We are not doing this again.”
I spent two weeks refusing to do physical therapy after the accident. Refusing to talk to anyone. Refusing to move out of bed except to drag myself, crying and swearing, to the bathroom.
If I do that now, I’m going to die. I’ve lived too long where it’s hard to die. I don’t know how to be properly afraid yet. I don’t know how to tell the difference between one kind of fear and the next. The fear that makes you fast. The fear that makes you wary, lets you hear a twig snapping like it’s a gunshot. The fear that makes you freeze. The fear that paralyzes you, and the fear that keeps you alive.
I’m going to die, I force myself to think, and then I say it out loud, shout it, because I need to believe it down in my gut or I’m never going to be able to move.
“I AM GOING TO DIE,” I scream across the lake. The words tear from me and leave my throat raw.
Bo barks, backing away from me, then spinning to face whatever threat I’m screaming at. My hands shake. I press my palms against my eyes, shivering.
Bo quiets down, creeps up toward me with his head low and his tail wagging tentatively. I grab him around the neck, pull him close. His fur is wet and the smell of him is strong and musky, but I don’t care. I bury my face in his ruff. He huffs against my shoulder. The rain gets stronger, drumming against the hood of my rain shell until I want to tear it off and let myself get soaked just to get a little silence. I shut my eyes.
“I’m going to die,” I whisper. “I’m going to die.” I’m stuck on it. Unless, I force myself to add. There are a hundred, a thousand things that come after that word, but I focus on one.
“I’m going to die unless I find shelter,” I tell Bo. “Shelter first.” Something to keep the rain off me, to keep the cold out. Something that can fit me and Bo and even a fire, which means it has to be more impressive than the little hutches we made in school. I can make a lean-to, I think, if only I have something to lean it against.
I had weeks with my dad, walking out in the woods. It all blurs together now into brown and green; I couldn’t even keep track of which way the lake was, once we were in the thick of the trees. But I remember a boulder. Dropped here by some long-gone glacier, it leaned a bit, like it was drunk. The ground under it had been dry. Safe from the rain.
If only I can remember where it is.
We were checking the traps my dad set nearby. He said it was a bad spot and picked them up to set somewhere else later. He looked up at me, grinned.
“You’ve got dirt on your cheek,” he said. I went to wipe it clean. He shook his head. “Makes you look like a proper wild girl.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s going to take more than a little dirt.” I scrubbed at my cheek with my sleeve until the skin stung. He reached over, his hands all mucked up from working in the dirt, and tapped my nose.
“It’s a start,” he said. I grabbed my nose defensively. He just laughed, and I almost laughed, too. Almost. Managed to keep glaring, but only just. Had to stomp away to keep from looking like it’d been funny. That’s when I saw the boulder, and the sun was low between the trees.
What direction? Where did we go from there?
I keep my eyes closed until I think I know, drawing a mental line from the lake to the rock.
The pill is kicking in, so I’ll have to be careful. The pills make it so it doesn’t hurt when it should, and that’s when you injure yourself. I know my injuries are going to be my biggest problem. It would be hard enough for a whole, healthy person to survive. I’m hurt. I have to survive and let my body knit up.
Which means walking as little as possible today. Which means that I have to get this right on the first try, or I’ll add a bunch of wandering around I can’t afford.
“I’ve got it,” I tell Bo. I don’t sound convincing. I let go of him slowly. He sits down, watching me. Waiting for instructions.
I look at what I have with me. Backpack, duffel bag, rifle, bow, hatchet, arrows.
I reach for the duffel, stop. I shouldn’t carry everything at once, not as hurt as I am. I have to prioritize. I grab a handful of clothes from the duffel along with the bottle of pills and stuff them into the backpack. I grab the hatchet and the rifle, leave the bow and arrows in the duffel. It’s not like there’s anyone out here to take them.
I get to my feet, stop. My first task should be the simplest thing in the world. Walk to the rock. And if I was whole, if I was healthy, maybe it would be simple.
But I’m not. Haven’t been for a long time. After the accident, I couldn’t walk for weeks. And now—my foot drags. My leg seizes up. Now I’m not supposed to walk on uneven ground. I’m not supposed to run or strain myself.
I look around, as if a sidewalk will manifest itself in the wilderness. I snort. Will said it would take me another year at least before things start feeling normal, before I don’t have to take every step carefully. I shouldn’t have run yesterday, throwing myself carelessly through the trees, tripping on roots. I shouldn’t be walking now. But I don’t have a choice.
“Come on, Bo,” I say. “Let’s go.”