I couldn’t stay in that spot.
Nobody could. The hardiest, most experienced camper in the world would be packing it in right about now.
First, the bear might come back. The thought of that made the hair rise on the back of my neck. It made me long for the cute yodeling of the cuddly wolves and coyotes. Second, there was the bear’s midnight snack, the dead animal about three feet from my tree. Even if the bear didn’t remember it and lumber back even hungrier and angrier, some other forest predator was probably already smelling it.
Time to go. Now.
I grabbed my stick with one hand, a rock with the other, and looked around in the gloom, my heart still pounding. I didn’t do any of my usual indecisive waffling about which way to go. I would go the complete and exact opposite of the way the bear had gone, wherever it led me.
I crashed through the forest, slipping and falling and blundering into trees. It was not in any way an organized, well-planned escape, but I kept putting distance between the bear and me, going as fast as I could.
In the silence of that still night forest, I was making a whole lot of noise. Panic noise: panting and thumping and crashing. It began to worry me. I was probably disturbing other predators, who might wake up alarmed and then hungry.
I stopped once or twice, convinced something was following me, but all I could hear was my own raw, gasping breath and pounding heart.
It was exactly like a nightmare. In fact, if you had to pick the setting for a nightmare, that night forest would have been perfect. Eerie, ghostly, illuminated dimly by the thin moon and the snow, the looming, spiky trees pitch black against the deep gloom. The evergreens, the big, fleshy monsters of the night forest, stood like massive giants against the other spindly trees.
I surprised a couple of rabbits sheltering underneath one of these huge evergreens. They shot out, almost giving me a heart attack, and bounded off in different directions.
I stopped uncertainly, straining to hear anything around me. My legs were quaking and burning, and my head was throbbing. I was shaking all over. Fear? Shock? Cold? Hunger? Take your pick. I had to take cover, and if the rabbits thought the underside of that evergreen was a decent night shelter, it was good enough for me.
I pulled my hood tight around my face, steeled myself for the inevitable prickles of the needles and crawled under the low-hanging branches of the big tree. It was so big that there was room to crawl, especially as I got farther in. I slithered as far as I could, right up to the trunk.
I bruised and broke and crushed so many needles that there was a heavy smell of pine in the air. Improbably, here in the middle of nowhere, in flight from almost-certain death, I got the happy whiff of Christmas. And not only that, I found the spot where the rabbits had been. It was still slightly warm from their furry little bodies. It was like a gift.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, rabbits,” I whispered. “You are officially my favorite forest creatures.”
I lay on my side under the massive evergreen, trying to get my heart rate and breathing under control. I looked up. What a monster it was, this tree. Massive, thick branches spiraled up above me, wide and black.
I tried to think about nothing other than the tree above me. About how it was shaped like a triangle or a pyramid, its huge branches getting smaller the closer they got to the cone-laden point at the top. I tried to forget that my hand was throbbing and my eye was swollen shut and my face was stinging from all the scratches. I would not think about the bear or the wolves or the coyotes. I would ignore how I was freezing and starving. I would forget about everything except this tree.
I turned on my back in the rabbit bed. It was quiet under the tree, all the forest noises muffled by the snow and the thick branches. For the first time since I had wandered into this forest, I felt safe and protected. I rested my head against the huge, hard trunk.
I glimpsed the sky through a gap in the tree’s branches. Unlike the previous night’s snow-laden, overcast sky, it was brilliantly clear, stars pricking shining points in a blue-black velvet sheet. I had never learned any of the constellations (I had an app for that, but I’d never used it). I just asked Cassie. Cassie knew a lot of them. She’d call them out like they were old friends.
That’s my favorite—Cassiopeia, the queen, she would say, stopping in the middle of the driveway, pointing up and pulling my face over beside hers so I would see what she saw. See the sideways W? She’s sitting on her throne.
I never saw it and wasn’t really interested, but I would always say, Oh, yeah, I see it now.
Tonight I craned my neck to find the queen, sitting up there on her throne in the sky. It seemed desperately important to find her. She was the only link out here with Cassie, with home. I hoped Mom and Dad hadn’t gone and pulled Cassie from her camping trip. I hoped she was somewhere feeling one with the forest.
I couldn’t see that stupid queen. Truthfully, I couldn’t see much. Just a small triangle of sky. But one star seemed particularly bright to my eye. I’m not sure if it was the first one I saw, but close enough.
“Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight…”
I whispered it slowly and carefully, like I was a little child, like it was prayer.
Like it really mattered.