I opened my eyes.
Eye. I opened my good eye. The other seemed willing to open, but stayed swollen shut. My left hand was bandaged and lay on the unfamiliar covers in a useless lump. My right hand had a needle in it with a tube leading to an IV pole.
“Wow. No trees,” I murmured, looking around half the hospital room. It was very quiet.
My sister was sitting in the chair by my bed. She turned to me eagerly, shutting her book.
“Hey,” Cassie said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose with one finger.
“Hey.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Just…you know. Weak.” Even my raspy voice sounded small.
“Dad’s getting food at the cafeteria, and Mom’s calling Grandma and Grandpa. I said I’d stay in case you woke up.”
“Thanks, Owl.”
I thought for a minute. The nickname reminded me of something.
“Hey, I saw an owl out in the woods. They don’t make a sound when they fly.”
“Really? I’ve read that, but I’ve never seen one.”
“How was the camping trip?”
“Short,” she said ruefully.
“Oh, no, because of me? Did you miss the whole thing?” I felt terrible.
“Yeah. That’s okay. We all joined in the search party.” She smiled. “It was kind of fun, even though we were looking in the exact wrong place. I knew you’d be all right.”
“Did you? How? I sure didn’t.”
Cassie laughed.
Something gave a familiar brrrrr. Cassie rolled her eyes. “We charged your stupid, grubby phone. It’s been doing that constantly.” She peered at the phone on the bedside table. “You have …216 messages.”
She held the phone out to me, but I shook my head. Not yet. And not only because I couldn’t feel my thumbs.
“You want to hear this morning’s news article about you? You made the front page!”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t really care, but she seemed to.
Cassie grabbed the newspaper.
“Front page!” she emphasized, turning the paper so I could see it. “Here goes. The headline is Find Flynn: Extensive Rescue Operation Called off as Boy Rescues Self. And now here’s the article: A thirteen-year-old boy is in stable condition after surviving three days of subzero temperatures while lost deep in the backcountry southeast of the city.” Cassie looked over at me. “This is the best part: ‘He just wandered out of the forest off Tamarack Point there, right onto the road,’ said Dave Wosnicki, the city bus driver who picked up the boy and alerted authorities. ‘He looked awful—eye all swollen up, scratched all over, absolutely filthy. Kept shedding leaves every time he moved. The kid staggers onto the bus like a frigging zombie, reaches into his pocket and hands me a ticket!’ ”
Cassie laughed. “I love that guy.”
“Glad you’re enjoying yourself,” I said.
“Oh, come on. A ‘frigging zombie’ handing the bus driver a ticket is hilarious. Anyway…” She continued. “ ‘This really could have been a serious situation,’ said emergency-room doctor Armajit Khan. ‘He’s a strong, healthy kid, but if he had been exposed another night, his hypothermia would’—Hmm, you probably don’t need to know that…blah, blah, blah…‘We expect him to make a full recovery,’ ” Cassie finished triumphantly.
“Yay me,” I said weakly.
“Then there’s a bit where they interview Mom and Dad. Mom is described as ‘tearful,’ ” Cassie said.
“She’ll love that.”
“‘It was just a terrible time, knowing he was out there alone in that snow in just a skimpy little hoodie,’ said a tearful Helen Davison. ‘It was totally out of character for him to wander off like that. Like, you wouldn’t believe how out of character it was.’ Then she and Dad thank everyone who helped.” Cassie looked up. “Tons of people were looking for you, you know.”
“Really? Didn’t see any of them.”
“We were looking in the wrong place. It explains that somewhere…Oh, here: Falling snow and the peculiar geography of the area impeded the rescue operation, with the boy idiotically crossing a slim band of the river that swelled later from upstream runoff. Because it was assumed that the idiot boy could not possibly have crossed the river, the rescue effort focused entirely on the areas south and east of the river, while the idiot boy made his way north and west.”
Cassie looked over at me each time she added her own words to the story.
We were interrupted by a nurse bustling in with another warmed-up blanket. After shuddering in freezing wet clothes for a few nights, those blankets were sheer heaven.
“Anyway, that’s about it. Oh, they interviewed Mr. Sampson, your Outdoor Ed teacher.”
“Oh, great.” I groaned.
Cassie nodded gleefully. “Yep. It’s at the end…here: Sampson credits the boy’s survival to both smarts and skill. Insulating his jacket with leaves, keeping warm, seeking shelter, conserving energy, hydrating. ‘A big focus of our Outdoor Ed program is survival strategies. Somehow, I never thought Flynn was paying attention. But he sure must have been.’ ”
“Mmm. I think I’ve had enough of the news,” I mumbled, my eyes closed.
Cassie tossed the paper on the table and sat back in the chair.
“You look pretty rough,” she said, tilting her head to one side.
“Thanks a lot.” I gave a wheezy half-laugh. “Lots of bruising and/or abrasions?”
“All manner of them,” she said. “But there’s nothing more serious. Other than the hypothermia, which is ‘mild to moderate.’ That doctor said that somewhere in there.” Cassie nodded at the paper.
“Woo-hoo, no dismemberment! No death!” I pumped my IV fist weakly in the air, the tube flapping against my arm. This small, lame action was absolutely exhausting.
“It was a risk of death and dismemberment. Just the risk of it.”
“Yeah, well, the risk was enough for me.”
We lapsed into silence. Then I turned my head slightly and looked at her.
“Hey, remember telling me about how you feel very peaceful in the forest? One with the woods? Joe said there’s some German word for it, so you’re not as freakish as I thought.”
She punched my shoulder. I must really have been in rough shape, because that actually hurt.
“So what’s the word?”
“Loooong German thing. Starts with W.” I wrinkled my brow, trying to remember.
“Doesn’t matter. Did you ever feel it?” she asked. “When you were out there? Or was it all scary?”
I thought for a minute. I thought of two beautiful deer wandering through the forest in the falling snow, pawing at the ground, quiet and natural in their wilderness home. I thought of the rabbits that had lent me their beds, and that strong, safe, majestic evergreen, and the winking stars in that deep, deep sky.
“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “Not one big ta-da moment like you seem to have. But maybe I got bits of it. Bits of it here and there. Sort of squashed between the worry and the terror. Do bits count?”
“Sure,” Cassie said. “You know, Mom and Dad said we never have to go camping again ever if you don’t want to.” She added quickly, “And that’s fine with me.”
I was getting tired again. So tired.
“No, we’ll go. Of course we’ll go camping again,” I said. “I think there were three YouTube videos I didn’t watch last time…”
Cassie laughed, and then she looked anxiously at me.
“You look super tired again, Flynn. Like, zombie tired. Better sleep. Don’t worry about anything. You’ll be home soon. The doctor said you’re out of the woods, no pun intended.”
She leaned over me and gave me a quick hug.
I was too tired to even move my club hands to hug her back.
“Love you, Owl,” I slurred.
“Me too,” she whispered, her voice muffled in my shoulder.
I closed my eye, drifting, slipping into sleep.
Out of the woods…out of the woods…
I was safe. Even without the pemmican and the tree house. Without training a falcon or making a fire or killing anything or getting killed.
Against all the odds, and with a lot of luck, I had made it.
I had survived.
Just like those kids in the books.