I followed the winding path into the trees until I couldn’t see the house anymore. It was a relief to get away. I thought I’d walk until the path stopped, like Ellen said, then turn and come back. There was only one path, which Ellen and Joe must have cleared themselves, so there was absolutely no danger of taking a wrong turn.
I walked. It was slightly warmer here in the woods, with the trees blocking the cold wind that had come up since we went outside. I looked around. The forest was completely still. I tried to think about what kind of trees surrounded me. Some were birch—that whitish bark was a dead giveaway. But the others? No clue. Who really cared?
See, that was my big problem with nature: it’s boring. Like a museum. Nothing ever happens. You walk, you look at it sitting there, you maybe exclaim at how beautiful it all is (whether you really think that or not) and then you leave. What is the point?
After about ten minutes of walking, I came to the end of the path. It ended pretty suddenly, as if it just got tired and said, “Okay, enough. We’re done here.” I stood at the end of the path and looked up. The trees were leafless and spiky against the sky. They soared above me, some of their branches meeting overhead.
Okay, I thought, closing my eyes. This is when I should be feeling that whatchamacallitshmidt. Peace, oneness with the woods. I breathed in the dead-leafy, earthy, pineconey smells. I opened my eyes and did a full 360. I listened. Underneath the silence I began to hear small sounds. The last of the fall leaves rustling in the wind. A slight creaking of branches. One lone bird. My own breathing.
I felt very alone. Was this a good feeling? A peaceful feeling? A German-word feeling? I didn’t think so. It was creepy here. I wondered if there was a ridiculously long and difficult-to-remember German word for the feeling of the forest not really wanting you there, of being in no way one with nature, of being a complete stranger in the woods.
I grabbed my phone to check on this. Oh, yeah. Still dead. I’d look it up later.
I looked around at the bleak, silent, hostile forest.
Whatever, I thought. I tried. We can’t all be nature freaks.
I turned to go back down the path. Back to people, a house, a fire. Back inside, where people belonged.
And that’s when, in a split second, everything changed.
I heard a sudden rustle and snapping branches very, very close to me. I whirled around.
Something huge and brown crashed through the bushes on my right and charged out of the forest, landing on the path right in front of me in a blur of brown hide and animal smell. It all happened so fast, and it was so loud and so sudden, that I don’t even know what it was. Moose? Deer? Something that ate meat? Cougar? Anyway, some wild animal was within a few feet of me.
I turned and ran. Okay, full disclosure: I gave a muffled shriek, flailed my arms, stumbled into a tree, fell, cracked my knee and leaped back to my feet. And then I ran.
I bolted away from the beast, off the path and into the woods. I ran faster than I’d ever run before, even with sharp branches and prickly shrubs tearing at my clothes and smacking me in the face. Terror, I discovered, is a great motivator. Crashing, slipping and sliding, I ran and ran. I stopped once, my heart pounding out of my chest, and listened. Something was still moving through the woods.
I ran again, until all I could hear was my ragged breathing. I was running so frantically that I didn’t even see the steep drop into a ravine until I was over the top and crashing down into it.
When Cassie and I were little, we used to roll down a grassy hill near our house. We’d lie down, tuck in our arms and push off. The rolling started slowly and then picked up, until grass and sky all blurred together in an exhilarating whirl and we ended up, sprawling and breathless and triumphant, at the bottom. Then we’d run up the hill to do it again.
This wasn’t like that. At all. This was a dirty, painful, out-of-control, thumping, thwacking roll. Sharp tree branches and stumps dug into my legs and back, and prickly bushes stung my face. I gritted my teeth and tried to shield my eyes as the breath got knocked out of me. It seemed to go on and on for hours. Endlessly. It didn’t, of course. In fact, if somebody had been there timing it (or, worse, filming it), I probably would have been astonished to find that it had only lasted about thirty-two seconds or something like that. I would have said, “Are you serious? Did you see that fall? No way was that thirty-two seconds!”
Anyway, it was a miracle I didn’t get brained or blinded by a tree, because I bounced off plenty of them on my way down. But all hills have bottoms, right? Even steep death ravines in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere. I finally reached the bottom a winded, huddled, torn, scratched mess.
“I’m down…I’m stopped…I’m at the bottom… It’s over,” I muttered to myself.
I lay there groggily waiting for the forest to stop spinning. I was grateful, so grateful, for having stopped. I stayed motionless for a while just to appreciate the stillness. I was also afraid. I was afraid that the shooting pains all over my body meant I had sustained all manner of injuries and/or scratches and/or contusions (whatever they are).
Because Cassie was right. I am not good with blood.
I had to have a blood test once, and I almost fainted. Just the thought of blood makes me woozy. I can’t even watch crime shows on TV. And don’t get me started on horror movies. Most people shriek when the main character insists on walking into a dark room to investigate. Me, it’s the blood. I can tell myself, “Food dye, food dye, ketchup, ketchup, la la la” all day long, but it always—always—makes me completely sick to my stomach.
So I lay there, more afraid of my own blood than of the monster animal, saliva sliding down its huge canines, that might at this very minute be assessing my meal potential from the top of the ravine.
“Stop!” I said out loud. “Stop it!” I said again. I didn’t know if I was talking to the animal or to myself.
I looked down at my right hand.
“Okay, right hand, let’s start with you. Let’s very gently…move…each finger…” They moved. The left-hand fingers wiggled too, but I didn’t watch them, because when I’d glanced down at my left hand, it was covered with blood.
“Only scratches, probably. Most likely just a scratch or two. Arms? Legs? You ready?”
I tried moving my arms and legs. They moved. Painfully, and not very well, but they moved. This seemed a good sign. I sat up slowly, feeling my head for any gashes or bumps. A big lump on the back of my head seemed to be it. Of course, it’s not like I had a mirror. I could feel the scratches all over my face, and one of my eyes was starting to swell.
I looked down at my white hoodie, smeared with dirt and dead leaves, then let my head flop back onto the ground.
Wait—when did it get so dark?
A warning bell went off in my sluggish brain. I’d better get back to that path. Yeah, that path. That path is very, very important. That path leads to the house that leads to the car that leads to home. I hauled myself to my aching feet and almost fainted, my head was pounding so hard. Can you get a concussion if you aren’t actually playing hockey or football? Probably.
I stood there, swaying. From what I could see, I was at the bottom of a long ravine, the sides sloping sharply up all around me. Trees everywhere, ominous-looking in the gloom.
Where had I fallen? I looked for a swath of broken branches and flattened bushes. There had to be some evidence of my spectacular death-slide to the bottom of this ravine. But there wasn’t. There were fallen branches, scraggly bushes, dead leaves and leaning trees everywhere I looked. I hadn’t made a dent in the forest at all; it just seemed to have swallowed up my pathetic little trail and settled into calmness again.
I stood still, trying to clear my foggy, shaken-up, possibly concussed brain.
Did I recognize anything? Anything that would lead back to the path? Think, Flynn, think. I hadn’t exactly been taking notes during my rolling fall into the ravine, but did that one bent tree look familiar? I thought it did.
Later I would realize there are a million bent trees that look kind of familiar in the forest. And they’re all ones you haven’t seen before. But I didn’t know that then, and the sight of the tree made me hopeful.
I stumbled toward it, my whole body pulsing with pain.
Out of the gloom a sound broke the silence.
A faraway, thin, yip-yap kind of sound.
A dog!
It was a dog barking! There was a dog down here! If there was a dog down here, there would probably be a person down here with the dog. If I could just walk toward the dog sounds, the person could direct me out of this forest. A wave of relief washed over me. Things were looking up.
Or so I thought.
The faraway yipping was joined by nearer yapping. A couple of dogs? That seemed odd.
Then came yelping, nearer still.
Then howling. I froze. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
Then the whole forest seemed to explode in senseless dog howling. Only they weren’t dogs.
They were coyotes.
The coyotes Ellen had told us about. The ones that stole cats and ate them. Cat eaters. Meat eaters. I realized with a start that out here in this bleak wilderness, I was not some cool kid in slightly battered Nike Air Force 1s.
I was meat.
I ran.