“AND THAT IS HOW I WOUND UP in this hellhole.”
Four days after the kidnapping and Dawn is still in that banana-yellow Bear Cub bullshit T-shirt, still dropping things from her tarp literally every time she moves. She’s still kind of half wondering if this whole fiasco isn’t just a bad dream or a bad trip and she’s about to wake up in a pool of her own drool on Julian’s couch again.
Right now, Dawn is sitting balanced on a lumpy-ass log beside an anemic little campfire, slowly starving to death with the rest of the, quote, unquote, Bear Pack while they wait for the counselors to finish checking the tents before lights-out.
Dawn still doesn’t have a tent. She hasn’t earned one yet, so she has to rig her tarp into a little lean-to and spread her sleeping bag out underneath it. But she’s really not good at the whole “rigging shit up” thing, so half the time she wakes up in the morning with a face full of dirty tarp, and the other half she wakes up freezing cold and damp to find her tarp’s blown off into the bushes somewhere. It’s September and Washington State in the mountains is a lot colder than Sacramento and when Dawn’s not starving she’s pretty well freezing to death.
There are six other kids in the group. Four guys and two girls. They span a range of ages and demographics, but mostly they all just look miserable.
Sullen.
Angry.
Tired.
Nobody talks very much in the group because there isn’t much time and nobody has any energy. They’ve been hiking since Dawn got here and maybe since forever, through a never-ending rain forest and over literal mountains. It’s too cold most of the time and too hot the rest, and there are weird bugs and spiders and probably cougars and bears, and Dawn’s back hurts from the way the rope around her tarp digs into her back when she’s trying to carry all of her shit, and she’s hungry because all she’s eaten is rice and raisins and lentils—
(some of the other kids have, like, energy bars and dehydrated meals and even chocolate, but Dawn has surmised you have to earn that stuff, too)
—and her leg muscles are screaming from having to hike so much, and she twisted her ankle on a tree root somewhere, and she’s dirty and smelly and sick of peeing in the woods and having to wear the same underwear every day, but according to one of the guys in the group, Lucas, this is about as good as Out of the Wild gets.
“It’s wilderness therapy,” Lucas tells her. “Like, you’ve heard of boot camp and stuff, right? Send all the bad kids to army school and get some drill sergeant to scare the bad right out of them? This is the same shit, but we’re mobile.” He gestures in the vague direction of the counselors. “And those two dumbasses would make terrible drill sergeants.”
The scheme, Lucas explains, is you hike around in the woods more or less nonstop, graduating through the ranks from Bear Cub all the way up to Grizzly, at which point they let you go home.
“It usually takes two or three months, sometimes longer,” he says. “I never heard of anyone getting out quicker.”
Lucas is wearing a red shirt. That apparently makes him a Black Bear, though why the Black Bears wear red is beyond Dawn’s comprehension, until she looks around and notices how every kid in the Pack wears a bright color, no matter what level they are. The Brown Bears wear orange.
“It’s because of the forest,” Lucas says. “Bright colors make it easier to find you if you escape.”
“Or find your body if you die,” a girl named Kyla says, rolling her eyes.
Kyla’s a Polar Bear. Polar Bears wear blue.
Black Bears are apparently two levels up from Bear Cubs. Brown Bears are between Bear Cubs and Black Bears, and Polar Bears are one level higher than Black Bears. Then it’s Grizzly Bears, who wear whatever they want, because that’s when you graduate. Lucas has been here for almost a month, so he’s doing okay.
Kyla has been here for three months. She’s not doing as great.
“They can bust you back down, too,” she tells Dawn. “Like, I lost a bag of rice a while back and we had to cut the hike short, so they demoted me to Black Bear again, not like I gave a shit. What I got waiting for me back home? A little walk in the woods is easy.”
Kyla’s here because she stabbed her mom’s boyfriend in the neck with a pen when he tried to put his hands on her, and the judge gave her a choice, jail or this.
“White people are so fucked up,” she says. “Like, this is your idea of punishment, you know? Walking. In nature. Rocks and trees and shit. Shit, I should get y’all’s parents to pay me to take you through my city, try to survive a week where I’m from. You can even wear your pretty yellow shirt.”
Regardless, Kyla has a tent and nice new hiking backpack. She has better hiking boots than Dawn does, and a thicker rain jacket, too.
Polar Bears earn.
So far it hasn’t rained, but it’s Washington State in September. From what Dawn’s heard people saying, it’ll start to rain soon, and it won’t stop until May. Awesome.
There’s one other Polar Bear in the Pack, a tall, brooding guy named Warden. There are two Brown Bears and one other Black Bear.
The other Black Bear’s name is Brielle, and she doesn’t talk much or make eye contact with anyone, but she’s a good hiker. She’s always up near the front of the Pack.
Dawn’s always near the back, always out of breath, always sweating through her yellow shirt and praying for another water break.
The Brown Bears are two guys named Evan and Brandon. They hike together and set their tents up beside each other, and whenever the counselors aren’t paying attention, they crack jokes and play fight and generally cause mayhem. They’re both medium tall and kind of plain-featured and entirely unremarkable, and Dawn has already confused their names at least once a day since she arrived. They don’t say much to her, but sometimes she’ll go for water or to find firewood or something and look back and catch their eyes and know they’re talking about her and it’s kind of creepy. She sets her tarp up far away and generally tries to avoid them.
Lucas, Kyla, Brielle. Warden, Evan, Brandon. Those are the kids in Dawn’s, quote, unquote, Pack, and that’s about as much as she knows about each of them, at this point in time. They’re all messed up, clearly, or they wouldn’t be here. They all did something bad enough to get them exiled to this patch of lonely rain forest, anyway. But just who they are and what exactly they’re capable of, Dawn’s going to have to wait and find out.
And she will.