The Wild Lands

by Paul Greci

  “Wouldn’t it make all kinds of noise splashing through the water?” Jess asks.

  “Maybe it’s stalking us,” Max says. “Bears do that. But usually, they follow a solo woman.”

  “How do you know that?” I ask. “You’ve been stalked by a bear?”

  “One of our group home counselors,” Max says, “this old lady, she used to hike alone in bear country. It happened to her, and once she started asking around, she found out it wasn’t so uncommon.”

  “What’d she do?” I ask.

  Max smiles. “This was back in the day. She had a satellite phone and called for help. The State of Alaska picked her up in a helicopter. It was somewhere up on the Yukon.”

  “I remember her,” Tam says. “At the time I thought she was making it up just to get a reaction.”

  Once again I am aware of our lack of protection. I wonder what condition Mike’s body is in. And where exactly it is. I want to get out of this place before the bear starts looking for another food source. And Dylan? Where is he?

  “My dad told me that most bear attacks happen less than two seconds after the person becomes aware of the bear’s presence,” I say. “Usually, it’s a mutual surprise. At least we’ll be walking with the wind today. That’ll warn the bear if it’s downwind.”

  “We should each carry a big stick,” Max says. “I know it’s not much, but we don’t have much else.”

  My knife, I think. That’s it. A four-inch blade, just big enough to piss off a grizzly.

  We stick to the south wall and walk downstream. We reach our turn-around point from yesterday and the wall appears sheer as far as we can see, but there’s a slight bend coming up and the fissure looks like it’s growing narrower. We haven’t seen any more bear tracks. We’ve eaten the rest of the loose salmon, but I still feel hungry.

  If we split two jars a day, we have eight days of food left. Not much for our journey. With what Mike and Dylan had been carrying in their packs, we would’ve almost doubled our food supply.

  “Look how narrow it’s getting,” Tam says. She’s back to walking without a limp, and the long scratches on her face are filling in with scabs. “If a bear passed through here, no way could we miss its tracks.”

  The wall is still sheer as we round a corner. Max puts a hand on my shoulder from behind and I stop.

  “You guys feel that?” she says.

  I turn around.

  * * *

  “Warm air,” Tam says. “Just like we felt on top when we were searching for a way down.”

  Jess puts her hand on the ground. “I thought I felt something through my shoes. It’s not just the air.”

  I bend over and touch the ground and it feels like a warm loaf of bread. I dig my fingers in and feel moisture and see a tiny ribbon of steam escape and disappear.

  Max takes her pack off and puts her cheek to the ground. She pushes herself up and says, “This is a power place.”

  Tam’s still standing, looking behind us and then in front of us. “Downstream.” She points with her stick. “Steam. A lot of it.”

  I stand up. Down the fissure on the north side some steam filters through the willows but dissipates in the birch trees as it reaches their lower branches.

  We start walking toward it, and the closer we get the more I can feel the heat penetrating the worn-out soles of my shoes.

  I’ve gotten used to the sound of the creek, the flowing water, but now I start to hear pounding and popping sounds, too. The noise isn’t as steady as the smooth sound the creek makes; it comes in bursts. The closer we get to the steam, the louder it becomes.

  The south wall appears a little more jagged now, with ledges here and there, but it’s still not climbable.

  We decide to cross the stream to see what the deal is with the popping sounds. I step in, bracing myself for an assault of cold on my feet and lower legs, but it doesn’t come. I reach down and put a hand in the creek. “Warm,” I say. “Like bathwater.”

  We all splash our faces and scrub our hands. When I look at my hands compared to my arms, it’s like they’re a different color. That’s how dirty I am.

  Can we afford a few minutes to really wash up? Strip down and scrub up?

  “Everyone,” I say, “what do you all think about really washing up?”

  “The risk,” Tam says, “is if we all of a sudden need to move or fight, then we’re vulnerable. We could have two of us keep watch and two of us bathe and then switch.”

  “Or,” Max says, “we could all bathe at once and then we’re at risk for the shortest amount of time.”

  We go with Max’s idea and I walk downstream a little ways to give them some privacy. They are still visible but I face away from them. I quickly undress and wade back into the warm water and sit on the bottom of the creek. I scrub my arms, legs, chest, stomach, and what I can reach of my back with my hands. The popping noises that we stopped to investigate remain steady. Once we’re all done, we still have to see what the deal is with those sounds.

  I stick my head under and scrub my hair and beard, and then before I stand I glance upstream quickly just to make sure everything is okay. I see three heads above the water. Jess raises her hand and waves at me and I wave back.

  I wish I could share this moment with them. Not just because I’m attracted to Tam but because these are my people. But I know that Tam was attacked by her foster brother, so I want to give them their space. I don’t want to bring more stress into their lives and I want them to know they can trust me, absolutely, because when you’re in a survival situation, trust can mean the difference between life and death.

  After we’re all dressed Max says, “With the warm earth and the warm water, you really could live here year-round.”

  A tiny bird wings by at eye level and we all jump. Max smiles. “I told you I saw birds from above.”

  We wade across the stream. The popping is louder and more constant, and the steam is drifting into our faces.

  I push through the willows, and steam is rising from the ground all around me, like I’m inside a sauna and someone has just thrown water onto the stove.

  I feel a hand on my arm and turn. Jess is hanging on my upper arm. “I don’t want to go any farther. It’s too hot.”

  Max and Tam stand next to Jess.

  “Will one of you stay with Jess while I check out the popping noise?”

  “Trav,” Jess says, “I don’t want you to go.”

  I look into her eyes and see the same fear I saw when we barely survived the fires that second summer. I think about saying this is just steam, not smoke, but she already knows. She’s still frightened.

  “Sis,” I say, “we need to know what it is. We need to know everything we can know. I want—”

  “I’ll stay,” Max says. She puts her arm around Jess.

  Jess turns to Max and says, “You’re my best friend ever.”

  Max smiles at her and says, “You’re mine, too.”

  Tam and I claw our way through the willows. We walk under the skinny birch trees. The ground feels solid enough, but warm beneath our feet.

  Just beyond the birches, but before we get to the north wall, we see it. A circular pit maybe fifteen feet across, and ten or twelve feet down the blue-green water boils, bubbles, and pops. And there’s no telling how deep it is because it keeps churning constantly like a pot of boiling water.

  Tam and I creep closer, the steam condensing on our faces and arms. I get down on one knee and start poking the ground, curious as to how stable it is, because steam is escaping from the ground everywhere.

  Tam taps me on the shoulder.

  “What?” I ask as I continue to check out the ground. Under the crusty surface, my fingers sink into sticky mud, hot to the touch. If you kept your fingers in the ground, they’d slowly cook. You could wrap a fish in foil and bury it, and it’d cook. Or you could heat up a jar of salmon.

  Tam taps me again. Then she pulls on my arm. I stop poking the ground, pivot toward her, and stand up. Her f
ace, free of dirt, is bright and beautiful, but there’s a troubled look on her face. Tam’s other arm is outstretched, her index finger pointing. I turn and follow it with my eyes, and my breath catches in my throat. There, along the north wall, fading in and out of view through the steam, I see bodies, more like skeletons really, slumped together.

  CHAPTER

  37

  “I THINK THEY WERE TRYING to stay warm,” Max says. “Maybe they’d run out of food.”

  “Probably starved,” I say. We’ve gotten Max and convinced Jess that it’s safe, and we’re all standing on the side of the boiling pool.

  “These bodies look undisturbed,” I say. “Like they died here, in a group, together. On purpose.”

  “Or maybe they were sick,” Jess says. “My friend Elsie died because there was no medicine for her. Her tonsils swelled up. She couldn’t breathe.”

  Max puts her arm around Jess and pulls her tight, and Jess lets her.

  Most of the corpses’ clothing is worn away, but there are still pieces of gray cloth around their arms and legs. And fragments of dried skin on bones. Two of the skeletons are smaller than the others. A family traveling south? How long have they been here? Did they leave the year the buses took people north? Or had they left even before that? I mean, how long does it take for bodies to get to this state of decay? Another thing I don’t know, can’t know, but can only guess.

  “Group suicide,” Max says. “That’s the only way they could’ve died together. Unless someone killed them all. But it doesn’t look like that.”

  “I think they lost all their gear,” Tam says. “I mean, here they are, but there’s nothing else around here. Not even a junk pile. Maybe they got robbed, or their stuff sank in one of those water-filled fissures.”

  I shake my head. “The one thing I don’t understand: If there’s a bear roaming around down here and it dragged Mike’s body away, then why aren’t these bodies disturbed?”

  The heat from the steam is making me sweat. I take a couple steps back from the boiling pool.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Max says.

  “If a bear didn’t drag Mike away, then what did?” Jess asks. “And what about all those tracks?”

  “You mean, what about those few tracks?” I say.

  I glance over at the pile of skeletons again and wonder what’s become of Stacy’s family. Did they make it to the coast? Or are their skeletal remains littering some other spot in this wasteland? Is this their family plus a few other people? I wouldn’t be able to tell for sure anyway. They’re literally skin and bones.

  “I think we all know who might’ve dragged Mike away,” I say. “Maybe Dylan’s watching us right now.”

  “Or maybe he’s headed back to his cave up north,” Jess says.

  “Or maybe he kept heading south,” Max says.

  “Or maybe he’s dead,” I say. “But if he’s down here and wants to be found, he’ll make himself known. We’ve been walking all over the place, building fires at night, screaming his name. It’s not like we’re invisible.”

  “You think he faked the bear prints?” Tam says.

  “Probably,” Max says. “Remember, we were confused because they were different sizes.”

  I’m pretty sure everyone thinks he’s dangerous. And I don’t know what was in that blue stuff sack that he refused to empty when we were taking stock of our possessions. Mike had one as well.

  “Whatever we do,” I say, “we need to be careful. And if we see Dylan, we need to be extra careful. We don’t know what he has in his pack.”

  We keep heading downstream. Pools of boiling water dot both sides of the stream. Most of the plant life has disappeared; there’s just a stray willow here and there. The ground is dark brown, flaky and moist at the same time. In some places it’s collapsed and mud slowly bubbles in the depressions.

  My feet start to sink and all of a sudden I’m in over my ankles. I take a couple of big steps backward, battling against the suction of the hot brown goo. My ankles are on fire and my feet are hot, like they’re in an oven. I run for the creek and splash into the warm water, shaking one foot and then the other.

  “Nobody walk out there,” I say. “I almost cooked my feet.” I try to imagine what it’d be like if I really sank in that goo and got stuck, like up to my waist. I’d basically bake until I died. I remember burning my hand on the woodstove when I was little and how painful that was. How I screamed. I rub the wrinkled skin on the palm of my hand.

  I step out of the creek. My feet feel fine, but I’m still feeling warm above the ankles. I pull my pant legs up. The skin on my lower shins and calves is light pink, like I’ve been sunburned.

  Max takes a look and says, “First-degree burn. You should be okay.”

  “Does it hurt?” Jess asks.

  “It’s a little hot,” I say. “But not bad.”

  I’m glad it was me and not Jess. Just a little hot skin, I tell myself. But I’m shaking. You hurt your feet out here and you’re screwed.

  We decide to walk in the creek to avoid the hot mud. Farther down the fissure we can see where it gets green with plant life, and we figure the ground will be more stable there.

  A couple miles later we stop at the edge of the willows and step out of the creek. I stare back at the narrow, steamy stretch behind us. “If you could keep yourself from being boiled, burned, or baked, it’d be a nice place to spend the winter,” I say. “If you had food.”

  “Back in the day,” Tam says, “you could’ve hunted up top and lived down here, climbing up and down with ropes and pulleys. With the right materials you could make all this steam and hot water work for you. But not anymore.”

  Max smiles. “If you built a shelter on top of the warm ground, it’d heat up nicely.”

  A rumble shakes the ground, causing the trees to wave. Little bits of dirt rain down from the fissure walls.

  “Just a reminder that we’re in a crack caused by an earthquake,” I say. I wonder if it could close back up the way it opened.

  The ground heaves up again, like it’s trying to throw us off. I stumble and grab the back of Max’s pack for balance. I hear a splash and turn. Jess is on her knees in the water.

  Tam grabs Jess by the pack and pulls her up.

  “I’m just glad we weren’t standing by one of those boiling pools. We could’ve been soup.” I smile, but no one laughs.

  “Maybe it’s not such a great place to live,” Max says. “But if you could pipe the hot water down to this spot, that’d be cool. And it’d be all gravity flow.”

  “All you’d need is some pipe,” Tam says. “Good luck finding that. And then getting it here.”

  “I’m speaking in ideals,” Max says. “Maybe it’ll be possible in the future. It could be one of several places you visited in the cycle of seasons. Maybe a good winter spot. People used to move around to survive. My ancestors were nomads.”

  “So are we,” Tam says, “so let’s keep moving. Besides the trees and the stream where we soaked, this place is a hellhole. We’ve already spent too much time down here. I wish we would’ve stayed on top and followed the edge until it was clear that, once we committed to coming down here, there’d actually be a way out. If Willa were still here, that’s what we would’ve done.”

  “You didn’t argue at the time,” Max says.

  “Trees, trees, trees,” Tam says. “Everyone was taken by the trees.”

  “And you weren’t?” I ask. I think of the trees by the Yukon River. That place felt like heaven because of the plant life. Until my parents got murdered there.

  “All I’m saying is that we didn’t look for a way out before we came down a route so steep we wouldn’t be able to climb out the same way.” Tam pauses. “We got so comfortable letting that crazy-ass lead us through the swamp, it was easy for him to talk us into coming down here before we knew how we’d get out.”

  An image of the skeletons at the boiling pool flashes into my mind. Why didn’t they make it out of t
he fissure? My stomach muscles contract, and I taste old salmon in the back of my throat and swallow it back down.

  Maybe there isn’t a way out.

  CHAPTER

  38

  WE KEEP HEADING DOWNSTREAM IN silence, searching for an escape. The fissure keeps narrowing and dropping. In one spot the creek tumbles over a series of tiny falls, each three or four feet high, like a descending stairway.

  The steam and boiling pools totally disappear. So do the birches, leaving a thick band of willows following the stream, bordered by rock and dirt. This feels like the old Interior Alaska. It even has the old smell of freshness you get when rushing water creates its own cool breeze.

  We hug the south wall, each with our big walking sticks that we hope to craft into spears.

  Up ahead a spine of dirt and rock slopes down from above. The tip of the spine disappears into the creek, creating a sharp bend with willows clinging to the outside edge.

  I stop and point. “Right up there. Could be our way out.”

  “Steep,” Tam says, “but doable—probably. A little risky, but I don’t think we have another choice.”

  “We might have to ditch the walking sticks.” Max points about halfway up. “It looks like we’ll need to use our hands in places.”

  “Let’s strap them to our packs,” I say. “We really might need spears.”

  Jess hasn’t said a word. And her face is way closer to an all-out frown than a smile.

  “Sis,” I say, “what’s wrong?”

  Jess points partway up the spine we’re talking about. “It looks really steep right there.”

  “What if we use the rope in the really steep place where we need our hands to climb?” Max says. “Not for everyone to climb on, but we could have a couple people climb up the steep part, lower the rope, and then we could tie the packs onto the rope and haul them up one at a time.”

  Tam nods. “I forgot we had a rope. Good idea. That way we won’t have all that weight throwing us off-balance on the dangerous part.”

  I turn to Jess. “Do you think you could give that a try? You could even use the rope for a little support while you’re climbing if you want.”