by Carrie Mac
Bacteria that has now devastated his leg.
I won’t say it. On the off chance that it hasn’t occurred to him.
I hope it never occurs to him that if he hadn’t insisted on finding the hot spring, he’d be fine. And before that, if he hadn’t fallen. And before that, if he hadn’t planned this trip.
And before that, if I hadn’t ground to a halt and needed him to get me actually living my life again.
And before that?
* * *
—
“Well, you just have to walk.” I say this loudly. “We have to make you a better crutch, and then we go. As fast as we can. At least to the river, Pete. I can find my way from there. Then I can go get help once the map makes sense.”
“No.” And then, as if he has something to prove, he leans over and vomits between the sleeping bags. Retching and retching, with hardly anything coming up because he’s hardly eaten for over a day now. With each thrust of his body, he lets loose with a terrible, low groan.
I pull his sleeping bag out of the way, and when I catch sight of his calf, I almost vomit too. It is cooked-lobster red, twice the size that it should be, yellow pus soaking the edge of the bandage. So is his knee, and his ankle and foot. There is no way he could even put that foot into his shoe anymore. Heat peels away from the leg as if it’s a roast that Dad just took out of the oven. And the streaking. The thing that means trouble.
There’s a word for it.
I put my hands on my knees and think hard.
What is the word?
Pete whispers something.
I half hear it, but that’s all I need to remember the wilderness first-aid course we took last year. With Preet. I was so distracted by her being there that I got high in the bathroom on the first break and only half paid attention to the discussion on sepsis.
That’s what it is.
Pete is septic.
Septicemia.
I don’t remember much about it, except that for every hour that a septic patient isn’t treated, the likelihood of death goes up by 8 percent. I can’t remember if you’re supposed to pull at an angle to remove a tick, or how to do a proper chevron with a Tensor bandage for a sprain, but I remember that statistic, and now I very, very much wish I didn’t.
* * *
—
Does that mean that he’s already at 100 percent?
Does this mean he is walking down the hall with his mom?
No!
No.
We’ll call right now his hour zero. Diagnosis. Because if I think that he’s already going to die, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do anything other than sit here with him and cry until he does or we’re both consumed by the wildfire, whichever comes first.
A realization just a moment later: I remember why the detail about septicemia stuck with me. It was the story that the instructor told about a man who was scratched by his cat on a Friday, just before he and his wife were going to go camping. They got to the trailhead, he vomited, and they both decided to turn back. Saturday he had a fever and chills and spent the day watching soccer, and he was so bad on Sunday that his wife wanted to call an ambulance, but he said he was fine, and then on Monday he didn’t wake up. He was swollen and red and hot, and his toes and ears and nose were turning black, and his pulse was racing. The instructor was the paramedic who picked him up. She said it looked like someone had boiled him and just taken him out of the pot. He was that red and swollen and hot to the touch.
Just like Pete.
I reach for Pete’s wrist. Hot. So hot.
I feel around until I find the strong thumping. His pulse is racing.
“What was the ending of that cat scratch story?” I say. “I don’t remember.”
“He didn’t die.” Pete reaches for his water bottle and takes a sip. There’s hardly any left. I’ll have to go get some. Keep him hydrated. “He was in the hospital for months, and he lost parts of his arms and legs.”
“And his ears and nose.”
Pete laughs.
“You’d finally be as ugly as me,” I say.
“Because you are so ugly?”
“So ugly.”
I kiss his cheek, my lips still warm from the touch when I pull on my shoes and take out the water bladders and bottles and filter.
“Don’t die while I’m gone, okay?”
“Okay,” he says. “I’m looking forward to not having a nose. That’d be epic. At least Preet would still love me. You can’t say that about many people.”
I unzip the door, every ounce of muscle in me not wanting to leave him.
“Annie,” he says.
I scramble back to him. “Do you want me to stay with you?”
He starts to shake his head, but I can tell even that hurts.
“We need water,” he says. “And I want you to take the compass and orient us. Look for tall peaks, big water. Maybe we can figure it out from there. Find the trail again. There’s a road at the bottom of the trail, on the other side of a river that we have to cross. We can try and figure out exactly where we are if we find that.”
I want to ask him. But I don’t want to know the answer, so I don’t.
How far away should that river be? If he and I were practically running down the trail? If I knew exactly where I was going? I am so thankful that I can run.
“I’ll be right back.”
He reaches for my wrist. “You need to figure out exactly where we are.”
He takes his hand away.
My wrist is hot.
“I think we should go back to the stretcher idea.” I crawl toward the door. “Because I’m not going to go without you.”
* * *
—
The big creek—which could also be called a small river—is down a shallow slope, so when I get to the water and turn to look back, I can’t see the tent at all. If you took a picture of me right now, you’d think I was all by myself.
“But I’m not,” I say out loud to myself. “I’m not. I’m not. I’m not. Pete is with me and he’s going to be fine and I’m going to be fine.” This is just another thing we survive. I park the filter bag, the bladders, and our two bottles on a big, flat rock at the water’s edge. I’m going to collect the water from a few steps in, where it’s clearer. Even though the water runs fast, which means it looks clear enough to drink without filtering, we always filter our water anyway.
I’m just about to slip my shoes off when I hear twigs crackling nearby.
“Pete, if you’ve tried to…”
I turn and freeze, dropping the filter bag, which falls onto the narrow bank and into the water. A grizzly bear cub is standing on its hind legs not even twenty feet downstream, staring at me and sniffing the air. Potentially the cutest thing on the planet, and not even all that scary. I would win that fight, easily, and just come away with some bad scratches. Not even a fight, really. It’s the mama bear that is now a much bigger problem.
You’re supposed to play dead if a grizzly comes at you, but Pete is up at the tent, so is the bear spray, and I don’t know where the mama is, so there is no way that I’m staying put to wait for her, only to end up having to play dead, lying on my stomach with my arms protecting my head, as if an angry mama bear couldn’t just punt me clear across the creek with one swipe, before or after she gouged my stomach out in one bite.
Don’t wait.
Stand tall, say something, retrace your steps. Slowly.
But the “say something” is only if you want the bears to know that you’re human, and that you’re there, so they can watch you go away and get on with their foraging. This is a bear cub. And I don’t want the mama bear to know that I’m here if she’s far enough away not to hear me.
Which is a joke, Annie, I hear Pete’s voice tell me, as if he’s right beside me. That bear can
smell a carcass from twenty miles away.
“But that’s a carcass.”
I’m not a carcass. Yet.
But what if she smells Pete?
Keep backing up the hill. Slow and steady.
I can’t go slowly, though. What if the mama bear is up at the tent?
The cub wanders up to the rock with the water bladders and bottles on it. It swipes at them, and they all fall into the water. Less than a few seconds later, they’ve floated downstream and out of sight.
Don’t think about that. Get to Pete.
To hell with it! I turn and sprint up to the top of the hill, my heart pounding so hard I can hardly see straight, but there is the bright orange tent, and no mama bear looking for the carcass of Pete’s leg. That I can see. Now it’s time to make noise.
“Hey, bear!” I holler. “We’re little, tiny, terrified humans that you can kill with your giant, scary claws and your giant, scary teeth!”
Pete peers out of the tent.
“Bear cub! By the creek! I don’t know where Mama is!” Loud and musical, to sound extra human. “Pot, pan, noise, now!” I sing.
He reaches for the pot, which is right there, still with oatmeal gunk in it, which is glaringly stupid, of course. He starts banging, and I start to relax just a little, because it’s a horrible, obnoxious sound that would drive away pretty much anything with a heartbeat, deadly claws or not.
“Because what idiots do that in the backcountry?” I shout. “And now we have no water bottles and no water bladders because Baby Bear chucked them in the creek!” I holler to the warbling tune of absolutely nothing in particular.
“Really?” Pete yells in his bear singsong, which is much more pleasant than mine, even if it’s at half power because he’s so sick. “That is incredibly unfortunate, because drinking dirty water from our cooking pot is not ideal in the least! And if you go for help, you’ll need to take it!”
“It stays with you!”
“You’ll need it more than me!”
“No I won’t!” I sing.
We both fall silent. Surely, that’s enough to scare off the mama bear.
“I’m going to go look,” I say.
Pete nods.
“I do have to go back down there to clean the pot and get more water.” I take the pot. “Pass me the scrubber thingy?” He fishes in the little bag with all our cooking stuff in it and hands it to me.
“I can’t believe you just asked for the scrubber thingy in the face of an impending grizzly attack.”
“Scrubby thingies are essential in warding off a mama bear defending her postcard-cute baby bear.” I laugh. “Didn’t you know?”
“I do now,” Pete says. “I do indeed.”
* * *
—
From the edge of the slope, I can see exactly no bears, and no water vessels of any kind. I sprint down to the creek, take a few steps in, and scrub off the caked-on oatmeal as best as I can.
Once all the oatmeal gunk has been washed away, I fill the pot up to the top and secure the lid in place like we do when we pack it with the little folding stove and the fuel canister to hike to the next spot.
* * *
—
I owe Preet another apology.
The last time we saw a bear was just a couple of months ago, at the base of Ugly Mug. Pete and I had been climbing—me with ropes, him with no ropes—while Preet was setting out the picnic she had put together. Pete had offered to teach her how to climb, but she had zero interest. Instead, she was treating the day like it was a weird time-travel scene in a B movie.
“Are you seriously going to wear that?” I’d asked that morning when we picked her up. She was dressed in a crisp white dress that fell to her ankles and had a white satin sash tied in a bow at the back, like something the Jane Austen character in said time-travel movie would wear. White gloves with pearl buttons up to her elbows. A wide-brimmed straw hat decorated with flowers—fresh, not fake—and little black ankle boots with ribbon laces.
“Absolutely,” she said as she lifted an enormous wicker picnic basket into the back of the truck. “You’re lucky I’m not insisting we travel by horse and carriage.”
“Don’t deny her her Victorian picnic,” Pete said from the driver’s seat. “But you should keep the basket on your lap, Preet. It gets dusty on the way up.”
So we drove half an hour with that basket half on her lap and half on mine.
* * *
—
Fine china plates, crystal glasses for the iced tea, silver knives and forks and spoons. Scones, thick cream, three different kinds of homemade jam in little jars with waxed cloth for lids. A loaf of bread she’d baked that morning, pasture-fed butter, pickled mango, tapenade, an entire watermelon—which is what made the basket so heavy—and five kinds of cheese. There was more, but that’s what she’d pulled out for us when we came down from our climb.
But that’s not what we saw first.
What we saw first was Preet between the truck and the picnic spread, mostly obscured by a white parasol with tiny cherry blossoms on it, squatting down, arm outstretched, offering a large chunk of cheese to a bear cub. Scrawny and very little and probably just a couple of weeks out of the den, but a bear nonetheless.
“Stop!” Pete shouted.
“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled.
We ran to her, shouting and waving our hands, which sent the bear cub galloping into the woods.
When we got to her, she looked so out of place against the backdrop of the beat-up old truck and the Cascades behind her. And she clearly was in the wrong place and time if she was about to hand-feed a dangerous wild animal.
“That was pretty stupid, for a vegetarian,” I said, not even trying to hold back my anger.
“It’s just a baby,” she said. “Is it really all that terrible to feed it? Did you see? How skinny it was?”
“Because it’s a baby,” Pete said. “It just came out of the den, Preet.”
“A fed bear is a dead bear,” I said. “What kind of idiot are you? Don’t they tell you that at the airport when you get here?”
“Annie! That’s a stupid thing to say.” Pete took Preet’s hand and headed for the picnic blanket. “And you know it.”
“Actually,” Preet said, “at the airport they say ‘Welcome to America,’ if you’re lucky. And if not, then good luck. Nothing about bears. Brown bears? No problem. Brown people?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a dumb thing to say. Really dumb. Lots of stupid Americans feed bears too. Or chase bison at Yellowstone.”
“I accept your apology.” Preet kissed me on one cheek and then the other. “Now I won’t feed anything. Not even those blue birds that beg.”
“Steller’s jays,” Pete said. “But we feed those, so that’s okay.”
“Surely one nuisance animal is like the rest,” Preet said. I could tell she was turning her wildlife lesson into a rule, which she would not go on to break. Which meant no more putting peanuts on our heads and waiting for a Steller’s jay to swoop down and get them.
“You need to be afraid of bears,” Pete said. “And be respectful of their space.”
“Steller’s jays are just fun.”
* * *
—
The cooking pot is what the mama bear might’ve smelled from miles away. It’s not feeding them Stilton by hand, but it’s still mighty stupid. I’ll happily tell that to Preet when we get home.
I have never wished for a straw more than right now. Pete has to sit up every time he wants a drink, and every time I think he should have a drink, no matter how much he protests. Water is all we have for medicine, so to speak. I’ve pillaged our packs, looking for something better to use as a cup, but we only have our bowls, which are also our mugs and too shallow.
We empty one pot. T
hen two. And the whole while neither of us talks about me leaving to get help. Things feel calm, like maybe he’s improving. I just want to wait, until morning, and then see.
Pete pees into a plastic bag, which I empty and rinse and give back to him. We don’t talk about that either. Especially not about how dark his pee is, like cloudy apple cider.
* * *
—
We both fall asleep, but for how long, I don’t know. When I wake up, it’s dusk. I watch Pete sleep, the blue twilight making the shadows long. I can still see the sweat dripping off his face. The very tips of his ears and nose are almost black. His chest rises with quick, shallow breaths, and I am thankful for each one.
It is time to go.
* * *
—
While he sleeps, I empty my pack of anything he might need while I’m gone. I lift his head to slide off his lanyard with his whistle on it. I put the first-aid kit by his head, even though there isn’t much in there now. I take out my extra layer and fold it and my quick-dry towel and set them with the first-aid kit. I leave him the last two energy bars and PowerGels, which are pretty much all the food we have left, except for oatmeal and two packets of miso soup. I don’t know why we have so little, but it will have to do. I take one bar and one gel. I’m not going to be gone that long.
I empty the one dry bag we have for our electronics and take it and the pot to the creek and fill both. On the way back, I stop to build a big “SOS” with rocks. Even if it’s easy to see from here, it will be harder from the sky. I glance up. The smoke cover is like a wide, foul bank of clouds. Which will need to part for the rescue helicopter.
Pete is awake, trying to sit up. He knocks the pot over, and my heart sinks. I fill it from the wet bag and set it outside on the stove to boil so I can make him miso soup.
“You have to watch out for the pot,” I say as I help him up to drink the soup once it’s ready. “That’s the one thing you cannot knock over. So this was your pass. I’m going to fill it again, but you’re not going to knock it over again. Spill your pee bag, but not the pot.”