The candle was burning low now, and it was very late, but I read furiously, my breath shallow. The Agency pressed the same question that I now had: Where was the Guide? Where could he be found?
The six refused to say. They would not give up their guide. The closest they ever got to a real answer was from one of the six, a man who was apparently quite old. Just before he died while being “examined,” he told the Agency the guide lived “deep in the forest, on the mountain of the bear.” The remaining five were also killed while imprisoned—Arie assumed they, too, were tortured to death.
At this I gasped, and something inside me awakened. I didn’t take time to think about it, didn’t even really acknowledge it at that moment, but on some level I knew it was the drive I’d had before, the urge to make things right, the urge that had led me to trouble again and again. I read on.
A search was made for this “mountain of the bear,” but nothing came of it. Sure, there were several mountains with “bear” or “grizzly” in their map names. They searched anywhere there was a road, town, river, or even trail that had anything to do with Bears.
The Guide was never found.
Instead, Arie postulated, this was how certain individuals within the Agency’s medical core, such as Eudrich and Bellington, were first alerted to the possibility of total memory restoration. Hypnosis? Exposure to familiar stimulus? Drugs? The information squeezed out the six under “intense examination” generated several hypothetical lines of research and testing began for ways to restore memories.
I read these pages furiously, my heart beating hard and an excitement growing within me.
“Chase,” I called, kicking the cot.
Chase mumbled and rolled over. He hiked himself up on one elbow and squinted against the candle light.
“You read this? About the Guide? About the man in the mountains?”
“Mm-hmm,” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“Well?”
“Well, I thought you’d find it very interesting,” he said. “That’s why I suggested that you read it.”
“Yes, but do you think there is really a man living in the mountains who can restore memories?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think he really lives in the mountains? Like these mountains where we are?”
“Yeah, I do.”
My body, my whole soul, felt energized. As if this whole time I’d been sleeping and only now had awaken.
“Well, how could we ever find him?” I said, feigning my skepticism. “I mean, it says here that they sent out search parties all over the place. They searched every bear place they could find, and they came up empty.”
Chase shrugged and said, “I think I know where he is.”
“What? Where?”
He stood, stretched, and then went to his backpack. “Al, I’ve forgotten everything about my past. Who I was, where I came from, what I did before—it’s all gone. But there’s a few things I know about me. One thing: I like maps. I’m fascinated by maps. I like looking at ’em, I find it easy to read them, and once I see something on a map, I remember it.”
“Okay. That’s nice. So?”
He drew a folded map from a pocket in the pack, sat on the cot, and unfolded it on his lap.
“I, uhm, ‘borrowed’ some maps from Woolly and Ruby’s stash,” he said. “They’re old. They’ll never miss ’em.”
I wanted him to hurry and show me whatever it was he wanted to show me, but I didn’t want to interrupt. He must have read this on my face.
“I’m getting to the point he said,” holding up a finger. “As soon as I read that this Guide fella lived on the ‘mountain of the bear,’ I knew where it was. I knew I’d seen it before on a map. A map of this area.”
He unfolded his map. It was deeply creased and worn. Some of it was only faintly legible. Chase picked up the candle, held it near, and pointed to a spot on the map. To me, maps were confusing conglomerations of lines and contours and colors. I didn’t have a good mind for scales or grids or terrain. I was more into landmarks, more of a “turn-left-at-the-big-crooked-pine-tree” sort of navigator, and I had to really try hard to find my way by maps. But I looked at the place on the map where Chase pointed. I could tell it was a mountain within a larger region of mountainous country. The whole space was covered with snaking contour lines stacked closely and precisely together, a two-dimensional representation of very three-dimensional ground. Chase tapped the map.
“This says Caspian Peak,” I said. “What’s it got to do with a bear?”
“Look closer,” said Chase, holding the candle closer. “Look at the lines.”
I looked. A few drops of tallow dripped from the candle onto the map. With my eyes, I followed the contours, blinking, squinting. Chase’s finger guided my gaze. Then I began to see what he meant.
“The bear,” said Chase in a whisper.
I saw it. Goosebumps formed on my arms and neck. Caspian Peak was shaped uncannily like a bear. Its valleys and draws and ridges outlined the body, legs, and head of a galloping bear.
It was the Mountain of the Bear.
CHAPTER 52
We left the next day. There wasn’t any question of whether we should go. We didn’t even really discuss it. Instead, we immediately went to sleep and in the morning there was tea and a little breakfast and we loaded our packs. I wrote a note for Woolly and tucked it under a broad, flat rock on the firepit.
By midday we were on the trail.
The Mountain of the Bear was a mere twenty-five miles away. I had to believe that there had to be a time in my life when I thought at the very least that twenty-five miles through a rugged wilderness was a long way to hike. In a past life, I may even have thought it was impossible to make such a journey, especially with the cold weather and snow. But on that day, I knew it would take only three days—two days if the weather was good. It would be a cold trip, to be sure. And there was a very good chance that we’d encounter a storm or two. If it got bad enough, we’d have to hunker down and wait it out, but we wouldn’t stop altogether. We were going to the Mountain of the Bear.
We hiked with determined quickness for about two hours without saying much of anything. If there was any talking, it was about the trail.
“I think the trail turns back south up ahead, but it’ll be hard to see under this snow, so keep your eyes open.”
“Okay, will do.”
As we stopped for a breather and filled our water bottles at a stream crossing, I finally asked the question I knew we both were turning over in our minds.
“What are the chances?” I asked between gulps of water.
“Chances of what?” replied Chase.
“You know what I mean,” I said. “What are the chances?”
“That he’ll be there? That we’ll find him?”
I nodded, gulped my water.
“Well,” said Chase, “that’s a question within a question within a question, isn’t it?” He drank a mouthful of water and then wiped his beard with the back of his gloved hand. “First, is this really the Mountain of the Bear? Second, if it is, is the Guide still there or has he moved or died or been captured? And third, if this is the right mountain, and if he’s still here, can we locate him? I mean even narrowing the search area to the mountain that has the vague shape of the bear itself, we’re still dealing with something like ten square miles. That’s an almost impossible area for two people to search. And what if he wasn’t really at the Mountain of the Bear, but that was just a landmark? What if he’s somewhere in the twenty square miles surrounding that particular mountain?”
I shrugged.
“So, I guess it’s three questions wrapped up in a fourth,” said Chase, looking off toward the mountain.
“Then why are we doing this?” I said, again, faking a tone of skepticism to keep my own hopes at a manageable level.
“Doesn’t hurt to try,” said Chase turning back to me with a sarcastic grin. He clunked his water bottle against mine in a chilly, trail side
toast, and we were off again.
We encountered a storm. Big flakes of early winter snow pounded the area, left another foot of snow. We trudged through it. We kept walking until it was almost too dark to see, and then even I was ready to stop. With the snow on the trails it was difficult enough to find our way. They were slippery, too. It was a miracle we didn’t fall and break our necks in the daylight; we couldn’t continue in the dark.
We found a level spot in the woods, tramped down a flat spot in the snow, and built the small tent Chase had brought with him. We took off our boots but left our snow clothes on and wiggled into our sleeping bags. Chase threw a mylar-coated emergency blanket over us to trap our heat, and then we lay on our sides, close together in the small tent.
“There’s another question to answer here, ya know,” said Chase. He lay behind me, one arm around my middle. “One that’s arguably bigger and more important than finding the Guide.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Do you want to remember?”
I would have thought that was an easy question. In fact I almost blurted, “Of course I do!” Who wouldn’t want to remember? But I didn’t say that. Because it honestly was a question I hadn’t answered yet. A question I hadn’t truly asked yet.
I knew why Chase has raised the question. He raised it because we were okay, he and I. We were happy. We had been together before, and we had either found one another again or had been thrust together, depending how you viewed it. But we were together, and we were happy. We stayed busy, we helped one another, and at the end of the day we collapsed into one another’s arms and slept peacefully. And it sometimes felt like we could go on that way for a very long time.
So, what did I need from the past? What could knowing about my past do for me now?
It was easy to think our memories would be nothing but happy times and delight, but I knew better now. A person can’t live through a pandemic without witnessing suffering or without feeling pain. I knew there was loss back there in the back before.
There may or may not be happy memories, but there would undoubtedly be sorrow and pain and suffering. I wasn’t sure I wanted to remember. Knowing that I’d been responsible for the deaths of others was already a heavy burden that affected me daily. What if there was more? What if I’d made even bigger mistakes?
Chase waited in the darkness as I considered these things.
I turned to him. “I’m not sure,” I finally said.
“I know,” he said. “It’s okay. I’ll be with you whatever you decide. My choice is to stay with you.”
Over the next two days of hiking, what I couldn’t discount was the excitement that I felt every time I thought about finding the Guide. I may have been theoretically or psychologically or intellectually unsure about the prospect of remembering everything, but my heart was all in. My mind pulled on the reins; my feelings cracked the whip.
I wondered sometimes if subconsciously we still knew everything, still made decisions based on our previous experiences. I may have believed that to be true, but which direction was my subconscious leading me? My heart pounded, and I felt full of life when I thought about getting my memories back. But it was always followed by a queasiness in my stomach, a feeling of dread and regret.
But in the end, I knew what I had to do.
“I’ve decided,” I told Chase.
“Great,” said Chase. “But this means we’ll have to hurry. The later it gets the harder it will be to find Arie.”
I scoffed in disbelief.
“That’s what you meant, right? That you want to re-unite with Arie? Convince him to stay with us?”
“I didn’t realize I was that easy to read.”
Chase exhaled. “You’re his mom, Al. Despite what you do or don’t remember or whatever the relationship has been lately, it’s obvious. I don’t think that’s something they’ve been able to erase out of you. Or maybe it’s because I’m almost as good at reading people as I am at reading maps. But I agree with your plan. We find the Guide, then we find Arie.”
I nodded. “He’s free to make his own choices, but if we find the Guide, and if he can do what the notebook says he can do, I think it’s imperative that I let Arie know. Is that selfish?”
“No. How could it be selfish?”
I couldn’t put it into words exactly, so I just shrugged. There was one thing I wanted desperately, and that was for Arie to remember me.
“Like I said, though, we have to hurry. Ruby’s got her plans to head east. I figured she was gonna need at least two months to get ready for that, which doesn’t give us much time. We’ll have to hustle.”
CHAPTER 53
After the first day of our hike to find the Guide, Chase went back to warning me not to get my hopes up, even though I could tell he himself wasn’t taking this advice.
“I mean, look at this terrain,” he said as we trudged through the snow. “With the weather holding us back, and so much area to search, I don’t want to say it’s hopeless, Al, but I sure as hell ain’t hopeful.”
We were relying on fragments of rumors and hearsay, Chase reminded me, and we had re-assembled those fragments in the most optimistic way possible.
“I’m telling you right now, it could take weeks to find this guy, and we don’t have weeks. So keep your expectations low,” said Chase. “Very low.”
And I’d already adopted that outlook on my own—trying to convince myself that nothing would come of this—but I was only saying it to protect myself, and alongside my innermost thoughts, I couldn’t stop those hopes from rising secretly up, the way a helium balloon keeps floating up when batted down.
But all of the hedging and expectation management turned out to be for nothing. We didn’t so much find the Guide as he led us to himself. It appeared he wanted to be found.
It started with the sound of chimes. There were wind chimes hanging from high in the trees. First just one, and then one every mile or so, and then more. Some were made of delicate metallic slivers that rang and jangled ethereally with the slightest motion. Others were made of wood that made hollow, clonking notes. Some of the chimes were like those you’d find on a back porch; others were just tied-together collections of metal and glass that made discordant clankings.
After a while we saw strands of yarn and ribbon tied around branches, hanging down over the trail, and tied like fencing between tree trunks to guide searchers. Some of these trail markings looked to have been there for years.
Chase and I said almost nothing, but we exchanged amazed glances as we felt ourselves getting closer and closer to the Guide.
And then we found the camp.
It was a small oval-shaped glade in the trees. Not a clearing, exactly, but a place where the trees were larger and the forest floor was more open, with no undergrowth. It was an oval about three hundred feet long and maybe two hundred feet wide. At the center of this camp there stood a massive tee-pee, its outer skin made of canvas and animal hide. Long, slender pine trunks held it up, converging high in the canopy. The tapered ends mingled with the branches. There were more wind chimes here, creating an unending, atonal musical chord.
The tee-pee dwarfed several other tents, which had been erected in a rough circle around it. They were of various kinds—canvas, vinyl, and makeshift lean-to’s constructed from blue tarps. Some of them had been there long enough that they were anchored to the ground by grass and accumulated pine-needle duff.
The snow cover was only just a dusting here beneath the massive pine trees. Chase and I trudged toward the tee-pee with our heavy packs and our breath smoking in the cold.
Outside the tee-pee there was a large, ornate rug. On the rug there was a man seated cross-legged.
The Guide.
He was dressed in simple, coarse clothing—a loose woolen tunic and roomy, natural-cotton pants. He wore no shoes. His long, silvery hair was pulled back into a ponytail. His arms were outstretched so that his upturned hands rested on his knees, fingers touching thumbs. His head
was slightly bowed and his eyes were shut.
Chase and I stopped about twenty feet from the man, waiting for him to notice us, but he sat completely still.
I set my backpack on the ground. The vinyl fabrics swished and zipped and the backpack thudded into the snow, disrupted the tinkling chimes and the generally serene setting. Then Chase took off his backpack in a similar noisy fashion. We exchanged a look. The man still had not looked up, had not done anything to acknowledge that two strangers were now standing in front of him.
“Should we say something?” I whispered to Chase.
“No,” Chase whispered back. “Let him finish.”
The man let out a rough sigh. “I can hear you,” he said.
He opened his eyes and stood up.
“Sorry,” I said. “We didn’t mean to interrupt.”
He smiled accommodatingly, but didn’t answer us. Instead, he rolled up his rug and headed for the tee-pee.
I approached him, my mouth suddenly dry and my breath ragged in my windpipe.
“Hey, uh, hi,” I said. “I’m Alison, and that’s Chase. We’ve been looking for you.”
He stopped walking and turned to me. “Looking for me? Who do you think I am?”
“Well, uh, what I meant was—”
“You said you were looking for me, right?” he said. “You must know who I am, then.”
“No,” I stammered. “Not exactly. It’s just—we heard there was a man here who knew how to restore lost memories.”
“Interesting,” he said.
“Well, can you?” asked Chase.
“Can I what?”
“Can you help restore lost memories?” said Chase, with an impatient buzz in his voice.
“You’ve lost your memories?” said the man with a bemused smile. “Where? How? Did you leave them at the bus station? Did they fall out of your backpacks?”
Chase and I traded a perplexed glance. It was like talking to the Cheshire Cat. I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed with us, or if he was only joking, or if he was being completely serious. Chase was about to answer—angrily, I suspected—so I stopped him by placing my hand on his forearm.
Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember Page 24