Wild Bird

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  But since I have no idea where I am, or how to get back to camp, I follow him up, up, up a mostly nonexistent trail to a mesa, where I find him waiting, looking out across an enormous canyon.

  The view catches me off guard, makes me a little dizzy. It’s like we’ve shifted dimensions, entered an alternate universe. There’s a river below us—a river. It’s muddy, tinged red, and lazy, but it snakes along for as far as I can see.

  Mokov gives no explanation, no instructions. Instead, he begins a story as I stand beside him, looking across the canyon. “In the Long Ago, Owl gathered the birds for a contest to settle a dispute. Eagle had been leader for many years, and other birds felt it was time to challenge him.

  “ ‘It is known far and wide that I can soar highest,’ Eagle said, and indeed, in challenges past he had won easily.

  “But Crow and Hawk had been preparing for this challenge. Secretly, they had risen earlier than usual each morning for two moons, flying higher and higher to strengthen their powers. ‘We shall see,’ Crow cawed to Eagle. ‘Yes,’ agreed Hawk, ‘we shall see!’

  “Lark, like many other birds, had traveled a great distance to see the contest. And, like many other birds, Lark was resentful of Eagle’s place. Emboldened by Crow and Hawk, Lark now stepped forward singing, ‘Yes, we shall see!’ Excitement ruffled through the other birds. How brave Lark was to challenge Eagle!

  “The competing birds aligned side by side, and at Owl’s command the contest began. Lark, Hawk, Crow, and Eagle lifted from earth, rising into the air. Lark’s wings beat mightily, but before long the little bird returned to earth.

  “ ‘You were brave to try!’ the other birds chirped. Their eyes returned to Hawk, who was now also returning to earth.

  “ ‘Crow is strong,’ Hawk said to the consoling flock. ‘He might do it!’ But Crow, too, could not match the strength of Eagle’s wings. He returned, greatly disappointed. It seemed that, once again, Eagle would win the contest and remain leader.

  “To make his victory one beyond question, Eagle did not immediately return to earth but pumped his mighty wings and spiraled toward the heavens, higher and higher. The other birds watched in wonder at Eagle’s power and strength. ‘Eagle is indeed a great leader,’ Crow conceded. ‘Yes,’ Hawk agreed. ‘Eagle is powerful and fearless.’

  “But then, just as Eagle had exhausted himself and could fly no higher, Hawk saw something shoot upward from between Eagle’s mighty shoulders. ‘Look!’ Hawk exclaimed. ‘It is Wren!’ ”

  I jolt. “What?” I turn to Mokov. “Don’t put me in your moral lesson!”

  He goes on without missing a beat, without pulling his gaze away from the canyon. “The other birds twittered and sang. How clever Wren was to stow away! Wren had soared to a height even greater than Eagle! They had a new leader!”

  “Oh,” I say, feeling embarrassed but…good. Wren is a bird in legends who’s clever and outsmarts Eagle! Who knew?

  But then Mokov goes and ruins everything. He says, “But when Wren returned to earth, the other birds’ song began to change. Where Eagle was quiet, Wren was boastful, reminding all the others how clever he had been. At last Owl asked Wren, ‘But who lifted you so high?’ Wren cast aside the question and continued to boast, and soon the flock had had enough. It turned to Eagle and said, ‘You are Leader, now and through time.’ ”

  Suddenly I feel crushed and angry and…tricked. “I am not boastful!” I snap at Mokov. “Why did you tell me that story? I hate that story!”

  He turns his ancient eyes on me and says, “You’re not the Wren of this legend. But it’s wise for all of us to respect the wings that beat hard to lift us.”

  I’m about to tell him to stop already with the lectures when I notice the way he’s looking at the sky.

  “Rain is coming,” he says, then removes the knapsack and leaves it at my feet. “Let your heart open up like the skies.”

  I blink at the knapsack. Watch him walk away. Panic.

  “That’s it? You’re leaving me here?”

  I chase after him, but it’s too late. He’s already vanished.

  It takes a few minutes for reality to sink in.

  I’m alone.

  Completely alone.

  It flashes through my mind again that Mokov leaving me here by myself can’t be legal, but what slaps that thought away is that it doesn’t matter—there’s no arguing my case in this desert courthouse. Out here, Mother Nature is my judge and jury, and objecting or redirecting or even being out of order won’t help me escape. The only way to survive my sentence is to serve it.

  It also flashes through my mind that maybe my mom and dad won’t be grieving parents if I don’t survive this. After reading my text history, they’ll probably be more relieved than heartbroken.

  I return to the knapsack and find that inside it is my food and water supply. I don’t rummage through it, because the sky is a heavy gray and I know I need to set up camp. Shelter first, I tell myself, then firewood, then food.

  I scan the area for a good place to string up my tarp but get distracted by the strangeness of where Mokov has left me. Over the last few weeks, I’ve hiked wherever I’ve been led. I haven’t looked around much. I’ve just trudged along until we’ve been told to stop. But for all the not looking I’ve done, I know I haven’t been anywhere like this before. I’m on a wide, red plateau with a big canyon in front of me and a towering wall behind me. It’s like I’ve come up a secret back way to a giant notch in the earth. Looking across the canyon, I see that there are notches on the other side, too. Notches that go up the canyon like a staircase. Notches that lead to towers of red earth that look like chimneys. Notches that spill streams of black tears over the face of a sheer wall.

  There are also places where the walls look scooped out like servings of orange sherbet. Some are shallow, some are almost cave-like, some are wide, some are small. And speckled up the canyon from the muddy river to the bases of the chimneys are shrubs and trees clawing onto ledges, clinging onto cliffs.

  I feel like one of those shrubs on the other side—isolated, digging in, trying to survive. But taking time to see like this sets up a battle in my mind. Something’s telling me it’s important, but it also feels like I’m wasting time. Why am I looking at scenery, thinking how I’m like a bush, when I should be setting up camp? Rain is coming!

  I turn away from the canyon and look around my little mesa. And it sinks in that where I’m standing is probably a lot like what I can see across the canyon. If I could fly over to the other side and look back, I’d probably see notched steps leading up to red-earth chimneys, sheer walls of rusty-red earth, and streaks of black tears.

  In a flash of excitement, I realize that scoops of orange sherbet may be gouged out of my side of the canyon, too. So…maybe I won’t need to set up a tent. Maybe I can be a cave dweller!

  I grab the knapsack and set off away from the canyon, scanning the wall on my side for a cave I can sleep in. I see scoops, but they’re either too high, too shallow, or just too small. I’m moving fast, passing by pinyons and junipers where I could string up my tarp tent, seeing dead wood that I could collect for building a fire, but I keep going, obsessed with finding a cave.

  And then the rain starts.

  I cuss because…why not? The consequences in the field are already happening, and besides, if a girl cusses in the desert and there’s no one around to hear, did she actually cuss? “You’re an idiot, Hollister Keegan,” I shout into the air. “Of course it makes a sound!”

  So now I’m talking to myself. In the rain. On a mesa in the middle of the desert. Alone. I yell, “THIS IS ABUSE! IT’S ILLEGAL! IF I DIE OUT HERE, YOU WILL PAY!”

  My voice gets swept away by the wind, drowned out by the sky.

  The Judge isn’t backing down.

  “Fine,” I grumble. “I’ll set up my stupid tarp.”

  And then I see it. About ten yards away. A scoop deep enough to be a cave, low enough for me to reach, and small enough to protect
me from the wind and rain. I hurry over, toss in the knapsack, shove my backpack inside, and scramble into the cave. It’s not very deep and not wide enough to lie down in, but it’s perfect shelter. “HA!” I shout up at the clouds.

  A streak of lightning shoots down into the canyon.

  “You missed me!” I call out.

  The sky answers with a long, low rumble of thunder.

  “Quit grousing!” I shout, and laugh.

  I’ve actually won a battle with the sky.

  I enjoy being safe and dry in my cave for a little while, but then I start feeling panicked about the rain. Not because I worry about getting wet, not because a flash flood might sweep me away. No, I’m having a little freak-out because water is getting away.

  It’s more a low-flow showerhead kind of rain than one gushing from a fire hose. But the showerhead is the entire sky for as far and wide as I can see, and I’m not set up to catch any of it. If I was, I could drink it. Cook with it. Wash my hair or clothes with it. If there was a little gully, I could line it with my tarp and take a bath. But instead the most precious thing in the desert is just falling out of the sky and hitting the dirt.

  It’s not much, but I get my billypot and set it outside the cave to collect rain. Drops ping on the bottom and I feel like a beggar, thankful to the sky for tossing in a few coins.

  I empty out the knapsack to see what I can eat while I’m waiting for the rain to stop. The answer is…nothing. There’s no energy bar, no trail mix, no dried fruit or anything I can eat without cooking it first. “Are you serious?” I cry at a big baking potato.

  Reality stares at me through the cold, dead eyes of the potato. This is why Dvorka told me not to pack food. If I want to eat, I’m going to have to build a fire.

  But why? Why? Do they really have to make it this hard?

  My mind wanders to home, where there’s always something in the freezer that I can zap in the microwave and just eat. But thinking about home reminds me of my parents reading my texts, and panic jolts through me like electricity. I don’t want to think about that. Anything’s better than thinking about that.

  I look out at the sky hanging heavy and wet and try to figure out where the sun is. It’s impossible to tell, but thinking back on the day and the hike with Mokov, I guesstimate that it’s four-thirty or five. Each day has gotten a little longer as the weeks have gone by, with the sun now setting after eight o’clock. Which means—if my guesstimate is right—I’ve got about three hours of daylight left. If I was stuck in a class with Hollister Keegan, that would be an eternity. But out here, needing to find wood and start a fire, it’s a scary short amount of time.

  The lightning and thunder have stopped, but that doesn’t mean it won’t keep raining, and for who knows how long? And even though rain means drinking water and hair washing and cooking, if you have to go out in it, it also means getting wet. And without fire, wet means cold, especially at night.

  So I’m tempted to wait it out, but the longer I sit watching the rain come down, the more I know I need to get out there and collect firewood. The wetter the wood gets, the harder it’ll be to light and burn, and fire is important for more than just being warm and heating up dinner.

  It also keeps animals away.

  An image of hungry coyotes creeps into my mind. There’s a pack of them coming for me, stealthy, hungry, determined…and they’re not interested in my potato.

  I force away the vision, open my backpack, put on my poncho, and go out into the rain.

  Since it’s not a hard rain and since it hasn’t been going all that long, the upper branches of the pinyons and junipers have kept the area underneath them pretty dry. I go from one tree to the next, collecting any dead branches and kindling I can find, using the bottom part of my poncho like a sling to carry the wood and keep it dry.

  After four poncho loads back to the cave, I’ve got a pretty good stash of firewood, but there’s now a lot less room for me to sit. Especially with my backpack unlashed and spilling out. I try shoving stuff out of my way, try using my sleeping bag as a headrest, try telling myself to relax and wait out the rain. But no matter what I do, I feel claustrophobic, and I’m shocked to realize that I’d rather be outside doing something.

  So I finish unbundling my pack, pull my tarp free, grab the cord, and go back out into the rain. I move fast, finding anchor rocks, setting up the tarp between two scrawny pinyons near the cave. The magic knot Michelle taught me slides tight and holds, making it so I can use low branches as a sort of back-door awning. The tent’s up and trenched faster than I’ve ever done it, and I smile when I look inside. If I had ornaments, I could hang them on my back-porch Christmas tree.

  I don’t put anything inside the tent because I don’t want to carry my sleeping bag and mat and ground liner through the rain if I don’t have to. Instead, I ready a ring of rocks a few yards in front of my tent opening, thinking it will be a good idea to have a fire near me, but not so close it sends sparks into the tent.

  That’s about all I can do until it stops raining, so I crawl back into the cave, wait around, get bored, start thinking about my text messages and my parents, panic, leave the cave again, and go out for more firewood.

  Anything’s better than thinking about my parents.

  This time I store the firewood inside the tent. I feel like a squirrel collecting nuts. How many nuts do squirrels collect? How do they know they have enough?

  I check the trench around the tent, digging it out some more with a rock, extending the low spot to run farther away from the opening. I think about my brother and how he would love this. I wish he could be here, helping me dig. We hardly ever went to the beach, but the times we did, I built the castles and my brother dug the moats. He did great moats. Not great enough to stop the ocean for good, but still. Great moats.

  My parents edge back into my mind as I dig. Water is running off my poncho hood. Water starts dripping from my eyes. The trench around the tent is plenty good enough, but I keep digging and dripping and wishing. For what I’m not sure. The impossible, probably.

  Like moats that won’t wash away in the tide.

  I’ve been balled up in the cave thinking about hieroglyphics. Or, I guess, pictographs. On one of our day hikes last week, the jailers took us to a secret place where Native Americans had drawn things on a cave wall. It wasn’t a scooped-out cave like mine, more a wedge area between rocks, with trees growing in front of the opening. I couldn’t in a million years find it again, because after marching along for half the day, we were led to and from it blindfolded. Of course.

  The pictographs were faded, barely even there, but John pointed them out, one by one. There was a circle, big X’s, a bird, fire, a man with wavy arms, and raining clouds. John made up a story based on what the symbols might have meant, explaining that no one really knows because a circle could mean the sun or a shield or an eye or pretty much anything else that’s round. He also explained that some wall art dated back to 7000 BC and said that we were in the presence of “America’s earliest storytelling documents.” He said the pictographs were painted by mixing natural minerals with plant and animal oils to make colored paints, which were then put on the walls with fingers or brushes made out of animal hair or yucca leaves.

  I was more interested in when we’d finally sit down and have some lunch.

  But in my own cave now, I look at the blank wall and wonder what I would draw. What symbols I would use. What story I would tell. I also wonder if the story John told was anything close to the real story that was painted on the wall.

  I’m lost in thought about cave paintings when I notice how quiet it is, and when I look outside, the rain has stopped and the clouds are breaking up.

  Yay!

  There’s still daylight, but it won’t last long, so I scramble out of the cave with my bow-drill kit and the kindling and tinder bundle I got ready while I was waiting. I hurry to the tent, pull some firewood over to the fire ring, and get to work.

  In the last few week
s I’ve gotten really good at busting out a fire. It’s always hard, always intense, but I always volunteer to get the campfire started anyway, because I like the way it still feels like a genie rising out of the wood. When the spindle rubs back and forth in the fire board, it makes a puff of smoke, then a little stream of it rises, then the ember makes the bundle ignite, and poof, the fire genie grants three wishes—heat, light, and food.

  Getting a fire going now is extra hard because everything’s damp, but it would have been impossible if I hadn’t gotten some wood out of the rain. When I’ve finally got a real flame burning, I’m tired and sweating and really hungry.

  I retrieve my billypot of rainwater, a ration of freeze-dried meatball marinara, and a ziplock of spiral pasta noodles. Once I’ve got the water heating, I spread out my ground cloth inside the tarp tent, roll out the mat, and spread out my sleeping bag. Then I put my extra clothes inside the sleeping bag’s stuff sack to make a pillow, hang my poncho on a pinyon branch, and lay the zip-off bottoms of my wet pants across fire-ring rocks to dry.

  By the time dinner’s ready, the cave is empty, the firewood is all stacked inside my tent so it’s easy to reach and will stay dry if it rains again, and my stuff is organized and tidy.

  At home Mom would cook pasta in gallons of water, then dump the water down the drain. Here, I’ve got hardly any extra water in the pot after the pasta’s tender, so I just add the freeze-dried marinara sauce right into the cooked noodles, heat it some more, then eat straight out of the pot.

  When I was little, being in the “clean-plate club” used to be linked to getting dessert, but we quit having to pay those dues after my brother was born. Leftovers got scraped off plates and went down the garbage disposal while the tap ran and ran and ran.

  I never thought twice about it, but that’s what I’m thinking about now as I’m wolfing down my food. There are no leftovers out here. If you don’t eat everything you cook, you will go hungry. Maybe not today, but when your rations run out before resupply. Out here, everyone’s in the clean-plate club, especially since there’s usually no dessert.