by Paul Greci
“Okay,” Shannon says to Derrick. “I want you to slowly take your hands away from your forehead, but don’t sit up.”
Derrick peels his blood-soaked hands away from his forehead. Blood has run down his face in streaks. “What—”
“Don’t talk,” Shannon says. “I don’t want your skin stretching anywhere near the gash. We need the blood to keep clotting to slow the bleeding.” She leans in close. “It looks pretty good.”
A zigzag gash about two inches long runs across Derrick’s forehead. A little blood is leaking out of it at one end, and I wonder if the cut is deeper in that spot.
Shannon looks at me and Brooke. “Can one of you get out a sleeping bag?”
I pull out mine and help Shannon cover Derrick.
“We should probably sit tight for another half hour or so,” Shannon says. “If we can get the bleeding to completely stop, that’d be ideal.”
Shannon tells us that the fifteen-minute rule for head gashes is something she learned from her mom. “There are lots of capillaries in the head so wounds tend to bleed a lot whether they’re shallow or deep. My guess is that Derrick has a pretty shallow wound since the bleeding has slowed way down.”
“How big is the cut?” Derrick says softly, barely moving his lips. “What’s it like?”
“About two inches long. It sort of zigzags up as it goes from right to left,” I say.
“Just call me Frank,” Derrick whispers.
“Frank?” Shannon says. “Why?”
“Tall guy. Big scar across his forehead. Short for Frankenstein.” The corners of Derrick’s mouth curve up into a smile.
“Just be quiet for now,” Shannon says. “You don’t want your sense of humor to end up killing you.”
“I can think of worse ways to go,” Derrick mumbles, and then he’s quiet, following Shannon’s instructions.
I turn my attention to my improvised shoe. I dismantle the whole thing and study the parts. And then I get an idea.
I put the foam piece inside my sock and try to put my sock back on, but my foot and the foam won’t fit inside it together.
I lay the piece of foam flat on a rock, then I pick up a small sharp rock and go to work cutting it down to make it narrower and just a little shorter.
Brooke watches me put the modified blue foam into my sock. “Good idea,” she says.
“We’ll see,” I reply. Then I pull my sock on. I have to push the blue foam down because it wants to ride up on my heel, but once I get it set on the bottom of my sock it stays in place pretty well. I put one stuff sack inside the other and pull them over my foot. Then I take the string and wrap it around my foot a few times and tie it off.
I stand up and shake my foot, and the contraption stays on. I want to test it out by walking, but I don’t want to dislodge more rocks. I glance over at Derrick. I caused that. Accident or no accident, I feel terrible about it.
I sit back down and take a breath.
Shannon says, “Okay, Frank, I want you to sit up slowly.”
Derrick props himself up on his elbows. Then he pushes with his hands so he’s sitting all the way up.
“How do you feel?” Brooke asks.
“I’ll live,” Derrick says. He looks at me. “It’ll take a bigger rock than that to keep me down.”
“Man,” I say, “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” Derrick says. “You already told me once. You think I’ve got brain damage from this?” He smirks.
I know he’s joking around to try to make me feel better, and it kind of works. But I still feel lousy.
“We’ll have to come up with a new way to go up the slope,” I say. “Walking below someone else is too risky.”
“Now you tell me,” Derrick says.
“We could spread out a little,” Brooke suggests. “And each climb the slope in a different spot.”
“That would work,” Shannon says. “Good idea.”
Derrick slowly stands up. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 46
TWO DAYS LATER WE’RE STARING down at another valley. We hiked high ridges after dodging the fire we started, but now we have no choice but to go down again.
“I think we should expect there to be a swamp,” Derrick says. “That way we won’t be bummed if there is one.” His forehead wound has scabbed over and looks like a dark red lightning bolt.
My improvised shoe has held out, but one of the stuff sacks is starting to wear thin. I’m not feeling the effects of the bear spray anymore, and Shannon says she’s fully recovered from her EpiPen experience. And Brooke’s feet—she hasn’t mentioned them and she’s keeping up with everyone, so they must be okay, too. Her cell phone is still red, with an outline of a bear.
Our biggest problem at the moment is food. We don’t have any.
Walking on well-drained tundra when you’re starving is barely manageable. Bashing through brush and bushwhacking through a mosquito-infested black spruce forest is something entirely different. It takes way more physical energy and mental concentration. Plus, my homemade shoe could get caught or snagged on downed branches and tree roots.
“It’s hard to tell from here,” Shannon says, “but this valley looks bigger than the one with the swamp.”
“Could be a river snaking through those trees,” I say. “Or at least a creek.”
The sun is poking in and out behind big white cumulus clouds.
“Empty country,” Derrick says. “We haven’t seen one scrap of anything that would suggest people have been through here.”
I wish we had some topo maps so we could try to match the valley in front of us with one on a map. At Simon Lake, we learned how to read them so we could figure out where we were and what we were seeing.
We’re probably not taking the most efficient route to Talkeetna. We don’t even know how far off we are. But if we keep walking west, we’ll at least eventually hit the highway, even if we miss Talkeetna. That is, if we don’t starve to death first.
We start heading down and Derrick says, “Josh, try not to draw the moose toward you this time. We’ve only got so much bear spray.”
“I’ll do my best,” I say. I have sort of become the point guard when we’re walking. I like route finding, and everyone seems to be happy with me taking on that role once we’ve decided on a direction.
The first part of the descent is gradual. We’re walking on a well-drained tundra ridge sloping gently downward. I keep us on the spine of the ridge that I think will penetrate the valley the deepest. That way, we’ll have more tundra walking and less forest walking. At least, that’s the idea.
My pants are fitting more loosely than they were at the start of the hike. None of us had much weight we could lose, but we’re all looking thinner, even Derrick, who was already pretty thin to begin with.
Gaunt is how Shannon described us when we broke camp this morning. And then Derrick chimed in, saying, “We’re the gaunt, out for a jaunt.”
After a couple of hours, I reach the absolute edge of the spine we’re walking on.
I stop and wait for everyone so we can discuss where we want to go from here. Will we pick a mountain to aim for on the opposite side of the valley like we did the last time? Will we decide to follow the valley? Maybe this drainage will lead to Talkeetna?
Brooke pulls up next to me. Then Derrick and Shannon.
“Hmmmmm,” Derrick says. “So many great choices.”
“I don’t know how much farther I can go today,” Brooke says. “I’m feeling kind of weak.”
“How about if we rest here for a while?” I ask. “It’s breezy so there are fewer mosquitoes.”
Everyone agrees, and we take our packs off and drink some water. We all ran out of purification tablets yesterday. Up high on the ridge, it was easy to find snowmelt water, but down where we’re going, we’ll just have to risk drinking what we can find.
We talk for a while about which direction to head. The spine here splits into two smaller spines. Both of th
em end in the forest pretty quickly. We decide to take the right spine because it points farther up the valley and it looks like we’ll have less spruce to crash through before climbing out the other side.
“We can always set up the tents in the trees and take another break before we climb out the other side,” I say, hoping that will ease the stress I know Brooke is feeling.
We slowly stand up and put our packs on. I start heading down the right spine. I hit a patch of big rocks and slow my pace, taking care each time I set my shoeless foot down.
I’m working my way through a spot with jagged gray rocks when Derrick calls out, “Hold up, people. I just saw something.”
We all turn toward Derrick, and he’s pointing to the left and across the valley.
“In those trees on the far side,” he says. “It was something human-made.”
CHAPTER 47
“IT WAS GREEN,” HE SAYS as he pulls his binoculars out of his pack and scans the area he was pointing to.
Now it’s my turn to make a joke. “That’s really helpful in a sea of green spruce trees. Maybe that knock to the head did have an impact.”
Derrick ignores my jab, keeps looking through his binoculars, and says, “It was long and narrow, and I didn’t see it until it started moving. When it was still, it blended in with the trees.” Derrick pauses and lets his binoculars rest on his chest, hanging from the strap. He puts one arm in the air. “When it moved”—he pulls his arm down—“it came straight down.”
“Could it have been a falling branch?” Shannon asks.
“Branches grow out from tree trunks, and when they fall, you can really see them tumble,” Derrick says.
I think about what Derrick says, and it makes sense to me. “So, how did this thing move again? And how big was it? I mean, you saw it from way over here.”
“It was long, and it was moving vertically. But it was narrow and smooth-looking. And green.” Derrick makes a tight circle with his hands. “Like a small diameter pipe. I wouldn’t have picked it out of the trees if it hadn’t moved. It was just as tall or taller than the trees, and then it disappeared straight down into the trees, like someone was lowering it.”
We all keep staring into the spruce trees on the far side of the valley and down to the left. I’m trying to pick out anything unnatural down there. Anything that would make me want to change our course, because if we go that way we’re going to be bashing through at least twice as much forest and brush. I pull my binoculars out and scan the area but turn up nothing out of the ordinary.
“Could it be some scientific research station that’s operating automatically?” Shannon asks. “Like whatever you saw was programmed to do what you observed, but no people are actually there?”
Derrick cocks his head sideways. “Raining on my parade again.” But he’s smiling. “I’ll bet you … hmmmm … nothing much to bet … that it’s more than just some automated thing.”
“Why do you think that?” Shannon asks.
“Because I want to believe it,” Derrick says. “If there’s a minute chance that there’s a person over there doing whatever they’re doing, we’d be idiots to walk in a different direction. We’ve done some idiotic things, but we’re not true idiots. Not unless we ignore this.” He turns and starts scanning with his binoculars again. “It could be our Get Out of the Wilderness Free Card. Right over there. Hidden in those trees.”
I want to believe Derrick. To believe that what he saw wasn’t just a branch falling straight down. Or a play on the sunlight hitting the trees. I wish more than one of us had seen it. I wish I could have seen it. Truth is, I am very concerned about how, without any food, every mile will just get harder and harder. If we hike over there and find something, that’s great. But if it’s nothing, we’ve just wasted limited, precious energy we could have used to keep us moving toward our goal.
Brooke, who hasn’t said a word since we stopped, says, “I’m in. I want to see what’s over there. Even if it is some automated science station, we could break it and then maybe someone would come out to fix it.”
Shannon responds, “Sometimes stations are set up and data is collected on-site, and periodically someone visits the station to get the data. So, if that’s what it is, it’s not necessarily sending information back, so someone might not realize it’s broken for quite a while.”
“Whatever,” Brooke says. “I still want to know what it is that Derrick saw. I’d have a hard time just walking away from it.”
“We’ve got nothing,” I say. “If we expend our energy with extra bushwhacking, that’ll just exhaust us sooner.”
“But think about it,” Derrick says. “We’ve got to cross this valley anyway. So, we go down the valley a ways instead of up a ways. The forest will be harder to navigate. I can see from here that the trees are thick down there. But we’re not adding that much distance.”
“I’m thinking about every step.” I point to my un-shoe. “I don’t want to be a burden on the group if this thing falls apart.”
“We’ve got plenty of blue foam pads to cut from, and two more stuff sacks to use.” Derrick sets his binoculars on top of his pack and crosses his arms.
I take a breath. “Okay,” I say. “I’m in.” I want to believe what Derrick believes. I want to trust his vision and his interpretation of what he saw. I want to believe that it’ll be worth the expended energy, but right now I don’t have that 100 percent belief. But what I do have, I realize, is hope. I can’t control what is and is not over there, but I can control my decision to put forth the energy to check it out.
“Derrick makes a good point,” Shannon says. “If there’s nothing there, we’ve walked maybe a day or two out of our way. But if we don’t check it out, it will haunt us.”
“We’re the gaunt out for a jaunt,” Derrick says, “and we can’t take no haunt.”
And with that, we study the new route. When we agree on the general direction to take, I start leading my starving friends down toward the thickest, most inhospitable-looking vegetation in the valley.
CHAPTER 48
BELOW THE TUNDRA, WE HIT chest-high willows growing so close together you can’t tell where one plant stops and another starts.
“Keep your eyes open for bear sign,” I say. The last thing I want is to surprise a grizzly. But with the four of us crashing through the brush, we’re making so much noise that hopefully any bears in the area already know we’re here.
I catch my un-shoe on a sharp branch, and I hear the unmistakable rip of nylon. The tear is on the outside of my ankle and is only through one stuff sack. I tuck the torn parts under the string and keep going.
The willows seem to go on forever. Like we’re adrift in a willow ocean and the shore keeps getting farther away. We work our way slowly because that is the only way to swim through willows this thick.
I’m bending a branch and there’s this explosion of vegetation right in front of me, and I leap back and fall as I let out a scream. My feet are sticking straight up in the air, and I’m waiting for the bear to pounce, but it doesn’t. Then I notice a medium-sized roundish bird, perched on a stout willow branch, moving its head up and down.
Then I hear Derrick’s voice. “Always grousing around.”
I kick my legs forward and sit up. “Thought it was bear.” I point at the bird. “A grouse.” I shake my head.
“More specifically,” Shannon says, “that’s a ptarmigan—our state bird.”
“Ptarmigan sharmigan,” Derrick says. “It acts like a grouse.”
“Yeah,” I agree, “and I was the birdbrain.”
“How much farther?” Brooke asks, not laughing at my joke.
I stand up and look back where we came from and then to where we’re going. “We have to crash through at least as many willows as we have so far to get to the spruce forest, and then we’ve got to cross most of the spruce to get to Derrick’s mystery spot.”
Brooke sighs. “I wish this were easier.”
“Don’t we all,” D
errick says.
The sun is low in the sky. Soon it’ll be setting. It won’t get super dark, but it might be a good time to take a break.
“How about when we get to the edge of the willows”—I point in the direction we are heading—“we find a spot to set up a couple of tents. We can sleep for a few hours and then continue our search.”
“That makes sense,” Shannon says. “Whatever we’re looking for, it’ll probably be easier to spot in the daylight.”
“And,” Derrick adds, “we wouldn’t want to surprise someone who’s sleeping. Judging by how this guy”—he points at me—“reacted to a bird, whoever is there may think we’re a bear and just start shooting.”
It takes a couple more hours to reach the edge of the willows. The sun has sunk behind the horizon and the mosquitoes are getting thicker. We decide to set up two tents because there’s not much open ground, and—while I can’t speak for everyone—I like having a person next to me when I rest, even if it is kind of crowded. There’s some kind of support or energy you get from doing things together. When we got to do our solo experiences at Simon Lake, I was way into that. I was itching for a new experience, for a new way to push myself. I was going to be all by myself in the wilderness. That was cool and intense, and I was hungry for it. But now, maybe because we’re so alone out here, being truly alone in a place like this would feel overwhelming—like if I woke up and Shannon, Brooke, and Derrick were gone without a trace. I don’t really want to be in a tent by myself. I don’t want to be anywhere by myself.
And I like Brooke. If circumstances were different, I don’t know what would happen between us. I mean, we haven’t talked about any of this stuff. I don’t know if she feels even remotely how I feel. Maybe someday, if life gets back to normal—if we do survive—we’ll find out just how much we like each other. I like her enough that I want to know if being together would work for us. I wonder if she wonders about this very same thing.