Lost in the Wild

by Cary Griffith

  It has to be the lake! He scrambles toward the opening, elated. He cannot believe he’s been that stupid—stupid enough to miss an entire lake. But now he has recovered it. Now he can use the last hour and a half of dull gray light to move up Fallen Arch’s shoreline and recover his camp.

  And then he pushes through the trees and sees—another bog. Another damn bog? He peers to the west, turns and stares into the gray eastern light. He squints across the bog’s surface.

  If there is a landscape of the soul its lowest point must be a bog. Jason struggles to get a grip on himself. He can feel some part of him getting sucked into shadowy desolation. For now, the mottled and tangled surface of the bog—knowing he must cross it—is the single tangible expectation keeping his panic at bay. For now, crossing the bog occupies an imagination that might otherwise drown in the full realization of his predicament.

  He turns into the brush, finds a dead tamarack bough, and trims it down to a sturdy five-foot pole. He starts picking his way across the tangled bog’s surface. And he makes excellent progress. He is almost to the other side when his last leaping step breaks the bog’s surface, starts sucking him down, and he lunges for the far edge. He topples onto firm ground, but his feet and legs are cold and soaked to the upper calf. He watches the black water runnel off his legs and boots. The feeling of cold is far off, and he sits and stares into the tangled surface of the bog, unbelieving, the panic now full in his throat, disarming, forcing him mute and still.

  Jason doesn’t know how long he has been sitting. Profound panic has given way to catatonia. He cannot move, cannot think. He is trying to figure out how he got here. He is trying to understand it, his legs soaked with water and his boots full of it. The bog has reached up and taken his spirit and he hunches on the edge of it, wanting the sick feeling to be over, wanting to awaken from this nightmare.

  Where was the lake? What happened to that lake? The question rises and words form, but there is nothing behind them. He feels outside himself, or in some other landscape. It’s starting to occur to him. Gradually, like a far-off wave coming in to curl and crash, his awful predicament is starting to rise over him.

  He is wet, cold, tired, and there is not much more than an hour of light left, possibly less. It is the waning light that strikes him, slaps him at least partially awake. If he has to stay in these woods for the entire night, with the temperature dropping fast, the smell of storm in the air, he might not see tomorrow’s dawn.

  The thought of dying makes him rise. He has no idea where to turn, where to find shelter. He looks across the bog but knows a return south is out of the question. He has to push north. He climbs through the boggy shoreline into the trees. He is looking for something, he doesn’t know what. He is searching through dusk for some place to hide—some place to pack himself away for the evening where he can roll up in a fetal ball, conserve his heat, and survive.

  He stumbles through the woods like a somnambulist. He is devastated. He is trying to remove himself, trying to bring himself awake, but he’s beyond conscious thought. He is tired, and he tries to focus on his mission—to find someplace to hide, someplace to sleep, someplace safe, out of the weather, out of the cold.

  But he is cold. He can feel it as he walks. His legs are still wet and stiff and his feet are numb. His brain isn’t functioning. It is as though the freezing water has reached around his cerebral cortex and deadened it with an icy grip.

  Up ahead he comes to a boulder as large as a house. He walks around the base and sees a very small depression. He gets down on his hands and knees, looks at it abstractedly. He might be able to dig it out. He pulls some small boulders out of the space, but then looks at it and realizes it would be more work than he has time to burrow. And besides, the rocks are cold. The entire landscape is freezing.

  He walks away from the boulder. He wanders another five minutes through the woods, absent and searching. He doesn’t know what to think. He doesn’t know what to look for. He is dimly aware this may be his last walk anywhere. He tries to put it out of his mind, to keep moving through the woods.

  Up ahead he sees a huge, fallen pine. It’s in a forest of giant trees. The woods are dark and forbidding. The tree is fallen on its side, at a slant where it snapped off a few feet up its trunk.

  He walks up to the toppled tree. It has been lying here awhile. He considers building a lean-to. He looks around the woods for material, but there are only thin boughs and dead wood. These would afford no protection from the wind. And he didn’t pack matches. He has no means to build a fire. I didn’t pack matches. He repeats it to himself, but he is a long ways from registering its full impact. He is numb.

  The air is turning colder, and he thinks he smells snow.

  He looks at the fallen tree, at the dusky woods around him. It feels hopeless. Maybe somewhere else, he thinks. Maybe if I keep moving? He turns and walks another fifty yards. When he comes to the end of it, he is in the same woods he has been in for most of the day. There is still a half-hour of light, but it is rapidly getting dark.

  He stands and tries to think. He suspects he has seen something he could use to make a shelter, somewhere in the latest ground he’s covered. It is one of his first truly coherent thoughts since panic first set in. He tries to recall the landscape. The boulder. The tree.

  He could keep moving forward, searching through the woods until they darken. But he knows there’s not much time. He needs to use whatever he’s seen in the last twenty minutes. There is no time to keep searching. He turns and starts retracing his steps. Fifty yards later he is back at the tree.

  The boulder would take too long to burrow out. It would be well after dark before he could fashion a cave big enough. And then what about the cave’s mouth? Cold seeks the lowest elevation. The cold would sweep into the gap and freeze him into a fetal fist. He stands beside the fallen tree, reconsidering his idea of building a lean-to. He tries to recall something from his book on wilderness survival. He can’t remember anything. He can’t figure out how he could make a lean-to with enough cover to retain his body heat. Its sides would be a sieve, and the wind would sough through it all evening. He’d be dead by morning, or near dead. He reaches up and absently breaks away part of the end of the huge fallen tree. It is rotted. Its center is heavy with decay.

  He tries to focus. Something he has seen over the last thirty minutes could save him. He knows the forest has something to offer—other than devastation and the end of his life.

  He reaches up and dislodges another piece of wood. It falls from the center of the trunk. Chunks of decayed wood tumble down after it. The surface of the trunk is still strong. Because of its angle, water seeped into the trunk and apparently rotted its inside. Absently he pulls another chunk out of the trunk.

  And then it occurs to him.

  Suddenly he starts digging in the middle of the tree. At first, he’s careful, too uncertain to believe he might have found something, some kind of shelter. But in seconds his care dissipates under the real possibility of shelter. His hands are flying. Suddenly he feels energized. The feel of swamp water on his legs evaporates. His hands move with frenetic energy.

  It is cartoonish, as though he is a dog burrowing into a hillside at breakneck speed. Hope and energy flood his veins. Lethargy is replaced with a hard rush of adrenaline. In five minutes he has dug out a cave large enough to hold his entire upper body.

  He keeps digging. Hands flail, arms pull and throw. As the daylight continues seeping out of the western sky he fashions a deeper hole. There is at least two inches of firm wood surrounding the rotted center. Within fifteen minutes he has used his knife and hands to dig a hole out of the wood wide and long enough to hold almost his entire body. He keeps working, keeps digging.

  Just before dark he turns into the woods and forages pine boughs, slashing them off with his blade. He is working quickly now. He has purpose. He has a plan and he is cert
ain it’s going to save his life. He gathers three loads of boughs and carries them to the trunk.

  He can now wiggle down inside the trunk with his head well concealed inside, his legs bent but not folded. He lines the nest with spruce boughs.

  It is almost dark, just barely light enough to make his final preparations. He finishes lining the trunk with boughs. There is just enough room to squeeze into his makeshift house. He brings the last bunch in behind him, closing the overhead gap.

  It is cold in the tree, dark and enclosed, but he can feel his body heat starting to warm the inside. He has laid enough boughs across the entrance to make a thick mat. He cannot see anything in front of him. There is no light, just the sound of a spare, cold wind. The inside of the tree smells like rich, moldy pine.

  He is starting to feel tired now. For another day he has hiked through difficult woods much longer than expected and with entirely different results than those he anticipated—at least when he started. Now he doesn’t want to think about it. Now the half-hour adrenaline rush is dissipating as quickly as it rose. A dull ebb of tiredness washes over him. He is well beyond panic, unable to think of much but closing his eyes. And after a few more minutes, totally exhausted, Jason falls asleep.

  In the middle of the night Jason awakens to howling wind and fierce pain. His calf feels as though it is being lanced. He has little room to move and can only sit and come awake to the pain. He shifts his leg, hoping to assuage the pain.

  An enormous windstorm has come out of the sky. He hears a tree topple and fall. It sounds far away, but it must be a large tree. The wind howls and the tops of the trees knock and snap. He has never heard this kind of wind. Even through his pine-bough covering he can hear the blow whipping the tops of the trees.

  The pain is back, and when he moves again, slightly, the pain moves, too. There must be a small hole in the side of his shelter with an icy blast spearing through it and cutting into his calf. He shifts again and tries to maneuver a section of tree bough between his leg and the hole. He is only partially successful, but it’s enough to give him some respite.

  The wind picks up. Jason wonders if the notorious Fourth of July storm from the previous year, the one that blew down a million trees, was kin to this one. Another tree falls, this one closer than the last. More wind, and he hears another tree fall, like a tottering giant in the woods. He cannot believe it, but this one shakes the ground. He can actually feel the ground shudder when it falls. Then another, and another. Giants are falling in the woods. It must be some kind of centennial storm, and he is smack in the middle of it. He is too incredulous to wonder. He realizes that if one of those huge trees topples over on him he’ll be crushed. His tree trunk will crumble like an egg.

  He closes his eyes and prays, but all he can hear is howling. He asks for deliverance. He doesn’t want to be crushed by the forest, though he feels that the woods are doing their best to finish him. But he’s a scientist. He is a med student, and he doesn’t give much credence to the idea of forest malevolence. He knows there is nothing to be done but lie quietly and try to recover his strength—and hope like hell the storm passes without crushing his narrow home.

  Somewhere from inside him a question cannot help but rise unbidden to his lips. What next, he wonders. What in God’s name is it going to be next?

  12

  Assistance

  Prairie Portage Station, Quetico Provincial Park, Thursday, August 6, 1998

  As the Chattanooga group nears the other canoe party, they can see it’s from Sommers, their base. They paddle like hell across the blue expanse of Carp Lake, hailing as they deepen their strokes. By the time they skid up alongside, it’s a little after 5:00.

  “Wha’s up?” one of the other group asks. He is weathered and lean and sits comfortably astern with a paddle across his legs.

  “We’ve lost our guide,” says Tim Jones. He is winded from paddling, and bends over to catch his breath.

  The leader scans the group. His body bends forward and stiffens, unsure he has heard it right. “Lost your guide?” he wonders.

  “Back up on the lake before Bell,” Jones says. “He walked into the woods looking for our portage and never came out.”

  The guide is incredulous. He looks for a smirk. He scans the group, searching for a familiar face. He knows that nameless lake—the connection between Fran and Bell. Like most of that country, it is rugged and remote and surrounded by brush. But in his brief season of guiding he doesn’t think he has ever heard of a guide disappearing. He looks at their faces but can only discern sharp worry and weariness.

  “Who was it?”

  “Dan Stephens.”

  Christ, he thinks. Stephens? He’s one of the best, with paddle know-how and more savvy about the woods than almost anyone in camp. “Did you call it in?”

  “Our radio’s out.”

  The leader leans forward and rummages through his own pack, pulls out the crude radio phone, and fires it up.

  Back at the base there is static on the wire, but this time the attendant is ready. He listens to the voice on the other end, recognizing the guide from a different group. He reports the group number and their location: Carp Lake. The guide is with the 801C group. It comes across the air waves clear enough to hear. The attendant waits for the pause and then responds.

  “We read you loud and clear. What’s up?”

  Hirdler and Joe Mattson have also heard the call. They come out of their offices and cross the room as the other guide explains Stephens’s disappearance. There is universal disbelief. Over the raspy radio phone, all they know for sure is Stephens has been separated from his group. They need more details. They instruct the Chattanooga group to continue to the Prairie Portage Ranger Station, at least another two hours’ paddle. At Prairie Portage, Mattson and David Japiksi, the camp chaplain, will meet them. It’s 5:19.

  Prairie Portage is a Canadian ranger station. It has two good rangers and radio connections to every emergency location across the Quetico. Whatever they need, they should be able to call in from there.

  Doug Hirdler is worried, but he knows Dan Stephens. “If anyone can walk out of those woods in one piece,” he tells others in the office, “it’s Dan.” Joe Mattson, the one who hired Stephens, who saw his résumé and had a chance to work with him through guide training, agrees.

  “If he can walk,” Mattson qualifies. In the back of Mattson’s mind he remembers a statistic about people who get lost in the woods. Most lost people are found within seventy-two hours. Mattson is not sure, but he thinks he recalls that those lost in wilderness over seventy-two hours are—more often than not—gone forever. For Stephens, he realizes, it has already been more than a day.

  Carrie Frechette and Cathy Antle, Quetico Park rangers, are busy sunup to sundown. The Prairie Portage Ranger Station is one of the primary checkpoints for anyone crossing the Canadian border. Even though the station is a half-hour boat ride up Moose Lake north of Ely, Minnesota, and in the middle of wilderness, on August days it can be more like an urban transit depot than an outpost in the Canadian woods. The log structure is small. The Canadian flag waves high on the station pole. And Carrie and Cathy busy themselves changing money, stamping and checking papers, dispensing licenses.

  Two hours earlier, at about 5:00, they received a call from Doug Hirdler at Sommers. He told them one of his groups was in some kind of trouble and Joe Mattson and David Japiksi were coming up to meet them. Now Carrie and Cathy hear the low whine of an outboard motor—they assume the boat from Sommers. Cathy looks up long enough to see a distant party of canoes crossing Bayley Bay. It must be the Sommers group.

  “Here they come,” Cathy observes.

  “Maybe we’ll find out what’s up,” Carrie suggests.

  Normally the Prairie Portage Station is staffed by a married couple. The previous year, the couple decided they’d had enough�
��of the outpost, and their marriage. If the couple’s divorce had a silver lining, the two current rangers were its beneficiaries. Carrie Frechette, Cathy Antle, and the Quetico Park system all took chances, and so far it had paid off in spades.

  The two women were almost through their first season, and they were happy with their choice. It was remote. At times it was as quiet as dusk light on a spellbound lake. At times it was anything but. They were open for business at dawn, and closed just after the sun dropped below the lake’s far western shore, making canoe travel difficult. But they loved the wilderness and reveled in the deep-woods feel of the place.

  It had been a busy season, and except for a few temporarily lost people and some minor accidents, their days were mostly spent regulating travel. The station is sparsely furnished. They have a satellite phone that operates sporadically, currently on the blink. They have a two-way radio—the Teleconnect—that is somehow patched into the phone system. That is the device Hirdler used to contact them.

  As the two remote parties approach—one from the north, one from the south—Cathy and Carrie are glad to know that at least they have means to contact the operations specialist at Quetico Park HQ in Atikokan. They suspect they’ll be on that line before the evening is out. There is still plenty of light, but it is fading and casting sideways shadows across the trees.

  “Better make sure there’s a clean spot for all of them to stay,” Carrie suggests.

  “Good idea.” Cathy walks out the door to check the nearby yard. As she scans it, looking at the approaching canoe party and the boat from the south, she knows it is large enough to manage them.

  By 7:30 everyone is assembled, and the entire bizarre episode has been explained. Cathy and Carrie ask as many questions as Mattson and the chaplain. What surprises the rangers is that Dan disappeared clear up on no-name lake. That was one hell of a long way to paddle in a day. And the Cache Bay Station was half the distance closer.