The Wolf Keepers

by Elise Broach

  He seemed to be walking faster, and even without the weight of the backpack, Lizzie had a difficult time keeping pace. “I got tired of it there,” he said.

  “But … you had a place to sleep, and food, and people taking care of you,” she said. “Even if you were tired of it, wasn’t it still better than running away? Having to hide and sleep out in the cold at night?”

  “I told you, I like being on my own,” he said. His voice was hard.

  “Listen, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.… I’m not going to change my mind about coming with you. I just wish … I mean, it seems like you wouldn’t have run away for no reason, and I wish…”

  He spun around. “You wish what?” he demanded.

  She looked at him, saying nothing. The answer was, she wished they were good-enough friends by now for him to tell her why.

  His expression softened. “Nothing happened,” he said. “My foster parents, they’re all right. They try, you know? But there’s a ton of kids, people always coming and going. It’s not like it matters whether I’m there or not.”

  “I’m sure it matters to someone.”

  “Well, to Jesse,” Tyler amended. “But he left.”

  “Who’s Jesse?” Lizzie asked. “Your brother?”

  “Foster brother. But he came the same time I did.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “He joined the army.”

  Tyler turned and started walking again. “So now you know the story,” he said.

  Lizzie followed in silence, thinking that stories were like that—one detail was a boulder poking out of a creek, with so much more below the surface. People were like that, too, she decided … certainly Tyler was.

  “Hey, we’re at the top,” he announced.

  The trail turned at the edge of the hillside, about to dip back into the trees, but for a brief moment, they could see the valley again, sparkling in green and brown and gray and silver, stunning in its vastness. The sky blazed above them, and steep bluffs rose majestically all around.

  Tyler’s whole face lit with excitement. “I could look at this forever.”

  Lizzie smiled at him. “You sound like John Muir,” she said.

  “Yeah, I really get that crazy dude now. Why would he ever want to leave?”

  “He didn’t,” Lizzie said. “And when he had to leave, he kept coming back. Wait, hand me my notebook—I want to read you something.”

  Tyler set the backpack between his knees and fished around for Lizzie’s journal. It had a greasy splotch on the cover now, and the metal spiral was stretched and bent. She spread it across her lap and turned to the page she wanted. “Listen, this is something he wrote about Yosemite:

  “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

  Tyler grinned, staring out over the endless landscape of cliffs and forests. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Lizzie took a deep breath of the clean mountain air. “It feels like nothing else matters here.”

  She pressed the notebook against her knees, trying to flatten it. “Know what else John Muir said? That ‘most people are on the world, not in it.’”

  Tyler nodded vigorously. “Yeah, that’s right. But here, we’re really in it.”

  They sat for a few minutes longer, feeling fully part of the world. Then Tyler asked, “Do you think we’ll find it?”

  “Tenaya Creek? Sure, the trail goes there.”

  “No,” Tyler said impatiently. “The lost cabin.”

  Lizzie gazed out over the valley. “People have been looking for it forever,” she said. “Think of all the people who’ve come to Yosemite since John Muir lived here. Why wouldn’t one of them have found it by now?”

  “Well, your cousin Clare Hodges did,” Tyler reminded her. “Remember the photo? She and that Kitty woman were standing right in front of it.”

  Lizzie thought of the picture of her cousin standing by the creek, with the faint outline of John Muir’s house on stilts hovering behind her. “But that wasn’t so long after John Muir lived there. Now it’s a hundred years later. More even. So why wouldn’t other people have found it?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know where to look,” Tyler suggested.

  Lizzie paused. “There are swarms of people here in the summer. Seriously, it’s like the zoo. Even the really steep trails have a lot of people on them.”

  “There aren’t people on this trail.”

  Lizzie saw the longing in his face. “That’s true. It’s a huge park, so I’m sure there are lots of places people have never been. But … well, I’d be surprised if we could find the cabin after all these years when nobody else has been able to.”

  Tyler shrugged off this logic. “But we saw the photo, right? From your Grandma May’s apartment. So we know what the cabin looks like, and we know what that place around it looks like.”

  “Yes,” Lizzie agreed. “And we have my notebook.” She ruffled through the pages until she found her sketch and notes, angling the image toward Tyler.

  “Hey, that’s pretty good,” Tyler said, pleased. “It looks just like the picture.”

  Lizzie summoned the faded photograph in her mind: the ramshackle tree house on stilts, the creek flowing in front of it, and the dense vegetation all around. John Muir’s cabin! Where Ralph Waldo Emerson, that man her father had told her about, had been. Could it have survived from the 1870s? What were the chances, really?

  Tyler stood. “Come on, it’s downhill from here.”

  Lizzie closed the notebook and slid it carefully into the backpack, trying to protect it from the messy jumble of food. Tyler heaved the pack onto his shoulder, and once again, they started down the trail, which wound along the hillside and then dipped into a redwood grove.

  Chapter 26

  TENAYA CREEK

  “HOW MUCH FARTHER do you think?” Tyler asked, after they’d been walking for a while. Downhill was much easier, but the trail was rough, so there was still a bit of climbing required.

  “We should be close,” Lizzie answered. “The sign said four miles, and it feels like we’ve been walking a long time.”

  “Let’s stop and have something to eat.”

  He plopped down on a large boulder and began unpacking the containers of half-eaten food from the day before.

  None of it looked very appetizing to Lizzie, but she was hungry, too. Tyler stuffed the last remnant of hamburger into his mouth and handed her a glutinous pile of damp onion rings.

  She took one and nibbled it distastefully. “Isn’t it funny how something can taste so different hot than it does cold?”

  “Yeah,” Tyler agreed. “Anything that’s greasy tastes bad cold. Cold pizza … yuck. And things that are supposed to be cold, like milk, taste bad when they’re warm.”

  Lizzie thought of him sifting through trash cans at the snack bar and felt bad about complaining. She ate another onion ring. “We shouldn’t eat too much,” she said after a minute. “Since we don’t know how long we’ll be out here. And it will make us thirsty.”

  Tyler nodded, closing the lid of the cardboard box with the onion rings in it. “Maybe we can find some berries,” he said hopefully.

  Lizzie shook her head. “We shouldn’t eat any of those. They could be poisonous. It’s too hard to tell without a guidebook.”

  “A guidebook would be great.” Tyler sounded wistful.

  “Well, they have those at Yosemite Village…” Lizzie said, and then at the look on his face: “Never mind, let’s just keep going. We’ll figure something out.”

  Privately, she had no idea how. They were in the middle of the woods, in a park that spanned hundreds of thousands of acres. She remembered her father telling her that Yosemite was the size of the state of Rhode Island. How were they going to find food?

  But there was nothing she could
do about that now. She shook off her fears and sprang to her feet. “Let’s go. It can’t be too much farther to Tenaya Creek.”

  * * *

  They kept walking along the rough trail, winding their way down to the valley floor. Lizzie’s legs ached from climbing, and she was sweaty and thirsty. The path grew flatter, and finally they came to another juncture with a sign that read TENAYA CREEK, 1 MILE.

  “We’re almost there,” Lizzie told Tyler.

  “Huh,” he said. “That’s still pretty far.”

  Lizzie checked her watch. “It’s three o’clock. We just need to make sure we find a good place to camp before it gets dark.” The long summer evenings would be a help to them. They had plenty of time before sunset.

  “Okay,” Tyler said gamely. “Let’s go faster.” He picked up his pace, notwithstanding the heavy backpack, and Lizzie hurried to keep up.

  They were rounding one of the trail’s many switchbacks when Lizzie heard a noise down the hill on their right.

  She stopped and scanned the slope.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked Tyler.

  He stopped, too, and followed her gaze. The woods seemed quiet now.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I heard something move.”

  Tyler came back to stand beside her. They heard it again: loud rustling, the crackling of branches.

  “Is it people?” he asked.

  “Maybe.” She peered into the trees. She was still surprised they hadn’t seen any hikers. But this was a narrow, difficult trail, far from the tourist activity in Yosemite Village, and it didn’t appear to lead to any of the park’s major sights, like Bridalveil Fall or Half Dome.

  The rustling grew louder. Whatever it was certainly didn’t care about being heard. Lizzie moved closer to Tyler and nervously searched the bushes.

  “Wait…” Tyler whispered. “Over there!”

  Then Lizzie saw it. Ambling heavily through the underbrush, twigs snapping beneath its feet, was a large black bear. It walked toward them, its massive haunches rippling. It was so close Lizzie could see its broad, flared nose and small eyes.

  “What do we do?” Tyler asked, his voice low.

  “Shhhh,” Lizzie said. “Keep walking. I don’t want it to smell the food.”

  “Will it chase us?”

  “I hope not.”

  There were often problems with bears in the park, she remembered from the times she’d been camping with Mike. They ripped car doors off hinges and broke windows in search of anything that smelled or looked edible, including fragrant suntan lotion. But they generally didn’t bother people. She glanced anxiously at the bear. It was still coming toward them, in no particular hurry, meandering sloppily through the brush.

  Tyler started walking again, glancing over his shoulder, and Lizzie hurried close behind.

  “What if it follows us?” Tyler whispered. “Should we climb a tree?”

  Lizzie scanned the tall redwoods surrounding them and shook her head. “It won’t help. That bear can climb trees better than we can.”

  Tyler’s eyes widened. “It’s still coming. Should we run?”

  Lizzie knew how fast bears were—as fast as a horse. “That won’t do any good,” she told him. “We can’t outrun it. If we have to, we can throw it the backpack. That’s all it wants.”

  “No, we can’t,” Tyler said sharply. “That’s all we have.”

  Lizzie looked back and saw the bear sniffing the air. Did it smell their food? Her pulse quickened.

  And then she crashed into Tyler, who had stopped dead in the path.

  “Lizzie, look,” he whispered. Standing in the woods some distance ahead were the wolves. They stood together with their ears pricked, utterly still. Lizzie wasn’t sure she would even have noticed them without Tyler’s warning, but now her eyes were riveted on Lobo.

  He stared back at her with his steady, unflappable gaze, and Lizzie felt again the spark of connection. Was he chasing her? Protecting her? It was impossible to know. She reminded herself that it was probably neither.

  The bear saw the wolves. It rose on its hind legs, its front paws dangling against its massive chest. Tyler cowered. “What’s it doing?”

  Lizzie’s heart thudded against her ribs, the sound of it filling her ears.

  “I don’t know.”

  A moment later, the two wolves disappeared into the trees, crossing the trail and trotting purposefully down the slope.

  The bear stared after them, then dropped to all fours and turned its attention to a fallen tree. It began scraping the bark aggressively with its paws.

  Lizzie let out a long breath. “Keep walking. We’ll be okay.”

  “Whew,” Tyler whispered. “See what I mean? It really is like those wolves are following us.”

  “Or leading us,” Lizzie said. “They’re going the same way we are. But there are still only two of them.… I hope Athena is okay.”

  Tyler shook his head. “Easier for us to worry about two wolves than three.”

  Together, they hustled down the path. Lizzie kept looking back at the bear, but it remained where it was, busily digging at the rotten log.

  And then they heard the faint sound of water.

  “The creek!” Tyler said. “It must be.”

  Abruptly, the trail ended, and they were standing at the shore of a wide, shallow stream. The brown water swirled and rippled over rocks, cascading past them in foamy ribbons. A small meadow opened out from the opposite bank, but their side of the creek was clogged with brush and small trees, interrupted by craggy piles of rocks. There was a wooden sign at the end of the path that read TENAYA CANYON, 2 MILES.

  “Look, Lizzie!” Tyler said, his eyes bright with excitement. “Tenaya Canyon—where the cabin might be!”

  Lizzie stared at the sign. “But see what it says?” She read the text at the bottom of the sign aloud: “Warning: Trail ends here. Travel beyond this point is dangerous and strongly discouraged.”

  Tyler shrugged. “Yeah, like travel up to this point hasn’t been dangerous?”

  Lizzie frowned at him. “This is different,” she said. “It’s the canyon that was cursed by Chief Tenaya, remember?”

  She took the backpack from him and pulled out her notebook again, thumbing through it until she got to the page with her sketch of Muir’s lost cabin. “Look, I copied down the curse. ‘Any white person who enters the canyon will die.’”

  Tyler punched the air with his fist. “Sweet!”

  Lizzie looked at him blankly.

  “Don’t you get it? It’s just against white people,” he said happily. “It doesn’t apply to me.”

  Lizzie swallowed. “Well, it applies to me.”

  They stared at each other across the notebook, over Lizzie’s pencil image of the cabin on stilts.

  “What are you going to do,” she asked, “leave me here? I didn’t leave you.”

  “Of course I’m not leaving you,” Tyler said easily. “You’ll be fine if we stick together. Nothing can happen to you if you’re with me.”

  That had hardly been true from the first moment she met him, Lizzie thought, starting with the incident in the food court.

  But that was so long ago—not in terms of time, but in terms of friendship—that it didn’t even seem relevant now. Four days ago, she hadn’t even known Tyler existed. How was that possible?

  She pointed to the brambly shore of the creek. “Look … there isn’t anywhere to walk.”

  Tyler nodded, a smile spreading across his face. “I know! That means nobody’s been here. Except, maybe, John Muir.”

  He looked at her with such a secret, shining happiness that Lizzie’s qualms almost faded. What if they really could find the cabin? After all this time! The hidden, historic house of John Muir! But when her gaze shifted to the creek, spilling frothily out of a dense wilderness, she was filled with trepidation.

  “Tyler…” she began.

  “We’ll be okay,” he told her. “Remember?
We’re not on the world, we’re in it.”

  And he took off along the shore. Lizzie had no choice but to stumble after him.

  Chapter 27

  WATERFALL

  WHILE THE SHORE of the creek was flatter terrain than they’d been hiking, it was so choked with brush and rocks that nearly every step required a decision. At first, Lizzie led the way, but when she got too tired of bushwhacking, Tyler went first. They took turns carrying the backpack, and Lizzie’s shoulders ached from the bite of the strap. She noticed that they seemed to be entering the canyon now, with rock walls that loomed steeply on either side.

  She thought of Chief Tenaya’s curse. What if Tyler was wrong? What if he wasn’t safe from the curse … or what if he was and she wasn’t? But then she remembered that this was where her cousin Clare Hodges had been, so long ago, and near where her mother and father had hiked once, when they were young, before she was born. The thought that she was walking along the same ground her mother might have walked gave her a strange comfort, like a dangled rope of courage.

  The creek rushed beside them, thickly bordered by bushes. There were small, secret beds of ferns and little glistening pools. Lizzie felt almost as if they were wandering back in time, into a primeval grove. It was easy to imagine how this place had looked when the first explorers traveled through it. Or when Clare Hodges and Kitty Tatch came here to have their picture taken by George Fiske.

  But as foretold by the sign, there was no trail, and no evidence of humans anywhere.

  Tenaya Creek became broader, deeper, and faster as they hiked farther into the canyon, which meant that the large rocks closest to the edge were wet and slippery.

  “Watch out!” Lizzie warned Tyler more than once, raising her voice over the rush of the water. Her father had told her stories of hikers being swept into the strong currents of the park’s many creeks, dashed to their deaths on rocks, or drowned.

  “I am,” Tyler answered impatiently. “I won’t fall.”

  Twice Lizzie herself stumbled, scraping her palms on the rough boulders. The sound of the water grew louder and louder, an insistent roar.

  “Tyler! Look!” Lizzie pointed. Far ahead of them, through the trees, she glimpsed a waterfall. It cascaded over a cliff, tumbling thirty or forty feet in multiple slender streams. At its base, a pile of large rocks glistened, framed by a dense thicket of low-growing trees and bushes.