Grim Hill: Forest of Secrets

by Linda DeMeulemeester

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Remember what they said about witnesses.”

  Clive shoved his hand into the bag and fished around. His expression grew puzzled. “I … I … thought the driver kept his gun in here.”

  “He did,” I said, remembering that he’d reached inside the bag and pulled out the gray handle of a gun. Had he put the gun back in the bag? I couldn’t remember.

  “And what’s with this?” Clive pulled out a handful of dirty pebbles. “Why are they carrying around this stuff?”

  Amarjeet let out a gasp. “My uncle is a jeweler and trust me, I’ve seen those before – sort of. Those aren’t rocks at the bottom of the bag, they’re uncut diamonds.” She took the pieces Clive was holding – they filled the palm of her hand. “Look at all of them – these are worth a fortune!”

  “We’ve got their stash and I’m thinking they won’t be waiting around to get it back. Should we get going?” Amarjeet was staring anxiously at the dense trees lining the forest’s edge.

  “We can’t go south,” I said suddenly. “Those creeps will be hunting for us. They’ll see the footprints by the creek and follow us.”

  “But if we go north, no one will find us,” complained Mitch.

  “Ugh,” groaned Mia. “We’re running out of time and it’s impossible to know what we should do.”

  “I know what to do,” Sookie whispered in my ear. “I can take care of those dreadful thieves if you let me, Cat.”

  “We have to head north,” I said instead of replying to her. I sighed. Going in the opposite direction would fool the criminals, but the rescuers wouldn’t think to search for us up there either. “We should take a branch and clear away the footprints. Then we should take off our shoes and walk along the creek bed for a while.”

  “But Mitch said nobody will find us if we go that way,” Skeeter said.

  “We can always double back,” consoled Clive. “After the rescuers come and catch those guys.”

  “Exactly. We can always come back when it’s safe,” I said, even though I wasn’t so sure. There might be a search party, but would they even find the bus? It had spun off the road, and if those crooks in the helicopter wanted to camouflage it, they could do that easily.

  We all grabbed spruce branches, careful to use ones that had already fallen to the ground. We didn’t want to disturb the trees and leave more signs. We swept our prints off the mud and then pulled off our shoes and socks and used the laces to hang them around our necks. Sookie’s and Skeeter’s shoes used Velcro, so I stuffed them in my pack before wading into the water.

  “Mmm, that helps.” Only Amanda welcomed the freezing temperature – it soothed her sprained ankle.

  “The water might only be to your knees, Cat, but Skeeter and I are going to get soaked. If we don’t freeze to death first.” My sister crossed her arms and refused to budge until Jasper piggybacked Sookie and Clive piggybacked Skeeter. I carried the duffel bag – it was heavy and I was amazed Clive had been able to run with it. We kept moving forward, even as a cold ache rose from my toes to my ankles and up to my knees. But I wasn’t going to complain if nobody else was.

  Soon, my legs had numbed completely and I felt as if I were using stumps to walk. I think I even stubbed my toe on a rock, but felt nothing over the nagging agony of the icy water. I kept moving forward anyway.

  Finally, when Jasper stumbled and almost sent both himself and Sookie into the creek, Mitch piped up. “How much farther?” he asked. He gave Jasper a break and took over piggybacking Sookie.

  “We should keep moving a little longer,” said Clive, though he sounded exhausted.

  “Good idea,” I replied, not wanting Clive to outdo me. I tried to keep my mind blank and not think of the pain as I lumbered along. Finally, we scrambled onto the muddy bank of the creek. We sent Sookie and Skeeter to fetch branches to erase our footprints while the rest of us rubbed the circulation back into our feet.

  “Do you think we’ve gone far enough in the water to throw them off?” asked Amarjeet.

  Nobody wanted to wade back into the freezing water, so after a moment’s rest we started out again. We walked in the forest to avoid leaving footprints on the bank, but kept sight of the creek to make sure we didn’t go in circles. After an hour or so we stopped for another break and passed around the water bottle again. Mia and Mitch went down to the creek to collect more water and pass it through the water filter in the first aid kit. When they returned, I divided up the peanut butter crackers and Mia’s chocolate bar.

  I let the piece of chocolate dissolve slowly on my tongue. My stomach practically leaped into my throat from hunger.

  “I’ll be starved to death before nightfall,” Mitch said in sheer anguish.

  As if in answer, my stomach growled.

  “You won’t starve,” said Amanda. “We can eat wild plants.” She reached down and pulled out a bulrush. Breaking off the fuzz, she peeled back the stalk and revealed a tender shoot. Then she dug out the bulbs. “That is, if you aren’t too fussy.”

  Mitch stared at the bulrush for a second before asking, “Can we at least cook it?”

  “How do you know that’s even edible?” asked Amarjeet.

  “Trust me. I’ve eaten it,” Amanda answered ruefully.

  “Do tell,” said Mitch.

  “Last summer, my father took my sisters and me up to the Northwest Territories to visit my grandmother’s village,” explained Amanda. “It was the most boring summer of my life. My grandmother kept dragging me outside so she could teach me the Dene people’s ways. Every day my sisters and I had to gather herbs and greens and cook them for dinner.”

  “So let’s gather some of this food,” said Mitch.

  Amanda hung her head. “I hated it and complained all the time. But now I … I hope I get a chance to thank my grandmother.”

  I patted her on the shoulder and said, “You will.” Amanda lifted her head and managed a half smile. But then we both remembered we weren’t exactly friends and turned away. Except that even thinking about arguing over Zach’s attention seemed petty and stupid at the moment.

  “So should we build a fire and start cooking?” suggested Mitch.

  Clive shook his head. “We should go along for a while longer.”

  Though my heart sank, I agreed with him, and with a faint nod, so did Jasper. Skeeter drew himself up and offered Sookie a hand. Even though she’d been piggybacked, dark shadows circled my sister’s eyes. Skeeter seemed good to go – that didn’t surprise me, since he always had energy to spare. Except –

  “I’m not walking anymore until we get dinner,” Skeeter demanded.

  “Amanda can show us what to look for on the way so we can gather food for dinner,” I said. “C’mon,” I coaxed Sookie and Skeeter. “This way we can cook a feast.”

  “I know plenty of stuff we can cook. Nobody asked me,” muttered Sookie.

  We kept moving, though more and more slowly, as the shadows deepened. The warmer afternoon faded and a bitter wind rose. We could hear its shrieks as it whistled through the craggy cliffs surrounding the valley.

  There was no formal agreement about when to make camp. But we all staggered to a stop when we entered a small clearing. We piled the edible leaves, rushes, berries, flowers, and roots we had found along the way onto a big rock. Even if we managed to build a fire and cook this stuff up, it would hardly be more than a salad for dinner. I wondered if there were any fish down in that creek. Maybe we could make some kind of net with the emergency blanket or with a pack.

  “We’re going to need some kind of shelter,” said Clive. “It’s getting cold.”

  In the distance, I heard a bone-chilling howl. Prickly shivers erupted all over my skin. Everyone stopped what they were doing and stood stalk-still.

  The dreadful howl echoed across the valley and was joined by another and then another. My heart flipped and sped up.

  Wolves!

  CHAPTER 10 - Deadly Encounters

  “WE’D BETTER BUILD a shelter
fast,” Amarjeet said weakly, as more howls echoed across Headless Valley.

  We scrambled around as we argued over how to begin. Mitch shook his head, saying, “I’ve never built anything without a hammer and nails before – not even a birdhouse.”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Jasper. “Woodwork wasn’t my best subject.” Clive muttered something about rope.

  “Amanda, did your grandmother ever teach you about building shelters?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. But she took me to a sweat lodge once and it was like a small shelter.” Amanda frowned in concentration. “Come to think of it, they put heated stones in a pit inside the lodge, which made it really hot. Maybe we could do something like that?”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Clive, who wasn’t one to dole out compliments. “Then we can extinguish the fire and won’t have to worry about smoke leaving a signal for those crooks to follow.”

  “No fire? Um, would that shelter hold up against wolves?” Amarjeet scanned the ragged edge of the forest, as if anticipating a wolf or a bear to crash through at any second.

  “No,” Amanda said flatly. “I doubt it. It’s just a bunch of branches heaped up in the shape of an igloo.”

  “Wolves won’t approach us,” I said carefully. “Not if we’re in a group. They would be as wary of us as we are of them.” At least, that’s what I remembered from my science project.

  “Unless they’ve hunted humans before,” said Amanda, who had actually spent time up north, so I figured she knew more about wolves than I did from my research.

  “Man-eating wolves?” Skeeter yelped.

  “That’s not what I said, exactly …” said Amanda. Then she looked at us, her eyes slightly alarmed. “The old aunties in the village would tell tales – I thought it was like the boogie man, you know, to keep us from wandering off.”

  “Cat,” Sookie stood on her tiptoes and whispered in my ear, “maybe I should use my mag –”

  “No,” I cut her off. Then loudly, I said, “Let’s focus on what we have to do first.”

  “Shelter,” said Jasper.

  “Heat,” said Clive.

  “Food,” said Mitch.

  Then we all launched into the work.

  While Jasper, Clive, Skeeter, and Amanda set out to gather spruce and willow branches for the shelter, and Mia and Amarjeet dragged large stones up from the creek, Mitch, Sookie, and I set to work creating a fire.

  We piled up all the papers from our packs that we’d received from school. I had to stop and think how Orientation had only happened yesterday, and yet it seemed forever ago – that part of my life was quickly fading into a distant memory. I shook off that thought and crumpled more papers under the kindling Mitch had laid out in the shape of a pyramid.

  Try as he might, Mitch could not get the fire started by rubbing two sticks together. “This wood’s too green,” he said dismally. Then we tried smacking rocks together to get a spark. No luck.

  “Wait,” I said. “I’ve got an idea.” I grabbed Lea’s mirror from my pack and set it up to reflect the last of the sun’s rays that made it through the trees. I shone the mirror onto the paper.

  “It’s getting too dark,” said Mitch. “That’s not going to work.”

  Then a burst of light erupted from the mirror – a strange, green light. Next thing we knew, the paper ignited and Mitch was quickly chucking pieces of wood into the fire.

  “Wow, that was weird,” he said cheerily as he fed the flames.

  “Where’d you get that mirror, Cat?” Sookie’s voice took on a strange lilt, sort of a hollow sound, like the wind blowing through the rocks. I stuffed the mirror back into my pack and mumbled, “Never mind.”

  “A little help here,” Clive called to us. “Night’s closing in fast.”

  Clive, Skeeter, and Jasper dumped armfuls of branches into a pile. Under Amanda’s direction, we wove the willow branches in and out, building the shelter up from the ground like a snow fort. Then we covered the frame with spruce boughs. We huddled on our knees under the low shelter, scooping dirt out from the center of the floor. This was hard because we had no shovels. First we used stout sticks to loosen the dirt and then we used our hands and backpacks to scoop out the dirt and dump it outside. We took more spruce branches and scattered them loosely across the ground under the shelter. With us working together, it only took about an hour and a half – but after the day we had, it was still pretty exhausting.

  “If we snuggle up like a litter of puppies, we should all be able to cram in for the night,” Amanda said. “And while it doesn’t exactly resemble the sweat lodge I was in, I … I think my grandmother would be proud.”

  It looked like a sorry mess to me, but I wasn’t about to say so. Besides, it was definitely better than nothing. Jasper and Amarjeet hauled back large, wet stones from the creek and dumped the first one on the fire. For a few seconds water spat and sizzled, until finally the stone glowed red. It was Skeeter’s job to wave the smoke, dispersing it, but some still trailed up to the sky.

  “How are we going to get hot stones into the shelter?” asked Amanda. “I think they used a shovel at the sweat lodge.”

  We mused on this until Mitch grabbed his backpack, placed it at the edge of the fire, and then used a stick to roll the stone onto the pack. “Now we can drag the rocks into the hut.”

  But the pack started smoldering along the way. When we rolled the stone off there was nothing underneath but a gooey plastic mess. I started coughing from the burning acrid stink.

  “Whoops,” said Mitch. “Guess that’s not going to work.”

  “Not so fast. Let’s soak the packs in the creek first,” I suggested. Mia and Clive volunteered their backpacks since theirs were empty anyways. We drenched them in the creek. When we rolled the first hot rocks onto the sodden pack, the pack smoked and smoldered but held together as we dragged the heated rock into the pit inside the shelter.

  I sure hoped this would work. It was getting cold.

  “I’m starved,” complained Skeeter. “If I don’t eat soon I’m going to pass out or even die.”

  “I hear you, man,” Mitch said woefully.

  We went back to the creek to gather more plants for dinner. Amanda showed us how to look for cattails and how to dig deeper into the wet soil for the long roots. “You can even eat the flowers,” she said.

  Mitch started gnawing on a root. “Not bad,” he mumbled between bites. “Sort of like raw potato.”

  Sookie said that a raw potato didn’t sound tasty at all. I hoped she wouldn’t get stubborn. We had to eat something and there wasn’t going to be any frosty oats cereal in the forest.

  We gathered watercress and water lilies and we pulled out bulbs from the mud that Amanda called duck potatoes. Farther upstream we discovered more lilies from another patch of plants. The leaves were shaped like arrowheads. When Amanda pulled some out, Sookie shouted, “Stop! Those leaves are water hemlock and they’re poisonous.”

  “What do you mean?” Color drained from Amanda’s face. “We gathered a bunch of these greens downstream. What’s wrong with this patch?”

  But I grabbed Amanda’s hand. “Listen to Sookie. She knows about plants too.” I’m not sure how much Amanda remembered about my sister’s plant lore and the havoc it had caused, but she dropped the leaf. It fell into the creek where it bobbed like a toy boat before sinking.

  If there’s one thing my little sister knew a lot about, it was poisonous plants. Sookie had once been the apprentice of a wicked banshee named Bea, who taught her dangerous magic potions using plants from a deadly garden.

  “It looks exactly the same as the other leaves,” said Amarjeet slowly. “But Sookie knows this kind of stuff, doesn’t she?” Amarjeet rubbed her head as if waking from a dream.

  Jasper nodded. “Yeah, Sookie would know.”

  “There’s one important difference with these plants,” said Sookie in her typical, take-charge voice. But this time I wasn’t irritated by her bossiness. “Their stems are t
inged purple,” she explained with authority. “Definitely a bad sign. Also look how all the other leaves we gathered are full of tiny holes and jagged edges from insect and animal nibbles.” Then her chiming voice darkened, turning almost sinister. “Nothing has touched these leaves – not a fish, not a frog, not a bug. That’s how you can tell these leaves are poisonous.”

  “What would have happened if we mixed those leaves in with the rest of the food?” Clive asked.

  Sookie straightened up, looking livelier than she had for hours. With an almost gleeful tone, she said, “Nasty things – even eating a little piece of root would mean a dastardly death.” And then with even more relish she added, “– after you’ve bitten off your tongue in the throes of agony.”

  “Cool,” said Skeeter.

  Amanda paled even more. “My grandmother always checked over the plants my sisters and I gathered. I … should have paid more attention. Sookie, could you look over the rest of the plants I found?”

  Sookie practically crowed with pleasure as she sorted through the greens.

  We all decided we had enough food for dinner. Amarjeet and Jasper found a large, flat stone, which they carried back and set over part of the fire. We threw all the plants we’d collected on top of the stone to cook. The plants sizzled and I couldn’t believe my mouth actually began to water. Yum, bulrushes …

  Starving, we stuffed the plants down our throats – they tasted like cooked salad, only bitter and a lot chewier. Sookie grimaced, gagged a couple of times, and with an expression of utter misery, she took another mouthful. For dessert we allowed ourselves peanuts and the last of the chocolate. My stomach finally stopped growling, but the plants weren’t easy to digest. While the girls tried to burp quietly, the guys started a belching contest.

  We sat around the fire while the sun dropped off the horizon. Mia had snuggled next to Mitch, and I couldn’t help but notice that Jasper was stealing glances at them. He’d pretty much given up hope that Mia would ever look his way instead of Mitch’s.

  When Jasper saw me watching, he made as if he’d been studying the skies. “We’re far enough north that the sky should stay twilight instead of turning pitch black,” he explained. “So we could be up all night waiting for the stars to come out.”