Stormer’s Pass

by Benjamin Laskin

  “Don’t worry,” Steve said. “It’s just a friendly little get-together. Heck, everybody’s probably gone home already anyhow.”

  Max knelt down and cupped Beowulf’s head between his hands. The dog’s tongue lashed out and licked him across the face. “You listen good to Uncle Steve. And remember, it’s a jungle out there, so don’t go poking your puss into places it shouldn’t be. And look both ways when crossing the street, okay?”

  Beowulf barked and twirled his tail like a propeller.

  “Don’t you worry about Beowulf, Professor,” Steve said, slapping his thigh. The dog whirled and jumped up on him. “We’re going to have a great time.”

  Mr. Thoreson coughed and cleared his throat. “Your idea of a good time is something to worry about.”

  “Well, don’t. Come on, boy.” Steve walked off with the dog at his side. “So, Beowulf,” he said, “when was the last time you got any?” Beowulf whimpered and reared like a horse. “That’s what I thought. Well, I know this gorgeous black lab…”

  The weather on their side, Max and Mr. Thoreson made good time. They struck out for the farthest peak and marched as the crow flew. Neither wanted to admit that it was quite possible they were headed in the wrong direction. They walked straight through till dusk, resting only a few times. They set up camp in a grove of aspen trees, made a fire, and ate a meal of beans and potatoes which they wrapped in tin foil and tossed onto the coals to cook. Exhausted and sore, they climbed into their tent early and fell asleep as soon as they zipped up their sleeping bags.

  Up first again, Max rejuvenated the fire and boiled some water. He sat on a log and stared into the dark woods trying to recall a dream. The morning air was cold, but the fire quickly warmed him. He felt surprisingly good, not nearly as sore as he thought he would be.

  A stiff and creaking Mr. Thoreson joined him after about an hour and forced down Max’s pasty oatmeal and a cup of thick, black coffee, pebbly with grains. “No wonder your restaurant went down the tubes,” he said, spitting coffee granules from his lips.

  “Have some more oatmeal,” Max said. “You’ll need the energy.”

  “Are you kidding? This stuff is so heavy my socks won’t stay up. It weighs more than my ruck.”

  When dawn broke, they were already well on their way. The distant peak seemed no closer, and when they stopped for lunch alongside a swift-flowing creek, each secretly wondered if it wasn’t all a wild goose chase. They ate egg salad sandwiches, munched on trail mix, and swigged water from their canteens, which they refilled in the creek.

  Then they were off again, trudging through snow that at times was knee deep. Tired of the scenery and the monotonous sound of their own footsteps, they played a game the professor and Aidos used to play. One of them quoted a famous writer or thinker, and the other had to guess who said it. It wasn’t much of a game but at least it took their minds off the ache in their backs.

  Mid-afternoon of the second day they heard the sound of a helicopter whacking its way towards them. They were caught out in the open and could do nothing but stare dumbly upwards as it shot past.

  “That’s the sheriff’s bird,” Max said.

  “They’ll be where we’re going in an hour,” Hardy said. “It’ll take us two days.”

  Max shrugged. “We can’t stop now. At least we’re headed in the right direction.”

  They watched the helicopter soar towards a distant peak until it was out of sight. They picked up their pace and marched onward. Come dusk, they set up camp, feasted on “beanies and weenies,” as Max fondly referred to his favorite childhood dish, listened to the howl of distant wolves, and crashed.

  Again the first one up, Max stepped outside the tent into a misty drizzle. He rekindled the fire and waited for the water to boil. As he waited, Max pondered the night’s dreams, shreds of which still flapped in his mind, but he could make no sense of any of them. He thought about Steve and the others and wondered how things fared back home. He thought about his mother and Ms. Winters too. He missed them.

  Max inhaled the musky sweetness of morning. The chilly air warmed him. The hard rock he sat on was a cushioned throne. The crackling fire felt friendly and sociable. He looked about and saw the snow around him as a fluffy blanket pulled snugly up to the chin of the world, keeping it warm. He was alive and everything around him was alive.

  He thought about Katie. He never answered her letter. Would he ever see her again?

  And then there was Aidos. ‘What do you make of her, Maxxy-boy?’ he thought. ‘Admit it, you love her too. You hound dog, you can’t be in love with two girls at the same time! No? Well I can, and I am. Damn, I’d marry either one of them in a second it they’d have me… Oh, life!’

  The clatter of the lid on the boiling water snapped him from his daydream. He set about fixing breakfast when he heard a terrible growl.

  “What did you say?” Max shouted.

  Growl.

  “What? I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  Growl!

  “What? Come out here. I’m about to make breakfast.”

  Max heard the zipper on the tent rip open and turned just in time to duck underneath a soaring size eleven hiking boot. The professor was on his knees in his long underwear, holding the tent flap open with one hand and clutching at his throat with the other.

  “Get out of my kitchen!” His voice was hoarse and gravelly.

  “Are you okay? You sound…oh, man. Don’t tell me you’re sick!”

  Hardy answered with a harsh, painful cough.

  “Well, that’s just great,” Max said. “I can’t believe you’d let yourself get sick at a time like this. Stay away from me, phlegm face… Here, I’ll make you some coffee—”

  “No!” Hardy croaked. “You breakdown camp. I’ll cook.”

  “But you’re sick.”

  “Don’t touch anything,” he snarled. “I’ll be right out. Toss me my boot.”

  Max picked up the damp, heavy boot and dropped it into the tent. “I’m just trying to help.”

  “Yeah, right,” Hardy said in a low, scratchy whisper. “Put me out of my misery, I know…”

  “What? Speak up.”

  “Nothing!”

  After a breakfast of scrambled eggs with onion and potatoes they were off again. Max lent Hardy his walking stick, and without telling him, he lightened the load in the professor’s pack by ten pounds, adding the weight to his own. Mr. Thoreson didn’t notice the difference and began to lag behind anyway. Max slowed to a stop, pretended to take extreme interest in some fungus growing on a decomposing log, and after Mr. Thoreson caught up to him, paced himself accordingly.

  “How ya doing, Doc?”

  “Fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “Then why did you ask?”

  “Ignore it,” Max said. “Pretend it isn’t there and it’ll go away. That’s what I do when I catch cold. Those buggers thrive on attention.”

  “I ignore you and you don’t go away.”

  They both laughed and the professor broke into a spasm of coughing.

  “Dude,” Max scolded, “cover your mouth when you do that!”

  By noon the sun had broken through the mist. It was shaping up to be a nice day. Two hours later they stopped for lunch.

  Ahead was the summit of the mountain they had been ascending. Max told Mr. Thoreson to wait while he went to have a look. He trudged along through the thick woods, serenaded by birds in the treetops. He saw rabbits shoot across his path, heard the chatter of chipmunks, and spotted three squirrels, a raccoon, and two deer. He even thought he glimpsed a panther, but he couldn’t be sure. The sight of so much wildlife thrilled him. Was not he, Tyrannis-Max, wildlife, too? Hadn’t his teachers and elders been calling him a ‘wild man’ for as long as he could remember? He smirked and felt distinguished. He was in good company.

  Atop the summit he had a clear, unhindered view for miles in every direction. Max lifted his binoculars to his eyes and swept t
hem slowly back and forth. He stopped and adjusted the focus. He turned and ran.

  When he returned to Mr. Thoreson he found him dozing against a tree.

  “Wake up!”

  The professor opened one eye, saw Max panting in front of him, and closed his eye again. “Back so soon?”

  “Come on,” Max said urgently. “We gotta go.” He put out his hand and yanked the professor to his feet. Handing Hardy his ruck, Max said, “I spotted the helicopter.”

  “Where?”

  “Not far. Come on.”

  Hardy coughed. “Great.”

  “Maybe not,” Max said. “Maybe not great at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It crashed.”

  “Crashed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How could they crash?”

  “Things crash,” Max said. “I don’t know—but we should hurry.”

  When they got to the summit, Max showed the professor the location of the helicopter. The copter’s bubbled nose was buried in the snow, its tail held upright by a tree. No bodies were visible.

  Max said, “What do you think?”

  “No way to tell if they were coming or going. Aidos might have been in there.”

  They hiked as fast as Mr. Thoreson was able, but by nightfall they were only at the bottom of the valley. Mr. Thoreson had grown much weaker, and Max no longer thought Hardy had a cold. He hacked more violently than ever, and shivered too. His face was pale and his eyes looked red and moist.

  Max set up the tent and told Mr. Thoreson to rest while he collected wood and made a fire. The professor made some feeble protests but did as he was told.

  When Max returned to the tent with a cup of hot tea, he found Mr. Thoreson wrapped in his sleeping bag convulsed in shivers. He sat by Hardy’s side and held his head so he could sip at the tea. Max removed his jacket and spread it over the professor’s sleeping bag, and then he dabbed at the beads of sweat on Hardy’s forehead with a bandana. Max had prepared some steaming oatmeal, his best batch yet, but Hardy could not be persuaded to eat anything. Max sat quietly by his side and ate the whole pot.

  “Lousy timing, Professor,” Max said.

  Hardy nodded.

  “Can I get you anything? Water? How about a biscuit?”

  He shook his head, no.

  “Do you have to pee or anything? …Well, I do.”

  When Max returned, he was relieved to see that Hardy was snoring. He stripped and climbed into his own bag. After some trouble, he finally drifted off to sleep.

  A few hours later, Max left a note that he had gone to check out the crash and would be back by noon. For three hours Max scuttled through the dark, primordial mist. He tramped over boulders and fallen logs and through the damp heavy undergrowth that flourished on the forest floor. He hiked straight ahead—over, under, or through every obstacle to avoid veering from his course and getting lost.

  He followed a vague homing instinct that seemed to be guiding him along. Once or twice he felt pangs of panic but he staved them off with the strangely comforting irony that he was truly no more lost there than anywhere else. He made no great distinction between being lost in the woods or in life in general. Often he had felt lost and stranded on the streets of Pinecrest, though physically he knew every square inch of the town he grew up in. Now he felt physically lost, but oddly it lacked the psychic disorientation he had often felt in the most familiar of surroundings. He remembered Aidos telling him once: “No matter what we may feel or think in our most distressing times, we are never really lost, but always arriving, and always leaving, and everywhere was home to the person who was not afraid.”

  The first rays of light found Max perched forty feet above the ground on the limb of a five-century-old pine tree. He always felt a thrill when climbing a tree. He thought tree climbing, unlike many childhood adventures, was an amusement that age did not diminish. To climb a tree aroused something far older than childhood memories. The oddly comforting feel of a tree’s limbs seemed to awaken in him a time preceding even mythology’s earliest memories. Nearly every day for the past eight months, Max had made it a point to rise, go outside, ascend a tree, and catch the first glimmers of dawn. His morning trysts had the components of religious discipline—meditation, prayer, and a bowing in his heart.

  Max thought every dawn was unique, but none so far had touched him as profoundly as this one did. Never before had he climbed so high. He thought he detected in the tree a sensibility like that of an ancient patriarch for its great, great grandchild. He felt as if the tree had been expecting him. Its great age betokened a saner wisdom than anything modern man could conceive. This, Max thought, was the Tree of Life. Its hard, woody bark exuded a fragrance, an almost palpable breath, gentler and more serene than that of a sleeping infant. In the whole wide universe there was nothing, he felt, more beautiful than a tree.

  When the dawn came, its pastels filtering through the outstretched boughs of the pine tree, Max was overcome with the desire to join in with the chorus of feathered songsters and sing his own wild notes. But he didn’t. He just listened, his feet dangling freely over the forest floor below.

  Finally, the sun having arisen, Max held up his binoculars and searched for the fallen helicopter. He spotted it a mile off. Closer now, he could better view the damage. It was worse than he thought. He climbed down from the tree and scurried in the direction of the crash.

  55

  Eddy Bear

  When Max arrived at the scene of the crash he found a mess of sheared-off branches and other debris. The body of the helicopter remained intact but was badly mangled. A blade had snapped off and stood upright in the snow like a giant butter knife.

  Max climbed into the cockpit and found the sheriff slumped over the controls, dead and covered in blood. On closer inspection, Max saw that a branch had pierced the cockpit and lanced the sheriff through the throat. It was a hideous sight. What a way to go, he thought. He felt sorry for the man, and for his family.

  Max climbed back down and searched the area. He called out but there was no answer. He detected prints that looked as if something or someone had been dragged through the snow. He followed their path for about thirty yards until he came upon Ed Boswell laying in the fetal position on a bed of pine boughs. Under the boughs was a yellow parka.

  Max dropped to his knees and tried to wake him. At least the man was still breathing.

  “Ed,” he said, slapping gently at his face. “Ed, wake up.”

  Max rolled him over onto his back and Ed’s eyes bobbed open.

  “My ankle,” he groaned.

  “Broken?”

  “My arm.”

  “Broken?”

  “My stomach,” Ed groaned again.

  “Fat?”

  “Hungry, you idiot. Help me up.”

  Max grabbed Mr. Boswell by the shoulders of his jacket and dragged him to the base of a large tree. He set him upright. Ed yelped in pain.

  “Sorry… Which arm and leg?”

  Ed winced. “Left arm. Right leg.”

  “Any bleeding?”

  “No, but my head is killing me.”

  Max removed Ed’s fur-lined cap and saw on his big balding head a bump the size of a Ping-Pong ball.

  “Wow,” Max marveled, “now you have two bald heads.” He poked gently at the bump.

  “Ow!”

  “Oops, sorry… Boy, you’re lucky I found you.” He uncapped his canteen and handed it to Ed, who downed the entire contents in a series of long, thirsty gulps.

  He handed Max back the empty canteen saying, “That remains to be seen.”

  Max chuckled and shook his head. “You and the professor have the same sense of humor.”

  “No, we don’t,” Ed said. “He’s not the least bit funny.”

  Max grinned. “That’s what I meant.”

  Ed stared crossly at the long-haired, handsome youth kneeling beside him. “You’re under arrest, Stormer.”

  Max’s grin blossomed
into a broad, toothy smile. “A citizen’s arrest? Fine…” He put out his wrists for cuffing. “Take me away, Officer Ed.”

  Ed swatted at Max’s hands with his good arm. “Wise-ass punk. Where’s my brother-in-law? Why isn’t he with you?”

  “I left him to rest about a half day’s walk from here. He’s sick.”

  “What kind of sick?”

  “Pneumonia, maybe.”

  “Pneumonia! How’d he do that?”

  “People get sick. I don’t know.”

  Ed shook his head in disgust. “Did you see the sheriff?”

  Max nodded.

  “Dammit,” Ed said, a new anger in his voice. “None of this would have ever happened if my damned brother-in-law didn’t—”

  Max said, “Was Aidos with you?”

  “No, we went down before we ever got where we were going.”

  “What happened?”

  “I have no idea. The damn thing just quit on us. The next thing I knew we were crashing through the trees, the sheriff started screaming, and then, well, it’s blurry. I shook the sheriff but he was dead. I tried the radio, but it was dead. I thought the copter was going to blow any second, like in the movies, so I grabbed what I could—that’s how I knew my arm was broken—and tumbled out. That’s when I broke my damn ankle. I dragged myself over here… It never did blow up, did it?”

  “Nope.” Max stood and walked away.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Firewood.”

  “We can’t stay here!”

  “Okay,” Max called back, “then come on.” He started whistling and disappeared into the woods.

  An hour and a half later Ed was eating beanies and weenies as Max busied himself digging a shallow, coffin-sized trench with an ax he found in the helicopter. Beside Ed was a pile of things Max had also salvaged from the helicopter: packages of freeze-dried food, a two-gallon jug of water, sleeping bags and tarps, a battered Zane Grey paperback (the sheriff’s), a first-aid kit, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and the sheriff’s handgun.