Walter Eliot pointed.
“South by southwest,” Walter said. “They’re following the outflow. My son, Paul, is with them.”
“How many? You said four?”
“Four people.”
The man made a quick calculation, Web saw. He did the subtraction. He had been looking for ten and had found three. Four more were off somewhere else. The difference was dead.
“I’ll radio it in once we get in the air. Not much reception in these valleys. That’s rough country they’re heading for. How many days ago did they leave?”
“Three days,” Web said.
Candy nodded.
“They figured they should make a try at getting out,” Jill said.
“Of course they did,” Candy said. “Most natural thing in the world.”
Walter Eliot didn’t know where to put his eyes. The sight of Camp Lollipop dug into his heart each time he looked at it, but he couldn’t look away. Not yet. The pilot stood on the pontoon and whistled softly between his teeth as he pushed them away from shore. Jill had insisted on bringing the calendar pole, and the pilot used it to push away, then stuck it in the cockpit without a word. He hopped in afterward and slammed the door shut behind. He kept whistling softly as he did his preflight checklist. Buford snuffled forward to smell the pilot, then backed up awkwardly to sit beside Jill.
Walter Eliot felt empty and joyful and scared. He couldn’t sort out his emotions. He stared at Camp Lollipop, wondering how they could simply leave it. They had to, of course, but it still wrenched him to be away from it, to be in a tidy little plane cabin, waiting for liftoff. Other than the calendar pole, they had left everything else, figuring if somehow Team Four made it back to camp, then at least they would have the basics. Jill wrote a note and put it in the pine hut where they couldn’t help but see it.
SAVED. PILOT SENDING HELP.
WE WILL FIND YOU! STAY HERE!
Walter had helped her compose the note, and they had both agreed simpler was better. Too many words might confuse things. The main point was to keep them here if they returned. Candy had the coordinates. It was a forty-five-minute hop from Fairbanks, thirty-five with a tailwind. A piece of cake to get them. Candy had said the authorities would laugh when finally they found out how close by the Junior Action News Team crash had been.
Waiting for the pilot to start the engine, Walter felt himself tearing up again. More than anything else, he wished Paul had stayed. He had told him to stay, that was certain, but Paul had insisted on going. It had been a grave mistake, one Walter had known he was making even as he’d committed it. You stayed with your dad. You stayed with family. You didn’t go traipsing off into the woods hoping to find a way out. They hadn’t listened, and now he had been proven correct.
But that didn’t help his son.
“Guess we’re ready!” Candy yelled. “You all want to say good-bye to the place? We could circle around.”
“Good-bye,” Web said. “See you later! Just get us out of here!”
Walter had to wipe his eyes. Jill, he saw, whispered good-bye.
Then the plane began to move.
“Have you home in a jiff,” Candy said, his voice rising to pass over the mounting engine sounds. “Or if not home, at least to a hot shower and some good chow.”
Walter nodded. That sounded good. But it felt like cheating to sit in a plane and feel it begin to skim across the water. It felt like abandoning his son, abandoning them all. They had stuck it out together, and now three lucky members, plus Buford, got to zip away, shoot across the treetops, and leave. He cried harder. He had never felt such a strange mixture of emotions.
“Up, up, up,” Web said as the plane began to leave the water. “Up you go.”
Then the plane banked and Walter realized they were in flight, no problem, and the lake receded below them like a green-blue coin flipped into a sea of pine trees. He turned in his seat to see Camp Lollipop disappear. He heard Candy open up radio communications with a home base somewhere. He said he had the television people, gave a series of coordinates, then said, in answer to something, “Three.”
Three survivors, Walter knew.
“Seven,” Walter corrected him. “Seven survivors. And Buford, our dog.”
But that claim wasn’t certain. Three were certain. The rest, Walter understood, were still not rescued. They were still in jeopardy. They had followed a river toward the west, an area that Candy had said was rough. Very rough. Not to mention the snow called for by the latest forecasts. They had another four days before they would even consider turning back.
“Good-bye,” Jill whispered again, and this time, Walter guessed, she meant good-bye to her sister.
Walter reached over and took her hand. To his surprise, Web reached for his hand and held it, too. The plane made a good solid sound of flying, and Candy told the radio everything he knew about them. Walter listened, and at times it seemed the pilot talked about people from a newscast somewhere far away. Survivors. Plane crash. An unnamed lake not far from the old Hubbard Line.
SURVIVAL TIP #3
* * *
Making a simple emergency shelter can be as easy as finding a downed pine tree. Make sure the tree is solidly on the ground — pine trees can spring forward or back if they are still green and the limbs are not secure — then decide where the tree is thickest. Gradually break off branches below the trunk so that you create a hole in the tree between the trunk and the ground. Use the broken limbs as a floor for your shelter. Usually, you will have to back into the newly formed slot. If you have a tarp, put it on the ground below you. If you have two tarps, it is easy to spread the second tarp above, using the pine limbs as convenient tentpoles.
It was a mistake.
And now he had added a second mistake to it.
That’s what Seldon thought as he came slowly out of the bushes, pulling his belt tight against his empty stomach. He felt empty and drained and garbled in the guts. Whatever Walter had, Seldon knew he now had it, too. Might have been something they ate. Might have been anything at all.
To come at all had been his first mistake.
To leave the Team Four party had been his second.
He felt weak. He was weak. His frequent trips to the bushes had sapped his strength. His feet, too, had become two pillows of bloody tissue. His loafers had popped and the duct tape had given way, and he could not take more than a few steps at a time without stopping to rest. Bad footgear. He was essentially walking barefoot.
A mistake to come with the party. A mistake to leave the party. Bad thinking. Panic. Stupid, heroic thinking.
Don’t worry, I can make it back alone. It’s a day and a half, right? Not that far. I’m sorry I can’t continue, but maybe you would make better time …
All those words. All those rationalizations. What had he been thinking? It was crazy to head into the wilderness alone. He knew better. What was he trying to prove? It made him angry just to think about it.
And now he stood near the water, the outflow of the lake, and he felt too tired to take another step. He had stupidly ended up in the middle, not one place or another, not at camp or in the discovery party. It had been a fundamental mistake.
Jumping jackrabbits, he thought.
He didn’t know where that phrase had come from, but it buzzed around his head like a squirrel rattling up a tree. It had been with him the entire trip.
Jumping jackrabbits.
He leaned on his wooden staff and walked three steps forward. He tripped slightly on the uneven rocks because he could not lift his feet high enough to accept the irregularities in the terrain. He needed to find a place to spend the night. He needed to lie down. If he could just rest for a while, he thought, then it would be okay. He could get his strength back.
He had listened carefully when Titus had talked to him about survival techniques. He had listened, honestly, but hearing Titus talk about it was way different from having to put the techniques into practice. Way different. Titus had said somet
hing about sleeping under a downed pine tree, but Seldon wasn’t sure how that was supposed to work. He was supposed to back into the tree branches and make a little cave. That was the idea, but it seemed crazy now that he stood on the mucky beach, trying to sort things out.
He looked back down the shoreline. Then he looked up it.
Nothing. Zero.
Jumping jackrabbits.
He took two more steps forward. Then he stopped.
Make a plan, he told himself. Make a plan and stick to it. Get back to Camp Lollipop. Get there, keep going.
Before he could move, it started to snow.
It was pretty, actually. It came very softly, quietly, the good kind of snow, the sweet, memorable kind of snow. It reminded him of snow he had known as a boy. The kind of after-school-first-snow-of-the-year sort of snowfall. He remembered how it had smelled, how the snow had tasted on his tongue, how the warm kitchen light had thrown a blade of welcome across the backyard. Yes, he remembered all that from playing out in the snow as a child. Now the snow fell here in Alaska, and he held out his hand and told himself not to get distracted, to get going, to find a tree and back into it. That was what he was supposed to do, but he didn’t seem to care about doing it.
He hoped they were taking good care of Buford. He hoped that.
It took him a long time, but eventually he came to a bare tree trunk at the water’s edge. It wasn’t a pine tree, but he dug under it and made himself a shelter. It wasn’t much. He crawled in, and it felt like being an animal, not a human animal but a real, go-to-the-ground sort of animal. A badger, maybe, or maybe a prairie dog. He squeezed down and tried to get completely under it, but it didn’t work the way Titus had outlined it. He ended up resting next to it, his shoulder under a portion of the trunk, the snow falling gently onto the beach and disappearing. He pushed a little more and managed to get his head under the trunk, and that kept the snow from his face. An improvement. That was better.
He stayed and listened to the water running by and listened to the late crows calling to one another, and he worried that his legs would freeze with the snow falling on them. He scooped a little beach dirt up onto his legs, but the sand dug into his hands and made them hurt.
Finally, he slept. He went far away, and he remembered coming inside to see his mom warming soup, her head turning to him, the vapor from the boiling pot obscuring her face.
Did you have fun? she asked.
But he couldn’t answer. His mouth wouldn’t work, and his eyes didn’t want to close.
“We can’t cross, and we can’t float it,” E said, her voice low and studied. “This is the end of the trail, partners.”
Titus listened, but his mind was on the tactical problem in front of them. E was correct. They couldn’t cross, and they couldn’t float it. The band of water they had followed from the lake had broadened and strengthened and had knotted together into white rashes of rapids. Now it had surged into a small canyon, or squeeze box, and the banks on either side rose up in flanks of granite or basalt. Not passable. To go over the steep slope would require too much time, he knew. They would have to backtrack, then find an access point, then climb. He couldn’t tell how technical the climb might be, but he doubted they had the strength to attempt it. By the time they made it over, it would be time to turn back.
“Doesn’t look good,” Paul said from his other side. “E’s right. We’re done.”
“We’re never done,” Titus said reflexively.
It was not good to concede even small defeats. Giving up could become a way of thinking, and you could not let it infect you if you were trying to survive.
“Even if we could build some sort of raft or boat,” E said, “it would get smashed in the first hundred yards. You couldn’t steer it. You’d be freezing cold in no time, and it’s not even certain you could make it anyway. I think we should camp here for the night and turn back tomorrow.”
“We could go over land,” Titus said.
He didn’t really believe it himself, but he had to put it into the mix of options.
“You mean leave the river and go deeper into the woods?” Paul asked.
“I don’t know what I mean, really,” Titus said, pulling back from his position next to the water. “I’m just thinking aloud.”
“It’s snowing,” E said. “Holy mackerel, it’s actually snowing.”
Titus looked up. White flakes drifted softly down from a gray sky.
“We should make a camp anyway,” Paul said. “We can figure it out once we have a shelter.”
Titus nodded. Night would come on even faster given the snow. The snow changed everything. The snow could be a game-over message.
“We can do a lean-to using that rock over there,” Paul said. “Easy breezy, apple peezy.”
“Okay,” Titus said. “Sounds good.”
He turned back and looked at the water.
Could he swim it? He couldn’t say. He might be able to. He was a decent swimmer. He could fill up his shirt with air or cling to a hunk of wood. He might make it. He could send Paul and E back and continue on himself. It was nuts to even think about it, he knew, but not nuts if you considered that the alternative was to travel back to a camp that was in trouble anyway. Was in big, serious trouble. Truthfully, it seemed to him like a coin toss. You took your chances either way. If he could stay afloat and make it through the rapids, at least as far as it went through the gorge, then he could come out the other side and maybe, just maybe, find something.
Or he could drown.
Or he could simply find more woods and hummocks and marshlands.
“Let’s build,” he said.
But the water stayed in his head.
He pulled himself away from the water and helped E drag pieces of brush and pine boughs to lean against a rock outcropping. It was a good setup for a lean-to. The rock projected a little back onto the trail, and it was no problem to create a small cave of wood and stone, where they could set a fire and receive the reflected heat of the flames. Not only would the fire keep them reasonably warm, it would also discourage animals. They had seen a million tracks, some of them made by bears, and Titus did not plan to make it easy for a predator to pick them off. The crossbow could do little against a full-grown grizzly, so the trick was to make it seem like a bad idea to attack them before the notion got implanted in a bear’s head. That was the beauty of a fire and a lean-to.
With all three working, it took only an hour to get the camp set up. By that time, snow had covered the ground. It fell into the water and onto the pine and brush they leaned against the rock. When Titus finally crawled under to get out of the wind and cold, the tight kernels of snow sizzled on the brush. It was a smaller, narrower sound than the liquid hum of the river.
“That’s better,” Paul said when he had the fire going. “Much better.”
“I hope Seldon got out of the snow,” E said. “I’m worried about him.”
“He’ll make it back. Won’t he make it back, Titus?”
Titus shrugged. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure about much at the moment. He felt dizzy and weak.
“How much fish do we have left?” E asked.
“Only a few bites left,” Paul said, taking out the nearly empty bandanna that Jill had given them. “I’ve never been so hungry in my life. I think we’re starving. How do you know when you start to starve? Is there a sign or something?”
“I think I need to swim the river,” Titus said, throwing the words out like you would throw grain to chickens. He wasn’t sure why he let it pass his lips, but he did, and he waited to gauge their reactions.
“You can’t swim that,” Paul said, putting more wood on the fire. “That’s crazy talk.”
“He’s right, Titus,” E said. “Even if you could make it, you can’t be sure it would get you anywhere good. I mean, if there was a city waiting for you just past those rapids, it might be worth it. But you could do the whole thing and end up exactly where we are right now. No food, no body warmth …
It doesn’t make sense. Once you go down that river, you can’t come back. You’re committed to going all the way out.”
“Does it make sense to go back to Camp Lollipop?” Titus asked. “Or starve and freeze here? We’re out of options. We’re running out of strength.”
For a while, no one said anything. Titus glanced at them with sideways looks. They looked tired and dirty and thin. Real thin. He imagined they saw the same changes in him. They wouldn’t make it too much longer in Camp Lollipop. Once the snow set in and the lake began to freeze over, it was game over. True game over. They might be able to hang on a little longer, but even that was doubtful. And it wasn’t going to be pleasant. It was going to be ugly and horrible. Then what? He couldn’t even push his mind to think about it.
He could swim and take a chance. He could think about that.
Paul handed out half of the dried fish. It was disgusting. Titus had to eat it with his mouth open to mix cold air with the horrible taste. He didn’t like fish to begin with, and now chewing dried fish skin made him gag. He forced himself to eat. He followed Paul’s example of holding the fish out to the fire to warm it slightly before biting it apart. He promised himself that if he did get out of this predicament he would never eat fish again.
He ate trout and thought about the river.
E shivered herself awake. It was late. Or early. She couldn’t tell for sure. The night seemed to go on forever. She lay between Titus and Paul, her blanket tight around her, the fire smoking in a lazy, tired way. She sat up and put a little wood on it. The fire refused to catch, so she had to bend and twist and get her lips into a position to blow onto the coals. It still wouldn’t catch. She broke off smaller twigs, then stirred the coals until she had a red base. After a few more minutes of blowing, the fire finally returned. She felt light-headed from hunger and from blowing so much air at the fire.
“What time is it?” Paul whispered.
“No idea.”
“It feels like morning.”
“It’s still dark. Keep sleeping if you can.”
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