“Why did the chicken cross the road?” Sophie asks. Dad loves chicken-crossing-the-road riddles.
“To get to the other side,” I say, not really in the mood for riddles.
“Why did we cross the creek?” Sophie asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, but I do know why.
“To get to Dad’s mountain,” she says. I nod, because she’s right. But I’m shocked, too: Has Sophie become a believer? Is she looking for Dad—real Dad—too?
I unlace my hiking boots, pull them off, and dump out the water. I don’t bother trying to wring out my socks or pants. It’s too cold to dry out anything today. It must be about thirty-five degrees—not cold enough to become ice, but darn close.
“Let’s set up a catnap spot,” Sophie says.
Phew. Sleep at last.
I build a mattress out of willows, piling up branches to create a nest above the wet tundra. I do it just how Dad taught me. I lay out Sophie’s sleeping bag, and I imagine my own, still floating down the McKinley River. Then I cover Sophie’s lone sleeping bag with our rain tarp. It will have to do for both of us.
Even though sleep sounds good, we can’t resist food any longer. Before lying back against our willow mattress, we have to snack on something. Sophie and I agree to eat only one peanut butter and jelly sandwich each. I make mine last ten minutes. Mouse-size bites combined with sips of water from my birch-bark canoe make the food seem larger than its actual size. I can almost believe I’ve just eaten a full meal.
I’m exhausted, but falling asleep is still impossible. I’m shivery, wet, and hungry, and willow branches poke up through my damp long johns and into my back. Sophie and I lie huddled together, two cold caterpillars trying to stay warm underneath our one mummy bag and rain tarp.
“You warm?” Sophie asks.
“No,” I say.
“Warm enough?” she asks, and I know exactly what she’s asking.
“Yeah. I’m not going to die from this amount of cold.”
“Good. Me either,” she says. “Good night.”
The drizzly rain is loud against the tarp. But if we can just get a few hours of good sleep, maybe we can muster the energy to get to Dad by evening.
I wake up curled in a tight ball, shivering, with no mummy bag on top of me. My hands are over my head the way my teacher taught me to duck and cover in an earthquake. I think the nightmare came back, but I’m too cold to be sure.
I know one thing: We’re close to Dad—maybe seven miles, give or take a little—and I can’t get the wolf and the golden eyes and the whimper out of my mind.
I stand up and pace around the tundra to warm up. I’m wearing every last piece of clothing I have. Sophie doesn’t budge from beneath her sleeping bag, which she has hogged all to herself. She’s all warm and wrapped up in it. When she breathes, a puff cloud rises into the cold air.
I jog to the edge of the creek and fill up my canoe with water to drink. Then I do forty-five jumping jacks. On the thirtieth, I feel my feet again. By the fortieth, my legs are no longer numb.
As my body awakens to the day, so does the memory of our river plunge. The wet, toppling and choking—and water everywhere.
And the clock is still ticking. Dad’s been missing for six days now.
Six days!
We need to get a move on.
“Sophie, Sophie,” I say, shaking her cocoon. I feel bad for waking her back into this hungry, cold, and no-trace-of-Dad-yet world. But we have to keep on moving if we’re going to change that.
Sophie peeks her head out of the bag.
“What time is it?” she asks.
“Time to go—now,” I say. Clock time doesn’t matter. We’re on Dad time—mountain time.
Sophie wakes up as clumsily as a ground squirrel stumbling out of hibernation. “I have to eat something before we start out,” she says. When she swaps her socks, I notice that the blisters on her toes are ballooning up even more. I don’t know how she can fit her feet into her sneakers. Plus, the sneakers are hardly lime green anymore, scuffed and smudged with trail grit.
Sophie’s a trooper, and I can already imagine what Dad will do when he sees her out here. He’ll give Sophie a pat on the back and say, Way to get those feet back to the mountains and your head back to the wild air. And Sophie will say those words that she really needs to say: I love you, Dad.
We divvy up our only bag of trail mix. I eat it one food type at a time: ten peanuts, three almonds, nine M&M’s, two cashews, and fourteen raisins. Why are there always more raisins than the good stuff? Raisins are just filler food. I could eat hundreds of M&M’s right now.
I gulp one more canoe full of creek water and tally up our remaining food supply: four fun-size Snickers, two bags of gummy bears, and two soggy PB&J sandwiches on pilot bread.
How far can two girls get on these rations?
Reading my mind, Sophie answers. “The longer we wait, the worse it’s going to be.”
“Darn right,” I say.
If we’ve learned one thing so far on this trip, it’s not to dilly-dally and think too much about food. But right now, for some reason I can’t stop thinking about that green bean casserole that Barb brought to the house a few days ago. Which leads me to start thinking about her story of Moses dying on a mountain.
Things start feeling better as we walk away from our sleep spot. We’re close to McGonagall Pass—the base of Denali. No more big river crossings, and we’re not far from Dad’s stash of peaches and brandy. With any luck, Dad will be there too.
A breeze picks up—and it meets me head-on. The breeze is not like the one in the Irish blessing song that Dad loves so much, the one with the lyric “May the wind be always at your back.” Nope. Today the wind is blowing right smack into our faces.
But we’re so close. We can’t let wind slow us down now.
It doesn’t matter that my feet are sloshing around inside my boots, or that I’m hungry—ravenous, as Dad would say. I’m so focused on the ground directly in front of my boots that I don’t see the brown beast until it’s pretty close.
Galloping toward us.
“Sophie!” I say.
“Bear!” she confirms.
I unclip the pepper spray from Sophie’s pack. My hands are shaky and jerky, but my mind says hurry-hurry-hurry.
“Whoa!” I scream.
“He’s coming!” Sophie yells.
“Hey!” I wave my arms, but the grizzly doesn’t stop, and he’s huge.
Sophie drops to the ground to play dead. Just like she’s supposed to.
I stand frozen, unable to move.
“Drop!” Sophie says.
I expect him to veer off. Bears don’t usually charge all the way, but he’s almost here.
I yank on the safety latch of the pepper spray. Ugh. It’s not coming off.
I yank harder. Pop!
It’s off. Just in time. The grizzly is here. Eyes huge. Fur raised up on his neck. He stops just a few feet away and stands up on his hind legs, and just as soon as he’s up on two—pausing for a breath—he’s back down on all fours coming closer.
“Hey! Whoa!” I holler one last time, but then I step in front of Sophie and press down hard on the button. Pshhhhhhhh.
It all happens so fast.
I see shadows and hear grunts.
Bear. Spray. Smack. Sting.
My eyes burn and everything gets blurry. The air is thick and peppery and impossible to breathe. The huge brown shadow goes from large to medium to smaller. But everything is silent—slow panic silent—with eyes on fire.
“Lily, Lily,” Sophie says. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and my heart is racing through questions: What happened? Where’s the bear? Why are my eyes on fire?
“He’s gone,” Sophie says, and that’s when I realize that the spray did it—fended off the bear.
I cough and cough, and panic rises. I can hardly see anything.
“D
id he get you?” I ask.
“No. I’m okay,” Sophie says. “What about you?”
I’m rubbing my eyes, the sting so sharp I wonder if I’ll ever be able to see again.
“Sophie, what happened to my eyes?” I say, but it’s becoming clear: the wind. That dratted wind blew pepper spray into my eyes.
“Can I help?” Sophie asks. I manage to force one eye open for a second.
“Yow!”
“Hold on,” Sophie says. “Let me read the pepper spray canister.” But I’m worried about the bear now too. Where did he go? Will he come back for us? Is he circling around?
After a minute or so, Sophie says, “If I rinse your eyes with water, you’ll be okay.”
“So I’m not going to be blind?” I ask.
“Doesn’t sound like it,” Sophie says.
“What about the bear? Is he gone?”
“No trace,” says Sophie, and I hope she’s right. “But hold on. I’ll be right back. I need to go find water.”
Sophie returns with canoes filled with water from a nearby kettle pond, one of the glacier-formed lakes on the tundra. It stings when she pours water into my eyes, but vision begins to come back—vision and the reality that we’ve had more than a few close calls.
“We never should have come out here,” I say. “If you had died, I’d never forgive myself.”
“Well, I didn’t die,” Sophie says, “and there’s no way we’re turning back now.” She’s hugging me, and I don’t want it—the hug—to end. “It’s not your fault, Lily. Plus, we were just in the bear’s way. He didn’t want to eat us.”
“It is my fault. I made you come all the way out here,” I say.
Sophie holds me in the hug, but I’m still panicky inside. “No, Lily. I agreed to come.” She squeezes me like old times.
“Plus, you did it,” she says.
“What?” I ask.
“Saved me with the pepper spray.”
I hug Sophie harder, but I don’t feel like I’ve saved anything.
“We’re not going to give up on Dad’s mountain just yet,” Sophie says, “and that’s final.”
Sophie leads, and I’m following close behind her.
“We deserve these,” she says, opening our second to last bag of gummy bears.
I eat three gummy bears from the package and then stop. It’s wrong to eat them when they don’t even taste good.
“Aren’t you scared?” I ask.
“Sure, I’m scared,” Sophie says. “But what can I do about it?”
“You finish these bears,” I tell Sophie, and pass her the package. Giving away my gummy bears feels like doing something.
We walk for hours, and we don’t bother making noise anymore. What are the chances of getting chased by a bear twice in one day?
For a while, I sense something following us. I think it’s the bear at first, but the noises are wispier, like the sounds of a small animal. I’m convinced that it’s the wolf, but when I turn around, he’s not there. Maybe all that pepper spray has made me crazy.
Somewhere near the top of the pass, I muster up some new energy and go by Sophie. I don’t have dry socks or a proper amount of candy, but we’re almost to Dad, and I have enough hope to take the lead.
I’ve never doubted the scale of the mountain, but when we reach the top of McGonagall Pass, it really hits me. She’s huge, mostly white, with dark rough patches where the wind has whipped snow off her face. Denali. She’s so big that I have to arch my neck back to see the bright blue of the sky. Yes. The sky’s blue now. I’m not quite sure when the drizzle ended.
We’re finally here. At the base of the mountain. The place where Dad left his stash.
I scan the tundra. Nothing obvious. No pot of gold. No X to mark the spot. No Dad. A lone arctic ground squirrel pokes his head up from a nearby hole. “Cheep, cheep, cheep.”
“Where is he?” I whisper.
The Muldrow Glacier is an ice and snow ribbon winding its way up the mountain. Is Dad in there?
I shake my head no, pushing away the thought of Dad trapped in the ice.
He’s not.
He’s up here—out here—somewhere.
Sophie reaches the top of the pass seconds later. We don’t talk. I pull the binoculars from the top flap of her pack. I zoom in on the glacier ice, the snout of Denali. I always thought ice was just one color, but this ice is white, blue, green, and gray, depending on how the light falls on each glimmering stretch.
No sign of Dad in the colors.
“We made it,” Sophie says, and she hugs me from behind.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“Oh, Lily,” she says.
“Where?”
“He’s not here,” she says, her words like quills in me, barbs digging deep beneath my skin.
“He has to be.”
“He’s not,” Sophie says, and she’s clutching her silver feather like it’s the only thing left.
“So that’s it, then?” I ask. “You give up?”
“Getting here is something,” Sophie says. “In fact, it’s a lot.”
“I wouldn’t have walked all this way just to get here,” I say. “I need Dad, too.”
Sophie swings the pack off her shoulders and sits down on a tundra patch. She lies back, props her head up on a rock, and closes her eyes.
“How can you just lie there?” I say. “This is no time for a nap.” There are tremors running through me, and I can’t still them.
“I need a moment,” Sophie says. A tear slides down her right cheek, and it—the tear—makes me furious.
“You need a moment for what? We found nothing,” I say.
“I know,” Sophie says. “That’s just it. It takes time to soak in the nothing—and remember.” As she says these words, her hope flies away into the high mountain air.
“No, no, no,” I say. I gasp for breath. “We can’t give up now.”
Sophie doesn’t budge from her spot on the tundra.
“I thought you were a believer,” I say.
“He’s not here, Lily . . . and he’s not coming, either.”
“What about his stash, then?”
“I’ll help you look for it, but first I need some alone time.”
“We’ve been alone without him the whole trip,” I say. “What we need is to be together again.”
“Not going to happen,” Sophie says. But it will, it will, it will.
What I do next is wrong in every way. I pull our food bag from Sophie’s pack, walk away from her, and start eating. I begin with the four remaining fun-size Snickers. I pace around as I eat, hunting for clues. Surely food will help me figure this out.
When the Snickers are gone, I gobble the last two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. My mouth is so dry the peanut butter sticks to my teeth and my tongue, but I don’t care. I simply chew, swallow fast, and keep on eating.
Food is momentum. One foot in front of the other. No stopping. No giving up.
Soon I’ve eaten everything except for the last bag of gummy bears.
I focus my eyes on the ground beneath my feet rather than on the mountain looming above me. There must be a sign of Dad somewhere. I skim the tundra.
For the stash.
Footprints?
Candy wrappers?
Any trace of him?
Nothing.
“Dad,” I whisper into the air, and I wave my arms as if something or someone might be looking down on me.
It’s the empty feeling in my chest that’s the worst: Could it be that Dad’s not here? That I won’t ever find him?
No, Lily. Don’t let hope fly away.
Where is his stash? I pull out his map. There’s a star right where I’m standing, but definitely no stash. Maybe Dad crawled his way out of the glacier and collected his peaches and brandy. But then why wouldn’t he have come home?
The Muldrow Glacier haunts me, her slick snow and ice glimmering under the sun like an evil finger wagging at me. I trace
the glacier on the map. Dad put a circled star on the Muldrow, so why didn’t he rope up?
Mom told me that the place where he fell was usually no problem. Easy. Close to the end of the climb—and there were usually no crevasses there.
I know what to do next.
I go back to Sophie’s pack and pull out a few pieces of Dad’s rescue gear: a rope and a pair of crampons.
“Soph,” I say.
No answer. She’s either asleep or just plain ignoring me.
She doesn’t know that I just ate all our food, and she doesn’t need to know what I’m going to do next. This wasn’t part of my plan, exactly. But I was sure Dad would be here at the base of the glacier.
Now I’m going to have to walk up the glacier to find him.
First things first: I scramble down the rocky hill to get to the tongue of the glacier. Halfway down, I try to scree ski through the rocks, but there’s no way to glide. I slip, topple, and slam into the gravelly hill.
My butt lands hard against the rocks, and I start skidding again down the slope. The scree isn’t like powder snow. It’s rough, and the sharp rocks spit me down the hill.
Thud. The hard landing knocks the breath out of me. It’s a lot like getting washed up on the McKinley River bar. I don’t quite know whether to feel lucky to be alive or terrified by what might have happened.
But this is no time to dally. I hoist my body up to sitting position and assess the damage. I can still lift my head. There’s no blood, and my boots are still tied on my feet.
Phew.
Just in front of me, one boot step away, is the Muldrow Glacier.
“Dad!” I yell up the mountain of ice.
Silence.
I bend over and secure Dad’s crampons onto my feet. They’re little metal spikes for my boots that help me grip the snow and ice. They’re much too big for me, loosely fitting onto my boots, but they’re better than nothing.
I start walking, one foot in front of the other. Glacier walking is slow, slippery, and cold, but I keep on going. It’s good to be here on the glacier after thinking about it nonstop for almost a week.
A week. Dad’s been missing almost a week.
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