“Watch your face!” Elaine shouted back to them. She held branches and brambles, lest they flew back and slap someone’s face.
“I prefer to watch where I put my feet.” Miriam held on to the branches. She had Kimberly behind her, and Miriam thought it might be fun to let the branches fly. Good sense prevailed. It would hold them up if she had to stop and have it out with Kimberly, who would know that her actions had been deliberate. Plus the path was steep and was taking much of their energy.
Miriam held the branches for Kimberly, who took them gingerly, as if they would bite.
“Hold the things as if you have life in your hands!”
“You think I want strange things pricking me or my beautiful skin marked up by these strange bushes?”
Why didn’t I whack her with the branches? Miriam thought. I still have a chance. There’s always next time.
Susan battled the vertical slope. The others had to wait for her to catch up before even handing off the branches to her.
“Hurry up,” Kimberly said.
“Just wait,” Miriam replied on Susan’s behalf. Susan couldn’t speak. She didn’t know how the three of them could climb this path and still carry on a normal, calm conversation. After the long walk on gravel, this hill was taking the life out of her knees. She didn’t think she’d had to exert this much energy in a long time. Not even gym class was as excruciating. As for those classes and all other sporting activities, she would try to get out of them, often blaming painful periods that she didn’t really have on her inability to participate.
“Aerobics in gym class is coming in pretty handy now.” Miriam grabbed more branches from Elaine and used them as climbing tools for the grade.
Maybe for you, Susan thought. Not to mention Miriam played soccer. How anybody would want to run up and down for 90 minutes was beyond her. Susan had seen Elaine playing tennis. She seemed good at it too. As for Kimberly, Susan didn’t know if she played any sports, but she was waiflike enough to just float to the top of this slope.
“That and walking to and from school every day.” Elaine held up her right palm. “Let’s take a little breather; this hill has teeth.”
“I’ll second that motion,” Susan said.
“Why do you walk to school every day?” Miriam’s mother picked her up daily. If her mother was going to be late, she would practice soccer or hang around the library until she came.
“My parents moved to where we live now so that my brother and I would be close to where we go to school. They want us to walk. They say there’s no excuse not to walk if you live three or four blocks away. My brother and I hear lots of stories about how much they used to walk when they were young. They’re happy with their decision because they see all this research on the news about obesity and how physical activities in schools are failing children and blah, blah, blah.”
“Even in winter?” Susan lived a ways away from school, but even if she lived two blocks away, she couldn’t see herself walking for even a block.
“You simply bundle up.” Elaine held some plants apart as if she was ready to go on again. “Let’s finish this.”
“When my mom picks me up, we go home together. Are your parents at home when you get there?” Miriam took more branches from Elaine, with Kimberly and Susan repeating the same motions. Every time the gathering of the branches would reach Susan, everyone would have to slow down and wait.
“When I was younger, my father stayed home with me all the time, but now that my brother is seventeen, he’s supposed to be responsible. He gets home before I do. But many days one of my parents is home, usually my father.” Elaine could see a semblance of open space coming up in the distance.
“Your father stayed home with you?” Kimberly was drenched in sweat. The air had gradually become cooler, but the elevation had taken its toll.
“Yes, he did,” Elaine said. “Soon we won’t have to do this anymore. I think I can see a clearing of some sort in the distance, and the ground seems to be getting flatter.”
“And he didn’t feel bad?”
“About what?”
“Staying home.”
“Why would he feel bad?”
“That your mother had to work and he had to stay home.”
The bushes thinned out and the path grew clearer.
“It’s not like he was forced to. They decided, I think based on the fact that he had more flexibility in his job as an information technology consultant and she was the manager of a bank. They wanted one of them to be home with us, and he decided that he would do it.” Elaine had always felt close to her father, and she believed part of it was because he had stayed home. He wasn’t just a man who came home and asked what was for dinner. He had made them dinner countless times. He still did.
“So he was happy?” Kimberly was glad to be on flat, even surface again. The hill had eventually eased away.
“Why do you keep asking as if he shouldn’t be?” After the strenuous negotiation with the slope, Elaine was a little winded. “He’s one half of my parental equation. An equal half.”
“Halves are equal parts,” Miriam pointed out.
The trail now continued into a grassy area that looked like a wilderness. They all hoped they wouldn’t be wandering in it for long.
“Kimberly’s questions suggest they aren’t. I just wanted to make a point.”
The place was a bewildering mass of grass, trees, other plants and what looked like a huge hill.
“She spends a lot of time in the bathroom, so she’s missed a lot of math classes. Hence, you have to be patient with her.” Kimberly rushed up to Miriam and shoved her, which caused Miriam to stumble a bit. “She also loves to get her butt kicked.”
They walked around, taking in the scene and doing a survey of the land.
“This place is pretty and somewhat unfriendly all at once,” Elaine noted. It was the unkempt nature that made it seemed so hostile, but it was beautiful nonetheless.
“Sort of like Kimberly then,” Miriam said.
“So you do admit to thinking I’m pretty. Well, it’s clear to see, so why would you be the only one not to see it?”
“Do you ever listen to yourself?” Miriam asked. “Fun and jokes aside—seriously, do you?”
“Why would I listen to myself? Why do you constantly bother me?” The mound in front of them was getting closer. It looked dark as it loomed in the distance.
“Maybe you should listen to yourself so you can hear what you’re saying.” Miriam understood what Elaine had said about the place. It was attractive and delicate in a weird way, but it was also weird in its neglect and abandonment.
“It’s getting cool,” Susan said as she rubbed her palms up and down her bare arms.
“And soon it will be both cool and dark,” Elaine said.
The sun was high, but it was at an angle and had turned to a shade of yellow that suggested the end of day was near. The hill was in front of them now and seemed to beckon to the girls to come even closer. They slowly inched their way toward it and stopped when they realized that the dark hollow gaping at them was a cave.
The Cave
What they thought was a hill or a mound was a massive rock with great big walls. Trees and grass overshadowed it. Facing the dark space, they stood their ground, not knowing what to do.
“What are those?” Miriam pointed as she moved toward the walls. There were strange drawings and carvings that looked weathered and faded. Elaine and Kimberly stepped closer to the wall with Miriam, but Susan hung back. The carvings and drawings were of birds, lizards and some animals that looked like small bears. Some of the figures were half human and half animal, and some had birdlike heads and human bodies.
“Petroglyphs and pictographs.” Elaine had thought that she would only see these things in books. She wondered if these could poss
ibly be real.
“What?” Kimberly asked, mystified. She ran her hands along one of the carvings.
“Carvings and paintings.” Elaine could barely make out some of the yellow and red pigments. Exposed to the passing seasons, they couldn’t be expected to last.
“There are no paintings out here in these bushes. You think you’d see these at the Art Gallery of Ontario” Kimberly scoffed.
“The AGO isn’t the beginning and the end of art. If they could lift this rock, maybe. But because it’s not down at the AGO doesn’t mean it’s not what it is.”
Designs of hands, arms, boomerangs and axes with and without handles were depicted all over the walls. Figures in ceremonial garb, hunters, gatherers, more animals and abstracts that couldn’t be deciphered littered the walls. It was another world.
“I guess this is it,” Elaine said, moving away from the cave walls. “We can’t walk anymore.”
“We can’t stay here!” Susan stepped even farther from the cave.
“Why not?” Elaine asked.
“Not with those things.” She pointed to the wall.
“What things?” Elaine was puzzled.
“Those drawings.”
“You’re afraid of staying near the drawings?” Elaine looked incredulously at Miriam and Kimberly.
“You won’t see them when you’re sleeping,” Miriam said. “We’ll probably be sleeping inside the cave, so you won’t see a thing.”
They didn’t discuss sleeping arrangements, but the cave seemed as good a place as any. Inside or outside, it was the same danger.
“Cave? Who says? I’m not sleeping in there.” Susan was adamant.
“Okay, okay,” Elaine said. “We’re wasting time. Let’s take a vote. By a show of hands, who wants to stay here for the night and sleep in the cave?” Miriam had her hand up before Elaine had finished talking. Kimberly, who was in the process of checking the Storm, slowly hoisted her hand. Elaine already had her own hand up. Susan folded her arms over her breasts and looked away.
“The tribe has spoken, I guess.” Kimberly walked away and spat on the ground. Her blonde hair swished into some of the spit as it left her mouth. She fingered it out and wiped it on her shorts.
“Are we sleeping on the cold ground?” Kimberly walked back. “I don’t know how I’m going to sleep under these conditions.”
“That makes two of us,” Susan said.
“Nobody’s going to sleep on the cold ground.” Elaine scratched her cornrows and looked around. “We have to make a bed from branches and whatever else we can find, such as leaves and … whatever.”
“More SurvivorMan.” Kimberly sighed. “And what are we going to cut these branches with, pray tell?”
“We’re going to use our imagination and break them off at the joints. Plus, I should have a knife.” Elaine searched around in her bag.
“Why do you have a knife anyway?” Miriam asked.
“My silly brother was having a laugh at my expense for being sent on this fun trip. So he says ‘E’—he calls me E for short—‘you may need this and this and these for your forage into the woods where you’re going.’ He tosses me a Swiss Army knife, a lighter, a little first aid kit and some other stuff in a bag that I haven’t even looked at. He does and says all this while guffawing and carrying on.” Elaine finally retrieved the knife from the bag and unfolded all the blades, nail file, corkscrew and other tools from the handle. It was an abnormal apparatus with all the various parts sticking out.
“The knife seems like a good idea now,” Miriam said, “but why would he give you a lighter?”
“His exact words? To roast deer meat.”
“He’s a comedian. But yet you took all the stuff he gave you.”
“I don’t know. I like to pack stuff up. I’m always afraid I might need something and not have it.”
“You’re a pack rat.”
Elaine shrugged.
They started to break off and gather the branches, leaving them near the mouth of the cave. Elaine tried to saw her way through the branches, which was difficult work when you only had a small blade. She alternated frustrating cutting and breaking off limbs with her bare hands like the others.
Susan worked slowly, breaking off one or two branches and then stopping to stare at the cave.
“You have to commit to this, Susan,” Elaine told her, “we’re all doing it.”
“I didn’t vote to sleep in any cave.”
“Sleeping in the cave or outside it, we would still be making a bed so that we don’t lose all our body heat.” Elaine was having enough trouble with blisters she was developing on her index finger from the knife pressing into it without arguing with Susan about her vote.
“You know, Susan”—Miriam dragged three branches behind her—“this vote was done in a democratic way. Three out of four is a majority. It really doesn’t get any fairer than that. That’s how they decide on some activities at school. They say, ‘Here are your two or three choices.’ We all tick the one we want and stick our preferences in a suggestion box. They tally the suggestions, the most votes win and we all go on a trip to the zoo when all I wanted was to go to BMO Field to watch soccer.” Miriam dropped the branches and kicked them closer to the growing pile.
“I wanted to go to the zoo,” Susan said.
“Well, it worked out for you that time. That’s how it works. Sometimes you get what you want and sometimes somebody else does.” Miriam walked back to a tree with low branches and began to break some off. She walked back with a small bundle.
Kimberly broke off one at a time and walked back and forth each time.
“It was more realistic to go to the zoo than BMO Field.” Susan had been breaking off the same branch for quite some time.
“That’s a matter of opinion, but I guess it’s also more realistic to sleep in the cave.”
“Personally, I wanted to go to the textile museum,” Kimberly interjected, “but no one asked. It wasn’t an option.”
“For what, to look at cloth?” Miriam had a pile now. She decided to drag it to the others.
“For your information, sometimes they have cutting-edge pieces from some of Canada’s top fashion labels. It would have been fun to see the connection between cloth, as you call it, and fashion.”
“That’s wonderful, but the only cutting edge”—Miriam formed her index fingers into inverted commas—“that’s going on now are these branches. You don’t have to go to a museum to make the connection between textile and fashion. We’ve been wearing clothes for like what, the last couple thousand years?”
“Someone like you wouldn’t understand. It’s not just clothes, it’s fashion and art.”
“Someone like me?” Miriam dropped the branches that she was dragging behind her to look at Kimberly. “Do you mean someone who doesn’t have a grand sense of self-importance? Or someone who doesn’t have a history of hanging out with people who make fun of other people? Do you mean I’m not someone who thinks the world revolves around me? Or could you mean that I don’t think my own trivial discomforts are worth everybody’s specific attention?” She picked up the branches again and dragged them toward the cave. She looked back over her shoulder at Kimberly. “You’re right. Someone like me wouldn’t understand.”
“Jeez, I just meant that she wasn’t into cutting-edge fashion that has elements of art. I didn’t mean she should go off the deep end and give me a speech.”
Susan’s hands were breaking branches, but her heart wasn’t in it. What were they doing sleeping in a cave where dark creatures could be awaiting them? Miriam had told her that the decision had been based on a democratic process, so it was fair. What a load! That’s what they said in classes at Anne Beaumont too, that democracy was government by the people, for the people and all that good stuff that they drilled into gulli
ble heads. But her father had told her not to be fooled. He said majority rules and the individual suffers. And here his words had come to pass, and she was about to sleep in a cave.
The separation of the branches from the trees continued in silence for a while. Each girl wrestled with her own thoughts. After a while there were enough limbs to make a decent bed. All the branches were gathered at the cave’s mouth.
“Now what?” Kimberly asked, looking down at the huge pile of branches, which was now quite high. “This isn’t going to be comfortable.”
“Now we put the bed together, either inside the cave”—Elaine pointed into the darkened cavity—“or right here and then we take it inside.”
“We can’t put it together out here. We’d need cord or something to tie with, which we don’t have. Even if we did have cord we wouldn’t have enough to do it out here.”
“Inside then,” Elaine said.
The sky oozed a sort of liquid orange and the air felt chilled.
“We don’t know what’s in there,” Susan said. “We don’t know what’s in there,” she repeated, and each time her voice became higher and more fearful.
“Listen, Susan—” Miriam started to say.
“I’m not going in there,” Susan shouted at the top of her voice, placing her hands over her ears. With that she started crying uncontrollably. Tears ran down her face and she started to howl like a coyote in pain.
“If she keeps this up,” Kimberly said, “maybe someone will hear her and find us.”
With her hands still planted firmly over her ears, no one could talk to her. Elaine went to stand in front of her and pried her hands away. She held one of the hands by her side while Miriam held Susan’s other hand.
“You’re being hysterical, Susan.” Elaine tried to make her own tone even. She didn’t want to raise her voice and make the girl any more frantic. “Let’s talk about the cave in a calm, reasonable way.”
Susan’s desolate cries now turned to sobs.
Lost at Running Brook Trail Page 5