Backcountry

by Pamela Beason

  Gabriel raised a hand, and she tossed the tape roll to him. Three of the others plopped down on the log beside him to wait their turn.

  * * * * *

  As she’d been told to expect, the whining was nonstop during the second day’s hike. Aidan and Maya adjusted pack straps and contents, told the crew to loosen or tighten boot laces. Complaints about carrying a heavy pack or being tired or just being here were ignored.

  “Fire starter kits,” Sam reminded them after the first mile.

  That sparked a few battles over each sturdy stick or flat piece of wood. Nick found a nearly perfect holding stone, just big enough to fit in his palm, with an indentation already hollowed out near the middle. The others obviously coveted the rock, although Gabriel and Taylor pretended they didn’t care. Twenty minutes later, Ashley located another small rock that was nearly as good. Sam was amazed that all of them had paid attention to her instructions and that they cared enough to compete for the tools.

  The morning was cool, crisp, and sunny, with only a few wisps of white drifting over the jagged peaks of Mount Baker to the south. To the north in British Columbia, clouds were stacking up. The forecast was for increasing clouds in the north Cascades near evening. Forty percent chance of rain, the NOAA prediction said. If it rained, was she supposed to make the kids do their exercises outside, or could they just sit in their tents and write in their journals? She’d have to ask Maya or Aidan what was typical.

  They stopped for lunch near a small grove of trees where a log offered convenient, if damp, seating. “You can pull your rain pants from your packs and sit on them to keep your hiking pants dry,” she told them.

  The girls did just that; the boys seemed to believe that taking Sam’s suggestion would make them look like sissies, and parked their backsides directly on the wet wood.

  “Completely up to you,” she told them. “But if you want to stay warm, it’s important to stay dry. Wind goes right through wet britches.”

  “Britches?” Ashley sneered. “How Little House on the Prairie!”

  Sam pulled open her packet of cheese. “As a matter of fact, Ash, I was raised on a prairie in Kansas.”

  “Awkward...” Taylor ribbed the other girl in a sing-song voice.

  The uncomfortable moment directed attention away from Nick and Gabriel, who had apparently decided their buttocks were now clammy enough and pulled out their rain pants to sit on. Justin, still in rebel mode, stayed put on the damp mossy back of the log. Sam hoped he’d develop diaper rash.

  They munched silently for a few minutes, then a flutter of wings overhead caught Sam’s attention as several gray jays landed in the branches of the Douglas fir. “Check this out, crew,” Sam began.

  Nick too had noticed the visitors. “Whiskey jacks!”

  She smiled at him. “Ah, you know them!”

  Everyone looked up.

  “Crew, these are gray jays, also called Canada jays, or whiskey jacks,” Sam told them.

  “Whiskey jacks?” Justin laughed. “Are they heavy boozers?”

  “I think ‘whiskey jack’ is a corruption of a Native American name for them.”

  Taylor put a hand over her brow to shield her eyes from the sun as she gazed upward. “They’re cute. So fluffy.”

  A couple of the birds hopped to lower branches.

  “Around here, we call them camp robbers.” Aidan stuffed a piece of pepperoni into his mouth.

  “Why?” Justin asked. “They don’t look too tough to me.”

  Nick was breaking off pieces of his crackers and cheese, barely managing to stifle a grin.

  Sam nodded at him. “Nick, show the crew why.”

  The boy held out his hand with the bits of crackers and cheese scattered across his palm. Less than ten seconds passed before one of the jays swooped down. The bird hovered uncertainly for a few wingbeats, regarding the offering with bright eyes. Then the jay landed, its tiny claws grasped around the boy’s fingers, quickly snatched a snippet of cracker and fluttered back to its perch above.

  “That was awesome!” Gabriel breathed.

  “Who trained ‘em?” Ashley wanted to know.

  “Nobody.” Sam was pleased to see a smile on every face. “They are wild birds, but for some unknown reason, they are very friendly. Anyone can feed them.”

  Every kid started breaking off pieces of their lunch and offering them skyward. Olivia and Gabriel and Nick silently beamed when a bird took their offerings. The first time they felt the bird’s tiny claws, Taylor squealed, Ashley gasped, and Justin whispered, “Sweet!”

  Sam was ecstatic that her crew was so enraptured by the birds’ visit; maybe interesting these teens in nature wouldn’t be an onerous job after all. “Don’t feed them your entire lunch, crew. There’s no more food until suppertime.”

  The gray jays were the core of conversation for the next four miles, with the kids tossing in sightings of other wildlife they’d encountered while growing up. Most encounters had been in zoos and roadside parks, judging from their stories.

  After arriving at their next campsite and setting up the tents, they all attempted to start their bow-drill fires. After a couple of hours, each camper had a small fire smoldering in front of them, although more than one blaze had been finished by Maya or Aidan. The kids had individual packets of macaroni and cheese to cook, with green peppers and turkey pepperoni to add if they wanted. Carrots and dried fruit rounded out the meal.

  Sam slid onto the ground in the circle beside Ashley. “It was a good day, right, crew?”

  “Those birds were awesome.” Olivia’s eyes were still shining.

  “We’ll probably run into more camp robbers before this trip is over.” Sam took a bite of her macaroni. She hadn’t cooked it long enough, and had to chew carefully before she said, “A few things before we say good-night, crew. First of all, good job, all of you, on trying the bow-drill fires. I promise that if you keep at it, every one of you will be able to build a fire from scratch.”

  She scooped up her last bite, and after she’d swallowed it, set down her dish and stood up. “Nick, please stand up.”

  “Gex, dude,” Justin hissed. “What did you do?”

  Nick, anxiety stiffening his face, pressed his hands onto the ground and pushed himself to his feet.

  “Nick Lewis.” Sam pulled a necklace out of her pocket. “Because you have been willing to follow all instructions and because you have helped your fellow crew members without being told, you are our first Voyager.”

  She placed the pendant around Nick’s neck and knotted the leather cord in the back for him. The boy’s face was scarlet with embarrassment. He sat down quickly, but Sam could tell he was working hard to stifle a smile as he fingered the bead in the hollow of his throat.

  “Congrats, man,” Justin slapped him on the shoulder hard enough to make the younger boy wince. “You get to crap alone!”

  Sam resumed her place in the circle.

  “Lurik, what about the rest of us?” Gabriel wanted to know. “I hacked up an onion yesterday.”

  Sam said, “You’ll all get there. Remember that we’re watching for willingness to contribute to the group and assume individual responsibility, as well as your ability to develop leadership skills. Now, I need to remind you that you each have at least one letter from your family in your pack.”

  Most of the young faces around her assumed wary expressions.

  “And you need to use your journal to write a letter to your family sometime during the next two days.”

  “What the gex are we supposed to write?” Justin asked.

  Sam shrugged. “Whatever you want to tell them. Write about what you hope for the future, what we’re doing here, about your feelings. It’s completely your choice. The letter will be picked up in two days, when the counselors come up to check on you. When they leave the next day, they’ll deliver the letters to your families.”

  Now all six of her crew stared at the ground, shuffling their feet, crossing their arms, clearly uncomfo
rtable with the reminder of the people waiting for them back home. She hated to be the one to bring them down after a good day, but she had instructions to follow. These kids were here to think, and, with luck, to change. Their families were receiving counseling back at the Wilderness Quest office to learn their roles in breaking old destructive patterns.

  Reaching into her pocket, she thumbed the recorder on.

  “Okay.” She rubbed her hands together. “Final exercise of the day before cleanup and bed. I want each of you to say what kind of animal you’d be if you could choose, and why. Me, I’d like to be a crow. They act like they have a lot of fun, and they can live practically anywhere and eat whatever’s available. A crow is a very adaptable bird.” She twisted her head to the left. “Ash.”

  “Huh.” The girl stirred the remaining macaroni in her bowl for a minute, thinking. Her purple-streaked hair stood up on one side and she had a smudge of charcoal on her cheek, but somehow these imperfections made her more pretty instead of less so. “A leopard. One of the all-black ones.”

  “Why?” Aidan asked.

  “All black so I could be practically invisible.” Ashley’s gaze bounced around their circle. “And I’d have claws so I could shred other animals when I wanted to.” She held up her hands, her fingers curled into claws.

  “Leopards are endangered.” Nick sounded concerned. “Poachers would want to kill you.”

  Ashley scrunched up her face as if she’d just tasted something bitter. “That’s why I need to be all black,” she reiterated, “so I could hide in the shadows.”

  The girl had prostituted herself, according to her mother. Despite Ash’s brave words, maybe she hadn’t done that willingly.

  “And you’d be a hunter,” Nick told her. “You’d have to kill things.”

  The girl’s eyes darkened, a little sad now. “I guess I would.”

  “Pick someone else,” Aidan instructed.

  Ashley glanced across the circle. “Gabriel.”

  “I’d be a voltenark,” the chubby boy grinned. “It’s a shape-shifter. It can go anywhere and look like anything.”

  Eyerolls all around the circle. Sam pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. When she’d recovered, she said, “How about an animal from this planet, Gabriel?”

  “Really? Boring.” His forehead wrinkled. “I guess I’d be an owl, then. Owls are cool. And they’re wise.”

  And they’re magical and they’re in Harry Potter books, Sam thought. An easy answer. Owls were cool, and they were real but still magical, some of her favorite creatures on the planet.

  Gabriel picked Taylor.

  The lanky girl was briefly distracted by finishing the braiding of her long blond hair. When she’d wrapped a rubber band around the end of the plait, she said, “I’d be a peacock.”

  Justin scoffed. “You’d have to be a peahen.”

  She aimed an icy glare at him. “We’re choosing what animal we want to be, and I want to be a peacock, because it’s beautiful.”

  “Weird,” Nick said.

  It was a bit weird. Did Taylor, who claimed that all she wanted to study was modeling, secretly want to be a boy? An idea crawled into Sam’s mind. Taylor was lean and rangy and if she had breasts at all, they didn’t show through the unisex crew clothing. Her facial features were androgynous. Was Taylor a transgender girl, and nobody had thought to enlighten the new field guide?

  But even if that were true, what difference would it make? Sam considered; she couldn’t imagine how she would treat Taylor differently. She had been told to watch out for sexual encounters among her crew, to not allow any two to go off alone. No matter anyone’s gender, this was a group date.

  Justin volunteered, “I’d be a pit bull, so nobody would mess with me.”

  “You’d probably end up in the pound,” Gabriel said, and then slapped his hand over his mouth to stop himself from saying anything else.

  Sam’s brain filled in the awkward silence. In the pound, where nobody would take you home, so you’d be on death row. Sorta like your dad.

  “Olivia,” Justin snarled.

  The black-haired girl stared at the ground as she talked. “I’d be a lemming.”

  Maya squinted at her. “A what?”

  “It’s a rodent of some kind.” Olivia briefly looked up and then quickly shifted her gaze back to the dirt in front of her boots. “I’d like to be one because lemmings follow each other, even over cliffs, without thinking at all.”

  Sam made a mental note to remind Maya and Aidan about Olivia’s previous suicide attempt. They’d all have to keep a close eye on her.

  “That’s even weirder than the peacock,” Nick said. “I’d be a hawk. I could soar so high that I’d be out of reach. No hunter could shoot me.”

  The fifteen-year-old seemed obsessed with hunting. Or was it killing? Sam frowned. She might have expected that from bully-boy Justin, but not from Nick.

  The others noticed Nick’s preoccupation too. Justin pointed out, “You’d be the hunter instead, just like Ass, er, I mean, Ash.”

  Ashley’s hands closed into fists, but she didn’t respond. Nick scowled at Justin for a long moment, his jaw clenched, and then turned his gaze back to the coals of his fire still smoldering in front of him. Smacking his foot down on top of the smoking embers, he crushed them into dust with the sole of his hiking boot. The scent of burned rubber filled the air.

  Completing the exercise, Maya chose a dolphin and Aidan a chimpanzee, which ended the discussion on a laugh and a less disturbing tone. Why the company psychologists wanted the kids to discuss this peculiar topic was a mystery to Sam. Most likely, she decided, the exercise was designed to make the teens think about themselves and their place in the world. What would the Wilderness Quest counselors make of her choice to be a crow?

  After washing dishes and locking everything away in the metal bear box the company had stationed at this site, Sam gathered them all along the ridge to watch the sunset change the clouds in the west from yellow to gold to fuchsia, then to purple and finally, cobalt blue. Olivia began the conversation by saying her favorite color was that saffron shade. Then the others punctuated the silence with poetic sounding colors as the names occurred to them. Tangerine. Scarlet. Crimson. Amethyst. Mulberry.

  “Puce,” Ashley contributed.

  “Puke?” Justin snorted.

  “Puce is kind of a purple-brown color.” Nick turned toward the muscular boy. “Similar to mulberry.”

  “Huh,” the boy with the dragon tattoo huffed, for once without a witty retort.

  Then they were quiet for a few minutes. Nick sat cross-legged, fingering his Voyager bead. As the sky darkened, he murmured, “Indigo.”

  As the last colors faded into black, Sam ended the evening. “To your toothbrushes and tents, while you can still find your headlamps.”

  A collective growl went up.

  “It’s only a little after eight,” Taylor complained.

  Maya reminded them, “You can write or draw in your journals, or read.”

  “And we arise at dawn,” Aidan said.

  “We arise at dawn!” the six kids instantly yelled in chorus.

  Sam laughed. When did they have time to organize that? Kim and Kyla had often talked about special moments when all the kids came together. Camp robbers. Sunset colors. We arise at dawn. She’d have a pleasant report for Troy tonight.

  Chapter 5

  Day Three. Sam got up before the kids to watch as they emerged from their tents. Nick had been first yesterday, but Ashley beat him this morning, her hair a rat’s nest of purple spikes. She was already crouched over her fire kit, bowing as quickly as she could, when Nick slid out of his tent. Before he pulled on his orange windbreaker, Sam spotted a damp red line across his blue T-shirt.

  “Nick.” She crooked a finger at him, drawing him toward her as she walked a few paces to a private area behind a clump of trees.

  He had a hard time meeting her eyes. “Yeah?”

  “Show me your s
tomach.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Resigned, he unzipped his windbreaker and pulled up the T-shirt. Two bright red horizontal scratches adorned his flat abdomen above the fading pink stripes of previous wounds. Blood beaded the top line.

  “Why, Nick?”

  His gaze unfocused, he slowly untied his Voyager necklace and then dropped it into her hands. His fingers were cold against hers. “I needed to.”

  She gritted her teeth, experiencing simultaneous urges to slap him and hug him. “Why?”

  His thin shoulders lifted and fell. “I just did.”

  Sam had no clue what she was supposed to say to connect with him. “What did you use?”

  Silently, he pulled a sliver of shale from his pants pocket and handed it over, then turned away, shuffling toward the group area and his fire kit.

  Well, that was just great. Her first Voyager had already reverted back to a Zombie cutter. She inspected the sharp edge of the shale flake. It was lined with red. She didn’t need to keep Nick away from knives; he was a smart kid who could manufacture his tool of choice at any time.

  She did not know how to read these kids. Nick seemed happy last night at dinner. What the hell had set him off? It couldn’t have been the sunset; he’d been the most enthusiastic about naming colors. The animal discussion? He’d picked a hawk as the creature he admired. She could picture him as a bird now, rising higher and higher, moving so far away that nobody could reach him.

  Expect setbacks had been a piece of advice from the counselors, none of us changes overnight. Apparently she’d been naïve to imagine that Sam Westin might escape the normal course of events.

  She felt slightly more optimistic when pit bull Justin succeeded in making fire on his own for the first time, and then volunteered to help Olivia the lemming with hers.

  The gift of the day came in the middle of their nine-mile hike. They’d just resumed their march after taking a lunch break in the middle of a fragrant field of fading lupines and brilliant Indian paintbrush.