Born to Run

by John M. Green

  “You still there?” asked Niki Abbott over the speaker.

  “Davey’s just come in… with his new camera.”

  “I should give him some lessons,” she laughed.

  “Not with what you’d teach him!”

  “Funny man. I know he can’t hear, but shouldn’t…?”

  Ed waved at Davey before turning away. “I’ve got my back to him now. Where were we?”

  “You were saying it’s two hours till she leaves. I’m getting wet just thinking about this,” she said.

  Ed shook his head. “No dirty talk.”

  “Ed, he’s deaf!”

  “I don’t care,” Ed said. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the light flashing red for an incoming call on the other line. “Our call’s coming through…”

  BY the time Isabel was ready to fly to the shack, Davey was back in happy-mode and she guessed it was the excitement of coming to the heliport.

  His toilet break was taking time. The rotors had been spinning for five minutes and Davey hadn’t made a reappearance.

  “What is he doing in there?” repeated Isabel.

  “Don’t wear out your watch,” Ed said, glancing at the chopper whirling outside the terminal not fifty feet away.

  “It’s not as if you have appointments at the other end,” George added.

  Davey burst out of the restroom door, his toy penguin Pip flying in one hand, his camera gripped in the other and his shirt flapping out from under his sweater.

  “I hope you weren’t taking photos in there!” George laughed.

  Davey ran straight to Isabel and whooshed up into her arms, squeezing her with all his might. She tucked in his shirt as he hung there and hugged him back, and spun him around like the rotors, with so many swirls they were both giddy.

  When she stopped, and was still swaying a bit, Davey slipped down and his blond head snuggled into the down-filled squishiness of her steel-grey parka. With cuddles over, he handed Pip to George and stretched his camera out in front and pointed it back at his face, snapping a big cheesy self-portrait. He held up his hand signalling to the others to wait for a moment—this was serious business. He had to check his work was of adequate quality, inspecting it on the camera’s display screen. Finally, Davey, apparently satisfied, placed the camera firmly in Isabel’s gloved hand.

  He signed, “I am going with you.” He pointed to the camera. “I’m inside there.”

  THE chopper was loaded up with more than enough provisions for her stay at the shack, long enough to recharge her batteries but short enough to make the President’s State of the Union Address where she’d be officiating.

  It really was a shack, not some millionaire’s conceit. This was no mountain mansion with a staff of five and rooms for twenty. Isabel had bought the tumbledown log cabin from the estate of a recluse who’d lived there since before World War II and, apart from the roof and the walls, which she’d had freshly insulated, there wasn’t much in it… All its magic was outside.

  Over the years, so-called nature lovers wrecked great tracts of the Appalachians’ fragile alpine vegetation, especially around the 2,000-mile hiking trail that spans from Mt. Katahdin up in Maine down to Springer Mountain in Georgia. If it wasn’t trees lopped for firewood or soils compacted by walking or erosion, it was the food and trash left behind that weaned the wildlife off nature. You didn’t have to be a tie-dye wearing eco-nut to want these remote reaches rededicated as wildernesses, though it helped.

  In local Park Ranger Andy Goodman’s case, his extra motivation was that humans hampered his grey wolf reintroduction program. Consequently, the deal he’d negotiated with Isabel was that she kept no foodstuffs stored at the shack unless she was staying. Nothing his wolves could sniff for.

  Isabel’s pilot and co-pilot were already inside the chopper. Apart from her food, she’d packed fresh batteries for the lanterns and a backpack bulging with her sketchpad and pencils, her laptop—she was working on a couple of speeches—eight spare fully charged computer batteries, an iPod, and some books. She’d thought of taking an iPad, but she was old-school about reading and loved the feel of books, even their smell. Besides, she didn’t want to be reliant on batteries for everything. The shack had no power. That was not something the Fish and Wildlife Service rangers were prepared to budge on, not even if she paid for the line to be taken up there.

  AS the helicopter skimmed across the tips of the mountain range, there was something ethereal about the white-dusted clusters of fir and eastern hemlock streaking below her. The word “privileged” did come to Isabel’s mind; she knew there were precious few in the world who had their own mountain peak, let alone could access it in this style, especially if they’d come from where she had.

  From the jumpseat, Isabel thought she caught the pilot’s worried lips in the windshield reflection. She followed where she imagined his eyes were looking down and saw the landing pad at Roget’s Peak, high ground that was normally flat bare rock clear of scrub about 200 feet east of her shack. She was guessing but, judging from the build-up against the walls of the shack, it looked like the landing pad was under three or four feet of snow. The crew were discussing alternative landing strategies since there were no snow ploughs or salt spreaders up here. Isabel switched on her helmet speaker to hear the two men debating whether it was dry enough to blow the snow away or whether they should drop everything in by cable, including Isabel. She didn’t meddle but was relieved when they voted for the first choice.

  The pilot shifted the chopper into a hard 30-degree tilt and she watched the snow shoot out in a wild sweep arcing back into the trees away from the shack. He held the slant steady for several minutes, but when the surface snow had blown off and they reached the denser packed mass, he added small vertical adjustments, tilting up and down a few degrees each way, manoeuvring the helicopter in a fan-wave rhythm. When her tongue-in-cheek welcome sign—Shade’n’Froid—poked out of the snow, he swung a 180-degree turn and, with a similar technique, cleared a path toward the shack taking care to keep clear of the trees.

  Isabel jumped onto the cleared landing pad. “Cold isn’t the word for it,” she said, pulling her cap down over her ears and crossing her arms over and whumping her gloved hands to her shoulders several times.

  “Good thing we got no wind.”

  The unloading was swift; it needed to be. The men refused Isabel’s offer to help them carry the boxes up to the shack, insisting she climb back inside their machine and wait till they did their security check on the shack.

  “I’m not entitled to Secret Service any more, you know,” Isabel joked.

  “Hop back inside and stay warm, ma’am. We’ll take care of the rest,” said the pilot, and he and his co-pilot hoicked up two of the boxes each, one on top of the other, and trudged through the few inches of heavy powder left lying on the path to the shack.

  She smelled the fire they’d set even before she walked in but, once inside, the stubborn mustiness of ingrained mildew from the half-century the former owner had been cloistered here hit her. She had changed the furnishings last year but still the mouldy odour clung. It would lift in a few hours, she knew that, once she’d aired the place or got accustomed to it; though which it was, she was never sure. It seemed self-defeating having a fire and simultaneously holding the door open, but it always seemed to work.

  Before the two men left, Isabel ticked through her checklist, opening up the lockbox in the cabin to make sure all her “outside” gear was still there and in order—thermals, cap, face mask, gloves, parkas, overalls, snow shoes, cross-country skis, poles, boots, rug, sleeping bag and blankets. The stack of firewood she’d collected last time she was here was untouched and still dry, and the three fire extinguishers were still rating well in the green safety zone. She inserted the new batteries she’d brought in the lanterns and checked the drawer for the spare globes.

  “No radio, ma’am?” asked the pilot.

  “That’s the point… sanctuary. No radio, no TV. There
’s not even any phone signal up here.”

  BY mid-afternoon the next day, Isabel thought she had captured almost enough frames on Davey’s camera to keep him happy. She kidded herself she was following in the footsteps of Claude Monet’s famous painting series, Cathedral at Reims, by snapping her shack at various times of day from the same spot to reflect the varying shimmers, sparkles and moods. It wouldn’t be long before dusk’s fade to nightfall would drag her back outside to capture her stunning finale.

  She’d sketched, too. Today, it was the unusually gnarled and twisted hemlock, the proudest in the stand not too far from the shack, and she had been pencilling it from three perspectives and in four lights, until around three when the wind blew up. At around 100 feet, to her, it was Roget’s Peak. What fascinated her most was not its height or the knots that made it an unappealing construction timber, but its rough scaly bark, in the past valued by the leather industry for its tannins. What she had been drawing was the maze of cracked, carved furrows crossing and recrossing the trunk on their journey upwards through its arrogant upsweeping foliage, speedways and rest stops for ants and other bugs in spring. To her, it was like her political career so far: heading everywhere, yet arriving nowhere. Inhaling its Christmas tree perfume wasn’t a good idea, rekindling her broken promise to Davey. As a sort of recompense, and she knew it was facile, she pulled out his camera from her pocket and took a few close-ups of the trunk. With the sun getting low, she packed up her sketching gear, and stripped some pine needles off a fallen branch.

  When she was inside the shack, after rebuilding the fire, she connected the camera to her laptop, and as an afterthought tossed the hemlock leaves onto the flames. With her only companion the smoky tang and crackle, she opened up the trunk shot and continued to sketch it, until a distant wolf howled, startling her out of her solitude.

  She put down her crayon.

  Wolves. When she was buying the shack, she had been told there was a grey wolf reintroduction program up here, so she checked with the experts. According to them, there had never been a single documented attack on an adult by a healthy wild wolf in recent history. But that had never been a complete comfort to her. What if a wolf was unhealthy was the question she had asked to a blank stare.

  She got up to latch the door.

  54

  THE NEXT EVENING, in his work cabin high above the small town of Manifold, Fish and Wildlife Service ranger Andy Goodman was fixing for a night out at Daisy’s Bar & Grill. He was a regular, always cracking his jokes, and when he was sober, they were sometimes funny. When he was off duty, humour and booze were his crutches. Andy knew he wasn’t the best-looking guy around; his wife had told him often enough, what with his big ears, his acne scars and the stubble he kept to hide them. She had complained so much, why she married him in the first place was a mystery to him, but at least, he thought, it would have a happy ending. She was about to be his ex.

  Before leaving, he clipped the alert beeper onto his belt as he checked his wolf-scan. The GPS-based, radio-collar system showed all his seven wolves’ heartbeats humming along, including that of Gretel, the alpha female. Sure, Gretel’s heart rate was faster than the others, up at 125 beats per minute compared to Zane’s at 84 bpm, but 125 wasn’t out of the norm for an afternoon roam, and neither was 84. Zane, the wily old Casanova wolf, was probably letting the females do the hunting to save his energy for better things. A man after my own heart, Andy thought.

  Andy set the alert to beep him if any of their heart rates hit 200 bpm or if any changed by more than 30 percent over a 15-minute period. Experience taught him that at even around 160 bpm it could be hackles up, snarls, teeth-bared, real back-off stuff, but not too big a deal. But at 250, it’d be a chase or an attack and Andy liked to monitor those, especially after learning Gretel was pregnant. The screen mapping her routes showed a significant shift in her habits; she was avoiding the edges of the pack’s territory so he guessed she was looking to establish her den, even though it was a bit early in the season up here for mating. He had regaled everyone at Daisy’s with the news that day, and the next, as proud as a husband who’d just learnt his own wife was pregnant… though if that lying, scheming bitch was, Andy thought, it wouldn’t have been his.

  He loved his canis lupus grey wolves for what they were, and for what they did. And for never accusing him of being ugly, or stupid. With their central role in maintaining a balance in nature, wolves were an “apex” predator. The remaining elk and deer herds around these parts got to profit from the wolves culling out their weakest, but being mostly killers of foraging herbivores, the wolves also boosted the survival of the region’s delicate alpine flora, which in turn improved the perching and feeding prospects for birds and butterflies. Andy also saw his wolves as the mountain’s providores. When they did kill an elk—mostly a sick calf or an old female—what they left of the bloody carcass would be a feast for a horde of scavengers: black bears, ravens, coyotes, golden eagles. Even the beetles and squirming maggots would be food for the regenerating flocks of magpies, warblers and nuthatches.

  Andy loved his mountain, and he loved his wolves, and his bitch of a wife could simply go and fuck herself.

  55

  ISABEL GLANCED AT the grey puffballs flitting across the sky and saw they were turning just the slightest pink. With some regret, she thought, tonight’s would be her last sunset this trip, with the chopper due the following lunchtime, a day-and-a-half before the State of the Union Address. It gave her plenty of time to get organised since it would be flying her straight to Washington DC, where Ed and Davey would be joining her.

  Leaning down to place her sketchpad on the worn porch boards by her side, she rubbed her hands above the brazier at her feet, hoping the breeze would stay weak so she could stay outside and take more shots. Last night, even from inside through the window, the sunset had been spectacular drawing her back outside for its neon yellows and ochres slowly spraying across the sky, turning into oranges and reds, and eventually fading into deep, long pinks and satiny purples. The longer she’d looked at it, the more it sparked memories of George’s favourite shirt back from when she first arrived at Half Moon Bay, the one he only wore on his and Janis Joplin’s birthdays, claiming the singer had given it to him at Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love in 1967. She smiled, wondering if George still had the shirt somewhere and remembering how, whenever he told his Joplin story, Annette had always rolled her eyes and busied herself.

  Checking the small screen on the back of Davey’s camera, she noticed its disk was nearly full. She wondered why, since the guy in the store had guaranteed a capacity of a thousand shots and she had to be hundreds short of that.

  She was right. The folder called PIX contained 202 shots, which from the thumbnails seemed mostly hers, and the other folder, labelled VID, only listed three. Videos, she guessed. Digital cameras could do that, she recalled, but thought they must be mammoth video clips. But she hadn’t taken any herself, at least not intentionally, and started wondering if it was one of those annoying instances of accidentally tapping the ‘on’ button, with the video camera rolling and rolling and making a mind-numbing clip of the insides of her pocket, or something equally inane.

  She sipped her Virgin Mary, its thick tang of tomato juice rolling over her tongue just giving it enough coating to take the big smack of spice and pepper she liked to lace it with. The breeze puffed an icy breath over her face before it moved on, tinkling the branches of fir overhanging just a few feet away from the porch.

  She stayed curious about the videos. Maybe they were Davey’s, and he’d shot a surprise for her, like his snaps of Ed posing in his office making cute faces. She clicked on the first one but no, it was her feet. Her snowshoes, actually. She decided it must have been yesterday when the camera was dangling from her wrist as she wandered around the hemlock grove. She deleted it, and clicked the second one open. It was indeed one Davey had taken, and showed Ed with his back to the camera.

  To Isabel, it vague
ly sounded like two people talking… Ed and… was it a woman? Yes, it was, but with the breeze picking up, she couldn’t make out what they were saying. She moved onto the second clip, also Ed, but with more voices. Her eye caught a few flashes of green from the dome-shaped phone console on Ed’s desk. He was talking on speaker, that was clear, yet the call couldn’t be private or confidential since Ed was turning towards Davey to wave happily at the camera. He’d even signed: Hey son, what’s up?

  Isabel packed up her sketchpad, pencils and glass and brought them inside, then booted up her laptop to view her shots on the larger screen.

  As she scrolled through them, first hers, and later Davey’s, she leant back and smiled at Davey’s snaps—of Isabel and George, her with Ed, the three of them together, and Ed in his office. It was such a shame that she couldn’t bring him this trip but she would next time, she promised herself. Again.

  With the video clips, she toyed with the sound as she enjoyed how Ed’s shoulders never slouched, not even in private. But when his hand started rubbing across his buzz cut, a gesture he made when he was nervous or excited, she started wondering who was he talking to? Not that she cared. Or that’s what she pretended. Maybe it was just Davey?

  Eventually, after trying various sound settings, she succeeded.

  “You still there?” It was a woman… a familiar voice, but not one Isabel placed immediately.

  “Davey’s just come in… with his new camera,” said Ed.

  “I should give him some lessons,” laughed the woman. Niki Abbott? Was it Niki?

  “Not with what you’d teach him!” Ed sniggered.

  “Funny man. I know he can’t hear, but shouldn’t…”

  Isabel watched Ed wave his fingers at Davey and poke his pinkie up his nose playfully before turning, but unlike Davey, she wasn’t amused, and her spine was stiffer than Ed’s.