Dara shook her head. Climbing to her feet, she zipped her gear and hauled it onto her shoulders. “I have to get back now. If anybody realizes I bailed, they’re going to know where I went.”
Following her, Cade seemed determined to make this hard. He caught her, held her tight. And he pressed his brow to hers. When he murmured, his voice slipped into her veins, sizzling through her body to her heart. “I love you.”
It was a moment suspended. She longed to keep it, to let it play out until the bubble burst. But there was too much at stake. With one last kiss, she hoped she’d imprinted herself on his skin, too. “I love you, too. And that’s why you have to run.”
“Stay with me,” he said.
“I can’t, not yet,” Dara told him. She pushed away, stronger than he was. Backing into the forest, she raised her hand—a good-bye. Tears streaked her cheeks, but she didn’t look heartbroken. No, she was determined. Certain. Sure.
His voice broke when he asked, “When?”
With one last smile, she swore, “I’ll find you. I promise.”
And then, she was gone.
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EPILOGUE
It wasn’t Sheriff Porter’s idea to let Dara stand next to him during the press conference.
At five thirty, six, and eleven, her raw, tear-streaked face played on every station, exposed to the world. It was her face that landed on the morning paper, dissected with sidebars. Was she sorry? Grieving? Traumatized?
They didn’t really care. It was just something else to talk about. A little sidebar to the main story and that was, the Primitive Boy was dead. In his gravelly voice (described by the Indianapolis Star as weary gravitas; the New York Times called it appropriately solemn) Sheriff Porter told the world that Jonathan Walsh was dead.
There were witnesses. Dara Porter, the daughter who brought the Primitive Boy out of the forest in the first place. And three very shocked fishermen, whose truck she stopped in the middle of the road.
Panicked, they said. Crying and hysterical, translated the newspapers.
But they all believed, the Parks Department and the Sheriff’s Department, the State Police, and just about anybody else with a badge and a vested interest. They believed her when she said she found him burning up with fever. They believed her when she said she did her best to drag him out of the woods.
They put a blanket around her shoulders and carried her away in an ambulance, in the middle of the nastiest spring thunderstorm any of them could remember. Four days passed before it was safe to send people into the depths of the national forest again. Hikers, campers (bloggers, reporters) were advised to note the GPS coordinates if they found remains—under no circumstances should they attempt to remove the Primitive Boy from his grave.
It was a warning made on account of protocol. Nobody expected to find a body—four days! Four days in the rain and the elements and the wild. No one said it, but everyone believed it: what remained of the Primitive Boy was probably bubbling in a coyote’s belly and feeding the beetles.
And it was always the Primitive Boy.
His birth name was barely remembered. Even when magazines dug up the very strange history of Liza Walsh, interviewed old friends and colleagues, they still called her son the Primitive Boy. That was the story. They wouldn’t let go.
That’s what made it easy for Cade to make his way into the Cumberland Mountains. On his own, he decided to cut his hair. When he passed through a regular hiking trail, he traded a couple of furs for a down coat and some boots. They fit all right. What mattered was they weren’t primitive.
Neither was he. He had maps and a compass, and a paygo cell phone. And as he stepped into his first dark night in the mountains, he looked up. The stars shifted with the seasons, but they never changed. When he gazed at Orion, Dara gazed at him, too. That hunter, wearing the skins of an animal, standing against the elements, stretched between them.
It was the light that blinked, the one that streaked across the horizon, that would connect them. Cade pressed the number one on his cell phone and sent a message not to the stars, but to the satellite.
The satellite caught it and tossed it back, over trees and mountains, valleys and rivers. Over miles and miles, in the blink of an eye. Cade waited, breath caught in his throat, listening to the distance. The silence went on, but not endlessly. Barely a moment passed.
Dara answered. She would find him.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to . . .
Vincent Racaniello, PhD, for answering my questions about rhinovirus in the wild. His Virology blog (www.virology.ws) was an invaluable resource while writing this novel.
Kimberly Morgan, Public Affairs Specialist for Daniel Boone National Forest, who helped me accurately hide Cade and his family.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, for the original—first and best—Tarzan of the Apes.
Anne Hoppe, Sarah Shumway, and Jim McCarthy, for taking a chance on a book with no magic in it at all.
J. Wescott and W. Lorraine, the cornerstones of everything I do. You make all things possible.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALEX MALLORY was born and raised in the Midwest. A big fan of reading, history, camping, and competitive M&M sorting, Alex once crossed a dilapidated train trestle in the middle of the night, two hundred feet above the Wabash River, in a futile attempt to prove her love to someone who had no idea she existed. (1) She lived to tell about it, (2) it didn’t work, and (3) she doesn’t recommend it. You can visit Alex online at www.alexmallorybooks.com.
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COPYRIGHT
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
WILD. Copyright © 2014 by Saundra Mitchell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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EPub Edition October 2013 ISBN 9780062218742
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