The Trail

by Meika Hashimoto

  To my father, Toshio Hashimoto,

  who taught me to love the mountains

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map Illustrations

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  OUT IN THE woods, all by myself, I’ve become aware of the little things. There are the good littles: cooling my face with a handful of water from a mountain stream. The way sunlight plays through wind-rippled leaves. The startled leap of a deer that only I see.

  Then there are the bad littles: mosquitoes, mostly. Achy feet. Lying down on a sharp rock under the tent after a long day of hiking, being too tired to move, and waking up to a bruise the size of a baseball on my shoulder.

  But really. These are little things.

  Then there are the little things that can turn into big things. I call them my keeps list. When I’m out on the trail, every hour or two I tick them off: (1) Keep warm. (2) Keep hydrated. (3) Keep eating. (4) Keep an eye on the sun.

  Ignoring a little keep could turn into a big problem later. So I’ll pull on a jacket if I’m cold, or slug back some water if I’m thirsty, or scarf down a Snickers if my belly rumbles. And I always try to make camp before dark.

  It’s a simple system, but I’ve learned the hard way that if you neglect one of the keeps long enough, before you know it, your teeth are chattering as you tilt back an aspirin for your dehydration headache, trying to make dinner in the pitch-dark with a groan in your stomach loud enough to wake the zombies.

  In the woods, after dark, it’s easy to believe in zombies.

  But I know better than to be afraid of that.

  Sort of.

  Right now, I’ve been doing pretty good with my keeps list. It’s evening, and I’ve pitched the tent by a small stream. Even though it’s late June, I’ve layered up with a wool hat and two jackets—a light fleece and a waterproof shell. I’ve taken a long drink of water and have unpacked my mess kit to make dinner. Bowl, cup, fork. A quart pot with a lid that doubles as a frying pan.

  Next, I break out my stove. It’s an MSR PocketRocket, a pretty cool piece of camping equipment that folds to the size of my fist. I screw it onto my fuel canister and open the three pot supports. A quick twist of my wrist turns on the gas; I flick a match and, a second later, a bright blue flame darts up. I pour the rest of my water bottle into the pot and settle it onto the stove.

  By the time the water has boiled, I’ve dug through my pack and found my meal for the night—a package of spaghetti and some ready-to-eat tomato sauce in a plastic pouch. It doesn’t compare to what I’d be eating back at Gran’s house, but I’m so hungry I don’t care. I dump the spaghetti into the bubbling water. As the long, thick strands twist in the water, a burst of saliva floods my mouth.

  I’ve been on the trail for just a few days but have enough food for only one more, two if I count my candy bars as full-on meals. I’ve been eating more than I expected. I’m going to need to find a gas station or grocery store on a real road soon to restock.

  That’s what I call them now: real roads. Gravel and tar with straight yellow lines that run true and smooth to their destinations. Sometimes when the bad littles are getting to me—I’m lying in the tent and a stray mosquito won’t stop buzzing, or my pack strap presses right on my black-and-blue shoulder—I think about taking a real road. A real road would bring me home so fast. All I would need to do is follow one to a town and turn myself in to the police station. A few hours later, I would be home.

  But taking a real road would mean giving up. And I can’t do that. Not yet, not while there’s something warped and unfinished inside me that can be drained away only by hiking, step-by-step, down this two-foot-wide path, into the wilderness for four hundred more miles, until I’m standing at the top of Mount Katahdin at the end of the Appalachian Trail.

  Just when I am crouching over the boiling pot, calculating the last nuggets of food in my pack, I hear it. A growl in the shadows.

  My heart slams into my throat.

  Bear.

  I’ve been so busy thinking about the little things that I lost sight of the big ones. A bear is a big thing. And not a good one.

  I am alone, with only a Swiss Army knife for protection. And I’m pretty sure a two-inch blade covered in last night’s cheese crumbs won’t stop much of anything. But I slide the knife out of my back pocket anyway and point it out ahead of me, jabbing at the night.

  The growl gets louder. It’s coming from a choked tangle of bushes fifty feet from my campsite. In the thickening darkness I can’t see when it might attack.

  I think I read somewhere that if you see a black bear, you shouldn’t run away or they’ll think you’re prey. You’re supposed to look big and make loud noises. So I stand up slowly. I open my mouth to shout at it.

  Nothing comes out.

  I also read somewhere that animals can see and smell fear, which is really too bad because I’m trembling all over and I can feel myself breaking into a cold sweat. Look big, I tell myself again. Be brave. But then my mind empties and I’m just praying, Please don’t eat me, please don’t eat me.

  Bristling fur. Sharp teeth. Snarling lips. I cry out as it comes hurtling from the bushes like a burst of crackling gunfire and—it’s a dog. Shaggy-faced and flop-eared, eyes brave with desperation. Pitch-black except for a hollowed-out chest that’s so mud-spattered, I can’t tell if it’s brown or white. A tail bent at the tip, as though someone had tried to snap it in half. He’s definitely a mutt. Mangy and starving and as ugly as sin. I can count his ribs.

  The dog rushes at me, but I feel my heart start beating again. I leap back as he stalks over to my cook site. A swift kick with his hind leg upsets my dinner pot.

  “Hey!” I shout, but it’s too late. Spaghetti and foaming starchy water spill to the ground. The movement was practiced, smooth. This dog has done this before. He must have seen me—a skinny kid with unwashed dark hair and terrified brown eyes who weighed less than a hundred pounds even with pockets full of change—and figured I was an easy target. He grabs a mouthful of scorching noodles and beats it back to the bushes.

  I have never seen a dog hold boiling food in its mouth. The rest of my fear melts away. He must be near-crazy with hunger. I wonder how long he has been out here, scavenging for scraps from frightened hikers.

  I stare at the remaining spaghetti lying in the dirt. My dinner. My stomach growls angrily. I can try to salvage the remains, give the noodles a long rinse and hope the tomato sauce covers up any leftover grit.

  I sigh. Instead, I dig a fork out of my mess kit and scoop the muddy spaghetti into my pot. I tiptoe over to the edge of the campsite and dump the contents on the ground. I can see the do
g now. He’s twenty feet away, behind the thickest part of the bushes. He watches me with uncertain eyes.

  I back up slowly. The dog does not budge until I have retreated all the way to the tent. Then he shuffles forward and begins gulping down the rest of his dinner.

  “Enjoy it,” I tell him. I’m still annoyed, but at least he seems to appreciate my cooking.

  Digging into my pack, I pull out a flattened peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. It was going to be my lunch for tomorrow, but it will have to do for tonight. As the dog busies himself with my pasta, I put away the rest of my food and then crawl into the tent, where I spend the last minutes before true dark with the taste of cold sandwich in my mouth and the certainty that, tomorrow, I’m going to have to find more food.

  INSIDE THE TENT, the dark heavy all around me, I can’t stop my thoughts from crowding back into my brain. It’s easy to keep them out when I’m worrying about food or water, or putting one foot in front of the other. But here at night, I can’t help thinking about the reason I’m here: my best friend. Lucas. It was Lucas’s idea to hike the Appalachian Trail in the first place.

  He had been my best friend ever since second grade, when I moved from my parents’ house in the suburbs of Boston to my grandma’s place up in Norwich, Vermont, to wait out their divorce. My parents and I had been driving up I-91 one rainy night when a moose jumped the guardrail. My dad rammed on the brakes, and the car had gone spinning.

  From the backseat I had seen a whirl of dark fur and the tiny needles of the spruce trees that lined the highway. Fur, needles, fur, needles—we were out of control, and like a sped-up movie I watched the galloping animal come straight at me, its heavy body smashing like the Hulk’s fist through the back door.

  There was the crack of a shattering window, and I remember thinking how I never realized that car glass broke in twinkling cubes instead of jagged triangles.

  The next couple of hours were fuzzy—there were blue-blazing sirens and the static of police radios clicking on and off, but nothing really came into focus until I was in the hospital with tubes up my nose and my arm in a cast and Gran by my side, telling me that I was going to be okay.

  My parents were unhurt in the crash. They stayed in Vermont only long enough to make sure I would be okay and left before my week in the hospital was even over. I guess nearly losing their only son wasn’t enough to distract them from the grief of losing their marriage.

  On the third evening, a boy my age walked in, joking with the nurses as he climbed into the bed next to mine. He had a cast on his arm, like me, but it extended all the way down to his hand and fingers as well. He didn’t seem to mind. He saw me looking at his arm and lightly patted the hard plaster of his cast. “Fell out of a tree. Never trust a dead branch.” He nodded at me. “How did you get yours?”

  “Car accident.”

  The boy went still. Then he swung his legs past the side of the bed and trotted over to me. He was barefoot. I shuddered when I saw his toes curl against the tiles—what kind of kid would cross a hospital floor without shoes? His feet must have been freezing. The boy’s deep blue eyes were filled with amazement. “You’re the kid.”

  “The kid?” I asked.

  “The moose kid. Norwich is a small town. Your grandma and my parents are friends. I heard about you and your folks at dinner last night.” He gripped the side rail of my hospital bed with his good hand.

  I looked at this boy, with his broken arm and chipper freckles, and all I could manage was a strangled “Yeah,” before burying my head in my pillow. I had just been in an accident. Everything hurt. My parents had abandoned me. I didn’t want to talk.

  After a while I heard him remove his hand from the rail and return to his bed. He didn’t speak to me again; the next morning he was gone. I figured I’d missed my chance to make a friend but couldn’t really bring myself to care.

  The day before I left the hospital, Gran handed me a plain white envelope. “This is from the next-door neighbor’s son, Lucas,” she told me.

  The envelope contained a note in messy handwriting on plain white loose-leaf. It read: Hey Toby! I heard you’re getting out of the hospital. I’ll come by on Saturday at noon.

  That Saturday I met him on Gran’s front porch. He had a stack of DC comics with him. We didn’t talk much, but we sat on the porch swing as cold spring rain soaked into the grass, and buried ourselves in the adventures of Batman and Superman and the Flash.

  When I boarded the bus a week later for the first day of school, I was dreading the long walk past unfamiliar faces as I tried to find a seat. Then I saw someone standing in the back, waving wildly with his one good arm. Lucas, of course. We ended up riding the bus to Norwich Elementary School together every day, and by the end of the fall we were testing out our newly healed arms on bike rides and games of catch.

  For three years, Lucas and I were inseparable. As I settled into Norwich and got to know other kids, sometimes I joined in on kickball games and freeze tag at recess. But most of the time it was just me and Lucas.

  That first year, we spent endless afternoons exploring our backyards, but by fifth grade we were having adventures by local rivers and trees and mountains. We built forts with rocks and broken branches. We battled with sticks for swords. We watched the tadpoles shed their fishy tails to become full-throated bullfrogs.

  Sometimes we’d swing bats in Norwich’s perfectly measured ball fields, or go to a pool party in town, but our favorite thing to do was to go camping behind my house. Lucas’s dad was a middle school teacher and a Boy Scouts leader, and he taught us all about survival in the woods, taking us for overnights during the summer when he was on vacation.

  As I lie here thinking about it, I can almost pretend that that’s where I am right now: a tent in the woods behind Gran’s house. Lucas beside me. His dad in another tent just next to ours. I can almost feel their presence, and it helps me finally fall asleep.

  I WAKE TO light rain pattering down on the tent. It’s snug and cozy in my mummy sleeping bag, and even though I know I should get up soon, I pull the hood over my head and burrow deeper inside.

  Gran likes to say that the best temperature is bed. At this moment, I couldn’t agree more. There is something miraculous about the fact that my own body turned yesterday’s soggy peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich into enough energy and heat to keep me sleeping comfortably through the night.

  Curled in the darkness, I inhale my warmth for a few minutes more, not minding the smells that happen to a hiker—sweat, dirt, and last night’s trapped farts. They’re not pretty smells. But they’re my smells.

  Eventually, though, I know it’s time to get up when my belly reminds me of the third thing on my keeps list: Keep eating, Toby! I wriggle out of my bag and rub away my eye crusts. My boots are under the vestibule, a patch of tent awning that keeps my belongings dry and covered. I unzip the door and poke my head out, scanning the campsite to see if that mangy dog is still hanging around.

  He’s not there. I reach out and pull my boots inside. My socks are draped over them, dirt-stiffened but not too damp. As I slide on a sock, a scraping jolt of pain hits my foot. I yelp. Blisters have formed on two of my toe knuckles, red-shiny and taut with fluid.

  I dig through the top pocket of my pack and find my Swiss Army knife and Band-Aids from my first aid kit. I unfold one of the smaller blades from the knife. As I lean over to nick open my blisters, I hear a voice.

  Toe, you’re gonna have to sterilize that.

  It’s Lucas’s voice. Inside my head again.

  Suddenly the pain of my blisters is obliterated by a wave of guilt that hits me. I shake my head to clear my thoughts, but it is another minute before I can focus on moving my hands back to the first aid kit.

  “Thanks, Lucas,” I whisper as I rip open an alcohol prep pad.

  I wipe the blade with alcohol to sterilize it, then swiftly draw it across my blisters. Clear pus oozes out. I squeeze the bulbs of liquid until the blisters have drained, then wrap them t
ightly with the Band-Aids.

  My foot taken care of, it’s time to get dressed. I pull a sweat-stained T-shirt over my head, then a thin long-sleeve shirt.

  My raincoat goes on next. “Always dress in layers,” Lucas’s dad had told me when I had first started camping with them. “Layers let you regulate your temperature. One of the most common things to deal with on the trail is hypothermia, and you can get it by both over- and underdressing. If you don’t wear enough, your body’s going to cool down. If you wear too much, you’re going to soak your clothes in sweat, and they’ll be useless if the wind picks up or the temperature drops.”

  I pick up a pair of lightweight hiking pants and slide them on. They are another lesson from Lucas after the two of us had gotten caught in the rain during a camping trip. I had been wearing jeans and they had stuck to my legs like warmth-sucking leeches, making me completely miserable.

  “Cotton kills,” Lucas had said, echoing his dad’s advice. He told me that when it gets wet, it gets heavy and loses its ability to keep you warm. After that trip, Lucas had given me a pair of his old nylon hiking pants. I never had to wait long for them to dry.

  Everything I was doing that morning was reminding me of Lucas.

  LAST SUMMER, LUCAS and I made the List.

  It was the weekend after school had let out, and the two of us were in the middle of our Saturday morning ritual of gobbling down breakfast in my kitchen. Gran had left a thick stack of pancakes for us to eat before heading into town to run errands.

  “You know,” said Lucas, stuffing an entire pancake in his mouth, “weshldwridownsmthgs.”

  “Huh?” I asked, slathering butter on five pancakes before pouring syrup over them.

  Lucas took a big gulp of juice. “We should write down some things. A list of all the totally awesome things we want to do this summer.”

  I sliced into my stack and forked a huge chunk of pancake into my mouth. “How about we put ‘Eat twenty pancakes in one sitting’ at the top?” I mumbled.

  “We basically do that every Saturday,” Lucas said, waving away my idea. He got a pen and piece of paper from a kitchen drawer. “We should do something new. What about fishing?”