The Trail

by Meika Hashimoto

  “I didn’t particularly like Arsenic—he was always bumming cigarettes and food off other hikers, even though he had more than enough of his own supplies. And he wasn’t exactly a bluebird in springtime when it came to personality. He was rough. He had been in the army. It had … done things to his head. Served three tours in Afghanistan, came home angry and broken and decided to hike the trail.

  “While I hiked with Arsenic, I had to listen to hour-long rants about the messed-up things that humans can do to one another. At first, the stories that Arsenic told made me more than a little afraid of him—this was a guy whose job description included shooting people, after all. But as the days went by, I realized that Arsenic didn’t enjoy watching or participating in the dark side of human nature. He was mad that he had to be part of it.

  “That first day in Vermont, Arsenic and I had booked it pretty hard and got twenty-three miles from the last town before we set up camp for the night. We were stopped at a shelter, just the two of us. It was pretty late for trail time, about seven o’clock, with the sun hurrying down toward the horizon.

  “We left our dinners inside the shelter—three packets of ramen noodles each—and went out to hang the rest of our food.

  “We were rigging our bear bag and had been able to throw our rope over a high branch of a beech tree. We had tied the sack with all our food to the rope and I was just starting to haul it up when we saw this shape coming out from the shadows. It was covered with shaggy black fur, and it was very, very big.”

  “A bear,” I breathe. Not a funny one, like the one Moose and I had run into last night.

  Wingin’ It nods. “Not just a bear. A hungry bear.” Wingin’ It reaches for a water bottle and takes a deep swig. “Coming face-to-face with something with claws and teeth—something that will eat meat, and realizing that in the end, you are potentially just another meal for a wild animal—is a frightening thing.

  “And here we are, with all our food on an open sack on the ground and a massive black bear lumbering our way. Arsenic goes running, and I am left holding the rope. In that moment I have to make a decision. Run for it, and lose whatever food the bear decides to eat, or try and scare it away.”

  “What did you do?” I ask. I know what I would have done. Run like heck.

  Wingin’ It blinks slowly, remembering. “I let go of the rope and hoofed it back to the shelter. Arsenic was there, too. We watched in dead silence as that bear tore into the dry sack and had himself a fine old dinner at our expense. He ate every last bit of our food, snuffling around to pick up the crumbs he might have left behind. When he was done, he gave this satisfied grunt and waddled back into the shadows of the woods.

  “And when Arsenic and I finally turned away from the scene of carnage to our ramen noodles behind us, we discovered that some manner of chipmunks or mice had gotten to it. They had chewed through the plastic ramen packages, leaving only sad curls of broken noodles scattered across the wooden floor.”

  “That night Arsenic and I swept the fragments of noodles into one cooking pot and had ourselves a miserable dinner that tasted like half food, half boot dirt. We had to decide if we were going to backtrack for a resupply, adding almost twenty-five extra miles to our journey, or if we were going to press on and hope that we would find people with extra food that they could give us.

  Even though I’ve had dinner, my stomach growls at the thought of hiking for so long with so little food. “What did you do?” I asked again.

  “Arsenic and I made different decisions. Arsenic was convinced that even if we ran into people, they wouldn’t spare us any food. He decided to backtrack. In all honesty, his pessimism was practical. But I had faith that I would be able to get by.”

  Wingin’ It takes another sip of water. “The next morning we said good-bye to each other and parted ways. By midafternoon I was starting to think that Arsenic had been right, and by nightfall I was convinced of it. I had crossed a road and waited four hours for a hitch to a town. A couple of cars passed, but no one picked me up, so I kept going. I didn’t see a single human soul over the nineteen miles I traveled that day. The only food I had had was a few chocolate smears that had been left inside a Hershey’s bar wrapper that I found at around mile twelve.

  “That night there was a cold snap, and I found myself shivering like a wet dog inside my sleeping bag. I didn’t have enough calories to keep warm. When dawn came, I was shaking so hard from hunger that I could barely stand up.

  “I made it about twelve more miles, and then I was done. I staggered and fell, and no amount of willpower was going to get me back up again. And so I dragged myself to a tree by the side of the trail and sat. And waited.

  “I was there for six hours. Just waiting, too tired to swat the mosquitoes slurping away at my blood and the flies buzzing about my ears. And as evening crept on and the sun began to set, I heard someone coming down the trail. I cleared my throat and begin to call out for help. And who should answer but a familiar, irritated voice. It was Arsenic.

  “He had backtracked, filled his pack with food, and then hitchhiked to a spot on the highway, bushwhacked to the shelter where we had met the bear, and had started hiking to find me. When he did, he cursed and muttered and called me all sorts of things that amounted to the fact that I was an idiot, all the while putting pieces of chocolate into my mouth as if I were a baby sparrow.

  “An hour later, I was able to get up and help pitch a tent, and a week later, it was me who Arsenic leaned on for over six miles, as he hopped out of the wilderness on a broken ankle.”

  A quiet descends. Wingin’ It tips back his water bottle and finishes the last of his water. He turns to me. “Thanks for the dessert,” he says.

  “Thanks for the story,” I tell him. I get to my feet. It’s full dark now, and tomorrow both of us have big days ahead of us. I say good night to Wingin’ It and find a tree to hang my bear bag.

  That night I dream that a pack of hungry bears are chasing me with their open claws and mouths. When I wake the next morning, Wingin’ It has already packed up and left, and it’s just me and Moose again.

  JAKE WAS RIGHT. Unlike the numbingly cold rainstorm that nearly ended my hike a few days ago, today the air wraps around me like a hot, slobbery tongue. Heat rises from the ground, rippling the summer leaves. There is no wind. As I slog forward, my eyes begin to droop and my feet get sluggish.

  Moose starts off racing ahead of me, but soon the heat gets to him, too, and he’s matching my snail’s pace. By midday we have covered seven hilly miles of trail and crossed over Route 302 to tackle the other side of the valley. Here the trail goes up sharply. I battle gravity and the heat. My world shrinks to my feet and the dirt in front of them. Step. Step. Step. Plod. Plod. Plod.

  My palms are greasy with sweat. I am hot. Hotter than baked pizza. Hotter than a cactus in the sun. Hotter than Mount Vesuvius. When it’s erupting.

  The heat does not quit. I mop my forehead and stare out at the trail ahead me. I swear it is shimmering with heat. I see a boulder up ahead. All of me wants to lie down on it and go to sleep.

  Keep on going. We’re nearly there, Toe. It’s Lucas’s voice inside my head. Telling me what to do again.

  I check my map. I still have five miles to go before the tentsite near Mizpah Hut. Despite the heat, I shiver. Lucas is wrong.

  Just like the last time he said that.

  It was when we were doing number five on the List.

  We had already done #2: Eat a worm. That was the hardest one of all, I’d thought at the time. The day after our fishing trip, I got up early, when the grass was still wet with dew, to dig up the worms from Lucas’s backyard. My stomach was a pile of knots. I couldn’t promise myself that I wouldn’t upchuck the worm as soon as it touched my tongue.

  When I arrived, Lucas was wearing a chef’s apron that seemed to swallow his whole body and a white poufy hat. “We are going to have the most delicious worms in the history of worm eating!” he told me. He showed me a bucket and a spade.
“You go dig up the worms. Leave the rest to me.”

  I went outside and dug the spade into the soft ground. When I pulled it out, there were at least six or seven worms writhing in the clod of dirt. I hurriedly dropped it into the bucket and ran back into the kitchen, my stomach churning.

  Lucas took the bucket. He made a big show of washing the worms, then drying them carefully with a square of paper towel. Next, he melted a stick of butter in a cast-iron pan and tossed the wiggling worms inside, frying them up. He looked over at me, grinning maniacally as I tried to ignore the smell of cooking worms and the sizzle of the hot butter.

  I had almost backed out when I saw the limp gray squiggles in the pan, but Lucas knew exactly how to get me to eat them. He had toasted two buns until they were golden brown, drenched them in more butter, and laid a worm in each bun. Finally, he had pulled out bottles of Heinz and French’s and squirted ketchup and bright yellow mustard until I could barely see the worms. We had sat on his front steps and had eaten them like extra-skinny, extra-chewy hot dogs.

  They weren’t bad.

  The next to go was #3: Spend a whole day at the movie theater. We paid for a 10:00 a.m. showing and stumbled out ten hours later, our bellies lurching with popcorn, having watched five movies on one ticket each.

  For number four, Lucas’s dad helped us nail together a tree house using scrap wood from an old barn that had been torn down. We spent entire afternoons in that rickety thing, playing cards and reading comics, ready to dash down the rope ladder if a creaky board gave way.

  Then came number five—blueberry picking. Two weeks after building our tree house, we took two gallon metal buckets and went up a local mountain in search of blueberries.

  Lucas, as always, was in the lead. His dad had shown him a supersecret blueberry picking spot the year before, and he wanted to show it to me by himself.

  We climbed and climbed for hours, finally getting to the bald summit at noon. Blueberry bushes were everywhere, but a lot of them had been picked over. The mountain was known as the blueberry spot for miles around. People had even seen commercial blueberry pickers combing through the bushes with rakes.

  Lucas wasn’t worried, though. “C’mon, Toby. The spot I’m thinking about isn’t on the path. We’ll be sure to find gallons of blueberries there.”

  “Is it close?” I peeked up at the sky. The noonday sun was blazing overhead, and I was nearly out of water.

  “So close,” he told me.

  He led us off the main path, bushwhacking through thigh-high bushes that scraped against my legs and made me itch. After an hour, I was ready to stop. My arms were lobster red from sunburn. I had forgotten to wear a hat. I didn’t even want to think about what my face looked like. “How much longer?” I asked.

  “Just a little bit farther.” But now Lucas didn’t sound so sure.

  “Well, you’d better be right.”

  “Keep on going. We’re nearly there.”

  But we weren’t. We wandered until our water was gone and our skin started to peel and blister. When crows began to circle above, I swear they were waiting for us to drop so they could eat us.

  Finally Lucas called it off. “We’ll find it next time,” he said.

  “Next time? Next time?” I laughed. “Some supersecret spot you found.”

  “Well, you haven’t been much help,” Lucas snapped tiredly. “Why don’t you try taking charge for once?”

  “How am I supposed to lead when I don’t even know where we’re going?”

  “Is it my fault that I’m always the one who has to know where we’re going? And that you never even bother to try to help out?”

  “Well, is it my fault that you never let me be first?” I shouted.

  “You never want to!” Lucas shouted back.

  “Sure I do.” I said the words, knowing that they were a lie.

  “Yeah, right.” Lucas rolled his eyes. “You’re just like a little lost puppy, Toby. Following me wherever I go.”

  Anger rose in my throat. “Well, guess what. You need me following you around to feel important. To feel like you’re in charge.” I was so mad I could spit. Only, I was so dehydrated I didn’t have enough saliva to even do that. “Except now you’ve screwed up, and you don’t want to admit it.”

  “Let’s just find the trail and get back down,” Lucas said stiffly.

  “Fine.” I was too tired and hot to argue more. I had trusted Lucas to lead. To know where to go and what to do. Instead, he had failed. For the first time, he had failed me.

  We backtracked until we hit the main path, then hiked down in complete silence. When we got to my house, I turned my back to him and went up the front steps without saying good-bye.

  Later that night, when I was getting ready for bed, Gran came into my room. She handed me a little glass jar. “I found this on the porch. I think it’s for you.”

  Inside the jar was a single blueberry. A Post-it note was stuck to the lid. Lucas’s handwriting, of course.

  #5: Go blueberry picking

  Sorry about losing the way.

  NUMBER FIVE. NUMBER five was when things between me and Lucas started to go wrong. I began seeing ways that Lucas was not perfect. How he could mess up, just like me. He had been my good-luck charm, and he had failed me.

  I hear a low growl of excitement. I look up and instantly forget about Lucas. “Moose. Moose, no.”

  Moose has torn into the woods, barking furiously as he scrambles past a thicket of young spruce. His prey is small and furry and slow. It ambles unhurriedly through the brush, snuffling through the dirt for grubs. It is way too easy to catch.

  “Mooooose!” My pack is on the trail, and I go crashing through the brush. “Come back, boy!”

  Moose does not listen. By the time I get to him, the skunk is already hissing and stamping, its tail puffed out so wildly it looks like it has been stuffed into an electric socket.

  “Hey there, boy.” I try to keep my voice even. “Moose, you leave him alone.”

  Moose perks up his ears. He hears me, but his eyes are fixed on the skunk. Slowly he lowers his head. A woof escapes his throat. He begins to circle the black-and-white ball of fur.

  The skunk hisses again, and Moose rushes it. The skunk backs away and turns its tail toward Moose.

  “Moose, stop!” I cry, but Moose is in full-on attack mode. With a snarl, he darts forward, his mouth gaping open as he goes in for the kill.

  The skunk blasts him with a putrid yellow spray that lands squarely on Moose’s nose. He sneezes and snuffs, and lets out a piteous moan, as if hot coals have been thrown on his snout. His hind legs collapse on him as he paws at his face. Satisfied, the skunk hurries on its unharmed way.

  “Oh, Moose.” I want to hug him, but the stink is overwhelming. Moose drops to the ground and rolls around, trying to escape the horrible smell covering his body, but only succeeds in dirtying up his already-mangy coat.

  As I watch Moose, all I can think is that I’ve gone and done it. My bad luck has rubbed off on him. Of course the first thing I tried to take care of would get hit in the face with skunk spray.

  “C’mon, boy. We’ll get you cleaned up.” I hope it’s the truth.

  It seems like ages before we reach Mizpah. It is late afternoon, and both of us are tired and stinky. Moose drops his head and lays down on a flat rock while I go inside.

  Afternoon light pours through the high windows of the dining room. Leaning back on a chair behind the front desk is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She is wearing a denim dress cinched at the waist with a simple brown belt. Her long brown hair falls over her shoulders like waves on a beach. Her green eyes are fixed on the guitar she is strumming. Half-formed thoughts and murmurs spill from her lips. She is lost in the song that she is making.

  I want to freeze that moment forever. A girl, her voice, sunlight falling on her hair.

  She finishes and looks up. “Hi there.”

  “Um. Hi. Hello. Um.” I am having trouble making words. “Y
es. Well. You sing. That was really nice. Oh! Yes. Skunk.”

  I think I am babbling.

  “Oh no.” The angel puts down her guitar. “Pepper.” She sighs. “He’s been hanging around the hut for the past month. At some point he was bound to spray.”

  “I tried to stop him, but he got to Moose.”

  The girl’s lovely eyebrows arch delicately. I see the question on her face.

  “I mean, he got my dog. Well, he’s not my dog. But he’s been following me. I named him Moose. The skunk didn’t get a real moose. That would be funny. Ha-ha.” My efforts to sound intelligent are not improving.

  The girl comes out from behind the counter. “Let’s take a look and see what we can do.”

  MOOSE HAS COMPANY by the flat rock. I spot a familiar ball cap and bandanna standing a respectful distance from him.

  “Sean! Denver!”

  “Hey there, Tony.” Denver waves. “How long have you been here?”

  “Just a couple of minutes.”

  “Are you planning to stay the night?”

  “Yeah. At Nauman tentsite, next door.”

  Denver nods. “Us, too. Glad to see you caught up to us. Sean and I were heading to the hut to refill our water bottles when we ran into your dog.”

  “It doesn’t seem as though he’s having a very good day,” says Sean.

  Moose thumps his tail sadly.

  The girl from heaven turns to the pile of stench curled in a miserable ball. “This guy is going to need a good scrubbing.”

  “Do you need help?” Denver asks eagerly.

  “The more the better,” says the girl. She smiles at Denver. “I’m Abbey.”

  “Denver.”

  In that moment, I wish I were five years older and handsome and rugged and not a blubbery mess whenever I talk to a pretty girl. Denver has spoken five words, and already he’s gotten the girl’s name and her smile. Jealously flickers in me.