Dawn chooses the pack. She’s sick of having to tie everything up in that stupid tarp, and anyway, it probably won’t rain, and even if it does, she has Lucas’s tent pegs to keep the tarp down.
That’s what she tells herself, anyway.
As Amber mentioned, part of Dawn’s reward is she gets some actual food this week, too, instead of just a sack of rice and whatever. Amber gives her six little boxes that look like Army surplus, and smiles another game show host smile that would be super irritating if Dawn wasn’t so sick of freaking rice.
Anyway, Dawn stuffs everything in her new backpack, and then she joins the rest of the Pack on the grass behind the buildings for pictures, and then it’s time to go again and Christian’s leading them to this week’s trail.
“You’re going to love this one,” he tells the group, grinning that ghoulish smile. “I promise, this week is going to be fun.”
THE NEW TRAIL CHRISTIAN CHOOSES seems to go straight up through the rain forest, over like a million switchbacks on a steep, narrow path. Dawn’s new pack helps, but the straps dig into her skin through her yellow T-shirt as she climbs and she’s tired and she’s hungry and she thinks about Christian’s burrito and decides she would trade her new pack and her clean yellow shirts just for a bite of it.
But there are no burritos in Dawn’s future. There’s only hiking.
The new guy, Alex, turns out to be a pretty good hiker, just as Dawn suspected. She can see his yellow shirt keeping pace with Christian and Warden at the head of the Pack, even with no backpack and just a stupid tarp to carry his stuff.
Dawn kind of hates him already.
The Pack makes camp for the night on the shore of a little lake just below the tree line, beside a large boulder field that looks something like Mordor, rocks the size of dump trucks scattered around the mountain slope. A hundred feet up the slope, the trees end, and it’s just bare rock and grassy moss and a towering cliff face, high above. Beside it, a rocky spine of a ridgeline leads off behind the trees. The clouds are pouring over it as the last light of day disappears. It looks naked and barren and soulless; Dawn shivers and hopes they don’t have to go up there.
“Fart Mountain.” Lucas’s voice scares her out of her trance. Dawn stifles a shriek and spins around to shove him.
“Don’t do that,” she says, angry at first but not really, especially after Lucas gives her that big white smile. “Wait, what?” she says. “Did you say Fart Mountain?”
Lucas nods solemnly. “Yes, ma’am. Spell it like it sounds.”
Dawn points up the boulder field. “You mean that cliff up there?”
“No,” Lucas replies. “You can’t see Fart Mountain, yet. It’s still hidden behind the trees. But tomorrow, if it’s not too cloudy when we get up into the alpine, then you’ll see it.” He grins at her again. “And it will scare the ever-loving shit out of you.”
This actually makes Dawn kind of nervous, but she pretends like she doesn’t care.
“What the fuck is Fart Mountain, and why should I be scared?” she says. “And that’s not its actual name is it?”
“It might be; you don’t know,” Lucas says. “No one ever said what its real name is, so who’s to say it wasn’t named after a fart?”
“You sound like Evan and Brandon,” Dawn replies. “All this fart talk, what are you, twelve?”
Lucas’s smile disappears. “I’m just saying, it’s a scary freaking mountain,” he tells her. “I call it Fart Mountain to, like, ease the tension or whatever, because up close and personal? It’s terrifying. You’ll see.”
Dawn looks out through the trees again, even though it’s getting dark and there’s no hope of seeing the mountain, whatever it’s called, anyway. “How do you know that’s where we’re going?” she asks Lucas.
“This trail only goes in one direction,” he tells her. “Ask Kyla or Warden; they’ve done it before. Ask anyone; why do you think Christian’s so excited? He knows it’s going to be torture. It’s three days to get to the top of Fart Mountain, three days to get out of the bush again. The toughest hike in this part of the state, and we haven’t even barely started yet.”
Lucas doesn’t look like a big happy dog anymore. He looks pretty scared actually.
“Have you done it before?” Dawn asks him. “Climbed, you know, the mountain?”
(She’s not calling it “Fart Mountain.”)
Lucas shakes his head. “Not yet.”
“So how do you know it’s so rough? I call bullshit.”
“Ask Kyla,” he says. “She did it, the first month she was here. She said the summit’s so high, there’s snow up there all summer long. Half of the Pack nearly froze to death.”
Dawn doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t look at Lucas.
“I mean, hey, she’s probably lying,” Lucas says after a beat. “Either way, I guess we’re going to find out.”
He wanders off, after that, though Dawn barely notices. She’s watching the night fall above the dark treetops, feeling the sudden chill in the air.
And that’s when she hears the bear.
DAWN’S IN A LITTLE CLEARING away from the campsite, gathering firewood, and at first, she thinks it’s just one of the other group members making all that noise through the trees. One of the boys, probably, or maybe even Christian. Somebody big, anyway.
She watches the tops of the trees sway and listens to the leaves rustle, and maybe it’s residual fear from Lucas’s Fart Mountain proclamation, or maybe it’s instinct, but something twinges in her stomach as she begins to realize it’s probably impossible for a teenager—or even an adult—to break so many tree branches so easily.
“Hello?” she calls into the bushes, and there is no answer, and suddenly the rest of the group seems to have disappeared, leaving her alone with whatever’s coming—slowly, steadily, heavily—toward her.
And then the trees part, and the bear wanders out into Dawn’s little patch of space.
* * *
It’s a black bear. Amber says there are no grizzlies in Out of the Wild territory, which is good, because Christian swears that grizzly bears will happily kill and eat you.
(Black bears, Amber says, just want to be left alone.)
This black bear hasn’t seen Dawn yet. It’s just nosing through the bushes, snorting and snuffling, and even though it’s enormous and could probably kill Dawn with one swipe of its paw, it doesn’t really look mean or even seem to care that Dawn’s there, and for a moment she starts to believe that maybe it’ll just wander right past her, without even seeing her. Without even trying to eat her.
But then Dawn shifts her weight, and a twig snaps beneath her boot. And the bear stops, suddenly, and looks across the clearing at her.
And Dawn hears the low growl begin in its throat.
ONE OF THE BOOKS Dawn’s been lugging around since she got here is called Don’t Get Eaten. It’s the only one she’s actually bothered to read, mostly because it’s small, and also because she really doesn’t want to get, you know, eaten, by bears or cougars or wolves or anything else that lurks in this ungodly place.
And Amber’s always preaching bear safety, so Dawn knows a little bit about how to deal with an unexpected bear.
She knows, for instance, she’s supposed to stay calm. She knows she’s supposed to speak to the bear and identify herself and let the bear know she’s not food.
“Hello, Mr. Bear,” Dawn says, hoping the bear doesn’t hear how her voice is shaking. “I’m just a friendly girl over here, not your dinner.”
According to the book, this should convince the bear that he’s better off moving on. But if the bear sticks around, Dawn remembers, she’s supposed to make herself big and back away slowly.
The bear does not seem to be moved by her introduction.
“Just asking you not to eat me, Mr. Bear,” Dawn tells it. She wa
ves her hands above her head and takes a step backward, keeping her voice calm and her movements slow.
The bear growls again. Louder this time. It stands up on its hind legs and peers across the clearing at her and yawns, and Dawn can see drool in its mouth, and sharp, yellow teeth.
“Don’t eat me, Mr. Bear,” Dawn says again. “Please?”
But the bear doesn’t seem to be listening. It drops down to all four legs again, and begins to approach her, and even though it’s just walking, it’s faster than Dawn expected, and closer, too. It’s thirty feet away and closing fast, faster than she can walk backward.
(Don’t run, the book says. Don’t scream or make sudden movements.)
Dawn’s not sure she can control herself; she’s too scared. She’s half afraid she’s going to pee her pants.
She’s. From. Suburban. Sacramento.
The bear keeps coming. It’s looking right at her, and now she can smell its terrible breath and see right into its eyes, and it looks mean and angry with her, like a friendly discussion isn’t going to scare it away.
Dawn’s still backing up, trying to remember what she’s supposed to do next, when she backs into a log and loses her balance.
And as she falls flat on her ass, she glances to her left and sees another bear emerge from the trees, a smaller bear.
A baby bear.
And that’s when she knows she’s screwed.
Dawn screams.
A MOTHER BEAR IS DANGEROUS, the book in Dawn’s pack says. Especially if she perceives you as a threat to her cubs.
Dawn wants to explain to this approaching mama bear that she’s in no way a threat to anybody. That she’s actually literally a Bear Cub herself. That she just wants to get back to her group, and then down off this mountain, and then back on a plane to Sacramento.
But she’s flat on her ass and the mama bear’s approaching. The time for conversation is over.
If a black bear attacks you, the book says, fight back.
Fight for your life.
Dawn reaches around for a weapon. A stick or a rock or anything she can find. The bear keeps coming toward her, snuffling and snarling, and Dawn screams and she can hear voices behind her, somewhere in the forest, but they seem so far away, and the bear is much closer, and she can’t find anything she can use to defend herself.
She scrabbles backward, over the log that tripped her. Finds a broken tree branch and lifts it and swings wildly at the bear, and the branch is rotted through and splits in half as she swings it, and she’s crying now and screaming her throat raw.
“Help!” she says. “Damn it, somebody help me!”
The bear looms above her. From this angle, it’s huge; it’s all Dawn can see. Its harsh breathing is all Dawn can hear. And it suddenly seems stupid that this is how she’s going to die, eaten by a bear—a black bear—in the middle of nowhere, screaming for her life and probably peeing her pants.
And then a gunshot cracks behind her.
It’s loud.
The bear goes stiff, and seems to forget about Dawn. Looks past her into the trees as another shot fires. As Amber races into the clearing and drags Dawn to her feet. As Christian and Lucas and maybe some other people burst in beside her, yelling loudly at the bear and waving their arms.
A third shot goes off, and Dawn momentarily goes deaf.
The bear looks around. Looks back at its cub, which is now racing away, terrified, out of the other side of the clearing. The bear opens its mouth and makes some kind of noise that Dawn can’t really hear because her ears are still ringing from the shots.
Then it turns and lopes off across the clearing, following its cub.
It stops once, and looks back, and its eyes fall on Dawn again. And it stares at Dawn for a long moment, like it’s staring right into her soul.
And then it turns around and disappears into the trees.
“I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” Dawn says, when Amber and Lucas have helped her back to the campfire, and after she’s unsuccessfully petitioned the counselors to abandon the hike, bring the group out of bear country and back to civilization.
“If Christian shot the bear, why wasn’t it injured?”
Christian laughs. He looks utterly unfazed by the whole experience. “I didn’t shoot the bear,” he tells her. “You think they’d let you kids anywhere near a gun?”
Dawn stares at him. “No, what the hell,” she says. “I heard the shots.”
Christian and Amber swap looks. And then Christian reaches into his pocket. He pulls out something the size and shape of a pen. “Bear banger,” Amber explains. “It sounds like a gun. Most of the time it’s enough to scare a bear away.”
Christian grins at her. “Most of the time,” he says.
“And if that doesn’t work, there’s bear spray,” Lucas adds quickly. “Right? You guys are at least carrying bear spray, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” Christian says, and he seems to meet Dawn’s eyes the same way as the bear did. “And most of the time that works pretty well, too.”
Dawn shivers, and stares into the campfire. She’s already pretty sure she’s never sleeping again.
THE BEAR DOESN’T COME BACK. But Dawn doesn’t sleep much that night anyway.
It still sucks sleeping under that tarp, her new pack notwithstanding, and it’s starting to get really cold when the sun goes down. She spends most of the night curled up in her sleeping bag, freezing, listening to the sound of the trees moving in the wind, and branches snapping, and worrying the bear will come back.
And when she’s sick of worrying about bears, she starts to worry about Fart Mountain.
Of course, she doesn’t know much about Fart Mountain other than it has the world’s stupidest name, so she actually moves on pretty quickly to her other big concerns, like whether she’ll ever get to see her nana again, and whether Bryce is getting bullied at school without her. She spends the time feeling helpless and powerless and lonely and hungry and sad.
(And cold. Really cold.)
And in between all the worrying, she spends some time, being mad, too, at Christian and Amber and all the other Out of the Wild d-bags. At the bear for trying to eat her, and at Lucas for putting the fear of Fart Mountain in her. At Wendy for marrying Cam, and Cam and Wendy both for kidnapping her and sending her to this awful frigid place. And when she gets done being mad at everyone she can think of, Dawn turns her anger on the person who deserves it most.
(And that person is Dawn herself.)
Dawn’s dad would be alive, if it wasn’t for Dawn.
That’s just a plain fact.
Everything bad that’s happened to Dawn afterward?
She deserves it.
THERE IS NO COFFEE in Out of the Wild.
I don’t think I mentioned that part.
Sure, Christian gets to drink his coffee in the morning, but nobody else does. Not even Amber, though Dawn’s pretty sure that’s a choice.
There’s, like, herbal tea, but it’s weak as shit and not even close to adequate for the situations described herein. Right now, and most mornings, Dawn needs like a quad espresso and maybe a shot of Jack.
But there’s no whiskey in Out of the Wild either.
(Duh.)
Anyway, Dawn staggers out from her tarp the next morning, foggy-headed and somehow, miraculously, not eaten by any bears, and she joins the rest of the Pack with the morning chores—
(get dressed, brush teeth, pee in the woods somewhere, pump water for your water bottle, build the fire, cook breakfast, etc., etc.)
—and then she packs up her tarp in her brand-new backpack—
(which is already starting to get smeared with a little bit of mud, just like her brand-new yellow shirt)
—and they kick the fire out and fall in behind Christian, and Christian leads them from the campsite a
nd into the trees again, through the middle of bear territory on a narrow game trail that winds around the shore of the little lake and up the side of the boulder field toward the edge of the forest and the ridgeline beyond.
And by eight in the morning, Dawn and the rest of the Bear Pack are up on the ridge. And Dawn hopes that means the real bears, at least, are behind them.
* * *
It’s kind of overcast this morning, so Dawn can’t see Fart Mountain right away.
What she can see is a long, arching ridgeline of barren, empty rock, punctuated by a few lumpy, pimply hills and a couple of deep chasms. On either side, the ridge drops away sharply into empty forest and wide, lonely valleys. Aside from the cairns that mark the path every so often, there is no sign of human life.
(You’re not supposed to be here.)
The Pack takes a few minutes for water at the start of the ridge. Dawn spends it peering in vain through the cloud cover for any sign of Fart Mountain. Then Christian tells them to mount up again, and they’re off, following the top of the ridge from cairn to cairn, a long line of misfit teens yawning and stumbling toward an uncertain destination.
* * *
Dawn’s really tired. She’s got enough on her plate trying to put one foot in front of the other and not, like, fall off a cliff or twist her ankle on a rock. She’s following Evan, who’s right in front of her, and that’s pretty well sapping her mental capacity at the moment. So she doesn’t really notice much of anything else.
(Though later on, she’s really going to wish she did.)
She doesn’t notice, for instance, how the ridge they’re hiking on joins another ridge after a couple of hours. She doesn’t notice how there’s really only one good way to traverse this particular chasm she’s struggling down, and how the route isn’t exactly obvious from the bottom. She doesn’t notice how Lucas has sped up a little bit, and is talking with Alex, leaving her a ways behind, and she definitely doesn’t notice how Warden’s kind of lagging behind everyone, dawdling at the back of the Pack when he’s usually at the front.
The Wild Page 5