Chapter Twenty
TWENTY
It’s almost daybreak when you hear the scritching sound.
There’s a dim blue light in the tent that’s not quite the full darkness of night, but not morning either.
At some point, you actually fell asleep, but now you’re awake and your anxiety is spiking.
You’ve woken up in the middle of a panic attack before, and by comparison, this one isn’t so bad.
Still, you really wish you had a Xanax to clear out the spiders.
Instead, as you strain to listen for whatever you first heard, it feels like an elephant is sitting on your chest, only making possible the smallest sips of air.
The sound disappears for a moment. You close your eyes and try for a long exhalation, and just when you manage a full breath, it comes back and sends another boost of adrenaline coursing through your blood.
There are a few more noises in these woods as it gets closer to dawn—small moving and chirping things you can’t begin to identify—but this one stands out because it’s so close.
You shuffle out of your sleeping bag and sit up.
You think about waking someone, but Will and Troy are still fast asleep, and they don’t move a muscle even when you climb over them.
Your only option at this point seems to be to peer out of the tent and see what has invaded your space.
Ideally, it will be something benign and obvious and you can relax the old-fashioned way: by knowing you’re out of danger.
Somehow you make it to the zipper without knocking the whole drooping tent down.
But before you pull on the tab, you wait one last time, just in case all of this wants to go away.
It’s something you do at night, before another day has started and everything becomes painfully real: You pretend that your life has reset.
Sean is across the hall, unharmed. Diana is in your doorway, talking about nothing.
And, in this case, there are no woods. No disappeared counselor. None of this at all.
You stop.
You breathe.
Then you hear it again.
So, like the painful easing off of a Band-Aid, you slowly open the flap of the tent and wait for your eyes to adjust to the light.
When they do, you see a large black shadow against the backdrop of the moonlit lake.
This is not nothing. It’s something. And it’s nosing at the ground nearby.
As your focus sharpens, you start to see various items scattered around the campsite, and the first thing you realize is that you’re looking at food.
An animal has gotten into your food.
The food that you should have hung up in a tree.
The only food you have.
You can’t help it then: You climb out of the tent.
And when you do, a fuzzy head slowly emerges from a bag and stares directly at you.
You know you should wake the others at this point, or at least make some kind of noise, but it’s the size of the thing that keeps you quiet.
Because, yes, there is definitely a bear ten feet away from you, but it’s too small, you think, to be a full-grown one.
It’s a cub. And it looks more like an overgrown teddy bear.
An overgrown teddy bear who is eating all your food.
The cub has somehow nudged the cooler open, but there must still be food in it because it’s trying to get at something with its snout. The cooler is not empty. Not yet. Along with a tidal wave of new anxiety, you feel a jolt of something foreign to you. Your competitive instinct.
On every bad team you ever played on (before you realized you were not destined to be an athlete), the coaches said the same thing: “Who wants it more? It all comes down to who wants it more!” You never understood this because you never wanted it more.
You didn’t care if the soccer ball went in the net or the ball went in the hoop. You always, always wanted it less.
Until now.
The problem is, you’re still not an athlete and wanting is not the same as getting. You are not an athlete, but you know someone who is.
“Will,” you whisper-shout. “Will!”
You hear the shuffle of his sleeping bag, and after a few seconds, you feel his presence behind you.
“Case, man, I do not like being woken up … HOLY SH—”
You put a hand over his mouth.
The bear has returned to sniffing something in the cooler.
“Will,” you whisper, just audible enough for him to hear. “What’s your sport?”
“What?” he whispers.
“You’re sporty,” you say. “You’ve made that clear. We’re NARPs, you’re not. So what is it? What’s your sport?!”
He takes a long breath.
“Tennis,” he says.
“Oh,” you say.
“What do you mean Oh? I was almost state champion last year; if it wasn’t for this knob-head Eric Tulliver, I would have—”
“It doesn’t matter,” you say. “Can you get that cooler?”
Will stops talking and rubs his eyes. He studies the bear. Then the cooler. Then the bear again.
“Sure. It’s a shuttle run,” he says.
“A what?”
“Just a drill we run in practice. You sprint to the baseline to pick up a tennis ball. Then you sprint back to drop it. Over and over. Sounds simple, but it’s torture. The worst. I can crush them, though. I am the freaking king of the shuttle run, bro.”
He’s lacing up his boots, and it’s like he’s suddenly in some kind of other mode of being.
“Tulliver had a killer backhand,” says Will. “But I had better footwork, which gave me a chance. I took him to a tiebreak in the final set. And I think it was all the shuttle runs. If it wasn’t for the…”
“Will,” you say, and point. “Cooler.”
He looks at you, and he’s about to say something when you hear another voice.
“Psssst. Here, little guy. Come over here.”
You both look up, and in that blue light of the predawn, you now see Diana sitting on a tree stump, holding out a granola bar. Fran is beside her. The bear turns its head and looks at them instead of you and Will
“You don’t want that cooler,” whispers Fran. “You want this delicious nut-free granola bar with chia seeds in it. That’s right. Chia seeds! Lots of antioxidants.”
She’s using the kind of singsong voice you’d use with a baby.
And when she gets to the last word, Diana motions to the cooler ever so slightly with her head.
Will’s whole body tenses. And what goes down next all seems to happen so fast, but it also feels like you can see every frame of it in slow motion.
Will takes off. And Will is indeed very fast. Faster than you ever could have imagined.
He makes it to the cooler in seconds. So quickly, in fact, that the cub hardly notices him.
Will scoops up the cooler with a single fluid movement.
He has it in his grasp. It’s his. But then two things happen in quick succession.
The first is that the baby bear finally notices what’s going on.
It yowls and Diana jumps back, tripping over her own feet.
Fran catches her. The second thing is that instead of running back, Will’s body freezes entirely like he’s been hit with a stun gun.
He doesn’t move at all.
“Will,” you say. “You got it! Get back here.”
But there’s no movement. You can’t even tell if he can hear you.
In moments, you see something bursting out of the brush.
And, somehow, you know what it is before you even see it.
But still, seeing it is utterly terrifying.
It is, of course, the mama bear come to get her child, and she smashes through, leaving a trail of trampled vegetation in her path.
She is very large, and she is less than twenty feet away from Will.
She does not appear to be stopping. And Will, you’re certain, is going to die right now in front of all of you.
“Will,” you say. “Get out of there! Now!”
Will turns toward you finally. But it’s only for a moment.
You’re sure he’s going to run now. As he has just proven, he is extremely fast. If he took off at a sprint, would the bear really follow him?
Would he have a shot at outrunning her? You’ll never know, because instead, he locks eyes with you, and his face looks desperate, like he’s powerless to move.
Before you can ask him what he’s doing, he swings the cooler by the handle.
“No!” you say. “Don’t…”
Then he lofts the whole thing in the air, right toward you.
You’re completely shocked, but somehow you stumble into position to catch it.
It comes winging in, spinning like an asteroid, and hits you hard in the chest. You almost drop to the ground, the wind knocked out of you.
The handle pounds your chin, but you manage to clasp your arms around it and hold it tight.
It’s possible your jaw is broken, along with a couple of ribs, but Will’s pass was right on the money.
And, of course, the movement startles the mama bear.
She pauses for a moment. Then she keeps walking forward.
And when she gets a few feet away from Will, she blows hard at the ground and swipes a paw at a nearby tree.
Will doesn’t move. The mama bear looks up at him and moans.
Then she slams both of her paws into the ground.
The next pause seems to last about three hours.
Maybe it’s five seconds in real time. You have no idea.
But right when you think Will is going to have to fight a bear, and that you’re going to have to help, the tent flap flies open and what appears to be a shirtless Troy emerges from its depths.
His hair is wild from a night of bad sleep, his glasses crooked.
His eyes are wide open, and he is carrying a frying pan and some other object you can’t quite make out.
From the second he’s out of the tent, he starts wailing on the pan like a drummer for a metal band and walking toward the bears.
He has his eyes closed and he is singing a song at the top of his lungs that is so loud and off-key, it takes you a moment to realize what it is.
“COUNTRY ROADS! TAKE ME HOME!!”
Will turns around, and in that moment he seems to come back to himself. He’s scared and angry, but he starts waving his hands.
“Troy, no!” he says. “Get back in the tent!”
But Troy does not get back in the tent. He keeps walking toward the bears. And the mama bear takes a good look at Troy. She takes in his pan and his horrendous singing. She clocks him coming closer, cocking her head slightly.
And she stops dead in her tracks.
“WEST VIRGINIA!” Troy screams atonally. “MOUNTAIN MAMA!”
And you wait, wondering at which moment both of your companions are going to be ripped apart in front of you.
You also can’t help wondering if you will be next.
But the mama bear, who is probably 250 pounds to Troy’s 115, does not charge for some reason.
And she does not immediately attack, claws flying, the way you imagine.
Instead, she snorts once and slowly turns around.
She does a complete 180. And she doesn’t just walk; she bounds back into the woods with her cub behind her.
She runs on all four bear legs and does not stop to take another gander at the fresh hell behind her.
And Troy, who never stops banging, switches from John Denver to some kind of war cry and then to screaming:
“THAT’S RIGHT, BEAR! YOU BETTER RUN! DON’T COME BACK! DON’T MESS WITH US AGAIN, BEAR! DO NOT! DO NOT! AIIYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Will actually has to put a hand on Troy’s shoulder to get him to stop screaming.
At which point everyone is watching. Diana is on the rock, clutching her granola bar.
Fran is holding her. You’re still hugging a cooler like your life depends on it (which it might).
And Troy is in some kind of warrior pose, holding his weapon aloft, which you can see now, in the brighter light of daybreak, is actually your collapsible whisk.