Chapter 8 #2
“Yeah, if you get to where you feel like you’re going in circles, and you’re in a stopping place where you feel like you can make a decent shelter, it’s best to just stop. You’ll have your supplies, and you can always get yourself more lost.”
“What if you get yourself more found?”
The question was sincere. He looked at her for a long moment. “My experience is that it’s much easier to get yourself lost than found.”
She wrinkled her nose just slightly, the corners of her mouth twitching. And he found himself captivated by every small movement that she made.
For just a moment, the forest around them receded, and all he could do was look at her.
For just a moment, he forgot everything. What they were doing, where they were, who he was.
He wanted…
He felt like there was a wall between them, but he felt like that with everybody.
What he didn’t feel with everybody was the desire to knock that wall down. So that he could dig deeper into who that person was. So that he could feel a little bit closer to that person.
The sensation was so disoriented, so utterly outside his normal experience, that it made him feel like he was standing in the middle of a dream, rather than in the middle of real life.
What he had to remember was that he was lost. He had been lost from the time he was thirteen years old.
And he hadn’t yet figured out how to get himself found.
Cara didn’t deserve to have to deal with a lost boy.
He pushed that down, deep, where it lived. Where all the exiles stayed. All the memories, all the feelings, everything that he wanted to avoid as best he could.
He locked it all down.
He was good at that.
Like securing everything at camp in a storm. Taking everything loose and extraneous and tying it down, sheltering everything possible. That was what he did with himself. Every day.
Batten down the hatches of his soul, and he never had to worry about pieces of it flying away on the wind.
Assuming there were any pieces left.
“Another important part of wilderness survival is awareness. I’ve been walking through the brush before and startled the bear out of hiding.
Normally, a black bear is going to see you and try to get away from you.
Unless they have a baby, and then you’re in a situation.
We don’t officially have grizzly bears here, but they have been known to wander over from Idaho from time to time.
State borders don’t mean much to a bear. ”
She blinked up at him. “What’s the difference between a black bear and a grizzly bear? I mean, in terms of not wanting to run into them.”
“Well, with a black bear, if you start to get attacked by one, you lie on the ground, cover your neck, curl yourself into a ball as best as you can to try and cover up your vital organs, odds are it’ll chew on your fingers for a while, maybe jump up and down on your back, and then lose interest.”
He turned away from her and kept up the hike.
“That’s horrifying.”
She sounded horrified. And for some reason, he was enjoying teasing her.
“A grizzly bear is probably going to eat you, or just kill you for fun. I mean, by all means, put up a fight, it’s honorable. It’s just probably not going to matter much.”
“Great.”
“Like I said, the odds of you running into a grizzly bear out here are low. Another thing you can do to deter them is to make a lot of noise. Some people wear bells on their clothes.”
“Bells!”
“Sure. It’s a great way to make noise in the wilderness. You can warn them you’re coming, and then if you run into one, you still have your bear spray.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “But like I said, awareness is a big part of it. So, you keep an eye out for signs. Footprints, bear scat.”
“Bear scat?”
“Poop. Black bear poop generally has a lot of berries in it, it’s pretty identifiable.”
“Well, what about the grizzly bear… scat?”
He turned back toward her. “Usually has little bells in it. Smells like pepper spray.”
Her eyes went wide, and her mouth dropped open, and he felt a laugh building inside his chest.
Instead of holding it back, he laughed.
His dad had told him that joke years ago, and it was still one hell of a dad joke.
“I’m kidding,” he said. “You don’t need to wear bells. And generally you’re not going to need to worry about grizzlies, but what I said about black bears is true.” Further down the trail, he saw a pile of bear sign. “Right here,” he said.
He touched it with his toe, exposing the berries in the pile.
It was relatively dry. “This is old, you can tell because it’s just kind of dry and dusty.
So I wouldn’t take that as a sign that there’s a bear close by, but you can also take it as a warning that a bear does like to walk through here now and again. ”
She looked around, her eyes wide. “Have you ever seen a bear here?” He asked her.
“No,” she said.
“Right. You’ve been here for a few months. I’ve seen two bears around the cabin, and I’ve lived here for five years. I also spent a lot of time down by the creek, and when you think about it, that’s not very many bear sightings in that space of time.”
“True,” she said.
“None of this is to make you afraid of nature, or of the animals. It’s just to make you aware.”
“Okay. Right.”
“This is deer sign right here,” he said when they came upon a pile of round pellets. Then, he knelt down and touched a perfectly formed print. “This was a buck.”
“What? You can tell that?”
“Yep. See, you’ve got your little V footprint here.
And behind it, you see the two dots. You can’t always see it, because it depends on how quick the deer is running, whether or not the dewclaw made contact with the ground, but when you see it, you can be sure that what you’re looking at is a buck. ”
“How does this help me survive?”
“It doesn’t. But it’s pretty cool, right?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Bear footprints are kind of wonky and uneven, and you see claws at the end of the toes. The same is going to be true with a coyote or a wolf. There is a wolf pack out here, so it’s good to be aware of that.”
“This is scary!”
“Animals aren’t scary. They generally don’t want anything to do with you.
As long as you come into their house and respect it, and give them a wide berth when you can, there’s nothing to worry about.
When you don’t see claws in the footprints, you’re looking at a cat.
Cougar, or bobcat. Because their claws are retractable, they don’t walk with them out. ”
“I’m going to get eaten.”
“You’re not going to get eaten,” he said. Their eyes caught and held, and he felt compelled to say something that was almost flirtatious.
Definitely a double entendre.
Because he was the Big Bad Wolf after all, with those big teeth.
Yet again, he was tempted to say it to her. But he wouldn’t.
Because even in another lifetime, he had never been that guy. He had never had the opportunity to be that guy. He wasn’t sure if he would’ve been even without all the heaviness.
But he surely wasn’t now.
And he definitely couldn’t be that for her.
He cleared his throat and kept on blazing a trail down toward the river.
“I got you some iodine drops that will kill protozoa and other hazards, but it has a shelf life, and as great as I think all of these hacks are, it’s good to be able to make safe water decisions no matter what you have on hand. ”
He’d seen guys get Giardia from drinking water that hadn’t been purified. No one wanted Giardia.
He gestured toward the rushing river. “If you absolutely have to drink water without boiling it first, fast-running water like this is going to be the safest. Key word being safest, not safe. Stagnant water is bad, bad, don’t do it.
Ever. Dehydration is a killer, but the issue is that if you drink water without sterilizing it, that’s a fast track to dehydration via bacteria or parasites.
All water carries a risk if you can’t heat it up first. But you’ve got your canteen.
And it’s metal. So if you absolutely have to, you can put water in the canteen, stick it on the fire, and get it to a boil.
That way, you can kill the bacteria in the water.
If you’re already lost, the last thing you want is to develop a serious gut issue.
That’s going to dehydrate you faster than just about anything. ”
“So, what I’m getting from this is that I might get lost,” she counted off each thing on her fingers. “I might get ill, and then I might get eaten.”
“Look around you,” he said. “That is not the takeaway from this.”
“Oh, sorry. Given my recent brush with near death, I wasn’t sure what my takeaway was supposed to be.”
“You didn’t almost die. And anyway, life is dangerous. But safety protocol helped you mitigate the danger. That’s what we’re doing here.”
“All right. I’ll try not to panic about the animals that I didn’t even know were out here until we started this lesson.”
“Would you rather run into one without expecting it?”
“No.”
“All right then.”
He sighed. “You’re not a very eager recruit.”
“I didn’t choose this life, it chose me.”
“Well, that’s just not true. You chose to move out here. You chose to go on that hike. You’ve chosen this in a hundred different ways, even if you didn’t know all the places that it might lead you. You enlisted yourself in this army. So now you need to know how to conduct yourself.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
She did salute this time, and he paused, turning to face her, trying to ignore the churning fire in his gut.
“I have a feeling that was insubordination.”
“Well, and I have a feeling this isn’t the actual military.”
“Good for you.” He scowled. “You know, you’re much sweeter in your bakery.”
“That is true. I’m usually much sweeter in general. Because I don’t have a lot of opportunity to be anything else.”
He turned and kept on walking. “No?”
He was fascinated by that. Because he had assumed that very nice people didn’t need a break from being very nice people, but he wondered if that was a little bit na?ve.