Chapter 10
“Soon after moving here,” Grace said, “I was backpacking with one of my girlfriends from town to Crested Butte. We passed a pair of men going the opposite way. They stopped us, kind of quizzed us about if we knew how to set a fire, if we had enough food, that kind of thing. They seemed annoyed, like we should have been grateful even though they were criticizing us. It took awhile to kind of politely keep moving. But once they were out of sight, my friend and I both admitted we felt…weird. About the way the guys had acted. Their anger, it felt disproportionate—that means too big, they had too big a reaction, offended over nothing. And I didn’t say it, but I didn’t like how they’d looked at us.
Kind of like that bear, the way its eyes were? ”
Bonnie’s face went tight, picturing, Zach supposed, the promise of grievous harm in the beady fierceness of the bear’s eyes.
“We decided to make camp early, and we hiked maybe a hundred feet off trail. Pitched our tent where it was hidden in the trees, not at any official campsite or anything. Didn’t light a fire.
Just ate granola bars for dinner. Kind of laughing about how silly we were being, making a fuss over something that was probably nothing. ”
Grace shook her head ruefully, as if wishing the story went another way at this point, a line drawn between what was and what could have been.
“My friend woke me in the middle of the night. There were men’s voices.
Arguing. When we looked out the tent’s little screened window we could see their flashlights through the trees.
They were on the trail, talking about how far ‘those girls’ might have gotten, how it was impossible we could just disappear. They were loud. And using bad words.”
“They were looking for you?” Zach whispered, wide-eyed.
“Yes. But we stayed quiet. Watched. Saw their lights disappear down the trail. Which meant we hadn’t woken up when they’d passed by going uphill.
” Grace shivered. “I didn’t like that, knowing while we’d been asleep they were sneaking around.
We got dressed and put our shoes on, in case we had to run. ”
Zach nodded, thinking of a game of Gray Rabbit, the way a Rabbit-child didn’t just hide, but could run if a Wolf found him.
“They came past again. Still looking. Then near dawn we heard them go down the trail. No voices, no flashlights. But we knew it was them. We’d learned their sounds.
The sun came up. We were still too afraid to do anything.
Finally we heard people talking. Women. I sprinted to the trail and found two couples backpacking.
They were nice, when I explained. Waited for us to pack, and we hiked with them the whole rest of the way to Crested Butte.
But. They hadn’t seen the men going down the trail, which they should have, given the timing.
They asked a lot of questions that made it clear they thought we were paranoid.
Or exaggerating. But for my friend and me?
It felt like those men might jump out any second.
Like they were watching us from the trees.
Because they had to have hidden so that group wouldn’t see them. ”
“Did you tell the police?” Zach asked.
“We did. But the other group couldn’t identify them, or back us up. You’re supposed to sign a register at the trailhead, but lots of people don’t do that. I’m not even sure the police ended up checking on the people who had signed.”
“Didn’t you record a video or something? On your phone?”
“This was before most people had smartphones. We sure didn’t have them.
So there was no proof. And to the police—nothing really happened.
When we told them about the men questioning us on the trail, the cops said it sounded like they were concerned for our safety.
Were trying to help. Cops are a little like teachers.
If they don’t see a kid’s bad behavior, they don’t really believe it. Especially if no one’s hurt.”
This was true enough of teachers in Zach’s experience, but he frowned at the idea the police might be the same, waving off the flurry of back-and-forth accusations, not really caring who was at fault.
Unless the hurt was very bad. And for name-calling, or threats?
No one ever got in trouble for that, no matter how frightening, sometimes not even when a teacher overheard.
“Let’s rest a second, huh?”
Their mother sat on a downed tree by the side of the trail, both children snuggling next to her, needing her reassuring closeness after the bear.
Head resting on his mother’s shoulder, Zach heard her voice as a soft rumble through her body.
“For a long time after those men, maybe because I’d been right about them, I thought I had good instincts.
Good intuition. But”— her voice strained thin, more than it had when she went toe-to-toe with the bear—“I don’t think that anymore.
It’s not always as easy as it was that time. ”
Seeing Zach’s and Bonnie’s puzzled faces, Grace, rubbing a temple, translated for them into the language of childhood.
“I guess what I mean is bad guys aren’t like in the movies.
You can’t just—see badness on most of them.
They don’t say their plans out loud. And they’re not always strangers.
They’re more like bullies. Bullies look like normal kids, right?
Sometimes they can even be nice, which is confusing.
Then they’ll say something that hurts your feelings, but if you show you’re hurt they say they’re just being honest, or that you’re being a baby, or that it was a joke.
Bullies say give me your toy, and when you don’t, they might hit you, then say that’s your fault because you didn’t share.
A bad guy thinks if people obeyed him, everything would be better, and that they should obey him because he’s better than everyone else.
Most of the time, a bully believes what he’s saying.
Sometimes he believes it so much it convinces you, too.
So you wonder if maybe he was just joking, or if you’re the one who is actually the bad guy.
And he’ll say whatever he has to, to avoid getting in trouble, because he’s sure he’s right, and whatever he did was really your fault. ”
Recalling taunts, playground violence, the indignation of even the kids who hit and harmed, Bonnie and Zach nodded.
“An animal like that bear, though? He doesn’t think like that. Doesn’t act like that. He doesn’t know what’s right or wrong. He was just…scared.”
Standing in the woods staring down at the clawed tracks left by whatever had gone slinking into the trees, Zach shivered, desperately needing to take the sting out of his fear, push down the darkness of his memories.
He nudged Russ with an elbow. “One time? Over the summer? A bear broke into my school. It went in the teacher’s lounge and tore the door of their fridge right off.
And it pooped”— he paused for dramatic effect—“aaaaaaall over their couch.”
“What?” Russ grinned wide.
“Yeah! Like this big.” Zach held up his hands to outline a circle about the size of a dinner plate. “Bears have huge poops.” He frowned at his hands, then widened the space between them to beach-ball size for good measure.
“No way. Is that true?”
“That’s what everyone said. And when school started the teachers had a new couch, a new fridge, and”—Zach wrinkled his nose—“it did not smell good in there.”
Russ guffawed. “That is amazing! I have a couple of teachers I wouldn’t mind if a bear took a giant—”
Dave’s voice reverberated through the trees, making both boys jump. “Russ! Zach! Time to come in!”
They looked at each other. They’d forgotten the hut, the adults.
“Boys?”
“We should stay out here,” Russ grumbled. His eyes darted up to the crows, still cawing from the treetop. “Go see what those birds are yelling about. See if there’s another dead elk!”
Zach felt an almost physical pull toward the hut.
“Russ? Zach?” Dave called again. “Time for dinner!”
Russ crossed his arms and stuck out a petulant lower lip.
Zach squirmed, needing to obey, wanting to flee the trees, the tracks, the creature, the birds. He feigned casualness. “I mean, it’s getting dark anyway.”
Russ gave a put-upon sigh. “I guess. But tomorrow, we’ll come search around, right? And you’ll show me that elk on the way down?”
“Sure!”
“Bear crapping in the teacher’s lounge,” Russ said with a cackle as they skied back, snow beginning to fall lightly around them. “Classic.”
Inside, the hut felt overwarm, even stifling.
“You boys have fun?” Bram asked.
“Yep,” Russ said. “Zach knows a ton about outdoor stuff.”
Zach covered his smile with a hand. Maybe Russ liked him after all.
Darkness swallowed the mountains and the storm thickened. When Steve switched on the porch light, the men cheered at seeing snowflakes the size of quarters dancing unpredictably down a path slanted by wind.
“Already almost two inches, wouldn’t you say?”
“Could be a big dump.”
“Don’t jinx it, man!”
“A bear-size dump,” Russ whispered, nudging Zach, and they both snorted with laughter.
As the group ate dinner, Zach felt the power of the snowstorm knit the group together in anticipation, the hut becoming ever more the bright center of a snowy world creating itself just for them.
He relaxed into his new friendship, into the comfort of his father’s smile, which said the storm was a benediction; proof that this trip, his trip, was right and good.
“Dude, Zach,” Russ said wide-eyed, “this is gonna cover those tracks! We’ll probably never get to see whatever those crows were after. Or that dead elk.”
“What? A dead what?” Pike’s slurred, overloud voice made Zach recoil.
Russ’s cheeks went red at being thrust into the spotlight. “Oh, it’s—we saw some tracks out there. With claw marks! A whole bunch of crows were freaking out, too. So we figured the crows and whatever left the tracks were feeding on a dead animal or something.”