Darwin Expedition (2 page)

Water from the melting snowpack trickles in small channels and I stoop to collect some in my cupped hands. It's cold, almost ice, and it burns the back of my throat. My hands feel raw and I jam them back into my gloves. Rounded hummocks of new grass line these channels and I pick a stalk to chew. At least we have good gear. We packed for spring snowboarding conditions high on the glacier, so we have rainproof jackets, pants and gloves. We
have food—power bars and dried fruit. We had sleeping bags in the truck. Tej likes to think that we'll end up in some babe's cushy condo, but it hasn't happened yet—we always end up sleeping in the truck. But we didn't bring the sleeping bags. We left almost everything behind with the truck so we could walk fast. Now I wish I'd packed a few of Tej's Cokes.

I don't know how far we've walked. Tej is in the lead, as usual. I follow the bobbing hood of his blue jacket as he picks the trail. He's a good foot shorter than me, always has been, and there's nothing to him. But he's strong. Tej and his family moved to our town partway through first grade. The teacher put him in the desk in front of me. Back then no one was moving into our town; they were all moving out. We hadn't seen a new kid in town, ever. And Tej was small, smaller than the kindergarten kids. The other boys and I probably laughed at him. Anyway, he pissed himself. No one else noticed. I did, because the puddle was right in front of my feet. I didn't
say anything. At recess he showed up on the soccer field wearing his gym shorts. He walked into our soccer game like he owned it. He was fast, but more than that, he knew what to do with the ball. Tej is like that with all sports. He makes up for his small size.

Tej calls back to me, “There's a carcass up ahead. It looks like your dinner plate on rib night.”

Tej and I have been friends for a long time. That makes up for his big mouth. Mostly.

Just off the path, a flock of crows haggle over the bony remains of what looks like an elk calf. Tej pauses, and I take the chance to rest. I sink down to the ground to watch the birds. Whatever got the elk didn't leave much behind. Elk bones shine white among the black of the crows. A patch of brown elk hide flaps like a small flag.

Tej tosses me a power bar. I say, “Just one?”

“We have a ways to go. We don't want
to eat everything at once.” He sits down on the ground beside me.

“I do.”

One crow is using its big black beak to saw into the spine bones of the calf. Another snags the bit of hide and flies off with it.

I tear into the power bar. The bar is hard to chew and I wish I had a bottle of water. Tej is eating his bar in small bits. I finish mine and watch him eat his.

“A bear has been through here,” he says.

I follow his gaze just off the trail to a pile of black scat. “Nice.” I wrinkle my nose. The poo is pebbled with red. “What's it been eating?”

Tej leans closer to the pile. I think about pushing him into it, but of course I don't. He says, “Looks like bear berries from last fall. Berries that stay on the bush over the winter are sweet.”

“Bear berries?”

“Kinnikinnick is the real word. Bears love them.”

That's the other thing about Tej. He actually pays attention in biology.

“Any shoelaces in that scat?”

“Bears don't eat people.” He toes the grass around the pile. “Good thing too, because this bear can't be too far away.” He points to the fresh green grass under the scat. “What bears really like to eat is dead things.” He points to the elk. “Like that.”

We've seen bears when we were fishing and along the highway. My dad says that when he was a kid, bears used to come into town in the spring. You can't be afraid of bears or you'd never leave the house. You just have to give them enough room. I glance around me.

Tej elbows me. “You want the rest of this?” He hands me his half-eaten power bar.

I grab it and cram it into my mouth.

Tej shakes his head. “You're as bad as those crows. Come on, let's get moving.”

No complaint from me, not if there is a bear anywhere close. I take a last look at the elk bones and start walking again.

The trail drops down into a grove of aspen. The leaves on the trees are so new that the branches seem to glow green. Here the trail breaks into strands between the trees. In some places I have to turn sideways to fit between the tree trunks. Despite the drizzle, I'm starting to sweat. The ground is roped with tree roots and everything is slimy with rain. The white bark of the trees is gashed by the elk that eat the bark in the winter. I'm so hungry I think about the bark. But it's water I want. The power bar is like a brick in my belly and it's sucking up all my moisture. When I see a rivulet of meltwater, I kneel down and take off my gloves. As I scoop my hands into the tiny stream, I notice a flattened smear of mud along the water. The back of my throat sticks together.

“Tej!” It comes out as a croak. I try again. “Tej!”

He stops and turns back. I point to the track in the mud. “Bear.”

Tej stoops to examine the track. He whistles.

The track is twice the size of my glove, a
fat five-toed pad marked with curved claws. Big claws. I know from the size of the track, but the claws confirm it. Black bear tracks don't show much claw.

“That's a good-sized grizzly.”

I can't trust my voice, so I nod.

Tej straightens up and says, “If we're going to make it before nightfall, we better pick up the pace.”

“Nightfall?” I scramble to my feet and follow him.

He speaks without turning his head. “I thought we'd be out by now. The trail must not follow a straight line.”

He plows through the undergrowth and branches snap in my face. I say, “Like the elk herd made a nice straight path for us to follow?”

“Fairly straight. Or at least I thought so. With the cloud cover, I can't tell our direction so well.”

“But you know where we are.”

“Of course. I think we should climb back out above the trees. Maybe we're too low.”

I won't mind being in the open. We find
a path that is wide enough that our packs don't snag on the branches and make our way up. By the time we break free of the trees, my thighs are burning and we're both panting. Under my pack, sweat plasters my jacket to my back. The clouds hang even lower and the drizzle hardens to rain. Below us, the trees are shrouded in mist. It's like the rain is erasing where we've been. Tej pauses.

“Maybe we should go back down, try to get into the valley.”

My jaw drops. “We were hours hiking up!”

He scans the horizon. For a second, he looks worried, but when he turns to me, any concern is gone from his face. “You have a better idea, brainiac?”

I spin on my heel and head back the way we've just come, leaving Tej behind me. In Tej's smaller tracks, I purposely stomp. It's not his fault that we're here. It's not his fault we took the forestry road, even though everyone knows it's too early to be on the back roads. They're labeled “summer only” on the maps for a reason, Tej. It's not his
fault that the truck rolled, even though he oversteers. It's not his fault that it's raining, although if the sun were shining, he'd take credit for that. I could have studied the map, tried to figure out a route to the highway. But Tej is better at that than I am. He's smarter at everything. He's the one who's leaving Tremblay after graduation and happy to be going. He's the one who wants me to go too, get a real job, a city job. Tej is the one who sets the plays and makes the decisions. I can hear Tej behind me, and I know he's half-running to match my pace.

In the fringe of aspen, I stop dead. Tej stumbles into my back. “What?”

On the trail ahead of me, among our own clear footprints, I see the tracks of a grizzly bear. The paw prints flatten ours. The impressions from the bear's clawed toes cover the toes of our boot prints. It's like the bear was trying to remove our marks from the trail.

“It's following us.” I look over both my shoulders. “The bear is stalking us.”

“It was going the same direction. That doesn't mean it's following us.” Tej glances around him, and then he shouts, “Okay, bear, the meadow is all yours. We're going down to the valley.”

I slam my hand over Tej's mouth. “You're telling it where we are. It's like ringing a dinner bell.”

Tej knocks my hand away. “You don't think the bear knows exactly where we
are?” He sniffs at his underarms and then mine. “He knows.”

I peer into the deepening forest. “It must be close.”

Tej nods. “It's just waiting for us to get out of his way.” He steps in front of me on the path. “So let's get out of his way.”

I'm not too proud to say I'm glad Tej is going first. But every hair on my back prickles when I think the bear might go for the straggler at the rear. I match my pace to Tej's, sticking to him so close I can hear him breathing. He says, “We've probably walked this close to bears a hundred times. They don't want to cross paths with us any more than we want to meet up with them. You just don't want to surprise one.”

Suddenly I wish I carried one of those lame little bells the tourists use to make noise in the woods.

I can hear rain pattering on the leaves overhead, but the canopy of branches acts like an umbrella. The trees are dense and sometimes I have to stoop to get under
the branches. It's darker in the forest. I stumble over a tree root and crash into Tej. He swears, and then he says, “Watch your big feet.”

It's stupid but I feel like crying. My muscles are on fire; my empty stomach has stopped rumbling and now aches.

On cue, the rain turns to a torrent and crashes through the canopy of aspen to pour down on us. We tighten our hoods, but it feels like rain is running down my back. Tej is shivering. He says, “We should think about making a camp.”

“You mean spend the night out here?”

“It's getting too dark to hike. You don't want to fall in the dark and risk breaking something.” He steps off the path and scans the forest.

“But you said...”

He lifts his hand to stop me. “If you want to keep walking, go right ahead.”

He knows I won't, and I hate him a little for being so sure of that. “You have a lighter to make a fire?”

He nods. “Matches.”

I sigh. “I'll find some wood.”

This makes us both laugh. We're in the middle of a forest, after all.

We set up camp in the lee of an overturned pine tree, its shallow roots still encased in a plate of dirt. The roots form a back wall for our shelter and a bit of overhang for a roof. Not much overhang—we won't both fit in the sliver of dry ground.

“Look for some small deadfall. We can make a lean-to.” Tej takes off his pack and settles himself under the overhang out of the rain.

“We?” I sling my pack next to him.

You'd think that in a forest it would be easy to collect small tree trunks and branches. Not. Fallen trees are heavy, and small ones in the ground are too green to snap. I haul what I can back to the shelter. I'm sweating and want more than anything to take off my jacket. But the rain would douse me in seconds. I set the bigger trunks up against the dirt overhang, and then I layer on branches to form a barrier
from the rain. I set small green branches on the floor of the shelter as a mattress between the wet ground and our butts. It is small, but the shelter keeps the worst of the rain off.

Tej has gathered a pile of twigs and small branches. He's shredding bark with his knife. He says, “We need more dry wood for the fire.”

I look at the heap I've already hauled to the shelter. “More?”

“Do you have to question everything I say?” He reaches for another piece of bark and attacks it with his knife.

“You're going to cut yourself.”

He tells me to commit a physically impossible sex act.

I say, “I'll make the fire. You get more wood.”

His look says what he doesn't have to:
You can't make a fire
.

I say, “One match. I do it all the time.”

“To light a bush fire with half a can of white gas.” But he stands up and tosses
me the matches. Then he plods off to get firewood.

I choose a spot for the fire in the opening of the shelter, not so close that we burn ourselves down, but under the overhang of the tree roots to keep as much rain out of the fire as possible. I arrange bark strips, shredding some even finer with my fingers. I take out a match, wooden, waterproof—trust Tej to think of packing these—and scrape the match head against the package. It flares, and I set the flame to the pile of bark. It catches. A strand of smoke lifts from the tiny pile. I grab some twigs to feed the fire, and in that instant the fire sputters out.

This time I pull everything I need close at hand. I add more bark strips to the pile and light it. The flame is bright and I feed it a small twig. Then another. The twigs are damp, everything is, and the fire fades to a red ember. I drop to my knees and blow gently. The fire catches again and I hold a twig in the flame, puffing air into the flame. I grab another twig, and
another. Smoke is burning my eyes, but I keep blowing on the fire. I have to get it burning hot enough to add bigger bits of wood. I'm kneeling over the fire, my butt in the air, feeling like I've finally got the fire started, when I hear a branch snap in the forest right next to the shelter.

I sit upright. New sweat prickles under my arms. “Tej?”

No answer.

I peer into the trees. My mouth is suddenly so dry that my tongue feels like a sock. “That wasn't funny, Tej.”

Nothing. I yank back my hood so I can hear better. Rain sizzles into my small fire. “Okay, Mr. Bear. You can piss off now.”

The forest is quiet.

I want fire and I want it now. I look down at my fire to find it's gone out. With shaking hands I grab more bark, lots of it, and put a match to it. And another match, just for good measure. I toss on a twig, blowing hard so that the flame jumps, and then add a bigger twig. The fire is going, but my head is light from blowing on it
More twigs. I dump on a handful. Smoke pours from the fire and I empty my lungs into it, but the twigs drop into the fire, smothering it. Again, the fire dies.