Lost at Running Brook Trail (10 page)

Elaine wondered about interesting and valuable objects that might be lying somewhere in the cave. She had heard about archeologists and other hunters who had found priceless artifacts in caves. She had seen many documentaries and movies about that too. People going down into dark places and coming out with treasures. Many scientific truths that helped people progress had been discovered in caves.

“Something’s poking into my side,” Kimberly said, turning on the bed.

“Well good, it’s happening to the right person. You
are
the reason we’re here.”

“You’re here because of yourself, so stop blaming me.”

The last thing they all heard was the harsh sound of Susan’s uneasy breathing.

Tracks
 

M
orning broke in the cave, where four bodies formed one large S. They spooned, curving in their sleep. It was a situation that wouldn’t continue while they were awake. Elaine, Miriam and Kimberly awoke to Susan’s snoring and broke the S. Susan lay on her back, head on her bag, mouth open, so that when she snored it made a gargling sound like a stream impeded by stones. The three got up one by one and stretched their stiff limbs. In the semi-darkness of the cave they walked around and looked at the walls.

“She went to sleep first, and she’s going to wake up last,” Kimberly said, glaring at Susan.

“She’s tired,” Miriam said.

Kimberly laughed. “And we aren’t?”

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Elaine said. “Sleeping means she doesn’t have to do anything. It’s a perfect state for her.”

“Should we wake her?” Miriam said.

“Let her sleep; it’s not as if we’re going anywhere fast.”

“Gross,” Kimberly said, pointing to the grotesque stick figure that Elaine and Miriam had seen the day before.

“Yeah, we slept with it last night, and so did she.” Miriam nodded over her shoulder at the sleeping Susan.

“What did they use to draw these things?” Kimberly asked.

“Crushed iron ore mixed with water or charcoal,” Elaine answered.

“And how do you know all this?”

“We go to a Canadian school, don’t we? It’s in that book
Places and People
.”

They walked around some more in the greyness of the cave and delayed the inevitable going outside, mesmerized by the wall of strange red and black imagery. Their heads all snapped around when Susan’s cries punctured the air. Her arms flailed in front of her as if she was fending off someone or something. Her body was one big tremor.

Elaine ran over and shook Susan awake. “Hey, what’s going on?”

Susan sat up and looked around dazedly, as if she wasn’t sure where she was. “Bad dream.”

“Well, it’s not surprising,” Elaine said. “What was it about?”

“Scary, painted monsters with witches and funerals. The monsters were coming toward me like they were going to get me. It’s like they were coming out of these walls.” Susan waved her hands for emphasis.

“It’s your imagination. You have all these distorted feelings about all this; the drawings, the cave, us being out here, lost and not knowing when we’re going to be found or when we are going to find someone.” Elaine looked toward the rocks at the mouth of the cave. What were they going to do today?

Susan sat up briefly and then threw herself down again.

“We have to go outside,” Elaine said, “so Susan, you have to get up.”

Susan slowly rose from the makeshift bed and dabbed at her sleepy eyes. She adjusted to the light of the cave and her eyes were immediately drawn to the bizarre mythical stick figure on the wall. She’d learned that caves had been used for worship or burial, but Susan didn’t know whether this drawing was some strange god or some freakish ghost. All she knew was that she wanted to get out of the cave. She had slept with this figure all night, but now that she was awake, she couldn’t stand to be in its presence.

“My dream was just like that.” Susan nodded toward the wall. “We really should go.”

They used their bodies to lean on the top rock by the mouth of the cave. They pushed and pushed until the rock gave way and fell with a heavy thud outside. Bright sunshine blasted through the empty space, and they had to glance away for a moment.

“Do we have to move the other one?” Susan wanted to know.

“We could leave it,” Elaine said. “We could just climb over it and go, but what if we need to run back in here quickly? Then what?”

“Why would we need to run back in here quickly?” Kimberly asked.

“Just use your imagination,” Miriam said.

“We’d better move it then,” Susan said.

This one was harder to move. They really had to lean their bodies into it. After moving it partially, when they had enough space to walk out, they gave up the effort. If the cave was looked at from afar, it would appear as if it had a half-open door.

The foursome stepped out into the morning light. The sun was bright but the air was cool. The mountains, as always, looked down at them.

“I’m cold,” Kimberly said. “I want my sweater back.”

Susan was still wearing the grey and pink sweater and was about to shrug off her bag to take the sweater off.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Miriam said. “She isn’t giving it back. Yesterday you said you had no use for it, and now you want it back. No way! You haven’t even apologized for your nasty comments.”

“Who died and made you queen of the woodlands? I’m not sorry for the truth. She’s fat, and my sweater is stretched. But it’s still mine.”

“You’re going to pay for that!” Miriam cried.

“Who’s going to make me?”

“You’ll see.”

Susan walked away from the rest. She didn’t want to hear anymore. She felt the same pit at the bottom of her stomach as yesterday. She had it every single time she heard a “fat” word. Sometimes it was other words, such as “muncher,” “butterball,” or “dough girl.” The list went on. Susan was starving too. While she stared up at the snow-capped mountains, she wondered what they were going to eat.

“Nobody’s going to make anybody do anything,” Elaine said. “We need to find food.”

“Where?” Kimberly asked.

“Beats me, but we’ll have to look and see.” Elaine called out to Susan. “Do you have any more chocolate?”

“No, it’s all gone.”

“How many did you have?” Elaine asked Susan.

“I didn’t count them. I don’t really know.”

Miriam pointed to a tree. It was laden with small dark red berries. “Those look good.”

“We don’t know what it is,” Elaine said. “If it’s poisonous, we could die or something.”

“If we don’t eat, we could die,” Susan said.

“Do you want to take your chances?” Elaine asked.

“I want to wash my face, comb my hair, brush my teeth and put some lip gloss on,” Kimberly said.

“I’ll bet you do,” Miriam responded.

Kimberly took some things out of her bag. She took a comb and repeatedly ran it through her hair. She then took out a bottle and spritzed her hair, creating a halo of mist that hovered and dissolved over her head.

“You shouldn’t spray anything out here,” Elaine said.

“Why not?” Kimberly asked absentmindedly.

“It smells.”

“So what?”

“So we don’t want bears coming to us because of the smell.”

“That’s probably just a load of crap like everything else.” Kimberly ignored Elaine, took a mirror from her bag and looked at her face and hair. “My face needs washing but my hair looks good.”

Miriam grabbed the mirror from Kimberly’s hand and threw it with all her might. It landed on a rock and broke into numerous pieces. The shards glinted like winking eyes in the morning sun. Before Kimberly could react, Miriam grabbed the bottle of hair spray and tossed it too. To exact more damage and to make sure the mirror was indeed broken, she ran over to where it lay, stomped on it with the heel of her boot and pressed in so that some parts of the mirror became finely crushed splinters of dust.

Kimberly’s face was pink with rage. She ran over to where her broken mirror lay in the grass and dirt. She saw her face as deformed in the broken, scattered and grainy fragments. As mad as she was, she knew she didn’t have the strength to take Miriam on. There was something wrong with Miriam, a vindictive kind of anger that Kimberly didn’t want to face. She had done so before and found out the hard way that Miriam’s anger gave her the strength of ten men.

“You nasty, ugly cow!”

“Yeah, well, I’d rather be an ugly cow alive than beef for bears! And I know you have shampoo. If you want to keep it, it’d better stay in your bag or it’s going to end up in the bushes or somewhere other than your hair. Any other titivating cosmetics that you have had better stay zipped.” Miriam made a zipping motion with her thumb and index fingers.

Kimberly said nothing but turned her back on Miriam in protest. Elaine walked over to the broken mirror. The parts of it that were not ground to sand were bright in the sun.

“That was uncalled for.”

“That’s what you think. She had it coming.”

Elaine closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “Maybe these will come in handy.”

“How?” Miriam asked.

Kimberly’s back was still turned. Nobody had really come to her defence. Elaine had told Miriam that she should not have broken Kimberly’s mirror or thrown away her stuff, but it hadn’t been enough. Why would someone be filled with such unjustified malice? Some random comment about the Philippines, made in the hallway at school by someone else, couldn’t be the only cause.

“We should hold a piece up to the sun, and maybe somebody looking for us will see the reflection and know where we are. It’s worth a try.”

Elaine took up a piece of the shard, being careful not to cut herself. Miriam and Susan did the same. Kimberly still had her back turned and her arms folded across her chest. She wasn’t going to use her own mirror as a signalling device. They glinted away at the sky until they grew tired.

“I’m hungry,” Susan said at last and threw down her shard.

“We all are, but it’s better to be hungry than sick.” Elaine knew they could go for a long time without food, as long as they had water. She still wore the head tie she had put on last night. She remembered it, took it off and stuffed it in her bag. She patted the rows on her head and felt that all was in place.

Although the air was still cool, the sun was taking precedence, and they could tell it was going to be a hot day.

“So we’re going to sit here and starve?” Susan asked.

“Okay, here’s a plan. We use this place as a base. We go and look for something that we know for sure can be eaten. But we come back here. We can’t walk aimlessly around like yesterday or no one will ever find us. So what do you say?” Elaine said.

Miriam and Susan nodded.

“Kimberly?” Elaine said.

“Whatever; you seem to have it all figured out.”

“We should leave something here, like an identifying marker that will tell people that we were here, just in case.”

They tried to come up with ideas about what to leave.

“Got it,” Miriam said. “The sweater Susan’s wearing.”

“Sure,” Kimberly grumbled, “leave
my
possession.”

“I’d leave mine too,” Elaine offered, “but it’s black, so I don’t know if anyone will see it from far away. But they may see the pink in that sweater.”

They left the two sweaters hanging on shrubs and headed off on a path that led them a little above the cave and to the left.

“We have to really take note of where we’re going and how we’re going to get back.”

“Maybe we should drop some bread crumbs then,” Kimberly said.

“I could do with bread,” Susan said.

The grassy path they were on seemed not to have been travelled lately. There was a path, but it was overrun with weeds. They heard it before they saw it—the roar of a waterfall still out of sight. It was farther up the road, but not by much, because the rush was right in their ears. And then they saw it, curtains and curtains of water, falling over a wall of rock to a circular pool carved out below.

“I can wash my beautiful face.”

“I can fill my water bottles so I don’t die from thirst.”

“I can rest.”

The waterfall and the pool gave them a sense of calm. Tucked off at the side of the road, it wasn’t a huge waterfall by any means, but there was still a great deal of power coming down with the gushing force. The pool below had no bottom that they could easily see; only froth and mist appeared with the constant beating down of the water. They strained to see its depth but were unsuccessful. Because they couldn’t see the bottom, they did everything carefully. Kimberly stayed far away to reach into the water’s screen and wash her face and arms. Elaine and the others filled their bottles, careful not to stand too close to the edge of the pool.

“It’s getting really hot now.” Elaine wet one of her rags and wiped the back of her neck.

“Yeah, it moves from cool to hot so fast in this place,” Miriam said.

Kimberly’s hair was wet from having just washed it again. She had used no shampoo, obviously afraid that Miriam would make good on her promise.

“We aren’t going to find food here,” Susan said. She looked off into the distance. She felt hungry, frustrated and powerless. When were they going to get out of this situation? The water thundered in her ear, and its noise irritated her because the sound played on her emotions. What was she doing out here? The water had allowed them to wash and refresh themselves, but she felt as if she was right on the edge of death. She wasn’t going to say this to the others because they would think that her silly imagination was leading her again. But Susan was sure of what she felt. She looked into the cloudy pool and felt herself drowning. Maybe that was what hunger did to a person. She had to turn her thoughts away from the water.

“We’ve got the most important thing.” Elaine held up a bottle of water. They stared into the cloudlike invisibility of the pool. It was a little disconcerting not knowing the depth. For all they knew, it could be as shallow as a bathtub or as deep as a sinkhole. Everything felt a little out of their control.