Darwin Expedition (3 page)

Nothing I'm saying is polite enough to repeat.

I grab the last of the shredded bark. “Light. Please light.” I set the match to the bark, holding it until it burns down to my fingers. Puff. Puff. Twigs, one at a time. Don't look away from the fire. Puff. It's starting to crackle. A bigger twig. More smoke, but the fire is strong. Grab a small branch. Breathe on the fire. The fire is the size of a basketball now. I snap dry branches over my shin and feed these to the blaze.

“You got it going.”

Tej's voice makes me jump. He's returned to the shelter with his arms full of dead branches. He drops these into the pile, and then he stoops next to the fire. Taking a branch from me, he stacks it on the fire. Then he holds his hand out. “Matches.”

I hand him the package. He shakes it and gives me a look.

We pile up wood at the entrance to the shelter and crawl in. I add more wood to the fire. The fire is like a furnace. More than that, it's like a barricade.

I tell Tej about hearing the noise in the forest.

He says, “Liam, if that bear had wanted us, he'd be eating us now.”

I look out through the smoke into the woods. It's dark now, too dark to see. I put another stick on the fire. I feed that fire all night long, only falling asleep with the first light of dawn.

During the night the sky clears, which is good because the rain has stopped. But without the cloud cover, it's cold. Our breath puffs out like smoke. Every joint in my body is complaining. Hunger wrings my guts.

Tej isn't wasting any time. He's got his woolen snowboarding toque pulled down low over his ears and he's walking fast.

“I think I know where we went wrong yesterday.”

I can hear the shiver in his voice.

He continues, “When we went off the road, we must have been farther north than we thought. That's why we didn't reach the highway. But we can't be far now.”

I stride along behind him. We're keeping to a well-worn deer trail. Tej says it's the right direction, more or less. The dense undergrowth among the trees makes a more direct route impossible. In an opening, I call for Tej to stop. “Just for a minute.”

Nature's call. I leave the path for a bit of privacy, just far enough that I'm out of sight of Tej. As I'm doing up my pants, I spot a quick movement on the forest floor. A bird bursts into flight right under my nose, which makes me jump. Just inches from my right foot is a small nest of eggs.

I kneel down to inspect the nest. The eggs are the size of the end of my thumb, five of them, pale brown with speckles. They blend so well with the ground that if the bird hadn't flown up, I never would have seen the nest. Probably I was just
about to step on it. I would have crushed the eggs and the adult bird.

My stomach rumbles. Eggs. Protein.

Not that I'm a fan of raw eggs. I like my eggs fried so the yolk is solid but still soft.

My stomach gurgles and growls.

These eggs are so small I bet I could swallow them whole. I pick up an egg. It feels warm in my palm. The forest falls quiet all of a sudden, as if it knows I'm taking an egg. I look around for the adult bird but nothing is moving. I'll just take two, one for me and one for Tej. I select another egg.

Tej is saying something, but I can't hear what it is. His voice sounds high-pitched, like a whine.

It's stupid, but finding these eggs makes me feel powerful, like we could make it out here, if we had to. I straighten up and take a couple of steps toward the path.

Tej is standing with his back to me, his arms straight at his sides. I can see his shoulders moving as he breathes, the
exhaled air puffing out as if he's panting. Then he sucks in his breath.

Just on the other side of Tej, something big and brown is on the trail. It shifts and now I know why Tej is scared witless. It's a bear.

I try to call to Tej but my voice barely squeaks. The bear is on all fours, swaying its head back and forth, sniffing the air. Its brown fur is tipped with lighter brown, and its eyes, close to the middle of its face, are round and black. Its ears are like brown tennis balls on the side of its head. The bear is looking at Tej, and then it sees me. I feel the eggs slip out of my hand.

We are so close to the bear I can smell it, a gagging smell that is rank and sweet at
the same time. The bear rears up, getting a better look at us.

Tej backs into me. He speaks to me in a singsong voice, trying to soothe the bear, I guess. “Walk backward, you idiot.” I force my feet to shuffle backward on the path. “Slowly,” he says. “Don't make eye contact with it. And don't run or he'll charge for sure.”

Tej is between the bear and me. I could turn and run right now, and the bear would get him. I'd get away and the bear would get Tej. I think about this for a shamefully long time, but then I do as Tej says

The bear on its hind legs is as tall as Tej, maybe as tall as me. So long as the bear is on its hind legs, we're all right. A bear can't charge on two legs.

The bear drops to all fours.

Tej mutters, “Crap.”

Good thing I already did.

The bear lowers its head. When a dog looks like this, it means you could get bitten. When a bear looks like this, it means you could be lunch. The bear's eyes
harden, as if it has lost patience with us. We're on his trail and he wants us off. The bear opens its jaws. Big jaws. Really big teeth. His jaws make a smacking sound.

I whisper, “He's going to eat us.”

Tej is backing up faster now. He says, “For once in your life, you might be right.”

I reach down for a rock.

The bear huffs, and then it sweeps its front paw across the path. Big paw. Really big claws. Dirt sprays up. I feel a clod of mud hit my cheek.

The rock in my hand is the size of a cantaloupe. I don't know why I'm holding it—a rock is useless against a bear.

The bear huffs and pops its jaw.

A bad sign, a very bad sign.

The bear shakes its head like it's making up its mind. Then it charges.

Tej goes totally still. The bear is so close now I can see bits of dried grass in its fur. Saliva hangs in ropes from its jaws. Its eyes are flat black. It's not so much a decision as a reaction—I lob the rock up.

The toss is so weak I could be pitching to first-grade T-ballers. But it arcs straight up over Tej, hangs in the air and then plummets. The rock clunks square in the center of the bear's skull.

The bear blinks and rears back onto its ass. It shakes its head and lets out a bawling wail. Then it runs away from us, up the trail in the direction we came.

Tej bursts out laughing. “It was just a yearling,” Tej says. “Hardly more than a cub.”

I'm not laughing, not yet. My knees are jelly and my hands are shaking. “Right, just a teddy bear.”

On the ground by my feet is a mess of smashed egg. I lean down. Two miniature birds lie folded in the broken yellow sacs.

“If that bear was just a yearling, I'd hate to see it when it's full-grown.”

We're in an open meadow of long grass. Ahead of me on the trail, Tej waves his hand. “I'd hate to see it with its mother. We'd be hamburger.”

“You would be. I'd still be running.”

“You ca n't out r un a bear, Liam. They're faster than they look. Remember that video my dad took of the grizzly getting the sheep?”

I remember. It was at his uncle's ranch in Montana. Tej's dad had videotaped the grizzly from his truck. The bear was in Tej's uncle's sheep pasture, chasing the flock. The video showed the bear taking the sheep, lunging with its front paws to bring the sheep down, and then tearing into the sheep with its teeth. It didn't take long for that sheep to die. I say, “Your uncle shot the bear, and then he yelled at your dad for sitting there with his camera instead of doing something to save his sheep.”

Tej says, “That's right. You think you could have run faster than that bear?”

I think about how fast that yearling bear closed the distance between it and us, how it drove with its front legs, how its shoulders rolled with each long stride.

I say, “The bear got the slowest sheep. I don't have to outrun the bear. It's like Darwin said about survival of the fastest. I just have to be faster than you.”

“Ha ha. Darwin's theory is survival of the fittest, by the way, and mental fitness counts. Human beings didn't get to the
top of the food chain by being big and dumb.”

I wish that sounded more like a joke. “By big and dumb, you're talking about the bear, right?”

He either ignores me or doesn't hear me. Probably he's ignoring me. Tej pauses on the trail. “Look,” he says, “you can see where a bear has been eating.”

The meadow grass has been cropped into jagged swaths. “Bears eat grass?”

Tej nods. “In the spring they do, when the grass is high in protein.”

I pull a stalk of grass and chew it. It tastes like, well, grass. “Just grass?”

“Pretty much, until the berries ripen.” Tej starts walking. “They'll hunt if it's easy, like a young or wounded elk.”

“Or a nice fat sheep in a pasture.”

“That was unusual, apparently.”

“Maybe the bear took the elk calf we saw yesterday.”

“If it didn't, it probably ate it anyway. Anything dead is food for a bear.”

I look over my shoulder for the hundredth
time, just in case that yearling brings its mama to kick some human butt. Nice fresh human butt. I step up closer to Tej. “I sure nailed it with that rock.”

Tej laughs. “I've heard of bears running away with bullets in their skull. I don't think your rock did much damage.”

I say, “Well, I guess I scared it away, which is more than you did.”

“The bear was just bluffing. It wouldn't have attacked us.”

“Oh, and you weren't scared at all.”

He turns to look at me. “You're scared of bears because you don't understand them. Like you don't understand most things.”

I know where this is going. “If this is about me leaving Tremblay with you, I understand enough.”

He shakes his head. “You don't. You only understand what you know, and all you know is Tremblay. It's a big, wide world out there, Liam.” He sneers. “The only thing big and wide in Tremblay is Jordan Campbell's ass.” He laughs.

I feel my face go red. “Is that supposed to be a joke, Tej?”

He shakes his head. “Of course it's a joke. You have no sense of humor.” He sniggers. “Maybe Jordan has sucked it out of you.”

“Maybe you should shut up about Jordan.”

“She's holding you back, my friend.”

I move in close to his face. “I'd rather be in Tremblay with Jordan than go live in some crap-hole college apartment with a bunch of guys who smoke and talk about girls because they never get a girl and never will because they're so friggin' conceited.”

Tej looks a bit like the bear right now. His eyes have the same maniac gleam. He says, “There's nothing wrong with being an intellectual.”

“There is if you're also an asshole.”

He flips me the bird. “Fine. Rot in Tremblay. Work in the mill for as long as it stays open. Or pump gas. Any idiot can pump gas. Marry Jordan and have six kids.
She'll already have a couple of her own from bedding everyone else in town, but what's a few more?”

My face is burning, and I feel my hands forming fists. “Jordan likes me the way I am. She doesn't try to make me into something else. And just because she turned you down for a date doesn't make her a whore. If it did, then every girl in Tremblay would be a whore.”

For a second it looks like he's going to take a swing at me, but then he drops his arm. He tips his head. “Do you hear that?”

“What?”

He holds up his hand. “Listen.” He cocks his head. “It's a siren. An ambulance or something.”

I can hear it now, but barely. “On the highway.”

Tej breaks into a grin. “The highway.”

We start to run.

I'm in the lead now, running in the direction of the sound of the highway. Tej is panting to keep up, but I don't care if I'm leaving him in my dust. I'm thinking about hamburgers, a six-patty monster dripping with cheese. And milkshakes. Chocolate. Strawberry. Both. And apples, a whole bag of apples. And pizza. My legs burn and the back of my throat feels like I've swallowed a scrub brush. “Hurry!”

We're charging up a slope strewn with rocks. Behind me, Tej stumbles and I turn to haul him to his feet. The sound of the siren has faded to nothing, but it plays in my memory. The highway. We're going home!

The slope grows steep and I have to scramble. I use my hands to pull myself up the rocks. Finally, the slope flattens to a broad plateau.

Tej calls from below me. “Can you see it?”

The light is getting flat. “It must be over the rise.” I wait for Tej to catch up, and then I start running again.

I don't know what makes me stop, but I do, and good thing. At the edge of the rise, the ground falls away down a sheer rock face, so far down that it makes me dizzy. I fall to my knees.

Tej runs up behind me and I yank him by his legs to stop him from going over the precipice. He takes a look over the edge. “Oh no.”

We can see the highway, all right. It
snakes through the valley far below us. Cars on the highway look the size of toys. Tej flips on his cell phone and then swears as he snaps it closed again. “Nothing.” He jumps to his feet and starts shouting at the cars, “Hey, we're here!”

“We're too far away. They'll never see us.”

Still shouting, he waves his hands over his head.

“ Like that‘s going to make a difference.”

He throws himself on the ground beside me. “Well, I found the highway. Now we just have to get down to it.”

I scan the rock face. “We'll k ill ourselves if we try to climb.” I'm so hungry I'm half-tempted to try it.