wire, some string, granola bars, jerky. My last eighteen dollars I gave to the trucker who let me hitchhike across the border with him. My driver’s license I slipped into a zippered pocket of the coveralls. If things didn’t work out, it might be the only way to identify what was left of me.
I didn’t bring a backpack or a sleeping bag or a camp stove or matches. I wanted to be unencumbered, and I wanted to live as much like a lone wolf as I could. The idea, after all, was to find a pack with a vacancy that might allow me to join them. The last human I spoke to-for nearly two years-was the trucker who dropped me off. “Bonne chance,” he said, in his Quebecois accent, and I thanked him and slipped into the fringe of pine trees that lined the edge of the highway. No fanfare. Nowadays, I’d probably have sponsorship endorsement patches all over my coveralls; I’d be swilling Gatorade from a CamelBak, and my progress would be simulcast on the Web and on a reality TV show. But then, fortunately, it was just me and the wolves.
I could tell you that I was a man on a mission, determined and brave and stalwart. The truth was, for twelve hours of the day, I was. I walked along old logging trails and would sometimes cover twenty miles of terrain a day, but I made sure I could get back to fresh water daily. I studied scat to see which animals were in the area, and rigged snares with the wire, string, and branches to catch squirrels, which I’d skin and eat raw. I urinated in streams, so that my scent couldn’t be traced by predators. But the mountain man in me disappeared at around seven o’clock, when the sun set the tops of the pines on fire and slowly disappeared for the night.
Then, I was terrified.
Imagine your worst nightmare. Now imagine it’s real. That’s what it is like to feel the dark close around you like an angry fist. Every twitch and hoot and skittering leaf becomes a potential threat. When nature switches off her light, there’s nothing you can do to turn it back on again. The first four nights I was in the wild, I slept in a tree, certain that I was going to be killed by a bear or a mountain lion. The fifth night, I fell out of the tree, and realized I was just as likely to die by breaking my neck. After that, I slept on the ground-but lightly, jumping alert at the slightest sound.
My learning curve was staggeringly steep. Within a week, I understood that in the wild, time moves much more slowly. A wind is never just a wind-it’s the email system of the natural world, bringing in new information about weather patterns, animals coming into and leaving the area, potential predators. Rain isn’t a nuisance-it’s a respite from bugs and fresh water for drinking. A snowfall isn’t an inconvenience-it’s a new source for tracks and animals that might become a meal. The rustling of the trees or the song of a bird or the scrabble of a rodent is the key to your survival; being able to spot a flicker of movement through the dense block of foliage is essential. When it is a matter of life and death, the volume of nature gets turned up loud.
Everyone asks what I thought of, all by myself, alone for so long. The truth is, I didn’t think about anything. I was too busy trying to keep myself alive and to read the signs that were presented to me, like some kind of hieroglyphic code without the Rosetta stone for guidance. If I thought about Cara and Edward and Georgie, I knew I’d be distracted enough to miss either an opportunity or a threat, and I could not risk that. So I didn’t think. Instead, I survived. I spent the days amazed at the beauty of a spiderweb, laced between branches; at the jagged rise of a mountain ridge in the distance; at the dusk rolling over the woods like a purple carpet. I tracked herds of deer and watched two beavers engineer a phenomenal dam. I dozed off, because midday naps were safer than nighttime ones.
For a month, I didn’t see or hear any wolves, and I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake.
The fourth week I was in the wild, a nor’easter hit. I moved away from the riverbank and huddled under evergreen trees, because they absorb moisture with their roots, and the ground beneath them would be that much drier. Unable to hunt and shivering and starving, I got sick. I drifted in and out of a feverish spell as the rain pelted me, wondering why the hell I’d ever thought of coming out here. I hallucinated that the forest had legs, that the roots of the trees were kicking me in the gut and the kidneys. I coughed until I vomited bile. There were points when I wished for a big cat or a bear, for anything that would swiftly put me out of my misery.
I think, looking back on it, that I had to get sick. I had to scrape away the very last bit of my humanity so that I would start behaving like a wolf, and not like a man. And in those dire straits, a wolf would not wallow in self-despair. Wolves do not give up. They assess the situation and ask, What can I eat? How can I protect myself? Even wounded, they will run until they can no longer stand.
Although it was only October, the elevation was high enough that it snowed. When my fever broke, I woke to find myself covered with a blanket of white, which I shook off as I sat upright. I glanced around to make sure I was safe, and that was when I saw it, pressed into the snow about three feet away from me: the paw print of a single, male wolf.
Scrambling to my feet, I searched the area for other prints-proof that a pack had been here-but found nothing. This animal either was scouting for his pack or was a lone wolf.
The wolf knew where I was. He could easily find his way back to me and, now that I wasn’t feverish and unconscious, consider me a threat to be dispatched. The sane thing to do was to move on instead of putting myself in danger. But instead, I did something that jeopardized my safety, that made my position blatantly known, surely as if I was sending up a search flare.
I threw back my head, and I howled.
When my friend Mariah sees me in the hospital bed, she bursts into tears. It’s almost ridiculous, the way I’m the patient but I have to hand her the box of Kleenex and tell her that it’s going to be all right. She pushes a stuffed purple bear at me. It’s holding a balloon that says CONGRATULATIONS. “iParty ran out of the Get Well Soon bears,” she says, sniffling. “God, Cara. I can’t believe this happened. I’m so sorry.”
I shrug-or at least I would shrug, if my shoulder weren’t immobilized. I realize she feels just as guilty about me being out at the party with her as I feel about my dad coming to get me there. If not for Mariah, I wouldn’t have been in Bethlehem; if not for me, my father wouldn’t have been on the roads that night. I hadn’t even wanted to go out; we’d been planning pizza and a chick flick overnight at Mariah’s house. But Mariah invoked the best friend code: I would do it for you. And so, like an idiot, I went.
“It’s not your fault,” I tell her, although I don’t really believe this when I say it to myself.
My mother, who has been living at the hospital, is in the family lounge down the hall with the twins and Joe. She hasn’t brought them in to see me. She is afraid that all the bandages and bruises will give them nightmares, and she doesn’t want Joe to have to deal with that while she’s sleeping here with me. It makes me feel like the Frankenstein monster, like something that has to be hidden away.
Mariah stares into her lap. “Is your dad… is he going to-”
“Tyler,” I interrupt.
She glances at me, her face red and puffy. “What?”
“Tell me what happened.” Tyler is the reason we went to the party; he’s the guy who invited Mariah. “Did he drive you home? Did you hook up? Has he texted you?”
Even to my own ears, my voice sounds like a string that’s been pulled too tight. Mariah’s face crumples, and she starts crying again. “You’re stuck in a hospital and you had to have major surgery and your dad is, like, in some kind of coma and you want to talk about a guy? It’s not important. He’s not important.”
“No, he’s not,” I say quietly. “But he’s what we’d be talking about if I wasn’t in a hospital and if this never had happened. If you and I are talking about Tyler, then for five seconds I get to be normal.”
Mariah wipes her nose on her sleeve and nods. “He’s kind of a dick,” she says. “He got wasted and started telling me how his ex had gotten a boob job over the summer and how he wanted to tap that.”
“Tap that,” I repeat. “He actually used that phrase?”
“Gross, right?” She shakes her head. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
