The water was so cold, my feet were already getting numb. I came back to the shore, climbed over the rock and landed on the trail. I had two wet boots now to go along with all the rest of my problems.
My problems, hell. If Maskwa and Guy went down in the woods-
I tried to replay it in my head. I had heard the plane above me. It seemed to circle and head back south, which meant it would have approached the lake from that direction. Which was more or less the exact direction I was walking. I hadn’t seen anything. I sure as hell hadn’t heard anything. Wouldn’t a crash make some sort of noise? Or would the trees just reach up and… God, catch them?
I headed back to the cabin site, squishing my way down the trail in my soaking boots. At some point, I’d have to make a fire and dry them out. Right after I found Maskwa and Guy sitting there on the porch of the cabin, having a good laugh. They had hidden their plane, just to play a joke on me.
Yeah, where’d they hide it, Alex?
“Holy fuck,” I said. “Holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck.” I started to run again. That little ball of dread in my stomach, it felt like it was spreading through my entire body. I could feel it burning in my intestines, squeezing my lungs, and tightening all the muscles in my back.
When I got back to the cabin, I was fighting for breath. “Get a hold of yourself, Alex. You’ve got to think.”
Water, that was the first thing I needed. Get some water in your body, and then you can think straight. I went into the cabin. It was exactly as we had left it. The big pot was still on the propane stove. We had boiled our water there in the morning and covered it with a lid when we left. I picked the lid up, dipped a coffee mug in, and drank. I took a deep breath and then drained another cupful.
Okay, I thought. That’s good. That’s just what you needed. Now what?
Now you go out and start looking for that plane. It can’t be too far away. They may both be alive. They may both need your help, very badly.
Vinnie. I’ll go back up the trail. I’ll get Vinnie, we’ll come back down here, and we’ll find them.
Vinnie will need water, too, I thought. I looked around for something to carry it in. A canteen, a water bottle. Anything.
There was nothing like that. Just a few pots and pans, and a lot of garbage.
Plastic Coke bottles. That’s what I needed. I went back outside and grabbed two empty liter-size bottles from the cooler. I came back in and filled them. Okay, I thought. I’m ready. Let’s go.
When I was outside, I couldn’t help looking at the lake one last time before I started back up the trail. I stopped. As if I didn’t have enough to think about, another horrible thought came to me.
Could that plane have sunk?
No. No, it can’t sink. It has floats. That’s why they call it a floatplane, you idiot. It can’t sink.
I carried the two bottles of water, one in each hand. Find Vinnie, I told myself. Look all around while you’re walking. And find Vinnie.
I hurried up the trail, looking into the shadows on either side of me. I kept expecting to see the plane. I imagined seeing it leaning nose down against a big pine tree, one of its wings sheared off and lying on the ground next to it. I imagined it so hard I made myself see it, again and again.
Easy, Alex. I made myself slow down a notch. Blind panic wouldn’t help anyone at this point. I kept walking, a mile into the woods, over the stream, then another mile. For a moment I thought I caught the far-off sound of a bear again. It didn’t chill me to the bone this time. I had bigger problems now.
I opened one of the water bottles, took a quick drink and recapped it. I wiped away the thin line of sweat that was running down the side of my face, even in this cold air. My feet were still wet. I kept walking.
I finally got to the stand of birch trees. Vinnie wasn’t there.
“Vinnie!” I yelled. “Vinnie! Where the hell are you!”
Nothing.
“Vinnie!”
A bear. In the distance. Nothing else.
“Where the fuck are you, Vinnie?” I went up the trail, trying to pick up his boot prints on the ground. I had already proven to myself just how bad I was at tracking, but I didn’t know what else to do. It turned out to be easy, because he had just been walking here within the last couple of hours, and a dozen goddamned bears hadn’t messed up the trail yet.
The trail split off into a couple different directions. I followed his tracks left. It split again. The tracks went left again. I picked up the sound of running water. And something else I couldn’t quite make out. Probably more bears.
“Vinnie!”
Did I hear something then? It was hard to tell. I kept walking. The water sounds grew louder. Finally, I came to a waterfall. The water was coming down, maybe eight feet from top to bottom, and splashing on the rocks.
I looked again and saw that there was a great beaver’s dam in the stream, raising the height of the falls. From where I was standing, the whole thing rose above my head. On another day, I would have stood there and admired it.
Then I saw the bootprints. Vinnie had gone up the side of this stream, up this jumbled mass of rocks and dirt, all the way to the top. I followed them. There were big depressions in the ground, where he had no doubt buried his boots halfway to his knees in the mud. Mine were already a soaking mess, so I had nothing to lose. I fought my way up the incline, grabbing on to rocks and roots and God knows what else.
I heard them. Before I got to the top, I heard the throaty roaring of the bears.
As I stumbled onto the top, I saw it all at once. I saw the bears, two of them, one black, one cinnamon brown, all fur and teeth and nails, one of them on its hind legs for a moment, suspended in the air. Vinnie swinging a long stick in slow motion, making a wide arc that would have been graceful in any other place than this sudden hell. The ground all churned up, like a battlefield. Freshly dug dirt, all along the bed of this creek. A clearing, the sun shining down. The sleeve of Vinnie’s coat in tatters, blood on his arm.
I saw it all for a moment that lasted forever, feeling like I was seeing it from far away, out of my own body, until finally it all snapped into place and I heard the noises again and I knew what was happening.
The bears were attacking Vinnie. He was screaming and trying to beat them off with a stick.
I yelled something and ran forward, sliding through the muck and landing hard on my back. I clawed my way back to my feet and ran to him along the edge of the stream. The bears were on either side of him now, the ground itself a morass of black soil and stones and dead grass, torn up in strips.
And something long and white.
Bones. God help me, bones.
As I came to him, I saw the bones in the dirt. A hand. Black fingers locked in a twisted claw. White fingernails. A leg. The ribs of a man, half buried in the dirt.
This is what happened. They are dead. All the men are dead. The bears killed them and now they will kill us, too.
“Get away!” Vinnie’s raw voice. “Get out of here!”
I screamed at the bears. I waved my arms. “Go! Get away! Go! Go!”
The smell. It washed over me. The stench of it, God, the dead rotting bodies.
And something else.
Vinnie swung his stick. A sudden pain in my arm as the end of the stick hit me and broke off.
I knew that smell.
“Get away!” he yelled. “Get away! Get away!”
One bear turned away, the one with the brown fur.
“Get away! Get away, God damn you!”
I couldn’t even tell which of us was yelling anymore. That smell.
The black bear made his horrible inhuman noise and turned around. He looked back at us with yellow eyes and went away, toward the woods.
Vinnie kept screaming.
A long time ago. How many years? The same smell. The bodies in bags, zipped up tight. And yet the smell still hit me right in the face. I’m there in that same place now, as if it just happened, the way only a smell can take
