He sat down in the dirt and leaned back against a tree trunk. I sat down next to him. I listened closely to the night, but didn’t hear a thing. The crickets were all asleep, buried under the ground. The birds had all flown south. The bears were out there somewhere, but at that moment I couldn’t hear them.
“We need another plan,” I said.
Vinnie didn’t answer me. His head bobbed down, snapped back up, then bobbed down again.
“You should rest awhile,” I said. I pulled him closer, so he could lean his head against my shoulder, with the bad side of his face in the air.
“No,” he said. But he put his head on my shoulder and kept it there.
I spent the next couple of hours just sitting there, careful not to move. No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t make things look any better. We were lost.
As I drifted off, I wondered if the next time I closed my eyes would be my last.
Chapter Sixteen
I opened my eyes. There was a dim light, and a wet fog hung heavy in the air. I could feel the cold dew on my face. When I tried to straighten out my neck, the pain ran right down my back. Holy God, I thought. This cannot be happening.
My heart stopped when I realized Vinnie wasn’t sitting next to me anymore. For one horrible moment, I wondered if they had gotten to him somehow. They had killed him like the others and now they were on their way back for me. Then I heard him behind me.
“Good morning,” he said. He was working on a long stick, carving the end into a sharp point. The duct tape was still wrapped all around his head. The black and red stripes had run into two great smudges on his face.
“Is that a knife?”
“Just a little jackknife. Too small to hurt anybody.” He put the stick down and started on another. “Now if you had brought your gun-”
I thought about it. “My gun’s on the bottom of Lake Superior right now.”
“Too bad,” he said. “Want some breakfast?”
“What do you mean?”
“Here,” he said. He threw me the plastic bottle I had taken from the cabin. He must have gone to the stream to fill it with water. “I found some dandelions. It’s just something to put in your stomach, if you want.” He dropped a couple of plants in my lap.
I took a long drink of water and tried taking a bite of one of the leaves. It tasted like bitter lettuce.
“I can’t find any insects,” he said. “It’s too late in the year.”
Insects, I thought. If he had found any, I’d be eating them. The way my stomach is feeling right now, I’d do it.
“Today’s the day, Alex. Are you ready?”
I looked at him. I couldn’t understand why he suddenly had so much more energy than I did. “Vinnie, are you all right?”
“For now, I am. Tonight will be a different story.”
“What are you talking about?”
“By the end of the day we’ll be really hurting. There’s hardly anything edible up here. We can’t signal for help, not that anybody else is even gonna fly over here. We can’t build a fire. They’d find us in a minute. We can’t get back on our own. It’s too far. We’ve only got one hope.”
“What’s that?”
“Their plane.”
“What are we gonna do? Steal their plane and fly it?”
“Not unless you know how. I was thinking about their radio.”
“How do we get to it?”
“Think about it, Alex. We know the plane’s still here, right? We would have heard them if they had left. We know they’re somewhere south of here. We have to find the plane.”
“Okay, that makes sense.”
“You know what else? If we find their plane, we’ll find them. Or at least one of them. That plane is their only way out, too.”
“The plane is their only vulnerable spot,” I said. “They have to protect it.”
“Exactly. We have to hit them there. We don’t have any other choice.”
“Except sitting around and waiting for them to make a mistake.”
“Which we can’t do,” he said. “Not for much longer.”
I grabbed the tree and pulled myself up. I had never felt more drained in my entire life. Vinnie handed me one of his sharpened spears. “One way or another,” he said. “We have to end this today.”
We went back through the trees, toward the cabin. When we got to the edge, we both stopped in our tracks.
“If there’s more than one of them,” I said, “there might be somebody watching the cabin now.”
“Could be. In the daylight, we’d be easy targets.”
So we made our way around the lake to the western trail, keeping ourselves hidden in the woods. When we got to the trail, Vinnie checked the ground. “Somebody came this way,” he said. “Heading away from the cabin.”
“We’ve got to be careful. They could be anywhere right now.”
He nodded as he looked all around us. “They know we’re coming.”
“What, to their plane?”
“Yeah, think about it. They know the same thing we know. Getting to that plane is our only hope.”
“They’ll ambush us on this trail,” I said.
“We’ve got to go around the trail, get to the plane some other way.”
It’s not what I wanted to hear, but I knew he was right. We left the trail, climbing rocks to the higher ground that seemed to run parallel, using our spears for leverage. The loose pine needles on the rocks made the going tough. More than once we both slipped and just about killed ourselves.
When we got to the top, we saw that what we thought was higher ground was just an illusion. The land gave way again and then rose to yet another hill, and then probably another. We had to climb back down and then fight our way through thick brush, and then climb again. The sun came up, but it wasn’t enough to burn off the morning fog. After an hour of picking our way over the rocks and through the brush, we were both soaking wet. It might as well have been raining.
We stopped to rest. We emptied the bottle of water. “We should come to another stream,” he said. He was breathing hard, and his breath made little clouds in the cold morning air. “All these lakes are connected.”
“Are your feet killing you, too?” Beyond the cold and the wet, I could feel the blisters growing with each step.
“I’m trying not to think about it,” he said. He rubbed at the duct tape on his face.
We kept going. As long as the rising sun stayed on our left, we knew we were moving in the right direction. But God damn it all, it was too slow. We went for another hour. Then another. The sun rose higher in the sky.
Strange thoughts came to me-memories of things that had happened years ago. Things I had forgotten. A day walking in the woods when I was a kid. The sudden fear that I was lost.
Vinnie tried to step over a great fallen tree. He misjudged the height and ended up tumbling right over it. He lay on the ground with his head on the rotting wood, his eyes closed. His spear lay across his chest.
“Vinnie, are you all right?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Come on, get up.” I grabbed his hand.
“I’m sorry, Alex. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”
I sat down on the log. “Just rest a minute,” I said.
“I’m trying to get us out of here.”
