Turning, he held up a small pot and two bowls of instant udon noodles. His lopsided grin told me he remembered eating them at my house and I stuttered, because it was the exact reaction I’d been hoping for when I packed them a lifetime ago, planning his rescue and the journey to rescue his father. Leaning over to kiss me, he promised to go start the fire and make me some ‘delicious food.’ I nodded and forced myself to smile.
The snow started as we finished eating, slurping the last of the broth and heating a fresh batch of filtered water over the dying embers. I was trying to find us on the map, the one I’d taped together at the library, but the snow quickly covered the paper, falling in swirls of obliterating white. Snow was good. Snow meant we’d be harder to track. It also provided a layer of insulation over any lakes that had started to freeze, preventing further ice formation. We added layers, packed up, and hiked back out to a different trail that led us through towering pine shadows, down into a frozen marshlike clearing, and winding over another hill. I started to wonder if we were even on a trail anymore, but Lucas didn’t hesitate. Every once in a while, he reached a hand out from under the canoe to skim the trunk of a tree, running his gloves over them like they bore messages in braille. A roaring noise grew louder as we made our way through the white world until Lucas stopped and gestured to an opening in the trees. I looked over the edge of a cliff and barely made out the still-rushing rapids below. Finally, we descended to a winding river where the force of the current kept the water open. As we climbed into the canoe and pushed our way through the frozen weeds, I glanced into the shadows on either bank.
‘Are there campsites along here?’
‘No, people canoe through here but they don’t get out except when they have to portage the rapids.’
Which was exactly where the rangers would be looking, in the most remote spots. We knew their route for this morning, but after that they could be anywhere. Maybe the snow didn’t matter at all, maybe they used infrared scanners, or even more advanced tracking equipment. We were close, I knew. And the closer we got to Josiah, the more scared I became of being caught before we could reach him, before I could make him pay.
We paddled to another set of still-rushing rapids and portaged up the hill, a fifty-foot climb that felt like five hundred. After we set back in I started getting warm, too warm, the heat burning through my clothes and throbbing into my side. My wound didn’t feel any worse, though. I wondered if I should eat again, even though the thought of food suddenly made my stomach turn. Water sounded better, but everything seemed out of reach. The filtration bottle might as well have been at my mother’s cabin as in the pack behind me. I took off my hat and unzipped part of my jacket.
My deteriorating state wasn’t lost on Lucas. He wanted to pull the canoe over and find a spot to rest, but I pushed us away from every bank he steered us toward. Fumbling blindly in the pack behind me, I grabbed the first aid kit and took another dose of antibiotics and a half pain pill, trying to pacify him and keep him carrying us forward, which was becoming more of an abstract concept. The white in front of us was impenetrable. Boulders and bends in the river appeared like they’d been conjured from the storm itself, obstacles with less and less meaning.
The quote on Dr Mehta’s office wall snaked through my consciousness. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Something within me had begun to burn.
‘Maya, I want you to promise me something.’ I’d long given up paddling when Lucas’s voice floated through the whorl of white.
I waited, not sure if it was really him or something my ill brain was manufacturing.
‘Promise me you’ll hear him out. Listen to him like you listened to me. That’s all I’m asking.’ A pause, drifting into the wind, bowing the groaning branches of a pine tree over our heads. ‘Maya?’
Bracing myself on the gunwales, I nodded, hoping he could see me through the whiteout. I didn’t notice I was crying until the tears had frozen on my cheeks.
I didn’t know how much time passed. There might have been a shooting star. There might have been a whole cascade of comets blasting through the storm, or it could have just been my eyes on fire. I stopped being able to separate the flaming, dizzying flashes in my body from what was happening around me. It wasn’t until the canoe grounded, scraping bottom on an ice-covered rock ledge, that I registered the outcropping of giant boulders we had wedged ourselves in between. I blinked and looked back to see Lucas hunched close to my face. His hand felt like an ice pack on my forehead.
‘Welcome to my home.’
The boulders gave way to woods where Lucas dragged the canoe and hid it under the drooping limbs of a listing pine. I shouldered my pack before he could take it and followed him into the dense trees. There was no trail, no campsites here where the forest seemed impenetrable. I concentrated on Lucas’s back, which squeezed through gaps and disappeared in between giant snow-laden branches like magic or a hallucination. He was there and then he wasn’t. Heat radiated through my body in waves, adding to the illusion; I could no longer tell what was real. As the pain medicine kicked in, I became clumsier. Needles scraped my clothes and face, combed my matted hair and showered it with flakes. The forest thinned as we moved into an old growth area where the lower branches, deprived of light, had lost all their needles and clawed at us even as the canopy above kept the snow away. Then we descended into a frozen marsh and struggled through quick-sand drifts of dead summer grass buried in white. I wanted to give up, to lay down in the marsh beds and let the cold sink into me, but Lucas pulled me forward. The farther we went, the more excited he became. He pointed out landmarks in a language only he could read. A trio of birch – the three sisters. A branchless trunk rising into the sky – the eagle’s nest. And finally, a dead pine partially uprooted and sagging into the wide branches of another – the hugging trees.
We ducked underneath the hugging trees into a shadowed place, old growth on rock bed, and Lucas stopped as his breath made short, quick puffs in the dark.
‘There,’ he whispered.
At first I didn’t see it. A rise of rock covered in dead moss and decaying needles blocked the way in front of us, but as Lucas moved forward and I followed him, the perspective suddenly shifted. What appeared to be part of the hill was actually a moss-covered wall, camouflaged so well I wanted to run my hands over it until I found the edges. It arched at least seven feet off the ground, sloping in gradually to a peak where I spotted a glint of metal hiding in the needles – a chimney. A few rocks were scattered around the base and one seemed planted directly into the side of the wall, all overgrown with winter lichen and giving off the impression that this was exactly where the glaciers tossed them ten thousand years ago.
Two boulders flanked the narrow entrance, covered by a flattened piece of bark. Lucas dropped his pack and lifted up the wood to reveal a zipper underneath, a tent inside the hill. He unzipped it and ducked inside. I stumbled forward, squeezing through the rocks with my pack and lowered my head into the void.