I looked up the path for his owner, but the track twisted away and ran across a field to the road. I scratched the dog’s ears and, when he gave a gruff of pleasure, built up into a massage over the folds of his face down to his meaty chops. And then I was a teenager again: the yeasty smell of his damp hair, the muscles knotting under my fingertips, the earthquake rumble in his throat; this could have been my dog, my Horatio, from all those years ago in Africa. If I closed my eyes, I was there again, leaning against his back under the shade tree in the yard while Dad loaded up the overland truck, my skin glowing like baked earth.
But my eyes opened on a dank English forest with a dog’s hot breath on my legs. He gazed at me like I was an angel. I took a moment to shake off the feeling that he was one too.
“So who are you, anyway?” I ventured into his pleated neck to retrieve his name tag. Chap.
“Chap?”
He looked down at the ground.
“Doesn’t do you justice, my ginormous friend.”
As I moved toward the camp, I saw that the dog’s back legs were streaked with blood. When I tried to touch them, he stepped away, so I let him be. The blood was fresh, from small cuts under his hindquarters, as though he’d scrambled over something sharp.
“Did you get hurt and run away? Come on, I know some people who’d like to meet you.” And when I headed up the short slope to the tents, he followed.
The kids tripped over each other to get to him. “Everybody,” I announced with a theatrical wave, which the dog recognized as his cue to step forward and draw up his chops, “this is Horatio von Drool, guardian of the camp.”
“Horatio!” said Billy.
“Horatio von Drool,” I corrected him, “likes to be addressed by his full name.”
The dog swatted his tail on the ground and walked to a spot in front of Joni’s cooking pot, where he lay down to rest.
“But there aren’t any houses round here,” said Charlie, my eldest and—at the grand age of nine—the wisest. He stared at the dog while twisting his trousers into tight buds.
“So where did he come from?” asked Peter, a classmate who was tagging along for the weekend.
Before I could answer, Charlie’s attention skipped away like a needle over scratched vinyl and Peter followed. They were fretting over the campfire. Charlie’s Survival Skills for Girls and Boys book said we needed to stockpile fuel. I knelt down in the dirt between Charlie and Peter.
“This is great, isn’t it?” I grabbed Charlie round the shoulders and crushed him into my side. “Being outdoors.”
He glanced up at me. “Are you okay, Mummy?”
The lack of phone service was forcing me to go cold turkey. But I was okay. A little giddy at being cut off from my usual responsibilities, but then a swell of contentment hit me like the head rush from a first slug of wine.
“Let’s build a big, cozy fire,” I said. “To keep away the bears.”
“There aren’t any bears. And we mustn’t start a forest fire.” Charlie read aloud the safety instructions from the book in ponderous detail. I knew he wouldn’t settle until he’d created a pile of tinder that exactly resembled the one in the book, so I said we should take a walk into the forest to gather some firewood. Hopefully, we’d also find someone who might know where Horatio—Chap—came from.
Joni was pulling Tupperware containers out of my cooler, getting ready to cook dinner as soon as the fire was going. As I came over to explain my catering system, she was already pointing at the sticker on one of the lids, grinning up at me from where she squatted in the dirt.
“Color-coded tubs,” she said.
“The ingredients for each meal are packed in labeled containers so they don’t get mixed up.”
“Does it come with an Excel spreadsheet?”
I made a face like that was ridiculous, but of course there had been an Excel spreadsheet.
As soon as everyone was ready, we set off. Joni tramped away in one direction with my seven-year-old, Maggie, whose foghorn voice sent birds skittering into the sky as she harangued her aunt to hurry so they could get back first.
“It’s not a race,” Joni said, fading into the tree line.
“I want to get the biggest log,” Maggie bellowed.
Joni’s own kid, Lola, refused to leave the camp. With the infinite disdain of a teenager, she said there was no need to fatigue ourselves. Fatigue ourselves. Lola went gliding in her slow-motion gait to pluck dead twigs from the trees, like a nymph picking enchanted fruit for a heartsick knight. She high-stepped off into the undergrowth and, for all I knew, changed into a deer, such was the inscrutable nature of my niece, the Lady Lola.
By contrast, the all too scrutable Billy was screaming to go with the big boys, who I knew would abandon him up a tree given half a chance. “Carry me,” he said no more than five feet from the camp. So he scrambled onto my shoulders, his arms clamped in a fierce little grip around my forehead.
Charlie ran to catch up with Tagalong Peter. I could hear the boy farther up the path, whacking a stick against trees and singing some awful ditty about piranhas eating his nether regions: “Dumb Ways to Die” it was called. Surprisingly, the list of dumb ways to die didn’t include pushing your best friend’s mother to the end of her perilously short tether.
The path turned uphill, so I swung Billy down onto my hip as I wheezed along after the boys. I was wondering how it was possible that I could run for ten miles and yet a few steep steps left me sweating and speechless, when we rounded the corner and emerged on the summit.
If fairies existed anywhere, they would set up home here.
The woodland gave way to a stage set with oaks, their trunks bright with moss and their lower limbs strung with ferns. The uppermost branches, though dead and bald, protruded from the canopy as proud as antlers. Charlie was capering about at the foot of one tree that was as wide as my car. My eyes followed his gaze up and up, and I performed my own little dance of consternation as I realized that Peter was already far above us in the branches, making his way, with a methodical coolness, ever higher.
“Peter, come down! That’s high enough,” I shouted, and he stopped. Somehow, looking up at him looking down at me gave me vertigo.
He cupped his hand round his mouth and shouted, “I’m going to the top so I can see out.”
“No, absolutely not. You need to come down right now.”
“It’s fine, the branches are really thick,” he said and climbed up another one, like it was nothing more than the rung of a ladder.
“They’re slippy,” I warned his retreating backside.
“Peter’s really good at climbing,” said Charlie. “His mum lets him climb trees all the time.”
“Well, bully for her.”
So there we stood, watching a nine-year-old perched several stories high, with nothing to break his fall but a few leaves—and me. I’d read once that it’s nigh on impossible to catch a falling child, but I could hardly stand back and let the kid plummet to his death. It would make the next PTA meeting most awkward. So I moved around the trunk, shadowing him from below, unclear of the correct heroic procedure should he actually slip.
“Peter!” I tried again. “Come down right now. Do you hear? Peter?”
But the boy had stopped and was staring into the distance at something visible only from his vantage point. He put his hand above his eyes, lookout-style. He glanced down as though he was going to say something, and then scanned from side to side again.
“What can you see? What is it?” yelled Charlie, tugging at my arm and adding, “Can I go up, too?”