Lost at Running Brook Trail (12 page)

The bear was so close now. Kimberly could see its long, dark-brown snout. She imagined she could see its breath. She was sure she heard it breathing, but it could have been all their ragged breath. But could the bear see her? Its eyes were very small. Kimberly had heard that bears had poor eyesight, but she was not about to move to proof that theory. With trembling feet she watched it circling and scrutinizing her. It stood right before her. The claws were the most frightening. She saw five strong claws curved at the ends. She imagined the damage those claws could inflict.

They couldn’t fight, and now there was no way to flee.

Susan was paralyzed with fear, but she was glad she managed to hold her bladder. How often had they heard that the smell of human urine was attractive to black bears? Who knew she would have been safer in that dark cave with sorcery, death rituals and terrifying drawings than out here in the open. The cave was dark, but that didn’t make it a bad place, just different from what she was used to. This real-life experience demanded her undivided attention. This was a sudden change for her. The school had given her that letter because they claimed she was lazy, mediocre and only participated half-heartedly in anything. Well, now her heart was in this because it was racing uncontrollably. She made the sign of the cross over her heart.

The bear seemed tired, because instead of looking at them as it had before, it began to look away as if distracted. After a while it gave up and wandered off in the direction they’d been headed in only moments before. The girls breathed easier but didn’t relax.

“What now?” Susan whispered.

“We wait. We stay quiet. We don’t move. We don’t know where the bear is. We don’t want to come out of here and find ourselves in the same position. We might not find another thicket to run into.” Elaine had heard that bears would watch from a distance and come back if they saw any sign of movement.

“How long do we wait?” Kimberly could barely be heard.

“Twenty or thirty minutes.” Miriam thought that sounded like a safe bet.

They stood there in silence, looking down at eight boots. The only things they heard were chirping birds and their own terror-stricken breathing. Miriam thought about her letter. Anne Beaumont Private High wasn’t why she was here, her mother was. She had signed the letter and given her consent for Miriam to go. And now here she was cooped up in some bushes, unable to speak from fear. She felt anger rising to her stomach, turning it green, or so she imagined. Miriam always had this bitter taste in her mouth every time she felt this way, and she imagined it came from a green stomach. This silence created by the bear was a silence she carried routinely, like the silence of not talking about her dead father. She felt the bitterness in her stomach now and tried to press it down into the darkness it had risen from.

Perhaps standing there in utter, tense silence was too much for them. A minute seemed like forever. When Susan could stand it no longer, she began to chant in a whisper.

“Down by the river we go …”

And because the others felt like goats caught up in the thicket, boxed in by an impenetrable mesh of brambles, they without thinking began to join in the words of the chant.

“Everything we do is a show …”

The whispered chorus and Susan’s leading lines became a spontaneous dialogue between them. In it they found a way to ease the tension.

“Hold my hand so you can understand …”

They were back at Anne Beaumont. The poem was familiar to them. In their minds, Ms. Carter was standing in front of the class dissecting the poem. If they really closed their eyes, the enclosed bushes they were standing in could become school grounds.

“That we have no master plan …”

How long they chanted in whispers, they didn’t know. They only knew that their steady, even tones were somehow warding off the bear. It allowed them to relax their trembling bodies and their overactive minds. It was an incantation that became a prayer. They chanted the words until there was nothing more to say and then lapsed into silence again.

After twenty-five minutes, counted off on Elaine’s watch, they decided to venture out. They carefully plucked the brambles from their path. They reinjured themselves with scrapes, bruises and pricks. They looked around them and listened to every sound.

“I don’t know what’s worse,” Miriam said, “being caged up in those rough, prickly bushes or being out here in the open.”

Scrambling back on the path, they looked right, left, up, down and all the places their eyes could search to see if all was clear. But they remained nervous because they had come suddenly upon the bear before, and it could happen again.

“I felt trapped in there, like an animal waiting to be killed and eaten.” Susan had thought it weird that she could become food for another living creature.

Kimberly stretched her hands in front of her. “My skin is all cut up, and my face is irritated. I just know I’ve scraped it up.”

“If you had washed your hair with shampoo, we’d still be in those bushes, and you and the rest of us might have been clawed to pieces. So I wouldn’t worry too much about your face being scraped up.”

“I’m talking about my face here!”

Kimberly reached into her bag and searched around. She came up with a small cover girl case that held a mirror. It had the words
Advanced Radiance
on it. She held the mirror to her face. “See, I told you my face is all scarred up.”

Kimberly produced a sponge from the case and daubed at some colour inside, and then daubed at the cuts on her face. Concentrating on her reflection, she almost tripped over the tracks.

“You should be looking for bears, but here you’re again with the face.” Miriam wondered how many mirrors Kimberly had in her bag. She thought she had taken care of the problem, but here she was with yet another one. “You’re filled with mirrors, and you’re still not seeing yourself.”

“Maybe you should get a mirror yourself, Miriam, so you can see your own reflection. Then you’d stop picking on me.”

They followed the railway track back. It had become their lifeline. They constantly looked back. The blackberry patch where they had eaten was before them now. They contemplated stopping to search out some more but decided against it. They had experienced enough prickly thorns for the morning.

They picked up speed along the track, wanting to get as far away from their encounter with the bear as possible. Whenever they lost sight of the track, they bent their heads, looked at their feet and found it.

At last they were back by the waterfall. The gushing water was sweet music to their ears because they knew that they were only steps away from the cave.

Harmful Substances
 

The cave stood before them with its half-opened mouth. The two sweaters still hung from the bushes. It seemed nobody had seen them or had been there. In the blistering sunshine, the paintings on the cave walls, although still complex and varied, didn’t look as frightening as they had in the gloom. The wall provided a record of birds, hunting, religion, sorcery, fertility, death and other events they couldn’t fathom. The drawings showed all things coexisting, even as the girls struggled with their own survival in the woods.

Elaine retrieved her sweater and tied it around her waist.

Kimberly held hers up by her thumb and index finger and glared at it. “It’s as big as a house. There—you have it.” She flung the sweater at Susan. It fell to the ground, and Susan bent to pick it up.

“What’s wrong with you? Don’t take it,” Miriam shouted. “Not too long ago she wanted it—no, she demanded it. And now she throws it at you like you’re a dog or something. She doesn’t even know what she wants. All she knows for sure is that she wants to make you miserable.”

Susan wasn’t sure what to do. Should she pick up the sweater or leave it? She didn’t want Kimberly to continue her cruelty about the sweater, but she didn’t want Miriam’s anger to be turned on her either.

“How am I making her miserable? If I were her, I would already be unhappy with myself. What, it’s my fault that she stuffs herself with chocolate and all the food that she can find? Do I restrain her if she wants to exercise?”

Miriam picked up the sweater. “I’ll keep this, you selfish twit.”

“You should know.”

Miriam moved a little away from the group. Her stomach was bitter again. She wished she could crush Kimberly to dust and scatter her remains into the ground or let the wind blow them away. This was how she had felt when Amanda Dean had fouled her and walked away like nothing had happened. That was when she had said that she would
kill
Amanda. Miriam knew deep down that she wouldn’t
kill
anybody, but she felt angry enough to think about them dead. She was being punished for her thoughts. She’d often been told that thoughts and actions were in fact the same thing, since one led to the other. She wasn’t sure if that was true. Now Kimberly was pissing her off, and her stomach felt green.

Miriam felt the video iPod in her pocket. She still had the Storm too. She looked at the phone and confirmed what she already knew: no signal. This had become a futile habit now. She took out the iPod. The earphones were wrapped around its body. Miriam unwrapped the cord and stuck the bud in her ear. Her heart raced and her fingers trembled a little. She would make Kimberly pay if it was the last thing that she did. The battery was low, indicated by the three-quarter-empty battery icon. Miriam searched through music, podcasts and pictures and then ran through a couple of videocasts. She found a video of Kimberly. More to the point, Kimberly had obviously recorded this video herself. It looked like one of those homemade videos on YouTube. She was doing a monologue, with the camera as her audience, in which she said that she’d asked her mother why her father went away. Kimberly told the camera that her mother’s response was that he was a
loser
. God, this girl was in love with herself. She had to make a video of herself, and she had to be running her hand through her hair while doing it.

Miriam walked back with the buds in her ear but the video on pause. “So your mother thinks your father is a big fat loser?” She laughed. “So you do know other losers who don’t go to school, uh?”

Comprehension dawned in Kimberly’s eyes. She grabbed the iPod, in the process plucking the buds straight out of Miriam’s ears.

“You have no right! You have no bloody right! Who told you that you could look at my stuff? Aahhhhh!” Kimberly screamed, her face to the sky, her hands clenched by her sides. Her face was pink. She could hardly contain herself. She spat on the ground and stormed off, iPod in hand, the cords trailing, up above the cave to the right.

“Watch out for bears,” Miriam called after her. “Told you I would get her!” She threw down her bag, revelling in the excitement of scoring a point.

“You did,” Elaine said. “Now she’s off to God knows where. Happy?”

“Why shouldn’t I be happy? She likes to cause people pain and suffering. Look what she’s trying to do to Susan. She tries to make her feel bad about her weight every chance she gets.”

Elaine and Susan sat on the rocks they had sat on the evening before. They faced the cave. They had slept there only hours before and had played truth or dare like a lullaby to help them sleep.

“Is this like a terrible circle? You’re using Kimberly’s treatment of Susan on Kimberly. Susan can defend herself.”

“It’s not the same thing. You see how Susan is. She’s accepting of whatever, you said so yourself. She can’t defend herself.”

Susan saw the half-moved stone in front of her. They should have moved the stone all the way. It just didn’t look right. The cave looked like a mouth caught in a half yawn. Susan felt helpless. Here they were saying she was accepting. Maybe she was, but they were all out here for something. They hadn’t found her out here; they were lost together.

“Not everyone can be like Elaine,” Susan said.

“How am I?”

“In control.”

“I don’t know about that, but you can’t allow Miriam to fight your battles.”

“You say that as if I asked her to.”

“No, you don’t ask her to, but maybe Kimberly bothers you because you sit in the middle. What she says bothers you, doesn’t it? But you don’t defend yourself, and you feign indifference. So she continues to attack you because she thinks you’re weak. My mother always tells me that if I sit in the middle of anything, someone will try to push me to one of the sides. But it’s not good to be pushed; we need to choose a side. You need to take a stand.”

Susan left her bag by the stone and walked away from the cave. She needed to get away. How often would she hear that she lacked diligence and enthusiasm? If she was brimming with eagerness and interest, would she be thin? Maybe that wasn’t the point. Maybe the point was that if she was more forceful about things, she could stand up for herself. Her father always said he preferred commission to omission because one had to commit to take action. But which was better? Wasn’t going too far either way still a bad thing?

“Where is she going?” Miriam asked when Susan walked away.

“I don’t know, maybe she wants to get away from the sight of the cave; maybe she wants to go exploring on her own.” Elaine sighed. She couldn’t see Kimberly anymore. It wouldn’t be good if anybody else got lost. Things just seemed to be falling apart. There was a battle scene on the cave’s wall thrown in with all the other markings. In an art class long ago, the teacher had said that some artistic activity was a manifestation of the artist’s struggle for existence. Elaine felt a struggle taking place within herself, but she wasn’t sure what it was or what to make of it. Maybe she should do some drawings on the wall. Maybe they all should. It would be like in Toronto where people carved words into trees, benches and whatever material they could find, saying they were here. But where exactly were they?

“Susan needed my defence.”

“You shouldn’t have opened Kimberly’s stuff.”

“After all the things she said, you would defend her.” Miriam’s face grew red, her brow deeply furrowed.