The raccoons got into the food again last night. It was Josh’s night to tie the bear-hang, but Josh has never been one to learn how to do anything properly. The guides tell us to go see if any food can be saved, so the new kid and I walk up to the disarray at the bottom of the tree and survey the damage. All six food bags have been chewed clean through. It rained last night as well, so a healthy layer of mud has seeped everywhere. Only the food in hard plastic was spared, which leaves us with seven half-eaten tubs of peanut butter and a tiny glass jar of cinnamon. I root through the mess of mud, gnarled plastic, spilled rice and oats for anything else that’s salvageable. I come back empty handed. I grab the yellow rope that used to hold the bags up.

         I guess this is what the shrink would consider a teaching moment, so I pull the new kid aside. I don’t know his name yet, and he looks smaller than he should be for being seventeen. He’s skin and bones, with an unsteady walk. Downright malnourished. I don’t know what the guides are thinking, putting a full pack on someone his size. I wonder what brought this kid to the woods. He doesn’t look physically capable of anything violent, so he must be a head case. I glance over his shoulders at Sarah and then shrug to myself. This tiny kid is staring bewildered at the wreckage that was at one point our food. Shrimp over here asks if we’re gonna starve now. I tell him, no our parents are paying too much for us to starve out here, but we’re gonna be hungry as hell for a day while they hike new food out to us. He lets out a small whimper.  

         I remember why I pulled him aside, and I take out the bear-rope. Doc says teaching moments are important to show what I’ve learned, and a chance to socialize positively. Plus, the guides are watching, and getting some mental-stability points is always a plus. I look down at my hands as I think of what to say. What was once a coil of neon yellow webbing is now a mustard-yellow-brown, balled up, tangled mess in my hands. I unravel it and show the new kid how Josh mis-tied the rope. I walk him through each step and even throw my weight against it to show how well a good knot can hold. I show him how to add a quick release to make it easier to untie later, without sacrificing strength. One pull on the right part and the whole knot comes undone. He asks me why we hang our food in the first place instead of just keeping it in the camp. I tell him that animals like bears and raccoons like to steal our food, so we hang it from trees at night using ropes like this one. He thanks me, and I feel a little bad that I don’t remember his name. We untie our newly made knot with a pull and trudge back over to the campsite. The guides look proud. Sarah does, too. I avoid both their gazes.

         Josh is now sitting in the mud by a tree a dozen yards away from the fire. I stifle my urge to throw the rope in his face and scream at him for wasting our week’s worth of food. He’s much smaller than me, and he jumps in satisfying ways when I get in his face. But the Doc says that I show a propensity to disregard others’ emotions when in a state of distress. So I ignore him and walk away. Plus, he’s probably trying to freeze himself to death in the mud, and that seems like sufficient punishment.

         I go up to the guides’ tent and try to ignore the smell of their fresh cooked oatmeal. They have real oatmeal, not the plain boiled oats us kids are stuck with. I ask them how long it will take for us to get new food. Oh yeah, one of them says, I guess I should call that in. He fiddles with his pack for a minute and fishes out the only electronic device in the area. He adjusts the antenna and sends a message out to the base camp. I don’t wait for the reply. I just leave the cinnamon jar on his pack as I go.

         News spreads quickly when there are only six delinquents and two guides on a trip at a time. Once we all know that we won’t be hiking today, everyone grabs their chosen methods of primitive entertainment and a jar of the remaining peanut butter, and we spread out. The new kid and Matt huddle by the fire. Matt flicks twigs into the flames. I find a downed tree to lean against. Will and Andy draw pictures and write letters respectively. The guides add some cinnamon to their oats. Josh sits in the mud.

         I’m sitting and breaking twigs when Sarah comes up to me.

         “Hey Jack,” she says.

         She sits down in the dirt to my right and leans her back up against the rotting log as well.

         “I’m proud of you for not yelling at Josh,” she says.

         I look at her over my right shoulder. The morning sun through the trees lights up her meadow green eyes. Her sundress is still stained with her brain blood, but I’ve learned not to stare over the last year. It makes her uncomfortable. Her golden blond hair falls over the shoulders of her dress and covers the hole where the golf cart wreckage entered the base of her skull. I fight the urge to cradle the back of her head again, as the memory of scrubbing her blood from under my fingernails comes back to me. I mumble something to her about how not yelling isn’t something to be proud of.

         “Well then, I’m proud of you for teaching the new boys. No one else would have taught them the right way.”

         I grunt in agreement.

         “It’s nice here,” Sarah says. “It is a little cold, but you can hear the creek from here, and the trees look like cathedral columns, all in a row.”

         What I want to tell her, is that it looks like the church where her brothers and I carried her casket down the aisle, but she leaves any time I mention her death. So instead I tell her that when this forest was chopped down for lumber a century ago, they replanted it in a grid, and that’s why it looks like a cathedral. I tell her that it gives me the creeps the way this forest looks so obviously manmade. Like staring down two endlessly reflecting mirrors.

         “I like it anyway,” she says with a smile.

         The guides ask me if I was talking to them. I decide that it’s worth the extra days I’ll get added on to my stay in the woods to fire back, so I tell them I was singing to myself again and to fuck off out of my business. Sarah sighs and leaves for a bit. The guides make a note of my behavior.

         Now alone, I go and fill up my water bottle. If I’m not going to eat any meals today, I might as well fill up on water. Josh joins me at our bag of purified water. His back is completely covered in mud, and he’s shivering against the cold. I tell him, Jesus, go put on some dry clothes and sit by the fire before you die of hypothermia. He stays silent, but he looks me in the eyes for a full five seconds. That must be a new record, I think as he looks away. He fills up his water and goes to sit between the new kid and Matt at the fire. You should really get dry clothes, I say to him, but he either didn’t hear me or just doesn’t care.

         “He’ll be fine by the fire, you did your best,” Sarah says.

         She came back quickly this time. Usually she leaves for a few hours when I upset her. I pull the collar of my jacket close around my neck and go back to my log. Sarah follows.

         I can’t quite make out what’s being said at the fire, but the new kid seems to be re-teaching Josh the bear-hang knot. Josh seems to actually be interested in learning the basics for once. Only took him a month.

         “See what a little kindness can do?” says Sarah.

         I tell her she may be right. I scoot down until the log is in the crook of my neck and I find a semblance of comfort. I close my eyes and can almost feel Sarah’s head on my chest.

         I wake up and the sun is in the middle of the sky. Sarah is nowhere to be seen. It feels strange breaking our routine of hiking all day with sixty pounds on our backs. I vaguely remember a time before, when my shoulders didn’t always ache, and I didn’t have to worry about the wildlife eating my food. I eat the last of my jar of peanut butter and survey our ramshackle campsite as my stomach growls. Our tents are right at the treeline with our packs lined up next to them. We have a tarp set up to keep the tents and packs dry in case of rain. The tarp is tied off to surrounding trees at odd angles. We don’t have spikes so we have to get creative with knots when making camp.

         The campfire is just a circle of rocks with some embers in it now, and the smell of smoke that permeated the camp earlier is slightly diminished. In the time that I was asleep, Andy and Will have apparently created makeshift chairs by the firepit by pounding large sticks into the mud for back support, and piling up dried leaves for seats. The new kid is gathering materials to do the same. Josh seems content with the ground. I think about joining in when we all hear an engine rumbling far in the distance. The guides tell us all to go sit silently by the fire and that one of them is going to go get our food.

         Apparently we’re close enough to a road that it didn’t need to get hiked out to us. The new kid loses it for a second, asking why we had to hike all day yesterday if we were this close to a road. I want to agree with him, but I don’t want to piss off the guides. We are told to stay by the campfire and that we can under no circumstances get up or speak until the other guide returns. For a moment, I wish I had made a chair with Will and Andy instead of napping, but then I see Sarah walking through the woods, humming a melody softly to herself— running her hands through the branches of nearby trees as she walks, and I’m suddenly okay with how I fell asleep earlier.

         An hour or so later, the other guide comes back without our food. We have to go hike there and get it ourselves, he says. I start to say that I’m glad that we sat silently for an hour for nothing, but Sarah shoots me a look from across the fire. Through gritted teeth, I tell him that I’m glad we got our food so fast. I think he can tell I wanted to say something else, but he lets it slide.

         We grab our packs and head off single file with a guide at the front and a guide at the back. I hum to myself as we hike, trying to match the tune I heard Sarah humming earlier.  A sullen, hungry line, we trudge towards our food drop. Thirty minutes is a quick hike for us, and we soon reach an actual paved road. It’s been at least two months since I’ve seen anything resembling civilization, and asphalt is a strange sight to see. A car passes by as we load up our new sacks of dry food into our backpacks. I instinctively look over my shoulder at Sarah, and she is staring wide eyed as the car passes. She goes and sits by a tree, hugging her knees tight to her chest with her right arm and absentmindedly running her left hand through her hair at the base of her skull.

         Josh asks me what I’m staring at. I tell him I thought I saw a deer.

         By the time we get back, it is pushing evening. Will cooks us a measly dinner of rice and beans, but it’s delicious to us after our involuntary fast. One of the guides makes a halfhearted attempt to quote the Doc about instant versus delayed gratification. We ignore him and eat our beans.

         After dinner, we put all our food into bags and go throw bear-hang. I throw a balled-up end of the browning yellow rope over a high and sturdy tree branch, and we tie all the bags to one end of the rope. We then pull on the other end and lift the heavy bags twenty feet into the air. I go to tie off the end to another tree while the group holds tension. Josh says he’s sorry for what happened last night and that he wants to retie it tonight.

         I tell Josh, hell no you’re not tying bear rope after last night. The skeletal looking new kid says that we should give him another chance, and that he taught Josh how to do it properly, just like I taught him. I make an unintelligible grunting noise and begrudgingly grab Josh’s spot on the rope as he goes to tie it off.  I try to watch over my shoulder and from what I can see he seems to do a pretty good job. He even adds in the quick release part that I showed the newbies. I guess Josh was paying some attention after all.

         It’s getting dark now, and it’s policy to have us in tents before dark, as it is hard to keep an eye on us after the sun goes down. We all grab our sleeping bags, shuffle into our tents, and go to bed. I go to sleep hoping to hear Sarah humming as she walks through the woods, but I only hear the nearby creek, and so I drift off with it instead.

         I wake up to the distant sound of bear-hang hitting the ground. I scream, goddamn it Josh, and bolt out of my tent. The guides heard it too, and they have flashlights out and are heading to the sound. They tell me to get back in my tent or else, but I ignore them. I run ahead of them to where our food is inevitably going to be laying on the ground, eaten by rodents or bears.

         The first thing I see, though, is our food bags stacked neatly thirty feet away from the tree, untouched. The second is Josh. He is crumpled and writhing beneath the tree, with the yellow rope cutting into his neck. He is choking and clutching at the rope. The other end of the rope is untied but hasn’t yet been pulled over the branch. It flaps gently in the cool night breeze.

         Jesus Christ Josh what did you do, I say as I rush to where his body is laying and convulsing in the mud, and I try to untie the rope from his neck but my hands are shaking and God, the knots have been pulled so tight and then the guides are there and thank God they have a knife and they start cutting the rope from his neck and I’m holding the back of his head as they work and his breathing gets slower and the coughs are less frequent and I’m looking in his eyes and they’re green like Sarah’s were and please not again and the rope comes free and he breathes.

         He gasps for air and tries to sit up. The guides and I press all of our body weight into him to stop him from moving. We tell him we don’t know if his neck is broken, so damn it, just sit there, be quiet, and be still.  His feet are kicking at us so I’m pretty sure his neck is fine, but I don’t know what he’s going to try to do to himself when he gets free, so I keep him pinned to the ground. I suppress the urge to slap him as hard as I can. The guides are eventually convinced he’s not going to die and that his neck isn’t broken, so they sit him up and tie his hands back behind him to the base of the tree. They tell me to watch him as they go to talk to camp and call in paramedics. I sit with my back to another tree fifteen feet away and look at him. He keeps his head down. We sit in silence.

         “I tied a quick release knot,” he says to me after a few minutes. He’s still looking down, but he’s talking to me. “I didn’t remember how to do it the other way. I figured no one would be there to pull it anyway. I jumped out of the tree and was just swinging there waiting to pass out when I saw her come through the trees. Yellow hair. She was beautiful, Jack. She just walked up to the tree, looked at me for a second, and then pulled the knot loose.” He pauses for ten seconds. “I’m not crazy, that’s what I saw. That’s what happened.”

         That’s the most I’ve ever heard Josh say at one time. He coughs and rubs at his throat. There’s a two-inch band of purple and black bruising all the way around his neck. I don’t reply to him. I just hum under my breath, and Sarah harmonizes in the distance.