What I Did Over Summer Vacation

Back in the beginning, when the ice was just starting to refreeze, there were sixteen of us. Then it all went to eskimo hell and now there’s half that. Zephin was the eighth, and the cold hard ground outside the house he died in was too frozen for us to properly bury him. So we piled snow on top and tried not to think about the howls we heard behind us, the same howls we’d learned in scouts that meant the pack had found food.

We hiked at least twenty miles after that. We needed to be away from him and to outrun the wolves. The wind was low and it had stopped snowing, but as the cold nipped at my face, the thought of what had happened in Canada returned. On the radio, they called it “corrective cooling”. It was John-boy’s idea to call it eskimo hell. He’d heard a story once about Spanish missionaries trying to convert the natives of Alaska, but when they were promised a lake of fire for disbelief, all hopes of converting them went out the window. To them, it was a worse fate to endure the cold. I didn’t know if I believed that then, but I remembered the icicle falling through the scoutmaster’s chest, and this all seemed pretty hellish.

At the end of the hike we came across a country house, a grand affair with a chimney for each of us. It looked like it had been abandoned right at the start of the cold, but that wasn’t enough for Johnny; he swept each room looking through the sights of his rifle. I’m not sure that could’ve helped - he shook the whole time. When the sun started to go down and the freezing darkness rolled in, we gathered books from the massive library and burnt them in its fireplace.

John-boy sat at the edge of the fire, stoking it occasionally with a poker. The other boys sat around the burning books, shivering, frost on their faces. Marv and I were the only ones not crowded around the warmth; instead, we were huddled together at the back of the room, watching the rest.

“I think Johnny’s losing it,” I said.

Marv turned his head sharply to face me, then more slowly, back to the others, to Johnny. “He’s quieter, but that doesn’t mean he’s crazy. It’s a tough time for all of us.”

“Exactly. For all of us. He was still smiling a few days ago, in Wisconsin. Now he doesn't talk, he barely eats, and he’s got that vacant stare. He’s losing it.”

“He hasn’t been eating?” The surprise in Marv’s voice was evident. 

I nodded. “When he tracked that deer the other night he didn’t take any food with him. And then he cut it up and cooked it and didn’t leave any for himself.” Marv looked at John-boy across the room. Now he could see the way the fire illuminated the gaunt cheeks, the tired eyes - the things I’d picked up on. 

“What do we do?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’m worried it’ll start to spread if they see him getting like this. He’s bad for morale.”

“You don’t want to leave him behind? Do you?”

“No. Of course not. But we need to do more to survive than just staying warm.” Then we got up and set our sleeping bags by the fire. It was a dark and quiet night. For the first time, none of us cried. I think that was our two month mark, and in that time we’d walked around six hundred miles. I guess that’s how much distance you need from a traumatic event to feel better. 

John-boy shook me awake and didn’t wait for me to sit up before launching into his plan.

“The people who lived here didn’t leave any food,” he started, “or anything else we might use. Just some lacrosse gear, it seems like. They had a road atlas though, and there’s a town nearby.”

“Why would anything be there if this place is cleaned out?” I asked groggily.

“There might not be, but it’s only a little bit out of the way.”

So we went. We helped the younger kids pack their bags, and Johnny led the way, eyes alert, rifle in hand. It was snowing lightly, in delicate, powdery flakes, the kind that are good for building snowmen or having snowball fights. I don’t think any of us wanted anything to do with those kinds of things though.

I couldn’t tell what Johnny was expecting to see, but his steps were beginning to falter, and he was tripping over the snow. Even if there was something to shoot, he would miss. I trudged up front and pulled my last granola bar out of my coat and traded him the rifle for it. Maybe he did know he was unraveling.

The rest of the journey was uneventful. When we came upon the town, our hopes weren’t high. The brownstone buildings around the intersection had their windows broken, with wedding dresses thrown out of one shop and bags of rotten feed out another. Marv found a crowbar inside the door to the feed store and went upstairs to see if there was anything in the apartment above. The rest of us poked around.

Behind one of the buildings, a print shop, were footprints, lightly filled in from the snow. They led inside, but they were outlined in red, like blood was soaking up into the fresh layer of snow. I raised the rifle and pushed the door open with the barrel. The shop was largely untouched - there’s nothing to steal from a print shop and the raiders wouldn’t have any fun destroying it. It was dark inside; shelves of papers and boxes blocked most of the window light. I couldn’t see the trail of blood until I slipped on it. I fell to eye level with someone who’d bled out quickly - they still had a shocked expression on their face. I couldn’t tell why.

Then I heard some of the boys screaming and had to run back outside, slipping on blood and stumbling on snow, trying to circle back around to the street. I fumbled with the rifle, trying to get it into my hands, and when I finally had my finger back on the trigger and I was looking down the sights, I saw the black eyes of a polar bear looking up the barrel at me. Marv, Johnny, and the others looked on, but in that moment it was just me and the bear, and it was Illinois, but it might as well have been the arctic. 

My finger twitched. The bear huffed a low growl. I thought about how the scoutmaster had told us he was bringing the rifle in case there were any bears at the campsite, but he laughed about how he enver needed to use it. I thought about John-boy grabbing it before we started walking south. Now, he was watching me put it to its god-given purpose, and his eyes and the bears had the same hungry look in them. Staring into that inky void, I could see the barrel pointed back at me in my reflection, like I might be killing some image of myself as well. But I had to pull the trigger. The shot rang out a little ways, but the snow muffled it and contained it to the town proper. Then it was quiet, and blood trickled out of the creature onto the perfect snow for snowmen.