Lisa

The mood among us remained relaxed and optimistic when we resumed our journey the day after Kevin killed had slaughtered the deer. We woke up in the morning and had more meat for breakfast, this time chops fried in the pan, and set off for the day with full bellies. My stomach cramps had gone away the previous night thanks to the hearty dinner we had, that and not having to conserve energy to conserve our food meant there was nothing holding us back from pushing forward with all that we had. The positive atmosphere among us was also the result of Hannah and Kevin finally getting together. We had been waiting for years for them to find their way to each other, often wondering if they ever would. Watching them returning to the campsite hand in hand, it was as if something that had been wrong with the world for too long had been put right, further vindicating our decision to leave Prospera. Kevin was right to be dubious about his and Hannah’s chances of being together in Prospera given the amount of attention he’d been the subject of from the governing authorities. Out in the forest we had no such worries; we were free.

Not very much was different about the way Hannah and Kevin interacted with each other the day after their long overdue coming together. Kevin took the lead when we set off and was his usual quiet, stoic self. It was easy to understand why he hadn’t changed. Our food situation had significantly improved but it wouldn’t be long—only a matter of days really—before we would once again be facing the threat of starvation, and after five days of travelling through the forest we were yet to make any sort of contact with the outside world. I started to question if we hadn’t recklessly underestimated the task we had undertaken and if the adults in Prospera had been telling the truth when they’d told us that everyone that had ventured deep into the forest had died. Wild animals weren’t the only things that could have killed them; they could have died of starvation, or been victims of the elements. The danger of the elements was what I was growing increasingly concerned about as we pushed forward. The air had gotten so cold that we were shivering under our thick winter robes. The snow was undoubtedly only a few days away and if we hadn’t gotten out of the forest by then we were going to be in danger of freezing to death.

We were so deep in the forest that the density of the trees blocked out the sun which made our surroundings darker, the ground soggier and the air at the floor of the forest colder. There was also much more shrubbery on the ground for us to navigate our way through and the terrain was becoming increasingly challenging. There were times when we struggled to make meaningful progress because there were ravines we either had to slide down into and find a way out of or circumvent altogether, sometimes the shrubbery on the ground was so thick Kevin had to use the hatchet to cut a way through it, which with the hatchet’s small size was a long process.

At one of the ravines where we decided it made more sense for us to slide down into it, Miranda scraped her thigh badly on a rock and we were forced to stop and apply some of the antiseptic cream to it. Miranda could no longer walk as fast as she had been and we all slowed down to accommodate her, hampering our progress. After a couple more hours of walking, during which we didn’t cover nearly as much ground as we should have, Miranda sat down on the ground complaining that the pain in her leg had gotten worse and that she needed to stop. Hannah and I stayed with Miranda while Kevin went off to look for a spot where we could rest for a while and have lunch. The ground we were sitting on was damp and cold, our clothes were dirty from the banks we were sliding down and climbing up, and the meat had collected a lot of dirt on it. The positive mood in which we’d set off for the day had been all but wiped out by the challenging time we’d had that day.

The reality was that we weren’t as strong and resolute as we thought we were, as we needed to be to get through this. Kevin was the one driving us forward, were it not for him I had no doubt that we would have turned around and returned to Prospera long ago. I could sense among us three girls that our resolve for continuing was considerably lower than it had been when we’d set out. Our short lived elation that had resulted from Kevin’s successful hunt had been nothing more than an excuse for us to force upon ourselves the belief that everything would be okay. The inhospitable environment that we’d encountered had disabused us of any thoughts we’d had about everything being okay. We were nearing our breaking point and desperately needed some positive news about our closeness to the exit of the forest to keep our spirits from completely crashing.

Kevin found a place for us to rest that wasn’t too far from where we’d stopped: a clearing that had at its centre a small rock formation. The top of the rock formation was smooth and flat; Hannah and I helped Miranda up to the top of the rock formation and joined her up there to get away from the cold, damp ground we’d been walking across and sitting on all day. Kevin took the hatchet and went to the trees to chop some firewood; Hannah volunteered to collect the dry firewood off the ground and I volunteered to take the meat to the river to rinse it clean. To get onto terrain that was easier to traverse we had walked further and further away from the river. Walking to the river to rinse the meat took me longer than I thought, about four minutes. The walk there was a little scary; being on my own the sounds of the forest all around me felt louder and closer. As we had travelled deeper into the forest it had gotten much livelier; we saw more deer, small rodents, birds and lizards and heard more insects; the sounds of them all around us created a symphony of nature that we had steadily grown used to. With that much life around us there was still a chance of there being dangerous animals like wolves and bears that we hadn’t yet seen. I thought I saw something when I was at the river rinsing the dirt off the meat; on the opposite riverbank I heard a rustling in the shrubs and thought I saw something white moving within them. I chose to put what I thought I saw out of my mind; we had enough problems to worry about without worrying about mysterious creatures in the forest. Kevin had gotten the fire started by the time I’d gotten back and needed only to get the pan heated up before he could start cooking. I handed him the clean meat which he placed on the brown paper in which we’d wrapped the meat we’d packed for him and I took my place atop the rock formation with Hannah and Miranda.

Eating the meat was an uncivilised process. Without any crockery we had to hold the meat in our hands and without any cutlery we had to pull pieces of meat off with our teeth. In the beginning eating this way had been kind of fun because of what a new experience it was for us but with our lower spirits that day eating that way didn’t feel fun at all, in fact it only added to our despondency. It wasn’t only us girls who were evincing a much more downbeat attitude; Kevin was also looking downcast and a little peevish, almost certainly because of all the time we’d lost due to Miranda’s injury which was in no way her fault. The feeling that I’d had from the beginning was that Hannah and Kevin viewed Miranda as the weak link among us that would eventually cost us dearly in some way. That Miranda had been the one who had picked up the injury created an uncomfortable rift in our group. I was of course on Miranda’s side and didn’t appreciate what I was sensing coming from Hannah and Kevin. The four of us ate lunch in uncomfortable, tense silence, separated into two pairs by Hannah and Kevin’s annoyance at Miranda for proving them right by sustaining an injury and slowing us down right when we were in a position to push forward aggressively for the first time.

The oppressive mood among us didn’t last long as we were soon approached by what had to that point existed as nothing more than characters in stories we’d been told to warn us against going into the forest. I should have paid more attention to what I’d seen in the bushes across the river, if I had we might have been able to avoid what happened next. There were three of them. They walked out of the trees in a pack; one was white, another was grey and the other was black. Wolves. They weren’t the size of houses as we’d been told but that didn’t make their appearance before us any less terrifying. They walked toward us slowly and menacingly, stalking us, none of them breaking rank. We froze when we saw them, recognizing instantly from the manner of their movement that they were every bit the dangerous predators we’d been warned about. Kevin reacted first; he sprang up clutching the knife and assumed a stance of readiness. The wolves weren’t the slightest bit fazed by his stance and kept slowly advancing toward us. The rock formation we were on wasn’t high enough to protect us from the wolves; we had to find a way to escape from them.

“Whatever happens, you three stay behind me; if they attack, run,” Kevin said to us.

There was no guarantee Kevin was the only one they’d go after if they attacked and Miranda wasn’t in great shape for running; we needed a plan and were fast running out of time to come up with one. The wolves were drawing closer, as they did the fur on the back of their necks started to bristle; they lowered their heads and licked their lips. They were preparing to attack us, of that there was no doubt. Feeling the need to act urgently Kevin pulled a piece of meat off one of the sticks we were using to carry it and threw it at the wolves. They pounced on it and ripped it into three pieces that they quickly swallowed, after which they remained stationary, keeping their focus trained on Kevin.

“They’re hungry, they must have come having smelled the meat. You three, there’s a tree behind us to the left that’s got low branches, when I give the signal run to it and climb up into it, I’ll keep them occupied,” Kevin said to us.

“We can’t leave you behind like that, and we don’t even know if we’ll be able to make it there in time with Miranda’s leg,” Hannah said.

“I can make it,” Miranda averred.

“There’s no time to lose, I’m going to throw them a big chunk of meat, as soon as I do, run; I’ll join you when you’ve all reached safety,” Kevin said, throwing the wolves a second piece of meat that they tore into as rapaciously as they had the first one.

“Are you sure…”

“Hannah, this is no time for doubts,” Kevin said to her, cutting her off.

While we were having this discussion the wolves appeared to have gotten impatient and had started advancing toward us again. Kevin threw them a third piece of meat to stop them advancing any further and told us to get ready. He pulled five pieces of meat off the stick he was holding and braced to throw them.

“NOW!” He said as threw it.

We jumped down from the rocks and set off for the tree without looking back, too terrified of what we’d see if we did. All we heard behind us as we were running was the rustling sound of the wolves’ paws scratching the ground as they scrapped over the meat. The wolves were so busy with the meat that they hadn’t noticed us making our escape, until Miranda fell to the ground from the pain in her leg when we were just a few steps away from the tree and alerted them to us. The wolves had consumed the meat that Kevin had thrown to them and turned their attention to us. The black wolf, upon seeing Miranda hit the floor, broke away from the other two and took off after her. Kevin tried throwing more meat to stop it but the wolf wasn’t interested, it had set its sights on Miranda and she was the sole focus of its attention. When Miranda had fallen I had stopped running and helped her to feet; this had placed us both in danger from the wolf. Hannah didn’t stop or turn around when Miranda fell and was unaware of the danger we were in. The wolf was gaining on us fast; Miranda and I could feel it drawing closer, its growing proximity to us was palpable. Only when Hannah had reached the tree and climbed safely into it did she see the wolf chasing us. By then Miranda and I were close to the tree but not close enough to have escaped the wolf’s reach. Miranda, because of the pain in her leg, was a little behind me and was the one in the greatest danger. Our only hope for escaping the wolf was to climb up into the tree without making a mistake. There were two low branches that we needed to use to get high enough up the tree for us to be safe from the wolf. With Miranda and I being so close to each other and the wolf being so close to us we weren’t both going to be able to make it into the tree in time. Hannah recognized this when she saw us running toward her and took quick action.

“Miranda, grab on!” She yelled urgently.

She suspended herself from the tree with her legs and lowered her hand to a level at which Miranda could reach it if she jumped for it. There was no time for me to doubt Hannah, I placed my trust in her ability to get Miranda to safety and ran for the low branches. I got up into the tree just in time to see the wolf jump after Miranda and miss her feet with its jaws by a hair. Unhappy that it had lost out on its prey the wolf bayed at us viciously from the ground below before accepting that we were no longer an attainable target and returning its attention to Kevin and the meat that he had with him. The meat that was on the stick that we had been eating from was all gone; Kevin had had to throw all of it to the wolves to make it possible for us to escape to safety. The meat that was left was on the stick that we hadn’t eaten from yet. Kevin undoubtedly had it in his mind to save as much of the meat as he possibly could from the wolves but he had a big problem: the black wolf had not rejoined the other two wolves and was blocking Kevin’s path to the tree. Kevin pulled a piece of meat off the stick and threw it at the other two wolves but the black wolf didn’t start running in their direction, it remained between Kevin and us and started moving toward him. To get it out of the way Kevin had to throw meat to its left to coax it in the direction of the other two while still throwing meat at the other two to keep them stationary. Using this strategy of throwing two pieces at a time the meat rapidly dwindled. By the time Kevin had coaxed the black wolf back over to the other two there were only a few pieces of meat left. To keep the wolves distracted while he made for the tree he did what he had done for us and threw all of what little was left to them. None of the wolves followed him like how the black wolf had come after Miranda; they were concentrated solely on the meat.

Perched up in the tree the four of us watched as the meat that we saw as our salvation only a day earlier was all eaten before our eyes. The wolves ate every scrap of meat we had and when they were done they all raised their heads to the sky and howled as if in celebration of their success before slinking back into the forest. We stayed in the tree for a while after the wolves had left to give them time to get far away. The despair hit us when we descended to the ground and had to contemplate what to do next. Miranda took what had just happened to us the hardest. I knew that she blamed herself, that she was thinking that if she hadn’t gotten hurt we would have been further downriver and possibly away from the wolves. Hannah and Kevin’s feelings I was less sure about. They had worked together to catch the deer; seeing the fruits of their hard labour vanish before their eyes must have been much harder on them than it had been on us. My greatest worry was that in their despair they would turn on Miranda and use her to unburden themselves of the frustration that had been building in them ever since Miranda got hurt and we’d been forced to slow down and eventually stop; Miranda was feeling so bad about what had happened that I was afraid of what it would do to her if Hannah and Kevin outright blamed her and did it vociferously.

Kevin wasn’t interested in apportioning blame. As was his way he immediately moved on to what came next. He picked up the pan that he’d placed on a rock to cool having rinsed it clean with water from the canteen and put it back in the bag which he then hoisted onto his shoulders.

“Okay, let’s go,” he said.

“Let’s go? Just like that?” Hannah asked him, perplexed, “We have no food! The deer we caught that we’d been trying to catch for days was just eaten by wolves that tried to eat us too! There may be more of them out there and who knows what else?! How can you just say ‘let’s go’?”

“It’s all we can do; the quicker we get moving the quicker we make it to the outside world.”

“How are we going to make it to the outside world when we have no food? We could be weeks away from the outside world, if we keep going and we don’t reach it in a couple of days we’re going to die out here!”

“It’s the only thing we can do.”

“No it’s not; we can go back.”

“Back to Prospera? Where they tried to kill me?”

“You don’t know that for sure, maybe what happened to you on the boat really was an accident.”

“That was no accident; they may have orchestrated it to make it look like an accident but it was no accident.”

“Kevin, maybe this is one of those times when your imagination’s gotten the better of you.”

“I didn’t imagine being struck on the back of my head so hard that I was thrown into the sea.”

“If we keep going we’re going to die.”

“It took us five days to get here from Prospera, we can’t last that long with no food so going back isn’t an option.”

I hadn’t expected Hannah to be the first one to break. She had been the first to force her way onto this journey on which she had finally gotten the chance to be intimate with him. Kevin’s stoicism was less of a surprise; I had never seen him react emotionally no matter the situation. Then he did something I wasn’t expecting. He took the bag off his shoulders, went over to Hannah and hugged her. Hannah was the most shaken among us, even more than Miranda. It was an unusual display of tenderness on Kevin’s part that helped to ease the horrible despair that had enveloped us all.

“We’re going to be fine; we made it this far, we’ll make it the rest of the way,” he said to Hannah to subdue her.

He wasn’t only speaking to her, he was speaking to me and Miranda as well, because we all needed to push on determinedly to make up the ground we needed to make up in as short a time as possible.

Miranda wasn’t the subject of any undue attention in the aftermath of our encounter with the wolves; I got the feeling that deflecting attention away from her was part of what Kevin had been trying to do, understanding that she would be feeling very fragile after what we’d been through. Following his mollification of Hannah—and me and Miranda by extension—we gathered our things and got going again in search of the outside world.