Aaron shrugged. ‘I don’t know – maybe that Ziegler guy, the one in the black hat who started the race. Maybe Amos. And how about number 102, the swimmer closest to Conner when he went down?’
Brainwashed. When you think it through, it literally means wiping the mind clean of all previous thoughts, being manipulated, getting confused over what is real and what is fantasy.
It’s when the Aztec masks leap from the wall in Brancusi’s underground house, when carved, painted wood spring to monstrous life. It’s murals on chapel walls turning into 3D wolves, coyotes and bears, and men shape-shifting into demons, rising into the air and bending you to their will. And more lately it’s monsters rising from Turner Lake, double-headed serpents, the beast with a snake’s head and giant leathery wings and the wolf man standing at the edge of the cliff.
‘I don’t think so,’ I told Aaron shakily, taking the route I’d already been down with Grace. ‘I’m not feeling it the way I felt it on Black Rock.’
‘So you’re not getting the bad dreams, the phobia about forest fires?’ Because he was worried about Holly, Aaron threw off his casual, neutral stance and pressurized me more than usual.
‘Yeah, I’m getting bad dreams,’ I admitted. ‘But they’re about water this time. And yeah, I’ve already told Grace that I know for sure we’re not through with the dark angel. I just don’t think it’s Amos, that’s all.’
Where are you? Who are you? If I’m to stand and fight I need to know my enemy.
Aaron nodded and grunted. ‘Tania, I hope you’re right,’ he muttered as Grace and Jude, freshly showered, joined us in the clubhouse.
That night Dad told me that Mom’s mom was taking a flight up from Miami. ‘Angelica wants to visit hospital, see Karen,’ he explained. ‘Stay two days then fly back home.’
He didn’t say much but he didn’t have to. My high-maintenance, botoxed grandmamma was nobody’s favourite person. We knew she would arrive at the airport loaded down with too many Louis Vuitton bags, would use my dad as a cab driver, stress the small stuff and suck all the attention away from the person we really cared about – my mom lying on her hospital bed. I personally didn’t want to stick around to see it happen.
‘So I guess I’ll join the New Dawn guys,’ I said suddenly. It’s weird what makes you finally quit prevaricating and reach a life-changing decision. ‘Sunday, Monday – I’ll be back Tuesday at the latest.’
Dad knew the recent history of open hostility between me and my grandmother too well to try and stop me. Instead, he went into be-prepared, boy-scout mode and pulled out good maps of the Turner Lake area that showed every detail of the topography – the small natural lakes upstream of the reservoir, the major landmarks such as Shaman Overlook and Spider Rock, together with the Jeep trails that threaded through the forest. And he loaned me Mom’s expensive, lightweight hiking jacket. ‘Tonight snow stops falling,’ he advised me. ‘Tomorrow maybe blue sky.’
Dad’s my all-time hero. By now that must be totally obvious.
Later, I had a conversation with Orlando. It was one of those sad, pathetic ones where not much gets said and a whole lot is held back.
‘I’ll be home Tuesday,’ I promised after I’d told him my new volunteer plan.
He was offhand, dismissive. ‘Cool. So I’ll be busy too. Tomorrow Ryan, Natalie and I plan to fix up the apartment then take in a movie. Monday we have lectures.’
‘Aurelie made a big deal over inviting me,’ I explained. ‘They’ll let me shoot documentary footage. I’m excited.’
‘Cool. Listen, Tania, I have to go. The guys are downstairs in the lobby waiting for me.’
‘Guys?’
‘Natalie and Ryan. There’s a college football game.’
‘OK, have fun.’
‘You too.’
‘I will.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
Click. Call ended. One minute thirteen seconds.
Then came the avalanche of emotion. Orlando hadn’t reacted the way I’d expected. He’d said ‘cool’ when I told him I’d volunteered, stayed out of any argument, hadn’t asked me questions, hadn’t even told me to take care. Natalie’s name had come up at least six times in seventy-three seconds. So I was swept away by jealousy and while I was floundering there I emailed Aurelie to confirm that I would be joining the River Stone band the next day.
‘Good news!’ She emailed right back. ‘My stepfather will be so pleased. We’ll see you tomorrow at dawn.’
9
‘So you couldn’t stay away!’ It was Viking Jarrold, brash and bold, there in the parking lot as the sun rose. I was going to say alone in the parking lot, except that I caught sight of Jean-Luc talking with him as I drove in then slipping away in the grey light without waiting to greet me.
Jarrold was dressed for the cold weather in a black ski jacket and a close-fitting, black knitted hat – a kind of skull cap that hid his long fair hair. There was a video camera slung over one shoulder.
‘Yeah, I’m here for your whole story,’ I countered as I looked around for the others – for Kaylee, Ava and Regan.
‘They got held up.’ Jarrold interpreted right without me having to open my mouth. ‘Regan has a mega brain but his cabin is a mess. He lost his hiking boots. The girls are helping him out.’
‘So are you still an Outsider?’ I was confused. ‘How come Jean-Luc was here?’
‘He had to deliver a message. The Hawk Above Our Heads band didn’t make it to the lake on Carlsbad because of the snow.’
‘But they’re OK?’ I asked quickly.
Jarrold nodded. ‘They came back down the mountain and camped overnight on Shaman Overlook. Jean-Luc thought maybe we’d run into them some time today.’
‘Still, he shouldn’t be talking to you. He should give the message to Kaylee or one of the others.’
‘Technically correct,’ he admitted, looking straight at me and curling his top lip. ‘But who here is planning to report back to the boss?’
‘OK, no problem. It’s not my business.’
‘Anyway, Jean-Luc has booked a one-way ticket out of here.’ Casually Jarrold dropped the information into our illegal conversation. ‘He doesn’t give a crap about guiding principles. Are you shocked? Yeah, you are – you’re stunned.’
‘Not really.’ I guessed straight away that Amos’s stepson had decided to go home to Paris. ‘I would’ve been more shocked if you’d said Aurelie.’
‘Oh no, not Aurelie.’
Still glancing round for the others and feeling uncomfortable under the steel-grey gaze, I blundered on. ‘What made Jean-Luc finally decide?’
‘He wanted to go, even before his mom died. She drowned in a ferry accident off the coast of Goa early this summer. They were out there searching for a location for Antony’s next movie.’
‘I knew she was dead but I didn’t know the details. I’m sorry.’
‘It hit them hard – Antony, Jean-Luc and Aurelie. They were all on the boat with Juliet, but she was below deck and she was the only one who drowned.’
I see an azure sea, a palm-fringed coastline, a badly painted, rusting bucket of a boat overloaded with passengers, cars and trucks. It sits low in the water, rocks from side to side as the waves meet it sideways on. Spray cools the faces of the passengers wedged shoulder to shoulder on deck, a midday sun burns.
And nothing terrifying happens. The boat doesn’t hit a reef with a sickening thud and scrape of metal. There’s no Titanic moment, just a gradual listing and sinking under its own weight, water washing in through open portholes, people slowly realizing that they’re in danger. The ferry wallows in the bright-blue water. Below are dark, volcanic rocks with shoals of blue, yellow and red fish swimming in and out.
Someone cries out. A wave breaks over the prow of the boat, a dark-haired child clings to the skirt of her mother’s shocking-pink sari. Some cattle penned in the trucks below deck begin to bellow.
The ferry rolls and wallows, it sinks. Three hun
dred people jump into the sea. A hundred and twenty souls are lost.
‘So after Juliet died, Jean-Luc flew back to New Dawn with the rest of the family, but it was harder to believe in the ethos here without Juliet. Eventually he’s had enough.’
‘I see that.’ Jarrold had just helped me make sense of Jean-Luc’s attitude. From the first time I met him, I felt that he didn’t belong at New Dawn. ‘Does he somehow blame Antony for his mom’s death?’
‘I guess.’
‘The whole thing’s so sad.’
‘Yeah, but don’t feel sorry for Jean-Luc. His own dad’s loaded. Jean-baby doesn’t have to stay here – he can do whatever he likes.’
‘Unlike you?’ In a prison without walls, waiting to be released.
‘Yeah, unlike me.’
‘So I’m waiting.’ It was my turn to look Jarrold in the eye and hold my nerve. ‘For your story.’
‘Later,’ he promised, picking up the approach of the other Explorers long before I did – as if he had sensitive, wild-animal hearing. And he walked quickly to the far side of the parking lot, isolating himself and waiting for Antony Amos to arrive.
Our New Dawn guru followed Regan, Kaylee and Ava down the track. Aurelie and Ziegler came a couple of paces behind, each carrying a long, red-and-white-striped pole decorated at the top with clusters of white feathers hanging from leather strips. Aurelie wore a small cap embroidered with turquoise beadwork and her soft suede boots were styled like moccasins with fringes and beads. Ziegler was all in black, his Stetson pulled low over his forehead.
Eventually we all came together in the centre of the parking lot. It was cold enough to see our breath in the pale morning light. Our faces looked pinched and we hunched our shoulders against the icy wind.
Amos gathered his Explorers close to him, beckoning for me to join them. Then he launched into his leaving ceremony. ‘You know that today you lose yourselves to find yourselves,’ he began. ‘Let the wilderness guide you and let yourselves be open to change.’
Hearing the slow, weighty words, I glanced up at the cliffs rising behind the New Dawn cabins – rugged rocks where snow clung to shadowy ledges. For a second I imagined the lone figure of the wolf man standing on the cliff top watching us.
‘I give you the advice given to Running Chief, a young Pawnee warrior, by his mother who raised him. “Now you are grown, be brave and face whatever danger may await you. If I should live to see you become a man, I want you to become a great man. If I live to see you go off on the warpath, I would not weep if I were to hear that you had been killed in battle. That is what makes a man: to fight and to be brave.”’
I looked to the horizon again. There was no wolf man – only the big, grey, snow-laden sky.
‘And here’s another voice belonging to these lands,’ Amos went on, drawing us in with his powerful shaman stare. He was the oldest of us by far and the only one besides Ziegler who didn’t hunch his shoulders, who seemed not to notice the arctic temperature. ‘This is the voice of Satanta, a great Kiowa chief. “I love the land and the buffalo and I will not part with it. I will not settle. I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle, we grow pale and die. When I go to the river I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down the timber, they kill my buffalo. I see this and my heart feels like bursting.”’
I sneak another look at the jagged ridge. There is a different figure. His hair is long and black, the bottom half of his face is painted vermilion, his upper body is bare to the elements and he wears a feathered headdress.
‘“This is our country,”’ Amos tells the band, speaking in the voice of Satanta. ‘“We have always lived in it and there was plenty. We were happy.”’
Hooves thunder across the open plain. A herd of black beasts with huge necks and curved horns raise dust as they gallop heads down, pursued by men on horseback. The men hold painted sticks adorned with feathers. They herd the fleeing buffalo towards the edge of a cliff. They funnel them, urge them on, kettle them and force them over the edge.
The beasts fall. The noise of thundering hooves stops. The hunters on horseback look down calmly on the broken bodies of fifty dead buffalo. Winter approaches. The tribe will eat.
Here again, at the rim of the cliff stands the tall, lean wolf man, his head turned towards me, his amber eyes gleaming.
‘You will walk in the wilderness and these are the voices you will hear,’ Amos promised us. ‘Respect them and pray that their hearts are at peace in this beautiful land.’
I listened to his voice in the cold grey morning and I was lifted out of time, out of place into another existence. Call it spiritual because I can think of no other word. It was a world where men and women were at one with the land they lived in, where ancestors lived on in the rocks, the trees and the water, and when the invaders came and took the land by force, it was a world of pain, of death, darkness and suffering.
Amos told us the simple truth of this. He lifted me above the small stuff, the details, and spoke to my heart.
I only came back down to earth when Ziegler approached. ‘Hey, Tania. We need to fix a rendezvous point for Tuesday.’
‘You’ll come and pick me up?’ I checked.
He nodded. ‘Name the time, the place.’
So I pulled out the map that Dad had given me and together we fixed on Spider Rock – a lookout point directly above the dam. From here you could see for miles – way down the valley as far as the point where Prayer River joined the Platte.
‘A good choice,’ Amos confirmed, looking over my shoulder at the map. ‘Spider Rock is a sacred place. It’s where a young boy of the White Water Sioux tribe would go to seek wisdom. He would fast there for many days and wait for a vision in the shape of a deer, a horse, an elk or an eagle – any animal spirit to guide him through life.’
Like my Zenaida, my spirit ally, my Weyekin, my good angel. She told me I would never be alone.
‘So what time will you meet me?’ I asked Ziegler. And we fixed on six in the evening – early enough for us to trek back down from Spider Rock to Ziegler’s Jeep and drive to New Dawn before the sun went down.
‘Are you comfortable with that?’ he asked, fixing me with his startling blue eyes. ‘It gives you three days and two nights in the wilderness.’
‘I’m cool,’ I replied. Actually, no. Scared to death of what lay ahead would be more accurate. But determined to do this, to hold a camera and shoot long shots of the spectacular scenery, plus close-ups of the inter-reactions between Jarrold, Kaylee and Ava. Maybe to discover more about my dark angel’s presence and eager at last to stop running and to stand up and fight. This is how it felt. It was a big moment for me.
‘So go,’ Aurelie told us, planting her striped and feathered staff firmly across the exit to the parking lot and raising it as each Explorer approached. ‘Open your heart to the Great Creator,’ she chanted as they passed through.
I was last to leave. ‘You are a Friend. You must open your heart,’ Aurelie murmured. The feathers hanging from her staff brushed my cheek.
A bitter wind blows. Ice freezes the tumbling, splashing creeks. Snow blinds me. Stink of wolf’s breath. Sweating, stinking wolf man in his winter lair, a dark place of thorns. His claws are bloodstained, his slack jaw hangs open. He pants.
In that visionary second, it was as if my brain had split in two with the sound of an axe cleaving a log – the swish of the blade, the clunk as it met solid wood – then a blur as the two halves of my brain shunted back together and I was whole again. Reeling a little, I followed the three members of the River Stone band along the lakeside track.
This was it, the reality of wild walking.
Ahead lay snow-covered mountains and ice-covered Turner Lake, voices from the past, visions of a terrible future. I am not running, I am moving forward. And somewhere my dark angel hides.
From the beginning Jarrold led the way. He set a fast pace but Kaylee easily kept up, her red jacket vivid against the
grey of the tree trunks. Twenty paces behind, Ava stumbled over tree roots and struggled with the weight of her backpack.
‘It’s OK, take your time,’ I told her as I caught up.
She turned her head away from me, tried to make out that she wasn’t having a hard time but soon gave up the pretence. ‘This sucks,’ she said as snow started to fall. ‘You have to be crazy to volunteer.’
‘Right,’ I agreed. I helped her shorten the straps of her pack and got it sitting more comfortably between her shoulder blades. ‘It doesn’t help that we’re being frogmarched out of here by Tarzan.’
Large snowflakes drifted down between the juniper branches and settled on the track so that already we could see the footprints of the two Explorers forging ahead.
‘Tarzan and Tarzan’s mate,’ Ava muttered sarcastically. ‘It was the same when we were the Black Crow band, actually. Only then I had Conner.’
The name brought on a cold tingle down my spine but I tried to keep things light. ‘Well, this time you’re stuck with me,’ I told her.
Ahead of us, Jarrold and Kaylee had reached a creek that ran down into the lake and they were figuring out the best way to cross it. It involved stepping on to a flat rock and leaping, praying that you made a safe landing on the far side. And I’m talking smooth granite covered in ice and snow.
‘I see a better way,’ I told Ava, heading off the trail to a spot where the creek narrowed and allowed us to step safely across.
‘You and Conner,’ I began as I waited for Ava to cross. ‘Were you like Kaylee and Jarrold – a couple?’
There was a long pause, a flicker of pain in her huge eyes. I held out my hand and she took it.
‘You loved him but you couldn’t go public with it?’
Ava sighed then nodded. ‘Not until after we left this place. You know – Conner was the first guy I’ve ever met who didn’t treat me like a kid. He made me feel grown up and good – he didn’t care what I’d done.’
‘So what did you do?’ I asked her as we hiked on through the trees. ‘How come you’re here?’