‘Talk to my parents,’ she replied bitterly. ‘This was so not my choice.’
I totally got that. It was obvious that skinny, fragile Ava wasn’t cut out for wild-walking.
‘How come I end up freezing to death by a lake?’ She hesitated then decided that she’d shared plenty already and she might as well continue. ‘The cops caught me walking out of a store with a jacket I didn’t pay for.’
I didn’t register any reaction though secretly I was surprised. It wasn’t the kind of offence that I expected intense, vulnerable Ava to commit. ‘Was it a cool jacket?’
She shrugged. ‘Plus a pair of shoes and a purse. All on-trend, designer goods but no way worth all this.’
‘So your parents decided on tough love – they sent you here?’
A nod this time instead of a shrug. ‘They took me out of dance school.’
‘Which you loved?’
‘Right. I had a major role in a new ballet. I was principal dancer in my year.’
So why risk all that for a designer jacket, I wondered. ‘So yeah, this sucks,’ I agreed out loud. We’d got into our stride and were walking more quickly, starting to catch up with Jarrold and Kaylee.
‘I told them I wouldn’t come. I swore I’d stop eating again, starve myself if they sent me to New Dawn.’
‘You’ve done that before?’ No surprise here. Ava was like a tiny bird with big dark eyes, thin wrists and slender, tapering fingers. A gust of wind could blow her over.
‘Yeah, and the stealing. It’s a compulsion. I guess I have a problem, huh?’
‘I’m not a psychologist so I have no clue. You’d have to ask my friend Grace. But you don’t want to stop eating. What good would it do? You’re here now and you have to get through it, go back to school.’
‘Easy to say,’ she sighed. ‘But my dad won’t pay any more fees, so that door is slammed right in my face.’
‘Maybe he’ll change his mind.’
‘You don’t know him,’ she said, lowering her head and walking on in silence.
I had Ava’s story – maybe not the whole of it but at least enough for me to begin slotting together the pieces of the jigsaw.
We were still walking by the shore of the lake where the ground was five centimetres deep in snow. We’d stopped for Jarrold to take a pee behind a rock and Kaylee was pointing the camera at me.
‘So, Tania, what do you want out of this?’ she challenged. ‘Are you seriously looking for the Great Creator?’
‘The way you say it, it sounds like you don’t believe.’
‘Oh, I believe,’ she assured me. ‘From heart at war to heart at peace. I love it out here, every freaking, freezing second.’
‘She sounds like she’s kidding but she’s serious,’ Ava confirmed miserably.
Kaylee lowered the camera and grinned. ‘I’d live like this twenty-four/seven if they let me. But we want to hear from you, Tania. What’s that gold heart and the cross you wear around your neck?’
I touched them with my cold fingers. ‘The cross is Romanian,’ I told her. ‘It belonged to my grandmother.’
‘You have a boyfriend? He gave you the heart?’ Kaylee quizzed, raising the camera again.
I nodded. ‘Orlando. He’s in Dallas.’
‘So why aren’t you there with him?’
I didn’t like this. I was supposed to be the one asking the questions. ‘Here comes Jarrold,’ I told her and Ava. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
By mid-afternoon it got to be my turn with the camera. I shot footage of the island in the middle of the lake, lost behind flurries of snow. Then I caught up with Jarrold and turned the lens on him.
‘It’s OK, I won’t hassle you right now – I know you can’t talk,’ I said. ‘Not officially.’
He stuck up a finger to the lens then strode away, cutting off the track and up the hillside.
‘Thanks for reminding him, Tania.’ This was Kaylee, walking into shot, the hood of her red jacket pulled tight around her face. She stuck out her tongue to show a silver stud right through the tip.
In the background, out of sight, I heard Ava asking when we could stop and build a shelter.
‘Wait here. I’ll go ask Jarrold.’ Kaylee took a couple of steps then came back close to the camera. ‘Obviously I’ll ask him in sign language,’ she grinned sarcastically. ‘No actual words will be spoken!’
And off she went. She mimed out the whole situation for Jarrold – made gestures to show that the snow wasn’t letting up and we had to build a shelter.
‘So funny!’ Ava said in a hollow voice. ‘Like, she’s following the rules – not!’
Sighing, I switched off the camera. At least this way Kaylee could cut out the play-acting. ‘How serious is Kaylee about Jarrold?’ I asked Ava, meaning, was it more than the obvious lust factor?
‘Like I said before, she’s one hundred per cent committed to the heartless shit.’
‘You can tell?’
‘Look at the body language.’
Following Ava’s advice, I saw Kaylee talking and laughing with Jarrold now that the camera wasn’t running. She was sharing a joke, glancing our way, actually full-on flirting as much as was possible for a girl dressed for a snowstorm in padded jacket, scarf and hood. I watched Jarrold shake his head then turn away and start searching under the nearby trees for shelter materials.
‘I’m a newbie but it took me less than twenty-four hours to figure out that everyone here – all the girls – think Jarrold’s hot,’ Ava explained. ‘Channing comes a close second but Jarrold is definitely number one.’
‘And Power Ranger Jarrold knows it,’ I guessed.
‘He leads them on then pushes them away, just like he’s doing now. No one knows much about him, not really. He keeps up a wall.’
‘That’s what he did with me – he promised to tell me his whole story, acted like he wanted me to join the River Stone band.’ I was getting to like Ava, to feel that I could trust her.
Trust no one. My good angel’s voice echoes inside my head.
Ava laughed. ‘You believed him?’
‘Not really. I’m here for other reasons.’ On the verge of sharing my precarious spiritual situation with Ava, with the words ‘dark angel’ on the tip of my tongue, I suddenly switched topics. ‘So what do we know about Jarrold?’
‘He lived in Denver. His parents were super-rich, but both big-time alcoholics. He’s lived with his grandfather since he was a little kid.’
‘Wow, that’s not how I figured it.’
‘Six months ago he was busted for stealing the old man’s credit card and running up thirty thousand dollars’ worth of debt.’
‘Ouch.’
‘He told the judge he did it because he was bored. It was all over the Denver newspapers – you can google it and read the whole thing.’
‘Again, ouch.’
By this time, Kaylee was yelling at us to quit talking and help with the shelter.
‘Unless you want to die in the snow like the Hawk Above Our Heads band!’
Straight away I ran up the hill to join her. ‘Why, what did you hear?’
‘Jean-Luc told Jarrold the Hawk band had to come down from Carlsbad, the snow was so bad.’
‘Yeah, I know – they built a shelter on Shaman Overlook.’
‘Which is still there,’ Kaylee told me, pointing across the lake and handing me the field glasses that hung around her neck. ‘Find the peak of Black Rock and focus directly under there, just above the tree line. See the shelter they built on the ledge?’
Following her directions, I managed to zoom in on a rough shelter built from brushwood and plastic sheeting.
‘Do you see anyone?’ Kaylee prompted.
The plastic roof of the shelter flapped, wind had blown the snow into deep drifts against the wooden sides. ‘No,’ I confirmed.
‘So either they went back down the mountain and headed for home, which is against guiding principle number three, or else they froze during the night and the
corpses are still in there.’
Gasping, I appealed to Jarrold, who was gathering pine branches left on the ground by forestry workers. ‘She’s kidding!’
‘You hope,’ he mumbled. ‘With Kaylee you never can tell.’
‘We ought to go over and take a look, make sure they’re safe.’
‘What’s with the “we”?’ Kaylee scoffed. ‘You go if you want to, Tania, but I’m staying right here to build a shelter.’
Jarrold agreed. ‘We’d never make it to the overlook before nightfall.’
‘Anyway, I was joking.’ Kaylee gathered more branches and followed Jarrold as he carried his load to a thicket of aspens, where they set them down. ‘The Hawk band probably spent the night on the overlook, left the shelter in place and moved on. The snow got worse today so I guess they came lower, towards the lake.’
Using the binoculars, I scanned the far shore for signs of life.
‘See anything?’ Ava asked.
I shook my head and handed her the field glasses, tried to tell myself that Kaylee’s theory was correct. If they had any sense, the four Explorers and Holly had given up the attempt to climb Carlsbad and were roughly at the same altitude as us, at this very moment building a new shelter for their second night in the wilderness.
Meanwhile, we had work to do, constructing our own shelter by bending and binding together the tips of young aspen saplings to form a rough tipi then weaving horizontal branches stripped from nearby pines between the uprights. Then Jarrold showed us how to cover the wooden framework with plastic tarp, strapping it in place and leaving only a small flap for the entrance.
‘Good enough?’ Kaylee checked after an hour’s teamwork.
Jarrold nodded and glanced up at the sky, which was growing dark. ‘We’re good unless the wind gets up. In case it does, we ought to weight down the tarp with extra stones.’
‘But first we eat,’ Kaylee suggested, digging into her backpack to produce bars of high-energy cereal and dried fruit plus packs of juice. ‘It’s not much but it’s all we have – unless you want to go out and trap rabbits, break the ice and catch a fish, shoot a deer …’
Gratefully Ava and I took the bars, sat cross-legged on some spare tarp and chewed in silence.
By now the light had almost faded and the snow clouds had cleared. A pale moon rose above the ridge.
‘Do you hear the wind?’ Jarrold said.
I hadn’t until that moment, but now I listened and sure enough the branches of the nearby trees were rustling, the aspens were beginning to bend.
‘We need more stones.’ Ava sprang to her feet and began the task of weighting down the bottom rim of our shelter. Kaylee too found heavy rocks and lowered them into position but now Jarrold didn’t seem interested. Instead, he stared at the moon and slowly wandered off through the aspens. Something made me follow him. I kept him in sight until the trees opened out on to a clear view of Carlsbad in the distance. Moonlight made the snow shimmer with a silver glow. Over our heads there were a zillion stars.
In the valley there is a large band of men marching in single file under the moon. They chant, they cry, they howl as they leave their land for the last time and walk into the mountains. It is a trail of tears.
‘I wouldn’t have left,’ Jarrold said quietly, as if he shared my vision of the defeated tribe. ‘I would have stayed to fight.’
‘What with? Bows and arrows against guns?’
‘I would still fight.’
I believed him. Nothing on this earth would have made Jarrold walk away from a battle. ‘How can it be so peaceful up here?’ I wondered.
‘With all the blood that was spilled?’ He shrugged. ‘You think you’d feel the anger, the loss.’
‘But you don’t.’ Maybe it was the eternal moon, the mountains rolling on for ever. I relaxed, breathed deeply and felt my worst fears slip away as I stood at ten thousand feet with snow on the ground and with Jarrold beside me.
10
For me, having a night without dreams is heaven.
I had no dreams, either bad or good, and without even my dreamcatcher to filter them. I slept like a baby inside our tarp shelter, glad of the body warmth generated by Ava, Kaylee and Jarrold as we lay nose to toe in our silver sleeping bags like a can of cosy sardines.
I woke at dawn and slid out through the canvas flap to greet the rising sun. And wow, what beauty, what a spectacular, pink-tinged, cloud-banked sky, and pure white snow everywhere – on the mountains, in the valleys and across the frozen surface of Turner Lake.
I breathed in the cold purity and vastness, felt my anxious heart lift. Jarrold followed me out of the shelter, camera in hand. He filmed the sparkling scene then closed in on my smiling, serene face.
‘Give me the camera,’ I said.
He handed it over without a word then zipped up his jacket and pulled his hat low over his forehead. I kept the camera on him as he walked away.
‘Where did Jarrold go?’ Kaylee asked, emerging sleepily but glancing at me and injecting a tinge of jealousy into her voice.
I pointed to the figure heading up the mountain, leaving a trail of fresh prints in the snow.
‘It’s his day to be alone, I guess.’ She looked anxious. ‘Let’s hope he doesn’t do anything stupid.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like decide this is all too hard – again.’
‘And then what – get the hell out of here?’
Kaylee nodded. ‘Jarrold wouldn’t be the first. He won’t be the last.’
‘Really? You guys go on the run? Tell me more.’
Maybe she would have talked if she wasn’t suspicious about me and Jarrold and if I hadn’t had the camera, but as it was she grunted, turned and crawled back into the shelter. Half an hour later, my new buddy Ava surfaced.
‘Did you sleep well?’ I asked.
There were dark shadows under her eyes as she pulled up the fur-edged hood of her jacket. ‘I had bad dreams.’
So it was her turn, not mine. ‘What about?’ Her confession drew a sympathetic smile.
‘About Conner,’ she replied, going tight-lipped and retreating into the shelter when I waited for more.
So I quit filming and sat listening to the wind in the trees.
My mind cleared as I absorbed the silence, the space. I internalized what I saw – the neat pawprints of a coyote between the aspen trunks, a blue jay huddled on a snow-laden branch (but no mourning dove, no Zenaida), the diamond glitter of snowflakes.
After an hour I felt totally calm until Jarrold came back down the mountain. I watched him closely, admiring his combination of strength and long-legged litheness as he skirted around icy boulders and waded through soft drifts. In the clear, early morning light he raised clouds of snow that seemed to form a sparkling halo around him. I held the camera steady, captured every move.
‘Is that what you do, Tania – sit here and chill while your buddy is in deep trouble?’ he demanded.
His voice was a gunshot shattering my peace. I let the camera drop to my side.
‘Come and look,’ Jarrold invited, grabbing my elbow and leading me out of the stand of aspens, giving me a clear view of the lake.
I saw another lone figure toiling up towards us – unrecognizable from this distance but it could only be an Explorer from the Hawk Above Our Heads band.
‘What makes you think … ?’
‘It’s Regan.’ Jarrold handed me his field glasses. ‘The only reason he’s on his way up here is because his band needs our help.’
‘So let’s go!’ I set off out of control down the mountain, half running, tripping, skidding and clutching at snow-covered bushes.
Behind me, Jarrold had raised the alarm with Kaylee, and Ava and all three were now following.
‘Tania, take it easy!’ Kaylee bawled. ‘You want to break a leg?’
I didn’t care. I only wanted to reach Regan and get the facts.
The thin, geeky Explorer saw us coming and slumped forward, hands on his knee
s, arms braced while he caught his breath.
‘What is it? What happened?’ I yelled as soon as I thought he could hear me.
‘Holly fell through the ice!’ His hoarse voice barely made it up the slope but it stunned me to the core.
My friend is down with the corpses – the skulls and coffins. She doesn’t resist as she drifts through the church door. The minister is the dark monster with snake head and lion body, his wings outstretched. Double-headed water snakes make up the hissing congregation.
‘Thank God, she made it to the island in the middle of the lake,’ Regan said.
‘But now she’s stranded. She can’t get back?’ I stumbled and slid the final few metres, grateful when Regan put out an arm to halt me. We were both caked in snow, our faces blue with cold. Regan was like Ava – not cut out for these conditions.
‘Exactly,’ he confirmed, repeating the situation for the benefit of the rest of my band.
‘Crap!’ Kaylee muttered. ‘How come she was on the ice to start with?’
Regan shook his head. ‘Channing’s our leader – you’ll have to check with him.’
‘What does Channing want us to do?’ Jarrold asked.
‘He says two of you should inform Ziegler, and two of you should head back with me.’
‘I’m coming with you!’ I cut in before anyone could speak.
‘Me too,’ Jarrold decided. ‘Kaylee, you and Ava report back.’
There was a short argument – Kaylee said she was stronger than me and would be more use, and anyway she was keen to film the rescue. But no way was I going to leave Holly stranded on the island. Before anyone could stop me, I set off in the direction of the lake.
‘How long has she been there?’ I asked Regan when he and Jarrold caught up with me.
‘A couple of hours. There’s a zip-line between the lake shore and the island. Marta thinks Holly tried to use it to get across but the wire snapped and she went straight through the ice.
‘Awesome!’ Jarrold gave a heartless smile. ‘Your buddy acts like we’re in a theme park and almost gets herself killed.’
‘Channing blames himself,’ Regan told us. ‘This is his third wilderness walk. He should’ve warned Holly to stay away from the ice.’