“What about touch, then?” Jeff asked.
“Feel the wind. Always, always, always be aware of that wind. Because bears rely mostly on their sense of smell, and if you are downwind of them, you’re going to be able to get pretty close before they can smell you. What else is wind taking away from them?”
“The sound of us,” Jace said, and regretted it immediately. He wanted to avoid all attention, but sometimes out here he got caught up in things despite himself. This was the sort of thing he loved, which was where the whole idea had come from. All the survival books, the adventure stories, the way he’d taught himself how to tie more than thirty knots with his eyes closed-his parents thought that they could hide him up here and have him be happy. And, he had to admit, there were moments when they were almost right.
Then the voices of the men in the quarry would return.
“Exactly,” Ethan said. “We always need to be aware of which way the wind is blowing. That’s a help with bears, but it’s critical to everything we do. We set up camp based on the way the wind is blowing, we anticipate weather changes based on what the wind does, we build our fires with the utmost respect for the wind. If you do not respect the wind in the backcountry, you will not last long.”
It was interesting, hearing all of the things that Ethan Serbin held in his mind. Jace was paying attention all the time, because if the killers came for him, he wanted to be ready. They’d come expecting Jace Wilson, the scared kid, and they’d run into somebody new: Connor Reynolds, who could make it on his own in the woods, who could outlast them. Connor Reynolds, a survivor. That’s who he was now.
Montana was better than the safe houses, better than being surrounded by people who knew you were in danger. That just fed the fear. They’d thrown every distraction they could at him, from movies to music to video games, and none of them worked, because none of them could pull his mind away from those memories, a dead man’s hair fanning out in the dim quarry waters, a knife tugging through the muscles of a throat, and, above all, a pair of oddly musical voices discussing where Jace might be and whether they had time to find him and kill him.
This was better. He hadn’t believed that it would be, because he’d be out here without anyone he knew, but he’d been wrong. Montana was better because it forced distraction. Video games and movies hadn’t been able to claim his mind. Out here, the land demanded his mind leave the memories. He had to concentrate on the tasks of the moment. There were too many hard things to do for any other option.
Connor Reynolds marched along the trail, and Jace Wilson rode secretly inside of him, and both of them were safe.
There were times, in the first week, when it felt like any other summer to Ethan. Or better, even. A good group of kids, by and large. He watched them and enjoyed them and tried not to think too much about the one who was there to hide. He’d heard nothing from Jamie Bennett, and that was good. Things were going smooth on her end, and he expected them to remain smooth on his.
They spent the first five nights at camps in five different meadows within a mile of their base. This was not the way it usually went. In a standard summer, the boys always slept in the bunkhouse, not on the trail, during the first week, allowing them some time to adjust and, hopefully, form bonds-sometimes they did, often they did not. Every day they went into the mountains, but every night they returned.
Not this summer. This summer they returned briefly by day and were back into the dark mountains by night because Ethan refused to be lulled into complacence by any promise of security he had been given. He believed Jamie Bennett, and he believed the summer would pass without incident. But he’d been tasked with being prepared and he did not take that lightly.
In an ordinary summer, he’d have more boys and a second counselor out here, and his route and campsites would be known to the county sheriff and shared with Allison on a GPS tracking device. This summer, he’d instructed the sheriff to speak to Allison if he needed to reach Ethan, and he’d turned off the computer tracking on his GPS. It still had a messaging function, allowing him to reach her through short text messages, but even his wife would be unaware of his precise location.
During those first days, they discussed first aid, studied with topographic maps and compasses, did all of the classroom work that Ethan knew they’d forget the instant they were in trouble on the trail. You couldn’t replicate the wilderness, though Ethan did try. His favorite exercise was a game he called the Wilder-a mispronunciation of an archaic word that was supposed to be pronounced “will-der.” Over the years he’d given up on saying it correctly, because the altered version felt right.
He explained the origin of bewildered. The word that described that sense of confusion and disorientation did not come from a term meaning “incomprehension” or “surprise” but from the same root word as wilderness. Those who were lost in a frightening and foreign land were the bewildered. Or they had been, back when wilderness was so common as to demand its own words for the experience of being lost in it. The word had been hijacked by civilization, of course, as everything had been. You could now say you’d been bewildered during a text-message exchange. But the term could be traced back to the verb wilder. That was the act of intentionally leading people astray, of causing them to become lost and disoriented.
When he started the game, Ethan would pick one of the boys and say, “All right, you’re the wilder for the day. See what you can do.”
The boy’s job was simple: Lead the group off trail in whatever direction he chose, for whatever reason he chose. Keep on going until Ethan brought it to a stop. Then Ethan would turn to the others, who were generally pissed off and irritated by the route that had been chosen-it was far more fun to be the wilder than to follow him-and he’d ask them to lead the way back.
This would begin with bungled efforts involving the maps and compasses. It rarely led anywhere good. They’d progress day by day, learning to read the terrain as they went, learning to create a mental archive of key landmarks, points of change. Learn little tricks, such as the rule that almost everyone, when faced with the choice between climbing and going downhill, went downhill. This was unwise, because hiking through a drainage was a hell of a lot more difficult than walking a ridgeline, but it was the standard choice of inexperienced woodsmen.
The game was useful prep for Ethan as well, useful for the real search-and-rescue calls, because he had the chance to watch how the boys reacted to the unfamiliar, to watch the mistakes in live action, and to understand the reasons for them. In the course of a game he demonstrated all the critical mistakes he had seen over the years, showed them how simple slips could become deadly, and taught them how to recover from the mistakes they made. Anticipate and recover, anticipate and recover. If you could do the first well, you were ahead of most people. If you could do both well? You were a survivor.
Some of the boys loved it. Some rolled their eyes. Some bitched and moaned the entire way. That was fine. The lessons were being ingrained, slowly but surely. Today they’d been at it for four hours straight, stumbling through the brush and learning fast just how difficult this country was to traverse when you got off trail, and they were thoroughly worn out when they got to the campsite he’d selected.
“Burning daylight,” he said. “We have to get shelters up.”
Groans in response; the kids were stretched out on the ground, sucking air.
“We’re all tired,” he said. “But we don’t rest right now. Because, of the priorities of survival, shelter is number three. Positive mental attitude is number one. We understand that. But without shelter, gentlemen? Without shelter, you’re going to be corpses. Proper shelter will keep you alive. Anyone remember the chain? The order of our priorities?”