He doesn’t take the canteen, and I lean forward, drawing in a breath. “What’s your name?” I ask, my voice broken.
His gaze roves the ground, then moves up to the sky, like he’s searching for the answer—his name lost somewhere in the woods. Taken from him. Snatched while he slept.
His eyes settle back on me. “Oliver Huntsman.”
“Are you from the boys’ camp?”
An icy wind sails over us, kicking up a layer of snow. His mouth opens, searching for the words, and then he nods.
I found him.
The Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys is not an elite facility, not a place where the wealthy send their sons. It’s a meager collection of cabins, a mess hall, and several neglected administration buildings—most of which were once the homes of early miners who panned the Black River for gold. Now it’s a place where desperate parents send their headstrong boys to have their minds and hearts reshaped, to turn them into docile, obedient sons. The worst come here, the ones who have used up their last chances, their last I’m sorrys, their last detentions or visits to the principal’s office. They come and they go. Each season a new batch—except for the few who spend their entire high school years at the camp. They learn how to survive in the woods, to make fire from flint, to sleep in the cold under the stars, to behave.
Two weeks earlier, the morning after the snowstorm had rolled down from the mountains, I woke to find my house draped in snow. Ice coated the windows, the roof moaned from the weight, and the walls bowed inward as if nails were being pushed free from the wood. The radio had said we’d get twelve to eighteen inches of snow. We got nearly four feet—in a single night. I crawled from bed, the cold leeching up from the floorboards, and went outside into the snow.
The landscape had changed overnight.
I walked down to the lake’s edge and found the forest dripping in white marshmallow fluff. But it wasn’t quiet and still like most winter mornings. Voices echoed across the frozen lake, coming from the boys’ camp. They shouted up into the trees. They stomped around in their heavy snow boots and sent birds screeching unhappily into the bleak morning sky.
“Morning!” Old Floyd Perkins called, waving a hand in the air as he trudged up the shore, head bowed away from the blowing wind, shoulders bent and stooped with time and age and gravity. When he reached me, he squinted as if he couldn’t see me clearly—cataracts clouding his already failing vision. “A bad winter,” he said, tilting his gaze upward, soft flakes falling over us. “But not as bad as some.” Mr. Perkins has lived at Jackjaw Lake most of his life. He knew my grandmother when she was still alive, and he lives at the far south end of the lake in a small cabin beside the boathouse store that he runs during the summer months—renting out canoes and paddleboats and selling ice cream sandwiches to the tourists under the hot, wavy sun. And every morning, he walks the shore of the lake, his gait slow and labored, long arms swinging at his sides, arthritis creaking in his joints. Even in the snow, he makes his morning rounds.
“What’s happening over at the camp?” I asked.
“A boy went missing last night.” He rubbed a knuckled hand across the back of his neck, gray hair poking out from his wool cap. “Vanished from his bunk during the storm.”
I looked past him up the shore to the camp. A few boys were shoveling snow away from their cabin doorways, while most of the others moved up into the forest, calling out a name I couldn’t make out.
“Talked to one of the counselors,” Mr. Perkins continued, nodding grimly, considering the gravity of the situation. “Boy might’ve just run away, made it down the mountain before the snow fell last night.”
The wind roiled up from the surface of the frozen lake, and it made me shiver. “But they’re looking for him up in the woods.” I crossed my arms over my chest and nodded to the trees beyond the camp.
“They have to be sure he didn’t get lost, I suppose.” He raised one thick gray eyebrow, his gaze solemn. “But if that boy went up into those woods last night, there’s a good chance he won’t make it back out. And they’ll never find him.”
I understood what he meant. The snow was deep it continued to fall—any tracks would be long buried by now. And the boy himself might be buried as well. Even Fin would have a hard time tracking his scent in this.
“I hope he did run away,” I said. “I hope he made it down the road.” Because I knew the outcome if he hadn’t. Even though the boys at camp learn wilderness skills and how to build snow shelters in tree wells, I doubted any of them could really survive a night out in the cold. During a blizzard. On their own.
The lake creaked and snapped along the shore as the ice settled. And Mr. Perkins asked, “You lose power last night?” He glanced behind me up into the trees, where my home sat hidden in the pines.
I nodded. “You?”
“Yep,” he answered, then cleared his throat. “It’s going to be a while before that road clears. Before the power’s back on again.” He looked back at me, and the soft squint of his eyes and the wrinkles lining his brow made me think of my grandmother. “We’re on our own,” he said finally.
The only road down the mountain was blocked. And the nearest town of Fir Haven—a forty-five-minute drive—was too far away to walk. We were stuck.
Mr. Perkins tipped his head at me, a grave gesture, a certainty that this was going to be another tough winter, before continuing up the edge of the lake toward the marina. Toward the boathouse and his home.
I stood listening to the shouts of boys fanning out into the trees, the sky growing dark again, another storm settling over the lake. I knew how ruthless the forest could be, how unforgiving.
If a boy was lost out there, he likely wouldn’t survive the night.
It’s still dark—the deepest kind of dark. Winter dark.
The boy, Oliver Huntsman, follows me through the trees, stumbling over roots, coughing—gasping for air. He might not make it out of the Wicker Woods; he might drop dead in the snow behind me. He stops to lean against a tree, his body trembling, and I walk back to his side and wrap an arm around him. He is taller than I am and broad in the shoulders, but together we continue through the dark. He smells like the forest, like green. And when we reach the border of the Wicker Woods, we step over the threshold and back out into the open.
I release my hold on him, and he bends forward, gripping his knees and gasping for air. His lungs make a strange rasp sound with each breath. He’s spent too many nights alone out here, in the forest, in the cold. Where the creeping, crawling sounds of unknowable things rest just out of sight, and fear becomes a voice in the back of his mind—nagging and threading along sleepless thoughts. A person can go mad in these trees. Hatter mad.
Beside us, the sound of rushing water beneath the frozen surface of the Black River is both palliative and eerie. Oliver glances up at the night sky, his expression slack, in awe, as if he hasn’t seen the stars in weeks.
“We need to keep moving,” I say.
His body shakes, skin pale and muted. I need to get him inside, out of this snow and wind. Or the cold could still kill him.
I fold my arm around him again, hand against his ribs where I can feel the rise and fall of each breath, and we march downriver until Jackjaw Lake yawns open ahead of us—frozen solid out to its center.
“Where are we?” he asks, his voice thin, a crisp edge to each word.
“We’re almost to my house,” I tell him. And then because I think maybe he means something more—his memory blotted over—I add, “We’re back at Jackjaw Lake.”