Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

As much as I craved his warmth, it was impossible to let myself take it. Pulling away, I lifted my pack out of the boat and dug through it. ‘Here. Modern technology to the rescue.’

I gave him a set of hand warmers and slipped another pair into my own gloves, glancing at the yawning darkness between the trees. ‘Packs first and then back for the canoe?’

But Lucas was already putting his pack on backward – over his stomach – and flipping the boat up without any help, balancing the yoke on his shoulders. Grabbing my own pack, I ducked out of the way and turned the flashlight on.

‘Too bright.’ He muttered, and I could hear the hurt from my rebuff slinking into the woods with him. ‘You can see that a mile away.’

So I followed blindly into the black, walking behind his boat-balancing shadow, while he whispered warnings of rocks and roots. As my eyes adjusted I could see spots of ground through the snow, other tracks besides ours, which were too big and too evenly spaced to be anything but human. The Boundary Waters was open year-round and winter campers came for ice fishing and dogsledding, but I couldn’t imagine who would be here now, in the transition between seasons when paddling became a dangerous gamble. You could get trapped in the middle of nowhere if a sudden freeze made the lakes unpassable. You could tip your canoe and fall into water with a temperature barely above freezing, water so cold that it sucked you down like Superior, and maybe you would drown or maybe you’d crawl your way out into hypothermia. Either way there was no help waiting for you. There was no 911 here, no phones, no outposts, no emergency services. There were a thousand ways to die in the Boundary Waters, and all of them were alone.

When we reached the next lake and emerged from under the canopy, the moon felt like a spotlight, a hundred times brighter than it had been before. I looked for the tracks again, but they were gone.

We loaded up and pushed out into a smaller channel lined with collapsed drifts of marsh grass. The ice was thicker here in the shallows and I punched at it with the oar, breaking a path into the open water around snow-covered boulders. We veered wildly in some places and not wide enough in others. The canoe scraped the bottom several times and at one point we lodged on a rock shelf, but not hard enough to ground. I shoved us off the shelf with the paddle and we tried another path, then another, breaking our way through by trial and error. It seemed to take forever for the channel to widen again and I wondered if we’d be forced to portage until finally the banks receded, our oars stopped hitting bottom, and we came into a glossy moon mirror of a lake.

This one was smaller and it didn’t take us long to paddle to the center, powered by Lucas’s long, sure strokes. When we reached the middle, I rested my oar across the gunwales and slipped a hand under my coat, gingerly feeling the edges of the bandage. It took a minute to register that Lucas had stopped paddling, too.

‘Look up.’ Lucas breathed, and I did. Overhead the cloudless sky showcased thousands of glowing and pulsing stars. As our paddle ripples faded off the surface of the water, the pinpoints of light reflected back from below, and it felt like we were floating in the middle of an endless galaxy.

‘I missed this.’

I’d forgotten how quiet it was, the total silence of the Boundary Waters. It was nothing like living at the mouth of Superior, which consumed everything in its white noise of wind and waves, and I understood why I hadn’t been back here, why I’d never come looking for the necklace. It wasn’t fear of a dead man. The dead man found me in my dreams no matter where I was. I hadn’t returned for the same reason Dad couldn’t; we didn’t want to have this without her.

I drew a shaky breath as I gazed from horizon to horizon. ‘Did you know we’re made of stardust?’

‘Really?’

‘Cosmic explosions from before time was time.’

She’d told me. It was written in the note she’d left on my nightstand before she’d tucked me in my bed, brushed a salty kiss over my forehead, and locked herself in the bathroom to eat two bottles of aspirin.

We’re molecules of living, breathing stardust, Maya, and just like the rocks, we’re all different. Some people are strong and beautiful and they can withstand glaciers. Others are weak and brittle, and the best thing we can do is birth a gemstone.

She hadn’t signed it with a goodbye or any words of advice or regret. There wasn’t even a Love, Mom at the bottom. Just a note about stardust, before she tried to turn herself back into it.

‘Then why don’t we shine?’ Lucas asked, pulling me out of my head. I slid my hand up to touch the agate pendant, making sure it was still there before grabbing the oar and setting my jaw against the fire that was going to start raging in my side.

‘Maybe we’re not far enough away to see it.’

We paddled into a larger lake and then portaged in a direction I’d never gone. The trail was a narrow, steep incline and the snow made everything more slippery. I fell twice and hit my head on the back of the canoe once. Just when I was about to break down and ask if we could make camp, Lucas froze on the peak of the hill.

‘What is it?’

‘Shh.’ He hoisted the canoe down and propped it on a fallen log, then scanned the perimeter. I held my breath, trying not to make the slightest noise. Finally, he pointed to a spot ahead and to our left.

‘There.’

He dropped his pack and cut away from the path, his form disappearing in the trees.

‘What?’ I asked again, and again he shushed me. Sighing, I dropped my pack, too, and picked my way behind him through the standing and fallen trees. Gradually my eyes adjusted and I concentrated on Lucas’s feet, watching where his heels landed and putting my boots in the same spots. When we scaled logs, he helped me over and I was too weak to resist. We hiked for at least ten minutes, to the point where I started panicking we’d lose our way back to the canoe. Was he leading me to his father, to their hidden campsite? I’d left the gun in the pack and had no idea how to find my way back to it alone. Then a familiar scent cut through the woods and I lifted my head to see a faint, flickering light eclipsed by Lucas’s silhouette. A campfire.

We slowed down and approached cautiously, using the muffling effects of the snow to our advantage.

‘ – too goddamn early to be breaking camp. You’re insane.’

‘I want to get a jump on today before the storm hits. No chance of finding Blackthorn in a whiteout.’

That drew a groan from the other person. I leaned carefully around a tree trunk and tried to count heads at the campsite, which was still a good two hundred feet away. Lucas crept even further up and crouched behind a boulder. I was calculating the risk of trying to join him when a familiar voice spoke up.

‘We’re not going to find shit until sunrise anyway, which is still an hour away.’

The voice belonged to Micah, the US Forest Service ranger who’d volunteered to be part of the Congdon search party, the veteran who had no problem with crazy people. He’d been at all the planning meetings and had kept in contact with Dr Mehta even after the expedition had fallen through. I could only see one other head beside his, crouched near the fire.

The rangers talked for a few more minutes, discussing routes and lakes. I couldn’t tell, though, which Blackthorn they were looking for. Did these two represent the search party Dr Mehta had assured me was still looking for Josiah? Or had they been alerted of the kidnapping and sent to find and arrest us? As I tried to get a better look at the man tending the fire, Micah stood up and walked straight toward us. I ducked behind the tree as the crunch of snow and pine needles became louder and louder. Holding my breath, pulling my legs in, I pressed myself into the base of the tree trunk. Silence. Then came the sound of a zipper and a thick stream of urine hitting the ground. I closed my eyes and waited until he finished and moved back to the camp. I heard the bang of a pot on the grate just as Lucas appeared at my side.