Craig Davidson - Cataract City

The stream was now narrow enough that Dunk could straddle it, his feet on either side. And now the woods changed, too. Where before everything was bright green, shot through with the gold of sunlight through the leaves, by afternoon it changed to the denser, darker green of pine needles so thick the light could not penetrate: the sunlight lay on top of the needles, making it feel as if we were insects picking our way across a saw blade.

We followed the stream, which by then — as we’d probably both admitted to ourselves but hadn’t dared vocalize yet — was only a sad trickle as it cut through a stand of pines. Big grey spiders suspended themselves on webs between the conifers. Dunk touched his finger to the centre of one web. A spider picked its way down like an inverted tightrope walker, the gossamer bowing with its weight. It stopped before reaching Dunk’s finger, thrown off by the heat maybe, then danced onto his fingertip. Dunk held it in his palm: a bead of swirling, concentrated smoke.

“It’s not poisonous,” he said, returning the spider to its web.

“How do you know?”

“Well, it didn’t bite me.”

After that we didn’t worry about walking through the webs. It felt nasty stomping like Godzilla through Tokyo, but we wanted to get back to our homes. The pines thinned to a stretch of waist-high bushes hung with bright red berries — the kind our scoutmaster called bird berries, because only birds could eat them. I was so hungry. All I could remember eating last night was licorice at the arena and a chunk of raccoon. I stared longingly at the berries hanging in plump bunches — couldn’t I try just a few? But I pictured my stomach swelling and splitting, my red-tinted guts spilling out like a frog’s who’d been force-fed Alka-Seltzer.

The air was shimmery with mosquitoes. Could you die of mosquito bites? I pictured my body full of tiny pinpricks where mosquitoes had pierced me, an empty skin-coloured balloon blowing in the breeze. Would a hiker find me, fold me up like a love letter, slip me in an envelope and mail me back to my parents?

Dunk shrugged the pack off. The straps left creases in his shoulders. We sat on a lichen-covered rock. The stream — what was left of it — trickled around the rock and down a shallow slope, disappearing into a series of puddles dulled with pond scum and alive with bugs.

We split the barbecue chips, which had been crushed into shrapnel during the hike. Dunk gave me one of the Cokes, warm and salty-tasting. I drank it too fast and got a head-rush. I belched and put the can in the pack. Maybe we could fill it with water later.

Dunk took the nudie magazine out. Its pages were greasy, as if they’d been sprayed with vegetable oil. The women were different than in the Baby Blue Movies. They had bruises. Some had weird scars on their bellies and others had black bars over their eyes. The women without bars stared with dead expressions, spreading their pinkish parts open.

Dunk said, “That girl has a black eye.” He threw the magazine on the ground.

The sun slid across the sky to hang above the blue hills to the west. I shut my eyes and saw my parents at the kitchen table. My father was wearing black-and-white-striped overalls, the kind prisoners wore in old movies. My mother’s fingers steepled under her lips, as if she were suffering in some manner I couldn’t name.

Dunk reached down for the nudie mag and stuffed it back inside the pack. “We can use it to start a fire.”

There was no choice but to keep going in hopes the stream would pick up again. The ground was as soft as stale sponge cake and the bugs were now everywhere —midges, maddening brainless midges that rose in seething clouds and flew up my nose, into my mouth and ears. They weren’t even worth slapping; it worked best just to wave at them, batting them away from my face.

My sneaker punched through a stable-looking scrim of dirt into a syrupy pit of stinky mud. I reefed my foot back but the greedy mud held on to my Chuck Taylor, pulling it halfway off my foot; mud flowed over the lip and into the toe. I leaned on a sapling — it cracked when I put my weight on it, rotted roots bulging out of the ground — and pried my sneaker up. Mud spattered to the ground like black pancake batter. I wiped out my sneaker with a handful of yellowed grass and put it back on. “My mom’s gonna kill me for mucking up my new shoes,” I said.

We were standing in the middle of a lowland marsh, what my dad called a muskeg. All around were dead trees, many of them split in half by lightning or snapped crossways under their own weight. Their bark was stripped and their trunks Swiss-cheesed by termites or woodpeckers. It struck me that the swampy ground was no more than a thin crust covering a vast pool of decay: a mulch of rotted trees and vegetation and the carcasses of whatever idiotic creatures might willingly inhabit such a place. Rising from still pools of water were more Chia Pet hummocks tangled over with vivid purple, ivy-like weeds. The air sang with midges and the dragonflies who dined on them.

“What now?” Dunk asked.

I squinted against the iron-grey sky. Was that a hint of greenery beyond the dismal grey? Maybe the stream re-established itself?

I took a tentative step, putting weight on my forward foot. My toe sunk down like it would on a soccer field soaked with a week’s worth of rain; dingy water filled the depression. Up rose that horrid gassy stink.

Dunk stepped past, hitching the straps on his backpack. “Come on,” he said grimly.

By the time we were deep into the muskeg — and it didn’t take long — we couldn’t have turned back if we’d wanted to. We hopped from one hummock to the next, clambering over blowdowns carefully so we wouldn’t stab ourselves on the sun-bleached sticks. Before long those maddening flashes of green were visible in every direction — we may have even turned ourselves around, looking back at land we’d already traversed.

Dunk’s shoulders hunched with the determined gait of a mule plodding into a stiff wind. I wished he’d taken a second to think before offering us both up to this awful grey netherworld, but Dunk didn’t operate that way.

He hopped from an oozy patch of ground onto a hummock that wasn’t a hummock at all — more a toupée of grass covering a sinkhole. Watching him sink through was comical, as pratfalls can be: his hands flew up like a supplicant at church. Hallelujah, Lawd! He tilted, grabbing for a jutting branch and bellowing in frustration when it snapped in his hand. He fell into a patch of dead sedge bristling with insects and lay there for a second. Drawing his arms under him, he performed a clumsy pushup. His foot loosened from the muck with a sucking plop . His leg was dripping with black sludge all the way to his crotch, his sock hanging off his foot.

“Sweet fuckity fuck .”

He rolled his sleeve up, exhaled heavily and plunged his arm into the black hole. His eyes squeezed shut, lips skinned back from his teeth. Dribbles of muck speckled his chin. He rooted around in the blackness, his arm jerking spastically: either he was tearing through roots and sifting through brittle insect carapaces or else he’d felt something brush against his arm — something that lived down there, which I hardly wanted to envision.

When he withdrew his sneaker, it didn’t look like a sneaker at all; more like a dead, black-encrusted rodent. A thick stream of goo ran out of the heel, resembling the old motor oil Dad drained from his car. Dunk ripped a spongy beard of moss off a nearby tree and swabbed off his sneaker, then stood and surveyed our position. Just hummocks and shattered trees and whatever lurked under the ground.

I pictured the muck beneath us becoming deeper and more treacherous. Would it get deep enough to suck us under? What lived in those festering black pools? The creatures who did were probably blind — no light down there, right? Blind but tenacious, as you’d need to be to live in sludge. Blind and tenacious and hungry .