Craig Davidson - Cataract City

When the rain let up we exited the glade, Dunk leading and me trudging behind. Mist rolled over our sneakers, perfuming the air with the scent of every green thing.

Late-afternoon sun baked down, prickling the burn on my neck and the raw bites on my arms. Dunk and I were beyond tired now. It seemed as if every topic of conversation — our favourite TV show ( The Beachcombers ), our favourite gum (Gold Rush, which came in a cloth sack, the gum shaped like gold nuggets) — funnelled towards a senseless argument.

When you and your best friend start arguing about bubble gum, you settle on silence as the best policy.

The cave lay halfway up an embankment studded with straggly pines. The incline was rinsed with grey stones each the size of a baby’s fist. Dunk picked one up and tossed it into the cave. It plinked somewhere past the mouth, giving way to a series of soft tinkles.

“Sounds empty,” he said.

The cave fell away in layers of flat grey rock. We stood under the overhang taking in the scent of our own stink, sweat and grime mixed with wood sap and smoke and dirt and dead bugs. I was aware of my body in ways that a twelve-year-old boy probably shouldn’t be. My guts were full of hardening concrete. Moon-slices of blood rimmed my fingernails.

We spent the next half-hour gathering firewood. I wondered if we ought to build the fire outside the cave, in the open where someone could see it. A helicopter maybe, searching for two lost boys. Late that afternoon I thought I’d heard the whuppa-whuppa of helicopter blades; they sounded incredibly close, just overhead, and a part of me actually believed that I’d look up and see it: a helicopter just like the one rich tourists rented out to get a bird’s-eye view of the Falls, the one that had its own landing pad on the roof of the Hilton Fallsview hotel.

But when I’d peered above me, the sky was empty. Maybe what I’d heard was the drone of mosquitoes. Afterwards the notion was one I continued to fixate on: hundreds of searchers looking for us. Perhaps hikers had stumbled across Mahoney’s van after it had showed up on a police all-points-bulletin sheet. If so, the cops and a small citizen’s brigade might be stomping through the woods right now. They’d have dogs with incredible noses hot on our scent; they’d be armed with walkie-talkies and bullhorns. If the wind died down and I strained my ears, I’d probably hear the distant barks of the search dogs.

But as shadows thickened and the colour drained out of the sky until only black was left, I heard no dogs. The mental image of a search faded. I trudged into the cave, where I made a teepee of sticks with the scrounged wood.

“We can’t do it there,” Dunk said. “Smoke will fill the cave and we’ll get affix … affix … affixated.”

“Asphyxiated.”

“Whatever. We’ll be dead .”

“So why don’t we light it here and move it out front? We only got one match.”

“Whatever.”

Dunk dug the matchbook out. The match looked so pitiful, half bent with red phosphorus flaking off the head. I almost didn’t care if it lit. If it didn’t we’d probably die tonight. If it did, we were simply granted another day. The sun would rise and our lot would be the same: starving, thirsty, alone and lonely. We’d be more lost, more bitten and scratched and burnt under the merciless sun, and tomorrow night we wouldn’t bother building a fire. We’d sit in the dark and freeze to death. Or the things in the woods with us would sense our weakness and take their due. Either way, we died. The only difference was that we’d suffer a little longer. Now or tomorrow or the day after. It was going to happen, right?

Dunk lit the fire. One match. Textbook . Our Scout leader would have shit a brick. We moved flaming sticks to the mouth of the cave. The fire sent up an orange cone that obscured everything beyond it, locking us in with its warmth and light. For the first time all day, I felt safe.

Dunk rooted through the pack. We both knew there was nothing in it. He pulled out the candy bar wrapper — it seemed like we’d eaten that about a billion years ago — and inspected it for leftover crumbs of chocolate. Finding none, he flicked it into the fire. The heat caved it in like a flower blooming in reverse. He picked up a pebble and put it in his mouth.

“Dad says if you suck on a stone it gets the saliva flowing so you don’t feel as thirsty.”

I put a pebble in my mouth, relishing its coolness beneath my tongue.

“Banana cream pie,” I said.

“What?”

“My mom says that if you, um, really concentrate and pretend you’re eating your favourite foods, you feel as full as if you’ve actually eaten them.”

“Yeah?”

“She says.”

Dunk scratched the ant stings on his legs — the heat was irritating my stings, too — and said: “Shepherd’s pie.”

“Tootsie Rolls.”

“Tollhouse cookies.”

“Sour cream and onion chips.”

“What brand?”

“Pringles.”

“Nice,” said Dunk. “Hungarian goulash.”

“Hawaiian pizza.”

“Kraft caramels.”

“Ballpark franks.”

Dunk dropped his head between his legs. “I don’t think it’s working.”

“Are you thinking about them? I mean, hard ? You really have to picture it.”

“I’m seeing them … it just doesn’t work for me, Owe. Sorry.”

You have a wild imagination . That was what my parents said to me all the time. Having a wild imagination wasn’t so hot sometimes. I spat my pebble out.

Dunk lay on the cave floor and shaped his body around the fire. The cave stones glittered around his head, firelight making them move like insects.

I said: “You shouldn’t sleep with your ear on the ground. Bovine …”

I laboured over it — one simple word, two syllables: Bovine. Bovine the word was attached to Bovine the person, who was attached to many other things: schools and malls and phones and pizza parlours and my parents … and to policemen who helped kids who’d lost their way. And all those things were so, so far away.

“Bovine what?”

“Bovine says that earwigs crawl in your ears when you sleep. Said his dad had to bury a guy whose whole brain was eaten away by earwigs.”

Instinctively, Dunk cupped a hand over his ear. “How?”

“An earwig just crawled into the guy’s ear. Guy didn’t even know. Our brains don’t feel any pain, right? No nerves. If it was just one earwig, no big deal. But it was a female earwig, man — she laid eggs . They hatched inside the guy’s head and they started eating. Like, a giant buffet.

“But guess what? We only use ten percent of our brains, so it took a long time. Like, he’d forget where his car keys were. He was blinking all the time and couldn’t stop. Finally he couldn’t even remember his dog’s name. When he died Bovine says his dad took the body into the funeral parlour to prepare it for the casket. When he touched the guy’s face it caved right in. A million earwigs ran out of the eye sockets and nostrils and mouth. His dad almost went crazy on the spot, but he smoked a cigar to calm down.”

Dunk pulled his hand away from his ear and laid his head down again. “Bovine’s full of shit.”

He was right, of course. Bovine was so full of shit he squeaked. I don’t know why I’d even told the story. Maybe I’d wanted to scare Dunk just a little.

I’d been worried more or less permanently since Bruiser Mahoney turned off the main road into the wilderness. The worry had sunk so deep inside that I could only feel it now when it surged up from my bones: fear bitter in my mouth, thrashing behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands — but it was a needful terror and perhaps the last truly childlike instance of terror I’d ever feel.