“Tell me about the one brother,” he urged.
“Joey?” She could almost see Joey’s blond crew cut and wide smile, his heavy glasses perpetually slipping off his nose. “The best way I could describe Joey is something one of my sister’s boyfriends told us once. I think he was Buddhist. He said there are some people who have lived so many lives and gotten so evolved that they have nothing left to learn on Earth. So they can go on to Nirvana.”
“Sounds vaguely familiar, but I haven’t studied eastern religions.”
“The point is that of those people, only a few are so cool, so advanced, that they choose to go back and live one more life, not so they can learn something but so that others can learn something from them. Those people are special.”
“So Joey’s a Buddhist?”
“No. Joey’s special.”
She walked faster. Another mile or so of the same and he insisted on stopping, fishing some snacks out of the backpack and a bottle of water for them to share as the supply was depleting.
“This is ridiculous,” she muttered, sitting on a boulder just off the trail. “How big did they say this park was? One hundred and fifty-six miles? How do we know we weren’t at the very south of it? It might take us days to walk it.”
He downed another handful of trail mix. “It is what it is.”
“How can you be so calm about all this?”
“Didn’t you say let what happens, happen?”
A rustling in the nearby trees brought a surge of hope—another hiker maybe who had a more detailed map of the park or something equally useful, like a car parked nearby?—but when no one appeared, it unnerved her.
“Hello?” she called out loudly. “Is someone there?”
The noise continued, moving closer, and Mason moved in front of her. “Shhh,” he said.
She looked at him in alarm and whispered, “Why?”
“Stay still,” he said softly and picked up her discarded walking stick before raising it.
Her heart beat faster. She had been in such a rush that she hadn’t given much thought to the fact that the terrain was wilderness and there might be something scary lurking within it. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
“Hello!” The walkie-talkie she had been trying on and off sounded loudly, making them both jump. “Are you there?”
The sound came closer, and Mason grabbed the walkie-talkie and held the speaker against his shirt to mute it.
A lumbering shape became visible in the trees as it got nearer, something black, and Mason whispered, “Back away slowly.”
“Are you there?” the walkie-talkie sounded again, muffled, projecting into his shirt.
“I’m here,” he said into it, low. “Wait a minute.”
“Oh! There you are! We got you!”
The sound of a helicopter came faintly from the west, the frantic rustling at the sudden noise driving the hidden shape into full visibility.
Fuck! She froze in place as a black bear, smaller than she would have thought, but hey, a fucking bear emerged onto the trail.
Mason raised the stick higher. The clamor of the helicopter as it approached got louder and louder, and the wind stirred up by the blades beat against the treetops.
“We see you!” came through the walkie-talkie. Her would-be savior pushed her back farther behind him, trying to face the bear alone, but she resisted.
It would have to eat them both, goddamit, and would that fucking helicopter land already!
After what may have been no more than a second, but felt a lot longer, the bear, on all four legs, loped back into the safety of the trees as the helicopter descended and both she and Mason breathed an audible sigh of relief.
He grinned at her as the helicopter landed on the trail in front of them, and Boyd, still in his uniform, considerably the worse for wear, stained and dirty, got out and ran to them.
“Nice timing. You made it to something on the west side of the park, I take it?” Mason asked.
“Sure did. We were getting a little worried about you, actually, because it turns out the distance going north was a lot less than going west, so when you didn’t turn up before us—”
“We stopped,” Mason said.
“A lot,” she added. “On the trail, I mean. I’m afraid we were probably pretty slow due to me. And did you see there was a bear right there? Mason held him off.”
Mason shook his head. “I did not. The helicopter did.”
“A bear? Was that what that was?” Boyd asked.
“That or an extremely big wolverine,” she joked. “But did you call somebody I hope? To make sure people knew we were safe?”
“Sure did. As soon as we got to the ranger’s station we called Miss White.”