and ice, and once he believed he was in the place where they’d flown above—it was hard to tell—there had been no sign of them at all. It was like he’d made them up. He’d found a covered place and stayed in that valley with Pup for a while, but it was rocky and cold, had barely any cover, and not close to enough food. So finally, he’d traveled back to the place he’d started out—the place where there were trees and caves, and rabbits that came out of their burrows to hop through the snow.
He was glad he did because the helicopters never came back.
Fear buzzed inside him, the memory of the two terrible winters before, and how he’d felt sure he was going to die so many times. But he and Pup had kept each other warm enough to stay alive, and the pocketknife had given them both a way to eat. Rabbits and field mice mostly, squirrels sometimes, the meat still warm and bloody. It’d gotten easier, second nature since that first kill, the one that had made Jak vomit in the snow, hot tears running down his cheeks as he’d gagged. And then he’d found that when he washed the meat in the river, the blood would draw the fish, and he could grab them with his bare hands.
Jak thought fish was better than mice. Pup liked both the same.
Pup hunted for them most of the time now that he was big and strong and could smell things Jak could not. Sometimes Pup even brought back a deer, and once a big thing he didn’t know the name for with antlers twice as wide as Jak could stretch his arms. That meat had lasted for a while, but then worms and bugs started crawling in it, so Jak left it for them to finish. He wondered if the other three boys who had gone over the cliff with him had been eaten by worms and bugs too but made himself think of something different.
Jak watched which berries the birds liked and picked those for himself, and he ate the same wild mushrooms that the rabbits and squirrels chewed on. He figured if the animals ate them, they were safe for him too. When the water was cold, he scooped handfuls of orange fish eggs from the river, the taste rich and salty.
He wanted to try to find his way out of the wilderness and back home, but each day was filled with feeding his hungry belly and making sure he had a safe place to sleep out of the wind. And he was worried that if he moved too far from where he was, his baka would never find him.
But in the last few days, he and Pup had traveled farther than they ever had before, over many smaller mountains and across a deep river that had almost swept Pup away, before he’d grabbed the loose skin at the back of his neck and pulled them both up and over the bank. There was one more cliff in front of them, and he wanted to stand on top of it and see if he could spot anything other than more trees and valleys and mountain ranges and wild rivers swirling with foamy white. Maybe he’d see other people, a town, and know which direction to head in.
A few fat snowflakes landed on his face and he stood, looking at his too-short pants. His clothes barely fit him anymore, and his toes were curled uncomfortably at the end of his broken boots. He wondered what he would do if he hadn’t found his way out of there, or if his baka still hadn’t found him by the time he outgrew them all the way. Thoughts of his baka still caused a twist of sadness, but when he tried to remember exactly what she looked like, her face was fading. And he couldn’t hear her voice in his head anymore the way he had at first, when he’d sworn she was scolding him for thinking about giving up, or when he needed to do something he didn’t want to do like skin a rabbit or eat its raw, warm meat. “Do it anyway,” she would have said. “You strong boy.”
Jak couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. Crying didn’t help anything, didn’t make surviving easier. His tears froze on his face, making him even colder than he’d been before, making him sleepy and useless.