She so badly wanted to shout at him: I don’t hear a stream. Do you hear a stream? No, because there’s no fucking stream here. We’re lost! How long have you been leading us in the wrong direction? How fucking hard can it be to distinguish between north, south, east, and west? You’re the great outdoorsman. You have the compass and a map. Come on, Tonto, figure it out!
He turned to look at her, as if she’d screamed so loudly in her head that some atavistic part of his brain had picked up on it.
‘It should be here, Andrea,’ he said. ‘I’ve been heading east, following the compass.’
He sounded bewildered, and he looked like a small boy. Some of her anger at him diminished.
‘Show me,’ she said.
He handed over the compass, and pointed a manicured finger at the map. He was right: they seemed to be heading east, and at their rate of progress they should have been at the Little Head Stream by now. She tapped the compass, more out of habit than anything else.
Slowly, the needle turned 180 degrees.
‘What the hell?’ said Chris. He took the instrument back from his wife. ‘How can it be doing that?’
He jabbed at the compass with his own finger. The needle didn’t move.
‘Could we have been going west all this time?’ asked Andrea.
‘No. I can tell east from west. We were heading east. I think.’
For the first time, he sounded genuinely worried. They had an emergency kit, and some food, but neither of them had any desire to spend the night out in the woods without the proper equipment. In fact, they weren’t fans of sleeping outdoors at the best of times. Both of them liked their creature comforts, and a long day’s hike was made worthwhile by the promise of a little luxury and a good meal at the end of it.
She looked up at the sky again, but there were only glimpses of it to be seen between the trees. They were thicker here, and more ancient. Some of them must have been centuries old, their trunks distended and tumorous, their branches like broken limbs that had been set wrongly. The terrain was rocky in places, and there was a stench on the air. It smelled like old stew made with innards.
‘Maybe you could climb a tree and get our bearings,’ she said, and giggled.
‘That’s not helpful,’ said Chris.
He scowled at her, and she giggled again.
She didn’t know why she was laughing. They were lost, and while it wasn’t as bad as being adrift in the woods when snow was falling and there was a chance that they might freeze to death, their cell phones had no signal, they still only had limited supplies, and the temperature was bound to fall once darkness came. Nobody knew that they were out here, either. They’d checked out of their motel in Rangeley shortly after dawn, just in case they found somewhere more interesting along the way north, and their car was now parked on the main street of Falls End. It might be days before someone noticed that it hadn’t moved. She’d told Chris that they should have made a provisional booking somewhere in Falls End, but he’d replied that it was too early to start thinking about that, and the town seemed quiet anyway, and if they made a start on the hike they’d be back by late afternoon. That was one of his other faults: he hated committing to anything in advance, even a motel room in a small town. When they went out to dinner in a new city, he would walk her from restaurant to restaurant examining each menu in turn, always looking for the perfect food in the perfect place. There had been evenings where they had walked and debated for so long that everywhere good was either closed or full by the time Chris made a decision, and they’d ended up eating burgers in a bar, her husband simmering at missed opportunities.
‘And what’s that stink?’ said Chris.
‘It smells like cheap meat was boiling in a pot, and then it went off,’ she replied.
‘It might mean that there’s a house nearby.’
‘Out here? I didn’t see any road.’
‘You notice how thick the trees are? There could be a four-lane highway a stone’s throw from here, and we wouldn’t know about it until we heard a truck.’
There’s no highway out here, she wanted to say. There isn’t even a hiking trail. We lost that