Chapter 6

Eighteen years have passed, and afternoon sunshine filters through leafy trees, laying aimless channels of light on the forest floor on a most perfect spring day. Pete Bartram contemplates his death while looking at the top of his hiking boots. They feel like cinder blocks strapped to his feet. The hide is stained and wrinkled after three days of continuous walking in the woods. They had felt good and new when he first entered the forest. He had been able to smell the new leather even amid the pungent, earthy odor of actinomycete spores stirred up by recent heavy rains.

It was the rain that had sealed his fate. After two days without food or drink, he collapsed from exhaustion next to a rotted tree stump. Inside the hollow stump, he discovered rainwater pooled at the bottom. He drank from a cupped hand, forced himself to swallow water cloudy with mud and tiny beetles. He had thanked God for saving his life. He spent most of that night dry heaving. Today he had debilitating headache and felt too weak to move.

Bartram sat with his back to the tree stump from which he had drunk bacteria-laden rainwater. He had accepted the fact that he was hopelessly lost. He had already blamed and forgiven himself-not only for failing to leave a back trail, but also for his ignorance of survival skills. The most useful things he had brought with him were good boots, a granola bar, and a cell phone, and he had misused all but the boots. He had consumed the granola bar only an hour into his excursion. He had not even been hungry. His cell phone's compass app may have helped him escape the woodland maze, but he had wasted the battery repeatedly trying to call his mother and 9-1-1 without a signal.

When he realized these things, he called himself worse things than he had ever called an enemy. Then he had collapsed and sobbed.

The notion of dying alone and scared in the middle of the woods didn't upset him like it had before. He let it come. He entertained it like a sales pitch during a cold call. "It will be like falling asleep. General anesthesia for all the pain of your life. Let me show you some figures." It was all weirdly calming.

He reached into his pocket. Next to the dead cell phone, he felt the Mead Memo notepad that he used to record the names of bird species. He removed the small pencil from the spiral, flipped to a blank page, and began writing.

"To whomever finds this," he began. "My name is Peter Bartram. I live at 510 Crystal Lake Hwy with my mother, Jeanine Bartram. Please tell her that I love her."

He looked at this last sentence for a while.

"I left to go bird watching on Thurs at approx 3pm. I entered the woods behind my mother's house. I followed a path that runs for 1/4 mile. I took it to its end and continued straight for a mile or maybe less and then turned off. It was hard walking. I can't remember where I went after that. I thought I was heading toward the lake. I never found it."

He paused.

"If by some miracle I am saved, I think I will find a new hobby," he wrote.

He signed his name. Below that, he added as a postscript, "I'm sorry." He looked at that too. He put the pencil back into the spiral. He left the notepad open to the page he'd written and tucked it into the front pocket of his shirt.

Bartram let his mind drift.

He was at summer camp. Nine-years-old. It was morning. The rest of the kids in his cabin were still asleep. A blue jay landed on the window sill. Bartram had never seen a bird like that. The feathers on its wings and tail looked like they were covered with tiles of stained glass. It cocked its head at him. Bartram mimicked it. He named the bird Blue and saw it every morning. Every morning, they exchanged the same silent pleasantries before going about their respective days. The nine-year-old felt special that the bird had befriended him out of all the other kids.

That was the same summer one of the campers drowned in the lake. Bartram had been affected by it more than the other kids. Everyone avoided Jason because his face didn't look right, but Bartram, who had a lisp that he never managed to overcome in life, thought he was all right. Bartram seldom spoke to anyone at length except for his mother. Around Jason, he discovered that he had a lot to say. Jason didn't talk much that he could remember, but the kid had smiled when he told him about his best friend Blue.

And then Jason was gone. Bartram remembered standing on the lakeshore with the rest of the children while counselors repeatedly dove under the water. They came up empty every time.

Jason died. Bartram lived on.

Only by twelve years, he thought.

He fell asleep.

When he awakened, the sun had floated closer to the horizon. It pulled at the tree shadows. It pulled them long and thin.

He stared straight ahead into the thicket for several minutes and had the notion that one of the tree trunks was alive and moving toward him.

The panic he felt was only a diaphanous veil compared to the suffocating anxiety of yesterday or the day before. His body was weak, and the chemical processes inside his brain were slow and deficient.

When the tree reached him, he saw that it was really a man. When he looked into the face, he saw that it was Jason. And this seemed reasonable to him at the moment. If Jason was dead, then Bartram had died. And here they were, seeing each other for the first time after twelve years.

But neither of them was dead. And Jason was not looking at Bartram for the first time in years. He had been watching him for days. He had tracked him during this and many other bird-watching hikes into the woods, blending completely and seemlessly into the thicket, usually standing no more than fifty yards away at any given moment.

Jason crouched down in front of Bartram, who smiled and said almost inaudibly:

"Will I get to see Blue again?"

Jason tilted his head like an animal does when hearing an interesting sound. One side of his mouth was upturned into a perpetual grin that Bartram's dying mind managed to remember after all these years. To Bartram, the grin signified affirmation. He would see Blue again. Then his heart stopped beating.

Jason watched intently as whatever was in his eyes fizzled and left nothing behind.

Then he unsheathed a fifteen-inch-long Hudson Bay Camp Knife and went to work on Bartram.