Losing the thread
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
When Mom returned, she tucked the Witch under the pillow, put her feet up on the spare tire, and we both tried to sleep through the restless twitching left over in her mind.
The sun, not the Witch woke us up in the morning. “Dog doo!” Mom said, sitting up straight without even checking with the Witch. “I was so preoccupied last night I must have forgotten to set an alarm. The trail’s gonna be jammed!!”
She took a poop juice pill from the first aid kit, filled a bag to the zipper with kibble, checked to make sure the Witch’s juice box was full, and we set off.
The car kennel welcomed us with a jack-o-lantern’s gap-toothed smile. “Hey look, Mom, there are empty spots!” I turned to see if she was relieved, but she wasn’t beside me. She was frozen several paces away, staring at a sign and lost in thought.
“Fee envelopes!” she said when I joined her. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Don’t touch!” I squeaked. “Envelopes are the mailman’s favorite type of boobytrap. People lick those things. It’s probably crawling with boogeyvirus.”
“All that fretting about parking… Why didn’t it occur to me that there would be fee envelopes?” Mom asked the envelope dispenser like it dispensed advice, too.
The trees were too socially distant and their branches too scraggly to make much shade. Trail dust gathered behind me as I walked, like the cloud that follows a galloping horse when the hero rides in to save the day. It ploofed from under Mom’s clunky steps like she was walking with elephant paws. It got in my eyes and stuck to the gooey spots in the crater where Mom’s bee sting used to be.
“Why, this trail isn’t hard to follow at all!” I pranced. “What were you so worried about yesterday?” I zigzagged across the trail to show her both how wide it was and how silly she was to worry.
“It does all the climbing at the end,” Mom said mominously. “We’re gonna have to climb like 4,000 feet in the last 3 or 4 miles. It’s gonna be like what we climbed with Lily yesterday, only we’ll already have 5 miles in our legs when we start, and 5 miles to go when we come back down.”
“Bah, you always think you can see the future, but nothing is ever how you expect it to be,” I reminded her.
“It says so on the map.” She poked at the Witch for backup and read triumphantly, “Here: 13.7 miles, 4,343 feet, 12 hours.”
I’m so glad that dogs can’t catch math. “Haven’t you learned by now that numbers are just something you made up to worry about? If you don’t like what they’re saying, just make up different numbers. Like this: onety miles, twoteen Friends, and five bajillion, nine zillionty and a half mouthfuls. See? It’s easy!”
Somewhere up the slope, a lawnmower-like growl shook the air, each snarl louder than the last. “Do you hear something?” Mom asked.
“I think someone’s mowing the lawn,” I said, not because it was true but because it’s rude not to guess when you don’t know the answer to a question.
Suddenly, a motorcycle buzzed around the corner. The Power Ranger on top must have been very lost to be so far up the mountain looking for a safe place to park. He put down his feet to give us time to get out of the way. When he spoke, instead of asking for help and directions, he asked where we were going.
“Are you going to the summit?” he asked.
The friendliness almost made me jump. Mom looked him up and down, searching for signs that he was looking for a fight. I guess you could say that Mom was the one looking for a fight, but when a fight finds you, it never seems like you were the one looking for it.
Fights had been harder to spot recently with everyone hiding their hostility behind muzzles and pretending like everyone else was invisible. The aggressive ones could turn on you in a flash if you broke one of their private rules, so you had to pay close attention to subtler warning signs. The most reliable tell was in their eyes, which couldn’t fake a friendly sparkle or hide a threatening stab.
Mom looked at her own scowl in the Power Ranger’s helmet window and then into his friendly eyes when he lifted the window out of the way. He pulled off the helmet so we could see his naked smile.
When he didn’t make any sudden moves, Mom answered cautiously, “Yeah, the summit’s the plan. But I’ve heard that the trail gets sketchy up ahead. We’ll see if we make it that far.”
“Most people stay on the fire road,” he said in a way that showed that he wasn’t most people and he knew we weren’t either. “When you get to the saddle, look for the stick with a string on it. Turn there and you can’t miss it.”
