One step, two step, fed step, clue step
- Apr 20
- 9 min read
“This must be what disappearing feels like.” I hoped that Mom still had enough wildness in her to find the right trail by instinct. The Wagon was counting on her, and we were all counting on the Wagon.
We left the house-sign behind, but had hardly taken three-teen steps when we reached another sign with more secret messages on it. This one was covered with a large picture of swirling lines like tree rings. A few tiny words were scattered across the drawing, but not in the usual reading way.
“Uh oh. This trail has a different name than the one we’re looking for,” Mom read.
“Uh oh,” I agreed.
“Oh wait, but look at the shape of the trail on the map.” She lifted her arm to show what she meant. “And it ends at a peak called Strawberry Summit. The name of the trail on AllTrails was Strawberry Mountain Peak, and if I remember right, it passed a lake shaped just like that one.”
“A clue!” I said, relieved that Mom’s instincts might not need a software update after all.
We explored a few steps farther and discovered another wooden post at the side of the trail. Instead of a string, this one had words on it. I sniffed it thoroughly, but found no hints about its message. When I’d finished peeing on it, I looked at Mom. “What does it say?”
“It says that the Strawberry Mountain trailhead is ⅛ of a mile away!”
“We’re saved!” I wagged. “Take that, Witch!”
We may have been lost in the woods for more than an eight of a mile (and that’s not even counting the length of the car kennel), but it had all worked out in the end.
“Isn’t it amazing that someone knew that we would be looking for the trail just here and thought to put a sign out for us?” I marveled at how thoughtful people could be. “I wonder why there aren’t more signs on trails so that people don’t need to rely on their double-crossing witches all the time.”
“There are,” Mom said. “I just don’t usually look at them.”
I was flubbergasted. “Why ever not?”
“Because the signs don’t know who you are or what you’re looking for. You could accidentally follow a sign meant for someone else and get lost. That’s why I never ask someone else for help. Life is just as much about knowing what advice not to take, you know.”
I went from thinking that Mom was the dumbest person in the world to remembering that she was the luckiest dumb person in the world. “Good thing today’s sign was for us then,” I decided.
We followed the sign’s instructions and walked into the forest. Only a few steps in, I noticed a mominous gurgling coming from the trees ahead. It could only mean one thing. We arrived at the banks of a river and I looked up and downstream for a bridge, but there was none. When I looked to Mom for advice, she was studying the rocks and ripples. Suddenly, surprise burst on her face.
“Hang on a second, we’ve been here before!” she said. “This is that trail where you chickened out crossing the river a couple years ago. Remember?”
I looked along the bank and tried to imagine what it would look like in high definition. The wet rocks sparkled like fool’s gold under the orange sun. Then I remembered—the last time we were here I was still a tenderpaw who hadn’t learned the secrets of roughing it yet.
The river had been pushy that day, shoving my paws in a direction that I didn’t want to go. When the river refused to yield, I refused to cross. I hadn’t yet learned that once you slip on a rock and lose your feet, the water holds you up and your paws become fins. Instead, I’d fought for control like Mom always does.
Mom had learned a lot herself over the years. She used to think that she needed a shower every week and didn’t know that wet socks were just a state of mind. When she thought that dry paws were something she could expect from life, wet socks felt like a great injustice. But the boogeyvirus broke all of that. Once we fell in and learned to accept wet in our socks, smoke in our lungs, and not to count on kindness from strangers, it turned into a kind of freedom. Once you give in, it’s quicker to swim to shore than to walk. Though you may come out in a different place than you planned, once you shake yourself off, it’s usually only a few steps back to the trail.
“I didn’t chicken out,” I said. “I stood up to the river. That was a story of bravery. You’re remembering it wrong.”
“Whatever you say, Spud.” Mom aimed at one of the hopping rocks and jumped. It wobbled under her, and she leaped toward the next one to catch her balance. She missed and made a disgusted sound, but hardly slowed down to shake the wet out of her shoe before taking the final leap to the bank.
I courageously mumped from rock to rock behind her and didn’t even need a leash to convince me to do it. I jumped dryly onto the sandy bank next to Mom and did a proud jig. “Look how brave I am!”
“Uh, yeah. It’s a lot easier when the river is low.”
“Nuh uh! I was brave and conquered my fears,” I corrected her. “The river only seemed smaller because my confidence was bigger.”
“And I suppose it has nothing to do with how the first time we came here it was peak melting season in June, and now it’s almost September?”
I had to think long and hard to remember what the different months meant. I don’t know how to count time, but I do know a little about seasons and how things change. Ever since the beginning, we’d been fighting the boogeyvirus and everything that came with it like we were trying to stand in a river that wanted to wash us away.
When the boogeyvirus first attacked, we’d tried to carry on hiking. But as time went by, we began to swim. As the boogeyvirus spoiled one thing after another, bit by bit, Mom had stopped fighting the relentless current. Her thoughts still doubted that a muzzle was anything more than a good luck charm, but she kept her face hidden all the same. Over time, the push from the boogeyvirus felt less strong as we adapted and Mom found other things to get frustrated about.
I’d never failed before, but I’d watched Mom fail plenty of times; Like the time she stopped being good at her job, or that time she stopped being in love. When Mom failed, she thought it meant there was something wrong with her. If only she’d tried a little harder, or if only she were a little smarter, or lovable, she would have succeeded. So she’d fought and tried to find more ways to change the way things are. When even that didn’t work and she had nothing left, she thought that something had gone rotten inside of her. A better person would have fixed the problem by now. But what if it wasn’t Mom who had diminished, but the river that had swelled? Or maybe we were wading when we needed a boat. Or maybe it just wasn’t the right season.
Mom could read the reviews of all the people who had crossed a river and think, What’s wrong with me if all those boobs could do it? But she could also think, That trail wasn’t ready for me yet.
One of the good things about being a writer is that you can think about something for a long time before you say your comeback, and it’s still devastating.
“Hey, Mom. The trail just wasn’t ready for me yet,” I quipped.
“What?”
“You said that snobby thing about me giving up in June when I just needed to wait until August. That’s my comeback: The trail just wasn’t ready for me yet.”
“That was like an hour ago.”
“So?”
“What’s the key to humor?”
“Wh—”
“Timing!” Mom interrupted. She laughed.
By now the sun was getting high in the sky, but it shone through the trees with the stillness and tint of sunset. Despite days of long hikes over rugged terrain, the wholesome life of a cavedog left my legs feeling springy and fresh. Mom might have felt the same, or maybe the reason she was bounding up the mountain so peppily was to finish the trail before she died of boredom.
A marathong dog like me has ears that can fast all day and live forever on the sounds they find in the forest, but Mom’s mind would die of starvation if it didn’t have something to chew on. It might distract her from her hungry ears if she had something to look at, so I checked uphill into the future for where the trees stopped and the sun began. But when I looked up, all I could see were layers and layers of trees sitting on each other’s shoulders, one behind the other, until they disappeared into the dingy haze.
Mom’s eyes followed mine uphill and rolled back down to the trail at our feet. Her chin lifted. “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” she gazed with determination into where the distance would be if the trees weren’t blocking the view, “I’ll count my paces…”
I sagged. I’d hoped that without the Witch to report to, Mom might let nature fill the space rather than finding extra ways to count it. Maybe she’d lose count by the top and let her instincts back in.
“… and every 100 steps I’ll give you a mouthful of kibble,” she saved. “Every 1,000 steps we’ll stop for water.”
“That sounds like an excellent plan! I especially like the kibble part. One question: how many is a hunerd?”
“… and when you’re drinking your water, I’ll check my phone to see how far we’ve gone.”
“But the Witch doesn’t know where we are, so she can’t tell you how far we’ve gone. And anyway, you said you gave her the day off.”
“True,” Mom paused to give me time to get ready to be impressed, “… but my phone counts steps even when I don’t have any apps running. We’ll use that!”
“Just like they did in prehistoric times, before they invented watches and witches!” I cheered.
I was about to ask the point of Mom counting her own steps if the Witch could do it in her sleep, but Mom was so pleased with herself that I decided it was more important that she start her challenge with a win. Maybe all that practice counting would come in handy when a house finally fell on the Witch’s head and we had to find our way in the world on our own.
“I’ll show you how to enjoy the forest in case you lose count,” I said. I led her through a googol of trees whose small differences only added to the feeling that they were all the same.
When a tree fainted across the trail, Mom stopped counting so as not to cheat at her own game. Seventy-two, she thought as she swung one leg over. Seventy-two. She scooted her butt cheek over the log’s crest. Seventy-two. She reached back for the packpack and plopped it on the far side of the log. Seventy-two. She found a grabbing place for each hand. Seventy-two. She dropped to the trail. Seventy-t-oof! She thumped on the ground next to the packpack. Seventy-two. She put the packpack back on her back. Seventy-three, she thought as she resumed walking. Behind her, I cleared the log in a single bound.
A deep, creaky grunt came from somewhere in the trees above us.
“Do you hear that?” my perky ears and head tilt asked. “I think it’s a bear who just realized he left his cave without his wallet again.”
Mom looked suspiciously into the infinitrees. “It’s probably a tree moving more than it’s meant to. It’ll probably fall down soon,” she concluded with a self-satisfied nod that she still had what it took to find disaster in everything.
“You and trees have something in common,” I said, seeing a chance to teach her a lesson about connecting with nature. “You both groan when you move. And when you forget your wallet.”
We stopped and I drank while Mom gave the Witch the briefest of meaningful looks. Usually, Mom thinks stopping is inconvenient, but we stopped again and again on Strawberry Mountain, as if rest were a natural part of hiking. Each time Mom put on the packpack and jiggled the counter in her head back to zero, she hiked like someone with a fresh start and something to look forward to rather than someone starting over after failure.
“What’s gotten into you?” I asked. “You usually hate hiking in the trees where you can’t see anything.”
“I don’t know. My legs feel great and time is actually passing faster when I count than if I were distracted. You can cram infinite thoughts into a mile when you’re not keeping time, which makes every second feel longer than the one before. Walking 100 steps takes no time at all, and I always know what number comes next. It actually feels like progress.”
“Sorta like how every day in the Stuck House feels like a million years, and you can’t remember if something happened this morning, yesterday, or a month ago?”
“Yeah. Time sort of loses meaning when everything happens inside the same walls just like it does when you’re trapped in your head. You’ve got to find some way to measure your progress or you’ll go crazy.”
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
