The hills have ice
- Feb 16
- 8 min read
Ever since the boogeyvirus locked us up and threw away the key, the part they called “real” life felt like make-believe. Mom may have enjoyed the months of freedom from bras and pants with buttons, but her paws had been leashed to the keyboard for too long. I was tired of naps, and missed the feeling of strangers’ noses and paws on my butt. It was high time for a proper vacation.
To prepare, Mom and the Witch began meeting in the evenings to go trail shopping. They scrolled, tapped, and zoomed until they’d planned a route to Oregon and back. We would start in the unknown mountains of Forgotten California, and come back through the mountains that everyone knows about.
When people think of California, they think about the beaches on the left and the mountains on the right. They know about the desert in the south and the City in what they call The North. What they don’t know about California is that the part called North is really the middle. There’s a whole other half of California above the elbow that hardly anyone knows about. It’s filled with bundles of mountains you’ve never heard of, lakes shaped like strangers’ birthmarks, giant trees, and dwarfed towns.
When I jumped out of the Wagon on the first morning, the thin air filled my nose with familiarity. This mountain had seen me before!
“Squeeee! I’m back! Did you miss me?” I ran most of a circle before screeching to stop to smell something interesting.
This trail had all of our favorite mountain things in just the right amounts. It climbed to the top of a pass, but wasn’t so steep that our legs would burn off or the trail couldn’t hold Mom’s shoes. It started at some lovely drinking streams and traveled along delicious lakes that mirrored the rocks and sky. There would be soft grass to roll in, bright-smelling wildflowers to sit on, white dirt to wallow in, squirrels chirping in the trees, and chipmunks to chase through the boulders. We would finish in a place made of nothing but rocks and sky, where I could look over the whole world as if it all belonged to me. Best of all was the trailside mystery, that I’ll tell you about soon.
We hadn’t been hiking for long when I smelled potato chips ahead. Mom was carrying an extra large bag of brunch in her pocket, but her bag-unzipping muscles hadn’t warmed up enough to serve brunch yet, so my growling stomach followed my nose. When I found them, the chips were stuck in the paw of a giant turtle.
Turtle-people are a species of stray hikers. Their habitat is any backwoods large enough to lose your Subaru in. Turtle-people have a terrible sense of direction and it’s not uncommon for them to wander for tens or hunerds of miles in the wilder-ness before they remember where they parked. Even though they know how badly lost they can get, they don’t stay close to the safety of roads and witch service. Instead, they walk foolishly into danger, carrying their homes on their backs.
Turtles aren’t bothered by their perilous predicament. They’re suspiciously happy and relaxed for someone living such a desperate life. Mom was already vulnerable to falling under their influence, what with her furry legs and bad sense of direction, so it was important to distract her around turtles.
But the potato chips, though…
“Unhand those chips, you brute!” I barked.
“Hi, buddy!” The turtle turned around to show its nice lady disguise. It held out its free paw for me to smell. How stupid did it think I was?
“Drop the potato chips and no one gets hurt!” I barked, refusing the empty paw.
Mom came up behind me. “Maybe she’d give you a chip if you weren’t so rude.”
That was the worst thing Mom could say. Now the turtle-person wouldn’t think I was ferocious at all. How would I make it drop the chips and run away now?
“You want one of these?” the mutant taunted, pulling a chip from the bag and waving it in front of my nose before finally dropping it on the ground.
I saved it right away.
When my mouth was free again, I barked one last warning. “I hereby invoke the five second rule! You have five seconds to throw those chips on the ground, or else!” I paused dramatically and waited for it to surrender. When it didn’t, I started counting. “Five… seven… fourteen… three… nine… eleventy…”
It sneered at me and rustled the bag.
“… eleventy and a half…”
I ran behind Mom to shield myself from whatever happens at the end of a countdown. “… ONE!” I barked, closing my eyes against the blast.
Nothing happened.
The turtle crouched into a play-bow and waggled the chips. “Come on, buddy. It’s okay.”
“I think it’s more scared of us than we are of it,” I whispered, making sure to keep Mom in between, just in case I was wrong. “Maybe it’ll drop the chips if you startle it.”
“Well if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Mom turned away from the turtle and continued up the trail without me.
Now there was no one to shield me. The turtle’s eyes smiled as it bared its teeth. I looked at Mom to see if she was going to let it get away with that, but she hadn’t even turned around.
I barked one final woof for the turtle to stay back as I passed, then ran bravely after Mom. She gave me a big mouthful of kibble as thanks for following, but my heart ached for the potato chips. You can’t save them all.
The trail was cool in the mountain’s early-morning shade, so I trotted past the lovely drinking streams and delicious lakes without tasting them. They would be more refreshing in the heat of the afternoon, and I was in a hurry to sniff the bare rocks ahead for new clues to the unsolved mystery. I kept my eyes on the secretive peak that never seemed to get any closer until we were right at its base. As if changing the channel, the grass, water, and flatness disappeared from one step to the next and we were surrounded by nothing but naked mountain and empty air.
From the bottom, the whole mountain looked like nothing but a pile of loose rocks all the way up to the pointy crown, but somehow the trail always found solid rock for our next step. Beside the trail, rocks the size of soccer balls mixed with boulders the size of SUVs to camouflage the chunks of solid mountain sticking out in between. Besides the lifeless smell of rock, faint whiffs of something that smelled like trouble mixed in with the thinning air.
Mom and I were alone when we reached the stony parapet below the summit. Silence and mystery filled the sky around us. Suddenly, Mom gasp-screamed and jumped backward toward the cliff, almost knocking me off. She’d finally noticed what I’d been smelling for a while.
A deer lay so close to the side of the trail that its antlers could trip a two-legged hiker who wasn’t looking where she was going. At least it had been a deer once, back when it still had eyeballs and all of its parts were still attached. Now he lay in pieces with his wife’s legs, spine, and femurs mixed in with his own. A little farther back, a fawn’s head lay on another rock among older skulls, pelvises, and hooves.
“Holy dog doo,” Mom panted.
“There was a deer graveyard in the exact same spot last year,” I reminded her. “Don’t you remember?”
“Last year all we saw were spines and legs. I thought poachers had shot a bunch of deer in the Park and taken them over the boundary to butcher them where they couldn’t be seen. But hunters would’ve taken those antlers.” She looked up the rockwall and then at the empty air behind us, searching for a lair. “What could be big enough to drag a full-grown buck over all these rocks?”
“A mystery!” I announced.
I was careful to walk on Mom’s zombie-free side as we hiked past the graveyard. If the deer came back from the dead looking for spare parts to put itself back together, I wanted Mom-parts to be conveniently within reach.
We climbed the last of the mountain to where the only thing not made of rock or sky was the sign that said that we were twelve thousand feet closer to outer space and that dogs were allowed no farther. Last year, I collected pats from dozens of turtle-Friends as they hiked out from a lonely dog-free week on Park land. This year, everything beyond the sign was closed and most of the hikers were home with their dogs.
We walked to the very edge of the mountain, where the ground broke off mid-climb and gave way to nothingness. The rock leaned away from the cliff at an angle that hid the emptiness beneath, so Mom didn’t go cliff-crazy. Instead, she sat on the edge with the bottom half of her legs sticking into nothingness. I peeked over her shoulder, saw that it was a long way down, and took a step back before sitting.
“Why are there trees and grass down there, but not up here?” I asked.
“Because it’s covered in snow and ice up here for so much of the year,” Mom mmfed around a mouthful of peanuts. “I bet this trail has only been clear for a week or 2. Plants can’t grow with snow blocking the sun all the time, and animals can’t live up here without plants to eat.”
“What about a yeti?” I asked, thinking of the bone yard somewhere below Mom’s dangling paws. “I bet yetis eat deer and turtles. When there are no potato chips, that is.”
“A yeti is just as likely as anything else, I suppose.” Mom put my water bowl and her peanuts back in the packpack. She pulled her legs out of the void and stood up. “Come on, if we make good time, maybe we can find a place to charge my laptop before Oregon.”
We climbed back down, past the deer graveyard to where the mountain was alive again with grass and trees. Somewhere among the fresh grass and bear droppings, I sniffed a man, a woman, and potato chips. I found my soon-to-be Friends sitting on grass tuffets, leaning against backpacks with their legs stretched out among the wildflowers. There was a bag of potato chips between them.
“Hi! I’m Oscar. I love potato chips.” I ran straight to the lady and gave her a kiss on the face so she would pay me back with a chip in mine.
“Oh, now you like me?” she asked.
“Yes, you seem like a very nice lady,” I nuzzled. “Nothing like the last chipnapping freak. You’ve gotta be careful out there. Watch your chips. Actually, you can give them to me for safekeeping, if you like.”
“You’re not nearly as scary as that deer graveyard up there,” Mom butted in. “I thought it was poachers, but maybe it’s a monster that tears deer apart and eats them?” This was Mom’s sneaky interrogation tactic. By turning the mystery into an un-clever joke, maybe she could trick them into correcting her and giving up a clue. Or a confession.
“Sasquatch,” my Friend said matter-of-factly without taking her eyes off of her sammich.
“Batsquatch,” her companion corrected her.
“Is that bologna?” I sniffed.
“Is Batsquatch like the 2020 version of Sasquatch?” Mom asked, trying to play along with a joke that had already gotten away from her. “Like taking something scary and making it way more horrific than you could ever imagine?”
“Yeah, stay away,” my Friend said. “He’s got Covid.”
This was the first time I’d seen the boogeyvirus’s work with my own eyes. I’d heard that it was scary, but I had no idea it could tear you limb from limb and throw your pieces off a cliff. I resolved to lick Mom’s hands clean more often.
A moment passed while Mom searched for a witty comeback. Her neck sleeve slipped, showing the top half of her frozen smile. When no wit came, she turned to me. “We should get you back down to the car before it gets too hot up here.” That was Mom’s code that she didn’t want to talk to strangers anymore. “Stay safe out there,” she called over her shoulder as she walked away.
“Don’t let Batsquatch get those chips,” I told them before chasing after Mom.
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
