Bearwalker (12 page)

M
r. Osgood and I hear the pontoon chopper go overhead just before we reach the bottom of the trail. We've made pretty good time with him leaning both on his stick and my one good shoulder. The fact that he found a second power bar in his pocket for me to wolf down helped some, too. Defeating monsters does work up an appetite.

And before we even reach Camp Chuckamuck we are joined by three sheriff's deputies who have driven their pickup to the place where the road was blocked by the dynamite blast and then walked the rest of the way in. Whatever I said in my phone call must have been convincing. It has brought as much help as any of us might have wished.

More than we even needed.

“Stay back,” one of the deputies is saying to us. A figure is starting toward us down the front
steps of the main camp building.

“Shucks, young fella,” Mr. Osgood says. “I'm not that afeared of my wife.”

The deputy steps aside as Mrs. Osgood throws her arms around her husband and me both and squeezes hard. With our combined injuries it probably hurts him as much as it does me, but neither one of us complains.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Osgood whispers to me.

After being greeted by Mrs. Osgood that way I'm only a little surprised at what I find when we follow the deputies into the building. Everyone is there and unharmed—aside from Mr. Mack, Cal, and Marlon, who appear to have suffered a considerable amount of bruising and are tied up in the corner. My midnight escape had provided the opportunity for Mr. Wilbur and Mrs. Osgood to put a couple of good-sized bumps on the heads of the distracted and dim brothers when Mr. Mack ran out after me. Mr. Wilbur had used a chair on Cal, but Mrs. Osgood had found a handier weapon. The fact that Poe-boy was engaged in taking a bite out of Marlon's leg had made it a bit easier for her to take aim.

“Dented my bear pan,” Mrs. Osgood complains.

When Mr. Mack came back in, he found himself confronted by the sight of two incapacitated confederates, a large growling Labrador, and the pearl-handled pistol in the hands of Mr. Philo.

“I've got a shotgun,” he'd said.

“Filled with rock salt, sonny” had been Mrs. Osgood's rejoinder from her hiding place behind the door, before she'd used her cast-iron bear pan to punctuate that remark.

“We looked for you for a good hour by the lake,” Mr. Wilbur says, then explains how they decided—over his protests—to concentrate on keeping the other kids quiet and protected. After all, Jason Jones was still out there and the safest thing for everyone to do was to stay inside where the adults could keep all the doors and windows guarded.

“Once we heard that helicopter,” Mr. Wilbur says, gesturing toward the rescue craft floating on its pontoons just beyond the dock where I fell into the water, “we knew you'd gotten through.”

He pauses and looks at me. “Have you gotten taller?” he says. Then he laughs. “Baron, you have been through the mill! Talk about a rite of passage!” He reaches out a friendly hand and
squeezes my shoulder. It's the same shoulder where the bear bit me. The colors around me are fading to gray. I start to sink toward the floor. I can hear voices shouting from far away. Then everything is dark and silent.

W
hen I open my eyes, it's morning. At least I think it is. I feel like I'm coming back from someplace blurry and far away. My eyes don't want to open all the way. I feel groggy and confused. But I can tell that I'm not in Camp Chuckamuck. Everything around me is too white. No knotty pine paneling or rustic furnishings. Was everything that happened to me just a dream? Getting shot and bitten by a bear and chased by the bearwalker? Was all of that like one of those dreams I used to have when I was a little kid being chased by a monster until I woke up safe in my own bed?

Except this isn't my own bed. I try to push myself up and pain stabs through my shoulder where the mother bear's teeth sank into muscle and scraped bone. I think I hear someone saying something, but the words are indistinct.

“Don't…you're in…”

I fall back to the pillow and keep falling.

 

The next time I open my eyes, my eyelids don't stick like they have glue on them. I can see clearly and I'm sitting partway up in the hospital bed. Someone is holding my hand. When I see who it is, I know I'm dreaming.

“Mom?” I ask.

“You're awake,” she says with a smile.

It's too good to be true. She leans over and hugs me and I don't even ask any of the questions that are filling my head right now because it's enough to just have her here.

Here, I soon discover, is Lake Placid Hospital. And here is where I have been for the last week, drifting in and out of consciousness. I'd been so beaten up and dehydrated and lost so much blood that the doctors were surprised I'd been able to walk, much less run, for miles along that mountain trail. Plus, in addition to the puncture wounds in my shoulder, which had been partially dislocated, I also got a roaring infection in the wounds on my back. Although I don't remember much at all, since I've been knocked out by the pain killers and
the other stuff they had to pump into me.

The Army contacted my mother, and she's been given family leave and flown back home to be with me. She arrived two days ago and has been at my bed every since. She won't be going back to Iraq. She's been reassigned to a training job at Camp Drum here in upstate New York.

“You'll still be staying with Grama Kateri,” she says. “It'll be a while before I can go back full-time to civilian life.”

‘That's okay,” I say. “Grama Kateri is great.”

“Plus you'll be able to stay at Pioneer Junior High where you've got all your friends,” Mom adds.

“Huh?” I say. What friends? Does she mean Mr. Wilbur?

Mom reaches over and picks up a box. “You must be the most popular kid in your school,” she says. “There's over thirty get-well letters here from your classmates. Plus there's that.” She points with her chin toward the wall on the other side of my bed. There's a big sign pasted up there, eight feet long and four feet high, with two words on it in huge letters.

OUR HERO

And all around it the kids in my class have signed their names and written stuff. Not just “Get well soon,” but also things like “Baron, you rock!” and “I never knew you were so cool!”

I look back at Mom. For some reason my eyes are moist. She has her head turned sideways, studying me.

“Is it my imagination,” she says, “or did you get bigger while I was gone?”

 

It's a bright December morning. It's warm for this time of year and there's no snow yet. The sun is shining on the steps of Grama Kateri's trailer, where I'm sitting and waiting for the school bus. I'm holding my little carved bear in one hand and my pen in the other as I write in my old journal. Mr. Wilbur gave it back to me yesterday. Between all that happened that last day at Camp Chuckamuck and my being in the hospital and then everything else, he completely forgot that he'd found it on the floor inside the main camp building. It fell out of my pocket when he gave me that friendly shoulder squeeze.

Reading through some of my old entries, it now seems to me as if I spent too much time feeling sorry for myself. But, like Grama Kateri says, remembering where you were helps you figure out where you need to go.

Where Mr. Mack and Cal and Marlon needed to go was to jail. They all accepted plea bargains that gave the brothers five to ten years in the crowbar hotel and Mr. Mack ten to fifteen. They could have taken their chances on a trial, but their lawyers advised them to take the deal that gave them shorter sentences. After all, Mr. Mack could have gotten a life sentence for attempted manslaughter. Their deal meant that they had to testify against the no-good nephews of the Philos and the executive officers of the Awlin Group, the developers who were behind the whole plot to destroy Camp Chuckamuck—and, though they are still trying to deny this part of it, eliminate Mr. and Mrs. Philo. Mr. Wilbur has told me that the case will be tied up in the courts for years, but it is probably going to end up bankrupting the Awlin Group, and that, sooner or later, almost all of the bad guys will end up in prison.

As for the Philos and Camp Chuckamuck,
there's good news there, too. Mr. and Mrs. Philo have decided that they're not ready to retire after all. They'll be hiring a new staff, but the Philos will be on site at the camp to make sure things get run right. They've also finished all the legal work to put the whole property into a permanent conservation easement to protect it from future development and keep it forever wild as a nature preserve. No logging. No condo or resort building. No matter what happens, its fifteen hundred acres will still be a place for the moose and the bears, the tall cedars and hemlocks, and all the other wildlife and plants of the Adirondack regions.

There's one or two more things you're probably wondering about. I know that I am.

The first, of course, is the monster at the heart of this story, the one who turned out to be a man with a painful past and a twisted heart. The Bearwalker. Walker White Bear or Jason Jones or whoever he was. What finally happened to him?

I'm sorry to say that's another question that hasn't been answered. The sheriff's deputies and the others who were called in to search looked for the place where Jones had been attacked by the mother bear. They only
had Mr. Osgood's directions to go on since I was still in the hospital and in no condition to talk to anyone. And Mr. Osgood hadn't seen it for himself. He just passed on what I had told him as we limped down the mountain.

They never found the spot. No sign of a struggle, no trail of blood. No bear tracks. Nothing. Finally they called off the search. Only one thing ever turned up. In November a hiker on one of those high trails saw something half buried in the leaves. It was a rusty saw-bladed hunting knife. Maybe someday a big-boned skeleton with unusually long canine teeth in its skull will be found. Or maybe not.

Although my mom is back safe and sound, we still don't know what happened to my dad. It's been said that some American soldiers are being held as prisoners of war. All we can do is hope that he's one of them and that someday he will be able to come home. Uncle Jules says that life is like that. You never get an answer to every question. You just have to trust that you'll learn enough.

The bus driver is honking his horn at me. I look up. Tara is waving from one window of the bus and Cody is gesturing at me from the
window behind hers. It's a toss-up which one of them I'll sit with today. Maybe Tara. After all, I'll see plenty of Cody at basketball practice after school. Even though I'm the shortest guy on the team, I'm the fastest down the court and I have a great jump shot. Plus I'm now five foot six and I'm still growing.

Enough. Time to close this journal and end this story. At least for now.

Jacket art © 2007 by Sally Wern Comport