Dan Versus Nature (18 page)

And this is no blackfly.

It’s a freakin’ black
wasp.

I swat at it with my free hand, but it has no problem dodging my blow. It lands on my face and sinks its stinger in deep.

“Yowch!”

And then there’s another wasp. And another one. And another one.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I shout, pinwheeling my arms around like a mental patient, feeling hot needles piercing my cheeks, my arms, my —

“Owwwww!”

— dingus.

“Fuck!” I reflexively slap my hand down hard — and punch myself in the junk.

“Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!”

I fold over, coughing. I struggle to get my pants up and protect my most sensitive bits, but my jeans are too tight. Or I’m too panicked.

Holy-mother-of-Christmas-morning, that hurts. My eyes fill with tears, but I can still see the angry red welts popping up everywhere I’ve been stung, including one — big and bulbous — on my schlong. Jeez Louise. I always wanted it to be larger, but not like this.

Meanwhile, I’m still getting jabbed — on the arms, the ears, the elbows — every sting a searing stab.

And that’s when the real buzzing starts. First low and distant. Then loud and blistering.

I look up and see a dark cloud heading toward me. Like the scouts have radioed for backup, and they are about to arrive in a big way.

My skin goes clammy. My pulse thrashes in my ears.

I yank up my pants and jerk at my jammed foot.

But it’s not coming out.

“Help! Help!” I shout, and as I do, a wasp flies into my mouth.

Plltttth.
I spit, and the damn thing stings my lip on its way out.

“Help!” I yell again.

Good thing you got nice and far away from them, huh?

Goddamn it. If I’m going to die out here, it’ll be because I’ve been eaten by a mountain lion or mauled by a bear — not because I was stung to death after peeing on a wasp.

I bend over and yank my bootlace loose. I wrench the boot tongue forward, pull my socked foot free, then run like hell.

“Aaaaaah!”
I scream, my wounded wang wailing inside my boxers.

I look back over my shoulder. The wasps are on my tail — a big, zigzagging ball of black specks droning in the near distance.

I turn back around and —

Ooof!

I run right into Charlie, tackling him into the dirt and grass.

“What the hell?” he groans.

“W-wasps!” I cry, looking behind me. “Attacking me!”

“What wasps?” Charlie asks, shoving me off him.

And he’s right. There are no wasps. It’s like they vanished into thin air.

I turn back around and see Max, Barbara, Hank, and Penelope all peering down at me.

“Have a nice private pee there, Dan?” Charlie says, brushing himself off and examining his camera. “Excellent work not drawing any attention to yourself, by the way.” He snaps a series of pictures of me.

“Hey there, Magic Mike.” Penelope smirks and points at my crotch. “I do believe your smiley face is showing.”

“Don’t ever do that again!” Hank says when he returns with my boot. He hurls it down beside me. “You heard what Max said: We always stick together. No matter what. If you need to go to the bathroom, you tell us and we wait for you.”

It’s the first time Hank has ever yelled at me. And I wasn’t even trying to annoy him this time.

“Are we clear about that?” Hank says, his neck red, his hands shaky.

I nod from my seat on a log. “Yes.”

And just like that, all of the anger drains from Hank’s face. “OK. Good.” He takes a deep breath. “Now, how are you feeling? The Benadryl cream helping?”

“Yeah, thanks,” I say, glancing down at the sweatpants Hank loaned me. “Still, you know, a little bit . . . tender. But definitely improving.”

I thought I’d be able to get away without mentioning the utterly humiliating fact that I’d been stung on my dong. But after the adrenaline subsided, I found the whole “situation” down below getting more and more painful. I tried to ignore it, act casual. And I’d thought I’d been doing a pretty good job — till Penelope asked me why I was walking like a rancher after a three-day cattle drive.

“You sure you’ve applied Benadryl
everywhere
?” Charlie had asked. “Wasp stings are not something you want to ignore. An allergic reaction can cause permanent neurological damage; a person can lose all feeling in the affected extremity.”

The confession came fast and furious after that bit of news. There are places you might not mind losing feeling in. And then there’s your Charles Xavier.

“Shall we join the others?” Hank says, extending his hand.

I grab hold and he hoists me up.

We walk over to the stand of trees where Max is explaining to Barbara, Penelope, and Charlie how to build a shelter.

“. . . as many of these,” Max says, holding up a long, straight stick, “as we can find. A little longer is fine, but this length is best. The straighter, the better.” He reaches down and picks up another branch, this one with a fork at the end. “We’ll also need six support poles. Again, as straight and thick as you can find.”

Barbara looks around. “The weather being as nice as it is, shouldn’t we be worried about finding food and water before building shelter?”

“Normally, you’d be right,” Max says. “But in the bush, the situation always dictates your priorities. With our little . . . setback”— he glances at me —“we lost some valuable time. If we’d kept pushing on toward the river, we likely wouldn’t have had enough light to scavenge by, so right now our priority needs to be our shelter. The temperature drops pretty dramatically in the Frank at night. We’re talking into the thirties. That’s potential hypothermia territory. You can live three weeks without food. Three days without water. But in the freezing cold, only three hours without shelter.” He sizes each of us up. “Barbara, why don’t you stay here and help me prep the building site. The rest of you get scavenging. Stay in pairs, and don’t stray too far. It’s
really
easy to get
really
lost,
really
fast.”

Hank turns to me, but before he can ask me to be his stick-finding buddy, I turn to Charlie: “Shall we?”

He frowns. “Don’t you think you and Hank should pair off? This could be the perfect occasion for you to share some of your more atypical
predilections.
”

“
Predilections.
Right,” I say. “I could do that, if you want to spend the next two hours alone in the woods dodging Penelope’s sneeze spray.”

Charlie sighs. “You make a good point. All right. But if I’m to be expected to lay my hands on Mother Nature’s detritus, I need to get outfitted first.”

“I think we need to step things up,” Charlie says, a bundle of sticks cradled in his long-sleeve-cloaked arms. He is wearing a full-on beekeeper’s outfit that he’s brought, complete with wide-brimmed hat, screened veil, heavy-duty gloves, and a neck-to-ankle white cotton suit. “It’s time to raise the bar.”

“What are you talking about?” I squat and grab a thick, forked branch. “We’ve thrown some great material at him:
emollient, cilia, confabulation, aesthete, evanescence, liberation
—”

“I’m simply saying that I believe we may have misjudged our enemy. His resolve is much stronger than I’d anticipated. Haven’t you noticed? Everything we do, Hank responds by being even
more
parental. He’s only lost his cool once — when you ran off and got your penis stung.”

“What are you trying to say? That everything we’ve done so far was pointless?”

“Not completely. I think we’ve laid a fairly decent foundation. Hank’s cracks are starting to show. But if we’re actually going to pull this off, we have to shift things into a higher gear.”

“And how do you suggest we do that?”

Charlie grins at me. It’s an evil grin — made all the more unsettling flashed from behind the gauzy black tulle of the beekeeper’s veil.

As Max predicted, the temperature has dropped pretty dramatically now that the sun is down. Big clouds of steam escape my lips with each breath. It’s not exactly freezing, but I can definitely feel the bite in my fingers and the tip of my nose.

Charlie and I are attempting to open Max’s “emergency provision” canned chili using a couple of sharp rocks we found.

The cans of chili and the bladder of water Max brought are our only backup supplies. He said he doesn’t like to use them on the first day but given that we’re a short walk away from a river, he feels it’s better for us to eat well tonight so we can be fresh and ready to conquer the wilderness tomorrow. “We’ll spend most of the day fishing and restocking our reserve supplies with dried and smoked fish.”

Amazing how Max can lug emergency rations all the way into the bush but not an emergency can opener. The least he could have done was let us use his knife. But when Charlie and I suggested it, he just laughed.

“If you’re not willing to open the cans without tools,” Max explained, “then it’s not really an emergency.”

I pound my stone into the top of the can, making tiny pockmarks in the aluminum but doing no real damage. The same cannot be said of the skin on my palm. I shift the rock to my left hand, flex the fingers on my right, the knuckles feeling like they’re locking up.

“I’m sure glad we don’t have to live like this all of the time,” I say, studying my lack of progress. “It must have sucked being a caveman.”

“Indeed,” Charlie says. “All those cans of Hormel scattered about and poor Cro-Magnon with no electric opener.”

I glare at Charlie. “You know what I mean. Having to get through life without the simplest tools. Like a can opener. A screwdriver. A MacBook.”

“If you ask me,” Charlie says, “it was a superior existence for them. Everything was more elemental. All the primitives were concerned about was food, water, sleep, and sex.”

My gaze flits over to Penelope, who is squatting over a pile of kindling, sending sparks into it by striking the back of Max’s carbon steel knife against a piece of quartz. Her jeans pucker just enough at the back to reveal the lacy edge of her red bikini bottoms.

“I would’ve thought you’d have hated the Stone Age,” I say. “All those germs and no hand sanitizer for thousands of years!”

“Ah, but I wouldn’t have known about the germs, now would I?” Charlie says, slamming his rock into the chili can top. “I do believe Thomas Gray was right when he said ignorance is bliss. However, I’ve been plagued with an unusually high intellect and thus do not benefit from the blissful state of most of my peers.”

I open my mouth to argue but am interrupted by Penelope’s triumphant cry.

“Got it!” she calls out, leaning forward, puffing tiny wisps of breath into her mini pyre.

“Gentle, now,” Max says as he helps Hank and Barbara layer leaves onto our shelter. “Don’t rush. If there’s one thing I want everyone to take away from this week, it’s that patience pays. Our modern existence may seem to tell you otherwise. That you have to ‘get it yesterday.’ But this attitude only fosters laziness. Entitlement. The natural world teaches otherwise. Mastery takes time. Endurance, stamina, fortitude, perseverance, persistence, patience. These are the pillars of accomplishment.”

“Persistence, my ass,” I mutter, slamming my stone down on my chili can. “We are never going to get these open.”

“Success!” Charlie shouts, his stone piercing the top of his can, a spray of brown sauce coating his face and his glasses.

“How the hell did you do that?”

He holds up his rock. “It’s all in the wrist, my friend.”

“OK, Wristmaster.” I chuck my can over to him. “Since you’re the expert, why don’t you finish opening the others? I’ll go help Penelope with the fire.”

Charlie glances at her. “Do you really think that’s such a good idea?”

“What do you mean?” I stand and brush off my stinging hands.

“It means you and I both know why you snuck off to relieve yourself rather than alerting the group to nature’s call,” Charlie says. “We’ve got a long list of pranks to pull off, Daniel, but all of them require total commitment on your part. If you’re feeling shy, inhibited, or self-conscious because of some harpy . . .”

“I know why we’re here, Charlie,” I say. “Nothing’s going to get in the way of that. Trust me.”