Noses Are Red (4 page)

I’m braced firmly on a patch of dryish land. I reach down. “Give me your hands, Victor,” I say.

The sun beats down. The black rich-smelling ooze roils and heaves. Victor’s hands appear above the surface, sprouting like flowers. I grab them and pull hard. He emerges slowly from the watery mud, gets a knee onto my patch of land and hangs there, panting.

“Come on, Victor.”

“I can’t.” His voice is a sob. “My foot is stuck.”

“Come on!” I don’t know if I’m shouting at him, or me, or –

–
Look behind you, Grunewald!
shouts Norbert.

“What is it?” Victor tries to turn his head around.

“What? What?”

–
On Jupiter we call them bears. Look at the teeth! Ooooh!
“Bear?” Victor pulls so hard I almost fall into the ooze.

–
Here it comes!
says Norbert.

We pull desperately. With a sucking noise, and a sudden pop, Victor is kneeling in front of me. We scramble to our feet and start to run. Jump over a bush and run as fast as our muscles can move us. We run and run. I hear crashing behind me, feel hot breath on my back.

I’m not a fast runner, but I’m faster than Victor. I hear another crash behind me, and Victor’s voice, cursing and crying.

–
The bear is going to get him
, says Norbert calmly.

“NOOOOO!” I grab hold of a tree trunk on the edge of the path, and turn around. I can’t let Victor be mauled by a –

–
Too late
, says Norbert.

Victor is on the ground, his feet tangled in a patch of grass. He’s sobbing, but he’s fine. I run towards him. I don’t see any bear. There’s a bug on his arm. Victor swats at it.

–
There it is again! You killed it!
says Norbert.

“That was a horsefly,” I say.

–
Did you see the teeth? Terrible.

“Alan, what is going on?” Victor climbs to his feet. Mud dripping off him.

–
On Jupiter, we call them bears.

“Why, Norbert?” I ask, but he doesn’t reply.

“Hey, Alan, why are you talking in that squeaky voice? And what do you mean, on Jupiter?”

“Skip it,” I say. He looks around.

“We should go back and get the canoe,” he says. “If we can find it.”

“Why?” I ask. I mean, what are we going to do with the canoe, once we get it? We’ve got nothing to move it around with, even if we had an idea of where to go. All we can do is carry it on our heads. A
moving
car is a wonderful thing – but if you take away the wheels, all a car is good for is keeping you out of the rain. It’s a great big heavy umbrella. We don’t need an umbrella now. The sky is blue, with a couple of playful puffy clouds.

Victor’s peering back the way we came, trying to work out where the canoe would be.

“Why do you call them bears?” I ask Norbert. “Flies, I mean. They don’t look anything like bears.”

–
Because of what we have to do to them
, he says.

“Huh? What can you do to flies?” I say. “There’s nothing you can do to flies. You have to put up with them, that’s what.”

–
Exactly.
He doesn’t say anything else.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“I get it. You can’t do anything with them so you have to
bear
them,” says Victor. I didn’t know he was listening.

“Hey, that’s good,” I say. “I didn’t see that.”

“What do you mean? It’s your idea. You made it up,” says Victor.

I ask Victor if he has anything to eat. He shakes his head.

“I’m hungry too,” he says. “Why didn’t you take a health food bar from Mr. Leech?”

I don’t want to go into that. “All those secret pockets in your pants,” I say. “Didn’t you pack
anything?
”

He checks carefully, and from the long and skinny secret pocket down his leg he withdraws…the safety pin, with the lucky shamrock on it.

I stare at it. Not much of a tool. “Remember that book we had to read in school, about the kid who survives in the wilderness with nothing but a hatchet. Remember?”

“What’d he have? A hatchet? Oh, yeah,” says Victor. “He did everything with that hatchet of his. Yeah, I liked that book. What was it called, that book with the hatchet? Do you remember?”

I think hard. “Uh…wait a minute…
Alone in the Wilderness?
Or maybe,
Chop Chop?
”

“Alone in the Wilderness.
Yeah, something like that. Not
Chop Chop
– that sounds like it’d be about a dinner.”

“Yeah.” I swallow, thinking about dinner. I bet the kid in the hatchet book would have starved to death if all he’d had was a safety pin.

“Hey!” Victor points overhead. “Hey, Alan! See that blaze?”

“No. What’s a blaze?”

“That white mark on the tree. It’s a trail marker. You know what, Alan? We’re on the portage again.”

“Great!” I say. “We’re not lost.”

“No.”

“HEY! CHRISTOPHER!” I yell. “CHRISTOPHER!!!”

Nothing.

“Let’s go to the end of the portage.” I say. “Maybe he’s waiting for us.”

“What about the canoe?”

“We can come back for it. Let’s find Leech first,” I say.

We turn onto the path. We stay on the path. It climbs up a hill. So do we. We both keep shouting for Christopher. I am starting to get less hungry, possibly because I am starting to get seriously tired. I’m too tired to be hungry. It doesn’t take long to get to the lake at the end of the portage. After only a few minutes, the trail swoops around a clump of pine trees and down a sloping rocky shelf to the edge of the lake.

Success? Not quite. Lots of sun, lots of rock, lots of lake, and a total lack of Christopher Leech. No packs, no note, nothing to indicate that he’s ever been here. Which means either that we’re in the wrong place, or that he never made it to the end of the portage.

What’ll we do now? It might make sense to go back to the other end of the portage. Christopher would have gone back along the trail to look for us.

I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to move. “How about we stay here?” I say. “And wait for Leech.”

“I don’t know,” says Victor. “What if this is the wrong place to be?”

“We followed the portage trail, didn’t we? Blazes, and all that. This is the right place. Leech’ll be along soon.”

“I’m worried,” Victor says. “What if he doesn’t come? What if no one comes?”

I’m not worried. I’m too tired. I lean against a piece of rock. Nice soft rock. Makes a good pillow. I settle myself on my back, and yawn wide enough to swallow a football.

“Then we’ll die,” I say.

He makes that noise with his tongue against his teeth.
Tsk tsk.

I close my eyes. “Night, Victor.”

I don’t sleep for long because of the high-pitched whistling noise. It comes and goes, and comes again. A hissing noise. It’s coming from near me.

“Norbert, are you snoring?” I ask.

No answer. The noise goes on. I turn myself over. The sound stops, then starts again.

“Alan. Alan!”

Victor’s worried about something. I’m too tired to wonder what.

“Don’t turn your head, Alan! Don’t move a muscle!” he says. “There’s a snake right beside you.”

I relax. I don’t bother to open my eyes. I like snakes. I really cannot understand why so many people are afraid of them. Yes, they’re long and thin. So what, so’s string. So’s spaghetti. So’s my friend Henry, in school. I’ve never heard of anyone being petrified of spaghetti. There’s the whistling sound again. Right near my ear.
Hiss.
Soothing sound.

“It’s big,” says Victor. “And it has these…patterns on it.”

“Uh-huh,” I say. “Don’t worry. I’m tired.”

The sun is hot. I lie flat out on the rock. I feel the energy flow out of me, like butter melting in the bottom of a pan.

“The snake seems…angry.”

That’ll be the hissing. Sounds like air leaking out of a soccer ball. “You’re probably making too much noise, Victor. Shhh.”

“What if it’s poisonous?”

“It isn’t. This is Ontario, not Africa.”

He keeps talking. “They told us about it at my camp,” he goes on. “If you get bit by a venomous snake and you don’t have a snakebite kit, you’re supposed to sterilize a knife blade in a flame, and then cut two crosses over the snake’s teeth marks and suck out the poison. Sounds gross, doesn’t it! The farther away the bite is from your heart, the longer you have to live. If you were bit on the toe, for instance, you’d have hours and hours. What are you smiling at?”

“Nothing.” I’m thinking of him cutting crosses in me with a safety pin.

–
Hey, Dingwall, what’s wrong with your heating system?
I’m too tired to talk to Norbert.

–
It’s getting hot in here, Where’s the air-conditioning?

I’d tell him to shut up, but it wouldn’t do any good. Telling Norbert not to talk is like telling the sun not to rise, or the peanut butter not to stick to the roof of your mouth.

–
And what’s with the shiver beside you? Sounds like a leaky hose. Last time I saw that pattern, it was on a pair of cowboy boots. Someone at one of k.d. lang’s parties. He sang a song, I really liked it, I sang it in the shower for a while. Let’s see if I can still remember it. Ahem, Ahem…

“Alan, what are you doing? Why are you squeaking? The snake might get upset.”

Not as upset as I am. “Shut up, Norbert!” I say, but I’m so tired the words lose their shape as they dribble out of my mouth.

It’s ludicrous. I just want them to leave me alone. Does Norbert think he sounds like a coyote? He doesn’t. More like a bagpipe, or like the music you hear from the guy sitting cross-legged in front of a basket, blowing into the –

“Hey!” whispers Victor. “Hey, Alan!”

That must be it. Norbert probably thinks he’s being a snake charmer. I turn over and try to shut out the noise.

The sound seems to go through my ears and right into my brain. I can feel the
Owoooooo!
vibrating inside my head. Really eerie. Reminds me of the alarm clock my mother got me a couple of birthdays ago. I hardly ever use it.

–
Owoooooo! Owoooooo!

“Come on, Alan! Get up!” Someone is grabbing me by the shoulders. I try to open my eyes. My eyelids feel as if there are weights on them, pulling them down.

“Yes, Mom,” I mutter.

“Alan! It’s me, Victor! Stop singing and get up!”

–
Owoooooo!

I get slowly to my feet. My head is ringing. It’s hard to concentrate. I look down and – there’s a snake all right. A big one. It’s all coiled up with its head raised, ready to strike. What kind is it? Not a garter snake, with that oblong pattern on its back. The head sways back and forth as Norbert is singing.

Norbert stops singing. The snake falls to the ground in a messy tangle. After a moment it unravels itself and pours away.

Victor stares after it. “That was pretty weird,” he says.

I can’t help but notice the rattle on the end of the snake’s tail. The bite from a full-grown diamondback rattlesnake can kill you. This snake – as long as I am tall – was coiled beside me. I feel faint.

“What’s the matter, Alan?”

“Huh? Nothing. Nothing at all.”

The snake disappears into a hole in the rocks.

I clap Victor on the back. “Thanks, Vic,” I say. “Thanks a lot.”

–
Ahem. Ahem.

“Oh, yes. Thank you too, Norbert.”