The Wild Things

CHAPTER XV

But one day he saw something. A green blot on the horizon, no bigger than a caterpillar. Half-crazed and untrusting of his eyes, he thought little of it. He went to sleep again.

When he awoke, the caterpillar had become an island. It towered above him — a rocky beach beneath massive cliffs, green hills above. The island seemed strangely alive everywhere, vibrating with color and sound.

By the time he reached the shore, it was night and the island had gone black. It was a good deal less welcoming now, as a silhouette against a gunmetal sky, but there was something high in the hills that beckoned him. An orange glow between the trees high above the shore.

As soon as he felt he was able, Max jumped out and into the water. He thought it would be at least waist-deep, but it was far deeper than that. His feet could not reach the floor and he was quickly swallowed in the foam, the white. And the cold! The water was colder than he thought possible; it knocked the wind out of him.

He held the rope that held the boat, and tried to dog-paddle shoreward. He thought for a moment he would have to let go of the rope, lest he drown. But just as his head dropped below the surface and the boat tugged against his grip, his feet found the sand below, and he stood. He would not die this night and he considered this, on balance, a good thing.

Max stumbled forth, soaked and exhausted. He dragged the boat onto the beach, placed a group of large stones around it, and tied its lead to the biggest tree he could find. When he was finished, he collapsed and lay down, his cheek to the cold sand. When he felt rested, he rose again, but found he could barely stand. He was tired and hungry and leaden; the weight of his fur when wet surprised him. He considered taking off his wolf suit, but he knew if he did he’d be even colder. The wind was bracing and he knew that his only chance at warmth — of survival — would be to climb the cliffs and find his way to the fire he’d seen from the sea.

So this is what he did.

The cliffs were jagged but dependable. He climbed to the top in under an hour and rested at the summit. While heaving and looking down — he was easily two hundred feet up — he heard the sounds coming from the island’s interior: crunching and crashing, whooping and howling, the crackle of a gigantic fire. Only in his depleted and desperate state would Max have considered his best option to be to run, stumble, and crawl through the densest and wildest kind of jungle toward the sounds of what seemed to be some kind of riot.

But this is what he did.

He walked for hours. He slashed his way through the undergrowth, ducking under grasping, luminescent ferns and slithering between the barbed and crosshatched vines. He waded through narrow creeks — the water strangely hot — and climbed over boulders covered with a red and delicate moss that clung to the stone like embroidery. The landscape was sometimes familiar — there were trees, there was dirt, there were rocks — but then again, very odd: the earth seemed to be striped in brown and yellow, like peanut butter and cinnamon after the first twirl of a mixing spoon. There were holes, perfect holes, cut width-wise in the trunks of most of the trees.

After some time his fur, at least above his shins, was dry, and he was warmer, but he was so tired he was dreaming on his feet. Again and again he would shudder awake and find that he’d been walking while asleep.

He was kept going, and on track, by the increasing volume of the chaos in the center of the island. It was such a strange mix of sounds — destruction, calamity, but then what seemed to be laughing.