The Altar Girl: A Prequel

CHAPTER 15

Water. She needed water.

During the early afternoon of the second day of her survival test, Nadia ate half of her buckwheat bread and washed it down with half of her jar of honey. It took all her discipline not to finish the bread and the honey because she felt as though she was starving. Her body was sending her a signal that she needed nutrition, but she ignored it. She could deal with the hunger. Water was the key to her survival.

The one thing she knew not to do was drink from the stream. One of the boys had done that last summer camp and ended up in the hospital with a Cryptosporidium parasite and diarrhea for a week. Nadia could name fifteen parasites that lurked on the Appalachian Trail. She’d memorized them from a guidebook she’d studied as soon as she learned she was going to try to pass the survival test.

After lunch, Nadia trudged toward the stream to keep her mind occupied. Her legs wobbled a bit and she got winded much faster than usual. But the challenge of surviving a night without fire consumed her and she couldn’t stand the thought of sitting around thinking about what awaited her. It wasn’t the realization that she was surrounded by wild animals that scared her. She was an animal, too, and even though she was still a kid she was bigger than most of them. And she had a knife.

No, it was the uncertainty that scared her. The darkness, the noises, the openness of her camp. A fire offered not only heat and light, it issued a warning to every living thing in the vicinity. It did so not only with its flames, but with its spitting and cracking noises. Nadia had once seen a sign hanging on the shed of a house near the Uke campground in Colebrook. It said, “Fuck the dog, beware of owner.” That’s what the roar of a blazing fire told the animals. “Forget the fire, beware of the girl who built it.”

Nadia took a circuitous route toward the stream to waste some time and see something new. In doing so, she stumbled upon a spectacular marble face. It formed an “L” on the ridge above the water. She knelt down beside the marble and swept a layer of limestone off the rock to reveal rich swirls of bronze and sapphire. When she nestled into their confines, Nadia felt like a princess in one of the corny Egyptian movies her mother liked to watch.

She closed her eyes and tilted her head toward the sky. The sun soaked her face like warm syrup. Her exhausted body absorbed the heat, and in less than a minute, she drifted to the border of consciousness. It was a delicious place, better than sleep itself.

A honk startled her. Nadia snapped upright. Scanned the horizon. A heron swooped down in slow motion from its perch on a limb across the stream and spread its wings six feet wide. As it dove, the bird’s blue-gray plumes cast a dark shadow on the water. The heron landed on a rock midstream and snatched a fish from the water with its yellow bill, barely causing a ripple. It tossed the fish in the air, uncurled its “S”-shaped neck, lunged forward, and swallowed its prey midair. Batted its wings three times and soared over the trees out of sight.

Awesome.

Mrs. Chimchak had taught Nadia that the forest was no different from the city. There were two types of creatures in both places. The hunter and the hunted. Which one did she want to be?

Maybe the other kids in her neighborhood in Hartford were tough when they were in groups. Maybe they tossed bubble gum in her hair and chanted “lesbian” when she walked by because there were usually three or four of them and she was alone. Maybe they wouldn’t be so strong out here, alone in the wilderness, where you had to be a hunter to survive.

An hour later, Nadia turned to head back to camp. The late morning sun shone on four bumblebees buzzing around a cluster of creeping bellflower, their open purple blossoms still wet with dew. Something about the scene struck a chord somewhere, but Nadia couldn’t figure it out so she moved on.

A minute later, a wind shook a grove of beech trees and sent a shower of nuts sprinkling to the ground. One of the nuts hit Nadia in the head. She picked it up. It was as green as the skin of a lime, and totally useless. Beech nuts could be ground into soup with boiled water but they’d probably make her sick if she chewed on them raw.

The nut glistened with moisture, like the inside of the bellflower. As Nadia’s fingers absorbed the wetness it dawned on her: there was water for the taking every night. Just as the bees could extract pollen from a plant, she could pull it from the ground by collecting dew.

When she returned to camp, Nadia used a sharp rock and her bare hands to dig a ditch big enough to fit the bowl from her mess kit. She pounded away at the rocky soil for more than an hour, pausing to rest every few minutes. When she was done, Nadia secured a plastic bag over the bowl with twine, poked a tiny hole in its center, and placed it in the ditch. She dropped a pebble on top so the plastic fell inside in a concave fashion. That would force the dew to stream down into the bowl.

When darkness fell, she jumped into her lean-to and crawled inside her sleeping bag. Excitement over the prospect of having water in the morning yielded to her current reality. Without the crackling sounds and blistering flames to distract her, each rustle of leaves and chirp of a cricket struck fear in her heart. How would she ever fall asleep?

She underestimated her fatigue, though, and after fifteen restless minutes she passed out.

A hoot from an owl roused her from her sleep. A flash of light pierced the darkness outside her lean-to. A second one followed quickly, and a third. After a pause, three more flashes of light followed, each of them longer than the first three.

Nadia sat up.

Five seconds later the flashes started again. Nadia rubbed her eyes. Three short followed by three long. Pause. Three more short followed by three long.

Morse code.

The SOS signal.

Someone was in trouble. Someone needed her help.

The flashes of light grew brighter as the person approached. The footsteps came rapidly.

Nadia had stored the whistle her father had given her in her knapsack. She remembered her brother getting in trouble for blowing it and vetoed the idea. Whistles were for losers.

Instead, she retrieved her knife from her lean-to and unsheathed it. Placed her thumb on top of the handle and turned the edge facing upward.

Forward grip, edge up. Forward grip for maximum reach. Edge up for finesse and flexibility.

Nadia slid behind the largest tree on the periphery of her camp, its trunk wide enough to hide her entire body, and waited for the source of the SOS to reveal itself.