Until the Beginning
Page 25

“You want me to go with you?” I ask, praying she’ll say no. I silently wonder if eighteen is too young to have a climbing-induced heart attack.
“No,” she says quickly, and then turns to me. “I mean . . . it would be great if you could set up camp for us. That way you could recover from the climb and eat.”
Perfect, I think. We’re on the same page.
We walk a few yards down the other side of the mountain. Once we hit a small clearing, Juneau dumps her backpack and I let my bags fall to the ground. I watch as she fills a canteen from a water bottle and then rifles through her bag for her crossbow. She strings the canteen around her neck and hangs the crossbow on a leather strap over one shoulder.
I dig into the grocery bag and hand her a Snickers bar. “You won it. Plus, all that wholesome natural goodness should help sustain you till you get back.”
She grins. “I’ll just be gone an hour or two,” she says, and turns to leave. Then, hesitating, she runs back to me, grabs my face in her hands, and kisses me quickly on the lips. She laughs at my surprise at this very un-Juneau-like display, and then is off. Now that I’m not weighing her down, she moves twice as fast, leaping atop a boulder and disappearing over the top of the mountain.
I stretch out and lay on the ground for a good ten minutes, until my breathing returns to normal and I stop my profuse sweating. Opening one of the water bottles, I pour the entire thing over my head and feel a lot better.
I pitch the tent in minutes flat, and put all of the cooking supplies in a pile, before hanging the bag of food from a tree branch like I’ve seen Juneau do. After gathering enough wood from the surrounding forest for a decent-sized campfire, I look around the clearing with pride. No way would I have known how to set up camp a month ago.
And look at me now—living off the land! Okay, not quite, but close enough, I think, as I make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and grab a bag of chips and bottle of water and hike back up to the lookout point to eat my lunch.
I try to look at the landscape before me like Juneau would. How did she put it? “Figure out which advantages nature gives us,” or something like that. I spot a little stream running down the mountainside a ways away, before the fence starts. I make a mental note to refill the water bottles from it. There’s the ridge I’m on—the perfect lookout. It’s surrounded by trees, so not obvious like some of the cliff tops down the mountain from me. That’s two advantages. Juneau probably wouldn’t even list those. She probably absorbed it all at first glance. For her, a landscape like this is like my living room is to me: She knows her way around it with her eyes shut.
I see something moving far off in the mountains, inside the gated area. It looks like an enormous reindeer, but since I sincerely doubt there are reindeer in New Mexico, I figure it must be something like an elk. Although, when I imagine it strung with bells and red reins, it does look just like the reindeers in all the Christmas movies. Elk. Reindeer. Maybe they’re just two names for the same animal. How clueless am I? I think, feeling a pang of despair.
Don’t give up just because you can’t identify the first wild animal you see. I think of what Juneau said about being one with nature, and decide to try an experiment. I do like she does and calm my breathing, trying to slow my heartbeat. I close my eyes for a minute, and then opening them, try to see inside the landscape instead of just looking at the surface. And as I become still, I grow aware of things moving around me.
To my right, my peripheral vision catches a squirrel scampering down the side of a tree, grabbing a nut off the ground, shoving it in his mouth, and running back up to his perch. Far off in the desert, inside the gates, I see horses . . . no—zebras. A whole herd of zebras walking through the desert toward the mountain foothills. Some kind of big bird—a falcon?—soars overhead, motionless as it floats on an air current.
I wish I had paid more attention in biology. Or at least watched more Animal Planet. The zebras and the squirrel are the only animals I’m actually able to identify. At least I know the elk-beast is some type of deer.
I close my eyes again, and feel the heat from the rock I’m sitting on baking the palms of my hands. I think of Juneau and wonder how she feels, being this close to her people. I wonder what she’ll want to do once she’s reunited with them. I mean once they’re free, course. I hope that whatever it is, she’ll want me to come along. And, without knowing that I already made the decision, I realize I’m ready to go with her. To follow wherever she wants to go. It seems like a huge, momentous choice, but really, it’s one of the easiest ones I’ve ever made.
I focus on the picture of Juneau in my mind, and imagine her following the fence as far as she can without being seen, scouting the surrounding area for anything she can use in her quest. A tingling sensation travels up my fingers to my arms, and suddenly I’m experiencing an overwhelming feeling of excitement, mixed with sharp jabs of anxiety. It’s something I’ve never felt before, not in this intensity. And it dawns on me that it’s because these aren’t my emotions. They’re Juneau’s. I’m channeling her feelings.
I scramble to my feet, and stare at my hands and then down at the rock. Was I . . . I couldn’t have been. Did I just Read the Yara? I rifle through my memory for the explanation Juneau gave this morning about what kind of Readings produce what effects. Is ground for feelings? I can’t remember. I seem to recall that Juneau touches the ground and thinks of the person whose emotions she wants to feel. At least that’s what I just did, but unintentionally.