We heard something digging underneath our tent. Ben heard…
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We heard something digging underneath our tent.
Ben heard it first, which is annoying, because for the first hour he blamed me.
It was supposed to be our last trip for a while, one more weekend in the Interior before he and Jess moved to Toronto in November. He'd been calling everything his last for about a month, and I'd been giving him a hard time about it.
Ben can sleep anywhere. He once slept through a fire alarm in a hostel and still tells that story like the alarm let him down personally. I'm the opposite. Put me in a tent and I hear every mouse in the province. But the walk in had been hot and mostly uphill, and I'd had two of the Kokanees, and that night for once I was out by ten and slept the way Ben usually sleeps.
So when he kicked my sleeping bag sometime after midnight and said, “Stop doing that,” it took me a second to remember where I was.
“Doing what?”
“That. The scratching.”
“I was asleep.”
“You've been doing it for an hour.”
“I was asleep.”
“Then you do it in your sleep. Knock it off.”
I lay there and listened. Nothing, for long enough that I'd started to roll back over, and then something scraped through the dirt under my right hip. Three quick strokes, close enough that I felt them come up through the mat as much as heard them.
I sat up.
“Thank you,” Ben said.
“That wasn't me.”
He didn't answer, because it came again, from the gap between our mats this time. A pause. Then two more strokes, slower.
Between us and the forest floor there was a foam mat each, a tent floor older than some of our friends' kids, and not much else.
Ben found his headlamp.
“Marmot.”
“Under the tent?”
“They burrow.”
“Under us? While we're lying on it?”
“I think you don't know much about marmots.”
“I know they're not magic.”
He smacked the tent floor flat-handed and the noise stopped. Maybe thirty seconds later it started again, directly under him, and Ben moved fast enough to put his head into the tent wall.
I laughed. “Marmot.”
“Shut up.”
We got out. It was cold enough that I missed the sleeping bag immediately. Under the lights the campsite looked the way it always did: needles, roots, bare patches of dirt, nothing moving in the trees. We pulled the pegs on one side and flipped the whole tent back over itself, bags and mats and all, like turning back a rug.
Where I'd been lying, the ground had sunk. Not by much. If you'd shown me a photo I'd have said I'd just flattened the needles.
Ben crouched and pushed on it with his palm.
The earth flexed.
He pushed harder and something under it gave with a quiet crunch, like stepping through a crust of old snow.
He stood and stamped beside the dip, and his boot went through. He jumped back swearing. A piece of forest floor about the size of a dinner plate had dropped into nothing.
For a few seconds neither of us did anything.
The top layer wasn't thick, maybe ten centimetres of soil and roots, and below that there was just space. Ben got down on his knees and put the light through the opening, and I got down beside him.
Roots hung into the hollow. That's what bothered me first. The small ones were completely bare, pale and stringy, and a couple of thicker ones ran underneath the surface from one side of the hole to the other. They hadn't been torn out or chewed through.
The dirt around them was simply gone.
There was air coming up out of it, colder than the night was. I keep coming back to this part. It didn't smell like anything. Put your face near a hole in the ground and you get dirt or rot or wet leaves, something. Everything in a forest smells like dirt. This smelled like nothing at all, and I've never managed to describe it better than that, which I realize is a strange thing to say about a smell that wasn't there.
Ben slid one of his trekking poles down through the hole until it touched something.
“Bottom?”
“I think.”
He moved the pole sideways. Then farther. Then he leaned on it, and the pole went in almost to the handle, at an angle, without touching anything at all.
I looked from the pole to the tent lying flipped over on itself a few feet away and tried to work out how long it would take to empty a space like that. Longer than an hour. Longer than Ben had been lying there listening to it. We'd gone to bed around ten, and I had been asleep on top of it the whole time. Properly asleep, for the first time in a tent in years.
Ben's the one who sleeps through things. On any other night he'd have slept through this too.
I've never asked him what woke him up.
I walked around the campsite looking for the dirt. There was no mound behind the tent and nothing thrown up around the trees or scattered over the needles. I checked the slope below camp and the ground under the tree we'd hung the food from. Whatever had emptied that space, what used to be in it wasn't anywhere I could find.
I'm not going to say exactly where this was. It was Crown land a few hours north of Kamloops, and there are rec sites and logging roads all through that country, and people camp out there every summer. If that spot is still there, I don't want anyone deciding it's worth finding.
We packed. Neither of us suggested waiting for morning.
The tent went in my pack. Technically it was Ben's, an old three-person dome he'd had since second year, which was when we started doing these trips, but on the drive up he'd told me I was keeping it because it wouldn't fit in the moving truck. It would have fit in the truck. I said thanks and offered him the last of the Doritos, and neither of us took it any further.
The car was a little under seven kilometres away, mostly downhill. The plan was to walk out, sleep in the car, and feel stupid about it after sunrise. We left around two.
For the first kilometre nothing happened, and after a while Ben started talking again, mostly because walking through that forest without talking was worse. He told me this was officially his last night hike. I said it wasn't a hike, it was an evacuation. He said it counted. Then he went through the list again: the last Canucks game, the last pint at our usual pub, and the donair place by his apartment that had been overcharging him for four years and that he was apparently going to miss. After that he complained about carrying three unopened Kokanees back out.
“Emergency hydration.”
“Beer dehydrates you.”
“That's propaganda.”
“From who?”
“Big Water.”
Normal crap. It helped more than I'd have admitted.
About two kilometres down, a pine had come across the trail and we stopped to get our packs off for a minute. Ben sat on the ground and leaned back against the trunk. I stayed standing.
He noticed.
“Oh, come on.”
“What?”
“You're scared of the ground now?”
“I'm stretching.”
“You're literally just standing there.”
The scratching started underneath him.
He was up before I could say anything, and it stopped.
Ben looked back up the trail, the way we'd come. “So it's not just back there.”
Apparently not. Neither of us said marmot again.
After that we didn't sit unless there was rock under us. Once it was a boulder beside the trail, and once a shelf of bare granite where the path crossed an outcrop, and nothing happened either time. Ben started to say something about rock and I told him not to. He understood. We didn't know enough to make rules, and I didn't want us trusting one.
The creek was about three kilometres from the car. It had rained farther north that week and the water was higher than the afternoon before, so the stones we'd used on the way in were mostly under. We waded it slowly and it was fine. On the far side there's a short scramble up the bank, a metre and a bit of dirt and roots, the kind of thing you don't think about.
Ben went up first. He put his right foot on a ledge of the bank and the ledge went. His leg dropped into the bank to the shin and he pitched forward over it with all his weight.
I heard something in his ankle go. It was a dull little sound. Then he was swearing loud enough that I couldn't hear anything else.
When I got his foot out there was a gap underneath where it had been, running back into the bank farther than my light reached. I told him creek banks do that. The water gets in under them and eats them out from below. I said that a few times, probably more than it needed saying.
I got him up onto the flat and got his boot off. The ankle was already swelling. For a few minutes I genuinely forgot about everything else.
“Can you move it?”
“Yeah.”
He tried. His foot moved about a centimetre and his whole face changed.
“Fantastic,” I said.
“Eat shit.”
I wrapped it with the tensor bandage from the first-aid kit, and then I made him put the boot back on over it, laced loose. I didn't know what else was going to hold it, and I wasn't sure we'd get the boot on at all later if the swelling kept going. He told me in some detail what he thought of that.
I was kneeling in front of him tying off the laces when he grabbed my wrist.
He didn't say anything. He just looked down at my knees.
The leaves around them were lowering. A centimetre, maybe two. I watched them go, and the dirt under them go with them, and nothing pushed up through it anywhere. The ground just lost depth.
I hadn't heard a thing. I'd been talking the whole time.
“Move,” Ben said.
No reception out there, and nobody expecting us before Sunday night. Ben got an arm over my shoulders and we went.
Half a kilometre on we dropped the packs. Mine had a shoulder strap I'd duct-taped back on years ago and Ben's was older than that, and neither was worth what it weighed anymore. Ben looked back at them sitting in the middle of the trail.
“You're coming back for those.”
“Yep.”
“Your tent's in there.”
“I know.”
“So's my beer.”
“I know.”
We left them.
The trail got steeper after that. Ben couldn't hop properly on the downhill, so I had most of his weight on my right side, and the farther we went the more of it I had. My shoulder went past hurting into something hot and loose. My thighs started shaking on every step down, the way they do at the end of a long day of skiing, except at the end of a day of skiing you get to sit down.
We had to stop. I'd been putting it off, and then I couldn't anymore. So we stopped standing up, a few seconds at a time, just long enough for me to shift his arm and get some air.
I started counting at those stops. I don't really know why. It gave my head something to do that wasn't the ground. The first time I got to twenty-two before I heard it under my boots, and we went.
The next stop it was eighteen.
Then fourteen. Then somewhere around eleven, though Ben was swearing through that one and I might have lost count.
I needed longer every time. The numbers kept going the other way. After the eleven I stopped saying them out loud, and Ben didn't ask.
At one stop I propped him against a tree and went a few metres down the trail to put the light on a steep section before I tried to get him down it. I'd been standing there a few seconds when I heard it under my feet. At almost the same moment Ben said, “It's under me.”
I thought he meant the same sound. Then mine kept going. So did his.
We were four metres apart.
I took two steps back toward him. Behind me, under the place I'd just been standing, the sound went on another second or two before it quit. Ben's hadn't stopped at all.
Until then I'd still been picturing an animal, sort of. One thing down there in the dark, keeping up with us. One thing can't be four metres apart from itself.
I put the light out into the forest. A flashlight doesn't go far in trees like that. It catches trunks and branches and undergrowth, and everything behind them is black. But I could see a lot of ground between the trunks, and it all looked normal, and that didn't mean much anymore.
“Let's go,” Ben said.
Maybe five minutes later the trail cut along the side of a slope and I nearly walked us past it. On the downhill side, the edge of the trail stuck out a little over nothing, like a lip.
I stopped. Ben swore, because stopping hurt, and I put the light under it.
There was a gap under the edge. It wasn't deep, maybe thirty centimetres at the lip, but it ran back underneath the path, back under where we were standing. Roots came down through the ceiling of it, fine ones and thick ones, with no soil around any of them.
I moved the light along the slope. The gap kept going. A metre. Two. Farther than I could see.
There was no water anywhere near it. No gully, nothing draining across, just the side of a dry hill in September.
“Was that like that yesterday?” Ben said.
I didn't know. We'd walked up this exact stretch the afternoon before, slowly, with full packs, and I couldn't remember it at all, because there hadn't been anything to notice.
I thought about the creek bank, and how much I'd wanted that to be the water.
I looked across the trail. Then at the trees beside it. Then farther into the forest.
All that normal ground.
I'd been carrying two people's weight across it all night, one foot at a time.
It had started up under us again while I stood there. I don't know for how long.
We moved faster.
There was less than a kilometre left when Ben fell.
His good foot caught a root and he went down and took me with him. I landed on my side. He landed flat on his back, and the scratching started before he'd finished swearing. No count at all. Right away.
I got onto my knees. The soil under his shoulders was already going down.
“Get me up.”
I got a fistful of his jacket and pulled, and the ground under his hips dropped, and when he shoved at it to get himself upright his right leg went straight down through the trail to the thigh.
He screamed. I'd never heard a person make that sound before and I'd like to never hear it again.
“Pull me out.”
“I am.”
“Pull me out.”
I got my arms under his and planted my feet and hauled.
The scratching under him had gone almost continuous, and I could see the dirt around his leg going. It didn't cave in or spray or collapse the way you'd expect. It just went, steadily, like something draining, and the cold air was coming up around his leg out of the hole and across my hands, that same air that didn't smell like anything.
One moment there was soil against his jeans.
Then there was less.
And as it went the roots stayed, one across his thigh and another lower down across his shin and more I couldn't see, so his leg was hanging in them like something caught in a fence, and every time I pulled they pulled back. I had my heels dug in and his whole weight on my arms and I was watching his leg, only his leg, and somewhere in there I'd stopped counting without noticing I'd stopped, and I didn't notice anything at all until my left heel went down. Not far. A centimetre maybe, the way your foot sinks into a mattress. Under the sound of Ben screaming I could hear it under my own boots, under both heels at once, steady and close, and I had been standing there for I don't know how long.
I couldn't step off. I'd lose my grip on him and he'd go down another foot, or all the way, and I didn't know which. I couldn't stay where I was either.
So I did something stupid. I started moving my feet. Not stepping away, just lifting them, one and then the other, little steps on the spot like a kid who needs the washroom, while I tried to keep pulling. You can't pull anything heavy like that. You've got no base. I don't know if it helped. I don't know that it didn't. The scratching under me didn't stop, but I think it slowed, and I think my heels stopped going down, and I'm aware those are both things I'd want to think.
One of the roots across his shin snapped when I yanked. Another dragged down the front of his leg as he came up and opened a line through his jeans and his skin from the knee down.
Then he came free all at once and we went over backward together.
His right boot didn't come with him. For a second I could still see it down in the opening, the laces I'd tied loose trailing off it. Then whatever was holding it let go, and it dropped.
I crawled over and put the light down the hole. At the surface it was barely wider than Ben's leg. Below that, roots crossed empty space, and the beam went down between them and didn't land on anything.
Ben grabbed the back of my jacket.
“Leave it.”
I did.
I got him up. I don't remember a lot of the last kilometre. I know I didn't count anymore, because I didn't stop. I remember the sock on his bad foot was black by the end, and that at some point he stopped swearing at me, which was worse.
The last stretch to the forestry road was surfaced with crushed gravel. Ben made it a few metres onto it and sat down hard, and I grabbed him under the arm to haul him back up.
“Wait,” he said.
So we waited. A minute. Then another. I counted to a hundred and twenty and then started over and counted it again.
Nothing scratched.
I didn't care why.
Ben lay back on the gravel with his arm over his eyes, and I'm pretty sure he was asleep inside a minute. Of course he was. I stood next to him for maybe half an hour with the light on the gravel around him before I woke him and got him moving again.
We reached the car sometime after five.
At the hospital they found a small fracture and significant ligament damage. The cuts down his shin had dirt and bits of root ground into them, and a nurse spent a long time flushing it all out while he swore into a towel.
We said he'd stepped into a concealed hole. True enough. Nobody asked anything else.
Ben moved east six weeks later. His ankle was still strapped when I helped load the truck, and he spent the whole day in a lawn chair telling everyone else where things went. Before he left he asked whether I'd ever gone back for the packs.
I said no.
He nodded, and neither of us said anything else about it.
For a while we'd send each other a photo whenever one of us saw a marmot. I couldn't tell you which of us stopped first.
I haven't been camping since.
The first time anyone else noticed anything was at a barbecue a couple of summers later, when a friend's wife asked why I'd been standing all afternoon when there was plenty of room on the lawn. I'd been there almost three hours. I hadn't noticed I was doing it. I don't sit on grass much. I don't lie down in parks.
I don't think much anymore about what it was. Sometimes I think about where it all went. Everything that used to be under that tent and that trail, and under however much more of that country. It had to go somewhere.
Last year I moved into a third-floor apartment. There was a ground-floor unit in the same building for a hundred and fifty a month less, and I told the property manager I liked the light better upstairs, which I think I believed at the time.
There's two other apartments between my bed and the earth.
Last weekend my girlfriend got invited camping with some people from her work, and she wanted me to come. So I finally told her why I wouldn't. All of it, more or less the way it's written here. She's the first person I've ever told, and once I'd said it out loud it felt strange to keep it anywhere else, which is why I'm writing it down.
Afterward she asked whether Ben had ever camped again.
I realized I'd never asked him.
So I sent him a message.
*You ever been camping since BC?*
It took him about an hour to answer.
*No.*
Then:
*You?*
*No.*
It was the first time either of us had brought it up in six years. I figured that was the whole conversation.
About twenty minutes later my phone went again.
*Jess got me one of those sleep rings for Christmas. She was worried I wasn't resting.*
*It says I've never gone longer than forty minutes without moving. Not one night since I've had it.*
*She thinks I'm a restless sleeper.*
That was Tuesday. I haven't answered him.
I keep thinking about the fire alarm.
#entertainment
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Ben heard it first, which is annoying, because for the first hour he blamed me.
It was supposed to be our last trip for a while, one more weekend in the Interior before he and Jess moved to Toronto in November. He'd been calling everything his last for about a month, and I'd been giving him a hard time about it.
Ben can sleep anywhere. He once slept through a fire alarm in a hostel and still tells that story like the alarm let him down personally. I'm the opposite. Put me in a tent and I hear every mouse in the province. But the walk in had been hot and mostly uphill, and I'd had two of the Kokanees, and that night for once I was out by ten and slept the way Ben usually sleeps.
So when he kicked my sleeping bag sometime after midnight and said, “Stop doing that,” it took me a second to remember where I was.
“Doing what?”
“That. The scratching.”
“I was asleep.”
“You've been doing it for an hour.”
“I was asleep.”
“Then you do it in your sleep. Knock it off.”
I lay there and listened. Nothing, for long enough that I'd started to roll back over, and then something scraped through the dirt under my right hip. Three quick strokes, close enough that I felt them come up through the mat as much as heard them.
I sat up.
“Thank you,” Ben said.
“That wasn't me.”
He didn't answer, because it came again, from the gap between our mats this time. A pause. Then two more strokes, slower.
Between us and the forest floor there was a foam mat each, a tent floor older than some of our friends' kids, and not much else.
Ben found his headlamp.
“Marmot.”
“Under the tent?”
“They burrow.”
“Under us? While we're lying on it?”
“I think you don't know much about marmots.”
“I know they're not magic.”
He smacked the tent floor flat-handed and the noise stopped. Maybe thirty seconds later it started again, directly under him, and Ben moved fast enough to put his head into the tent wall.
I laughed. “Marmot.”
“Shut up.”
We got out. It was cold enough that I missed the sleeping bag immediately. Under the lights the campsite looked the way it always did: needles, roots, bare patches of dirt, nothing moving in the trees. We pulled the pegs on one side and flipped the whole tent back over itself, bags and mats and all, like turning back a rug.
Where I'd been lying, the ground had sunk. Not by much. If you'd shown me a photo I'd have said I'd just flattened the needles.
Ben crouched and pushed on it with his palm.
The earth flexed.
He pushed harder and something under it gave with a quiet crunch, like stepping through a crust of old snow.
He stood and stamped beside the dip, and his boot went through. He jumped back swearing. A piece of forest floor about the size of a dinner plate had dropped into nothing.
For a few seconds neither of us did anything.
The top layer wasn't thick, maybe ten centimetres of soil and roots, and below that there was just space. Ben got down on his knees and put the light through the opening, and I got down beside him.
Roots hung into the hollow. That's what bothered me first. The small ones were completely bare, pale and stringy, and a couple of thicker ones ran underneath the surface from one side of the hole to the other. They hadn't been torn out or chewed through.
The dirt around them was simply gone.
There was air coming up out of it, colder than the night was. I keep coming back to this part. It didn't smell like anything. Put your face near a hole in the ground and you get dirt or rot or wet leaves, something. Everything in a forest smells like dirt. This smelled like nothing at all, and I've never managed to describe it better than that, which I realize is a strange thing to say about a smell that wasn't there.
Ben slid one of his trekking poles down through the hole until it touched something.
“Bottom?”
“I think.”
He moved the pole sideways. Then farther. Then he leaned on it, and the pole went in almost to the handle, at an angle, without touching anything at all.
I looked from the pole to the tent lying flipped over on itself a few feet away and tried to work out how long it would take to empty a space like that. Longer than an hour. Longer than Ben had been lying there listening to it. We'd gone to bed around ten, and I had been asleep on top of it the whole time. Properly asleep, for the first time in a tent in years.
Ben's the one who sleeps through things. On any other night he'd have slept through this too.
I've never asked him what woke him up.
I walked around the campsite looking for the dirt. There was no mound behind the tent and nothing thrown up around the trees or scattered over the needles. I checked the slope below camp and the ground under the tree we'd hung the food from. Whatever had emptied that space, what used to be in it wasn't anywhere I could find.
I'm not going to say exactly where this was. It was Crown land a few hours north of Kamloops, and there are rec sites and logging roads all through that country, and people camp out there every summer. If that spot is still there, I don't want anyone deciding it's worth finding.
We packed. Neither of us suggested waiting for morning.
The tent went in my pack. Technically it was Ben's, an old three-person dome he'd had since second year, which was when we started doing these trips, but on the drive up he'd told me I was keeping it because it wouldn't fit in the moving truck. It would have fit in the truck. I said thanks and offered him the last of the Doritos, and neither of us took it any further.
The car was a little under seven kilometres away, mostly downhill. The plan was to walk out, sleep in the car, and feel stupid about it after sunrise. We left around two.
For the first kilometre nothing happened, and after a while Ben started talking again, mostly because walking through that forest without talking was worse. He told me this was officially his last night hike. I said it wasn't a hike, it was an evacuation. He said it counted. Then he went through the list again: the last Canucks game, the last pint at our usual pub, and the donair place by his apartment that had been overcharging him for four years and that he was apparently going to miss. After that he complained about carrying three unopened Kokanees back out.
“Emergency hydration.”
“Beer dehydrates you.”
“That's propaganda.”
“From who?”
“Big Water.”
Normal crap. It helped more than I'd have admitted.
About two kilometres down, a pine had come across the trail and we stopped to get our packs off for a minute. Ben sat on the ground and leaned back against the trunk. I stayed standing.
He noticed.
“Oh, come on.”
“What?”
“You're scared of the ground now?”
“I'm stretching.”
“You're literally just standing there.”
The scratching started underneath him.
He was up before I could say anything, and it stopped.
Ben looked back up the trail, the way we'd come. “So it's not just back there.”
Apparently not. Neither of us said marmot again.
After that we didn't sit unless there was rock under us. Once it was a boulder beside the trail, and once a shelf of bare granite where the path crossed an outcrop, and nothing happened either time. Ben started to say something about rock and I told him not to. He understood. We didn't know enough to make rules, and I didn't want us trusting one.
The creek was about three kilometres from the car. It had rained farther north that week and the water was higher than the afternoon before, so the stones we'd used on the way in were mostly under. We waded it slowly and it was fine. On the far side there's a short scramble up the bank, a metre and a bit of dirt and roots, the kind of thing you don't think about.
Ben went up first. He put his right foot on a ledge of the bank and the ledge went. His leg dropped into the bank to the shin and he pitched forward over it with all his weight.
I heard something in his ankle go. It was a dull little sound. Then he was swearing loud enough that I couldn't hear anything else.
When I got his foot out there was a gap underneath where it had been, running back into the bank farther than my light reached. I told him creek banks do that. The water gets in under them and eats them out from below. I said that a few times, probably more than it needed saying.
I got him up onto the flat and got his boot off. The ankle was already swelling. For a few minutes I genuinely forgot about everything else.
“Can you move it?”
“Yeah.”
He tried. His foot moved about a centimetre and his whole face changed.
“Fantastic,” I said.
“Eat shit.”
I wrapped it with the tensor bandage from the first-aid kit, and then I made him put the boot back on over it, laced loose. I didn't know what else was going to hold it, and I wasn't sure we'd get the boot on at all later if the swelling kept going. He told me in some detail what he thought of that.
I was kneeling in front of him tying off the laces when he grabbed my wrist.
He didn't say anything. He just looked down at my knees.
The leaves around them were lowering. A centimetre, maybe two. I watched them go, and the dirt under them go with them, and nothing pushed up through it anywhere. The ground just lost depth.
I hadn't heard a thing. I'd been talking the whole time.
“Move,” Ben said.
No reception out there, and nobody expecting us before Sunday night. Ben got an arm over my shoulders and we went.
Half a kilometre on we dropped the packs. Mine had a shoulder strap I'd duct-taped back on years ago and Ben's was older than that, and neither was worth what it weighed anymore. Ben looked back at them sitting in the middle of the trail.
“You're coming back for those.”
“Yep.”
“Your tent's in there.”
“I know.”
“So's my beer.”
“I know.”
We left them.
The trail got steeper after that. Ben couldn't hop properly on the downhill, so I had most of his weight on my right side, and the farther we went the more of it I had. My shoulder went past hurting into something hot and loose. My thighs started shaking on every step down, the way they do at the end of a long day of skiing, except at the end of a day of skiing you get to sit down.
We had to stop. I'd been putting it off, and then I couldn't anymore. So we stopped standing up, a few seconds at a time, just long enough for me to shift his arm and get some air.
I started counting at those stops. I don't really know why. It gave my head something to do that wasn't the ground. The first time I got to twenty-two before I heard it under my boots, and we went.
The next stop it was eighteen.
Then fourteen. Then somewhere around eleven, though Ben was swearing through that one and I might have lost count.
I needed longer every time. The numbers kept going the other way. After the eleven I stopped saying them out loud, and Ben didn't ask.
At one stop I propped him against a tree and went a few metres down the trail to put the light on a steep section before I tried to get him down it. I'd been standing there a few seconds when I heard it under my feet. At almost the same moment Ben said, “It's under me.”
I thought he meant the same sound. Then mine kept going. So did his.
We were four metres apart.
I took two steps back toward him. Behind me, under the place I'd just been standing, the sound went on another second or two before it quit. Ben's hadn't stopped at all.
Until then I'd still been picturing an animal, sort of. One thing down there in the dark, keeping up with us. One thing can't be four metres apart from itself.
I put the light out into the forest. A flashlight doesn't go far in trees like that. It catches trunks and branches and undergrowth, and everything behind them is black. But I could see a lot of ground between the trunks, and it all looked normal, and that didn't mean much anymore.
“Let's go,” Ben said.
Maybe five minutes later the trail cut along the side of a slope and I nearly walked us past it. On the downhill side, the edge of the trail stuck out a little over nothing, like a lip.
I stopped. Ben swore, because stopping hurt, and I put the light under it.
There was a gap under the edge. It wasn't deep, maybe thirty centimetres at the lip, but it ran back underneath the path, back under where we were standing. Roots came down through the ceiling of it, fine ones and thick ones, with no soil around any of them.
I moved the light along the slope. The gap kept going. A metre. Two. Farther than I could see.
There was no water anywhere near it. No gully, nothing draining across, just the side of a dry hill in September.
“Was that like that yesterday?” Ben said.
I didn't know. We'd walked up this exact stretch the afternoon before, slowly, with full packs, and I couldn't remember it at all, because there hadn't been anything to notice.
I thought about the creek bank, and how much I'd wanted that to be the water.
I looked across the trail. Then at the trees beside it. Then farther into the forest.
All that normal ground.
I'd been carrying two people's weight across it all night, one foot at a time.
It had started up under us again while I stood there. I don't know for how long.
We moved faster.
There was less than a kilometre left when Ben fell.
His good foot caught a root and he went down and took me with him. I landed on my side. He landed flat on his back, and the scratching started before he'd finished swearing. No count at all. Right away.
I got onto my knees. The soil under his shoulders was already going down.
“Get me up.”
I got a fistful of his jacket and pulled, and the ground under his hips dropped, and when he shoved at it to get himself upright his right leg went straight down through the trail to the thigh.
He screamed. I'd never heard a person make that sound before and I'd like to never hear it again.
“Pull me out.”
“I am.”
“Pull me out.”
I got my arms under his and planted my feet and hauled.
The scratching under him had gone almost continuous, and I could see the dirt around his leg going. It didn't cave in or spray or collapse the way you'd expect. It just went, steadily, like something draining, and the cold air was coming up around his leg out of the hole and across my hands, that same air that didn't smell like anything.
One moment there was soil against his jeans.
Then there was less.
And as it went the roots stayed, one across his thigh and another lower down across his shin and more I couldn't see, so his leg was hanging in them like something caught in a fence, and every time I pulled they pulled back. I had my heels dug in and his whole weight on my arms and I was watching his leg, only his leg, and somewhere in there I'd stopped counting without noticing I'd stopped, and I didn't notice anything at all until my left heel went down. Not far. A centimetre maybe, the way your foot sinks into a mattress. Under the sound of Ben screaming I could hear it under my own boots, under both heels at once, steady and close, and I had been standing there for I don't know how long.
I couldn't step off. I'd lose my grip on him and he'd go down another foot, or all the way, and I didn't know which. I couldn't stay where I was either.
So I did something stupid. I started moving my feet. Not stepping away, just lifting them, one and then the other, little steps on the spot like a kid who needs the washroom, while I tried to keep pulling. You can't pull anything heavy like that. You've got no base. I don't know if it helped. I don't know that it didn't. The scratching under me didn't stop, but I think it slowed, and I think my heels stopped going down, and I'm aware those are both things I'd want to think.
One of the roots across his shin snapped when I yanked. Another dragged down the front of his leg as he came up and opened a line through his jeans and his skin from the knee down.
Then he came free all at once and we went over backward together.
His right boot didn't come with him. For a second I could still see it down in the opening, the laces I'd tied loose trailing off it. Then whatever was holding it let go, and it dropped.
I crawled over and put the light down the hole. At the surface it was barely wider than Ben's leg. Below that, roots crossed empty space, and the beam went down between them and didn't land on anything.
Ben grabbed the back of my jacket.
“Leave it.”
I did.
I got him up. I don't remember a lot of the last kilometre. I know I didn't count anymore, because I didn't stop. I remember the sock on his bad foot was black by the end, and that at some point he stopped swearing at me, which was worse.
The last stretch to the forestry road was surfaced with crushed gravel. Ben made it a few metres onto it and sat down hard, and I grabbed him under the arm to haul him back up.
“Wait,” he said.
So we waited. A minute. Then another. I counted to a hundred and twenty and then started over and counted it again.
Nothing scratched.
I didn't care why.
Ben lay back on the gravel with his arm over his eyes, and I'm pretty sure he was asleep inside a minute. Of course he was. I stood next to him for maybe half an hour with the light on the gravel around him before I woke him and got him moving again.
We reached the car sometime after five.
At the hospital they found a small fracture and significant ligament damage. The cuts down his shin had dirt and bits of root ground into them, and a nurse spent a long time flushing it all out while he swore into a towel.
We said he'd stepped into a concealed hole. True enough. Nobody asked anything else.
Ben moved east six weeks later. His ankle was still strapped when I helped load the truck, and he spent the whole day in a lawn chair telling everyone else where things went. Before he left he asked whether I'd ever gone back for the packs.
I said no.
He nodded, and neither of us said anything else about it.
For a while we'd send each other a photo whenever one of us saw a marmot. I couldn't tell you which of us stopped first.
I haven't been camping since.
The first time anyone else noticed anything was at a barbecue a couple of summers later, when a friend's wife asked why I'd been standing all afternoon when there was plenty of room on the lawn. I'd been there almost three hours. I hadn't noticed I was doing it. I don't sit on grass much. I don't lie down in parks.
I don't think much anymore about what it was. Sometimes I think about where it all went. Everything that used to be under that tent and that trail, and under however much more of that country. It had to go somewhere.
Last year I moved into a third-floor apartment. There was a ground-floor unit in the same building for a hundred and fifty a month less, and I told the property manager I liked the light better upstairs, which I think I believed at the time.
There's two other apartments between my bed and the earth.
Last weekend my girlfriend got invited camping with some people from her work, and she wanted me to come. So I finally told her why I wouldn't. All of it, more or less the way it's written here. She's the first person I've ever told, and once I'd said it out loud it felt strange to keep it anywhere else, which is why I'm writing it down.
Afterward she asked whether Ben had ever camped again.
I realized I'd never asked him.
So I sent him a message.
*You ever been camping since BC?*
It took him about an hour to answer.
*No.*
Then:
*You?*
*No.*
It was the first time either of us had brought it up in six years. I figured that was the whole conversation.
About twenty minutes later my phone went again.
*Jess got me one of those sleep rings for Christmas. She was worried I wasn't resting.*
*It says I've never gone longer than forty minutes without moving. Not one night since I've had it.*
*She thinks I'm a restless sleeper.*
That was Tuesday. I haven't answered him.
I keep thinking about the fire alarm.
#entertainment
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comments
Something digging under the tent and Ben spent the first hour blaming you. That is a special kind of loyalty. A last trip before Toronto, and the Interior decides to audition for the goodbye. I would not have lasted the hour.
