Page 86 of Happiness for Beginners

Because we were talking! Because we were flirting! Because Jake is so frigging funny, and he was telling me Chuck Norris jokes, and I cannot remember the last time somebody made me laugh!“Because,” I said to Mason, putting a hand on my hip for authority, “you were supposed to be the leader!”

“Keep your pants on,” Mason said. “We’ll just turn around and go back.”

But when we all turned around, there was nothing to go back to. There were lots of little animal trails, crisscrossing each other through the dry dirt. No big, simple, obvious trail like the ones we knew.

“That’s it,” Mason said, pointing southeast.

“That’s definitely not it,” I said. “We came from the southwest.”

“I thought we came from over there,” Dosie said, pointing due west.

I let out a sigh. “Give me the map,” I said.

Mason handed it over.

“You know you’ve got it upside down, right?” I said.

Mason blinked. “Do I?”

“Mason,” I said. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

But his eyes widened just a bit, and he shook his head very slowly.

I pulled my compass out of my pocket. “Okay,” I said. “This is north.” Then I rotated the map 180 degrees until the arrow for “north” on the map matched the arrow on my compass. “And now the map is oriented properly.”

Mason let out a long whistle.

Had he slept through map-reading class? I’d be the first to admit that contour wilderness maps required a certain sense for spatial relationships and weren’t everyone’s thing—but lining up two arrows seemed pretty basic.

“You took us left when we should have been going right,” I said.

“And,” Dosie added, “you took us off the trail.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Here’s what we know. The trail goes between this hill”—I circled one with my finger—“and that hill.” I circled the other. “We’ve been going up this hill. So if we go back down, we should, at some point, hit the trail.”

“What if we don’t?” Dosie asked.

“I think we will,” I said.

“What if—”

“Dosie!” Flash shouted. “Not helping!”

“Let’s check water bottles,” I said. We were all about the same: two-thirds gone.

“That’s the biggest worry,” Jake said. “Water.”

“The trail crosses a stream down here,” I said, pointing, “so if we can get back to it, we can camp right there.”

“If?” Dosie said.

“Sorry—” I said. “When.”

We started making our way back down the hill. I held my compass out to keep us on a straight line, which was easier under the trees than it was once the trees thinned out and the underbrush was thicker. After an hour, we were truly bushwhacking, and everybody’s legs were scratched and bloody. We’d all taken a few stumbles, but Jake had fallen the most, and his arms and face had scratches, too. It was tempting to avoid the brush by following the animal trails that zigzagged around us, but we didn’t want to get off course. Adversity kept us close together, and we hiked as a unified group of four.

“What happens if we don’t find water tonight?” Dosie asked.

“Then we’ll find it tomorrow,” I said.

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