Page 93 of Happiness for Beginners

We all woke instantly at the first sound. It was a long, high-pitched, eerie squeal that echoed through the valley and pierced my brain. It sounded like a banshee. One banshee at first. Then two. Then, at last, maybe five or six. All shrieking like nothing I’d ever heard and clomping around way too close to our tarp. I have never felt such paralyzing fear in my life. I could not have moved—even blinked—for anything. If those beasts had wanted to trample me, I would have been too frozen to even run. Fortunately, it turned out that elk are really all about other elk when they make sounds like that. The calls lasted at least twenty endless minutes, at which point the elk either found each other or gave up. All became quiet again.

“What the hell was that?” I asked, when my terror had melted enough to speak.

“Elk,” Jake said.

“Mating elk,” Flash added.

“They’re not actually mating,” Jake said. “They’re bugling. It must be rutting season.”

“Did you seriously just say that?” Dosie asked.

“I’ve done a lot of camping,” Jake said.

“What’s ‘bugling’?” I asked.

“Mating calls,” Jake said. “Which are not the same thing as matingsounds.”

“How do you know they were bugling?”

“Because that’s what it sounds like.”

“Didn’t sound like any mating calls I’ve ever heard,” Dosie said.

“Maybe you’re just not doing it right,” Flash said.

We listened for another minute. “Do we think they’re done?”

“They may go on all night,” Jake said.

There was really nothing else to do at that point but try to fall back asleep, keep our ears open, and hope we didn’t get trampled to death—or eaten, for that matter, or rutted with. While we waited, Dosie and Flash fell back asleep. But I didn’t. Lying there, I felt pretty sure that I’d never sleep again.

“You awake?” Jake whispered after a while.

“Yep,” I said.

“Me, too.”

“I intuited that.”

“Are you scared?”

“Fully, no-holds-barred petrified.”

“Does it help if I remind you that elk are vegetarians?”

“Not really.”

He was quiet for a minute after that. We stared up at the ceiling of the tarp. After a while, he said, “We wind up sleeping together a lot, you and me.”

I turned toward him. “In a manner of speaking.”

“It’s like the universe keeps throwing us together.”

“More like pelting us at each other.”

Jake was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Sorry about today, by the way.”

“What do you mean, ‘sorry’?”

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