The Troop

THEY SET out just after noon. Three boys: Max, Ephraim, and Newton.

Max checked on Kent beforehand. Still huddled in the cellar under the tarp—his body looked like it was vanishing into the cellar wall, oozing into the hard-packed dirt, as if the wall had grown a mouth and was consuming Kent the way a spider eats a fly: injecting corrosive poison, dissolving the guts, and sucking them out with a long, needlelike proboscis.

“We’ll be back soon,” Max told him. He stood on the final step before the cellar floor, keeping his distance. “We’ll find something to make you better, okay?”

Kent said nothing, just watched with eyes hard and dry as pebbles.

Shelley was missing. They called his name a few times, halfheartedly. No response.

“Should we go anyways?” Newton said.

“Why shouldn’t we?” said Ephraim.

If the boys felt a vague uneasiness over Shelley’s whereabouts—more and more it seemed best to keep him in plain sight—his disappearance gave them an easy excuse to leave without him. What harm could it bring?

Maybe he really did walk into the sea, Newton thought, not unhopefully, then quickly chastised himself for it.

Newton took the lead. Max and Ephraim didn’t question this. After seeing him emerge from the cabin sweaty and near delirious with fear, his knapsack slung triumphantly over his shoulder… it was tough not to measure him a little differently.

The afternoon was bright but cool. Most of their clothing was inside the cabin, damp and unwearable. Ephraim had a Windbreaker. Newton only had one dry shirt.

They walked along the southern skirt of the island following the shore. Strands of kelp washed up on the rocks, looking like disembodied green hands clawing their way out of the sea. Ephraim peeled a strand and looked questioningly at Newton.

“Yeah, it’s edible, Eef.”

Ephraim nibbled an edge. “Holy crap, Newt!”

“I said it was edible,” Newton said. “I didn’t say it was any good.”

Max peeled a strip off a flat rock. “Hey, it’s not bad,” he said, chewing. “Salty. Like beef jerky from the sea.”

Ephraim took another crackly bite and chewed morosely. “Whatever. I’m hungry enough to eat a bear’s asshole.”

Soon after saying this, Ephraim lapsed into a moody silence. He kept rubbing his knuckles on his pants.

“You okay, man?” Max said.

He put a hand on his shoulder. Ephraim shivered as if a spider had crawled down his back. At first Max thought it was because of what’d happened outside the cellar—that awful snap between them, something Max had felt to his core. But that wasn’t it, was it? A cold species of relief washed over Max, only to be replaced with dread. Was Eef…? Max gave Newton a worried look as his hand slid off Ephraim’s shoulder.

“Feeling real weird, man.” Ephraim’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. “I’m not really feeling like myself.”

“Yeah, none of us are,” Max assured him.

“Max is right, Eef. With what happened to the Scoutmaster and now Kent… we just got to hold it together a little while longer, is all.”

Ephraim gave Newton a bemused and slightly shaken look. “Newton Thornton, professional pep-talker,” he said bleakly.

They climbed a hillside that crested to a flat rise studded with boulders and hardy tufted shrubs. The air was perfumed by the salt wind that gusted across the table rock. The ground was pockmarked with holes. Each hole was dug down to a tight gooseneck bend that obscured its occupants from view.

“Prairie dogs?” Max asked.

“Are we on a prairie?” said Ephraim. “Where are the cowboys, Tex?”

“Shut up,” Max said irritably. “Cowboys aren’t all on the prairies anyway.”

Ephraim laughed and scratched his elbows. He’d scratched through his Windbreaker. Max noticed blood dotting the torn nylon.

“Not prairie dogs,” said Newton. “Birds. I’ve read about them. Instead of making nests in trees, they burrow underground.”

Max said: “Can we catch one?”

Newton looked doubtful. “I’ve never seen a rope trap for birds—you need box traps for those, with chicken wire. I don’t think it’d be worth it. They’re pretty much just bones and feathers, right?”

Max thought about those dead shearwaters on his kitchen table and said: “Let’s not bother, okay?”

“Whatever we do eat out here, you can bet it’s going to be a bit weird,” Newton said. “We ought to be prepared for that.” He smiled gamely. “Just think of it all like chicken or something.”

They crossed the plateau to a granite shelf overlooking the sea. The clean mineral smell of the rock hit their noses. Sunlight filled in the slack water between the waves in mellow gold. White ospreys took flight from their cliff-side nests, arcing over the water.

Ephraim kicked a stone over the edge. It clattered down the cliff and nearly crushed an osprey nest sitting on a jagged outcrop. Ephraim pointed at the trio of brown-specked eggs in the nest and said:

“You want to climb down for those? I could go for a three-egg omelet.”

Newton looked dubious. “There’s nowhere to tie the rope. If you slip, it’s a long way down.”