Wild

I got my purifier and pumped the questionable liquid into my bottle. My purifier had remained as difficult to use as it had been that first time I used it at Golden Oak Springs, but it was especially difficult in this water, so dense with sludge that it half jammed my filter. By the time I was done filling one bottle, my arms shook with fatigue. I went to my first aid kit and took out my iodine pills and dropped a couple into the water. I’d brought the pills for just this reason, reinforcement should I ever be compelled to drink water that was likely contaminated. Even Albert had thought the iodine pills a good idea back in Kennedy Meadows, when he’d been ruthlessly tossing things into the get-rid-of pile. Albert, who’d been felled by a waterborne illness the very next day.

I had to wait thirty minutes for the iodine to do its work before it was safe to drink. I was desperately thirsty, but I distracted myself by filling my other bottle with water. When I was done, I laid out my tarp on the dirt beach, stood on top of it, and took off my clothes. The wind had mellowed with the fading light. In gentle wafts, it cooled the hot patches on my naked hips. It didn’t occur to me that anyone might come along the trail. I hadn’t seen a soul all day, and even if someone did come along, I was too catatonic with dehydration and exhaustion to care.

I looked at my watch. Twenty-seven minutes had passed since I’d plopped the iodine pills into my water. Usually I was starving by evening, but the idea of eating was nothing to me now. Water was my only desire.

I sat on my blue tarp and drank one bottle down and then the other. The warm water tasted like iron and mud and yet seldom have I ever consumed anything so amazing. I could feel it moving into me, though even once I’d had two 32-ounce bottles, I wasn’t entirely restored. I still wasn’t hungry. I felt like I had in those first days on the trail, when I’d been so astoundingly exhausted that all my body wanted was sleep. Now all my body wanted was water. I filled my bottles again, let the iodine purify them, and drank them both.

By the time I was sated, it was dark and the full moon was rising. I couldn’t muster the energy to set up my tent—a task that required little more than two minutes’ effort, which now seemed Herculean to me. I didn’t need a tent. It hadn’t rained since my first couple of days on the trail. I put my clothes back on and spread out my sleeping bag on the tarp, but it was too hot still to do anything but lie on top of it. I was too tired to read. Even gazing at the moon felt like a mild effort. I’d consumed 128 ounces of questionable reservoir water since I’d arrived a couple of hours before and I still didn’t have to pee. I had done a stupendously dumb thing by setting out across Hat Creek Rim with so little water. I’ll never be so careless again, I promised the moon before falling asleep.

I woke two hours later with the vaguely pleasant sensation that tiny cool hands were gently patting me. They were on my bare legs and arms and face and in my hair, on my feet and throat and hands. I could feel their cool weight through my T-shirt on my chest and belly. “Hmm,” I moaned, turning slightly before I opened my eyes and a series of facts came to me in slow motion.

There was the fact of the moon and the fact that I was sleeping out in the open on my tarp.

There was the fact that I had woken because it seemed like small cool hands were gently patting me and the fact that small cool hands were gently patting me.

And then there was the final fact of all, which was a fact more monumental than even the moon: the fact that those small cool hands were not hands, but hundreds of small cool black frogs.

Small cool slimy black frogs jumping all over me.

Each one was the approximate size of a potato chip. They were an amphibious army, a damp smooth-skinned militia, a great web-footed migration, and I was in their path as they hopped, scrambled, leapt, and hurled their tiny, pudgy, bent-legged bodies from the reservoir and onto the scrim of dirt that they no doubt considered their private beach.

Within an instant, I was among them, hopping, scrambling, leaping, and hurling myself, my pack, my tarp, and everything that sat on it into the brush beyond the beach, swatting frogs from my hair and the folds of my T-shirt as I went. I couldn’t help but squash a few beneath my bare feet. Finally safe, I stood watching them from the frog-free perimeter, the frantic motion of their little dark bodies apparent in the blazing moonlight. I checked my shorts pockets for errant frogs. I gathered my things into a little clear patch that seemed flat enough for my tent and pulled it from my pack. I didn’t need to see what I was doing. My tent was up with the flick of my wrist.