The second chapter of The backpacker's journey

Seventeen Snow Ptarmigans passed my path but zero cars.

I kept trudging along the beaten highway, hoping a bear or something would attack me and relieve me of this horrible leg pain. It started in my head as a pressure headache, but headaches are as potent as venom: Capable of spreading like a virus without containment. The trees made smug winks of their comfort beneath the bright blue sky. My backpack felt like a million bricks weighing down on me, like the sum of all my pains and burdens finally catching up to me. Before, I could vomit when I looked at a gross burger, but now that was all I wanted.

I stopped and rested in an old hiker's shelter in Denali Pass. Would it hurt for God to come down from the heavens and give me a teaspoon of drinking water? My canteen ran empty a couple hours ago, and now the impending danger of a heat stroke was becoming ever so rampant. Odd how the weather finally decided to become 90 degrees on this day, when the average temperature in Anchorage was 70 at its finest.

I stayed in the shelter, refusing calls of slumber. That terrifying risk of falling asleep was like a trekker on the Himalayas, become lethargic and never wake up. What a peaceful way to die, really, fall asleep on a white wool of clouds and slowly ascend the mountains to heaven. Or hell. Was I to die from cold or warmth? My body and the world was confusing me. My mind couldn't make out anything that had happened to me ever since Simon left me. Out of pure desperation I flattened myself to my knees and cried out to the sky for forgiveness. I forgave Tabitha for stealing her money she was saving up for a new laptop, her old one that I tripped and it fell to the base of our pool. I forgave Simon for shouting at him to leave, because now here I was. I'm not sure if it was starvation or the heat catching up to me, but I curled up in a ball, ignored terrified cries from my mind, and fell asleep on the patch of dead grass.

"Look at that beauty."

I squinted through the curved lenses and blinked for better definition. "What? That's just a Blue Jay."

"Yeah, an entire flock of them. Always seem to find each other, that blaring call whipping through trees."

"I admire your poetry but I came here to see Spoonbills and Warblers, not some birds I can find at a nursing home's bird feeder."

"Don't just look, listen."

I placed the binoculars back on my chest and reeled my ears out to the forest. They kept making their signature blaring call, but something else mixed in. A sound of a kestrel. I looked back at them with my binoculars and fitted their calls within their tiny beaks. "Is there a kestrel in there?"

Simon smiled and furrowed his baked brown hair. "There is no kestrel. There's one imitating the call."

I glanced back at them in amazement, trying to focus on the odd one. Out of them I couldn't seem to find the single one, just blue threads woven together as if they were so good at keeping together. "But why?"

"Well the scientific reason is to scare away predators, but entire flocks of jays are supposed to imitate."

"Maybe the jay doesn't want to be supposed to," I replied, still searching for the oddball jay.

He laughed. "Maybe they're two jays in there."

I looked away from the Flock as they were ready to punish the young jay for disrupting their rhythm. "Look, they're arguing."

"The Flock will teach the young not to chirp out of rhythm. Soon that brave soul who cried hawk will chirp with compliance."

"That's sad," I remarked, "he wouldn't get anymore credit for giving label to himself."

We walked along the mountains trail, making occasional glances back at the blue jay Flock. Soon the forest parted green blankets and the baby blue sky bled its colors onto the mountains that lay beyond, as we searched for our blue jay within us. Simon and I laid on the cool grass and looked at the craggy slabs of rock, drinking pina coladas he had saved from the rest stop we were forced to go to from the danger of dehydration. We discussed the blue jays, who were now flying over the mountains, their blue threaded wings kneading with the sky, giving the torrents of winds new color. They chirped. Another blue jay tailed slowly behind them, struggling to catch up. It was him. The kestrel caller. That was the loose thread hanging from their Flock, and they could take a knife and slice that thread off, just for the sake of neatness and order.

The sound of breaking things woke me up. For a second I thought I was sitting in the waiting room to hell, the devil behind his book pounding away all of humankind's mistakes and sins in one large volume. When I brought myself to look at the sky, a bright white eye stared at me. Immediately the smell of crackling coal flaked the air, and blindly I chose to folow it. My legs still ached and pressure still gathered behind my skull, but I didn't care. If I hadn't left with that man, he wouldn't have stolen my stuff. Now was the time to make even more risky bets. A hungry mind was only so great at processing rational thought, so it imagined a band of conspiracists doing some kind of ritual, and needed an Alaskan forest for it. Suppose this scent was the odor of a burning body of a cat or dog. When the smell became mingled into my nostrils to the point tears started streaming down my face (I have no idea I still had water in my system), I looked through the open trees and caught sight of an orange orb, flickering and pulsing like a star. My eyes widened that my fantasy had been true. Right now I didn't care. If it really was a ritual, they would have food.

When I arrived at the camp, I dived into a squirrel-trimmed scrub and watched these crazy people. To my surprise, they were chuckling and poking the flames with a marshmallow lobbed stick.