I have a switch. Inside my head. I expect most people do. Mine just works differently. I'm not even sure if I've had it all my life or if something in my life installed it. It's a thing I choose not to share. There are a lot of things I choose not to share. The following is one I've only ever told one person before.
My dad was a photojournalist, he flew around the world covering wars and famines. Political upheavals. The irony being he went to some of the most dangerous places on the planet. He was shot at, abducted, held for ransom and once he was blown up. My mom, she was a wildlife scientist. Some of the time. Most of the time she was hiking around the great outdoors. Collecting experiences as much as data. She and my dad loved the untamed wilderness. Between them they must have travelled over half the globe. Rewind. Where's the irony? It's over there, in that burning 4X4.
I was 11 years old. Going on 12. It was my summer break, so as usual we were off road. Driving through the Canadian Rockies. It was where the me I now am was born. Memory is a slippery beast. The memory of a child especially so. I don't remember specifics. All I can recall with certainty was waking up from agony into greater agony. Drifting in and out of consciousness. My body broken. My mind scattered. Oh yeah, I can remember the pain. So intense it burned through my entire being. There must have been a before. Unless I was cast into this world at that precise moment. And for all any of us knows this could be true.
Slowly consciousness returned. A fuel tank or something exploded. I felt the red hot shards strike my legs. Maybe that's what woke me up. Eyelids fluttered open. The world was a fog. A fog of excruciation. My body didn't work. I'd forgotten how to operate it. Using only willpower I attempted to sit up. The pain dragged me back into the darkness. The next time the light returned, some of my wits returned to.
What do I put in? What do I leave out? What actually happened, and what was a convenient fiction my brain made up in an attempt to make sense of it? It was the voices that woke me again. Telling me I needed to get up. Whispers or shouts? I don't know. Loud enough to reach through all the torture. Loud enough to make me brave the coming hurricane. I sat up, screaming my torment. There in front of me, the burned out wreck. Still smouldering. In the front seats the burned corpses of my parents. I screamed again, as the tears ran down my face.
"Don't cry baby. Please don't cry. You'll get even more dehydrated."
Mother?
"You have to get up son. You can't stay here. You'll die. No one's coming for you. No one knows you're here."
Father?
"Mom. Dad." I wailed, struggling to hold back the tears. "I can't leave you."
"We're dead son. There's nothing you can do for us." My father's voice stated soothingly.
"Nothing, except survive baby. You have to survive. That's all that matters now."
Well I survived, in case you were wondering. The details are lost in the murk. I had a compound fracture of my lower left arm. Both bones poking through the skin. I set the fracture, splinted it with parts from the car and some gaffer tape. The Lord knows how, because I surely don't. My left leg was badly swollen from hip to ankle. The right side of my body wasn't exactly having a party, but it appeared most of the impact had been on the left. I could weight bear on my bad side. Only just. I needed a crutch of some sort.
I had a knife. I had a compass. A small bag of trail mix and a half melted plastic bottle, half filled with water. All the rest of our supplies and equipment had been consumed in the fire. I knew I had to head due south. The voices of my dead parents told me. I still waited though. Unwilling to leave them behind. My childish logic working out that once I departed, that was it. They'd be gone forever. And to a child forever is a long time, because even a week can feel like an eternity.
I walked. I hobbled. And every once in a while I crawled. Hours, days, weeks, months, years. I don't know. I was heading into forever. Desolated and lonely. On and on. The trail mix ran out first. At least I think it did. There were streams I could use to refill my small water bottle. So I must have used them. Expert opinion varies, but for arguments sake let's take the rule of three. You can survive 3 minutes without oxygen, three days without water and 3 weeks without food. If you're fit and healthy. Shelter is vital to. Even in the middle of summer it can get cold at night in the Rockies.
One foot in front of the other. Head down. Move or die. I think mostly I wanted to die. To lie down and fall asleep. Never wake again. Slip into the dark abyss of death. To no longer feel the pain and the torment. But I guess, somewhere deep down inside, my primitive survival instincts took over. Unless it was my dead parents urging me on. That's impossible though. Isn't it?
At night, what happened at night. I know I followed the compass needle. Due south. Keep walking. Cold and hungry. Hot and hungry. The constant torture of my injuries wearing away at the little amount of stamina I possessed. Do you know, I can't even recollect what I was wearing? Shivering as I sheltered beneath a tree, or in a hollow in the uneven ground. Until there came a point where I understood the shivering wasn't due to the cold. My wounds had become infected. Pathogens were coursing through my body. Every morning I'd pull myself up to my feet and start limping my way through the mountains. Their lower slopes at least. It's all so vague.
Though that's not the entire truth. There are things that are vivid in my mind. The mournful howls of wolves. The screeches of an owl. The fact I knew I was slowly starving to death. I was a kid. Not some explorer. If only I'd listened to my mother more. I expect she told me all about the edible plants. I know she did. Only I was far too busy with other stuff. far too stupid to understand that all you can ever have is now. Because tomorrow you may die. Someone you love may perish. Life is fragile.
I may have fallen. It could have been I was simply lying down exhausted. The fever raging through my poisoned body was gaining the upper hand. Something warm, wet and rough was lapping at my face. As it cooled, so refreshingly, on my skin I levered my sticky eyes open. I want to believe I smiled. I knew I'd had it. There was a wolf staring down at me. A wolf with green eyes. Normally wolves have nothing to do with humans. They steer clear. People are dangerous to wolves. I was too weak to be any threat. At least it would be quick. Carnivores kill then eat. Now if it had been a bear, things would have been much worse. It would have held me down with one paw while it ate me alive.
Wolves are born with blue eyes. Adult wolves though, their eyes are amber or brown. Apparently all wolves will have green eyes for a while as they mature. Very rarely you will find an adult with green eyes. Not the green I saw though. Those eyes were greener than emeralds. In my delirium I reached out to pet the head of the beast about to devour me. It moved away. My arm fell back to the ground beside me. Soft fur on the back of my hand? Green eyes still staring at me over the wolf's shoulder. With an effort that tore chunks from my sanity, I rolled my head. It was a dead rabbit. Food.
Eat. The word entered my skull. Reverberated around. Still prone on the ground I grabbed the still warm body of the rabbit. Raw rabbit doesn't taste like chicken. To me it tasted like iron. Smelled like it to. The liver, the kidneys and the other organs were the most nutritious. That I knew. Some of what my mother had tried to teach me, had managed to drip through. I knew I had to keep the raw meat down. Throwing up would not help me at all. Getting up would save my life. So in the morning, I got up. Due south. One foot in front of the other. One arm dangling by my side and the other holding an improvised and badly worn crutch. And now, as I marched to meet my maker, I had a companion. A green eyed she wolf, that couldn't possibly exist outside of a fantasy.
Speaking of fantasy, despite what the movies insist, crashing cars don't immediately explode into flames. They can burn of course under the right circumstances. A ruptured fuel tank and the gasoline coming into contact with something hot enough to ignite it. It's not instant though. It takes time. So the question is, were my parents dead before they were burned beyond recognition? Or did they feel the flames coming towards them. Helpless to save themselves from the wreck. It's an impossible question to answer. Even the postmortems couldn't reveal that. Their bodies too badly incinerated to check on the contents of their lungs. But strangely the unanswerable question that will always haunt me isn't that. The question that keeps coming up is, was it my fault? Did something I did cause the crash? Was I responsible for my parents deaths?
Had I distracted my dad at the wrong time. I was 11 years old and a massive pain in the ass on long, to me boring, drives. Sticking my feet against the back of the driver's seat. Constantly reaching for things my child eyes saw. Stupid little practical jokes. I will never know. In some ways that might be a good thing.
What more can I add that isn't part distorted recollection and part illusion? Fever induced dreams constructed an impossible she wolf, that fed and cared for me. That at times seemed to be guiding me. Sometimes when I sleep, I dream. Of her and me. And sometimes I dream that what I see, what I saw, in those eyes was unconditional love. The one thing I can say with absolute 100% certainty, is that it wasn't only my parents who died on that mountain. Whatever I was and whoever I would have become died there also. The thing that crawled out of there, wasn't what had gone in.