She cut down two saplings with her knife, stripped them of leaves and branches, and sharpened them to a point. Once the stakes were ready, she began to build a textbook campfire. Nadia loved building fires. So much attention to detail was needed to make it come out right.
The sun slid behind the peaks of the giant oaks. The forest darkened. She picked a flat spot in a clearing away from trees where sparks and flames were less likely to ignite a tree branch. She fell to her hands and knees and cleared the area of leaves and brush until the ground was bare. When she stood up, she was caked in sweat and dirt, but she didn’t care.
She built a mound of dry twigs and created a long fuse of white birch bark. She lined strip after strip in an overlapping fashion so that once she lit it, the flame would zip toward its target the way it did in the last scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Marko loved that movie, and she watched it with him whenever it was on TV. In three days, she’d be able to tell him she’d been thinking about it when she’d built her fuse. He’d love it. That would be so cool.
Nadia gathered wood into piles based on thickness. She crafted a wooden square around the kindling, using small branches from the second pile. Afterward, she erected a tepee around the square. She moved on to each successive pile of thicker wood, alternately building squares and tepees. When she was finished, Nadia admired her quadruple-layered bonfire with its long, white fuse snaking out on one side.
The final step was to take the two live stakes and nail them into the ground at a forty-five-degree angle to the center of the fire. She’d stack logs from the sixth pile against the stakes. A fresh log would roll into the fire before it died. That way, if she fell asleep, her fire would keep burning. When she was done, she treated herself to another swig of warm water from her canteen.
Dusk had arrived. A pileated woodpecker hammered at a tree in search of ants. Its drumming reminded Nadia that the seconds were ticking away. A cool wind blew through her sweaty clothes and body. She shivered. She needed fire. She needed fire now.
Nadia pulled a baggie from her pocket. It contained her lifeblood: three matches. They were the strike-anywhere kind that could be lit by scratching against any hard surface. At summer camp, Roxanne Stashinski could hold one in her right hand and strike it off the nail of her thumb without using her left hand. Nadia wished she could do something that neat, but those types of things didn’t come naturally to her.
Although the matches could be struck anywhere, she grabbed the same clean gray stone she’d used to bang the stakes into the ground to make sure it lit. As she swiped the match against the rock, a mosquito flew right into her ear. The matchstick snapped in her hand before it lit. She quickly reached down to get it, but the stick had broken so close to the head that it was useless.
One down, two to go. If tonight’s fire went out, she’d have only one more chance to relight it during her three-day test.
She took a second match and struck it on the same stone. Nothing happened. She tried again. Nothing. She tried again, and again, and again, but it wouldn’t light.
She stared at the head. Most of the red lighting compound was gone. There was a tiny spot left. Nadia aimed it at the stone, and with a shaky right hand, snapped her wrist one more time. Nothing. The second match was dead, too.
She was staring at three nights alone with one match left. That reality shook her to the bone. She took two long sips of water from her canteen to try to calm herself, and realized there were only four ounces left. Not enough for one day, let alone for two.
One match, no fire, and soon, no water.
Nadia pulled the last match out of her bag and took aim at the stone.
The match lit on the first try. Nadia cupped her palm around the flame to keep it alive and lit the fuse. The birch bark sizzled. A flame rolled forward like it did when they blew up the bridge on the River Kwai.
Awesome. Nadia wished Marko were here to see it.
She dropped down on all fours and crawled up to the fire. She didn’t care if she bruised her knees. This was survival of the fittest, not the prettiest. She waited for the kindling to light, and fanned the flame with her breath to keep it from dying.
A flame rose from the smoke. The kindling crackled and spit.
Nadia sat up and watched as the fire came alive. It was glorious, maybe the best feeling she’d ever had in her life, except that time she’d scored the winning goal in a soccer game at PLAST summer camp. All her teammates had cheered for her. Daria Hryn, the most popular girl, had actually hugged her. Even now, alone in the wilderness in the middle of nowhere, the memory brought tears to her eyes.
With the fire blazing, Nadia built her shelter. She took three long branches and placed them beside a pair of sturdy young saplings that were growing parallel to each other. She tied one branch perpendicular to the two saplings, making sure it was at neck height.
She secured the other two branches at the same height, one to each sapling, letting them fall to the ground at forty-five-degree angles. A lattice of smaller branches created a nice roof for her home. Nadia also stuck a few sticks in the ground on the sides of the lean-to so she could seal those holes up, too.
When she was finished with the skeleton of her shelter, she spread her poncho on top and connected it to the branches with twine. The poncho had holes in each corner for exactly that purpose. She wove ferns into a roof over the poncho, and did the same along the sides where she’d put the sticks. She also spread ferns on the floor of the lean-to, creating a mattress for her sleeping bag.
Her shelter built, Nadia sat down by the fire’s edge. The heat from the flames penetrated her clothes and dried her uniform and her body.
She ate a small piece of the buckwheat bread and went to sleep. She was so exhausted she packed it in after dinner and slept through the night. When she awoke the next morning, the sun’s rays poked into the entrance to her lean-to. Nadia stuck her head out and saw that her feeding mechanism was working well. A total of three logs had rolled successively into the fire. Its yellow flames still reached two feet high.
Awesome. She and her fire had both survived. That was key because they were both dependent on each other.
The sound of human feet bounding through the brush toward her broke her concentration. They didn’t sound like her brother’s and father’s long strides. They were short, crisp, and purposeful. They echoed through the forest.
Mrs. Chimchak.
Nadia pushed herself up and burst out of her lean-to, a smile already etched on her face. It would be good to see a familiar face, even if that person was there to remind her she was the only hope for one person or another, or some such painful thing.
She saw the strangers and realized there had been no echo of footsteps. She’d assumed one person was approaching, but there were actually two of them. A man and a woman.
They were both young. The woman reminded Nadia of a giraffe, a towering beauty with outrageously long legs, an elongated neck, and golden hair with streaks of caramel halfway down her back. She’d probably been popular in school, like the girls that terrorized Nadia on a daily basis. The man looked more like a kangaroo, much shorter with smaller features than the woman. He fidgeted beside the woman, wired with nervous energy. Both of them wore knapsacks on their backs and frowns on their faces.