I’ve seen dead birds in the woods before, even a dead deer with the antlers still attached to the hollowed-out skull. But never anything like this. Never a human body.
Fin makes a low whine behind me. But I don’t look back. I don’t take my eyes off the corpse, like it might vanish if I look away.
I swallow and crouch down, my knees pressing into the snow. Eyes watering from the cold. But I need to know.
Is it him? The boy who went missing from the camp?
His face is covered by a dusting of snow, dark hair frozen in place. There are no injuries that I can see. No trauma, no blood. And he hasn’t been here long, or he wouldn’t be here at all. The dead don’t last in the mountains, especially in winter. Birds pick apart what they can before the wolves close in, scattering the bones across miles of terrain, leaving barely an imprint of what once had been. The forest is efficient at death, a swift wiping away. No remains to bury or burn or mourn.
A soft wind stirs through the trees, blowing away the snow from his forehead, his cheekbones, his pale lips. And the hairs along the base of my neck prick on end.
I lift my hand from the snow, my fingers hovering over his open palm, trembling, curious. I shouldn’t touch him—but I lower my hand anyway. I want to feel the icy skin, the heaviness of death in his limbs.
My skin meets his.
But his hand isn’t rigid or still. It twitches against my fingertips.
Not dead.
Still alive.
The boy’s eyes flinch open—forest green, gray green, alive-green. He coughs at the same moment his fingers close around mine, gripping tightly.
I scream—a strangled sound, swallowed by the trees—but Fin immediately springs up next to me, tail raised, nose absorbing the boy’s newly alive scent. I yank my arm away and try to stand, to scramble back, but my legs stumble beneath me and I fall backward onto the snow. Run! my spiking heartbeat yells. But before I can push myself up, the boy is rolling onto his side, coughing again, touching his face with his hands. Trying to breathe.
Alive. Not dead. Gasping for air, warm skin, grabbing my hand, kind-of-alive. My throat goes dry and my eyes refuse to blink. I’m certain he’s not real. But he draws in deep, measured breaths between each cough, as if his lungs were full of water.
I sling my backpack off one shoulder and reach inside for the canteen of hot juniper tea. It will save your life if you ever get lost, my grandmother would say. You can live off juniper tea for weeks.
I hold the canteen out to him, and he lowers his hand from his face, his eyes meeting mine. Dark sleepy eyes, deep heavy inhales making his chest rise and fall as if it’s never known air before this moment.
He doesn’t take the canteen, and I lean forward, drawing in a breath. “What’s your name?” I ask, my voice broken.
His gaze roves the ground, then moves up to the sky, like he’s searching for the answer—his name lost somewhere in the woods. Taken from him. Snatched while he slept.
His eyes settle back on me. “Oliver Huntsman.”
“Are you from the boys’ camp?”
An icy wind sails over us, kicking up a layer of snow. His mouth opens, searching for the words, and then he nods.
I found him.
* * *
The Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys is not an elite facility, not a place where the wealthy send their sons. It’s a meager collection of cabins, a mess hall, and several neglected administration buildings—most of which were once the homes of early miners who panned the Black River for gold. Now it’s a place where desperate parents send their headstrong boys to have their minds and hearts reshaped, to turn them into docile, obedient sons. The worst come here, the ones who have used up their last chances, their last I’m sorrys, their last detentions or visits to the principal’s office. They come and they go. Each season a new batch—except for the few who spend their entire high school years at the camp. They learn how to survive in the woods, to make fire from flint, to sleep in the cold under the stars, to behave.
Two weeks earlier, the morning after the snowstorm had rolled down from the mountains, I woke to find my house draped in snow. Ice coated the windows, the roof moaned from the weight, and the walls bowed inward as if nails were being pushed free from the wood. The radio had said we’d get twelve to eighteen inches of snow. We got nearly four feet—in a single night. I crawled from bed, the cold leeching up from the floorboards, and went outside into the snow.
The landscape had changed overnight.
I walked down to the lake’s edge and found the forest dripping in white marshmallow fluff. But it wasn’t quiet and still like most winter mornings. Voices echoed across the frozen lake, coming from the boys’ camp. They shouted up into the trees. They stomped around in their heavy snow boots and sent birds screeching unhappily into the bleak morning sky.
“Morning!” Old Floyd Perkins called, waving a hand in the air as he trudged up the shore, head bowed away from the blowing wind, shoulders bent and stooped with time and age and gravity. When he reached me, he squinted as if he couldn’t see me clearly—cataracts clouding his already failing vision. “A bad winter,” he said, tilting his gaze upward, soft flakes falling over us. “But not as bad as some.” Mr. Perkins has lived at Jackjaw Lake most of his life. He knew my grandmother when she was still alive, and he lives at the far south end of the lake in a small cabin beside the boathouse store that he runs during the summer months—renting out canoes and paddleboats and selling ice cream sandwiches to the tourists under the hot, wavy sun. And every morning, he walks the shore of the lake, his gait slow and labored, long arms swinging at his sides, arthritis creaking in his joints. Even in the snow, he makes his morning rounds.
“What’s happening over at the camp?” I asked.
“A boy went missing last night.” He rubbed a knuckled hand across the back of his neck, gray hair poking out from his wool cap. “Vanished from his bunk during the storm.”
I looked past him up the shore to the camp. A few boys were shoveling snow away from their cabin doorways, while most of the others moved up into the forest, calling out a name I couldn’t make out.
“Talked to one of the counselors,” Mr. Perkins continued, nodding grimly, considering the gravity of the situation. “Boy might’ve just run away, made it down the mountain before the snow fell last night.”
The wind roiled up from the surface of the frozen lake, and it made me shiver. “But they’re looking for him up in the woods.” I crossed my arms over my chest and nodded to the trees beyond the camp.
“They have to be sure he didn’t get lost, I suppose.” He raised one thick gray eyebrow, his gaze solemn. “But if that boy went up into those woods last night, there’s a good chance he won’t make it back out. And they’ll never find him.”
I understood what he meant. The snow was deep it continued to fall—any tracks would be long buried by now. And the boy himself might be buried as well. Even Fin would have a hard time tracking his scent in this.
“I hope he did run away,” I said. “I hope he made it down the road.” Because I knew the outcome if he hadn’t. Even though the boys at camp learn wilderness skills and how to build snow shelters in tree wells, I doubted any of them could really survive a night out in the cold. During a blizzard. On their own.