Pete’s voice startles me.
“First one awake has to make breakfast,” he says from his place, still with his eyes shut.
I sigh. “Yes sir.”
Slowly, tenderly, I draw a few twigs of deadwood out from the pile Frankie and me gathered last night and start the fire. A few of the coals on the bottom still have life to them, the faintest red glow. I breathe soft and easy on them, and soon I’m rewarded with a cheerful snippet of yellow flame.
“Two eggs over easy, a side of Canadian bacon, and a cup of coffee, black,” Pete tells me.
I sigh again.
Will rolls and I realize he’s awake too. “Short stack of blueberry flapjacks for me.”
We take only what we need for the search. Everything else we leave on the bank. Pete says it’s base camp and wants to give it a name. Will ain’t pleased.
“What on earth for? A camp’s a camp!”
“This ain’t just any old camp. This is our camp. And it’s got to have a proper name.”
Neither notices as I sneak Dad’s camera out of my pack and into my back pocket.
“We’re wasting time!” Will shouts.
Pete shakes his head. “Not without a name.” His eyes fall on me. “Well, Jack? What’ll it be?”
I think fast.
“Camp Beowulf.”
Pete smacks his hands together. “Camp Beowulf! Established in the year of our Lord nineteen-hundred and sixty-eight—”
“For heaven’s sake, Pete—”
“Hush, Will, I’m commemorating the camp—by the Elliot brothers, Peter, Will, and John Thomas, and their city-boy cousin, Frankie.”
Pete picks up one of the fire-darkened sticks and shoves it into the sand. I don’t know what that was supposed to do, but somehow it did it, and we’ve commemorated Camp Beowulf now and forever.
“Okay, Will,” says Pete, brushing the sand from his hands. “Which way?”
Will sucks in a long breath through his nose.
“North, northeast half a mile. That should put us right on top of it. Keep your eyes open for anything like the piece Frankie found last night. They’ll lead us to the big wreck. And watch your step for any unexploded bombs or missiles. They should be easy to spot too. Any questions?”
Frankie and me shake our heads. Even if we had any, we wouldn’t ask. The magic has got us, the draw of that fantastic fighter jet. It’s time.
“Then let’s go!”
We follow Apple Creek a quarter mile north and cross at a sandbar where the water is ankle deep and crystal clear in the early light. Climbing up the far bank, we pass through a stand of pricker bushes and come at last to the other side.
Dark trees stand like old gray men at attention. We pass through their gloom and heavy quiet, spying into their deep timbers as if they’re cages for some living thing.
That lost fighter jet might as well be alive—a creature of living metal, sending out its pulses, like a heartbeat, for us to follow. I can almost smell jet fumes and burnt rubber on the thick, stifling air.
At Pete’s command, we spread out and walk slow through the spiderwebbing shadows, casting our eyes over ground covered with old leaves, dead leaves, rotting leaves, looking for anything that don’t belong: a flap of torn cloth, a gleam of metal, the shine of glass.
No one speaks, and even Butch seems to understand in his animal way that we are very near to the place where a man has died.
What was that night like? Blasts of stinging ice and howling dark. A sound like the world was ripping in two and a sudden flash of fire raging against all that bitter cold. Then silence.
Like it’s silent now.
The deeper we go, the less daylight there is trickling down through the treetops.
A thick dead-leaf perfume hangs on the air. Musty. Almost too much. A sudden sense of floating inside my head, and I have to place a hand against one of those old gray trunks to steady myself.
My brothers don’t see. They have all gone ahead, already tiny shadows under the trees. Like me, they’re thirsting to make the next discovery, hoping to repeat Frankie’s miraculous find from last night.
To my right, a stand of waist-high ferns catches a bit of sunlight that’s leaked in from above. It’s a cheerful splash of color in all that gloom, and I head for it, hoping I’ll come across pieces of the airplane on my way.
I don’t.
Just strips of old bark and rotten logs.
A bead of sweat runs down my forehead. Fever’s back.
I sigh, a muffled sound in that closed-up air.
I’m sweating more; I don’t care. That fighter-jet excitement is in my blood. We’re close, so close to the discovery that will save Pete’s life.