On the last night of the trip, Luke stirred awake. Something was digging into his ribs. He groped around on the ground. It was a rock, or a tree root, or something. Where had that been when he’d put his sleeping pad and sleeping bag down earlier in the night? He had no idea. The place he’d chosen had seemed like a perfectly flat piece of ground. He’d told Mad Dog that he wanted to sleep outside tonight, and Mad Dog had said, “Go right ahead. It’s a beautiful night to do it.”
Should he go back in the tent now? he wondered. He could if he wanted. There was plenty of room for him in there. He was too tired, though. Too tired even to crawl the short distance over there. They’d spent the night before at a campsite on the Caribou River, then hiked almost nine miles today through birch forests with views of Lake Superior, past a pond with floating bogs in it, and past a northern hardwoods marsh before stopping to camp tonight at Dyer’s Creek. Every few miles, it seemed, there’d been surprises. A covered bridge over a creek, an old mining site, a part of the trail lined by thousands of little white flowers called bunchberries. He thought about all the places they’d passed through over the last couple of weeks: Temperance River State Park, Tettegouche State Park, Beaver Bay, and Fredenberg Creek. And they’d spent two days canoeing on Gunflint Lake and Rose Lake. He’d learned a lot, too. How to purify water, start a fire from scratch, track wildlife, and identify native plants. Tomorrow they’d go back to where they started at Split Rock Lighthouse. Then they’d hike to Gooseberry Falls, where their parents would pick them up at the visitor center.
He rolled onto his back now and tried not to think about how lumpy the ground felt. After a few minutes, it stopped bothering him. Other things bothered him, though. A whole bunch of mosquito bites on his ankles that itched like crazy, and an ache in his shoulders from the backpack even though he’d taken it off hours ago, but pretty soon these stopped bothering him, too. The thing was, he felt good. Even with all the bites and stuff. Because what Mad Dog hadn’t told them that first day, when he’d warned them how tired they were going to be on this hike, was that it would be a good kind of tiredness. The kind that made you feel empty, but empty in a good way. The kind that made you feel light. Like now, he felt like he could almost float away, though that might have been his sleepiness. Sleepiness, he decided, was different from tiredness.
Still, he didn’t want to fall back asleep just yet. He lifted his head and looked around the campsite, at the silhouettes of the tents, the fire pit, and the benches. Everything was still. And the only sounds—the only people sounds—were the sounds of sleep coming from the tents. Someone was snoring softly; otherwise there was only the occasional cough, or mumble, or rustle of a sleeping bag. He put his head back down. He liked this feeling of being alone but at the same time not being alone. It was nice. Cozy, his mom would probably say. Or maybe she’d have a better word for it. She loved words. And she knew a lot of them. He missed her. He wondered if she’d talked to his dad. And if she had, what his dad had said. Would he and his dad go fishing together one day? And what about his sisters? That was the weirdest thing of all. To think it was just you, and then find out you had sisters? He’d tried to imagine what they were like, but he hadn’t been able to. Would he meet them one day, too?
Mad Dog had told him to focus on the present, though. (Mad Dog was all about “the present.”) Luke had tried to do that. And on most nights, he was so tired he didn’t even have time before he fell asleep to think about all of these things. But now, even though his body felt tired, his mind felt awake.
He thought about how everyone, it seemed, the campers and the counselors, had changed since the first day. His tent mate, Oscar, had changed the most. He was so homesick at the beginning that it could make you feel kind of miserable just to be around him. Then one day, on, like, the fifth day of hiking, right after they’d stopped for lunch, Oscar had been kind of crying, and Luke had walked with him for a while and talked to him about stuff. Just little stuff, just to keep his mind off being homesick. Later, when Luke was walking alone, Mad Dog had come up to him and said, “Hey, thanks for talking to Oscar. I think he’s doing better now.” And then Mad Dog kept walking with him and told him he’d noticed that Luke always helped other people, and that he didn’t have to be asked to do stuff—he just did it. “You’re a leader, Luke,” Mad Dog had told him, and Luke hadn’t even known what to say. He’d just nodded and looked away, like it wasn’t even a big deal, but it was. Luke figured if Mad Dog said something like that, he meant it. He didn’t just go around saying things to be nice, like a kindergarten teacher or something. He wasn’t the kind of person who acted fake. He was real. He wasn’t like J.P., who just said things to sound cool.
He wondered if Van and J.P. had really gone through with their plan to steal an ATV from the Greys’ barn. He didn’t think so. And then he thought about other things—what Annabelle had looked like the last time he’d seen her, at Pearl’s, and the way her charm bracelet had clinked against the side of her milkshake glass. He thought about going into eighth grade in the fall and wondered if it would be as lame as seventh grade. And he thought about Pop-Pop, and about how ever since that day he’d talked to Mad Dog, he’d been able to think about him, think about missing him, without wanting to cry. Which was the reason he’d tried so hard for the past year not to think about Pop-Pop. Because he was afraid he might cry. Now that he had cried, though, down by the lake after Mad Dog left, he wasn’t afraid. He’d even felt better afterward.
He yawned and looked up at the sky. There were about a million stars. More than he could see in Butternut, even. He listened to the frogs in the nearby creek. Why were they so loud? What were they doing? It probably had something to do with mating, he thought. He’d ask Randall tomorrow. He was the counselor with the bushy beard who knew the most about nature. Luke blinked, and started to drift, and he was almost asleep when something made him open his eyes.
There was a milky white cloud in the sky that hadn’t been there a minute ago. Was it . . . light from a flashlight? No. It was too high up. And then it was gone. Strange. He blinked again, sleepily, and it came back again, only this time it was greenish, and it was moving, moving almost like a wave, or a . . . a slinky? It was spooky, but he wasn’t scared. He knew what it was. Not because he’d seen it before, but because he’d heard his mom talk about it. It was the northern lights. The light green cloud spread out again, and now there were even little threads of red in it. Should he tell somebody? Mad Dog? Or wake up the kids in his tent? No, he decided, sleepy again. He wouldn’t tell anyone. It was cool that he was the only one seeing it. It was like the lights belonged to him, for right now, anyway. He watched them a little bit longer, feeling this kind of happy feeling. When they stopped after a few minutes, the feeling stayed with him until he fell asleep. He still felt it, in fact, when he woke up the next morning. But he didn’t tell anyone what he had seen. He kept it inside, a good kind of secret.