At twelve years old the boy was to become a man.

The boy’s father planned his rite of passage even though in those days such rites were unheard of; to leave a boy alone in the mountains was no longer done.

The boy, his father, and his uncle left from the trailhead that morning. They arrived by the afternoon, stopping finally at an alpine lake that sat serenely in the Canadian Rockies. The woods spread out from the lake and were thick, moist, and green. The breeze was cold and the earth was damp and everything smelled of mountains—of their stones and lichen, and of decaying, fallen trees. The boy loved the smell of the mountain air. On this occasion though the smell did not calm him. Rather, it made him more certain that his father was serious. The boy would soon be left alone.

A hunter that they passed on the way in warned them, “I seen fresh tracks ‘bout a mile down the trail. Be careful out there.”

The boy looked up at his father with uncertainty. Perhaps the father would not go through with it; maybe he would consider what the hunter had said. The boy knew about the grizzlies and he did not want to be left alone.

The boy’s father told the boy that he was to make camp on a little peninsula that jutted into the alpine lake.

“You are going to have to learn how to be alone with your loneliness,” the father said. The boy did not understand. “You’ll be alright,” the father said. “We’ll leave you here for three nights and pick you up on the fourth day. Your uncle and I will be camped about a mile away.”

The father said nothing about what the boy was to do, only that he was supposed to stay on the peninsula and not leave. The boy had food and camping supplies and a new knife that his father had given him when they had started up the trail. “A man should have a good knife,” the boy’s father had told him.

When the father and the uncle left the boy, the boy thought of grizzlies and of being alone. He looked down at his solitary pack that waited on the ground like a faithful dog. The wind picked up and the boy felt a chill and he put on a bright orange fleece. Clouds were gathering. Set up camp.

From his pack, the boy pulled out a stuff sack with a sleeping bag inside, and he pulled out a small, single person tent that would only cover his sleeping bag. He had another stuff sack filled with food that the father had warned, “Hang it high in a tree, away from where you sleep. Hang it higher than a grizzly is tall. You want it nearly twenty feet high.”

He brought out the knife, pulled at the hinged blade and set it open until he heard and felt the click that made it rigid. He admired the clean, sleek metal. He touched his thumb to the new sharpness, just like his father had shown him to touch the blade in order to check if it was good. It was a very sharp knife. The boy knew that the sharpness was a sign of his father’s trust. He cut a long length of cord and then pressed on the release at the back of the blade and the blade became loose again and retracted back into the handle.

The boy found a good stone to tie the cord to. He took the cord and wrapped it around the stone several times, but the cord slipped off and the boy had to begin again. He wrapped the stone crossways with the cord, and this time the cord held firm to the stone but the boy did not know how to tie the end and the cord became loose and again the stone fell free of the cord. The boy wondered if a grizzly could smell the food sack even now, and if the bear would come into camp, searching for food. With frantic wraps and coils the boy made something like a knot and the stone was secured to the cord and now the boy could try to toss it over a tree branch. His first attempts shattered the tiny, kindling sized branches that were crisp and dead on the big branch that he meant to throw the cord over. The stone cratered back to the ground, close to the boy. He picked up the stone again and again threw it, trying to get the cord over the branch. The stone serendipitously arced over the branch and slipped the cord cleanly over it and back down to the ground. The boy untied the stone and tied the food sack to the same end of the cord. He hauled the sack up into the branches, hanging it nearly thirty feet in the air. He tied off the cord to a low branch, leaving the bag. He stood for a time, watching the bag rotate, creak, and shift in the breeze.

The boy unpacked his sleeping bag and put it into his small tent, filling it completely. Though the boy brought a book and a journal for writing in and a field guide for building traps and snares and shelters, he left them outside of the tent because it would be too cramped. The boy staked down the corners of the tent so that it and the sleeping bag would not be picked up in high winds. His pack was empty after he had hung the food and put the sleeping bag into the tent and set his books to the side. The pack looked exhausted next to the filled tent.

It had only been an hour since his father and uncle had left the boy alone. The sun was descending down towards the peaks around him, but there was still much daylight left.

The boy set to exploring his small peninsula, though he could see every coast of it from where he stood. There was forest beyond the peninsula, with dense trees that stretched out into the mountains. But the boy’s father warned him not to leave the peninsula, so the boy took only to meandering around his tiny coast that he measured in footsteps. He explored his peninsula and got to know the trees and dipped his bare feet into the cold lake.

Satisfied that he had learned the peninsula well, the boy found a good walking stick and took it back to his pack. He reached into his pack and pulled out the new knife, clicking it open. With a good grip on the top end of the stick and a good grip on the handle of the knife, the boy pressed the sharp metal blade into the wood. The wood gave quickly. A thin wood chip curled off and fell to the ground. He pushed the blade into the wood again and carved another chip, and another. He carved at the wood until he sweat. He had to readjust his grip to get good purchase on the wood and the boy’s hands ached. He thought that if he wore the fleece gloves that he brought, his hands would not blister. So he put on the gloves and then worked to carve his initials into the walking stick. But the blade carved the wood too wide and the boy could not make letters with such cuts. The boy took the tip of the blade and prodded at the stick and made deep cuts, but the cuts were too square to carve the curved letters of his name. His left hand adjusted and sweat and his right hand prodded and sliced and splinters flicked off the wood. The boy made an attempt to slice a curve into the wood, to start the ‘J’ that started his first name, but the blade jumped. Then the boy felt a searing heat at the base of his index finger, and he saw that the knife blade was set into his finger. It had sunk in past the glove.

When the boy pulled the blade out, he felt the pull from beneath his skin. The release of the knife from his finger felt hot and wet and the boy grew afraid. He pulled off his glove and looked at the clean, straight line that crossed the base of his finger. The skin had folded in on itself and, for a second, there was no blood. It was not until the boy curled the finger, testing it, that the wound gaped open and he could see white fat and tissue and the emergent blood that started in tiny drops and collected and joined together and filled the wound until it poured out and dripped down the boy’s hand. The blood ran down his arm, to the point of his elbow, and it dripped as the boy watched.

The boy’s vision blurred. His breath quickened. His finger pulsed and the drops of blood made a small puddle into the dirt, and then the drops fell onto his clothes and the boy got up to find a bandana to stop the bleeding. But as he rose, his head felt very light and he had to sit down again quickly. He took deep breaths and the peninsula spun slightly and he envisioned himself collapsing there on the coast of his tiny peninsula, his blood flowing into the earth. And he thought, Grizzlies can smell blood.

He saw the scent of blood lifting from the small, red puddle in the earth, coalescing with the odors of his sweat and the smells from the foods in the stuff sack that was hanging in the tree. The scents were carried out by a breeze, beyond the peninsula, into the dark wood. If the grizzly was there, he would smell the blood and he would come.

Quickly the boy recovered his balance and moved tentatively toward his pack, blinking his eyes in order to turn the blurry, spinning camp into something clear and solid again. He pulled out a bandana from his pack and wrapped it around his finger. The blood pushed through the cloth in dozens of tiny droplets. He unwrapped the bandana and folded it this time so that the blood could not seep through. He wrapped the finger again with the folded cloth and tied a knot over where the cut was hidden, hoping that the pressure would stop the bleeding. The bandana was wet now and turned a deep purple color. The boy himself believed that he could smell the blood and taste it.

The boy sat against a log, holding the wrapped finger with his right hand. He checked the stream of blood that had gone from his finger down his forearm, and saw that it had dried. The blood was no longer flowing out of the wrapped bandana, though the cloth still felt wet. He opened his right hand, and there were brownish-red stains on his palm from where blood soaked through the bandana. He was not dizzy anymore and he went to the shore to splash water onto the blood, hoping to wash it away quickly. The water was pink and red after he rubbed it up and down his arm.

Clouds had collected overhead and the wind picked up. The boy felt occasional raindrops and he thought that he would have to take cover in his tent. There were echoes of far off thunder. It would be night soon anyway, and the boy would have to sleep. He unzipped the tent and slipped into his sleeping bag. With the movement, another small stream of blood was released from under the bandana that was still wrapped around the boy’s finger. The boy wiped the blood onto the sleeping bag. Rain drops beat against the fabric of the tent and the boy had to zip it closed, enclosing himself, as if in a coffin.

Outside it was black. Inside the tent, the boy’s world was his breathing and the rustling of the sleeping bag against the tent and the humidity of his breath. As the wind picked up, the rain lashed down against the thin walls of the tent and the boy could feel the vibration of raindrops. He wanted so much to sleep but the wind and the rain were too loud and he knew that he was just a small boy laying down on a peninsula in the middle of the mountains. And now there was a storm.

The boy tried to pull the sleeping bag around his ears, but when he did he noticed that the bandana on his finger had loosened and the wound had started to bleed again. He could smell the blood now, though he did not know if it was from the fresh wound or from the soaked bandana. He re-tied the dressing while the storm beat his tent and he listened attentively to the noises outside. He heard deep vibrations. Like heavy footsteps.

The boy stopped rustling around, stopped breathing, and tried to listen.

The rain beat against his tent too hard. It was not easy to discern what were the noises of the storm, and what were not. Again the boy heard a heavy thud. And another. And a noise that was deep, guttural, and mean. The boy closed his eyes and recoiled into his sleeping bag. He grabbed his left index finger, still wrapped in the bandana, and he squeezed until it was painful.

Again he heard footsteps.

Again a deep huff; a breath.

It was hard to hear with the rain beating against the tent. But there was something there.

The boy remembered the pen flare that his father had given him.

“If there is trouble, if you see a bear, you shoot this into the air and your uncle and I will come and find you,” he had said. “Shoot it high, where we can see it from our camp.”

The boy had envisioned a different plan. He would stand before the grizzly and if the grizzly reared up the boy would aim the flare at the bear and shoot. Alone the boy would scare off the bear, and in doing so the boy thought that he would be a man.

But now the boy was laying down, and was wrapped into his sleeping bag and the noise of the rain and the wind on the tent was very loud. He could not quickly stand up and face the bear. He could not see the bear. He could only hear the thuds and breaths and the wind and rain.

The boy slowly reached behind his head, where there was very little space but where he had stored the pen flare. He checked the flare by feeling it between his fingers. It was loaded properly. The rain picked up and beat down hard and now there was a loud creaking outside of his tent, very close to him. The boy got his headlamp ready and turned it on, holding it with the good fingers of his left hand. The creaking grew louder, and there were more deep vibrations, thuds and breaths. He muffled the light of the headlamp into his sleeping bag. He wanted to surprise the bear. Frighten him. He slowly unzipped the tent just over his head, held his thumb on the trigger of the pen flare and sent a beam of light from his headlamp into the darkness.

The boy moved the light back and forth into the night. But he only saw the lashing rain and the tree branches being beaten by the wind.

His heart pounded. He could feel his pulse beating from his wound. He was breathing hard.

There is nothing out there.

The rain beat against the boy’s face and head. He withdrew, back into the claustrophobic tent. The rain was loud, and the boy listened intently.

Again, hearing something near, the boy unzipped the tent, sent the beam of light out. This time he yelled but the wind and the night and the darkness swallowed his voice. The beam of light landed on nothing but lashing rain and bending tree branches and the mossy patch of earth that extended from his tent.

The boy felt very much alone. It was an alone where he could not cry. He could not pack up and find his father and his uncle. He could not leave the peninsula, nor would he dare to in such a storm, with grizzlies in the woods, waiting for him perhaps. All he could do was lay in the black darkness of his tent and listen to the rain and the wind, the creaking, and the thuds and those deep breaths that came from the night. And then the boy knew loneliness and fear.

The storm did not cease. Again and again the boy heard noises in his camp, but when he unzipped the tent and looked out into the night there was nothing. The light from the boy’s headlamp only caught the pine trees that bent and shook in the wind, and the rain that became icy and began to stick to the sides of the tent and blanket the ground.

Very slowly, the boy noticed that the sound of rain hitting the tent began to get softer. The blackness of the night seemed to lighten as well. He prayed for morning and for light. He had not slept, or if he had, it was only very brief.

Morning came in a thick fog. A light rain continued, but the storm was over. The boy unzipped his tent and peered out and saw that there was a fresh blanket of ice covering his peninsula and the woods beyond. The boy looked at his breath and steam rose from his sleeping bag. He looked out around the tent, checking for grizzly tracks. There were none.

The boy enclosed himself back in the tent and shuffled down into his sleeping bag so that his shoulders were covered. He fell asleep. The fog rolled across the lake and sat over the peninsula like a specter.

When the boy awoke, he saw that the bandana had become loose as he slept and his wound seeped a yellow fluid. The boy saw that the skin around the cut had become white and wrinkled. When the boy bent the finger slightly the corner of the wound dripped the yellow fluid. The cut was sick and it was retching the fluid and the boy knew that his father would be upset that the boy had cut himself. But to give up because of the cut, to leave the peninsula and find his father and uncle’s camp, only on the second day out, would mean that the boy was not a man and that he had failed and that he was not good enough.

The boy unzipped his tent and brought his lean, naked torso out into the cold. There was no rain now, just the light mist of the fog. He grabbed a small, rigid stick from the ground. It was wet, but it would do. He withdrew back into the tent, leaving it unzipped, and placed the stick below the cut index finger as a splint so the wound would not keep opening and leaking the sick yellow fluid. He wrapped the stained bandana around both the finger and the stick and he tied it off and now his finger could not bend and perhaps would heal and then his father would be proud that the boy had done it himself.

When the boy came out of the tent, the fog was breaking and rays of sunshine danced on the lake. The boy could hear the birds and smell the freshness of the air and he did not think about the storm and darkness of the night before. He went to the food sack that was hanging from the tree on the other end of camp and as he untied the cord with his good hand he noticed that around the cord the bark of the tree had been torn away. The boy could not determine if the bark had been freshly scraped off of the trunk, or if it had been that way for some time.

He lowered the bag down, opened it and pulled out dried fruit and meat. He ate his breakfast under the tree and he watched the sunlight dance on the lake.

The boy took his sleeping bag out of his tent and put it in the sun and let the sun dry it and make the synthetic fabric crisp. He walked the peninsula and checked for bear tracks, but the ice was nearly melted now and the boy could not distinguish tracks in the mud.

The boy thought of his friends back in the city and what they were doing and if they too were becoming men and how they would do it. He thought of the girls in his class, though he had never before thought of them so much, and he decided which ones were beautiful. He held two in his mind as particularly beautiful. Then he thought of those two girls a lot, and the fact that he could recall them so easily made him feel rich and he did not want to think of anything else. But the thoughts of the girls left him, and it was a great loss.

There were other ideas he considered too: Once he became a man, would he be able to confront the mean students at school—like the one that brought a gun to the school and showed it to the boy while they were in the bathroom and said, “You tell and I’ll use it on you.” The boy thought of the strength of a man, and the boy wondered if, after four days alone, he would have strength like his father. Then he would not fear the student with the gun. If he was a man, his mother would no longer tell him what time to be home, he would be able to hike in the mountains as fast as his father, and he would no longer be afraid.

In the middle of the second day, it snowed. The boy looked around in wonder as the snowflakes fell onto the lake like silent white fireworks. It was June and the boy had only known June as hot and dry and he believed witnessing the snow fall was great luck for him.

The snow did not abate. The clouds filled in above the lake and the boy could not see the nearby peaks. He could only see the trees of his peninsula and the shore of the lake. The snow began to gather first on the treetops and then onto the grass and finally it stayed even on the muddy surfaces and on the wet sand where small waves lapped at the shore. The boy put on a rain jacket and rain pants. His shoes were already wet and he felt the cold seep through to his socks and then to his toes.

The boy knew that he should go back into his tent, but he did not want to be confined to laying down and he already knew of the boredom of the tent. He also sensed that there was something beyond the snow. Though it was hard to see anything, he waited and peered into the storm.

It did not take long for him to discern that there was something there. An animal. It was just beyond his peninsula, near to the water. He looked at the animal and saw that it was very large, and he regretted feeling afraid again. Through the falling snow the boy could see the animal lift its head and look across the lake towards the boy. It was a moose. The boy was still nervous, but not afraid. He took his knife from his pocket and folded the blade out. The snowflakes fell onto the steel and melted into drops. He imagined the moose coming into camp, and he imagined sinking the blade into her neck. He thought that it would feel like his finger felt when the blade set into it. But if he was a man then he should not care because to kill a moose with just his knife would make him a great man. In the falling snow the boy practiced his stabs in the falling snow. From her stance across the water, the moose watched the boy for a moment and then lumbered off into the woods and the boy did not see her again.

His feet became cold now and he knew that he should not stay outside. He went to his tent and shook it so that the snow that had gathered fell away. He shook his rain jacket and his rain pants and quickly pulled them off before he unzipped the tent and crawled in. And now, again, he was confined back to his tent and to the sounds of the wind and the storm. And he thought about what his father had meant when he said, “You will have to learn how to be alone with your loneliness,” because now the boy felt very lonely and it seemed like it had been many days since his father and uncle had left, even though it had only been one full day. The boy could not imagine that he would have to be alone in camp for two more days. Such an amount of time felt impossible and the boy could not grasp at it.

At first the boy could not distinguish his boredom from loneliness. But soon he realized that loneliness was a great aching. It was a craving like he had never felt before, a craving for people, their company and conversation. But it was more. In his loneliness the boy began to know his thoughts and they surprised him and he did not recognize such thoughts as his own. Some thoughts were ugly and haunting and they made him ashamed. He could not ignore the thoughts because they were his only company. As the snow gathered again onto his tent, all he could do was listen and think and let the thoughts fill the tent like a plague of flies. Such thoughts came in pulses, like the pain of his finger when the blade set in. Sometimes the ugly thoughts subsided and then the boy felt relieved but he did not feel any less lonely. There were thoughts that frightened the boy too. They were not thoughts of grizzlies now. They were thoughts of inadequacy, that no matter how many days the boy spent out in the wilderness, he would not become a man. The boy did not know if he was doing it right. He craved affirmation from his father, saying, “Yes son, this is how you become a man: You keep warm and dry in the snow. You hang your food bag high. You know how to hunt the moose and scare off the bear.” But there was no one to tell the boy this and the absence made the boy confused and again a terrible loneliness set in.

With the darkness an emptiness came too. The boy missed people and he no longer wanted to be on the peninsula. The boy’s finger ached. When he rubbed the skin near the cut it felt waxy and cold. He unwrapped the bandana, removed the stick and let a subtle warmth return to the finger. The yellow fluid no longer dripped out of the wound, though the skin still folded into the deep cut and the boy knew that the skin was dead and the wound would take a long time to heal.

Snowflakes rasped at the sides of the tent and the boy wondered how much snow had accumulated. He hit the sides of the tent and heard the snow slide off the walls to the ground. The boy thought of the scratch marks that were on the tree by the food bag, and he realized that he had not eaten dinner. He did not want to go back out into the snow and the darkness though, and he thought it better that he did not eat food in the tent because the tent would hold the odors and then the grizzly might come into camp. The boy listened for sounds like the ones the night before, but he only heard the snowflakes falling onto the walls of the tent and the wind hitting the pine trees. Before long the boy was asleep.

During the night, the boy sweat and shifted in his bag and awoke often. When he awoke he listened outside. He did not know when the snow had stopped, but he hit the walls of his tent and the snow fell and piled to the sides and he no longer heard snowflakes falling against the tent. Then he noticed the profound silence, and he listened hard to what might be outside of his tent but he could hear nothing. And the sound of nothing also frightened him and he thought there was no solution to the fear.

He felt trapped. He unzipped the tent door and looked outside, this time with no headlamp. He felt the biting air and it felt fresh and it made him forget about his fear. He looked up and saw that the clouds had cleared and the sky was resplendent with stars. He had seen such stars before in other mountains, when he was not alone, and the sight made him remember those times and the boy felt happy. He left the tent unzipped and slipped his sleeping bag around his head and then the boy fell asleep, the cold air on his face, but his body warm and comfortable. These were the best conditions for sleep and the boy slept deeply and undisturbed. He woke when the sun was already over the peaks, and the light landed on his face and was bright and warm.

The boy finished his packing quickly. The process was easy and he looked at the filled backpack and understood that he would not unpack nor spend another night on his peninsula, though that had been his father’s plan. The boy had only been there two nights, not three. But the boy could not stand another. He made his decision and he knew that his decision was a weakness. He did not know whether his father would be disappointed, or yell and send the boy back to his camp.

Father, I was too lonely and I did not know how to be alone. Father, there were noises in the dark and my headlamp didn’t show me what made the noises.

Father, I was afraid.

The boy pulled the pack off of the ground, slipped it over his shoulders and felt that it was heavy and damp. His finger still ached under the bandana. He looked around at the melting snow and the dry patch where his tent had been. He heard the water lapping at the shore. He picked up his walking stick, cinched his waist strap down, and began walking towards the wood. He stopped before entering the wood and looked back at the camp and at the tracks in the mud, and then he set off into the wood, where he would go and find his father’s camp and he would tell his father what happened.