Afterwards, Brian built a shelter. On the side of the cliff, there was a rocky ledge to act as a roof, almost like a cave, and all he had to do was wall off the front of the with some fallen tree limbs. It was easy enough, though it took several hours to complete.

Brian’s stomach was growling. He was so hungry. He thought back to a barbeque with his dad and Terry, the smoked chicken was incredible. “No,” he thought, “I need to stop thinking about food.”

Instead Brian thought about The Secret. He decided he would tell his dad after he was rescued. His stomach kept growling. He decided to look for food, berries. He started walking, careful not to get lost. Around a clearing, he saw some birds, singing on some bushes. On the bushes were some small red berries. He felt lucky and grabbed a few.

Their taste was bitter, bad, and Brian spit them out. But then his hunger was too great. He kept eating and eating and eating. Soon, he went back to the shelter. Even though he felt sick, he fell asleep.

CHAPTER 7

The berries were a bad idea.Brian screamed and woke up. He wasn’t sure if the scream awakened him or the pain in his stomach. His whole abdomen was torn with great pain, pain that made him fall in the darkness of the little shelter, put him over and face down in the sand to moan again and again: "Mother, mother, mother..." Never anything like this. Never. It was as if all the berries, all of them had exploded in the center of him, ripped arid tore at him. He crawled out the doorway and threw up in the sand, then crawled still farther and was sick again, for over an hour. He was sick until he was left weak, with nothing inside his stomach.

Brian remembered “The Secret.” In the mall. Every detail. His mother sitting in the car with the man. And she had leaned across and kissed him, kissed the man with the short blond hair, and it was not a friendly peck, but a kiss. A kiss where she turned her head over at an angle and put her mouth against the mouth of the blond man who was not his father and kissed, mouth to mouth, and then brought her hand up to touch his cheek, his forehead, while they were kissing. And Brian saw it.

Brian woke up at sunrise. It was still very early, only just past true dawn, and the water was so calm he could see his reflection. It frightened him—his face was cut and bleeding, swollen and lumpy, the hair all dirty, and on his forehead a cut had healed but left the hair stuck with blood . His eyes were slits in the bites and he was—somehow—covered with dirt. He slapped the water with his hand to destroy the mirror. Ugly, he thought. Very, very ugly. And he was, at that moment, almost overcome with self-pity. He was dirty and starving and bitten and hurt and lonely and ugly and afraid and so completely miserable that it was like being in a hole, a dark, deep hole with no way out. He sat back on the bank and fought crying. Then let it come and cried for perhaps three, four minutes. Long tears, self-pity tears, wasted tears. He stod, went back to the water, and took a small drink.

Brian realized he was very hungry after being so sick. Brian walked a hundred meters and came across a clearing. It was filled with small thorny bushes that were covered with berries. Raspberries. These he knew because there were some raspberry bushes in the park and he and Terry were always picking and eating them when they biked past. The berries were full and ripe, and he tasted one to find it sweet, and with none of the problems of the berries he had eaten before. Although they did not grow in clusters, there were many of them and they were easy to pick and Brian smiled and started eating. Sweet juice, he thought. He picked and ate and picked and ate and thought that he had never tasted anything this good. Soon, as before, his stomach was full, but this time he did keep eating. He did not want to be sick like last time he ate.

Raspberries

Brian felt good but then heard a noise. He turned and saw the bear. He could do nothing, think nothing. His tongue, stained with berry juice, stuck to the roof of his mouth and he stared at the bear It was black, with a brown nose, not the meters from him and big. No, huge. It was all black fur and huge. Shining black and silky the bear stood on its back legs, half up, and studied Brian, just studied him, then lowered itself and moved slowly to the left, eating berries as it walked along. Then he walked away.

Black Bear

The bear had just walked up to him and could have eaten him if he wanted to. Nothing. Then without thinking, Brian’s legs started moving, and he was running back to the cave. He would have run all the way, in panic, but after he had gone fifty meters his brain took over and slowed and, finally, stopped.

If the bear had wanted you, his brain said, he would have eaten you. It is something to understand, he thought, not something to run away from. The bear was eating berries. Not people. The bear did not try to hurt you.

While he knew that the bear did not want to hurt him, he kept thinking about it. he took his hatchet out of his belt and put it by his head, his hand on the handle, as the day caught up with him and he slept.