lucyoncolorado

In which we find messages that foretell the deaths of our young hikers...

I'm leading a backpacking group of boy scouts on a hike through the woods. I've slept late, and the troop has gone on ahead of me under other adult supervision. I'm panicked at first as I hurry with packing up my tent, bag and cooking supplies. I'm afraid that they will have gone on so far ahead of me that I can't possibly catch up. But then I look at the itinerary and see that we are only moving 1.5 miles this day. This seems absurd, but instead of questioning it, I just feel relieved to have time to have coffee.

Some park rangers come along with a basket of plastic Easter eggs for the kids. Inside each egg, they tell me, is a message for the scouts that will lead them on a scavenger hunt. It sounds like a fun idea to me so I agree to deliver them to the kids.

Now I'm at the new camp. There is a playroom in the center of our campsite where the scouts are all playing. The kids are very young- toddlers mostly and a few young elementary-aged boys. They are all platinum blonde curly headed boys with pale blue eyes. I joke with another adult that it's like we are hiking with the kids from Village of the Damned.

I bring the Easter eggs to two of the boys who are brothers. One is slightly older than the other but neither is older than five or six, yet both can apparently read quite well. The boys take the eggs excitedly, and the elder one opens his first. He pulls a piece of paper from it as if it were the message from a fortune cookie, and then he looks back up at me with horror. I take the paper from him to see what it is about. It is a numbered list of four things that will happen to him that day:

1. You will get an Easter egg.
2. Your brother will die.
3. You will find a hat full of pine needles.
4. You will die.

Just as I'm absorbing the message and thinking of how to explain it to the older brother, the younger one starts to scream and then cry loudly the way a child does when he has seriously hurt himself. He is standing helplessly with his own paper in his hand, howling. I take it away from him and read what his says:

"You will die in the next seventeen seconds."

The child is terrified, so I pick him up and hold on to him to try to give him some comfort. I'm patting him on the back and holding his head on my shoulder while I tell him that it's not true. It's just a mean joke and he is perfectly safe.

"See?" I tell him. "It's already been seventeen seconds and you are fine." This soothes the child, and he climbs down from my arm and starts to suck on a mango pip which he inhales accidentally. He gasps for a moment, then collapses dead. He suffocated instantly- exactly seventeen seconds after reading his egg.

Now it is his brother's turn to cry while I'm busy trying to do the Heimlich on the younger one. Other scout troop leaders rush over. They start arguing over what we should do. Some tell me to turn him upside down and hit him on the back instead of doing the Heimlich. Others say we should do nothing since the boy is obviously dead already. All the adults start screaming at each other.

Meanwhile the elder brother is sobbing and looking at his dead brother's body in my arms. I lay the body down and look at the brother. All around us, I see the calves and knees of the panicking adults who are still running amok and shouting at each other. The sobbing brother and I are still. We are just staring at each other because we know now that the messages in the eggs are true. But I realize I need to be strong for the child and not let him be so afraid.

"It may be a long time before it happens," I tell him. "Years, even." But as soon as I say that, a ranger comes into the group and lifts up the dead child's body. Underneathe him is a hat full of pine needles. The elder brother sees this and shrieks so loudly that it wakes me up with a start.