Terror at Bottle Creek

Cort joins the girls in the tree, around 10 feet from the ground. He inspects his leg and finds a three-inch gash and worries about it getting infected. However, he prioritizes getting the girls comfortable, building a platform from branches, and padding it with his life vest. He tells Liza to chew up juniper berries to make a paste to smear on themselves to repel ants and thinks, “If it were any other girl but Liza with me, we’d be dead” (120).

Cort notices that the bear that passed them earlier is now up in the tree next to them. As he gathers more branches, a cottonmouth crawls over his arm and he slings it away in terror. He breaks the compass and uses the glass to sharpen the end of a stick to repel snakes. Down below, Rusty is joined by five smaller hogs, guarding the base of their tree. He gets a sense that his father is guiding him and reflects that he is “no more than the things he’d taught me” (122) before reflecting that he still feels abandoned.