Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [42]
“I can stand,” he said.
“Good, but you’re going to have to get right back down on your hands and knees again. I don’t think we’re going to be able to find my missing boot by looking for it. We have to crawl around and feel for it.”
“Fair enough,” he said, a phrase he’d often heard his father use with his mother.
Peter lowered himself back down to his knees and together they crawled around, going very slowly so as not to miss anything and to avoid getting further banged up. They carefully felt through wet and rotting dead leaves and over mossy boulders, squinting through the fear-weighted darkness, keeping each other in sight when they could and within easy earshot when they couldn’t. It took an awfully long time to do this and without success, so that Peter was beginning to worry that the soldiers might find them. They covered the ground around them several times, but there was no boot to be found. Then he heard Bo speak from up on the hillside above him.
“I’ve got it,” she said. “It was tucked in under a bush and mostly buried in the dirt we scooped up while we were falling.”
“Lucky that we could find it at all then. Can you get it on?”
“Ick! It’s full of dirt and dead leaves.”
“They can’t hurt you. Scrape it out and try anyway.”
“Oh no! Oh no!” she screamed above him in absolute terror.
“What is it?” Peter cried, already scrambling on all fours, up the loose hillside towards her. His thoughts filled with every imaginable calamity that could have befallen her. “Hold on! I’m coming!”
“There was a snail in it!” Her voice trembled with horror.
“Is that all?” He stopped climbing.
“But I touched it! And not just the shell part. I grabbed the sticky gooey part right in my hand.”
“That’s okay, Bo. It can’t harm you. Just put your boot on.”
“Not until I wash it out, and wash my hands too. I can have a wet boot, but not one full of snail goo. Stay there, I’m coming back down.”
He did and she did, and soon she was kneeling by the edge of the stream, thoroughly scrubbing out the inside of her boot. Peter crouched close beside her, trying to visually examine her for any obvious injuries. He thought he could make out a few scrapes and bruises, and one big goose-egg forming on the side of her head, but nothing that seemed to need immediate attention. “Hurry up,” he said. We have to cross the stream.”
“Why?”
“Because we know the camp and the soldiers are somewhere on this side of the stream, so that means they aren’t on the other side. We’ll be safer over there.”
“But can’t we just hide here until the soldiers go away and then go back to the camp?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think we have to get farther away first, before we try to hide, and I worry that we may not be able to go back to the camp at all. If I were a soldier in the woods, I’d stay there for a long time, waiting for someone to try to sneak back to see if it’s safe again.”
“But my mother and father may be back there,” Bo said. “What if they’re worried about me?”
“They’ll have to miss you for now. I’m not responsible for looking after your mother and father, but I did choose to pull you into the woods with me, so that makes me responsible for you. I have to make certain you’re safe, before going back to look for them, or your sisters, or my family.”
“You’re not the boss who gets to decide things.”
“No, but your father and my father are, and this is what I think they’d do.”
And that was that.
They crossed the stream, crowded with mossy-topped boulders, which the water had to find dozens of ways around. There were so many boulders that they could’ve tried stepping from one to another, and never have to get their feet wet — or more wet in Bo’s case. But the moss and smooth rock was slippery and Peter reasoned that it was better to walk in the stream, where the footing was surer. Better to get all of their feet wet, rather than risk slipping off of a boulder. Another fall might succeed in bashing their heads in this time. In the middle of the stream Bo stopped them and pointed upwards.
“Look,” she said. “Straight