An Oblivious Balancer

“ – and now, for the daily news. Believe me folks, we’ve got an odd one for you today. An entire pack of Gray Wolves in Yellowstone Park has gone missing, according to park rangers. The GPS tags fitted onto their legs have stopped working, and while that is apparently not entirely unusual to happen occasionally, the entire pack’s tags have all gone out at once,” the radio newsman said outspokenly.

I glanced my eyes at my buddy’s, paying attention to his expression instead of the darkened fields flying by at highway speed just behind the window.

He easily noticed my curiosity. “You can turn it up if ya want.”

So I did.

I listened keenly to the broadcast. “This has lead officials to believe that someone has managed to capture them and destroyed the tags. But not only that, the den that the females were building was also completely destroyed.” We both simultaneously raised our eyebrows. “I’ll just read the description they gave us, ‘The den was completely buried in a foreign soil that is not native to this area. When dug out, there was no sign that any wolf was in the area when the destruction of the den took place.’ The wolves are one part of the population building process in Yellowstone, and police are already actively searching for suspects. They added that this would’ve been a much bigger loss if it happened a decade or two ago. However, - “ and so the newsman went on.

We both took a moment to ponder the odd story.

“Who goes to Yellowstone, goes out into the wilderness, destroys a wolf den and breaks the tags off an entire pack of the things? How the hell are you supposed to even do that without getting yourself killed?” I finally said, fascinated by the whole thing.

“I didn’t know you were such a concerned environmentalist, Pierce,” Mason said mockingly.

“I’m not. For the record, I hate wolves. When I lived in that house in the woods as a kid you could hear them howl at night. Every single night. Creeped me out, ya know?”

“I don’t recall any wolves living anywhere in America, ‘cept for Yellowstone, Pierce,” he said to spite me. He was also probably right.

“Well, I guess they were coyotes then, Mason,” I bitterly spoke, “But even so, I remember hearing them when my parents took us to Yellowstone a few years ago, and they sounded pretty similar from what I could remember. So I still hate ‘em.” I crossed my arms in conclusion. “But seriously though, who does that?”

“I dunno man, do I look like I would know?” he said, clearly starting to get annoyed at me taking his focus away from the road that was filled to the brim with the dull shades of grey, red, black and white of the multitude of cars in the morning rush hour.

I waved my arm at him as if to say, “Well fine.”

My ear’s attention turned back to the radio, and to my disappointment they had gone back to playing the country music that was playing before. Still don’t know why Mason liked that sorta music. Guess it’s just cause we grew up in the midwest. I just never caught on to the stuff.

We had been driving for a few hours without an intermission, and were getting pretty restless. My parent’s house would’ve been about an hour away had we not stopped. The fast food place wasn’t anything special, we only stopped just because we had gone the entire night trading off driving and frankly we needed a break. The news was on the TV there, where they were talking about the wolves again. Nothing really new, just a few pictures. I thought whoever took them must of been a pretty bad photographer, because the lighting was very noticeably off on the dirt that they said the den was covered with. Or maybe it was just someone doing a bad photoshop job of trying to highlight the differences. I didn’t know then.

Eventually Mason finished his excruciatingly slow manner of eating and we got back on the road. It was pretty eventless except for the morning traffic. We finally made it to our exit, and trudged off the freeway through the town, then through the neighborhoods. Mason pulled up to my parent’s house.

“See ya in a bit. Got the list of stuff?”

“Uh…” I said, pulling several items out of my pockets. Finally, I found the list, a list of supplies we thought we’d be needing for our trip. “Yep.”

“Alright, say hi to your mom for me.”

“I will if I catch her.”

He drove away, off to his own parent’s house. We’d been friends since we were in elementary school. We actually both moved in at about the same time, about a dozen or so years ago. I remember driving by his house seeing a moving truck outside after we had just finished unpacking. Our assigned seats on the first day of 3rd grade were right next to each other, so we sorta stuck together since then.

Maybe I didn’t convey that we are indeed best friends usually, long drives through the night just make us both sour. I don’t even remember why we decided to go camping in the first place, by that point it was obvious it was gonna be a lot of trouble. Maybe I would’ve been better off if we had just ditched the idea long ago...

I walked up the stairs to the deck and knocked on the door. My sister opened it.

“Hey sis!” I said excitedly.

“Hey!” she replied, motioning me inside from the still somewhat chilly spring morning. “You’re here early. Ya just missed Mom and Dad, they left for work already, and I have to leave for school pretty soon,” she said, hugging me in a quick embrace.

“Ah, that sucks. But it’s good to see you, it was too bad I missed you during my last visit!” I said, closing the door behind me.

“Yeah, sorry about that, I wouldn’t have gone on that sleepover if you would’ve freaking told us earlier that you were coming over!”

“Heheh... sorry. It was kind of unplanned. But I’m here now! How’s your year been so far?”

“It’s been OK, the team did a lot better this year, we won the region but didn’t quite make it to the state finals. Did Dad not tell you about that?” she said, in reference to her school soccer team.

“He mentioned it a little bit, I just wanted to hear it from you. How’d you do, contribute anything in that little sport of yours this year?” I said. I didn’t have much of an appreciation for any sports at all, much less soccer.

“Just a couple goals, yeah. But I’m not supposed to score goals often! I’m a defender, how many times do I have to tell you?” she said, remembering when I teased her the last year about playing soccer and not ever scoring anything.

I smiled light-heartedly at that last comment, and mentioned, “Anyways, I would’ve offered to take you to school if we had driven my car here instead of Mason’s. When do you have to leave?”

“In like,” she took a second to look at a clock, “five minutes.”

“Ah. How do you get there nowadays anyway?”

“One of my older friends usually picks me up, at least she will until I get my license.”

“Mm. Well, I’m glad my car won’t be in the driveway when you get it.”

“Hey…”

“Just teasing. Mom’s told me you’re better than I was. That really means nothing though.”

“Yeah, I was gonna say with the amount of times you nearly rear-ended other people when I had to ride with you…”

“Aw, come on, I’m not nearly as bad as I used to be.”

“Oh I’m sure,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Well, I’ve got to go make sure I’ve got all my stuff ready.”

“Alright, I’m gonna text Mom and tell her I made it home.”

She walked up the stairs, leaving me to myself in the house I grew up in for the first time in a few months. I leaned against the stair railing and did what I said I would do, and told Mom I made it safely and got to say hi to Lorena before she left. My eyes scanned the living room after finishing with that, seeing if they moved anything. I planned to take a nap in my favorite couch, which was happily sitting there, looking undisturbed since I had been here the last time.

After a couple minutes Lorena came back downstairs with a backpack.

“That thing looks heavy,” I commented.

“Ya wanna see for yourself?” she said, taking the bag off with noticeable difficulty. She swung it at me from a few steps up, making sure I was ready to catch it. Then she threw it, and it caught me as much as I caught it, forcing me to take a step back.

“Sheesh, what’s in this thing? Wait, lemme guess…” I said, thinking of what I had to carry in my sophomore year of high school. She motioned for me to figure it out.

“Algebra 2 and World History textbooks?”

She looked at me disappointedly, “Pre-Calculus, I passed Algebra 2 last year. But close enough, those and -”

“Wait, wait, do you have Mr. Forney for English?”

She nodded.

“Well that explains it. Does he still make you freaking carry that three inch binder and give you like, five papers to read every day?”

She nodded again, her face said my exact thoughts from those many years ago.

“Ha, well, don’t look at me for advice. Just… don’t fail. That’ll ruin your grades pretty quick,” I sarcastically confided as we heard the horn of a car outside.

“I’ll try,” she said before she came up to me to give me another hug.

I hugged her back lightly, then said, “Ya know, I’m not leaving again until this afternoon, so we’ll probably see each other one more time,” to reassure her that I would be here all day.

That was the plan.

“I guess this is just in case I somehow miss you again.”

And that was the last time I hugged my sister for a good couple of months.