There being nothing left to do, I sat down and, with a strip of birch bark and an ember from the fire, made the first notation on what was to become my calendar.

Tim came back empty-handed and shamefaced. “I’m sorry, Lizzy,” he said. “I saw one partridge, but it got away.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “We have some clams and the beans. We won’t starve. But we have to make the best use of our time. Do you still have your compass?”

“Yes,” he said, happy to be of some help. He gave it to me. I held it up. The needle didn’t move.

“You’ve gotten water in it,” I said. I shook it. Sluggishly the needle began to swing. I checked it against the sun. Yes, if you were willing to wait, the instrument would point to the north.

“What have you decided?” Tim asked.

This made me mad. “I have decided,” I said, “that you are the leader of this expedition and that you should stop looking to me for every little suggestion.”

He gave a confused wave of his hand. “But you’re older,” he said.

“And you’ve been in the woods twice as much as I have. You take the lead. I’ll follow. When I think of something that will help, I’ll tell you.”

I had spent some time while I searched for the clams working out this approach. Tim was frightened and erratic just now, because my father’s death had scoured him of his natural toughness. But when it came back, he would be much more effective in planning the bold strokes that were necessary to rescue us from our forest predicament. I would back him up and recite as much of what my father had told us as seemed necessary. I saw immediately that my decision was the right one.

“All right,” Tim said. “We’re going to have to walk out.”

I already knew that, but I said nothing. “Which way?” I asked.

“Well…the creek’s running northeast.”

“Won’t it be hard following its banks, though?”

“Yes, I guess it would. Maybe we’d better head due east.” He paused and then said, “No, southeast. That ought to get us to a town quicker than any other direction. But we’ll have to walk around a couple of mountains, if I remember that map right.”

“We can take our time,” I said. “We’ll hunt and gather food as we go, so that we will always have something to eat.”

“But we can’t fool around too long,” he said. “You have to remember, we can get snow up here the first of November.”

I put the beans on to boil. “A little snow won’t hurt us,” I said. “But we must be very careful not to overtire ourselves to the point where we become careless again.”

“I know,” he said. Then: “Lizzy, I’m sorry.”