— Discover the mysterious details of Niko’s traumatic past —
About three years earlier …
Niko stumbled from the woods onto the narrow ATV track. His shirt — once a light-blue Columbia PFG — was missing buttons and darkened with blood and dirt. His eyes were red from lack of sleep, and he limped. He bled from a partially healed slash running in a line midst a raised and swollen purple ridge on the side of his face. Any exposed skin was sunburned and covered in the swollen pricks of bug bites.
He was thin, and his eyes focused on nothing in particular as they peered forward and slightly down into the dirt in front of him, as if he was willing his mind to dig a hole into which he could crawl and forget it all.
Less than a quarter of a mile along the path, he fell to the ground. He could not move his limbs — a level of exhaustion few have really felt. Niko laughed and coughed and whispered nonsense to the trees, and then he closed his eyes.
Niko, in that state, didn’t recognize the familiar terrane and had no idea that was just three point four miles from Ladawambuck. It could have been a hundred.
Niko was beginning to understand that the grit needed to survive is easier to find when the objective is clear, when there is a schedule, a lighthouse, or just a little wooden sign noting the distance to the next road. Without those things, the suffering seems endless, the task impossible, even for the toughest of people.
In his time out there, Niko had heard helicopters on two occasions, but he never saw one. He tried many times to make a fire, but he had no supplies and the soaking spring rains prevented creating one by natural means.
He wondered if they knew where to look, and he figured even if there was a search party, they would have given up after a week or so. Except Tracey. He knew she would never give up. If he could not survive this ordeal, he at least wanted to die in spot where she would find him and have some closure.
He didn’t know about all of the people who had searched. Firefighters, fellow guides, police, volunteers, Tracey, his family, people from his home town, people from college. Even some of the nomadic guides, salty captains, and mountain explorers Niko had worked with and befriended in his travels came all the way to Ladawambuck to look for him.
They searched even though the last people who saw him, Bernard and Andrea said he was drowned, swallowed up by the river. No one outright contested their story, as it would have been tasteless to do so right then, but the people who knew Niko, who really knew him, quietly wondered if they were getting the truth. So they searched on.
The search was expansive, but so is Maine, and they didn’t have accurate information to start with. They didn’t know that Niko waited for a few days and then tried to float the river on driftwood, but he split at the wrong spot, and then he went on foot for a while before returning to a smaller river where he collapsed and lay until a lone, rugged man with long hair and a wildly expansive beard that smelled of the woods found him and loaded him into a canoe and took him back to his cabin.
The cabin was set away from the river and miles from any roads, and it wasn’t on any map or any land deed or county record. The searchers tried, but they had been misled from the start.
After ten days, the official search ended. If Niko was mobile, he would have made it back by then. If he wasn’t, well that meant he was dead. No one talked about it openly, but local authorities were under pressure to resolve this quickly. A missing guide was bad for tourism. Bernard and Andrea, well connected Bostonians, had already enlisted the services of several lawyers, and a lawsuit was even worse than a missing guide.
So, based solely on Bernard and Andrea’s testimony, Niko was declared dead on June 7th. Tracey fought it in court the best she could, but the judge just wanted it finished.
Because so many family and friends were already in town, they hastily put together a memorial service. Tracey refused to participate, but her mother filmed the thing saying, “she’ll want to watch it someday.”
In the years after, Niko would celebrate June 7th as his death day. Tracey never voiced an objection, feeling that owning that sort of experience was personal and she had no context to judge’s Niko’s treatment of his own “death”, but she always made sure to be absent from that celebration for some reason or another.
Niko would begin the day by writing himself a happy death day card that he would file away in the clutters of his desk. Then he would go fishing with Mossy before beers at the brewery. There Mossy would usually suggest watching the footage of Niko’s memorial service. Niko always refused saying, “I don’t want to jinx the real one.” No one knew exactly what he meant, but they couldn’t argue with the man on his death day.
Then Niko would leave to get deliriously drunk by himself before passing out at the fly shop. June 8th was always a quiet day around the house.
After Niko’s memorial service, everyone went home, and the world went back to normal for everyone except Tracey. Some of local guides even approached her about buying the guide shop. She did her best not to punch them before calmly saying, “go eat shit and then think deeply about your life choices.”
Tracey kept looking. She would run up the rivers on boats, wind in her light hair and binoculars swinging around her neck as she scanned the banks. She would hike the trails for miles and miles around Ladawambuck, stopping to listen, and then calling his name out to the trees. Sometimes she cried when she knew she was alone. She covered ground like an experienced guide or tracker, and a few times she stayed out exposed for the night, building her shelter from the materials at hand, feeling connected to Niko through the land that they both loved.
Niko had always encouraged her to guide with him or take her own clients. He would say, “you’re better than any of the guides around here, including me. And people love to fish with me,” and then he would pause and follow up with, “Now, I am better at high altitudes and out on the salt, but you got me here in these woods.”
She appreciated the compliment, but would say, “I’m more than happy to make a living as a writer and artist. Fishing and hiking are for pleasure. Why muddy those waters with money?”
She loved how much Niko loved her. How he smiled at her paintings before they were even finished and hung the ones she didn’t sell in the perfect spot without asking, and how he always read her first drafts and posed questions that she hadn’t thought of, and how he would grab her from behind and pull her to his chest after she had been fishing or hiking and would put his face next to her neck and breathed deeply, absorbing her musk and dirtiness. Then he would smile and kiss her neck. Those were the nights he wanted her most, the nights he carried her to bed, where they lost themselves in each other, disturbing the fish-table bears with their intimate sounds that carried out the open window into the Maine air.
He loved every corner of her soul and every inch of her body for exactly what it was, never bending her unique will and peculiar tastes to a preconceived image. He conceived his images based on her.
She knew Niko was still out there, that he would not stop trying to return to her until his body had nothing left, so she kept searching.
She found him laying in the middle of the ATV track. A raccoon was sniffing him, but it ran away when it heard Tracey. Niko was unconscious but breathing. She grabbed his arms and tried dragging him, but soon realized that would take too long. She dropped his arms and then began to sprint. As an accomplished track and cross-country athlete growing up, Tracey had recorded some good times in the five kilometers, but this was by far her fastest pace. She got back to the trailhead, which emptied out next to the fly shop, and she ran to the four-wheeler in the garage. She fired it up, rushed back down the trail, lifted Niko’s body onto the rack in a swift motion, strapped him down, kissed his thinned face, and said “hold on just a little longer.”
She arrived back at the house, transferred Niko into the truck and then sped down the highway. When she dragged him into the emergency clinic, the doctors and nurses looked horrified. She yelled “what do I have to do to get some help around here?”
They rushed over and put Niko onto a stretcher. After Tracey explained the situation, the doctor scolded her for dragging an injured patient, and for not calling an ambulance. She was pulling smashed bugs from her face and hair, and she said “I got him here from an ATV trail in Ladawambuck in sixty minutes, you think you all could’ve done better?” The doctor didn’t respond, but one of the nurses smiled at Tracey.
Niko regained consciousness two days later. He was exhausted, dehydrated, undernourished, and was battling parasites as well as infection, but he had somehow avoided catastrophic injuries or organ failure. They said he would recover.
A clerk from the county came by the clinic to reverse Niko’s death certificate. Tracey called the clerk all sorts of names before a nurse suggested that she take a walk for a few minutes. Niko looked at the paperwork, and in spite of the urgings of both professionals and loved ones, who unanimously said “that’s weird, even by your standards,” Niko insisted on framing the original death certificate to hang in the fly shop. He explained that, “I don’t know too many people who have died, and I don’t want to give that up.”
He wouldn’t speak to anyone, even Tracey, of what happened during the time he was gone. When Tracey told him the version of events that Bernard and Andrea had shared, Niko just shook his head.
The local police were anxious to resolve all of this, but waited for Niko to recover before taking his statement. They had thought the case closed, two tragic losses in the backcountry, but no crime. Now that he was back, there would be legal matters.
…
Another episode will be published next Tuesday!