Leave No Trace, page 1
Leave No Trace copyright © 2025 by Randee Dawn. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise without written permission except short excerpts in a review, critical analysis, or academic work.
This is a work of fiction.
Cover art by Dany V.
ISBN EBOOK: 978-1-64710-162-6
First Edition. September 2025.
An imprint of Arc Manor Inc.
www.CaezikSF.com
For Julia, who’s always helped me find the way.
Contents
PART ONE
Going Offguard
Burt Fuckin’ Badass Reynolds
A Girl Named Jim
Welcome to Camp Furey
King of the Forest
Mostways Ready
Impossible Birch Trees
Down the Rabbit Hole
See the Pieces, Make ’Em Complete
The War Comes Home
Changing the Rules
We Live Here Now
Betwixt and Between
Living in a Box
What Needs Protecting
What Can Be Sacrificed
No Unnecessary Deaths
The Bear Chooses You
Rebalancing the Scales
The Truth of a Blue Knit Scarf
PART 2
Forest Dreams
An Unholy Mess
For All That Bodes Well
The Country of the Young
A Dark, Worn-Up Place
The Unseen
The Places That I Hide
Fixer, Finder, Healer
The Invitation
Bear Necessities
A Wild Test
Where Is the Exit
Chateau Artio
Shoot When the Target Presents
The Mercy Kill
Natural Magic
The Way Is Clear
Start Where You End
Glossary
Acknowledgements
PART ONE
“Nae endings w’out need
Nae beginnings w’out purpose”
— the Ghillie Dhu
Going Offguard
“Daddy was fulla it,” Jim always said.
Fulla what? I always said back. Knowing. Wanting him to say it.
Shit! Jim always shouted, so loud I thought everybody left in the world could hear. But wasn’t nobody around to hear him xcept me and the trees. He’s fulla shit!
And I laughed and laughed, sounds comin’ outta me like fireworks.
Jim never did.
Morning’s when you get stuff done in the woods, Daddy says. Get up before the sun, when even the Oscar owls are sleepy and the Harry hares are hiding and everybody else is in dreamyland. Sneak behind the back of the world so you can prepare. Do the thing nobody else is doing and nobody ever sees you coming.
Offguard, Jim xplained it once. You catch ’em Offguard. Offguard’s not a place, xactly. Offguard’s what happens when you go faster than the others. Whoever the others are. Get organized before they do. Then you’re ten steps ahead and you know the lay of the land.
I am always ten steps ahead. That’s ’cause I’m faster than anyone else in the forest. It’s one true I know about myself, one thing I know for certain on days when I feel like I don’t know anything else: I am the fastest.
Okay, xcept for maybe Artie.
We have a job starting later this morning and Daddy definitely wants me up and at-’em soon as he’s ready but I’m not waiting for him, I got my own place to be. Hard sometimes to get a minute on my own. Always chopping and hunting and peeling and cooking and hauling and—it doesn’t end. Was easier when Jim was here.
Jim, who isn’t here now. Jim, who left me behind. But thinking of Jim too much puts bees in my head and I don’t want to waste time being mad at him so I look up at the cabin’s ceiling and see where the roof beams join and cross and I find a little knothole I know about and I put all my Jim thoughts in there. Then I close my eyes and when I open them I’m me again.
I hurry hurry out of bed and creep out of the loft slow slow and leave Daddy behind making zzz’s. Got to be quiet. If I wake him he might find things for me to do. If I wake him he might think I’m trying to run away, like Jim did.
I wouldn’t, though. Got noplace to go. But doesn’t mean I don’t think about it.
I’m out in the forest with the trees and the sky and it’s just black and blue shadows outside the cabin, the old Sun still gone nighty-night. For a minute I look back at the cabin and hear the zzz’s and I stick my tongue out far as it’ll go.
See, Daddy, you don’t know everything ’bout me.
Turning round I take a sniff of the night-morning air. Heavy but cold. Wet. Snow’s a day off, prolly. Two. So yeah. Coming but not yet. Early, tho. Only September. Prolly.
Time to go Offguard. Got my pack and bow and arrow and cap and boots hanging off my belt and two apples and the book. I start a light jog, silent. Blink and you’d miss me—I’m just a bit of skin and hair and cloth. My toes pad over dead things like I’m hardly even here. Never liked shoes, not even boots, noisy stiff things. Xcept mocs but usually I don’t even wear mocs. Be too cold for barefeet soon. Winter comes fast and hard ’round here.
There’s a small clearing in the tall tall trees about a thousand jogsteps away and I stop. Listen. I can kinda hear Jim if I go still enough.
We could leave now, he said to me once right in this very spot. It was a hot day and we were supposed to be checking the snares but we were throwing round his baseball. He’ll never catch us. We can go home.
We are home, I said back.
Dummy, he said. There’s a whole wide world out there an’ you think this’s the whole deal.
I slugged him in the arm. ’Course I did. Been here a long time. Don’t remember much else. Daddy says people are sick.
Daddy’s the one who’s sick. He made a face. Jim always acted like he knew more than I did but there’s no way he could. We both got here the same day. Daddy gave us both the grape soda. But I trusted him. Even if he was a stupidhead for always trying to find the way out. We both knew there wasn’t one.
And we didn’t go. Least not that day. Least not me.
Jim never wanted to stay here. But Daddy said we had to. People got sick and the world was going crazypants and he saved us by bringing us here. He said. So of course I believed.
Sometimes I do think about what it would feel like to leave. To put my feet (with shoes on them) on that black hard road and keep walking until there were more people and houses and cars and dogs barking in the yards. I’m this close to asking Daddy ’bout it. He once said grown age was eighteen and I’m almost there. Next time the snow melts, I’ll be eighteen. Then I’ll ask. He might try to hit me but I’ll risk it. I am fast.
But could I go without Daddy? He knows most everything. Only stuff I know is right here right now.
I get out of my head and back into the trees. Thinking ’bout Jim makes me dumb, I don’t pay attention. But if I go too long not thinking about him he sneaks back into my head anyway and that makes me sad. He’s all over the forest to me. Over at Blueberry Cliff where we hunted or the Great Meadow where we ran around or in the forest clearings when it was fogmisty on the ground and he would say it’s like living in a cloud. He’s in all those places.
I bite my tongue ’til it hurts and there’s salt in my mouth and that wakes me up and puts Jim away for now.
Gil! That’s why I’m out here early. If Gil’s ’round we’ll have some time before I have to work. Make Daddy wake up on his ownsome and make his own coffee and have to come find me. Anyway, if I want to see Gil I have to try now—if I don’t I prolly won’t see him for a week. More. So I take a deep breath and put my hands up and whisper the abracadabras he taught me: Tha an t-slighe soilleir, which he says means the way is clear and then the trees go soft and wavy and hum to me and I read them like a map.
I lower my hands and breathe another minute. Saying the words makes my head hurt some. Like I thought and thought so hard my brain got sweaty. So I have to rest. After a minute, two minutes I look up at the map. It’s just waiting for me.
And I go:
Over a chewed-up log.
Scrambly up the sweet long grassy hill.
Touch the top of the stunty little tree, for luck.
All ’round the flowers (I only step between) with a look over my shoulder. I know I’m getting close when the bluebells show up. There’s so many it’s like the sky is napping on the ground.
Leap over the pine needle path, not onto it, nobody knows I was here if I do it that way.
And I’m here at the cliff base.
Climbing up the rock face is tough and can get noisy so I take it easy and slow like Daddy showed me. One hand one toe one hand one toe always three touches on the rock at once. Go careful, go quiet. Be part of the forest so nobody and nothing xpects you’re there xcept maybe an early-riser Rocky raccoon or Paul porcupine. When Daddy brought me and Jim to the cabin ’bout ten summers back I started giving all the animals names. Game I made up and Jim helped. So all the snakes are Susie and all the mountain lions are Leo.
Only one Artie, though. She’s different.
I
I am the forest.
My toes are strong and they grab hold of the jagged gray rock like fingers. They wrap ’round the outcrops and I can push hard down on them and I don’t even go “ow” anymore if I hit a sharp bit ’cause my feet are tough like shoes on the bottom. I stop once to get my breath but then finally I’m at the top and it’s one more push with my hard little toes and I’m up and over, flat on the ridge, face down in the dirt and grass.
I take a deep smell of the earth and it’s like I’m smelling the skin of the world. It’s rich and dark and there’s metal and wood all bundled up in there with the bugs and the grass and everything’s okay. Same as last time I was up here, maybe three days back. I can smell when things change in the dirt, ’cause when things change it means I gotta be ready to change too. Daddy always says the ones who survive in the forest are the ones who adapt. You have to be like a mirror. You become whatever, whoever you see in that mirror right that minute. And when that minute’s over you go back to who you really are.
If you can remember.
Jim didn’t adapt, Daddy says. That’s why he’s not here anymore.
We don’t have mirrors in the cabin. Instead we have lakes that hold still when the wind stops blowing. And there are mirrors at the hot shower place Daddy took me to a couple of times so I have a little idea what I look like but I don’t see my face regular. I don’t know if I remember who I was once. I’m just me, today.
Okay, maybe I know some. I was a second grader way back when. I was a Brownie. I liked science stuff when it was about animals. I could tell an ocelot from a lynx and I knew elephants had ears shaped like the place they were from. I was in a school with boys and girls and some who weren’t either and just wanted to be called “they” and homework and touchdesks that changed when you poked with a finger. But those things I remember are only bits and pieces, like flat rocks I bounce on to get from one side of a creek to the other. They don’t mean anything. They’re what was. ’Course if I was still a Girl Scout now I’d have all the badges they made for hunting ’cause that’s what I do really good. That’s another true thing: I am great with a bow and arrow and I can skin and dress a deer fast as Jim used to.
Leap!
I’m up on my feet making a big Harry hare jump and then I’m down in a crouch again and looking round. The treemap is still humming and the bluebells are thick on all sides of my ankles but I like to ’valuate things. I catch a bit of piney sap and a musky whiff that makes me think animals were here jumping on each other. There’s a breeze, soft and full of morning and it’s tickling my cheeks, slipping into my hair like fingers.
My memory jumps to another flat rock. To Mom. She combed my hair with her hands, her pointy thin fingers making braids. Once my hair was long and flowy and she could do it up faster than I could think and I’d be like ow ow it hurts but it didn’t really it just surprised me. Now my hair’s short like Jim’s was.
When Daddy started taking me to work he cut it all off and told me to burn the long tail in the fire and that was the end. My eyes stung watching it go. But Daddy made me understand why I had to be somebody else when we went on jobs. How I had to adapt.
I’m humming a little bit. Gil likes it when I hum. Likes it best when I sing. I don’t sing much. I only know a couple songs. But sometimes there’s just a tune in my head and then I put in words. Mostly the words are lists, things I must remember to do or that I did and if I hum them to myself I remember ’em better. But you don’t want to be too loud in the forest. You might get heard. So I am humming about climbing my cliff and smelling my ground and how the sun is just now starting to put the colors into the trees. About getting to see Gil.
Wind goes still and the fingers fall from my hair and Mom slips away again.
Now I have the measure of the place. I get tall and blink, then stride round the flowers—Gil says they’re called harebells sometimes—and I am the fastest softest quietest thing in the forest.
A too-whoo-whoot sound lifts over everything and I turn to one side so my chin hits my shoulder. There they are: seven tall bright birch trees. They’re huddling together in this C shape that Daddy called a “stand.” The trees are so beautiful; they’re straight and true and like they were just made yesterday even though they’re tall as any trees around. Their white bark glows.
And smack in the middle, standing on the softest patch of pine needles you ever dreamed up is Gil.
“Wean.” He smiles and thin blades of grass tumble from his hat like rain. “Knew ye’d come.”
Prolly been five years since I met the Ghillie Dhu. That’s what he is. He doesn’t have a name, xactly, so he told me to call him Gil, that first time we met. Sometimes he shows up as a girl and then he’s Gillie. Two in one. Gil’s more fun than Gillie; she usually is about telling me what to do or what not to do, but whether Gil’s being a boy or a girl he looks pretty much the same, like a person the forest grew.
He’s my only friend.
“Come, wean,” he says to me and holds out his hand. His words roll around like he’s got a pebble in his mouth and make me think of songs. “Set.”
I put down my bow and arrow—nae weapons he told me that first time—and my fingers curl round his and then I’m inside his clean bright pine needly place. We’re both still in the forest, and I can see everything going on out there but once I’m inside nobody can see me. Us. Leastways I don’t think so, unless Gil wants them to. He can do things people like me and Daddy and Jim can’t and I’m still not totally sure but I don’t think he’s people xactly, but I don’t ask. Maybe he’d be mad and go away if I asked the wrong thing.
I hold out one of the apples from my backpack.
“Thanking ye,” he says, whisking it from my hand, and sits down next to me in the needles. He eyeballs that apple like it’s the first one he ever saw. He smooths his hands over it and a little shiver runs through him. I always bring an apple, if we have apples. They keep a long time but they’re rare ’round here. It’s the first and only thing I ever gave him he really wanted. He brings the apple up to his nose and takes a long, deep smell and the colors on his face dance and shift and his eyes—they’re almost all black, just a little white on the outsides—shine out at me. “ ’ Tis a beauty. Like y’self.”
Gil’s ’bout as tall as me when he’s standing. That’s always been true: Whatever age I am he’s my height, tho’ I don’t know what age he is. He never changes. Got a grass hat that folds over his head like a roof and his jacket’s made of springy soft moss and grooved lined bark. His pants are like solid mud that bend when he moves. His skin shifts color, depending on the light and what he’s thinking about. Sometimes he’s brown and green, sometimes orange and yellow, sometimes sunny white, sometimes night black. Colors of the forest. But he’s always got this light all ’round him.
Took me a while to understand Gil. He doesn’t talk like people, but he doesn’t look like people either, so it makes sense. He’s the only person I talk to regular, xcept Daddy. When Gil calls me a wean, instead of my name, he means a little girl. Wee one, it means. “I’m not wee anymore,” I say.
“Nae,” he says. “But to me ye are, seems.”
I have to see Gil alone ’cause he won’t come round when Daddy’s near. Just for me, I guess. He shows up whenever he feels like it, but only when I’m by myself. Today’s different, though. I’m here right now ’cause Gil came into a dream in my head. Last night he froze up the other stuff I was dreaming about and stepped right into everything.
Come, he said to me. Come in the morn. We have of which to speak.
I lean back on my hands as he nibbles at the apple, then opens his jaws and chomps out a great big bite. Juice runs down his face and vanishes before it drips on the moss.
“Can’t stay long,” I say. “We’re working.”
