NC EOG Practice Test 12

Rule Number Forty-One

¹My cousin Dahlia is a year younger than I am, and she has a rule for everything. She has a rule for packing a backpack (heavy things close to your back), a rule for crossing a creek (unbuckle your hip strap first), and a rule for snacks (eat before you're hungry, not after). By the time we were halfway up Fernhollow Trail, I had heard about forty of them.

²"You're going to get a blister," she said when I stopped to retie my shoe for the third time.

³"I'm not going to get a blister," I said. I already had a blister. I did not tell her.

⁴We were hiking to Hawk Rock, a granite ledge at the top of the ridge where, Dahlia promised, you could see four counties on a clear day. Aunt Lucinda had settled in at the picnic shelter by the trailhead with a thick book, and she had made us promise to be back before dark. It was November, and the afternoon was clear, sharp and blue. Dahlia had checked the sunset time twice before we left her house, and when we signed in at the trailhead, the ranger warned us that the sun would drop behind the far ridge well before five. "Once it does, visibility on the trail can drop to almost nothing in a few minutes," she said. "You can lose sight of the trail."

⁵"We'll turn back by four o'clock no matter what," Dahlia told her. That was another rule.

⁶We reached Hawk Rock at three-fifteen, and I forgot about my blister. The valley below was folded up like a rumpled brown-and-gold blanket, and the dark line of the Blue Ridge went on and on until it faded into the sky. I wanted to stay forever, or at least until I finished my sandwich and then my second sandwich.

⁷At three-forty, Dahlia stood up and brushed off her pants. "Time."

⁸"We have twenty minutes," I said. "You said four o'clock."

⁹"I said by four." She was looking west, where the sun already hung low over the far ridge. "It's going down faster than I thought."

¹⁰I groaned and stuffed my second sandwich back into its bag. I followed her down the trail, but I made sure she could hear every sigh.

¹¹Half an hour later, the sun slipped behind the ridge, and the dark caught us.

¹²It didn't fall all at once the way night does in movies. It just thickened around us, a little at a time, as if someone were slowly erasing the world. First the far ridge disappeared. Then the trees beside the trail went soft and gray. Soon I could see Dahlia's red jacket ten steps ahead of me, then only five, and then I could hardly see the trail at my feet. The air turned so cold that I could feel it on my teeth.

¹³"Stay close," Dahlia said. Her voice sounded small in the dark, as if the trees were listening.

¹⁴I stayed close. I stayed so close I stepped on her heel twice.

¹⁵Then the trail split in two. I had no memory of a fork on the way up, and my heart started thumping. Dahlia stopped, unzipped the side pocket of her pack, and pulled out the flashlight and the map she had packed that morning. She laid her compass on top of the map and studied it in the circle of light for a long minute.

¹⁶"Left," she said. "The right one goes down to the old fire road. It would take us miles the wrong way."

¹⁷We went left. Twenty minutes later, the trailhead sign appeared in the flashlight beam like a ship coming into harbor, and behind it the lantern at the picnic shelter glowed yellow.

¹⁸At the shelter, while Aunt Lucinda packed up the cooler, Dahlia sat on the bench and pulled a small kit out of her pack. "Okay," she said. "Let me see that blister."

¹⁹I stared at her. "How did you know?"

²⁰"You were limping," she said, and handed me a bandage. "Rule number forty-one: always pack one more than you think you'll need."

²¹I didn't say anything. But on the drive home, I asked her to tell me the other forty.