The next day was Sunday, so after breakfast Isaiah went out into the woods. Kieran was there as usual, waiting for him. “C’mon,” he said, I wanna show you somethin’.”
Isaiah followed Kieran, who always seemed to know exactly where he was going. They walked for quite some time before Kieran turned and held up a finger in front of his mouth. Very slowly and quietly, he moved forward, Isaiah following behind and trying to be just as quiet.
They entered a clearing, and there, perched high atop a dead tree, was a bird that Isaiah had never seen before, but he knew exactly what it was. In awe he whispered, “That’s a bald eagle!”
“Yep,” whispered Kieran. “They’ve a nest around here but I haven’t been able to find it yet. I will though! They had two babies last spring. The babies don’t have the white on ‘em yet. When the leaves drop from the trees it may be easier to find the nest. Now, let’s leave before he gets restless.”
Slowly and quietly they moved back until they were far enough away so they could move faster without fearing their noise would scare the eagle.
From there, Kieran led Isaiah to an old dirt road. “Where does this go?” asked Isaiah.
“Don’t know. I’ve never been t’ the end of it. But we’re gonna try t’ do that today. Are ya ready t’ run?”
Isaiah nodded and off they went. For Isaiah, the first two or three miles were easy, but then he began to breathe a little harder. The road went up and down hills and around sharp turns. The longer they ran, the harder it was for Isaiah to breathe. Kieran, on the other hand, seemed to have no limit.
Finally Isaiah stopped, bent over, and panted. Kieran trotted back to him, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, “That was probably pretty good fer a first time.” They had come to a lake which the boys could use as a landmark the next time they ran.
They walked back the way they had come until Isaiah had caught his breath and then they jogged the rest of the way.
Later, when Walter asked Isaiah what he did that day, Isaiah answered, “Well, I saw a bald eagle and then I ran for a while on an old road that nobody seems to use.”
After Isaiah had finished the dishes, he noticed that Walter had pulled out a map. He told Isaiah that it was a topographical map of their area of Maine. He pointed to a tiny black square and said, “That’s our cabin. Can ya find the road ya ran on the map? Isaiah looked and looked. He had never seen a map like this before.
“What does ‘topographical’ mean?”
“It means that the map shows everything on the top of the ground ‒ rivers, mountains, forests, even individual buildings. Those squiggly lines show elevation. Of course the blues show water. Roads in the woods are little brown lines, or even, sometimes, dotted brown lines.
Again Isaiah looked at the map. He attempted to trace where he and Kieran had gone that day. He thought he could find the place where the eagle was and then he tried to trace back from there to a road. Finally, he found one and said he thought that was it.
“You were runnin’ on that road?”
“I think so but I’m not certain.”
“How far did ya run?’
“Until I came to a lake. I was pretty winded so I retraced the road.”
“Look where this road goes,” said Walter, and he ran his finger northward along the line. “Ya see that dotted black line along there?”
Isaiah nodded.
“Did ya cross a river?”
“Yes, a little one, and there was a lake on my left.”
“That’s Canada. You ran at least as far as the border of Canada and probably farther.”
They tried to trace the road in the other direction to see where it began, but the little brown line just disappeared.
Isaiah laughed. “I’ve never been in another country before.”
Even Walter smiled. “Well, now ya have.”
By the time Isaiah went outside in the dark, Kieran had apparently given up waiting.
The next day, on the school bus, Isaiah was congratulated by kids he didn’t even know. Catherine told him he was wonderful.
At school, there was a picture from the newspaper on the bulletin board of him with all his medals. People stopped and talked with him all day long.
The number of people at his lunch table had grown slowly through the fall. Of course, Catherine was there. Some of the kids passing by joked with him a little, saying, “Oh, he’s got a girlfriend,” but it was all in good fun. Isaiah just blushed and looked away. Phillip had been the next to join. Then a number of girls sat there, perhaps attracted by Phillip’s football physique or Isaiah’s winning smile. Two became regulars. The others left when they figured out that the boys were more interested in each other than in them.
That day, three new girls sat at the table. While they gave sidelong glances at Isaiah, they also talked with some interest about other things in the school. Isaiah was pleased that they actually carried on a conversation and slowly he joined in. They remained a permanent part of the table group for the rest of the year.
When Isaiah saw the coach that afternoon, the man said, “Now don’t get a swelled head, whatever you do. Somewhere out there is a boy who is faster than you, maybe not in northern Maine, but there is one. There’s always that challenge.”
Isaiah nodded and thought of Kieran, who was clearly faster than he was. Then he told the coach that he wanted to try cross country. He told him about running on the old dirt road for several miles. Of course he didn’t say anything about Kieran. The coach encouraged him to keep it up until the snow fell.
All in all, it was a rather heady day for him in school, but he tried to remember the coach’s words. He already knew that Kieran was faster than he was, or at least that he had more endurance. And he knew that keeping up with Kieran would be challenge enough for a while.
Going into the cabin that afternoon, he saw two objects which looked a bit like tennis rackets on the table. He knew that they were snowshoes, but he had never seen them before. The only ones he had seen were old ones in the shed.
“Where did these come from?” he asked Walter.
“I made ‘em for ya. Yer gonna need ‘em when we go t’ get wood this winter.” Isaiah wondered why they would get wood in the winter when he thought it would be easier to get it in the summer, but he said nothing.
In time, the colorful leaves fell from the hardwoods around the cabin, and the bare trees stood like sentinels.
One afternoon, when Walter picked Isaiah up from the bus, he saw that his father had fixed a plow to the front of the truck. Isaiah had seen the plow behind the shed but hadn’t thought much of it until now.
“Is’ it gonna snow?” he asked.
“Forecast says yes, but forecasts aren’t always right. Anyway, it’s best t’ be prepared.”
It did indeed snow that night, nearly a foot of wet, heavy snow. Walter said that school had been canceled for the day. Isaiah asked him how he knew, and Walter showed him a little battery-powered radio he kept so he could listen to weather forecasts and the like. After breakfast the two of them got in the truck and Walter plowed their little road out to the next road and then he plowed that road until they came to a paved one. The snow frosted the trees. A bright red cardinal sat on a dark green pine bough, nestled in the snow which showed off his crimson feathers.
Back at the cabin, whose roof also appeared frosted, Isaiah tried on his snowshoes. When he went outside, he couldn’t walk without his snowshoes hitting each other until he widened his stance. He went a few yards, tried to turn back towards the cabin, and promptly fell down. Then he couldn’t figure out how to get back up. He was like a turtle on his back. He got no sympathy from Walter, who was standing on the cabin porch and laughing. Finally, he managed to roll over and stand up.
From the snow-covered meadow he went into the woods, where he met Kieran, who was also wearing home-made snowshoes. They walked through the woods, snow falling gently from breeze-stirred branches. After a while Isaiah grew tired. Because of the way he had to walk, he was using muscles he hadn’t used before and they soon became sore. Kieran stopped and let Isaiah rest. Then he moved on and Isaiah tried to keep up.
Finally they arrived at Kieran’s winter shelter. The boys removed their snowshoes, stood them up in the snow, and sank onto the floor of the shelter.
“Looks like we won’t be usin’ our swimmin’ hole fer a few months,” observed Kieran.
Isaiah nodded.
“Nor doin’ our runnin’.”
Again Isaiah nodded. He was weary after the walk so they sat in the shelter for some time. Isaiah had not brought any food but Kieran gave him some dried meat which he said was rabbit.
“Don’t you have to worry about bears if you keep food around?” Isaiah asked.
“Not this time of year. Now they’re all hibernatin’, and besides, they can’t get in here.”
Isaiah had taken a book of stars and constellations out of the school library, and he asked Kieran if he would like to see whether they could identify some of the constellations that night. Kieran was enthusiastic, so they agreed to meet just as it grew dark.
At mid-afternoon, they made their way back to the meadow, stopping once for Isaiah to rest a bit.
That night, as it grew dark, Isaiah started to go outside.
“Where ya’ goin’?” asked Walter.
Isaiah told him he was going to go out and look at the stars and Walter grunted.
“Don’t stay too long. Ya’ got school tomorrow, remember.”
Isaiah nodded and went outside, carrying his flashlight so he could look at
the book. He put on his snowshoes and walked towards the woods. There before him, nearly invisible in the dark, stood Kieran. They went out to the middle of the meadow and began to look up. The moon was not up and the sky was very clear.
Each night Isaiah had been outside and looked up he’d been awed by the
vast array of visible stars. In the summer he had seen the Milky Way stretched across the sky, but now it didn’t seem to be visible. When he had looked at stars in Massachusetts, he had seen only a few stars because of light pollution, but in Northern Maine there was virtually no light at night so the stars were clear. Isaiah pointed out the Big Dipper and the North Star. They looked for some time, trying to pick out other constellations. Isaiah thought that he saw Orion and Cassiopeia, and perhaps Gemini but he wasn’t sure. He knew he should study the book in the daytime and memorize what he might see at night. When the boys parted, they tried for a good night kiss but discovered that kissing was very awkward on snowshoes, so they just waved and went their separate ways.
Isaiah told Walter some of what he had seen but Walter only nodded. Most likely, Isaiah thought, Walter had seen the sky for so long he wasn’t impressed by it any more.
Saturday morning, Walter got them up early. “Now you’ll see why we get the wood in the winter,” he said. They ate a filling breakfast of pancakes and bacon, and then Walter took Isaiah out to the shed. Together they hauled a large sled with sides out of the shed. Into it the man loaded a two-man crosscut saw, a smaller saw, and an axe. Then he and Isaiah pulled the sled over the snow and into the woods.
Walter seemed to be looking for something in particular. What he found eventually was a good-sized, nearly-dead tree. He told Isaiah to take one end of the two-man saw and they began cutting the tree down. At one point they stopped while Walter took the axe and cut a wedge out of one side, saying that the tree would then fall in that direction. The continued to saw until the tree came crashing to the ground, right where Walter said it would.
Walter told Isaiah to use the axe to cut away branches while he began to cut the tree up into four-foot lengths. It took Isaiah some time to learn to handle the axe. At first he nearly drove it into his leg. Walter showed him how to do it safely, and as the morning wore on he became better at it.
When the tree was cut up, they loaded the lengths onto the sled and then took down another tree. After the second tree, the sled was full. They hauled the sled back to the cabin and piled the wood at the side next to where the wood from the previous winter had been stacked.
“Now d’ ya see why we cut the wood in winter?”
Isaiah nodded, saying, “Because if we cut it in the summer we’d have to carry it back to the cabin by hand.”
“Yup!”
“But why are we cutting more wood when there’s plenty here from last year.”
“We gotta keep the cut wood fer a year so that it can dry out and become good fire wood,” Walter explained.
Getting up the next morning, Isaiah felt he could barely move and he had painful blisters on his hand, but Walter insisted that they go again to the woods. So Isaiah dutifully followed, aching in every muscle, some he hadn’t even known he had.
Every weekend for much of the winter, whenever the weather was suitable, they cut trees. Back at the cabin, Walter showed Isaiah how to split the larger lengths, baring the inside of the logs so they would burn better.
On Sunday nights, Isaiah went to bed stiff and sore, and arose in the morning to do his chores before school.
During the winter, as Isaiah took showers at school, he began to realize how much he liked looking at boys’ bodies, including their privates, although of course he tried very hard not to stare. He was especially fond of Phillips muscular, well-proportioned body, but he knew he would never get to touch it the way he wanted. He never said or did anything, but he began to believe that he truly was gay. Then came the questions about what he and Kieran had done in the summer and fall. Was it sick, or was it what two gay guys did? Of course he had heard boys at school use terms like gay and faggot usually as put downs.
Isaiah surreptitiously checked out a book on sexuality from the school library. Taking it to the cabin deep in his backpack, he kept it under his mattress so Walter wouldn’t find it. He devoured the whole book and then went back again to the section on homosexuality. Finally, he came to the conclusion that what they were doing was pretty normal and not sick or weird. He assumed that Kieran was gay as well, since he certainly entered into their activities.
Because he was busy on the weekends, Isaiah had little opportunity to see Kieran. Sometimes they met at the edge of the woods in the early night and talked for a bit, but sometimes Isaiah worried that he might lose his friend.
As the winter wore on, they saw less and less of each other. Now they never mutually jerked each other off or kissed. Each boy had to satisfy himself as well as he could.
By February, Isaiah realized that he was no longer stiff and aching after fetching wood. In fact, he could feel that his muscles had grown and he was stronger.
In March, Walter thought they had gathered enough wood for the coming year, so Isaiah was freer to see Kieran on the weekends.
In April the temperature often rose into the 40s during the days and, by the end of the month, had reach 50. Green buds began to appear on the hardwood trees. Most of the snow was gone by the beginning of May so the boys began running again.
At first Isaiah ran easily but ran out of breath quickly. Kieran, of course, seemed to have no such problem, but he was patient with Isaiah and they started to cover more miles.
There was a cross-country race in Caribou in late May, but Isaiah knew he wasn’t yet ready for it.
Meanwhile, the meadow had bloomed and grown. Spring rains nourished the plants and grasses, whose seeds had been spread naturally in the fall, and the warmth of the sun started them growing. They seemed to leap out of the ground, rising almost overnight to a foot or more and reaching toward the sun.
Isaiah thought the colors were beautiful. There were reds and yellows, whites and blues, purples and pinks. He and Kieran tried to learn the names of them all from a library book but eventually gave up and just enjoyed them. The cheerful colors helped to dispel the doldrums of winter. The early blossoms gave way to later ones so there seemed always to be something new to see.
The boys returned to their swimming hole often after running for several miles. There they soaped up and slid down the chute into the cold, refreshing water.
Usually as they lay on their rock sunning themselves, they grew hard. Sometimes they jerked each other off; sometimes they simply lay there and talked.
One day Isaiah asked, “Do you know what a blow job is?”
Kieran answered lazily, “Nope. D’ you?”
“Yeah,” Isaiah said. “I learned about it in school. One of the advantages of a high school education I guess.”
“So what is it?”
“I’d like to show you instead of telling you.”
Isaiah sat up, turned toward Kieran, and knelt over him, straddling his legs. Then he bowed his head down and took Kieran’s hard cock in his mouth.
“Oh, my God!” exclaimed Kieran.
Isaiah looked up and smiled. “Do you like that?”
“Oh, yeah! Don’t Stop!”
Isaiah returned to his task, sliding his lips slowly up and down his friend’s cock. It seemed like the more he did it the harder Kieran grew. Then, with a gasp, Kieran shot his load into Isaiah’s mouth over and over. Isaiah nearly gagged as cum hit the back of his mouth, but he was able to control it. When Kieran finally stopped he pulled Isaiah up to his face and kissed him hard on the lips. He still had Kieran’s cum in his mouth, so he squirted some into his friend’s mouth. A look of complete rapture came over Kieran’s face.
Finally he said, “I never, ever thought of doing that. My God, it was wonderful.” He paused for a moment and asked, “D’ ya want me t’ do that fer you?”
Isaiah nodded and they quickly got into position, Kieran straddling Isaiah’s legs. Taking Isaiah’s cock in his mouth, Kieran began to move his head up and down.
“Watch the teeth,” said Isaiah.
Kieran adjusted his mouth and continued. Soon Isaiah gasped. He raised his hips right off the rock and shot into Kieran’s mouth, his cock throbbing as he did so. Finally, he stopped. Kieran moved up to Isaiah’s head and kissed him, exchanging some cum.
“How was that?” Kieran.
“Perfect,” Isaiah answered, smiling happily. “I can’t ever imagine life without you.”
From then on, they began to plan how they would keep together as they grew older without Kieran coming out of the woods. Isaiah had decided not to go to college so that he could be with Kieran. He assumed he could continue to live in the cabin, at least until Walter threw him out, but they really wanted to live together.
They spent the rest of the summer concocting plans, most of which they knew wouldn’t work. Meanwhile, their sexual activities increased to the point where they were often coming several times a day.
Eventually they realized that doing that really tired them out, and they were unable to run nearly as well. So they agreed to keep it down to once a day, usually after they had run.
In late August, Isaiah turned 16. Kieran wasn’t sure when his birthday was or how old he was, so they decided that he would be 16 too and they would celebrate both birthdays on the same day. Kieran gave Isaiah a hand-carved wooden box showing deer and rabbits among the trees. Isaiah knew exactly what he would keep in the box, the other little mementoes of their friendship he had been collecting since he had first met Kieran. Isaiah gave Kieran a new knife for which Kieran was very grateful because the blade on his old one was nearly ground away from sharpening.
Sadly for the boys, the last few days of August meant that school would begin again. Isaiah wished he could just live in the woods with his friend, but he knew that wasn’t possible. He would be going to school for 3 more years, and those years loomed darkly ahead.
On the first day of school that year, he was at least able to greet a number of the kids at the bus stop. Once again he sat with Phillip. He was surprised but not at all sorry that Carter hadn’t shown up. When he asked Phillip about it, Phillip just shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe he’s quit school. You can, you know, when you turn 16. They can’t make you go any more.”
Isaiah had known that but hadn’t really thought about it. He was terribly tempted to tell Walter that night that he was quitting school, but if he did that, what would he do? He probably couldn’t get a job and Walter certainly wouldn’t let him sit around the cabin doing nothing. He knew he would love to live with Kieran, but he was pretty sure his father wouldn’t let him do that either. In fact, doing that would mean he would have to tell Walter about Kieran, and he wasn’t ready to do that. So he decided he would just slog through the year.
But once he got back with his friends and into the routine, his spirits rose some. Meanwhile, he prepared for his first cross-country race.