Free The Cactus Eaters by Dan White

make of water that had fist-sized islands of organic mucus floating in the middle of it. The filter winced. It made a small, discouraging sound.
    “Buck up,” I said. “Do your fucking job.” But no water came out, no matter how hard I pumped. “Filter, you filter!” I commanded. “Don’t be like the odometer.”
    Almost immediately the filter seized up and choked so violently on the water that Allison had to stop pumping. Unfazed, she removed a packet of denture tablets from her pack and handed them to me. Denture tablets? At first I thought she wasmaking a tart visual comment about my precocious senility. Then I remembered that denture tablets have a chemical that dissolves the muck that clogs water filters. Allison and I took turns soaking the filter components in a solution of tablets and water. It melted the crap right off, but every time we tried to filter more water, the gadget seized up again.
    “Let’s just forget the filter for now,” Allison said. “We’ll drink what we have, and wait for a stream, and put some iodine tablets in our bottles to kill the critters.”
    “But iodine tastes like rust,” I said. “It makes me nauseous.”
    Allison smiled and pulled out a packet of Hi-C she’d saved just for the occasion. Her competence was starting to grate on me.
    The nasty water seemed like enough of a punishment for our small transgression, but the trail wasn’t finished with its retribution. As we walked north, the PCT markers became scarce, as if an unseen hand had plucked the signposts from the ground. No doubt about it. Someone or something was fucking with us. We were lost, going around in circles until we finally wound up in a dark colonnade of trees. A seasonal spring seeped from a hill, poured through a clutch of wildflowers, and gathered in a puddle at our feet. Though the spring was too mucky to drink, it yielded a comforting sight: in the mud was a row of deep impressions full of black water. We shouted with relief, for there was no mistaking the size-thirteen footprints of Todd the Sasquatch. It’s not that we were eager to see him again, but his print suggested we were going the right way, and were close on his heels. After all that bragging, he was around the corner, going as slowly as we were. We decided to speed up and catch him, just to show him up. Allison took the lead, following the prints to a cottonwood overhang in the shade. But soon the ground went from muddy to bone hard. Todd’s prints disappeared, and Todd himself was nowhere to be seen. Sidepaths went off in every direction. Ahead of us, down in a valley, Bouquet Reservoir lay to the northwest in shadows. Or was it southeast? Our guidebook directions did not correspond with the landscape. “Walk .2 miles uphill to a bend in the road,” they read. What bend? What road?
    I blamed the compass. It must be broken. Allison doubted that anything was wrong with it. The compass was a well-made piece of gear with a sapphire bearing and notches of declination. I did not know what a point of declination was, or why the bearings were made of sapphires. I’d assumed these were good things because the compass cost so much more than the competition. Besides, a person could not be lost while holding a compass that cost thirteen dollars. And yet the reservoir would not keep still. It lay to the north one moment, then the east, then south. The compass needle bobbed and wobbled like a dowsing stick. Perhaps our compass was cursed. I remembered the narrow little salesman who had sold it to us four months before, back East. He had pouches under his eyes. “The Pacific Crest Trail?” he’d said. “Yeah, I tried to hike that thing in ’eighty-five. Tore a ligament the very first day. Then I drank some bad water. Got the trots so bad my friends had to carry me out of there. That’ll be thirteen dollars. Would you like a bag?” As I tried to figure out where we were, I wondered if his soul inhabited our compass, causing the needle to