Free Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta Page B

given up on saying it correctly, because the altered version felt right.
    He explained the origin of bewildered. The word that described that sense of confusion and disorientation did not come from a term meaning “incomprehension” or “surprise” but from the same root word as wilderness . Those who were lost in a frightening and foreign land were the bewildered. Or they had been, back when wilderness was so common as to demand its own words for the experience of being lost in it. The word had been hijacked by civilization, of course, as everything had been. You could now say you’d been bewildered during a text-message exchange. But the term could be traced back to the verb wilder. That was the act of intentionally leading people astray, of causing them to become lost and disoriented.
    When he started the game, Ethan would pick one of the boys and say, “All right, you’re the wilder for the day. See what you can do.”
    The boy’s job was simple: Lead the group off trail in whatever direction he chose, for whatever reason he chose. Keep on going until Ethan brought it to a stop. Then Ethan would turn to the others, who were generally pissed off and irritated by the route that had been chosen—it was far more fun to be the wilder than to follow him—and he’d ask them to lead the way back.
    This would begin with bungled efforts involving the maps and compasses. It rarely led anywhere good. They’d progress day by day, learning to read the terrain as they went, learning to create a mental archive of key landmarks, points of change. Learn little tricks, such as the rule that almost everyone, when faced with the choice between climbing and going downhill, went downhill. This was unwise, because hiking through a drainage was a hell of a lot more difficult than walking a ridgeline, but it was the standard choice of inexperienced woodsmen.
    The game was useful prep for Ethan as well, useful for the real search-and-rescue calls, because he had the chance to watch how the boys reacted to the unfamiliar, to watch the mistakes in live action, and to understand the reasons for them. In the course of a game he demonstrated all the critical mistakes he had seen over the years, showed them how simple slips could become deadly, and taught them how to recover from the mistakes they made. Anticipate and recover, anticipate and recover. If you could do the first well, you were ahead of most people. If you could do both well? You were a survivor.
    Some of the boys loved it. Some rolled their eyes. Some bitched and moaned the entire way. That was fine. The lessons were being ingrained, slowly but surely. Today they’d been at it for four hours straight, stumbling through the brush and learning fast just how difficult this country was to traverse when you got off trail, and they were thoroughly worn out when they got to the campsite he’d selected.
    “Burning daylight,” he said. “We have to get shelters up.”
    Groans in response; the kids were stretched out on the ground, sucking air.
    “We’re all tired,” he said. “But we don’t rest right now. Because, of the priorities of survival, shelter is number three. Positive mental attitude is number one. We understand that. But without shelter, gentlemen? Without shelter, you’re going to be corpses. Proper shelter will keep you alive. Anyone remember the chain? The order of our priorities?”
    The wind was beginning to push a little harder as the sun went down, putting a nice chill in the air, and he could see that the last thing any of them wanted was a lecture. That was fine, though. They had to remember these things.
    “Jeff?” Ethan said, going right at one of the quiet boys, forcing him to engage.
    “Food,” Jeff said.
    “No.” Ethan shook his head. “Food is last, in fact. Ask most people to rank things you need in a survival situation, and they’ll say water first, and food second. But the reality is, your body can go a hell of a long time without food, and