Juggling Fire (5 page)
Sometimes the trail divides, and I’m not sure which fork to take. So far, the forks have come back together. But what if they don’t? I start breaking off dry willows and placing them on the ground in the shape of arrows pointing in the direction I’ve come from. Then I can retrace my steps if I need to return.
I walk, singing a bit just to hear myself. The wind comes up like it did yesterday, and clouds sail above the peaks and blanket the valley I’m walking through. I pull on extra clothes and keep walking. Supper is cold food: dry meat and cheese and water straight from a creek. While I rest, my mind hops ahead, droning with nerves like the blackflies slithering along my skin.
At first we called Dad on an evening “sched” Mom had set up
with him. Often we heard only static. Once we heard his voice
calling for a radio check very faintly.
“This is Caribou Creek on a radio check,” he repeated, his
voice as low as possible to carry. “Can anybody copy?”
“This is Caribou Creek portable,” we shouted into the
microphone, louder and louder, taking it in turn, each one
convinced our voice would be the one to reach him. “We can
copy but it’s faint.”
No reply.
Then came days when we could hear other people with
radios around the territory. But no Dad. Northern lights can
interfere with radio signals. At first we thought there was just a
particularly strong solar storm in the atmosphere.
The days turned to weeks.
“Why didn’t you call the police earlier to search?” I heard
Becky ask Mom once.
“Because I didn’t know his plans,” she said. “He didn’t
even know them. So I didn’t know if he was missing until it
was way too late.”
I scrub the blackflies from the corners of my eyes. Surely I must remember more from before he left. I don’t try to control where my thoughts land. I just keep them in the air before the memory flies away.
I was lying in bed, one thin wall from the kitchen, listening to
Mom and Dad talk when they thought I couldn’t hear.
I was small, and there was a glass of water by my bed.
Moonlight spilled through my window onto my pillow and
blankets. I wasn't allowed to read anymore and I was restless.
I pretended I was in the desert, and I didn’t know when I’d be
rescued. A sip of water had to last me all day in the searing
heat. My camels lay on the sand…
“I need to get my head together,” Dad said. “I need to be
alone."
“Please don’t go. I can’t stand it if you go.”
Dad’s voice rasped. “I can’t help you.”
I wondered how many days it would take me to die of thirst
in the desert.
Months later the police launched a search with two helicopters.
When I wondered why we were staying with neighbors
for the day, Becky said Mom was worried. Nobody was all that
surprised that he had disappeared, it seemed. Only I believed he
was coming back.
Mom was dropped off at the cabin on that first flight.
An officer went with her. She said years later that it felt like
Dad had just walked out the door, expecting to return. His red
lumberjack shirt was on the back of his chair, smelling like sweat,
smoke and tobacco. Nothing was put away. She lugged food and
gear up the ladder to the cache and hunted for a note.
While she was at the cabin, the police helicopter searched,
throbbing up and down the valley and especially along the
river’s banks where his body might be bobbing in an eddy.
Caribou must have bolted. Grayling must have held themselves
motionless with noses pressed against the current, waiting for
the sky to grow still.
They flew back to the cabin once more after Mom came
back, and that time they looked farther away. I remember them
coming to the door of our place near town afterward.
I was looking out the window, waiting for Dad like I did
every day back then, and instead saw two cops cut across the
front yard and up the steps. They were dressed in red uniforms
with black stripes down their pant legs. I swung open the door,
with Mom and Becky right behind me. Mom didn’t ask them to
come in. I guess she didn’t want to talk with them longer than
she had to. She tried to shoo us back inside, but we only went as
far as the doorway and listened, huddled together.
“Where will you search next?” she said.
The cops looked at each other. “The search has been called
off. If something happened to him, it’s too late,” one said finally.
“I’m sorry. We have no idea how long he meant to be gone or
where he planned to go. You don’t really even know if he’s
actually still in the bush. He’s been out there for months. And
he knows that country. It’s not like he would have got lost.”
Becky broke away from the doorway and bolted across the
yard. She spent the rest of the day curled up under the house
with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head down. I know
because I found her. Mom tried to coax her out when she got rid
of the cops, but couldn’t. Eventually I crawled in with a plate of
stew and lay on my stomach beside her while she ate. Neither
of us said a word. I remember being relieved that she ate.
At bedtime she emerged and let Mom hold her. Only
years later did I realize that Mom hadn’t reacted much at all.
Whatever sorrow crashed over her that day, she hugged it to
herself. I guess she didn’t have much choice if she wanted us to
have a normal life. There was no one there to hold her.
At first, Mom just told me she didn’t know what had
happened. She came in to my room every night and asked me
what story I wanted and then she told it to me.
One night I told her that I didn’t like the ending.
She laughed and kissed my cheek. “Then change it,” she
said. “I’ll tell you any ending you like.”
“But doesn’t it have to be the true one?” I asked.
“No, silly,” said Mom. “They’re all made up, however they
end.”
T
hat’s when I started memorizing on purpose. I asked for
fairy-tale collections every birthday, every Christmas. Mom
didn’t have to tell me stories anymore. She’d given me my own.
That night I camp again by a creek with my pack visible through some low willows, but not too close. I put up my tent in the last of the light and juggle on the creek bank with Brooks on his haunches, mouth gaping like a fish, staring at the flowing balls. I add the fourth ball at the end. I toss eighteen passes in reverse cascade before I drop one in his mouth. Cool. I like it. Brooks sits, tail sweeping, until I call him for the ball.
It’s strange with juggling. Because I’m focused so much on the balls, everything else both slips away and comes clearer when I’m done. After I’ve juggled I have incredible concentration for a few hours. The light pats the top of the far mountains and then is gone. I leave bear spray, flashlight and bangers in my boot again for easy reach. Brooks snuggles at my side, and I sleep in my sweater so I can keep my arm out of the bag, wrapped around his warm chest. I want to feel him breathe.
You’d think the older I get, the less I’d worry about the past. But it’s just the opposite. It’s like Dad lives in my head, calling me. His voice isn’t sad or angry; it is simply there every morning when I tumble out of my dreams. Trouble is, I like it. His voice is all I have left of him, and once I’m fully awake each morning, even that’s gone.
I haven’t seen the cabin since I was a little girl. When we left because Dad was depressed, we thought it would just be for a little while and then we’d come back. My books, including the Irish fairy tales, must be in the cache with the remains of our gear. There should even be some food that’s still edible, staples like flour and rice. As far as I know, no one’s gone back there since Mom and the cops searched while the helicopter hovered over the valley. At first I concentrated hard on forgetting the years we lived there. When a memory popped up, I forced it to fly instantly up and away, like a spark from a fire.
A picture flashes into my head of the clearing with moonlight sliding over the surface of the river out my window and then lighting the wall of spruce trees and the mountain rising beyond.
Cabin. River. Forest and mountain
, I think.
Moonlight
covers it all
. I crack the tent zipper again and leave it open for easy exiting if I need to. The bugs have all gone to bed. Brooks snores at my side. The tundra is completely still, no wind sweeping the buckbrush, no songbirds flitting between the shrubs. Only at night can we see ourselves in context, I realize, one planet moving amid countless pricks of light, the familiar daytime sky peeled away like a blanket.
The next thing I know, it’s morning.
Brooks is growling outside the tent.
Terror leaps up and slams into me. I’m breathing way too fast, gasping, muscles contracting and loosening. “Calm,” I whisper, holding my own shaking body. I visualize the cabin and clearing bathed in sunlight. The memory settles like a ball, warm in the cup of my hand. I wrap my arms tighter around my chest.
Then he’s barking in ugly bursts like a shotgun in the silence. I want to curl on my side inside the sleeping bag. I want to shut my eyes and hug myself. Brooks will take care of whatever’s out there. I count to ten. Brooks sounds frantic.
I crawl out through the screen door on my belly.
What looks like a giant skunk stands by my pack. Maybe it is one, kind of like the giant beavers who wandered around here during the last ice age. I close my eyes and open them again—the creature’s still there, and I can see it’s not a skunk. Wind murmurs through the bushes bordering the trail, soft and silvery like faraway surf.
It has to be a bear.
The animal is black with a yellow stripe glinting like wet gold in the early sun. The stripe begins on the back of its head and flows along its humped grizzly back to its tail. The brush about him glistens with dew. Hair is rising all over my body; I’ve never seen anything like it.
Brooks simply stands, unmoving, his left front leg lifted, vomiting barks. The fur on
his
back bristles like porcupine quills.
The bear yawns. Glancing toward us, he flips my pack over with his paws. He tosses it once in the air and darts a glance at me again. Several times he looks away and back, as if I’m of no importance.
Unfortunately, I know that’s how bears act when they’re stressed.
The pack thuds closer to him, and the bear hooks it with a paw. He looks like Brooks playing with a ball, the hump behind his shoulders rippling as he moves. The bear heaves himself up and stands on his back legs, woofing.
“Hey, bear,” I say. Blood is pulsing in my ears like a waterfall. The ground is cold beneath my sock feet. I’m holding my boot full of defenses. Wind gusts. A tide of terror curls over me like a monster wave poised to crash.
I can feel it ripping through my body, right into my feet and hands. My whole body wants to run.
The bear dangles his short arms in front of his chest and waves his head back and forth. He smells like meat, must have been chewing on a carcass somewhere. My stomach turns over.
“Hey, bear,” I repeat, more loudly, my hands above my head to make myself bigger. My voice surges in my ears like breaking surf. My boot is tight in one hand. I am like a mother clutching a drowning child in the backwash.
Brooks doesn’t move.
The bear sits.
“Good dog, Brooks,” I whisper to comfort myself.
The bear gets back on all fours, pokes at the pack with his snout and wanders slowly off. I can see his yellow stripe moving clearly above the brush.
I stand very still and listen to my heart.
What do I do now?
Should I scare him with the banger?
Or let him be, relieved he’s in retreat?
Slowly, birds emerge and flicker between the bushes: two redheaded tree sparrows with a dark dot on their breasts like a target. Almost out of sight, a cow moose and calf amble through the willows and disappear into a draw.
I take my tent down and stuff my pack. I keep Brooks tied to a bush until I start to walk off down the trail, singing my head off. The words sound strange. I cover my jaw with my hand: it’s trembling. I’ll eat breakfast later, I think, when I’ve found somewhere I can see in all directions. Right now I need to move. My hands are shaking too. The leash connecting me to Brooks vibrates like a fishing pole.
Mom said she’d come in a month. Check on me is what she meant. I don’t want her to. I don’t want any limits. I want to go back to our cabin and look for Dad on my own. I want to lie in my childhood bed by candlelight and read my fairy-tale book and cook my own meals and be free.
Tonight I’ll stay awake all night. I’ll keep walking until I’m out of the pass and down in the spruce trees again.
I can collect enough wood there to keep a fire going all night. I’ll break off a dead pole and sleep in the open beside the fire with the pole beside me. If the bear comes back, I’ll stick one end in the flames and hold it out.
Nah, I think, I’m a juggler. I can juggle fire. I’ll stick three poles in the fire, and I’ll swing them all. The poles will
whoosh
with flame, bright in the dark air, and I’ll sing along.
The air’s different today: colder. I walk for miles with Brooks swaying at my side, blackflies lifting in the breeze and sunshine falling on my left cheek.
There’s no sign of the bear, no tracks or droppings.
Once a black fox stands on a knoll and looks curiously at us before trotting up a draw. Another time, I count eleven caribou cows crossing an open plain before us, calves racing on stilt legs among them. Several Dall sheep bed down in the sunshine on rocky outcrops far above the trail, like splatters of white cream against the stone.