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  Juggling Fire

  JOANNE BELL

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Text copyright © 2009 Joanne Bell

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bell, Joanne, 1956-

  Juggling fire / written by Joanne Bell.

  ISBN 978-1-55469-094-7

  I. Title.

  PS8603.E52J85 2009 jC813'.6 C2009-903348-8

  First published in the United States, 2009

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009929362

  Summary: Sixteen-year-old Rachel embarks on a solo quest to find her father,

  who disappeared years ago in the Yukon wilderness.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Design by Teresa Bubela

  Cover artwork by Getty Images

  Author photo by Mikin Bilina

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, STN. B

  VICTORIA, BC CANADA

  V8R 6S4

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 468

  CUSTER, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on 100% PCW recycled paper.

  12 11 10 09 • 4 3 2 1

  For Mary with thanks

  DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

  (stanzas four through six)

  Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

  And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight,

  Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  And you, my father, there on the sad height,

  Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears,

  I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night,

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  —Dylan Thomas

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1 Juggling Fire

  CHAPTER 2 Right on Rolling

  CHAPTER 3 So What Is a Bear?

  CHAPTER 4 A Grizzled Bear

  CHAPTER 5 Imposing Order

  CHAPTER 6 Building on Permafrost

  CHAPTER 7 Panic

  CHAPTER 8 In the Dungeon

  CHAPTER 9 Moving On

  CHAPTER 10 In the Forest

  CHAPTER 11 Cleaning This Room

  CHAPTER 12 Pirates in the Night

  CHAPTER 13 The Grayling Corral

  CHAPTER 14 Wounds

  CHAPTER 15 Clues Undercurrents

  CHAPTER 16 Undercurrents

  CHAPTER 17 The Snow Queen

  CHAPTER 18 In the End

  EPILOGUE

  PART 1

  INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

  1

  Juggling Fire

  Mom doesn’t cry when I heave the packs from the pickup; she only blinks hard, squeezes my shoulders and whirls around, like she has to get away from me fast. If IH1idn’t know her so well, I’d say she was furious. Her face is too tight to figure out.

  My older sister Becky, however, hugs me until my backbone cracks.

  I gasp.

  “THAT doesn’t hurt, Rachel,” she scoffs.

  Before I can squeeze out enough breath to yell, she sticks a bag of caramels and a roll of duct tape in my pack’s side pocket. “Got any haywire for Mom’s muffler?”

  I shake my head, mentally rolling my eyes. Really! As if I won’t need it more than they will. If I had haywire, I’d hang on to it.

  Mom doesn’t cry when I heave the packs from the pickup;

  “Come back alive,” she suggests cheerfully. She removes the caramels, bites open the bag, extracts a palmful for the ride back to town and sticks the remaining candies back in my shirt pocket. “Might be a long, slow drive,” she remarks, rolling her eyes toward Mom. “We’ll need a bite of trail food ourselves.”

  Mom’s head is resting on the steering wheel.

  “Mom?”

  She lifts her head and nods with a small smile. “I love you,” she mouths through the window.

  Then she starts the engine.

  “Me too,” says Becky. “Got to go.”

  She bangs the passenger door shut, rattling the whole truck.

  Mom grinds the gears and leans on the horn. Brooks, who is a nervous but sweet dog, crouches, shaking, behind my legs. Lots of things make him shake. Our red pickup bumps and backfires down the gravel mountain road away from me, belching black smoke. The smell of burning brakes drifts over the Yukon tundra, and it sounds like the muffler’s falling off. Mom never did pay much attention to anything mechanical. She’s an artist. The details of everyday life don’t interest her much.

  I stare until the truck is out of sight, swallowed by scarlet dwarf-birch leaves and yellow willows. Neither Mom nor Becky leans out to wave at me. To be fair, Mom doesn’t want to start begging me to stay. This trip of mine is her worst nightmare come true.

  Brooks, still cowering behind me, and I are finally on our own.

  I’ve wanted to do this since I was a little kid. I’m sixteen now, so I’ve waited for almost ten years.

  “Come on, boy,” I mutter, balancing the two sides of his pack bags in my hands to be sure they’re even. “Time to stand up.”

  Eyeing his load, Brooks slinks to the ground and sweeps his tail hopefully at me. “Not a chance, buddy.” Brooks makes a sound in his throat like a siren warming up, staring at the ribbon of gravel where scattered puffs of exhaust are still floating away. He hates to see anyone in our family leave. Brooks’s idea of a good time is to sprawl by the woodstove with the three of us in sight.

  “Up.” I haul him to his feet and buckle the straps under his belly. Breathing in a faint smell of sun and warm dog fur, I snap the final strap around his chest. Brooks at once sinks back down and tucks his head out of sight under his paws.

  My stomach clenches. Why am I doing this? I’m not sure I want to anymore.

  My pack’s too heavy to lift. I crouch down to slip the straps under my arms and, using Brooks’s skull as a lever, push myself to my feet. Sucking in my stomach, I cinch the belt tight around my hips and buckle up.

  No way. I’ll never make it a mile with this load. Panic gusts through me.

  I stick my hands under the shoulder straps and lean forward until my breathing slows and deepens. “One step at a time,” I tell Brooks, coaxing him to his feet.

  He promptly collapses.

  Breathe slowly, I tell myself. I gaze around me. Sunlight lights up a boulder on the slope to my left. For a moment I’m sure it’s a grizzly.

  Fear flames from the pit of my stomach up my chest and into my throat. My eyes skitter over the tundra. I feel like a flushed calf streaking to safety. I can be prey here, just like a yearling caribou I saw once, picked over by wolves. Only my jawbone and maybe a hunk of boot will be left.

  “Enough,” I say out loud. “Lightning kills more people than grizzly bears do. So does panic. Le
t’s go, boy.”

  Brooks is bunched in such a tight ball that I can’t find his head. I manage to haul him up again by heaving on his pack straps without taking off my own load.

  Leading him away from the road, I start down the trail before he has a chance to dig in his paws. Brooks tramps reluctantly at my side, occasionally bumping against my legs, staring pitifully up into my face and whining to make sure I know he’s not into this.

  Because we’re on top of a mountain pass, the tundra is spread out for many miles around us. I can see down the sweep of mountains to where we’ll be walking tomorrow. No real trees grow here; the largest shrubs are waist-high clumps of willow and dwarf birch. Out of habit, I trail my fingers along a birch stem. Sandpaper-rough birch twigs scratch my bare legs like thorns.

  I could just go home.

  A wedge of cranes creaks through the sky; they sound like a chorus of screen doors slamming shut.

  It wouldn’t help. I’d still need to do this.

  Brooks is half bloodhound and half malamute/Newfoundland cross. His father is Chili, Becky’s wheel dog, the last and usually the strongest dog in the team. Chili’s mother is Becky’s old lead dog, Ginger, and Chili’s father was Dad’s lead dog, Bear, who died one spring day not far from here.

  Brooks’s mother is a purebred bloodhound who got loose and came sniffing into Becky’s dog yard, hunting for a mate. Becky and I had just been returning from a walk with Chili. We looked at each other and laughed, and without a word, she unsnapped Chili’s leash. The bloodhound’s owner was relieved to have a good home for a pup. It’s hard to imagine my life without Brooks.

  Brooks has a sled dog’s powerful chest and legs, a long thin nose shaped like an icicle, and glacier blue eyes, but weirdly enough, he also has the sagging eyelids, pouches of hanging skin and droopy ears of a hound. Brooks, even when cheerfully chasing rabbits, looks so sad that I hug him every chance I get. He can howl like a husky and bay like a hunting dog. When I hug Brooks, he goes limp, squeezes his eyes closed and sighs with pleasure. Brooks is about as mean and tough as a spring snowball melting into mush.

  My hands are moving along Brooks’s head. He nudges me with his nose, hoping for a change of heart. When I keep walking, he dredges up a series of deep mournful bays.

  I ignore him. The pack bulges from both his sides, hanging from the ridge of his backbone. He waddles and bumps, but at least he’s staying close.

  She has to be nuts. What kind of mother would let me go?

  “I’ll give you a month,” Mom said.

  “Give me?”

  She gouged a minute speck of wood from the caribou she was shaping. “If I flew in a month after you got there, you might be ready for company.” She held the carving in front of her face with both hands and gently blew at the shavings.I watched them float a moment in a shaft of sunlight before they slowly sank to the floor.

  That’s what she’s usually like. Mom’s always had a pretty clear sense of when I need to do something, which battles are hers to fight and which are mine. But she also respects me.That’s obvious. And because she does, I agreed.

  I let her show me what to pack. She suggested lots of high-calorie foods: butter, chocolate, cheese and nuts. I agreed to it all.

  I hardly eat anything anyway. I don’t need to eat much. It’s probably bragging to say this, but I’m thin and supple—kind of like a green willow, Becky says. I’m not anorexic or anything. I just don’t get hungry too often, which is weird because I’m extremely tall and, unfortunately, still growing. When I stand beside Mom or Becky, I find myself hunching over so I don’t feel so awkward. All my life I was little, and then last year I grew five inches in nine months. I don’t like it much; I feel like I grew out of myself.

  Sometimes I forget to eat all day. Then at night, I can’t. It’s weird actually. I look at food and know it will taste good, but somehow I can’t put it in my mouth. Or I just put in a taste and then my throat clenches shut.

  Mom said when I was little I had chubby cheeks and I wanted to be a gymnast. She said I was smart and kind of—jolly. These days I have no idea what I’m going to be. I mean, I juggle and I memorize fairy tales. How can I make a life from that? I really do memorize them—page by page. And when I’ve got them memorized, then I change them.

  As Brooks and I bump along, I start to recite a story from an old Irish fairy-tale book Mom read to us when I was small. The original was called “The Princess in the Glass Tower.” My version, which is evolving every time I tell it, is called “When the Princess Bolted from the Palace.”

  In the original story a beautiful princess is on display in a glass castle on top of a glass hill. Her father, the king, has decreed that to win her hand and the kingdom, a prince must ride to the top of the hill. This has proven rather difficult, as the king has also decreed that unsuccessful suitors will be either put to death or locked in chains in the dungeon. Unless, of course, they can out-gallop his pursuing knights.

  I haven’t looked at the original story for many years. It’s gone through so many versions, first Mom’s and then mine. How do I know what the original story said? Whenever I read a fairy tale that I love—modern or traditional— it reminds me of that first collection of Irish tales. It had black-and-white illustrations and big letters and old-fashioned language. Not just the choice of words was archaic, but the way the sentences were put together. The other thing I remember is that the characters were fearless and stubborn in the face of danger. If they were scared, they stood straighter and whistled in the wind.

  The illustrations were just sketches really. Sometimes Becky and I took crayons and colored them in. The sky here is peacock blue streaked with snowy white. The ground cover is rusty nail brown, apple scarlet, banana yellow and wine purple. It looks like Becky and I were let loose with that pack of wax crayons one last time. I laugh out loud and feel my muscles unclench as I trudge on.

  By the time I get to the part where the various princes are lined up to die with their steeds on the glass hill beneath the princess’s window, I’m hiking down the pass. I force myself not to check for anything moving. It would be easy to get paranoid out here.

  The land is orderly beneath us. Lines of yellow willows outline creeks, dwarf birch defines the tundra, and scarlet berries outline the higher dry knolls. Wizened fireweed stems stand close by. The ground is littered with four-sided stalks of heath shaped like screwdriver handles stuck in the moss.

  The princess is getting enormously frustrated waiting on top of her glass hill. It’s no kind of life. Something has to happen and soon. It’s time to change the ending.

  The princess leaned out the window of her glass prison and watched the princes below. At least they were free, she thought.

  The princes wheeled their steeds into a circle. In the circle’s center was the youngest and fairest, bare-headed and lean, with the look of sunshine and happiness and the open forest in his smile. He looked up into her face as if asking a question.

  From her glass pinnacle, the princess nodded.

  The youngest prince raised his sword in a salute and dug in his heels. The corner of his mouth tugged up along with one eyebrow, and he lifted the reins to charge the slope.

  Before his steed even moved, the princess climbed out the window and slid down to meet him. Holding her skirts, she raced across the palace grounds to the circle of princes, grabbed the reins from the youngest prince and vaulted into the saddle in front of him.

  It was that simple. She’d only had to choose.

  The prince with the look of sunshine and happiness hung on to the back of the saddle and whistled to his steed. Peacocks strutted across the palace grounds. Far above, a falcon rode the open sky. The prince had a horse for the princess hidden in a grove of fir trees, where songbirds sang and the boughs surged in the hot winds like the waves of the sea. They could reach that hidden grove by nightfall if they hurried.

  I’m not sure if it’s a bear ahead or a spruce tree; the outline’s blurred. You see, we’re
above tree line, so there are almost no evergreens here, and where one has managed to cling to the mountain face, its shadow invariably looks like a bear. I unbutton my shirt pocket and take out the monocle my dad once cut from binoculars for me. I use a monocle instead of binoculars because I have a lazy eye—strabismus is the real name, I think. It means I can’t focus the images from both my eyes into one image. Kind of strange, because my eyes see just fine, but my brain doesn’t receive the messages properly. Some people with this condition go cross-eyed. Their weak eye rolls about and wanders until surgery sticks it in place. Others, like me, just slowly lose the ability to see from their bad eye. Mostly I shut that eye when I’m outside and looking out over any distance. I don’t even realize I’m doing it, but Dad noticed when I was little. He made me this monocle and a pirate patch for my sixth birthday. Come to think of it, it was the last birthday present he gave me—I don’t know what happened to the patch. The real trouble with my eyes, though, is that while I see surfaces all right, I don’t have much depth perception. The world is kind of flat for me.

  I scan the river bottom ahead of us but can’t find the bear. Unfortunately, I can’t find the spruce tree either.

  The dark spot, whatever it was, is long gone.

  I try to remember “The Princess and the Pea” next, but it’s hard to concentrate with my heart thumping so fast. Even I know the made-up story can’t compete with the possibility of being eaten myself. It’s scary here again. I roll up my shirtsleeves and examine the hairs on my arms. They’re standing upright.

  This is ridiculous. Why did I persuade Mom that I could do this?

  It’s obvious, even to me, that I can’t. It’s not too late to go back. But I’ll have to figure out a good excuse.