Juggling Fire Read online

  Mom dug her carving chisel into the wood and pressed hard. “I don’t want you to go, Rachel.” She held the figure close to the light and gently traced her fingers over its contours.“The answer’s no.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “I can’t help it. It scares me. Anything can happen. You’re too young.”

  “I’ll go when I finish school then.”

  Mom grinned, relieved. “That’s years away.”

  But it wasn’t that far away. That’s the beauty of correspondence school. We began correspondence school when we lived in the mountains and there were no schools within a hundred miles, but somehow it just worked better for me even when we moved closer to town. I liked getting through my schoolwork in the mornings and having the rest of the day to myself.I crammed the courses I needed to graduate into three years, not four, so I was almost sixteen when I finished high school.When I got my final grades a few months ago, I reminded her I was leaving.

  “Just so you know”—she pointed her chisel at my heart— “I don’t want you going alone. I can come with you.”

  “It wouldn’t work.”

  She left the room and neither of us mentioned it for a few days, until one night she dropped a slab of dark chocolate on my pile of gear. “You’ll need high-calorie food,” she said.

  “Sure, Mom,” I agreed. I broke off a corner of chocolate and split it between us. “I will come back, you know.”

  Mom didn’t reply. When she doesn’t answer, I know she’s trying her best not to cry. There are only three things I know for sure about Mom. The rest is kind of up for grabs.

  First, she’s stoic. When we lived in the bush and ran dogs, I’d see her break trail all day through slush, then help make camp and saw firewood without so much as a cup of tea. Secondly, she’s an artist. And lastly, she loves us.

  Oh yeah, one more thing: she thinks people are basically kind. When they’re not, she doesn’t get it.

  The only fairy tales I can think of now involve dragons, and the princess usually gets eaten. Or she’s saved by the prince, or by a sudden conversion on the dragon’s part to vegetarianism. That isn’t likely to happen here.

  I return to the princess’s adventures in the Glass Palace story instead.

  The steed rose on his hind legs once, then again, while the prince and the princess hung on, barely breathing. Then, with a toss of his head, the steed galloped across the palace grounds and over the wooden bridge across the moat, through the stone archway and into the green forest beyond, where the princess had always longed to roam.

  A nightingale sang from an oak tree by the arch, and a stream gurgled through the moss, flowing into the moat. But the prince and the princess could no longer hear them. They were heading for that hidden grove. They had begun their quest.

  A plume of dust trailed behind the horse’s hooves and hovered a moment in the still air.

  Nah. This isn’t a fairy tale: there’s a real stream gurgling through the moss. I fling off my pack, unbuckle Brooks’s pack and look for wood. Down near the ground, just like Mom taught me. In minutes I’m flat on my stomach with willow twigs heaped in a teepee. My billycan is sloshing beside me, newly filled, and as I blow, smoke drifts from my balled-up newspaper (just for the first couple of days) and flames the wood.

  I lean back on my heels and survey my magical kingdom. There are willow clumps and poplars along the creek, and the windswept tundra is dotted with scattered knolls rising from the flat. The trees grow only along the banks, an oasis in an enormous treeless plain. A gust of wind bugles through a boulder outcrop above me. “The Unlikely Forest,” I christen the oasis, as it’s so unusual to find here.

  When I stroll through the trees, picking up dead branches, the air is shadowed and scratchy-sounding with fallen leaves. There were flowers here not long ago; mountain aven and roseroot stalks scrunch underfoot. Only a purple harebell is nosing from the leaf litter, sheltered from the night frosts.

  The thing about memorizing is that if I can recite a story whenever I want, then it lives in my head and I can’t ever lose it. Fairy tales feel like the source of all true stories to me. All stories I love have at their heart heroism and a quest. If I follow this draw up past the thickets along the creek bank and over the rock slides, I’ll come to its headwaters. My first fairy-tale collection feels like the headwater: all other stories flow from it.

  Mom kept the tales alive because she repeated them to me. The trouble is that I’m not sure anymore what Mom made up and what really came from the book. And it’s started to matter. After Mom finished telling them, I started changing them around too. I couldn’t help it. The characters just got sick of being stuck in my head. They felt like victims with destinies out of control. They needed fresh starts and original plot twists.

  “That’s it,” I told Mom. “It’s not another planet, you know. I’m just going to walk there and get the book.”

  Mom carefully placed her chisel in its slot in her wooden case. “Actually,” she said, “it is like another planet. It will take you at least two weeks to walk there from the Dempster Highway. That’s two weeks mostly across mountain passes with no trail and nobody around if you need help.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “And for what? You left when you were only six.”

  “Because it’s home.”

  That’s the simple truth.

  I’m happy. I’m going home.

  I don’t remember it much, but I’m going home. That’s how it feels.

  Of course, there’s another story I don’t know much about either. The story of how Dad disappeared. All Mom will say is that for a long time he’d been fighting a depression that came and went, that he couldn’t completely shake. Because of it, we’d bought a cabin near town that no one wanted, where we still live today. When that didn’t help, he went back to our cabin in the bush to be alone for a bit, to try and get better. I remember it was late summer and he didn’t even take the dogs. He said he’d be back in a few weeks.

  We never saw him or heard from him again.

  2

  Right on Rolling

  I boil water in my billycan while Brooks sleeps by my side, his velvet curtains of ears twitching. Every so often he blinks and shudders, then relaxes into sleep again, snoring. Brooks is one laid-back dog.

  I empty out my food bag onto the bank. There’s every dried food I could want. Mom and I had peeled and quartered ripe bananas, and dried them with the morel mushrooms we’d picked in an old burn. We spread them, not touching, on window screens hung above the woodstove last summer. As they shrank, I arranged the pieces closer together and added more. We picked wild raspberries and mashed them into leather, which we baked on wax paper in the oven with the door open for several days.

  Finally we sliced strips of meat, marinated them and hung them over strings above the stove until they snapped like dead sticks when we broke them in two. Cut, hang, spread—over and over until even Mom looked content when she saw the paper bags bulging in my pack.

  “Dry food and butter used to be our staples,” said Mom, sticking the butter in freezer bags. “You’re leaving in the fall. It shouldn’t be hot enough for the butter to melt.”

  Now I chuck a handful of noodles into the boiling water, break off some cheese and throw in a pinch of dried onions. I drink the broth from the pot, holding it with my shirtsleeves, cross-legged by the scarlet flames. Every couple of minutes I feed in more wood. Willow burns hot and fast, and its smoke streams into my eyes. The fire feels like company.

  I don’t scan the valley or the mountainsides like I know I should. The creek makes enough noise to cover the sound of anything coming our way. Anyway, with some luck, snoozing Brooks should notice a visitor long before I can.

  The noodles smell like willow smoke. Bits of charred wood crunch between my teeth. Dad used to purse his lips and spit into the flames, backward cap across his forehead, laughing. Suddenly, I’m not hungry anymore. I wake Brooks with the pot shoved under his nose to lick
clean, douse the fire with creek water, tie the pot on the outside of my pack and load us up.

  I run several steps and leap across our first creek, pack bouncing. Brooks, however, braces himself against the current, wide-legged, and laps noisily. He splashes to the far side, where I wait.

  Good thing I’ve triple-bagged all the gear in his pack. “Let’s go,” I coax him, hauling on his collar from the shallows. He digs in his paws, whining his way up the cutbank, his pack dragging him back down.

  “Don’t worry, boy. It’ll get lighter,” I say just to hear myself talk. And now we’re away from the creek and climbing again. I can feel the muscles strain in the back of my thighs. With every step I’m farther away from my family.

  And with every step I’m closer to home.

  The trail is decades old and overgrown with brush. The sun has moved from my face to my right side. Clouds pile over the peaks like caps slammed onto heads. I hear wind whistling down the gorge ahead. The bushes shake and leaves skitter across my path from the waist-high brush. At least I can see around me. Without proper trees I can see for miles ahead.

  Brooks whines deep in his throat and sniffs the wind blowing in our faces. I prop up the shoulder straps of my pack and lean forward to take the weight off for a moment. “Stop it, Brooks,” I snap, my voice loud even with the whistling wind. Now the wind is groaning down the shafts of my pack. “Let’s go a bit farther,” I say. Brooks is standing with his nose high, front paw lifted in a perfect point.

  “Our packs are heavy enough,” I say. “No hunting on this trip.”

  But Brooks barks like a bullet spitting from a gun. Then again. The thing about Brooks is that not much riles him up. Mom said once if a burglar broke into our house, Brooks would just roll over and moan for his belly to be rubbed.

  “That’s it,” I tell him. “Quiet. It’s probably a tree.” I toss off my pack, scrabble in a pocket for his leash and snap it on.

  Then I shrug my arms back into the straps, stand and stare.

  The dark spot is far ahead and down from the trail on the river bottom, angling across a gravel bar away from us. My monocle stays in my pocket. I don’t want to see detail: mouth, claws and hump of muscle rippling above its back. I’ll just keep strolling along and make lots of noise.

  Trouble is that bears are individuals. Young male bears sometimes like noise. They’re attracted to it, just like boys. They want to investigate whatever’s making that noise. So if a person’s walking on a path bears often use, maybe that person should just step aside and not keep hiking along being louder and louder.

  Maybe it’s not a bear. “You’re not even likely to run into a bear,” said my sister. “And if you do, they’ll probably just run away.” Becky’s a dog musher, one of the best for her age. She’s put thousands of miles on her dogs and never lost one in harness. In summer she runs them behind an old golf cart that she fixed up.

  I stick the monocle to my eye and focus it in. Wrong end—a pat of magnified poop filled with red berries lies smack in the middle of the trail ahead. “Shucks,” I tell Brooks, who’s pulling at his leash and growling. “Now where do we go?”

  Maybe I like fairy tales so much because danger is necessary for heroism. It’s not meaningless. When someone calls a story just a fairy tale, they usually mean two things. First, they mean that it’s not true. Second, they mean that it has a happy ending. Kind of strange, I think, because fairy tales are brutal. If they end happily, it’s only because the characters who remain alive just call the happy part the end. “Whoa!” they shout, waving at the author. “Stop here while we’ve got a breather. Don’t go any farther down this trail.”

  It’s not happy for the princes who’ve died honorably or their old mothers rattling about in palaces pining for them to gallop home. It’s not always so merry for the villagers who’ve been picked off by the open-jawed, flamebreathing dragons chasing them down the cobblestones. About the best the survivors can do is make up tales of heroism to remember the slaughtered and keep their heads down and hope their own loved ones stay home.

  That’s a key part of fairy tales: staying home, which is usually way safer than going on a quest. Everyone knows what old maps said at the borders to uncharted lands: Therein lie dragons.

  “A bear isn’t a dragon, you know,” I tell Brooks bravely. “Bears are more vegetarians than meat-eaters.” I ruffle the fur behind his ears to soothe him. “We’re not going back though. I’ve decided.”

  Brooks solemnly licks my face. He washes me, concentrating hard on the skin around my mouth. I must smell like food. Or salt. Brooks has a thing about salt.

  I take one foot and move it forward. Then the other. I force myself to unfold my arms from my stomach, where I’m hugging myself. I put the monocle up to my eye again in a few minutes, this time scanning above the trail.

  The bear is gone. I’m not sure if this is a comfort, as I don’t know where or when he’ll emerge.

  Gray clouds are boiling over the mountain like demented popcorn overflowing a pot. The wind moans. I pull my raincoat and pants from my pack and shrug them on. I’m not camping anywhere near the bear.

  The trail climbs and winds across a knoll; raindrops glob together into white wet clumps of slush that slide down my cheeks and collarbone, plastering my hair to my skull even under my hood. The peaks have disappeared. The fog is comforting—or would be if I could quit thinking about being cold. It makes the land seem smaller. I walk and I talk and Brooks trudges along, swaying with each step. I keep the leash snapped between us. I like to feel him there at the end of it, within my reach.

  I drink at a creek crossing that is more like a slash through the tundra. The water smells like earth and moss. My rain gear is soaked. The fabric sticks to my wrists and calves. Shivering, I lie on my stomach and put my face flush with the ankle-deep water, moss green from its bed. The current slides fast around a bend. Twigs bob up and down, sweeping the waves. After each gulp, I lift my eyes and scan the far bank. My arms are tightening and loosening, clenching with cold. I have to move.

  I stumble on, trying to run until I feel my body relax; then I speed-walk with Brooks trotting at my side.

  When the rain has settled to a steady downpour, I stop on open high rocky ground where I can see and be seen. Low-bush cranberries lie like fat, round red apples along their creeping stems of evergreen leaves. Globs of slush are melting as I watch. Even under the snow all winter, cranberry leaves stay green. Easier for the plant not to start every short summer growing new leaves from scratch, I guess.

  I get my tent out of a garbage bag, then pull it from its stuff sack and dump out the poles and pegs. It’s a oneperson mountain tent. A pole threads from side to side across the front and another across the foot end where the ceiling’s low. That’s it. I stick them in fast but can’t peg anything on the thin soil beneath the lichen. I tie the tent ropes to twigs and hope the poles stay balanced. I need to work quickly before the cold makes me clumsy. When I roll back the sleeve of my raincoat, I notice goose bumps like a plucked turkey on my arm. I pull my sleeping bag out of its stuff bag and lay it flat over my blue sleeping pad in the tent. Fingers barely responding, I crawl inside, pulling Brooks after me and shoving him to my feet while I nestle in my bag.

  Wherever there’s tundra, there’s also permafrost. It’s a layer of soil and rock that’s been frozen year-round for at least two years. The trouble with permafrost is that there’s always an active layer above the ice that thaws in the summer and tosses about any structure people try to build over it. That’s why it’s hard to stick in my poles properly.

  “I don’t know where he is,” Mom kept saying when I was small and I’d ask when he was coming back. “But it’s very likely he died in the bush. An accident.” I think she wanted to say more, but her voice got small whenever she talked about it.

  She didn’t sound like Mom then, but like someone who was talking from very far away. I didn’t understand that when I was a kid, but now I think she was just trying really
hard not to cry in front of me. She didn’t want me to grow up sad.

  Except I knew different.

  He said good-bye to me the night before he left. I was tucked in bed after Mom had told me my story. Becky hadn’t come to our room yet. Dad slipped in and leaned on the windowsill for a long time. Stars pulsed across the sky, and the first snow lay like icing sugar sifted over the mountains in the distance where he was going. It must have been early fall, just this time of year. He stayed there with his head stuck out the open window for so long that I must have fallen asleep.

  He woke me with a hug smelling like snow and the night.“Don’t worry, Rachel,” he said when I wouldn’t let go of his neck. “I’ll be back. You just keep right on rolling.”

  He meant my gymnastics. I rolled right through my childhood up until he disappeared. Nothing stuck to me.

  He took my hands and pried them away from him. He grabbed the baseball cap off his head and shoved it backward onto mine.

  “Good night, Rachel,” he said. “Sweet dreams.”

  Then he walked out the door.

  What kind of father walks away and doesn’t come back? And in the morning, Mom was baking bread as if nothing had happened. “Want a piece to knead?” she asked when I got up.

  “Is he gone?” I answered. He must have slipped out when I was asleep. I should have stayed awake so I could stop him.

  “We’ll put some buns and a loaf in the freezer,” said Mom, nodding. “Dad can eat it when he comes back.”

  I climbed on the chair beside her and made buns like faces, with raisins for eyes and blueberries in a circle for mouths. Every mouth was scowling. The dough was greasy under my fingers.

  “How many sleeps until he comes back?” I asked her.

  “He’s not feeling well. He feels better in the mountains,” she said. “He’s always been like that.”