Juggling Fire (12 page)
Then I crawled back into my bunk and curled into a ball
beneath the blankets…
I don’t feel better here. Why did I ever imagine that I would? If I live to be one hundred, I’ll never come back, never even look at a picture of this place. If Mom or Becky mentions the bush, I’ll pick up my juggling balls and try a new trick. Left to right and right to left. I’ll hum under my breath.
Eventually I fall asleep again, sparks popping up the stovepipe and into the night. When I wake, my breath is steaming. Brooks is curled into my side. The cold empty cabin strums with silence. I shrug off the sleeping bag twisted around my body and stand, throwing on my sweater and tuque while I hop on sock feet to keep warm. Both stoves are frosty to the touch. I dash outside for kindling, which I’ve forgotten to bring inside.
Snow has fallen in the night, but the snow clouds have sailed on and the morning is clear and deep blue. Wind is playing through the tops of spruce boughs like distant surf. There are no tracks anywhere. I jump across the clearing, snap off some lichen and slide back to the door.
Brooks hasn’t budged. I haul him up, arms around his stomach, until he heaves himself to his feet. “Out that door, Brooks. Time to pee.”
When done, Brooks stands head down at the door and waits without whining until I let him in. He sinks back onto his bed and, I swear, he moans. His wound may be closing up but there’s infection inside, maybe spreading poison through his whole body. Without an antibiotic, I can’t do a thing.
All morning while the tin stove glows cherry red, I heat tubs of water and wash as many surfaces as I can. Steam fills the cabin with a smell like moldy socks, but I don’t care. I use old childhood clothes for rags and throw them in a heap out the door to burn in a blaze outside later. If I had a radio, like Mom begged me to take, I’d call in a chopper this morning. “I’m fine myself,” I’d say. “No problems with me. But my dog needs to see a vet.”
I need a voice, any voice that’s not my own and not in the past. I find a roll of window plastic and tack pieces over the window holes. Mountains aren’t peaceful like I always thought. They’re only big, and they go on forever here: it’s wild from one side of the continent to the other and then comes the ocean. And the landscape will go on, changing only over the centuries of geological time, long after everyone I love is dead.
“Don’t die, Brooks,” I beg, kneeling at his side. His ribs are visible, stomach collapsing. The silence after his final breath will last forever. Brooks’s tail sweeps the floor, but he doesn’t get up. He’s tired, I think. He’s moving on. Brooks doesn’t care anymore. All he wants is my companionship and to stay warm.
I scrub the floorboards first, then the shelves. The counter is worn smooth from years of Mom’s kneading bread, usually with one of us battering a lump by her side. I see a line of caribou trudging single file in each other’s tracks up the bowl of a mountain across the river. Snow melts, dripping from the roof, and the ground emerges again. I move Brooks’s bed into the sunshine and force him out so he feels the fresh air.
By afternoon the sun is shining and the river is ice-free. I throw the last of the wash water onto the slop pile and stare down the valley, swinging the empty bucket. Silence murmurs in my ears. Then, very slowly, sound washes back: a chattering squirrel clings to a tree trunk, a black-capped chickadee lands on a shivering branch with feathers plumped, a gray dipper bobs at the edge of the open current downriver, fishing for bugs.
Where exactly did I think Dad would be?
Brooks snores behind me; a great wave of contentment peaks from nowhere and crashes over my head. Right now, at this very moment, I still have Brooks and the mountains, and Mom and Becky, even though they’re not with me.
Astounded, I slide my eyes over the mountains we walked by to get here. Not once did I get lost or turn back.
I did it, I think. I got us here; I got us back home, all the way from planning to prying off the shutters to cleaning up the rooms. No matter what happens from here, I came home when I decided to do so.
It’s something, I guess. The feeling doesn’t last, of course, but I had that moment and I’ll remember it long after it’s gone.
Long after Brooks is gone.
Fresh food could help Brooks heal faster. My eyes scan the river where the grayling run should be happening soon. Every year around this time, grayling migrate to the big rivers like the Peel, where water doesn’t freeze quite to the bottom. I should be able to feed Brooks and me without much work if I get on to it fast, before they’re all gone. I’ll catch a few grayling and then fix the cache ladder, I decide.
I force myself to wash Brooks’s wound before I go fishing. Examining it at close quarters makes me retch. Crouched over the slop bucket, I vomit until I have dry heaves and my eyes water. Then I splash cold water over my face, gargle with river water and get on with it.
I pour water from the hissing kettle and mix in some cold, then dab for a while at the pus with the last of the salty brew. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but there seems to be more pus now, more dead tissue and blood cells around the cut.
I grab Dad’s rod from the spikes behind the door, kiss Brooks’s soft twitching ears and his nose, and pull on Dad’s hip waders.
Yuck!
I peel them off and tip them upside down fast onto the ground of the clearing. Years of accumulated mouse gatherings and poop slide out. I slip them back on anyway. Then I slide down the bank to catch us some fish.
I can almost smell them sizzling in the pan. Brooks will nuzzle against my legs and bay with hunger.
From the gravel bar, I can see the cache ladder leaning against a nearby spruce. The cache itself is still upright, tin on pole legs, a treehouse with a pole and plastic roof, sheltering gear up in the air from passing bears and other scavengers.
Tomorrow I’ll climb up and check for my fairy-tale collection. Maybe tonight if I get the rungs replaced in time. Even if the grayling take off soon, there should still be leftover dog food from our team.
It’ll be easier than looking for Dad.
I wade into the current and brace myself with legs apart at the same spot where I fished as a little girl. The water breaks around me.
Not a nibble even.
The grayling must already be gone.
My arm remembers swinging back, and then watching the curve of line dancing above the water. Again and again. I’m about to reel in for the day when I catch one, then a second. I wriggle the hooks from their mouths while the fish rock their slippery bodies, head to tail, against the icy stones.
A raven flaps over my head and lands on a rock close by. Down the valley a golden eagle circles above the river.
Kneeling, I smash the first fish’s head with a stick. I’m pinning the second fish’s shiny belly with my foot, stone poised over my shoulder, when I notice something. A dam built from stacked stones cuts across a dip in the gravel bar, creating a tub-sized pond. The edges are frozen, but a deep pool in the center remains ice-free.
I was wearing a T-shirt, underpants and rubber boots. A ripped
T-shirt of Dad’s hung on Becky like a tomato-colored sack. Mom’s
spaghetti strainer was wired to a pole. Becky was wading in the
pond, her shirt tucked into a pair of Dad’s hip waders, corralling
our captive grayling from where they huddled together, noses
into the current. She towed them triumphantly in the strainer
around the pond and then released them in a heap. They bolted,
fins flickering, and hovered motionless against the dam.
“RUN!” she ordered. “The water’s leaking out.”
Panicked, I plugged holes with stones until the sun slipped
behind the mountains across the river.
“HURRY!” Becky shouted at intervals when I slowed. “They’ll
die.”
My knees were bleeding. My knuckles were bruised. I was
entirely soaked and hungry and desperately worried about
Scales, Eddy, Berries, Currants and Easy.
Becky clambered out of the water. She shook each leg in
turn until the water poured out the top of the hip waders.
Then she kicked them off. Her legs looked like no legs I’d ever
seen before, the color of pickled beets set on fire.
“They leak something fierce,” she remarked. “Makes them
heavy as rocks. Good thing I’m tough.”
I was still trudging along the gravel bank with stones
clutched to my heart. I, unfortunately, was not so tough.
I wanted to cry with exhaustion but my sister would have
been ashamed.
“Time to quit,” she called cheerfully. “I smell supper.”
“What about our fish? The water’s still leaking out.”
“Sure is,” said my sister, staring at her now bare toes. “But
it’s also leaking in.”
I let the last rock drop into place and surveyed our handiwork.
Five tame fish wrestled from the wild currents of the river.
We should be proud, I thought, of giving those fish a safe home.
“Becky,” I pronounced, “I’m never going to eat our fish.”
And we never did. But before the river froze, Dad lent us a
bucket and we scooped them all together like one happy family,
kissed their slimy noses and upended the bucket so the fish
could swim gently out without being dumped.
“Swim, little fish,” I whispered.
Becky called an encouraging good-bye to each in turn.
“On Scales! On Eddy! On Berries, on Currants, on Easy!”
When we climbed the bank to the clearing, I turned one last
time and saluted the vanished fish. “Be brave, little fish,” I told
them. “Swim fast and swim far. And one day swim home.”
I carry the flopping second fish over to the pond and slip it in. Fresh fish for Brooks in a day or two if I can’t catch more, I tell myself.
“Good night, Flicker,” I call back, climbing the bank. “I’ll catch you some friends tomorrow.”
I shove my tent back in my pack, sweep off the boards of my old bed, stick a mattress on it and curl up. I have a lot to do tomorrow: fishing, the cache, washing shelves and cupboards, soaking Brooks’s wound, maybe…Salt! I should have fixed the cache and checked up there already. Trouble is, of course, that I’m not ready to look at all our gear, soaked with memories.
In the morning, heavy gray snow clouds have bunched down the river valley. I need to check out trails for clues now, before the snow stays. But Brooks needs fresh food.
Nah, I think, peering from my doorway and sipping a hot mug of tea. The first snow usually melts. And even if it doesn’t, there won’t be enough snow to cover anything.
Brooks barely reacts when I bend down to stroke his head. His tail sweeps feebly against the floorboards.
I catch two more grayling, a mug of coffee balanced on the gravel beside me. I walk over to the pond with one I name Friend. Even the air here is more alive. I breathe in great breaths with the fish flapping in my arms.
The pond is freezing from the outside in. No way can they live in there any longer. I scoop up both fish and release them back in the river. The pond may be solid ice by morning. It’s too late in life to start killing off pets, I think. The rule, though ridiculous, is not to eat anything we’ve named.
Sighing, I gut the lone unnamed fish on the gravel bar and boil it up at the cabin for Brooks.
It’s time.
While the soup cools, I saw lengths of ladder rungs from a young spruce, lay the ladder flat on the ground and nail the new rungs into place right on top of the old ones.
After slurping warm fish broth with some enthusiasm, Brooks seems spry enough to limp after me all the way to the foot of the cache, where I heave the ladder back into position and climb.
One misstep and I could crash to the ground with no one to help me. With each step I make sure my hands firmly grip the sides of the ladder. I’ve climbed this ladder countless times, but Dad’s hands were always just below mine.
At the top, I distribute my weight on the creaking cache porch by lying on my stomach. Below is spread an endless mosaic of mountains and rivers, strangely patterned with slush ice hissing as it drifts into eddies and then slows.
Bags of old coats, pants, sweaters and sheets. Boxes of books and cans of tomatoes, two suitcases full of spices and baking goods. Several taped and tied boxes feel like they might contain staples: one of rice, one of flour and one of noodles. After much poking, I toss those to the side to open when I have a knife. No sacks of dog food.
And worst of all: no salt. I banish the realization from my mind instantly.
A tent stove, however, is stuffed with strips of dry meat. I throw it down for Brooks. Protein will have to do.
“Should we put it on the toboggan?” asked Mom.
Piles of books teetered all over the cabin floor. She held the
Irish fairy-tale book in one hand, open to an illustration of a
handsome prince peering up from the bottom of a glass hill to
the princess’s castle.
I snatched the book from her and cradled it in my arms.
“Town or cache?” asked Mom, stuffing the books into boxes.
“How did we get so many books in here anyway?”
“Cache,” I decided. “That way it will always be here.”
Mom tossed me a daypack. “Would this work for packing
it?”
I climbed onto a stool and penciled a note in case intruders
decided to stop by and raid our cache.
This is the best book in the world,
I wrote, carefully thinking through the spelling of
each word.
Do not steel this book!
Becky, wandering through, added a skull and crossbones
and signed the note
Terror of the Sea
, which I found deeply
insulting. I realized she was trying to be helpful, but it wasn’t
her book. We folded the note into an envelope we made
and sealed it shut with a dripping candle. Then I stuffed note
and book in the pack, wrapped the pack in a garbage bag and
handed it over to Mom.
