Juggling Fire (2 page)
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.
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.
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.
