Juggling Fire (3 page)

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.”

She hadn’t even looked directly at me. Obviously Mom
didn’t know when Dad was coming back.

Every morning I checked the freezer for my bag of buns.
One morning it was gone.

But Dad hadn’t come home.

I quit rolling right around then. I wasn’t into somersaults
anymore or walking on my hands. I walked on stilts that had
rigid boots permanently attached right to the crosspiece. All I
had to do was step into them and shove off and I’d be hovering
over everyone else. I also began juggling seriously. I juggled
anything I could find. I picked up apples or potatoes from the
root cellar or even stones from the forest. I’d practice for hours
until the light dimmed. Of course, regular life must have gone
on then. I did schoolwork and ate meals, but juggling relaxed
me. It made me forget that Dad was gone. I had to concentrate
on the balls.

Sometimes I think I picked juggling because of the challenge.
Without depth perception I had to kind of feel for the
balls. Maybe I wouldn’t have tried it if I hadn’t listened to a story
tape about Beethoven. I couldn’t get over that he’d composed
symphonies even though he was deaf.

In the evenings, I memorized fairy tales. I’d done it back
before I could even read. I’d memorized picturebooks that Mom
and Dad read to me and recited the words while I turned the
pages. Then in the toboggan, watching the butts of our dogs
hunched over in their harnesses, I’d have something to do that
didn’t freeze my fingers like turning pages did.

My fingers, stuck in my armpits, are tingling. I shake them over the sleeping bag for a minute and stick them back in to thaw some more.

Becky says that people who don’t have a written language memorize their histories instead. Anthropologists are amazed at the accuracy of their accounts, going back sometimes for hundreds of years. I, however, wasn’t aiming for truth. At least not until recently.

Only the far corners of my bag are still frigid. I explore them with my feet, stretching so that my own heat spreads to the corners. Time to tell Brooks a story.

And so the princess traveled on with the merry prince and their
loyal steeds. They rode through open glades and splashed through
pebbled creeks and climbed the steep faces of mighty mountains.
The wind was fresh on their faces, the air was crisp and bright
in a late summer sky, and their hearts were full of wonder as they
trotted across this new and lovely land, searching for a mythical
lake that was rumored to be the source of all true stories.

I’ve been dozing like a baby with my legs drawn up to my stomach and my arms wrapped around my waist. I’m almost warm. I poke my head out into the growing darkness. The sky has blown clear, and stars stretch with a zillion pulses of faraway light from one side of the valley to the other.

I haven’t wrapped up my camp for the night, I realize. I need to be ready in case a bear comes sniffing around.

The memory of being cold is so recent that it sets me vibrating again at the thought of the night air. I climb out on my stomach and unpack my wool hat, my flashlight, my bear spray and a pen-shaped device called a bear banger. I screw one orange cap of gunpowder into its end and carry three more into my tent. Lying down again, I put my hat on my head and use my sweater for a pillow. I need to arrange my defenses where I can find them by feel in the dark. I prop up my empty boot and drop everything into it. I could find it by smell as well. My boots smell like moss. All I have to do with the bear banger is pull back one end, and the gunpowder will explode into the sky like a firecracker.

Brooks crawls up and lies on me, legs spread like a roasting chicken. Claustrophobic, I kick him off and he curls against the wall, making it shake. I shove him back to my feet and, feeling guilty, sit up to scratch his warm belly for a moment, my sleeping bag bunched about my waist. He moans, content. Eyes closing, I curl up again, relaxed and warm.

My pack is still too close if a hungry bear wanders past.

I crawl out yet again.

I drop my pack close enough that I’ll see a bear coming to investigate, but not so close he feels compelled to investigate me too. Unfortunately, there are no trees here so I can’t sling it over a high branch.

Back in the tent, I’m wide awake. My stomach rumbles and then twists. I didn’t eat enough, I know. I mound my sweater-pillow underneath me and stare at the roof sagging above my head. I unzip the outer door so I can see a crack into the night. I want to be able to run out if I need to, not fumble with the zippers of the screen and the nylon doors. I fall asleep with one fist curved around the toe of my boot. Brooks lies with his head on my stomach and snores.

My stomach growls like a bear in the night.