Red Fox Road

by Frances Greenslade

  PUFFIN CANADA

  an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, a Penguin Random House Company

  Published in hardcover by Puffin Canada, 2020

  Text copyright © 2020 by Frances Greenslade

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by Jon McNaught

  Cover design: John Martz

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Red Fox Road / Frances Greenslade.

  Names: Greenslade, Frances, 1961- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190188553 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190188561 | ISBN 9780735267817 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735267824 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8613.R438 R43 2020 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019950435

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Acknowledgements

  To my sister Barbie, who always says yes to adventures.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mom wasn’t speaking to Dad, but Dad hadn’t noticed. His eyebrows, which I could see in the rearview mirror, plowed toward his nose in his worried look, but he probably hadn’t noticed that either. When Dad drove, his focus was total. And this road required more focus than most. Sharp rocks pocked the hard-packed mud, and rivulets of rain had snaked across the surface, carving ruts like small valleys. Dad braked and checked his route, the front tires plunged down, the truck rocked crazily and Mom braced herself against the dashboard. Then we climbed out of the rut again and barely missed a rock the size of a microwave.

  All this with not a word out of Dad. Mom once told us that when she drove she could zone out for miles and suddenly come to, wondering where she was and how she’d gotten there. She had asked Dad what he thought about when he drove.

  “Driving,” he said.

  The funny thing was that it wasn’t a joke. Mom said Dad was the safest driver she knew and she trusted him completely. She wasn’t saying that now.

  About two hours and fifty miles ago (I checked the odometer and, yes, it took us that long to cover fifty miles), they’d had a fight. It was the first day of our trip to the Grand Canyon. Dad wanted to take this shortcut because we’d made a wrong turn and not noticed for nearly two hours. We’d stopped for gas in a small town, and then come out of the gas station and somehow ended up on the wrong highway.

  I was the one who noticed that we were heading west, not south, but by then we’d gone miles out of our way. Dad’s new GPS showed this road that would save us a little over a hundred miles of backtracking. The shortcut on the GPS was a thin line that joined up with a bigger line, a highway south of here. Once we got there, we’d have to make two turns to get back on the route we’d started on. But Mom didn’t trust the GPS. She had the paper map of Oregon spread on her lap. The map had a slogan on the cover: We Love Dreamers. I liked that, and it made me a little bit on Mom’s side. Of the two, Mom was more the dreamer than Dad, a fact I’d just realized. The line Dad wanted to follow wasn’t on the map. It wasn’t like him to go off the beaten path, which made me think he was pretty sure about the road.

  “It’s a logging road, Del,” Dad had said. “Logging roads don’t show up on road maps.”

  “Some do,” Mom said. “Anyway, what makes you think it’s a logging road? There’s no sign.”

  “It’s obvious. We’re in the middle of a forest in Oregon—it has to be a logging road.”

  “I don’t know why you’re so eager to go on this wild adventure today of all days, when it’s all I can do to get you out of the house most of the time. It’s been a long day already. I’d just like to get to the motel before dark.”

  “It’s not a wild adventure,” Dad said, and he let the other comment pass. “You have to trust the technology.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Mom said. “And I don’t think it was a great idea to bring that thing along to use for the first time in a totally unfamiliar wilderness.”

  “It’s not a wilderness, it’s a logging road.”

  And then there was the long, angry silence, which Dad hadn’t noticed.

  As fights go, it wasn’t much. I’ve seen worse between some of my friends’ parents, and they don’t even care who’s listening. Mom and Dad were more the type to let silence do their talking.

  This time, I was mostly on Dad’s side, because I was the one in the family who liked adventure, and it was true that Dad didn’t have the heart for adventures most of the time. When Mom was in a good mood, she said it was because he worked so hard and walked so many miles in his job as a mail carrier that when he wasn’t working he just wanted to rest his legs. When she was in what she called “a mood,” she said Dad used to be a lot more fun and that he was getting old before his time.

  I had my survival guidebook open in my lap, though it was too bumpy to read now. The book was old and dog-eared, with coffee stains on the cover. I’d bought it at a garage sale for twenty-five cents. The compact, wiry man who sold it to me, a man everyone just called Howie, was famous for writing a book about climbing in the bluffs outside our town. As he took my quarter for the book, his eyes twinkled and his eyebrows danced above them like gray caterpillars.

  “Going on some adventures?” he said. The anticipation in his voice told me he’d been on many himself.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “This book is a classic. Take it out to the woods. Practice a little.”

  That was my plan. I had it open to the page about trapping small animals. I wouldn’t be able to practice that where we were going, but I liked to imagine it anyway.

  I gazed into the woods now, inviting, mysterious. If we had time, we could stop and explore. But in case you hadn’t noticed, adults are always in a hurry. They drive by most of the best stuff in a big rush to get somewhere else—in our case, the motel. So I was glad to be taking our little truck off the main road, bumping over the rocks into this forest where we couldn’t see far ahead of us a
nd each curve in the road opened onto something new.

  But even I could see that the way the road was deteriorating, it would be hard for big logging trucks to get through here, and if it had once been for logging, it probably wasn’t used anymore. Dad must have been thinking that too. But he wasn’t saying anything.

  The road at first had been bumpy washboard, wide and sunny, with enough room for two vehicles to pass. Scrub alders and a few small firs stretched on either side of the road, bordered by some wild roses, not yet in bloom. Snow had begun to soften into melting, but the sides of the road still held pockets of it, glistening in the sun. It was only April, still cool enough for our hike in the Grand Canyon.

  The Grand Canyon was my idea. I never imagined we would actually get to do it. Mom and Dad had surprised me with a card for my thirteenth birthday, which was last month. The card had a picture from a magazine glued to the front, of three people standing on a rock outcropping overlooking mile after mile of folded, red-earthed canyon glowing in the light. Mom had labeled the three people: Mom, Dad and Francie.

  Now the road had narrowed. There was only room enough for one vehicle. The woods had changed, too. Huge firs and cedars rose on both sides of the road, their branches dipping into our path in places. The sunlight was mostly blocked out, just winking through feathery cedar fronds in a pretty pattern. I loved the deep-scarred bark of the Douglas firs, like the skin of a very old person’s face. I rolled the window down; the perfume of cedar and damp earth drifted in. If I wore perfume, which I didn’t, it would have to smell like this.

  Mom wiped her hands on her jeans. Her hands get sweaty when she’s nervous; we always teased her about it, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to tease her now.

  Neither Mom nor Dad was saying anything, but it wasn’t the kind of comfortable silence we usually had in the truck on our long drives where Mom might suddenly read out a crossword clue she’d been trying to solve for half an hour. It was the kind of silence where Mom was trying not to blow her top, as she called it, because if she said one word, it would be like blowing a radiator hose, which I had seen once—all that hot steam and water comes rushing out and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

  I daydreamed about the kind of tree forts I could build in these woods. It looked to me like it wouldn’t be that hard to find a frame of crisscrossing branches to use as a platform, and if I had my ax, which I didn’t, I could chop up some of that deadfall to build the platform. Dad said we wouldn’t need the ax on the Grand Canyon hike. I had no nails, either, of course. The thing about a Grand Canyon hike is that you want your pack as light as possible.

  You descend about a vertical mile into the canyon from the rim, or so the website says. That’s the easy part. The hard part comes when you have to climb back out. I’d trained by climbing the bleachers at school with my pack on, loaded with a bunch of binders and books. Sometimes Mom joined me, but not always. Even though she’s the guidance counselor at the school, so it’s easy for her to meet me, after school tends to be her busiest time.

  We each had light summer sleeping bags and just the clothes we’d need—one long-sleeved shirt, two T-shirts, one pair of pants, one pair of shorts, a spare pair of socks, underwear, a warm jacket and rain gear. Dad had the tent, and he’d bought a plastic cube to fill in case we needed to carry water between camps. Mom had the stove fuel and first aid kit. I would carry the one-burner stove and one pot to boil water. My pack weighed twenty pounds—we’d taken turns trying them on the bathroom scale at home. But we still needed to add our food. We hadn’t been able to find the dehydrated kind in Penticton, and Mom hadn’t had time to go to Vancouver or Kelowna to look for it. Our plan was to spend a night in a motel close to the canyon, buy the dehydrated meals, some chocolate, and some fruit, and finish packing. Mom said my pack shouldn’t weigh more than twenty pounds, since I only weigh eighty-five pounds “soaking wet,” as Dad says. But I wanted to carry my share of the food to prove I could survive out there on my own if I ever needed to.

  I didn’t need my ax because fires aren’t allowed in the canyon anyway. But if you camped in this forest, an ax would be pretty handy to have. Maybe not essential. Essential would be a tent, matches, knife, first aid kit, flashlight, map, compass, extra clothes, food and water. I’d brought my compass on this trip, even though Dad said we were just walking down a well-marked trail and back out again, so there was no chance of getting lost. Also, he had his new handheld GPS, which he wanted to try out.

  * * *

  I must have fallen asleep. A sudden bang that I felt under my seat woke me up.

  “That didn’t sound good,” Mom said.

  The truck had bottomed out in a gully. I watched Dad’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He blinked, but no more. He gave the truck gas and we banged again, the noise coming from farther back this time, then we climbed out to more level ground.

  We drove for another fifteen or twenty minutes. Then Mom said, “Do you think we should turn back?” Her voice was gentler now.

  “I don’t think we have enough gas to make it back that way,” Dad said.

  “Have a drink of water,” said Mom, passing him the bottle. “Let’s stop for a few minutes, take a breather.”

  “It shouldn’t be far now.”

  We may have gone another five minutes, slowly crawling along the worsening road, when Dad said, “Hmm.”

  “What is it?” Mom said.

  “I think we’re overheating a bit.”

  “Since when?”

  “I don’t know. I just noticed it.”

  “Let’s stop. Let the engine cool. We’ve got some bread and cheese. I’m starving.”

  Dad slowed, put the truck into park and turned it off.

  “I don’t think we need to pull over out of traffic,” he said and winked at me.

  We got out. Sweet forest air welcomed us. Moss-covered rocks and fallen trees of every shade of green, lime to deep emerald, covered the forest floor. Ferns and young trees with soft dainty branches like green lace formed the next layer, then the hemlocks with their slender, drooping limbs, hanging with black lichen, and above it all, the firs with deep-fissured bark. I had learned about forests in social studies. Ms. Fineday had taken us out into the woods and had us identify the species by making pencil drawings of them. I had my sketchbook in the truck and was still trying to decide if it was worth the extra weight in my pack to bring it on the hike.

  Ms. Fineday had been a forest firefighter before she became a teacher, so she knew the names of every tree this side of the Rockies. She said most people were content to call everything that had needles a pine tree, but that was missing out on the story of the forest. Every forest had a story, she said, and if you could read that story, you could not only appreciate it more but also survive there, if you had to.

  “And that knowledge could come in handy. If the zombies come,” she said. She only said that to wake up the students who weren’t paying attention. But I was always paying attention.

  “Can I go explore?” I asked Mom and Dad.

  “Don’t go out of sight,” Dad said.

  “I just want to see what’s over that ridge.”

  “Don’t go out of sight,” Mom repeated. “I’ll get out something to eat.”

  In among the tall firs, the sun warmed patches of vibrant green moss. It looked soft enough to sleep on. Some of the trees had branches covered in moss all the way up, like furry spider legs. I stepped over deadfall. Standing dead trees would make homes for owls, Ms. Fineday told us.

  At the base of the ridge, a boulder the size of a car had a small tree growing out of it. I scrambled up its side and looked out over the forest. The sun streamed through the trees. A woodpecker drummed a trunk somewhere nearby. Bands of green rolled out as far as I could see to the north and south, and to the west Mom and Dad stood on the ribbon of dusty road and waved at me.

  I reached for
a tree root and pulled myself up the rest of the way to the top of the ridge. Beyond it, to the east, more forest, the inviting carpet of moss and another ridge. I would need my hiking boots, a walking stick in case I had to ford any creeks, my jackknife…Mom was calling my name. When I turned, I saw that I had walked out of sight of them. I picked up a perfect stick, freshly broken with a knot at one end for a handle. I cracked it against a log to test its strength. Then I climbed back down the ridge and waved at Mom and Dad.

  They were sitting in the sun on the tailgate of the truck when I got back. Mom handed me a cheese sandwich.

  “Pretty here,” she said. She looked up from the map she’d been studying.

  “Perfect day,” Dad said. The road stretched out behind us, and above it, white balls of cloud billowed on the horizon, with clear blue sky above.

  “What would you call that blue?” Dad said.

  “Sky blue,” said Mom.

  “It’s not robin’s egg,” he said.

  “It’s not turquoise,” I said. “Is it azure?” Azure was a word I’d learned recently.

  “It might be azure. I don’t really know what azure looks like,” Dad said.

  “It’s sky blue,” said Mom.

  “I think it’s bluer than that,” Dad said.

  “The wild blue yonder. I was just noticing how many places in this part of Oregon are called ‘wildernesses.’ Right up your alley.” She jumped down from the tailgate and tapped my head with the folded map.

  “Yep,” said Dad. “We should get a move on.”

  I scrambled into the back cab seat, the little seat behind Mom’s that faced sideways. It wasn’t comfortable, but I rested my feet on the gear that was piled on the floor and that made it a bit better. Grandpa had offered to let us take his SUV, which would have been more comfortable, but Dad said the Mazda was cheaper on gas, since it was only four-cylinder. And we couldn’t have come down this road in Grandpa’s vehicle.

  Dad turned the key. The truck made a clunk-clunk noise and didn’t start. Mom and Dad looked at each other. He tried it again. The same tight clunk and the engine didn’t even turn over.