Grizzly Peak

by Jonathan London

  On the ground, splattered with wrapper shreds and bits of chocolate, is my notebook. The spiral wiring looks a little bent out of shape, but otherwise the notebook is all in one piece.

  But that doesn’t stop Dad from lighting into me. “Aaron! I told you never to leave your notebook lying around. Without your journal you can’t complete your assignment and graduate!”

  I can’t believe my ears. He’s mad about my notebook, not our food being gone!

  “Chill, Dad! Geez! You’re the one who screwed up, not me!”

  “We both messed up! I’m sorry, I’m losing it here. But the food at this point is less important than your notebook. We can catch fish, but—”

  “But nothing! I have a good memory! I don’t need the notebook to write my story. But now we have no food left!” I yell. “No pepperoni sticks. No peanut butter. No cooking oil. No salt. No hot chocolate. No pasta. No bread. No cheese. No sugar for our coffee. In fact—no coffee!”

  “Get a grip!” Dad says.

  “Oh no! My assignment!” I yell, picking up my dusty notebook and waving it around. “I will fail if I lose my journal. I won’t graduate middle school. I won’t go to high school. I won’t go to college. I may as well—” I start choking on my own sarcasm.

  And then I start to cry. It’s like when a campfire collapses in upon itself. Sparks fly and smoke rises, then the fire falls to its knees, hissing and spluttering.

  I don’t know how it happens, or why, but suddenly I’m on my knees in Dad’s arms. He’s cradling me. He’s rocking me. He’s shushing me. But tears are streaming down his cheeks, not mine. I’m teary-eyed, yes, but I’m quiet. And all I know is that it’s getting harder and harder to always be so angry at him. He’s wrong half the time—maybe more than half the time—but he’s my dad.

  Sometimes it’s a battle. But he cares about me. I know that.

  And sometimes, like me—well, less often than me—he just loses it. His cool. His temper.

  Later, in the tent, while Dad sleeps, I think about the Moon Bear, as I’ve come to call him. I’ve never heard of a grizzly bear with a white moon on its chest, but there’s a whole lot I don’t know about yet, I guess.

  As I drift off to sleep, I wonder if the grizzly that chased me in the skateboard dream was a premonition of the Moon Bear. And what about the grizzly I dreamed about smashing into our tent?

  “Some dreams become real.” That’s what Dad said.

  In the first light of dawn, I shake myself from a series of dreams. I can still see them, sharp and clear. Dreams about the Moon Bear climbing a mountain. Like scenes from a movie.

  I open the flap a bit to let in the light, pick up my pen, and write in my journal:

  In the dreams the Moon Bear sometimes whimpers and sometimes roars. He’s sometimes scary and sometimes not. But he always carries the moon up the mountain. Sometimes he holds it at his chest. Sometimes he carries it over his head or on his shoulders. Sometimes he pushes it like a boulder. But he always moves up and up. And when he almost reaches the top, he always slips and falls, tumbling back down, and the moon comes tumbling after him. And then at the bottom, he gets up, lifts the moon, and starts up again. No matter how high he climbs, the mountain always rises above him.

  DAY SIX

  FISH BUT

  NO FIRE

  I drop my pen, close the flap, and finally drift back to sleep.

  We wake to the crack of thunder. Lightning illuminates the inside of our tent, followed by more claps of thunder and flashes of lightning.

  Then the rain comes pounding down like nails. The tent ripples and sags and whips in the wind.

  It’s well into morning but we’re not going anywhere. I think about last night. The crying. And my dreams about the grizzly. The Moon Bear.

  “Dad,” I say, “I’m hungry. And I want coffee.” I feel like a little kid.

  “We’ll go fishing when this blows over.” Dad uncorks a loud one and the tent fills with killer gas.

  “Are you kidding me? Seriously!” I open the tent flap and try to wave the fumes away. I get a cold face full of rain and shut the flap before we’re soaked.

  “We’re lucky,” Dad says.

  “Why? Because we haven’t been hit by lightning? That could happen any moment now.” I slide back into my sleeping bag.

  “We’re lucky the bear didn’t destroy our tent. I snapped at you last night about your notebook—but what I was really shook up about was the grizzly. There was a short film at the ranger station about grizzlies. It showed one ripping a tent to shreds while a camper was still inside.”

  I wonder what happened to that camper. I feel a chill running through me, and it’s not from the cold.

  “That’s why you don’t keep food in your tent,” he says.

  “We’re food.” I pull my bag up around my head.

  “Could be,” he says. “When I was Googling Bowron Lakes I read a blog about a horrific bear mauling. It was at a camp on one of these lakes. One camper died and the other was pinned inside a cabin while the grizzly kept trying different ways to break in. It’s rare but it does happen.”

  “Geez, Dad! If you’re trying to scare me you’re doing a pretty good job.” I can’t shake the image of a grizzly trying to bite and claw his way inside the cabin.

  Or our tent. It’s like that dream I had about a grizzly pushing his great head into our tent. And then I think of my last journal entry this morning, the dream about the grizzly carrying the moon up the mountain.

  The more I think about it the more I’m sure that both grizzlies are the same bear.

  I want to tell Dad about it, or, better yet, show him what I wrote. But before I can get a word out, he says, “Actually, Aaron, we went about it all wrong. According to the film you’re not supposed to shout or move quickly when encountering a grizzly. You’re supposed to talk softly, calmly, slowly back away, and keep facing them while avoiding direct eye contact. A grizzly can outrun a man. Hell, they’re as fast as a race horse. And climbing a tree won’t do you any good—they can chase you right up!”

  “Well, whatever we did, it worked.” I grin. “It did run off. Eventually.”

  “Like I said, we’re lucky.” He grins back.

  “Well, I’m still hungry,” I groan. “And I still want my coffee.” It’s so cold in our tent, little puffs of cloud come out every time we talk.

  “This is the bare bones of survival, Aaron,” he says, suddenly very serious. “With luck, we’ll be out of here in two days, counting today. From now on we have to fish for our food and do without coffee and sugar and beef jerky. But really, it’ll be good for us. We can do this.”

  I know we can, but I don’t say it out loud. I’m not sure how “good” it’ll be for us, but something stirs in me. Surviving in the wild. Out in the elements. It’s intense. Suddenly I don’t feel like a little boy anymore. I feel like a young adult. A man, even.

  Well, almost.

  And just as suddenly the rain stops and the sun pierces the gloom. The tree branches drip and the lake laps against the shore.

  We fish for breakfast. But fishing for breakfast on an empty stomach is a real challenge. Have you ever gone to school on an empty stomach? Spent the whole morning on an empty stomach? Not fun.

  We go to the same spot we went to yesterday, but the only things biting are the mosquitoes and deerflies.

  After an hour we’ve only caught one fish between us. I hooked it and Dad scooped it up with the net. A small trout, not more than eight inches long. Maybe two or three bites each.

  Maybe we’ll have to eat the eyeballs.

  We keep fishing, but nothing happens. No fish jump. Silence. They must be hiding in the shallows, biding their time.

  My stomach grumbles. It growls. I could eat a bear.

  But it’s not until we get back to camp, a couple of hours later and still with just the one small trout dangling from the stringer, that we start to get a real sense of what hunger means.

  We look for our last box o
f wooden matches. Where could it be?

  There it is: in the mud near the fire ring. In the chaos of the Moon Bear’s raid, they’d been left out all night! And in the rain this morning.

  We groan. I pick up the matchbox and the cardboard falls apart in my hands. I look inside. Matches float in a puddle, like tiny kayaks in a tiny lake. Then they spill out in a tiny waterfall down onto the muddy ground.

  We have fish, but we don’t have fire!

  Great, I think. Just great.

  Dad swears, then picks the matches out of the mud, one by one, and sets them on a stone to try to dry them in the sun.

  Only the sun is hiding behind a cloud.

  “Don’t you have, like, a lighter, Dad?”

  “I don’t smoke, Aaron. Remember?” He looks at me like I’m a nut. I look back at him like he’s a nut. We stand there.

  We don’t know what to do.

  All I know is we may have to eat sashimi from now on—raw fish, without rice or soy sauce. Or chopsticks.

  “I’ll look for something to burn,” I say, and head off to look for some dry wood, just in case we get a match to flare.

  I find a few moss- and lichen-covered scraps under a rock overhang and bundle them into my arms. Not exactly dry.

  When I get back, I see Dad trying to strike the matches against stone. Most just snap in two. But a couple spark and go out, thin wisps of smoke disappearing into air. They’re still pretty soaked, and I’m not sure they’ll ever totally dry out.

  “Man!” I say, holding my small load of kindling. “Let me try.”

  “Go for it,” he says, and stands up, pressing his hands against the base of his back.

  Then I squat down and place the lichen-covered kindling above some twigs Dad had set atop the wet ashes in the fire ring, and I stick a twist of newspaper he had prepared beneath the wood.

  I strike a match against stone. It sparks and snaps in two and goes out. I strike another one, a little gentler, and the head drops off.

  I concentrate. I focus. I take a deep breath—and on my third match the head bursts into flame! I cup my hand and ease the lighted match down to the twist of newspaper, slowly, slowly.

  The paper flares up and I lean down and gently blow on it, coaxing it, until the flames crawl across the kindling and—PRESTO!—we have a small fire going!

  “Good job, Aaron!”

  But I look again and see that the wood is smoking, the flame is dwindling. Still too much moisture in it, I guess.

  And then I see that the rows of matches laid out on the stump have dwindled. There are only eight matches left! For tonight and all day tomorrow. They have become as precious as gold. And who knows how many of them will light?

  If any.

  While Dad guts and cleans our one small trout, I gather more stray scraps of wood and try to coax the fire, hoping for a little luck. When Dad’s done, he lays the slim slab of fish on the not-quite-hot grill.

  We have a spatula but no oil, no salt, no pepper, no lemon, nothing. Nothing but appetites as big as a bear’s.

  In a couple of minutes, Dad lifts the fish from the grill with his spatula to flip it over—but it slides off and lands in the dirt! Dad swears.

  Then we see that the fire is sputtering out.

  Dad snatches the gutted trout off the ground with his fingers, tips his water bottle over it to clean the dirt off, then flops it back on the grill.

  Which is now barely warm.

  I haven’t said anything. If I had dropped the fish, I hate to think what Dad would have said.

  I look at the last of the matches, but with the wood around here still so damp, I think maybe it would be better to try them later. If the rain doesn’t come back, and if the wood eventually dries.

  As if hearing my thoughts, Dad says, “Want some sushi? Actually, it might be almost half cooked.”

  “Or half raw,” I say. And we both try to grin. Sad little grins.

  With his spatula he lifts the half-raw trout off the lukewarm grill, and slices it in two.

  Yep. Inside, the fish looks almost raw. Dad pokes it, then serves me the half with the head still attached.

  I look down at it for a long moment. Then I say to the fish head, “Thanks, dude!” It’s my kind of grace.

  I pick it up with my fingers and eat all the meat I can get to—three yucky bites. A little like slimy gum—but not sweet.

  In fact it’s probably the worst thing I ever ate.

  I force myself to swallow, as I stare down at the fish eyeballs staring back up at me.

  The half-raw fish is gone, but I’m still super hungry. My stomach is growling louder than ever.

  DAY SIX

  THE MONSTER’S

  COILS

  Dad grabs the fish head when I finish with it. He plucks out an eyeball, pops it in his mouth, and chews it slowly, licking his lips. “Best part, kiddo. Um-hmmm. And good for ya too!”

  Gross! I think. But if he can do it so can I.

  I pluck out the other eyeball and pop it into my mouth like a grape.

  PFOOW! I spit it out and watch it roll across the ground.

  “Gross!” I yell it this time. “That tasted like . . . like an eyeball!”

  I’d rather go hungry.

  I try to rinse out the taste with water while Dad licks each finger, like he was eating a buffalo wing or something. Then we break camp on empty stomachs.

  Lanezi Lake funnels back into the Cariboo River. We’re running on empty, but we’re not letting that slow us down. We’re lean mean paddling machines. The quicker we can get to our next campsite, probably on Unna Lake, the sooner we can fish again.

  Ducks scatter out of our way. Snowy mountains slide by. The sky is clear blue here, scudded with clouds there, ever changing.

  We’re racing against our bellies.

  My mind’s no longer like a maze. It’s focused. It’s like an arrow flying toward >>>> FOOD.

  We’re moving so fast that we almost miss the channel into Sandy Lake. I’m in back. I execute a left pivot in the nick of time. The lake’s shallow with sandspits sticking way out into the lake. Around us, the cedars have turned to pine, the mountains to snow-dusted hills.

  We only pause to drink water from our bottles. There’s a cool breeze but the sun is hot. Sweat stings our eyes. We need salt.

  And we need food. I’d give anything for a bag of chips!

  We keep paddling.

  After Sandy Lake we fly down another river passage and then turn into the narrow entrance to Unna Lake. A tiny, enchanted gem, crystal clear. Awesome. Down below our kayak, we can see schools of small fish—too small to catch—darting in zigs and zags, as if with one intention:

  Get away.

  Although it’s still early afternoon, we find a good spot beneath some aspen trees, and set up camp on high speed. The plan is to fish now, eat, and then maybe take a hike up to nearby Cariboo Falls, if we have the energy.

  Easier said than done. It’s too sunny for good fishing. The fish are sleeping, hanging low along the bottom, or in the reeds.

  But we fish, anyway. No choice. We’re hungry.

  We fish the reeds and snag our lures and catch nothing but duckweed. I lose one lure and Dad loses two. After two hours we’re about to give up when Dad pulls in a little lake trout. It will have to do.

  But we use up half the remaining matches to get a fire going.

  That leaves four!

  I try not to think about the future. I’m living in the now. At least this time the fire burns long enough to cook the fish.

  Again I eat my share of fish in four or five bites, but this time I chew slowly, savoring the taste, trying to make it last.

  And no, I don’t eat the eyeballs.

  There are no mosquitoes in the warm sun. Even the deerflies seem to be sleeping. Dad says he feels like a nap, but I remind him that we were going to go to Cariboo Falls. And now that we’ve eaten, I feel like we could make it.

  “We’ll go in the morning,” he says. He yawns, lies
back on the ground, and cradles his head in his crossed arms.

  “Tomorrow we won’t have the energy to hike up to the falls. We’ll probably be starving. Come on, Dad. Let’s go! It’ll be cool!”

  “You go, I’ll nap.” He pops a toothpick into his mouth and smiles.

  “Geez, Dad! You told me they’re like five times the size of the Isaac River Falls. Epic!” I can’t believe myself. I’m actually begging my dad to come with me. A day ago I would’ve been deliriously happy to just go by myself.

  What happened? Something has changed.

  “Come on, Dad, you promised! We have to see the falls!” I punch his shoulder. I actually punch his shoulder! If he’d done that to me a few days ago I would’ve slugged him. Hard!

  “Okay, okay!” Dad sits up. “First just let me rinse off!” He pulls off his grimy flannel shirt, kneels by the lake, and splashes water into his face and under his arms. I can see he’s lost weight on this trip, and he was already skinny.

  At this rate he’ll be all skin and bones. And a scraggly beard.

  But right now I’m practically running in place, raring to go. I’m totally psyched about climbing the falls. It’s sort of like a sugar high, but I’m suddenly aware it’s really a hunger high. I read something about it one time, maybe in a story by Ernest Hemingway. I can’t remember. Whatever. I’m bursting with hungry energy, my mind as sharp as an ice pick.

  “We’ll climb the falls,” I say. “Then we’ll come back and fish when the sun is down and the fish are jumping.”

  Isn’t that like the song? Summertime . . . and the fish are . . . de duh duh . . . Something like that. One of Dad’s old bluesy jazz tunes.

  Dad slaps his face three more times, climbs to his feet, and slips back into his flannel shirt, only buttoning it halfway up. His chest hair is like a thick rug.

  I start off before he can catch up. It’s an easy walk uphill, less than a mile. Through the cedar trees we can hear the roar of the falls in the distance. As the trail starts to dip the roar grows louder and louder.

  I’m not prepared for what comes next. Instead of climbing the waterfall, we come to a drop-off, just above Cariboo Falls, and look down.