Wild Bird

by Wendelin Van Draanen

“Seriously? Why?”

  “It’s easier said than done. Read your handbook. Get the basics down. I’ll help you find supplies, but prepare to be frustrated.” Another fangy smile. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll manage to get it in a day. Maybe you’ll put willful to good use.”

  It feels strange to have her turn the word around like that. Being called “willful” has always meant I’ve been bad. Angry. Defiant. Hostile. Argumentative. Insolent. Oh. And let’s not forget bratty.

  But here was a new way of looking at willful.

  Of looking at me.

  When we’re nearing camp, Dvorka reaches into one of her magic pockets and hands me three string cheese packets, a power bar, and some dried apricots. “I know you’re out of rations,” she says. “I think you’ve earned a night off the raw beans and rice.”

  I take them and thank her. And I try to hide my glassy eyes.

  “Once you have fire,” she whispers, “your whole world will change.”

  I nod and head for my tarp tent, where I stash my dinner and dig up the handbook.

  I’m going to figure out how to make fire. And I’m going to be willful about it.

  Watch me.

  I’ll do it in a day.

  I miss my phone. I don’t like not knowing what time it is. I hate not being able to look things up. How much longer is it going to be light out? Do I have time to figure out how to make fire today?

  “The sun’s your timepiece,” Michelle told me when I brought it up before.

  Yeah, and the moon’s my flashlight.

  You can see why I hate her.

  But I have water and food and daylight, and nobody’s bugging me. The other girls are quiet, hanging out in their tarp tents, writing in notebooks, so I start leafing through my Wilderness Handbook—which is just a bunch of hole-punched papers held together with brads. There’s an introduction—I skip that. There’s a greeting from somebody named Soaring Eagle—I skip that. There’s a section titled MOVING FORWARD—I skip that, too, and I’m getting annoyed. I flip to the back, but there’s no index. If we’re supposedly students and this is our handbook, shouldn’t there be an index? I don’t want to read a bunch of stuff from some guy named Soaring Eagle. I just want to make fire!

  Then I come to calendar pages.

  Three of them.

  April.

  May.

  June.

  In tiny print inside each day’s box is information: Dawn, Sunrise, Sunset, Twilight, Moonrise, Moonset, Day Length. Tonight’s sunset is at seven-fifty-four. I am so excited to see this. It’s like a gift.

  The first thing I do is find my pen and cross off the five days I’ve been here: April 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Then I go back to the 3rd and begin to count off eight weeks, but stop as my finger touches down on May 22.

  My birthday.

  My birthday.

  I’m going to turn fifteen in the dirt?

  I get mad all over again. I hate my parents harder than ever. How could they do this to me? HOW COULD THEY DO THIS?

  I flash back three months to January. Back to my mother’s fortieth birthday. My dad had reminded me that we were celebrating that night and had given me forty dollars to buy her something on my way home from school. “Put some thought into it, Wren,” he’d said. “This is not an easy milestone for her. If you get stuck, a nice card and perfume is a safe bet.”

  Mom had been down on me a lot, mad at me a lot, disappointed in me a lot since my first-semester grades had come out. I was a freshman and failing. “How is this possible?” Mom had wailed. “You are smart. You are very smart! How can you be failing?”

  Then some other stuff happened over winter break. Stuff that gave her clues. And then, of course, there was the narc.

  So my plan was to be smiley-happy-helpful reformed Wren for her birthday. I’d been trying to reset the clock with her, because it was ticking like a time bomb. Even with my “new expensive counselor” reporting that I was making “great strides searching for answers,” Mom now acted suspicious of everything, always wanting to know where I’d been and who I’d been with.

  So I was planning to get one of those sentimental cards and some perfume at the mall, but after school I was with Meadow, and on the walk over we passed by a place that does body piercing.

  It was across the street from the mall in a converted old house with stained-glass decorations and large crystals in the shape of teardrops hanging from the porch awning. We were stoned and the crystals were dazzling. Sparkling and colorful. Like rainbow tears of a lonely giant. I couldn’t quit staring at them.

  “If you shoplift the perfume,” Meadow whispered, “you could get one of these.” She pulled up her shirt a little so I could see that her belly button was pierced. There was a crystal jewel right in the middle of it. It was beautiful. A little gemstone cave.

  “When did you get that done?”

  “Yesterday. Right here.” Meadow dropped her shirt and headed up the walkway. “Come on. Tanner’s cool.”

  “Tanner?” I followed her up to the porch, staring at the rainbow tears, then followed her inside the house.

  Tanner was head-to-toe tats, with quarter-sized gauges. “Uh…,” he said, glancing around like someone might be watching even though we were the only ones there. “I’m lookin’ at underage?”

  “Remember me?” Meadow asked, showing him her belly button.

  He didn’t seem to but said, “Oh, right.”

  Meadow hitched a thumb at me. “She wants one too.”

  “I don’t know, man. I need a parent’s signature.”

  “I got something better than a signature,” Meadow said. “Like last time?”

  “Oh, right,” he said when she handed over a baggie of weed.

  “And she’s got the forty,” she said, looking at me.

  I handed over my cash.

  “All right,” he said, taking it, “but let’s make it quick.”

  It was quick. And pretty painless. I left with a crystal in my belly button, just like Meadow’s. It made me happy that we matched. Any problems we’d had in our friendship were stupid. This was what it felt like to have a sister.

  “See?” Meadow said, laughing, on our way out. “Way better than perfume.”

  “But I still need to get the perfume.”

  “So let’s go!”

  We went into the mall, but by the third store the weed had worn off and I was starting to lose it. “Why do they keep it in cases?” I whispered.

  “So people can’t steal it?” She thought that was hilarious. “Let’s try Ross,” she said.

  But the perfume was locked up in Ross, too.

  “What am I going to do?”

  She shrugged. “Get something else?”

  “Like what?” I was running out of time and in a panic.

  “Does it matter?” She led me to tall shelves near the back of the store. Shelves of junk people use to decorate their houses. “Here,” she said, snatching up a glass bird. “It’s pretty. She’ll think it’s sweet and sentimental. Done.”

  I looked at the price: $8.99.

  “She won’t know it’s cheap! It’s art. Come on. Let’s get this done.”

  I didn’t pocket the bird right then. I put it on a shelf at waist height, then made a note of the surveillance cameras as we went to find some clothes to use as cover. I picked out three random tops, then went back to Home Décor, where I palmed the bird as I walked by without even slowing down. It was the size of a pear and I slipped it into my hoodie pocket, holding the clothes so no one could see, then went to stand in the dressing room line.

  “We’re clear,” Meadow said after scoping things out.

  When it was my turn to get a number for the tops, I asked the attendant what time it was. When she told me, I gasped and said, “Oh, wow! I had no idea! I have to go. Sorry!”

  I left the clothes with her and walked toward the entrance, pressing my arm against the glass bird to keep it safe while I had a fake conversation with Meadow about the time. “I can’t
believe it’s so late! I was supposed to be home by now! I’m going to be in such hot water!”

  We made it out the door.

  We made it down the corridor.

  We were home free!

  And then out of nowhere a mall cop was bearing down on us.

  Meadow said, “We gotta split up,” and took off down the escalator, leaving me to get busted.

  The rest was a nightmare. My parents didn’t believe that I’d lost the money. They didn’t believe I was just holding the bird in my pocket and forgot. They didn’t believe a single word I said. Not even “I’m sorry!” I was officially the worst, most disappointing daughter ever.

  So yeah, staring at the handbook calendar, I get why my mother is making me spend my fifteenth birthday in the dirt.

  This is payback.

  Bitter, petty payback.

  I am so mad at my parents for sending me away to live in the dirt as some spiteful revenge. They have the nerve to call me petulant and childish? What hypocrites.

  I wind up digging through the handbook, looking for how to make fire. If I can’t get out of the desert, at least I can get out of being a Rabbit. Seeing what the other girls are allowed to do—just seeing them be together—makes me feel so left out.

  So alone.

  HOW TO MAKE A BOW-DRILL FIRE is three pages long. There’s a list of parts, a diagram, and instructions. The list says I need to find or make a fire board, a spindle, a bow, cordage, a socket rock, a fire pan, and a tinder bundle.

  I have no idea what any of those things are, but the descriptions and diagrams help. The fire board—which is just a flat piece of wood—and the spindle—which is a stick in the shape of a big, dull pencil—have to be made from matching kinds of soft wood. I wouldn’t have a clue what soft wood is, but in parentheses it says that cottonwood, yucca, or sage heartwood all work.

  It feels strange to realize I know what two of those plants are.

  The bow—which looks like a crude violin bow—can be made from any kind of wood.

  The fire pan is just a dry leaf or a small piece of dry wood—any kind.

  And the tinder bundle—also called a nest—can be made out of dry grass or juniper bark.

  Juniper.

  I feel a little lift inside.

  I know what that is, too!

  The socket rock is a palm-sized stone with an indent—either natural or nicked in—and in the parentheses next to cordage it says provided, but can be made from yucca leaves.

  Provided?

  I study the diagram. Cordage is just a cord, and if I can find one that’s “provided,” it’s going to be a lot easier than making one out of yucca leaves because I don’t know how you can possibly make a cord out of yucca leaves. If you can even call them leaves. Yuccas look like woody desert pineapple plants with extra-long, sharp spears. Cord from that? Impossible.

  I start searching through my stuff, which is a mess. There are baggies of dried lentils and beans and macaroni sitting in between stuff like clothes, notebooks, toilet paper, deodorant, bug repellent, and sunblock. It’s all a big jumble, and for some reason that’s making me mad, too. Plus, everything’s gotten dirty. Gritty and dirty.

  I rummage around for a while but don’t find any “cordage,” and when I can’t stand being in the tent another second, I go out looking for a palm-sized rock with a dent in it.

  When I wander past the outskirts of camp, Michelle tags along.

  “Just don’t talk to me,” I tell her, and she doesn’t.

  Which is awkward after a while.

  “What’s sage heartwood?” I finally ask, still looking for rocks.

  She points out one of the big ugly shrubs that seem to cover the desert.

  “Seriously?”

  She gives a little shrug and a closed smile.

  I frown at her. “Look. You can talk. Just don’t get all chatty, okay? I’m not gonna see the beauty in the landscape. I don’t need to hear how I’m screwing up or how I should contemplate what’s brought me to this place.” I snap off a dead-looking branch from a sage bush. “It’s payback, by the way. The reason I’m here? It’s my parents getting back at me for messing up my mother’s fortieth birthday.”

  She looks at me and gives a nod, but she doesn’t say anything.

  I point at another sage bush. “How am I supposed to get a fire board out of that?” I kick at it with my boot. “I don’t have an ax or a knife or a saw.”

  She pulls a folding knife out of her pocket and thumbs it open. “You ask for help.”

  “Why can’t I have one of those?”

  “Why do you think?” She holds my eyes with hers. “You’ll get your own when you’re on Elk.”

  “Not Coyote?”

  Michelle frowns. “Not all Coyotes can be trusted.”

  I drop the subject and let her help me. She points out a sage bush that’s split down the middle and half dead, then shows me how to use the knife and a rock to wedge off a board. What we wind up with is crude and splintery and more a shingle than a board—maybe three inches wide, ten inches long, and less than an inch thick—but it looks like the diagram in the handbook and it makes me smile inside.

  My first fire board.

  “Can I use the knife to whittle down the end of this stick?” I ask, thinking the branch I snapped off will work as a spindle.

  “You need one that’s straighter,” she says, “with no nubs, if possible.”

  So I find another branch and she lets me whittle the end. “Always cut away from yourself,” she says. And after watching me a minute, she asks, “Have you ever done this before?”

  I want to lie so she doesn’t think I’m lame, but my head shakes out the truth.

  “That’s okay.” She takes it and demonstrates. “It’s more a flick than a cut.” She makes a few more strokes, then she hands it back and watches me adjust. “That’s it.”

  The knife’s sharp. I like the way it feels to shape the wood. Flick. Flick. Flick. Even after I’m done, I want to keep working on it. Flick. Flick. Flick.

  “How about making yourself a spoon while you’re at it?” Michelle asks.

  So I really get into that, splitting wood, rounding it, flicking out a shallow scoop, and then smoothing it all down on a rock.

  “Nice!” she says, admiring it. She hands it back and says, “You’ll also need a pilot hole and a notch in your fire board,” and shows me where they should go.

  By the time we head back to camp, I’ve got a spoon along with a fire board and a spindle; I’ve found a good socket rock and a branch for the bow, which is now notched and ready for cordage; and Michelle’s helped me gather dry grass and juniper bark for the tinder bundle.

  The sun is just dipping out of sight on the horizon as the blue tarps come into view. “It’s seven-fifty-four,” I announce. “Twenty-five minutes ’til dark.”

  Something about knowing this makes me feel anchored. Like I have a toehold on what’s going on. Plus, I’m holding everything I need to make fire.

  Well, except for the cordage.

  But that’s somewhere in my tent!

  Michelle gives me a small grin. “Someone’s been reading her handbook.”

  I try to hate her for saying that, but right now I just don’t.

  I’m inside my stupid tent, eating my last string cheese in the dark, watching the campfire burn, while the other girls are sitting around it laughing, when one of them squeals, “Mokov!”

  It sounds like she’s seen some exotic bird, but out of the darkness comes this man with two long silver braids dangling over a leather vest. Under the vest, he’s wearing a dark green thermal shirt, and his pants and hiking boots are just like the jailers’, only something about him seems really different.

  All the girls get to their feet. “Mokov!”

  “Hello, Grizzlies,” he says with a smile.

  Dvorka is suddenly at my tent. “Come with me,” she whispers. “You don’t want to miss this.”

  I scramble out of the tent. “Who i
s that?”

  “Mokov. It’s story time.”

  I stop. “Story time?”

  She waves me to follow. “Legend time. He’s Paiute.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a Native American nation,” she whispers. “Just come!”

  Since I’m still on Rabbit, I’m not allowed to sit by the fire on a rock or log. I’ve got a second-row seat with Dvorka, in the dirt.

  “Do you want anything to eat?” one of the Grizzlies asks the Mokov guy. “Or drink?”

  “The land has nourished me,” he says with a nod.

  I pull a face at Dvorka.

  “Don’t judge,” Dvorka whispers. “Just listen.”

  The Mokov guy spreads his arms. “Sit, girls. Tell me how you’ve been.”

  All the Grizzlies sit and look at him like he’s a god. “We gathered rain and washed our hair,” one of them says.

  “It was awesome!”

  “We used yucca root!”

  He nods his approval, then asks, “But tell me—have you been able to move forward in your quest?”

  They all look away. Mostly down.

  “It’s not easy,” one of them says.

  “I’m still so angry,” another one adds.

  He nods. Like he’s thinking. Considering. “Anger is a dry riverbed. You should follow it only if it leads you to the springs of forgiveness.”

  The Grizzlies stay silent, their gazes down, but I’m staring right at him, thinking he can’t see me in the second row.

  “Hello, young one,” he says, looking right at me. “Welcome.”

  Dvorka elbows me, so I give a little wave.

  I feel like such a dweeb.

  One of the Grizzlies peeks up at him. “Will you tell us a story?”

  The rest of them look up and start begging like little kids. “Please???”

  I squint at Dvorka. “Are they serious?”

  She shrugs. “There’s nothing like a story told by Mokov.” Then she adds, “Traditionally, the full legends were only told in the winter or fall, but he thinks there’s value in sharing shortened versions with us.” She lowers her voice even further as we watch the others. “Most Native American tribes have nature-centered spiritual traditions where everything has life and the power to direct its energies. The humans and spirits in their stories often take on the forms of animals.” She zeroes in on me. “Storytellers were the ones who passed along the tribe’s history and beliefs. These are sacred legends, told in a traditional way. They are not to be ridiculed.”