Juggling Fire

by Joanne Bell

  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.

  3

  So What Is a Bear?

  Grizzly, grizzle us,

  Ursus horribilis,

  Moonlight dribble us,

  You can’t get me!

  Not bad, I think. When I’m half awake, poems sometimes pop into my head. I’m a better sleeping poet than an awake one. I think of my mind as a long corridor with rooms opening off it. The poem-making room is sunny, with bright yellow walls and tall skinny windows letting in mountain views. Unfortunately, I can knock on the door in the day, but only in the early morning does it swing open.

  I lie in my bag with the low morning sun on my tent walls and floor, bathing me in warmth. Ursus horribilis used to be the Latin name for grizzly bear. Brooks yawns and stretches and the tent shakes. I stick my head out without getting out of my bag. The moon is sinking below a plug of rock at the top of some no-name peak. The upper mountain faces are rosy and fresh from the rising sun. Brooks licks my face at the same moment I open my mouth to speak. Gross!

  I’m happy. It isn’t dark anymore, and I don’t have to say good-bye to anyone today. As well, it’s completely up to me what I do with my day.

  An hour later the sunshine has moved down from the peaks and is shining on the willows. White-crowned sparrows flash above me from bush to bush. My first choice, which is to stay in bed, won’t work. To do that, I’d need someone to build the fire for me and cook my breakfast.

  I fling open the tent door and hop out, still in my sleeping bag, collecting dry twigs in the clumps of bushes. I don’t step out of my bag until the little fire is blazing and spitting sparks into the sunshine. I like the sound the sparks make as they pop and fly away.

  Brooks is sniffing down the trail, nose to ground. Brooks always has his nose on the ground unless a large mammal like a bear, wolf, moose or caribou is close. In that case, it’s up in the air and he’s talking away—kind of a cross between a yip and a drawn-out moan.

  “What could have happened to him, Mom?” I asked her once when he’d been gone a few years.

  Mom only talked about Dad’s good side to me. She figured if I only remembered the happy times, then I wouldn’t be traumatized. From the way she talked, I thought Dad was her hero, not her husband.

  “I don’t know,” she said, which was her usual answer.“You want me to tell you but I can’t. I don’t know.” Already her voice had that faraway sound to it that scared me into not asking anymore. She didn’t sound like the Mom I loved then.She sounded like she was walking away too.

  “A bear could have got him,” said Becky helpfully from the couch, where she was sewing a chewed-up dog harness.“Or he could have fallen through the ice.” Sharp cheekbones, masses of curly black hair, a gymnast’s strong thin body and energy crackling from her like a live wire: Becky is beautiful and couldn’t care less.

  “It was fall,” I snapped. “The river wasn’t frozen yet.

  Honestly.”

  “Okay,” said my sister. “You know what I mean. It could have been the river or breaking a leg when he was up sheep hunting.Maybe he surprised a bear when he was coming home. Why does it matter how it happened? He’s gone.”

  Maybe he isn’t gone. That’s the thing. Maybe he’s wandering around the mountains somewhere and doesn’t think he should come home. Maybe he thinks we’re happier without him, and he’s living on caribou meat and berries and wild pea roots and lichen, boiled and drained and boiled again until he c
an digest it. He’s probably got a few hooks for fishing waist-high in the current, and he’s snapped off a green willow pole and is drying the fish for winter.

  If bears come around to take their share, he probably just keeps on with whatever he’s doing, ignores them. ’Cause he wouldn’t be scared. He wouldn’t be scared because he wouldn’t really care if the bear ate him too. He’d think he wasn’t worth anything, just because he never came home.

  Grizzlies come in different colors. They can be yellow, brown and even black, and black bears can be brown. One quarter of the world’s population of grizzlies lives in the Yukon. They’re smaller than other grizzlies because the land isn’t so productive, and they roam a bigger range. Grizzlies have evolved naturally to live above the tree line; black bears live in the forest. That’s why black bears are better at climbing trees, but it’s also why I’m more comfortable seeing them around. They’re used to melting into the forest or climbing up a tree. Grizzlies are more likely to stand their ground if you surprise them.

  Mom told me that if you treat bears with respect, they’ll respect you back. What’s she talking about? Why would a bear feel anything for me but minor irritation? Oh, not her again, it probably thinks, wandering around with that smelly dog.

  Becky’s latest litter of sled-dog puppies was rampaging about the room one night shortly before I left. “I love fairy tales too,” she pronounced, “but I know they’re not real.”

  I was sprawled mostly on the couch—feet up, head on the floor—reading Hansel and Gretel. “So do I,” I snapped.

  Two wooly pups were tugging at strands of my hair, pulling and growling, bracing themselves for the kill. Becky lay on her back holding a third puppy over her face, kissing his nose.

  “Gross!” She bolted upright, wiping her cheeks.

  Released, her pup joined the brave attack on my hair. Becky actually spat on the floor. “He peed on my face,” she muttered when she could speak.

  But she’s right. I do think fairy tales are, if not exactly real, at least true. They contain truth in them somewhere. I’ve thought about this for a long time, maybe since before I was old enough to be able to express my thoughts. Perhaps long ago, when people began telling those stories, there wasn’t a difference between wind and spirits, bears and power. At least not to them.

  Sometimes I can almost see early storytellers crouched under the stars around a fire, drawing stories from the natural world they knew, like I might draw a bucket of water from a mountain pond.

  I think about this a lot. See, not only do we not believe anymore that bears, for example, are power, but we mostly don’t have a clue what an actual bear is. What is his favorite berry? Where does he sleep? What does he like to smell on the warm spring breeze? Does he miss his mom when he moves away? We don’t have any idea what it means to be a bear, and we don’t truly believe that a bear contains spiritual power, so what on earth is the point of a bear in a story?

  Once I asked Mom if she thought bears had emotions like people, if they ever got lonely.

  She was sketching cross-legged under a tree, her chisels beside her and the slab of wood flat on the ground. Sometimes Mom likes to get down the bones of a sketch first, then transfer it to a slab of wood. She copies the sketch on the wood first, then carves the outline and burns the picture to the right shade. To the side, a bonfire blazed in a ring of stones. Mom needed the heat for her hands.

  “Maybe wolves get lonely,” she said, glancing up at me. “They’re social animals. But bears? I don’t know. They live with their mother first and then sometimes den with a sibling for the first winter after she runs them off. When they leave their sibling, the males live alone.” She brushed her hair off her forehead, leaving a streak of charcoal. “I think all animals have feelings, but I can’t imagine what they’re like because I can’t imagine what they want.”

  Mom looks like an older version of Becky—a bit cleaner and neater but the general effect of careless beauty is the same. Logs collapsed into the flames and settled, shooting sparks.

  Mom was drawing a great horned owl in a cottonwood tree.

  The fact that the owl had flown away days earlier was irrelevant. In Mom’s eye he was perched in the high bare branches just through the haze of her campfire smoke.

  “Okay, Brooks,” I say, sifting through my food bag. “You can’t walk all day if you haven’t eaten anything.” I scoop out a cup of dry dog food for his breakfast and pour it on a bit of tinfoil on the ground. I don’t want any to touch the ground or its smell might linger there.

  Brooks crunches slowly, with great pleasure and concentration, and then lies on his stomach, tail sweeping the ground, in begging position. His sad eyes lock onto mine and he nuzzles my knees with his nose.

  “Greasy oats?” I suggest. I mix oats and brown sugar and butter and dry berries with water in my pot and let it boil for a few minutes. I can hear the boiling even above the noise of the creek. A white-crowned sparrow calls from a willow clump. The sun shines gently on my skin and I eat half the pot and give the rest to Brooks. Saves on washing dishes when he licks out the pot.

  Before we leave, I take out three juggling balls and stand on the creek bank. Basic juggling is called a cascade because the balls rise up the center and flow down the outside again and again. It’s the most relaxing hobby in the world. I whistle and juggle until I remember the marmots.

  Grizzlies dig out TONS of rocks just to get at marmots in their underground burrows. And guess how the father marmot sounds the alarm. He whistles! So if you don’t go out of your way to associate your presence with food, grizzlies will probably leave you alone. If you do something dumb, like whistle, there may be consequences.

  The word probably isn’t all that comforting when I’m alone.

  The balls are smooth and warm on the palms of my hands, and the tundra goes on forever. The white-crowned sparrow calls six notes. “Give me a clue for you,” I chant so I can remember its song, ascending and then descending at the end.

  Brooks yawns and I put away the balls; then I pack and shoulder my load. I’m achier than yesterday. My neck cracks when I move it. I walk with my hand under a shoulder strap to ease the pressure. I don’t want to leave my camp. Already it feels so safe; it feels like my home. Every time I light a campfire, I make a new home. In a few years, I’ll have the whole watershed feeling like my backyard.

  The sky is blue and blazing with heat. The bushes come alive with swarming blackflies. I don’t have a watch. It’s hard to walk forward because I’m nervous. The valley curves to the right so the place where my family left me will disappear from sight soon. I won’t be able to turn around to see where the road lies anymore. I’ll have to figure out which pass to go through when I want to go back. Stupid, I know. I mean, I’m following a trail at this point.

  But when I walk a few paces off the trail, I see no trace of anything but tundra. It’s weird that people take up so little physical and so much mental space. Blink and they’re gone, and yet after he disappeared, my dad lived forever scrambled in my brain. I trot back to the trail and keep moving.

  Midday means lunch, but I don’t want any. I perch on my pack and grab chocolate chunks from Brooks’s load. Brooks scrapes his pack at my legs, so I lift it off. He chases his tail a minute in delight, ears flapping like an elephant’s. I love chocolate. Mom and Becky and I keep good chocolate in the cupboard at all times. I nibble to make it last.

  Brooks stares mournfully into my eyes from two inches away, begging, but I know dogs can’t digest chocolate and it would just make him sick. I cradle his head on my lap and play with his floppy ears instead. Far away, a line of willow shows where a creek crosses the trail. “We’ll have supper there,” I tell him.

  Brooks leaps up and barks. My heart bangs in my chest. Panic floods through me before I can even see what he’s barking at.

  Two bull caribou saunter a hundred feet away, their antlers bobbing as they move. They circle around, heads tossed high so they’re facing downwind. Strip
s of bloody velvet hang from the branches of their antlers—time for them to shed. Only when they’re positioned to catch our scent do they bolt.

  The chunk of chocolate in my hand is stabbed with my teeth marks. Chocolate is smeared over my fingers. I don’t want it anymore. What is my problem?

  “Let’s go, Brooks,” I whisper, and we do.

  Hansel and Gretel outsmarted the witch who’d locked them in the cottage in the forest. They stuck a chicken bone through the bars of their cage to trick her. “Too skinny!” cried the witch and heaped on the rations.

  Out here, everything eats or is eaten by something else. The vegetarians are eaten by the carnivores. The predators get kicked in the ribs by moose or caribou and hole up under the overturned roots of a cottonwood tree to lick their wounds and eventually die. What’s it like to die? Can it be peaceful lying under the sky in pain while, far off on the horizon, peaks grow smaller because of the Earth’s curve? Wolves sometimes eat their prey alive, Dad told me. What does an animal think about when it knows it’s going to die? Dad loved to hunt. I remember walking beside him. It must have been in the valley by the cabin, because I can see big spruce trees in my mind and they only grow like that along the river-valley bottoms. I remember an explosion and a bull moose running across a gravel bar before us and then falling first to its knees and then onto its side. The gravel bar was ribboned with sunshine. Dad and I walked up to the moose’s mountainous side and waited quietly a minute. I wanted to hold his hand, but I was scared of his gun.

  The moose’s front legs kicked. Then it lay still. Not a sound.

  “Poor moose,” I mumbled.