Juggling Fire

by Joanne Bell

  “Don’t tell me that bothers you,” he laughed.

  So I didn’t tell him.

  But of course it did.

  In the afternoon the sun gets very hot, and no-see-ums swarm on my eyelids and lips and behind my ears. They burrow underneath my hair and crawl on my sweaty neck.

  I keep hunching forward with my hands under my pack’s shoulder straps to give myself a moment’s break from its weight. Then I let go to swat the bugs.

  Sometimes the trail divides, and I’m not sure which fork to take. So far, the forks have come back together. But what if they don’t? I start breaking off dry willows and placing them on the ground in the shape of arrows pointing in the direction I’ve come from. Then I can retrace my steps if I need to return.

  I walk, singing a bit just to hear myself. The wind comes up like it did yesterday, and clouds sail above the peaks and blanket the valley I’m walking through. I pull on extra clothes and keep walking. Supper is cold food: dry meat and cheese and water straight from a creek. While I rest, my mind hops ahead, droning with nerves like the blackflies slithering along my skin.

  At first we called Dad on an evening “sched” Mom had set up with him. Often we heard only static. Once we heard his voice calling for a radio check very faintly.

  “This is Caribou Creek on a radio check,” he repeated, his voice as low as possible to carry. “Can anybody copy?”

  “This is Caribou Creek portable,” we shouted into the microphone, louder and louder, taking it in turn, each one convinced our voice would be the one to reach him. “We can copy but it’s faint.”

  No reply.

  Then came days when we could hear other people with radios around the territory. But no Dad. Northern lights can interfere with radio signals. At first we thought there was just a particularly strong solar storm in the atmosphere.

  The days turned to weeks.

  “Why didn’t you call the police earlier to search?” I heard Becky ask Mom once.

  “Because I didn’t know his plans,” she said. “He didn’t even know them. So I didn’t know if he was missing until it was way too late.”

  I scrub the blackflies from the corners of my eyes. Surely I must remember more from before he left. I don’t try to control where my thoughts land. I just keep them in the air before the memory flies away.

  I was lying in bed, one thin wall from the kitchen, listening to Mom and Dad talk when they thought I couldn’t hear.

  I was small, and there was a glass of water by my bed.Moonlight spilled through my window onto my pillow and blankets. I wasn't allowed to read anymore and I was restless.I pretended I was in the desert, and I didn’t know when I’d be rescued. A sip of water had to last me all day in the searing heat. My camels lay on the sand…

  “I need to get my head together,” Dad said. “I need to be alone."

  “Please don’t go. I can’t stand it if you go.”

  Dad’s voice rasped. “I can’t help you.”

  I wondered how many days it would take me to die of thirst in the desert.

  Months later the police launched a search with two helicopters. When I wondered why we were staying with neighbors for the day, Becky said Mom was worried. Nobody was all that surprised that he had disappeared, it seemed. Only I believed he was coming back.

  Mom was dropped off at the cabin on that first flight. An officer went with her. She said years later that it felt like Dad had just walked out the door, expecting to return. His red lumberjack shirt was on the back of his chair, smelling like sweat, smoke and tobacco. Nothing was put away. She lugged food and gear up the ladder to the cache and hunted for a note.

  While she was at the cabin, the police helicopter searched, throbbing up and down the valley and especially along the river’s banks where his body might be bobbing in an eddy. Caribou must have bolted. Grayling must have held themselves motionless with noses pressed against the current, waiting for the sky to grow still.

  They flew back to the cabin once more after Mom came back, and that time they looked farther away. I remember them coming to the door of our place near town afterward.

  I was looking out the window, waiting for Dad like I did every day back then, and instead saw two cops cut across the front yard and up the steps. They were dressed in red uniforms with black stripes down their pant legs. I swung open the door, with Mom and Becky right behind me. Mom didn’t ask them to come in. I guess she didn’t want to talk with them longer than she had to. She tried to shoo us back inside, but we only went as far as the doorway and listened, huddled together.

  “Where will you search next?” she said.

  The cops looked at each other. “The search has been called off. If something happened to him, it’s too late,” one said finally. “I’m sorry. We have no idea how long he meant to be gone or where he planned to go. You don’t really even know if he’s actually still in the bush. He’s been out there for months. And he knows that country. It’s not like he would have got lost.”

  Becky broke away from the doorway and bolted across the yard. She spent the rest of the day curled up under the house with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head down. I know because I found her. Mom tried to coax her out when she got rid of the cops, but couldn’t. Eventually I crawled in with a plate of stew and lay on my stomach beside her while she ate. Neither of us said a word. I remember being relieved that she ate.

  At bedtime she emerged and let Mom hold her. Only years later did I realize that Mom hadn’t reacted much at all.Whatever sorrow crashed over her that day, she hugged it to herself. I guess she didn’t have much choice if she wanted us to have a normal life. There was no one there to hold her.

  At first, Mom just told me she didn’t know what had happened. She came in to my room every night and asked me what story I wanted and then she told it to me.

  One night I told her that I didn’t like the ending.

  She laughed and kissed my cheek. “Then change it,” she said. “I’ll tell you any ending you like.”

  “But doesn’t it have to be the true one?” I asked.

  “No, silly,” said Mom. “They’re all made up, however they end.”

  That’s when I started memorizing on purpose. I asked for fairy-tale collections every birthday, every Christmas. Mom didn’t have to tell me stories anymore. She’d given me my own.

  4

  A Grizzled Bear

  That night I camp again by a creek with my pack visible through some low willows, but not too close. I put up my tent in the last of the light and juggle on the creek bank with Brooks on his haunches, mouth gaping like a fish, staring at the flowing balls. I add the fourth ball at the end. I toss eighteen passes in reverse cascade before I drop one in his mouth. Cool. I like it. Brooks sits, tail sweeping, until I call him for the ball.

  It’s strange with juggling. Because I’m focused so much on the balls, everything else both slips away and comes clearer when I’m done. After I’ve juggled I have incredible concentration for a few hours. The light pats the top of the far mountains and then is gone. I leave bear spray, flashlight and bangers in my boot again for easy reach. Brooks snuggles at my side, and I sleep in my sweater so I can keep my arm out of the bag, wrapped around his warm chest. I want to feel him breathe.

  You’d think the older I get, the less I’d worry about the past. But it’s just the opposite. It’s like Dad lives in my head, calling me. His voice isn’t sad or angry; it is simply there every morning when I tumble out of my dreams. Trouble is, I like it. His voice is all I have left of him, and once I’m fully awake each morning, even that’s gone.

  I haven’t seen the cabin since I was a little girl. When we left because Dad was depressed, we thought it would just be for a little while and then we’d come back. My books, including the Irish fairy tales, must be in the cache with the remains of our gear. There should even be some food that’s still edible, staples like flour and rice. As far as I know, no one’s gone back there since Mom and the cops searched while the
helicopter hovered over the valley. At first I concentrated hard on forgetting the years we lived there. When a memory popped up, I forced it to fly instantly up and away, like a spark from a fire.

  A picture flashes into my head of the clearing with moonlight sliding over the surface of the river out my window and then lighting the wall of spruce trees and the mountain rising beyond.

  Cabin. River. Forest and mountain, I think. Moonlight covers it all. I crack the tent zipper again and leave it open for easy exiting if I need to. The bugs have all gone to bed. Brooks snores at my side. The tundra is completely still, no wind sweeping the buckbrush, no songbirds flitting between the shrubs. Only at night can we see ourselves in context, I realize, one planet moving amid countless pricks of light, the familiar daytime sky peeled away like a blanket.

  The next thing I know, it’s morning.

  Brooks is growling outside the tent.

  Terror leaps up and slams into me. I’m breathing way too fast, gasping, muscles contracting and loosening. “Calm,” I whisper, holding my own shaking body. I visualize the cabin and clearing bathed in sunlight. The memory settles like a ball, warm in the cup of my hand. I wrap my arms tighter around my chest.

  Then he’s barking in ugly bursts like a shotgun in the silence. I want to curl on my side inside the sleeping bag. I want to shut my eyes and hug myself. Brooks will take care of whatever’s out there. I count to ten. Brooks sounds frantic.

  I crawl out through the screen door on my belly.

  What looks like a giant skunk stands by my pack. Maybe it is one, kind of like the giant beavers who wandered around here during the last ice age. I close my eyes and open them again—the creature’s still there, and I can see it’s not a skunk. Wind murmurs through the bushes bordering the trail, soft and silvery like faraway surf.

  It has to be a bear.

  The animal is black with a yellow stripe glinting like wet gold in the early sun. The stripe begins on the back of its head and flows along its humped grizzly back to its tail. The brush about him glistens with dew. Hair is rising all over my body; I’ve never seen anything like it.

  Brooks simply stands, unmoving, his left front leg lifted, vomiting barks. The fur on his back bristles like porcupine quills.

  The bear yawns. Glancing toward us, he flips my pack over with his paws. He tosses it once in the air and darts a glance at me again. Several times he looks away and back, as if I’m of no importance.

  Unfortunately, I know that’s how bears act when they’re stressed.

  The pack thuds closer to him, and the bear hooks it with a paw. He looks like Brooks playing with a ball, the hump behind his shoulders rippling as he moves. The bear heaves himself up and stands on his back legs, woofing.

  “Hey, bear,” I say. Blood is pulsing in my ears like a waterfall. The ground is cold beneath my sock feet. I’m holding my boot full of defenses. Wind gusts. A tide of terror curls over me like a monster wave poised to crash.

  I can feel it ripping through my body, right into my feet and hands. My whole body wants to run.

  The bear dangles his short arms in front of his chest and waves his head back and forth. He smells like meat, must have been chewing on a carcass somewhere. My stomach turns over.

  “Hey, bear,” I repeat, more loudly, my hands above my head to make myself bigger. My voice surges in my ears like breaking surf. My boot is tight in one hand. I am like a mother clutching a drowning child in the backwash.

  Brooks doesn’t move.

  The bear sits.

  “Good dog, Brooks,” I whisper to comfort myself.

  The bear gets back on all fours, pokes at the pack with his snout and wanders slowly off. I can see his yellow stripe moving clearly above the brush.

  I stand very still and listen to my heart.

  What do I do now?

  Should I scare him with the banger?

  Or let him be, relieved he’s in retreat?

  Slowly, birds emerge and flicker between the bushes: two redheaded tree sparrows with a dark dot on their breasts like a target. Almost out of sight, a cow moose and calf amble through the willows and disappear into a draw.

  I take my tent down and stuff my pack. I keep Brooks tied to a bush until I start to walk off down the trail, singing my head off. The words sound strange. I cover my jaw with my hand: it’s trembling. I’ll eat breakfast later, I think, when I’ve found somewhere I can see in all directions. Right now I need to move. My hands are shaking too. The leash connecting me to Brooks vibrates like a fishing pole.

  Mom said she’d come in a month. Check on me is what she meant. I don’t want her to. I don’t want any limits. I want to go back to our cabin and look for Dad on my own. I want to lie in my childhood bed by candlelight and read my fairy-tale book and cook my own meals and be free.

  Tonight I’ll stay awake all night. I’ll keep walking until I’m out of the pass and down in the spruce trees again.

  I can collect enough wood there to keep a fire going all night. I’ll break off a dead pole and sleep in the open beside the fire with the pole beside me. If the bear comes back, I’ll stick one end in the flames and hold it out.

  Nah, I think, I’m a juggler. I can juggle fire. I’ll stick three poles in the fire, and I’ll swing them all. The poles will whoosh with flame, bright in the dark air, and I’ll sing along.

  The air’s different today: colder. I walk for miles with Brooks swaying at my side, blackflies lifting in the breeze and sunshine falling on my left cheek.

  There’s no sign of the bear, no tracks or droppings.

  Once a black fox stands on a knoll and looks curiously at us before trotting up a draw. Another time, I count eleven caribou cows crossing an open plain before us, calves racing on stilt legs among them. Several Dall sheep bed down in the sunshine on rocky outcrops far above the trail, like splatters of white cream against the stone.

  There was never a moment when I crossed the line between knowing Dad would come home and doubting it. As time went on, it seemed less and less likely to Mom and Becky, that was all. In the beginning, we all pictured him clearly. I still have his baseball cap in a drawer, our family picture by my bed. In the picture, our dogs are harnessed with the sled still hooked to a tree, and Dad is cross-legged in front of the packed sled. Becky and I are tucked into the shelter of his arms. Mom has slid into the corner of the frame, laughing, after propping up the camera.

  Even after we got electricity in town, we still lit kerosene lights when we went to bed. The light is soft and yellow enough to leave corners shadowed. Mine hung on a nail hammered into the log wall above my bed. When I was asleep, Mom came in and blew into the top of the globe to snuff out the wick. I woke for a moment to the smell of the kerosene and Mom bending quietly to kiss me good night.

  That’s how I thought of Dad, quietly and peacefully blown out. Then Mom kissing him good night.

  “He would have come back if he could,” she repeated, month after month, then year after year. “He loved us. And he’d want you to grow up happy.”

  But she never met my eyes when she said this. And her voice was quiet and slow as if she spoke from far away.

  “What was he like?” I’d bug her when my memories began to fade. “Did he like being alone? Did he juggle? Or tell jokes? What did he like to eat?”

  At first, Mom would weave stories of Dad into our nightly fairy tales. “The princess’s father,” she might say, sitting on the edge of my bed, “was a famous woodsman. He could talk with birds and all the creatures of the forest. Every morning he would take up his ax and go into the forest to cut trees. Then one morning when the dew was still on the grass, everything changed in a single moment.”

  But after she left my room, I lay alone and reworked the ending in my head. “And the woodcutter never returned,” I might say, “and the princess grew up alone in the hut at the edge of the forest, waiting for a glimpse of him through the trees.

  Day after day, she waited. The seasons passed. Snow came and went, but her f
ather did not return. ‘Daddy,’ she used to shout when nobody could hear her. All the longing of the waiting years was in her voice. ‘Daddy!’”

  “Look,” said Becky one day when she’d had enough of my questions. “Pick something that might have happened to him and tell yourself that’s how he died. Most likely he drowned. He was probably crossing a river and stepped into a deep spot and the current took him away.”

  “Could he swim?” I asked.

  “Actually,” said Becky, “he could, but not too well. That isn’t the point.” She stood, stretched and yawned, dainty and tough in her red wool pants, lumberjack shirt and cloud of long black hair. Her massive wheel dog, Chili, uncurled himself from behind the stove and went to her, happy for a run.

  “Want to come with me and the dogs tomorrow? I need some weight.”

  “What is your point?” I asked, my juggling balls cradled against my chest.

  She bent down to scratch Chili’s ears. “That you realize he’s dead. That you get a life.”

  This was interesting. Why did she think I hadn’t realized it? Unless, of course, it wasn’t really true.

  I threw the balls up so the outside balls met at the top of the arc and crossed over. I wasn’t talking with her anymore about Dad dying. “Juggling’s simple,” I told her. “One day I could teach you too.”

  Becky hugged me. She put her arms around my shoulders. “Come with us. I’ll teach you what Dad showed me about running dogs.”

  “Can’t,” I said. “I’m juggling.”

  Around suppertime I walk past the perfect spot for a fire, but I don’t even hesitate. I’m not hungry yet.

  After another hour, I realize that if I don’t stop to eat soon, I’ll have to boil supper where I camp. I don’t want cooking smells around my tent tonight.

  I heap twigs in a teepee, stretch out on my stomach and light a fire. White flames lick along the wood and crackle cheerfully into the still, clear sky. The weather sure changes fast in these mountains. Brooks lies down. I unbuckle his pack, and he rolls happily on the moss and wades into the creek up to his chest. The current breaks around him and flows on past a gravel bar. Brooks growls and snaps up mouthfuls of water, then splashes back to shore. I fill my pot and boil a stew with dry meat and vegetables and rice. It’s not bad, although all the broth boils away. I add a dollop of butter and eat it with a stick— I’ve lost my spoon somewhere. So far I haven’t eaten much on this trip. Not enough. Dad was like that, I think. Mom said that he’d walk for a day and take only a package of soup to boil at night.