by Joanne Bell
I force myself to eat until my stomach feels tight for once and give the leftovers to Brooks. I wash out the pot with hot water to get rid of food smells, tie it to the outside of my pack and wander on. My pants are hanging on me. I have to keep hitching them up. The trail is heading downhill now. Tomorrow I should be in the river valley. Tomorrow we’ll walk through the shadows of trees.
Before I go to sleep, I try to decide what I’ll dream. Mom told me that she could do it. She just figures it out before she’s asleep, and, mostly, whatever she picks will show up in her dreams. No bears, I chant to myself. No bears in my camp. No bears in my dreams. I’m half asleep when I realize what I do want is to dream about Dad.
That night, I dream I’m at the cabin and he’s sitting in the kitchen by the woodstove, whittling a spoon. “Here,” he says, laughing as he holds it out to me. “Take it. It will help you eat.”
I wake up in the dark, sweating, the wind moaning over the tundra again. It was his voice that I remember now. I haven’t heard it since I was a little kid. Even more clearly, I can hear his laugh. It makes me want to bury my face in his sweater. I can smell the wood smoke from the stove and I can still smell him, after all these years.
Mom never told us there was a letter. Not for years. When she went to search for him after he disappeared, she’d found no clues at all. The letter was stuck in the back of a drawer in our house in town.
She finally showed it to us. And that’s why I’m here.
5
Imposing Order
“At least,” said Becky, “we know he died happy. He was out where he wanted to be.”
We were standing by the woodstove with our hands out to the heat, Mom carving at her worktable beside us. Becky was stirring a five-gallon tin bucket of meat scraps and oil and grain for her team. Our cabin always smelled like wood smoke and Becky’s dog food.
“But we don’t really know if he’s dead,” I said, puzzled.I backed away from the heat and picked up my juggling clubs.They’re shaped like gaudy bowling pins and they spin when you throw them. If you get really good, you can spin two or three clubs.
It was winter and the northern lights danced like charmed snakes across the sky. The clubs were awkward. You shouldn’t impose your own order on the objects being juggled, I’d read.Clubs and balls have their own patterns, different each time you throw them. A cup of water can be absorbed back into a stream. Not so in juggling. A lost catch is gone forever. Let it go.
“Of course we do,” said Mom, as always.
I had four clubs in the air so I couldn’t break concentration. When I don’t focus, the balls or clubs begin to drift away from me and I have to chase them. Good jugglers should be able to stand completely still with their feet rooted. Only their lower arms and wrists should move. If a juggler moves forward even an inch, the balls or clubs will continue to creep forward. Soon they will be out of reach. Novices juggle with a wall in front of them to combat drift.
“Prove it,” I said. I’d never have spoken if I hadn’t been so focused. All those years, I’d never asked her to prove anything.
Mom came into my room with the letter when I was almost asleep. She handed it to me and stood by the window, looking out at the bowl of stars and distant mountains.
“I’m sorry,” I read. “I’m no good to you anymore. But I loved each of you. I hope you remember that.”
I let the letter drop onto my blankets and clutched my stomach.
“Why didn’t you show it to me before?”
“Because it was for me,” she said. “And I didn’t want you to know that he’d killed himself. But you need to understand he’s dead.”
I shocked us both by laughing. “But it doesn’t say that at all,” I sputtered. “It only says he’s sorry. He would never kill himself.He told me he’d come home.”
Mom sat at the bottom of my bed. “The sad part for me,” she said, looking directly at me, “is that it’s possible for you to choose not to live your life properly. You really can choose to wait for him all your life if that’s what you want to do. But it would be a bloody waste.”
The next day I started cutting up food to dry: peel and cut, peel and cut. I took the screen windows off the shed and hammered spikes above the woodstove to rest the racks on. It was all a misunderstanding, I realized. All these years and no one had bothered to search again. I put my hand tightly over my mouth.
He’d shoved his baseball cap on my head. “I’ll be back,”he told me, turning at the door to wave. And yet in the letter he said he wasn’t any good to us.
There’s a moment in the cascade when I feel the balls will drop past my outstretched hands and bounce on the floor, out of my control.
“Doesn’t it get boring,” asked Becky, “doing the same thing again and again?”
But it doesn’t. When the balls leave my hands there’s no guarantee they’ll return. Sometimes I let them bounce: one, two, three, and catch them with a flourish as if that had been my plan all along.
“You’re not going,” repeated Mom every day, suddenly looking old amidst a heap of wood shavings. She looked absent, like she’d looked in the first years after Dad disappeared.
I hugged her then. I didn’t quite know how to tell her that I didn’t care what she wanted anymore. And I wanted to care.
The only way that would happen was for me to go back to the cabin and see for myself.
Alone.
6
Building on Permafrost
The next day, islands of dark green forest float on the sea of tundra. Tundra comes from a Finnish word meaning treeless plain. The isolated patches of alpine trees that grow at the border of forest and tundra are called krumholz. Becky taught me that. I glimpse trees first from the top of a little bump of a hill studded with boulders. When the trail wanders down again, I lose sight of them until, after a few miles of flat steady walking, the trail begins to slope gradually downhill. The river line gleams to the left. Creeks flow out to join it from each fold in the mountains.
When I reach the first spruce clump, I see that there is a parent tree inside a circle of smaller trees: clones sprouted from the original tree’s branches, which must have sunk into the moss and leaf litter under heavy snows some longago winter. Black spruce reproduces this way in the Far North; so do trembling aspen. Aspen seeds die so fast when they leave the parent tree and need such specific conditions to germinate that they rarely travel up here. You can tell clones because they’re all somehow still connected. In the fall, whole hillsides will change color, patch by patch, clone by clone. In the spring, the clones leaf up together too. It’s pretty weird how plants and animals adapt simply to survive on the cold dark tundra. You’d think they’d just not bother.
The trunks are wind-blasted and twisted. I snap off a fistful of twigs drooping with old-man’s beard and stuff the lacy, green-black lichen in a pocket of my pack to light my supper fire. I walk on, crushing spruce cones between my fingers and breathing in the smell before I toss them away. Black spruce cones often stay on the tree for many years unless a forest fire comes along to force them open. I’ll just help these along.
As I walk, the distant glints become silvery river bends. Huge cottonwoods with bare upflung arms grow on the banks beside tangled clumps of head-high willow and alder. Spruce are spaced in open woods farther back. Ptarmigan will be flocking now, socializing after a busy summer of raising chicks. Hares should be hopping through the thickets, ears tuned for danger. I stroll along, thinking about the forest and all its communities. It’s always seemed strange to me that humans are so curious about life on other planets and know so little about the other worlds that share the Earth.
That evening I eat cheese and nuts while I walk. More and more spruce islands appear. The trail is muddy and rutted with moose and caribou tracks. No tracks that look like a barefoot human’s; no bears.
And then the clumps of brush become a forest. The trail is boggy and a gray thrush is trilling from a treetop. “You should fly away,” I
call in his direction. “Can’t you feel the frost?”
I find a flat area where the river bends and make camp on a bed of moss. All night a chinook blasts heat like a furnace over the mountain peaks.
In the morning the tent is steaming hot. I slide out through the front, shedding my bag inside. There’s an endless supply of dead branches to snap off for my fire. I carve a spoon from a chunk of cottonwood bark while I wait for my pot to boil. The forest is noisy with gray jays and tiny black-capped chickadees and rustling leaves.
On the spine of a hill, caribou mill about, digging for lichen, all skinny legs and antlers in the distance.
I am happy, relaxed at last.
The trouble is that I’m growing up. Becky has known what she wanted since she was small. She loves to run dogs and her life just falls into place around it. Maybe I should have taken an extra year to finish school, not a year less. Becky has to stay in shape. She has to work at two jobs in the summer to support her team and run them every day in the winter. Most winters there’s a litter of pups, and she sells all but the smartest and fastest. She goes where she likes, wandering miles and miles of trails with her dogs. Mom only asks that she draw a route map on a white board before she leaves. But how do I make a life from fairy tales and juggling, and the memory of a clearing in a forest long ago and far away, and a father who was either a kindly king or a humble woodcutter, depending on how you look at it?
“For heaven’s sake, Rachel,” said Mom, brushing my hair from my forehead. “None of the endings are actually true. They’re just stories. Somebody made them up. It doesn’t matter if it’s the author’s ending or mine or yours.”
This was serious. Didn’t Mom know that I dreamed of a lake? The water was blue and cliffs rose from it, and white birds roosted on the rocks and wheeled over its surface. And all true stories flowed from that lake, that beautiful lake. Endings couldn’t be changed simply because somebody wanted happiness. For heaven’s sake, dragons and prison guards patrolled its entrance. Princesses and princes had died, falling gallantly from overhanging boulders, yearning to reach the water nestled below them.
After many days of wandering through the wild forest, the princess wheeled her steed about and drew up beside the prince’s. “We could die here,” she said. “I’m afraid.”
The prince nodded his head and reached across to touch her hand.
Side by side, they trotted up a grassy slope until the horses could climb no more. Then the princess and the prince dismounted and set forth by foot through the enchanted forest, their hands on the sheaths of their swords, for there were many dangers…
Of course, I didn’t say all that, or even think it clearly, when I was small. But I kind of did. Fairy tales were sacred to me, nothing to be messed with. But because I couldn’t put it into words, I only kissed Mom and let her snuff out the light with her breath, quiet and warm in the darkness.
I’ve changed since the bear came into camp. Grizzly and polar bears can breed—pizzlies, they’re called, or grolar bears. They’re so new that there isn’t an established word yet. Maybe polar bears are wandering farther inland from the melting ice these days and meeting up with grizzlies they once evolved from. A grizzly and black bear supposedly mated in a London zoo, but their offspring didn’t live. Is the golden bear a hybrid who has somehow managed to grow up? And be beautiful.
Grizzlies are considered to be a symbol of wilderness because they need such an enormous range to thrive. Without an intact ecosystem to roam through, grizzlies die off. It’s not enough to preserve bits of habitat here and there: grizzlies need to wander.
I tie a pouch at my belt and drop my bear spray and banger into it for easy reach. Whenever I see spots moving in the trees, my hand cups the top of the pouch and gently tugs it free, like a cowboy drawing his six-shooter.
It’s different traveling in the forest. I miss the open land and the smell of Labrador tea when I lie on my stomach and willow smoke when I blow twigs into flame. The woods are to my left, dropping to the river. Beyond the forest on my right rise mountains: the lower slopes are dark with buckbrush; the upper slopes are bright with glistening outcrops of rock.
Every day I’m remembering more about Dad. Sometimes I can open the door to the past and he’s waiting inside. One memory will spark so many others, like a line of firecrackers when the fuse is lit. When that happens, it doesn’t feel like I’m remembering. It’s like I’m actually there.
The funny thing is that I’m different in those memories. I’m not a very emotional person. It’s only when I’m in the room of memories with Dad that I’m light and happy. I feel free. Until I remember—quickly as a curtain shutting off the stage—he’s gone.
I see the bear in the heat of the afternoon, a yellow swath over a dark shape lumbering far off through the trees. He’s gone so fast, I’m not sure it’s really him. Brooks growls and stiffens by my side.
I camp where I turn off from the forest to climb another pass. Although I’ve already eaten a cold supper while I walked, I light a fire and lie stretched beside it while the bowl of stars and the northern lights shimmer across the darkness.
From now until almost at the cabin, there is no more trail. If I don’t read the map properly, I’ll get lost. I’ll turn around and the mountains will all look the same no matter which direction I turn.
“Follow a creek,” Mom said. “All the creeks flow north into the same river. When you get to the river, walk to the cabin if you know which direction it’s in. If you don’t, stay visible on the bank and we’ll find you. Don’t go back into the forest. Don’t leave the water. Make a decent camp and relax. We’ll come eventually.”
For days she’d been giving me so much advice that I couldn’t take it all in. She’d mentioned this already at least three times.
“Mom,” I sighed, my hand on her shoulder, “I’ll be just fine.”
7
Panic
In the morning, fear is dancing like dust motes in the air. I can’t keep still. A cooling wind blows through my head, freezing my thoughts. A natural theater of jagged mountains is to the right of my camp. I poke at last night’s fire with a stick, and a cloud of ash billows up, making me cough. I heap lichen on still-red coals and blow until they flame a pale yellow.
Then I pace.
Snow streams out from the peaks I’m heading toward, like schools of fish darting through currents of air. If I broke camp and walked, I could get to the cabin without sleeping properly again. I could just head directly there, nap and walk, nap and walk. Dad’s handiwork will be all over the clearing and in the cabin and down the trails we made when we lived there. Dad’s blazes will be on the spruce trees, showing the way, marks from his ax fading into the tree trunks.
Mom told me she put our gear in the cache, as well as leftover food. Did she put in everything? Will his coffee cup be sitting on the counter? Will his frying pan be hanging on a nail above the stove and will his ax be stuck in the chopping block? Mom was looking for clues, not aiming for a clean camp.
Panic sweeps over me. My breath comes in quick ragged gasps.
He wanted to come back. He told me he would.
He could be anywhere, of course. Maybe he never came back to the cabin. Maybe the memories hurt him too much, so he just wanders about from camp to camp through the mountains, always on the move. Maybe he’s okay as long as he doesn’t have to damp down the restlessness churning inside him.
I stoop and stroke Brooks’s back. I’m still growing. At this rate I’ll soon have to kneel to pat him. What with walking all day and growing, I’m probably starving myself. Maybe I wouldn’t panic so fast if I just had more food.
I stand, feet slightly apart, elbows at my sides, and swivel my body, each time bringing it back to home position. After a few minutes, I pick up my juggling balls and warm up. I toss one ball behind my back and up and retrieve it with the other hand. Smooth and relaxed. Smooth and relaxed. Over and up into the other hand, with always an instant where the audience can no
longer see the ball. From now on, there’s no more trail. I’ll just follow the river.
When we’re dreaming—or remembering—time doesn’t exist.
The balls cascade out from the center, and I remember Dad in the sunshine on the gravel bar with his baseball cap on and his fishing rod flying out from his shoulder. I stacked rocks for a castle by his side. A warm breeze blew from the passes where the creek flowed down from the mountains. When I was little, I was sure I heard beautiful music, barely audible, on the wind. Mom and Becky were somewhere close by, and when I turned from my makebelieve world to fill my pot with river water for a moat, I saw smoke rising from our chimney and drifting to fill the wild forest around our hut.
Dad smelled like wood smoke and tobacco. So did the air about me. Peace buzzed through the air and landed lightly on us and made me smile. Did we live happily ever after?
I didn’t know what happiness was then, but I lived in it; I breathed it in.
I finish juggling with a high throw. While the third ball is overhead, I clap my right hand to my left, transferring its ball. I catch the high ball with my empty hand, letting only my arms do the work.