Juggling Fire

by Joanne Bell

  He still smells putrid.

  But the wound, when I stare at it, seems perhaps a bit cleaner, a little less inflamed. I almost dare to hope.

  For the first time, I let myself imagine the clearing with Brooks’s body cold by the stove. My mind skitters from the picture, and I whistle him back in to rest. All the time I’m frying bannock, I keep up a running stream of talk— about the trail, the beavers, the moldy comb. Before bed, I chop a box of frozen moss and leave it to thaw beside the stove. I soak Brooks’s cut with moss soup and bandage it with a fresh wet poultice.

  That night Brooks is restless, whining by the door and pacing in the kitchen from window to window. Bare feet on the table, I read my fairy-tale book by the stove: “The Snow Queen” again. Greta, still chasing her lost friend across the steppes and taiga, is in an ice palace filled with thieves.

  Brooks barks, a paw lifted, a series of alarm calls. I check out the window and, sure enough, a black wolf is standing in the clearing staring toward the cabin, head lowered slightly and eyes shining. I pull on wool socks and step into my boots. The moon is over the river and shining on the fresh snow, and snow is thumping softly from spruce branches in the wall of forest. I hear a keening from the trees to the right and see shadows moving. As I watch, seven long-legged wolves step out, form a semi-circle in full view and howl.

  Brooks dives under our bed so only his nose sticks out.

  Then I realize what I’ve done. In the moonlight, scattered heaps are visible beneath the cache. I’ve forgotten to bring in the food. Snow streams in the wind, flat above the ground like schools of small fish darting back and forth.

  I carry the lamp to the counter so it throws light out the window, shrug into Dad’s red lumberjack shirt and lift his rifle from its pegs behind the door. I break open the chamber, blow through the barrel and load it. Holding it at hip level, cowboy style, I stalk backward across the clearing, away from the wolves. Wolf eyes lock onto mine. Ice clangs in the current. The neighborhood raven flies over the wolves and disappears somewhere in the trees.

  Once beneath the cache, I load my pack by feel, never moving gun barrel or eyes from my visitors. And above us all, the northern lights stroll onto their stage, filling the valley with wild flings of green and white light, like sheets snapping across the heavens.

  Dad used to pee on the ground beside any meat he had to leave out overnight. It was his form of scent marking and it seemed to actually work; interspecies communication, he told me, smug. I’m laughing. The wolves are silent now, heads still slightly bowed. They begin to walk away into the forest, floating on their endless legs.

  The first wolf, the blackest and biggest, stays the longest, muzzle quivering. Alone he howls, a drawn-out note to his pack, breaking pitch once at the beginning and once at the end. As he calls, his nose lifts slightly to the sky and I see his breath steaming in the cooling night. From the surrounding forest, wolves sing back. I turn my head slightly to hear. Each wolf is howling in its own separate pitch. Ice swishes its way along the river on a higher note. Upriver, ice cracks like a drumroll, fast and deep.

  Pack full, I stand and howl along, chanting the word keen but letting the e sound linger in the night. I can smell the wolf now, and the smoke drifting across the clearing and the dried vegetable soup I boiled for my boring dinner. I can smell the cold air blowing softly from the mountain passes, brushing at the skin of my face. The blue moonlight is almost as bright as the middle of a winter day.

  I lower the rifle. I walk back past the black wolf to the cabin door with my father’s gun dangling by my side and a pack full of ancient, probably moldy, food on my back. As I get close, the wolf draws back and runs into the shadows to join his pack. Wolves don’t hurt people anyway, at least almost never. It’s mostly Brooks I’m worried about.

  “Liar!” I say out loud, and, startled, I laugh. The sound is weird in the dark.

  Branches crack as the pack lopes away. From a distance, they howl and pause and howl again. I can’t tell where the song is coming from.

  Brooks is getting better. In that moment I know it.

  I’ve never been so happy. Happiness wells inside me and makes me sing.

  That’s what happiness feels like, I think: the need to sing.

  16

  Undercurrents

  Brooks sits, head cocked to the side, staring at me and licking his muzzle, a ridiculous blend of husky fur and hound ears and loose folds of skin on his face. “Not bad, eh?” I jam the rifle against my shoulder and shoot again. A puff of snow falls from the stump I’m shooting at. “Always was a good shot, Brooks.”

  Brooks yawns and stretches his front legs.

  I stand, brushing snow off my red lumberjack shirt and wool pants. Dad’s actually; I found them in the cache. Every day I hump a box down the ladder and drag it into the cabin to sift through at night. Brooks dives through the snow, digging a trough with his long nose. I lean the gun against a trunk and hug him. I’m not taking any chances. “I’m soaking your cut again tonight,” I tell him, “and you’d better keep it clean.”

  Brooks is running, nose to a rabbit’s tracks. The raven lands on a spruce branch, dislodging snow, and acks at us loudly. Ice is barely flowing now. Soon the river will be solid ice.

  The raven flaps low to the ground in front of Brooks to get his attention. Ravens live so long they must get bored with the regular turn of the seasons. Amusement can be in short supply in the bush. The raven dives at Brooks’s tail and at the last moment flies up with a great flapping of black wings. I stare. I don’t believe this raven.

  Warm air hums and strums its way above the trees and wafts through the clearing. I wrinkle my nose and breathe in great draughts of spruce needles and Labrador tea and willow and a more robust flavor, like caribou, just a hint. “Lunch, Brooks.”

  I leave the door open so the wind plays through the cabin. I stand beside the cherry red cookstove with the fresh air blowing on my bare head as I fry bannock. Drops of ancient grease fly from the pan and ping on the metal, stinging my eyes with smoke.

  When it’s golden and crunchy, I chuck the bannock from hand to hand to cool. Then I spread it with Mom’s cranberry jam that I’ve thawed above the stove all night. I bet I helped her pick the berries. Probably we all did: long family days in the fall with the sun lower and lower each day and finally not rising at all, and the five-gallon buckets humped in our small hands when we refused to give them up.

  I remember Dad singing old hobo songs and Mom, giving up on berries, carving against a tree trunk while the rest of us picked. And I remember the feel of sunshine on my face and the smell of cranberries and the mingling odors of leaf litter pressing against my nose. I used to squint my eyes shut and sniff. Mom’s hair smelled like sunshine when I leaned against her shoulder.

  Sometimes Dad dropped beside her and they hugged. Then he would pull me close to them and poke me, and I’d laugh and wander off to play with Becky.

  I throw Brooks half the bannock and wolf the rest down, leaning against the open doorway. The warm weather should blow away by night, but it’s relaxing now. The river is empty of fish for the winter. Snowshoe hares don’t need trails yet; the snow isn’t deep enough. They can still run wherever they like. There’s no point in setting snares in the forest, but later I will.

  The raven lands with fluffed feathers and bobs his head, hopping across the snow. “Fine,” I laugh, and chuck him a burnt bit. He flaps off with bannock in beak, and a while later I see him circling above the river. You take your friends where you can find them here.

  And then it’s night again. It comes so early now that I’m restless. Leaving Brooks on the parka so he’s cozy, I stroll downriver again, Dad’s rifle in hand to make me feel safer. As backup, I keep a can of bear spray tucked in my inside parka pocket so it won’t freeze.

  I can’t smell the forest carried on currents of warm wind anymore. Above me, the moon and a million stars shine and bounce light from the skiff of snow. I see marten tracks and scattered
three-point rabbit tracks and high-bush cranberry laden with red berries. I pick a handful and let them thaw in my mouth.

  I wander for miles, without thinking much, while the moon travels above the mountains and the northern lights jig above the black horizon. I try the new shelf ice for a while, but I’m nervous, ears straining for a crack. Breaking off a dead spruce pole, I plant it hard into the ice before each step. The stick thuds safely. Really, using it is just slowing me down.

  Without warning, the pole breaks through. Cracks spread like spider webs across the fresh ice.

  I jump back as the current snatches the pole from my hands. It hesitates, bobbing at the far lip of the hole, before it is sucked under. Adrenaline swarms through my whole body like a hive of bees. Ice shifts under my feet. Cracks boomerang. The whole system is breaking up. I walk heel to toe backward, Dad’s rifle over my shoulder. Scrambling up the bank, I hear myself panting.

  Without the pole I would be under the ice.

  I imagine myself carried by the current under the ice, trying to shoot through a moonlit hole. I’d catch a glimpse of night sky and then a ceiling of ice as I hurtled by.

  Worse, I can picture it happening to Dad. I’d never know.

  The warm cabin and tea sound pretty appealing. I make for home and Brooks, following in my old footsteps. If I’d gone under, Brooks would probably have died of thirst in the cabin.

  There’s no lamplight shining through the clearing, but I creak open the door. Not a sound except a breeze playing in the stovepipe.

  “Brooks?”

  Brooks jumps from a deep sleep and wanders over to nuzzle and push against my legs. I grope for the matches on the table and light the lamp; the soft yellow light shines on us both. From the safety ring on the stove, a faint red glow peeks out, and I open it and shove in more wood and shoulder off my outdoor clothes. Through the open doorway a silver-blue bar of moonlight fingers the floorboards.

  I close the door and hug Brooks against my legs so I can play with his ears. Then I pour warm water from the kettle into the washbasin and get him to lie on his side. Cloth poised, I realize the wound has sealed. I lay warm compresses steeped in moss tea over the wound awhile until it softens. No pus beads along the scar. Nor does Brooks flinch.

  “I love you, puppy,” I whisper in sheer relief that we’re both alive. “Maybe tomorrow you can come too. But we’ll stay off the ice.”

  That night I sleep with my arm around Brooks and no bad dreams seep in, though the stove flares up and I wake to the play of firelight reflected on the log walls and have to throw water in the stove. A blast of smoke chokes me, and I open the door and stare out into the night. Far off I hear the wolves howling their individual notes. A sudden gust of wind shakes the ice floes in the river. They shudder and crash, rearing against each other. I shiver and watch a star falling through the sky.

  Then I shove more chunks of wood on the tamed fire and crawl back into bed. And again I sleep without dreams and wake hungry to a snow-bright day.

  17

  The Snow Queen

  “Of course we could live on oats and flour and rice until Mom gets here,” I say. Brooks sits, licking his lips as he waits for me to hand over my breakfast. Saliva trails from the corner of his mouth. I’m ravenous. Maybe I’ll give him the bowl to lick. “But I’d love to get some fresh meat.”

  Later I walk, with Brooks at heel, down the only trail we can use until the rivers freeze solid. Every hundred feet, we stop and scan the horizon and the mountainsides, and then I peer through the low, wild, gray forest. I watch particularly for movement, not just of animals themselves but also of branches they may have brushed. Then I scan once again for anything sticking out, too much regularity or an unusual shade. Before moving again, Brooks breathes in a great symphony of smells, a tapestry of wild scents. I sniff beside him, pulling air through my nostrils until my lungs feel full. Brooks moves, head down, sniffing tracks. Once, I lie on my stomach and close my eyes, breathing hard next to a rabbit track.

  Nothing. Maybe humans had hunter noses at one time, but we haven’t needed them for centuries.

  Do blind people develop a more acute sense of smell as well as hearing?

  I walk on, noting where the river still flows some places in an open channel and some places over top of ice that is surging beneath the surface. Details are sharper in the cold air today; spruce needles on boughs and leftover birds’ nests in the crotch of willow branches stand out as if seen through my monocle. Back home, both stoves are full and the cache ladder is leaning against a nearby spruce tree so I can lift it easily back into place, but no passing creatures can climb into the cache. A kettle of water is hissing at the far edge of the cookstove so it will stay hot but not boil. A box of wooden matches, decorated with an eagle in flight, lies on the table where I can grope for it even after dark.

  Loose matches are in my coat pocket too. At the point where we decide to return, I pull one out and strike the sulfur tip against a rock on a gravel bar where we once camped. I break off old-man’s beard and crumple it into a heap, hold the match to the pile and blow. Flames catch the lichen and then twigs and branches.

  I pick the roundest rocks and juggle. In gloves, the rocks feel different. I need to concentrate more. I keep up a regular cascade until the fire is burning smoothly with driftwood. I try the “snatching from above” trick and the “behind the back.” Not enough flexibility with a coat so I shrug it off, stoking the fire even higher.

  Before leaving, I push three straight sticks into the flames so only the ends catch fire. I pull them out, fire licking down the wood, and throw the torches toward the sky. I hear the whoosh of flame each time a stick flies. There’s a second when the fire is directly above my face. I force myself not to blink, and then their fire goes out.

  I keep juggling with the charred sticks—obviously there must be a better way to keep them lit. Brooks curls by the fire and sleeps. I juggle until my feet, stuck in home position, begin to stab from cold. Then I chuck my torches on the bonfire. No need to douse the flames on a gravel bar with the snow falling.

  Snow is falling in fat soft flakes that fill the sky, dancing like dust motes through a window.

  On the way home I notice them.

  Over my tracks, over Brooks’s tracks is another set of bear prints. The bear followed us downriver. He must have been standing in the shadows while I juggled. He was watching from the snow and Brooks didn’t even catch his scent. I cup my hands around my mouth and yodel loudly in the direction the tracks have taken. “Leave us alone, bear,” I say. “That’s enough.”

  I’m starving when I get back to the cabin. I devour a spoonful of brown sugar, grain by grain, while I wait for porridge to boil: dry flakes turning to mush and spluttering to the surface only to be dragged down again into the bowels of the pot. I share with Brooks, even though I’d rather not. Hunger tears at my stomach. I drink cup after cup of black tea and read “The Snow Queen” out loud to make it last.

  I’ve been forgetting about fairy tales. I read a page and lick my finger to turn it over, holding the book close to my face. I smell faint traces of must from the years the book lay in the cache while the winds from the passes blew through the open spaces between its log walls.

  “The Snow Queen” is about a young girl, Greta, whose dearest friend, a boy named Kay, wanders off with the Snow Queen because he has a magic sliver of ice in his heart that makes him hard and cruel. None of this is his fault, Greta is sure. It’s the Snow Queen’s way of casting a spell.

  Greta, of course, goes taking off in pursuit of Kay.

  An old woman in a wooden cottage built into a hillside writes directions for Greta on a fish skin.

  Back in the cabin I smell the paper again, and this time it smells like dry fish in a cold underground house. Of course, it could be just the general smell in the air from all the fish I’ve boiled here. I grab a stack of moldy paper and a pencil from a shelf. I know what this story says already. This time I’m going to write my own.<
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  “For whom do you wander?” asks the bent old crone. “For whom do you search?”

  And then Greta, who’s taken leave of her senses in the warmth of the buried home, remembers her sweet friend and the ice that had lodged in his heart. It is time to be gone, to be searching once again. She knows that’s what she came for, though she no longer understands why. Maybe, since her friend left, she should accept his decision and believe that’s what it is. After all, she has no proof otherwise.

  But in the end, she begs forgiveness from the old woman for being unable to tarry. That very morning, before the moon sinks below the horizon, Greta will journey, she’s decided, to the Castle of the Snow Queen, far away toward the gray line of horizon.

  As she shuts the old woman’s door, the wind grabs it and rips the handle from her hands. Smoke from the chimney blows flat, in a sheet, along the ground. Snowflakes, however, are not falling but jump about like popcorn on a hot stove. Greta laughs and catches several with her tongue before moving away from the safety of the now invisible shelter onto the white trackless plain.

  But as Greta ventures out from the mound containing the old woman’s home, she finds caribou tracks, a sign that other creatures have wandered this way. At first she sees only a few, then troughs through the snow where great wild herds have trotted. Greta can stay on these trails by the feel of hard-packed snow under her feet. And as she wends her way down the invisible route, her thoughts fly to her friend and his frozen heart and the wickedness of the Queen who led him so far astray. As the night passes, creatures of the taiga stare out from the storm so Greta sees only the shining of their eyes for a moment through the swirling flakes of snow; then darkness breaks about them.

  Greta is cold but she is also content. There’s nowhere on this Earth she’d rather be. Something in her heart answers the wildness of the storm. How unfortunate, she thinks, that I am seeking a friend who perhaps doesn’t even care to be sought. How lacking in good fortune that this fierce beauty cannot penetrate my own heart, that the fate of the old crone in need of a helper cannot move me as does the fate of my long-departed friend.