“Bread,” he said quietly, “I’m sorry.”
Bread shook his head.
This made Fish’s chest tighten. He had to whisper as he spoke. “You don’t understand.”
Bread looked at him, stubbornness in his eyes. “Fish, if you didn’t come back when you did, and done what you did—” He stopped. “It was different this time. Worse.”
Fish’s vision blurred.
“Bread. There’s something you don’t know. My dad—”
As he opened his mouth to confess, the shoreline broke open with noise. Branches cracked. River grass fell down in heaps. There was the sound of something yelling, or screaming. It filled the forest and sent Bread and Fish scrambling to their feet. The closest thing to it that Fish ever heard was the baying of a calf, but there weren’t any calves in the woods, not this far out. The river grass thrashed again and moved in waves, along with that awful baying. It sounded tortured, whatever it was.
And then the boys saw it, saw them.
A black bear cub bounded onto the shoreline near the trees. It scrambled and fell and turned onto its back and kicked its legs at four attacking coyotes. The coyotes took turns lunging at the cub, distracting it, dividing its defenses.
Fish glanced over at Bread, who was staring openmouthed at the cruelty of the scene unfolding before them. The cub bayed and lashed out at one of the coyotes’ snouts, gained its feet again, and bolted twenty yards farther downstream. The coyotes sprinted and caught it easily, nipping at the cub’s haunches. The cub fell again and lifted its paws. The coyotes circled, and the cub twisted and lashed out as each one came in snapping and growling. The coyotes moved so quickly and with such precision, and the cub so comparatively slowly and with such panic, that it was clear who would eventually win.
Fish saw Bread rustling around in his pack. When Bread stood up, he was holding the revolver.
“Gimme the rest of them shells, Fish!”
Fish dug into the chest pocket of his flannel. He scooped out the four remaining cartridges and handed them to Bread.
“What are you gonna do?” Fish asked. He found himself short of breath. He knew things had to kill to eat. He and his grandfather killed to eat. But to watch it like this, coyotes taking out a cub with their teeth, was horrible to witness.
“I’m gonna shoot off them coyotes,” said Bread, fitting the thick cartridges into the massive cylinder. His hands shook as he did it, but he managed to close the thing and cocked the hammer and took aim.
Fish, seeing it coming this time, covered his ears. Bread narrowed his eyes at the coyotes, and the barrel drifted a bit as it found a mark. Bread’s hands tightened on the grip and his finger began to squeeze. Even with his ears covered, Fish could still hear the awful baying of the cub, but when he turned toward the revolver’s point of aim, squinting in anticipation of the muzzle blast, the cedars behind the coyotes exploded, and it wasn’t from a gunshot. Bread never fired. The trees shook to their tops. A strange blackness shot forward, quick as an owl’s shadow. The coyote nearest the shadow yelped, cartwheeled, and landed, still as a stone, in the mud.
Fish took his hands from his ears. And then he heard it, and then he saw it, the massive shadow spiked with black hackles, raging through the underbrush, attacking the coyotes, moaning with wrath so great it shook the river and made Fish’s knees go weak. It was a black bear, a very big one. The remaining coyotes recoiled in panic. The cub regained its footing and scrambled up the nearest birch tree. The cub reached a fork in the trunk and sat baying into the morning sky as its mother killed. One coyote spun just in time to see the sow come down on it from behind. It tried to retreat by jumping backward, but it was too late. The sow grabbed the coyote’s hunched back with its forepaws and crushed it, followed up immediately with moaning jaws—silent for the split second they clamped the coyote’s skull.
Bread lowered the revolver. An openmouthed grin formed on his face. Fish met his grin and nodded.
“Mama came” was all he could say. And it sounded so silly to say it, but he said it again as he watched, to affirm in some way the miracle. “That’s mama bear!”
The cub bayed and the sow bellowed as the other two coyotes circled a moment more. They were overwhelmed by ferocity. They circled once or twice, defensively, no longer hungry. The bear turned toward whichever was closer, rocking back and forth in the cattails on her massive paws, popping her lips in menace.
The coyotes lowered their tails and fled inland. The cub bayed in its tree. The sow watched the coyotes run off, huffed, circled, and then answered her cub. Bread and Fish, caught up in it, cheered. They hooted and howled, unable to resist celebrating such a triumph. And then they realized their mistake. When the boys made their noise, the distracted sow spun and rose up on its haunches. She popped her lips and exposed her gums and teeth. She was still primed for battle. Fish realized then what she must have seen—a raft covered in skulls and snouts and glaring eye sockets, yipping like coyotes. The boys were silenced.
When she charged at them through the river grass, Fish fell backward. The grass parted like fire. It was amazing the speed at which so large an animal could move, and all Fish could do was stare, raise his hands, fingers outstretched as if to hold the bear at bay. The sow crashed into the river muck and sent waves toward the raft. Bread still held the pistol in his hand, seemed to remember it was there, and took aim. As Bread’s knuckle tightened on the trigger, Fish was met by an overwhelming certainty that something irrevocable was about to be broken. Some set order, some good plan, was about to shatter if Bread pulled that trigger. Fish had recognized something in the bellow of that sow that he couldn’t put his finger on. It was the same noise he’d heard in his dream, the sort of roar that sets the briars on fire.
“Stop!” yelled Fish, surprised to hear the roar in his own voice, and more surprised by its effect.
Everything but the raft froze in place. The sow stopped in her tracks, huffed through her nose, muddied ripples emanating from her legs. Bread sat with the revolver’s muzzle outstretched, shaking, knuckle tight. And then the sow reared up on her hind legs and let out a baleful noise that rose from her bowels and made Fish cover his ears. The bear had to be eight or nine feet tall. Her muddy forepaws stirred the air. Her jowls shook as she moaned. The sound was so similar to the sound in his dream that he feared he might be dreaming now, that the cattails might erupt. When the roar ceased, the forest grew silent. The sow watched the raft, let herself down onto her forelegs. Fish heard the revolver rattling against the wooden railing where Bread still steadied it. And with all held just so, the raft drifted away in the black water. The sow stood. The cub watched, blinked its shiny black eyes. And all remained that way for a long time, until the raft drifted downriver and the bear out of sight and the sky turned white overhead. For the next ten miles, still cold, still damp, Fish could feel the sow’s bellow in his mind, in his bones. He thought of his own mother, her talk of visions and dreams. He felt as if the wilderness was trying to answer a question he couldn’t remember asking.
“THERE. NOW YOU KNOW,” MIRANDA SAID, THREADING THE BRUSH A final time through Tiffany’s hair. Tiffany ran her hand experimentally through the tangles she’d been trying to tease out by the campfire. She laughed out loud when Miranda first produced a hairbrush from her pack. The woman was prepared. And Tiffany felt awkward at first when Miranda offered to brush it out for her. She sat rigidly on the tree stump near the fire, letting the older woman smooth and tame her hair. But it felt good, and Tiffany eventually relaxed into it, ridiculous as it was.
Tiffany remained quiet for a time. The sky was pink and blue and orange overhead, the first sign of true daylight. Soon it would be time to get back on the river. “Thank you,” Tiffany said, nearly a whisper.
They stopped at this place an hour or so before first light. When Miranda had edged the canoe toward shore, tied off, and grabbed her pack, Tiffany was confused.
“What are we stopping for?” she asked.
“We n
eed to wait for daylight before running the rapids.”
“About that,” Tiffany began, climbing out of the canoe—she’d just gotten the knack of paddling in flat water—but Miranda was already striding away in the darkness to a promontory downstream. Tiffany heard the river before she saw it, the rumble of water, a soft hum in the rocks she walked on. When she reached the shoreline, she reeled. There in the starlight churned a raging stretch of whitewater, shining its way downriver as far as she could see. She could make out an island in the river, whitewater in both channels. Boulders poked through the froth in places, creating pillows of water and churning pools. Tiffany closed her eyes. She felt her throat become very dry.
“Couldn’t we just go around it, you know, carry the canoe? What’s the word?”
“Portage,” Miranda said, her eyes not leaving the river.
“Yes,” said Tiffany, forcing a smile in the darkness, “let’s definitely portage.”
Miranda shook her head. “We could, but it will take us two or three hours to drag the gear and canoe. If we run the rapids, it will take us about two or three minutes. Besides, I ran this stretch when I was younger. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“I think I’m for dragging,” Tiffany said. “Dragging is good. I like dragging canoes.”
Miranda touched Tiffany’s elbow and smiled. “We’ll use the time until daylight to warm up and eat. When the sun rises, if you still don’t like the look of it, you can hike down and I’ll run the canoe myself.”
This denim-clad woman was filled with power. Tiffany felt both inspired and inadequate in her presence. Miranda was like a poem. The inertia, the turn, the confidence. Great poems inspired Tiffany to write as often as they discouraged her. Who could write like Dickinson? Like Whitman? There was something supernatural about a great poem, and there was something supernatural about Miranda too. Tiffany once came across a word in her reading that described the sensation—numinous. It meant to be marked by the presence of divinity, to be more than met the eye, things and words and people indwelt with a larger heartbeat, a larger breath. Once again, all Tiffany felt she could do was totter along behind this woman.
They dropped their gear on a flattened grassy area near a large split stone with a cedar growing from its center. Tiffany watched as Miranda prepared to start a fire. Miranda made a small nest of cedar twigs and birch bark, collected some larger pieces of wood, then crouched with her flint and knife. Tiffany knelt to watch more closely.
“I’ve never seen it done like this,” she said.
Miranda smiled and then paused, appearing to realize she was being asked for more than a mere demonstration. “So most people, if you hand them a rod and a knife, tend to go at it something like this.” Miranda held the tip of the flint into the nest of fibers and feigned a stroke or two along the stationary flint with the spine of her knife blade. “The problem with that is you’ll knock over your tinder in the process. You’ll get sparks, but they’ll scatter. They won’t catch.”
“So what’s the right way?”
“Hold the blade real still near the tinder and pull the flint away from the pile—like this.” Miranda made a fist around the handle of her knife, placed the flint beneath it, and scraped the flint sharply away from the tinder. The knife blade and tinder remained unmoved, and a shower of bright sparks accumulated in the same concentrated spot. They glowed for a moment, then went out.
“Neat, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yes, it is.”
“Here, you can try it.”
Tiffany pushed back, shaking her head.
“There’s nothing to it,” Miranda said, placing the flint in her hand. “And it’d be good for you to practice in case we get separated out here.”
The word separated tumbled along Tiffany’s spine, and Tiffany couldn’t tell if it was fear or excitement. After only a few hours in the canoe, she felt more competent. She laughed at herself—Tiffany, the frontier woman. She pictured herself in a jerkin and coon cap, the desirable mountain woman from a Zane Grey novel, seductive and capable of skinning her own deer. But the thing was, those women all had stables of cowboys pining after them, men they could send outside for more firewood when the weather turned cold. Tiffany had never seduced a man or skinned a deer. Not in real life.
Tiffany took a tentative practice stroke with the flint and was pleased to see a few sparks spray onto the dirt.
“A little more pressure,” said Miranda. “And remember, the flint moves, not the knife.”
Tiffany braced the knife over the tinder pile, wiggled her flint in beneath it, and then, increasing the pressure between blade and flint, drew the flint away from the tinder. An intense shower of sparks piled up on the birch bark. The glow worked its way along the papery tendrils.
“Okay, quickly now, but gently—give it some air.”
“What?”
“Breathe on it.”
Tiffany had seen this in movies, a cowboy blowing on a fire. So she knelt down and nudged air through her pursed lips, as if whispering to it. The glow became brighter and consumed more of the birch bark. She took in another breath and blew again, whispering louder, and the glow found a twig and leapt into flame with a nearly inaudible whoof.
Tiffany sat up, thrilled with herself. The smaller twigs caught and consumed themselves. Miranda showed her how to place larger and larger twigs onto the fire, then sticks, then branches from a white pine, which burned hot and noisily. The flames lit up the darkness, warmed it, tamed and softened it. Tiffany felt less forlorn.
“Nice fire,” said Miranda.
“It is.”
Miranda stepped away while Tiffany admired the flames. She looked at the knife and flint. “Would have been handy last summer,” she said to herself. She’d never allowed herself a large campfire while homeless and squatting in cornfields. She boiled her eggs in creek water over a small camp stove until the stove ran out of gas. By that time, fall had come, and Burt Akinson came out because of the stolen chicken, and after that she started small fires with her Bic, and stole chickens from other farmers. But there was something beautiful, something numinous, about starting a fire with sparks. She could have used that, all of that.
“Say again?” said Miranda, rooting through a pack.
Tiffany shook her head.
After the fire had burned for some time, Miranda raked aside a few coals and set two opened cans of chicken soup on top of them. When the soup was hot, they ate it hungrily, blowing on each spoonful. They added more wood to the fire and watched the sky for any sign of daylight. It wasn’t until Tiffany started toying a few knots from her tangled hair that Miranda disappeared into the darkness and reappeared with the brush.
“I thought we were roughing it,” said Tiffany, reaching out for it.
Miranda drew it back to her chest. “May I?” she asked.
“Oh,” Tiffany said, biting her lip for the briefest moment. “Okay.”
Miranda smiled, sat next to her on the cedar log, and motioned for Tiffany to turn her back toward her. Tiffany complied. The brush pulled deftly along her temples and the back of her neck before working upward from the tips of her hair. It felt wonderful. Tiffany laughed out loud.
“I’ve never had my hair brushed before,” she said.
The brushing stopped abruptly, then resumed. “What do you mean?” Miranda asked.
“I mean, no one’s ever brushed my hair. I didn’t even brush it myself until first grade. The school nurse taught me.”
The brushing stopped again. Miranda’s voice was cautious now. “Your mom never brushed it?”
Tiffany shook her head.
“Friends?”
No.
“Well,” Miranda said, running her hands through it to gauge her progress. “It is lovely hair. It deserves to be brushed. It is worthy of brushing.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“Say what?”
“What you just said.”
Miranda paused again. Tiffany sat forward a bi
t. It was difficult being spoken to that way when she’d grown so accustomed to its absence. She had a grandmother who called her pretty girl a few times, but it always sounded as if she was speaking to a parrot. And there was that boy with cigarette breath who called her pretty once, but he said it so he could kiss her, and when he tried to do more than kiss her she kicked him in the stomach, and that was the last boyfriend she ever had. That was in seventh grade, after which the decent boys wouldn’t talk to her, and none of the girls. She wanted to tell her mother about it, but the woman had a way of playing solitaire in front of the TV that walled the world off, and little girls too. Tiffany wasn’t worth the time. She’d gotten used to it.
“I think the sun’s coming up now, Miranda,” said Tiffany in far too quiet a voice.
There were indeed the slightest purple hints of dawn behind the tops of the cedar trees. To Tiffany the cedars looked like torn construction paper pasted against the stars. She inhaled.
“The sun is not up yet,” Miranda said in a voice that seemed both gentle and fierce. “And the sun is not allowed to come up until I finish brushing your hair. Okay?”
“Okay,” whispered Tiffany.
After Miranda put out the fire they loaded the canoe. The sky was orange and red and blue now, and Tiffany’s hair felt as light on her neck as the wisps of clouds overhead. Something had occurred in the darkness of the previous hour that didn’t need to be spoken of in the light—like a gift or secret that can be received in silence. That’s all she could call it. And she accepted the warmth of it, which both frightened and thrilled her. As she stowed her gear quietly in the canoe, a new thought came to mind. The problem with her poem wasn’t that the coyote had no aim. The problem was that the coyote ran alone. Coyotes have packs. They have tribes. Her coyote needed a pack. Tiffany would write in a pack somehow. She tugged a tight knot into her gear rope and made note of the revision in her mind.
They hadn’t worn the life vests before, but now Miranda insisted they put them on. Tiffany tugged the straps of hers more tightly around her torso, while Miranda secured a few lines that held a tarp over the gunwales, to keep out as much water as possible. Satisfied, she removed the mooring line she’d tied to a birch tree.
Raft of Stars Page 17