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.

Brooks sits before me, eyes tracing each movement.

“Let’s take the day off, Brooks,” I say, packing the balls away for the day.

An idea comes to me as I speak. “We’ll just leave everything here and walk up this draw along the creek. Maybe I’ll see something with the monocle from the ridge.”

I fill Brooks’s pack with cheese and nuts, drop the monocle in a shirt pocket and snap on my waist belt filled with bangers and bear spray and bug dope. We climb a knoll through dwarf birch and look back at my camp. A smudge of campfire smoke still drifts across the tundra. I think about returning to put it out, but the tundra is wet. It shouldn’t burn.

The brush is thick, and I need both arms to push my way through. Brooks gets stuck again and again with his pack. He whines and turns to bite himself free. I haul on his collar.

I haven’t eaten breakfast. I put my hands on my stomach.

It’s sunken in. I’m not hungry, of course. At home I mostly eat in bed at night while I read. Here I can’t do that.

Ahead I see an open patch covered with dried bearberry and blueberry leaves like a splash of spilled red wine. The golden bear is grazing in the berry patch. He is minding his own business, shoveling berries—leaves and all—between his loose black lips. Startled, he glances over at us and shakes his head.

Brooks dashes to the bear and stands by its head, barking his foolish head off. Like a boxer, he dances back and forth. The bear lifts his massive head, crowberry plants trailing out both sides of his mouth.

Brooks nips at its front leg. Like a demented terrier, he grasps the leg between his jaws, his whole body tossing with the effort.

“Brooks!”

No response.

The bear makes a grating sound like he’s grinding his teeth.

“Come!”

I see a paw with claws like hunting knives reach up and swipe through the bright air. Then Brooks is on the ground, lost under a mountain of shaking fur.

“No!” Not my voice. Not my voice at all.

Brooks screams; the bear grunts. Brooks is between the bear’s jaws now, being shaken back and forth like a towel. His ears hang down.

I screw the cylinder of gunpowder into the banger.

I want to run. It’s such an enormous effort not to.

Instead I point the banger into the air and then lower it a fraction so the flare will explode slightly toward me. I don’t want the bear to be scared in my direction. I pull back on the safety and, almost in the same motion, grab my bear spray from its holster and yank off its safety just in case the bear won’t leave.

The flare explodes with an orange tail.

The bear is running low to the ground. I see his yellow stripe rippling from head to tail, shoulder hump pumping as he escapes. Pee dribbles between his back legs. I can smell it, sour and hot.

I screw in another flare and watch it explode.

Willow branches snap back and forth. Behind the bear, bushes shake until gradually they still.

No birds.

Brooks lies on the ground without moving, his green pack ripped open.

The cheese is bloody. So are the nuts. Brooks’s blood blends with the red plants of the tundra.

I pick up the empty gunpowder shells from the earth and stick them in my pocket. I don’t know why; they’re completely useless but I want to hang on to them.

Then someone is screaming. Noises pour from my mouth. I fold my arms around my chest to keep them in.

Everything I love disappears. I’ll never see our cabin again. My father won’t come back. And now, neither will Brooks. There’s just loss, like the ball at hip level vanishing behind my back with a slight upward tilt.

“Becky’s happy,” said Mom. “She runs her dogs and she’s living her own dreams. You need to let go of what happened to Dad.

Remember the good times and what he was like then.”

“But there’s nothing left, Mom,” I said.

“You’ll always have your memories.”

“You can’t eat memories,” I said, before I could think. “And nothing else tastes good.”

I put my arms around Brooks’s neck and hold him. I’m lying on blood. I wriggle out of my sweater and place it on his flank, behind his pack.

My feelings are still somewhat frozen, but my memories are growing stronger. They unfold with all my senses involved: sight and smell and hearing and touch and even taste. They’re a time machine, and I can work the controls at will. It’s just a little trickier staying in the present.

Then Brooks picks up his head and licks my face.

He’s alive.

Barely, but he’s alive.

If he has to die, I want him to die this very second. That way neither of us will suffer. It’s childish and it’s selfish and I shouldn’t feel like that. But for this moment, I do.

I take the bags of bloody cheese and nuts and hurl them with all my strength down the mountain. Then I stand, hands over my face, and force myself to breathe slowly. It’s so hard to tear away my hands. I don’t want to see mountains all around me. I don’t want to see that I’m completely alone.

The pack saved his life. The fabric is torn and the deepest wound slashes along his left flank, sparing his belly. The rest are just scratches.

“It’s okay, puppy,” I murmur. “It’s okay.” I don’t look too closely or I’ll throw up.

I knot the pack around my waist and spend a few minutes searching with the monocle for an open route down the draw back to camp. Brooks lies on his belly and licks his wound. For a moment I scan farther. No smoke, no hidden camps with Dad about to charge out and help.

I scoop Brooks into my arms so he lies crosswise with his wound on the outside. Good thing I’m used to carrying a heavy pack. I carry Brooks as far as I can down the mountain.

When I collapse, I stroke him, both of us lying on the slope.

Without warning, I’m mad. Anger breaks over me. “What an idiot! The bear just wanted to be left alone. Was that too much to ask?”

I stand and walk off a few steps.

Brooks drags himself behind me.

“You could have got me killed too,” I shout.

Brooks lies perfectly still on his belly and whines.

My stomach cramps. I retch into the willows but nothing comes out. I haven’t eaten since yesterday. The ravens can devour the bloody lunch for all I care. Silence screeches in my ears. What am I doing? Brooks is in pain. And there’s no one else here to take charge.

“Come on, Brooks,” I coax.

Sunshine disappears from the valley below. Stars wink overhead.

“You can do it, puppy,” I tell him.

And he does, dragging one leg.

We get back to camp in the dark. I grope in my pack for my flashlight. I poke in the fire-pit ashes for a spark, but nothing glows. I’m trembling with cold and shock. It’s too dark to find kindling. I need to calm down, to focus on something else. That’s what my story does, I think. It takes me somewhere else.

The prince and the princess were still on their quest, searching for the lake of true stories where the white birds roosted, when the prince was captured by the Guardians of the Lake. Days of wandering later, the princess too was discovered. She was sleeping in a sun-drenched glade, sparrows twittering on branches above her grass bed, bees lazily droning amongst yellow poppies and blue gentians.

The guards led the princess to the stone-walled dungeon. One guard marched ahead, holding an oil lamp. The princess ran her hand along the wall as she stumbled through the dark hallways, hoping to memorize the return route. They slammed the cell door. She watched the last flicker of light retreat. The dungeon smelled of mold. Far off she heard water dripping.

I haul Brooks to the tent door and push him in.

He smells like meat and fresh blood. The smell will advertise us to animals passing in the night. Don’t think about it, I tell myself. Lock the image of that bear out of your mind.

I sit down, kick off my boots, arrange my defenses inside one boot by my head and go to sleep, an arm flung over Brooks. I will myself not to dream. In the morning, I think, I’ll decide what to do. It wasn’t the bear’s fault. It’s not like he was vicious or cruel. He was only trying to eat some berries.

My sleep is empty, a long blank hallway with slammed doors on both sides. When I wake once, I force myself to concentrate on my story.