Free Juggling Fire by Joanne Bell Page B

forest.

9

Moving On
    Clumps of willows hide the closed door. Raspberry and rosehip bushes tangle against the log walls. Empty windows trail strips of moldering cloth like prayer flags. I unbolt the door and push hard. It doesn’t budge.
    It’s not our main cabin, of course—just some little line cabin that someone once threw up for overnights while traveling. I must have been here when I was little, but I can’t remember, though it seems familiar. The building has sunk crookedly into the permafrost, taking the doorframe with it. No way will it open without the floor inside being dug out.
    I crawl in through the window hole and squint into the gloom.
    An ax lies flat on a drying rack above a tin cookstove.
    “Yes!” I shout to Brooks, who’s waiting outside. I chop at the floorboards until I can swing the door open. Brooks slinks in and collapses, exhausted. Shafts of evening light stream through, revealing a filthy floor littered with squirrel debris: cones, dried mushrooms, tattered cloth.
    A white quarter moon floats into a V between peaks and hangs in the branches of a cottonwood. A twig broom stands behind the door. I sweep the floor and the pole bed at the far wall by flashlight. In my pack is a box of candles. I place one on a table and one in an iron candleholder jutting out from between two logs. A box of kindling and another of spruce chunks is by the stove. It’s all familiar, I realize, lighting the fire. I’ve been here before—I must have been really little.
    I wait outside while the chimney clears; then I make the bed, keeping the door open, working by the moonlight slanting over the floorboards. Pictures are tacked along the walls, cutouts from magazines. In the dusk I can’t make out what they are. I tuck my tent into one window hole and my tarp into the other to keep in the warmth.
    I pry the lid from a tin: smells like black tea. I boil water in my own pot and throw in a pinch of the leaves. Maybe Dad stayed here. Maybe he lived here for a long time while Mom searched the cabin and we stayed with the neighbors. Maybe he was returning to us, and he found this place and hurt himself somehow. In the morning I’ll look for a note. If he had no paper, a message could be carved into a log on the wall.
    Brooks has managed to hop to the stove’s side, where he moans and nips at his wound frantically. I get out my spare shirt and dribble it with warm water and my last spoonful of salt. It’s easier when I can’t see the marbled steak of his flank.
    Grunting, I heave Brooks onto the bed and lie down, cocooned by the sturdy walls and the glow of flames through the stove’s open draft. Logs settle as they burn, and a breeze plays in the willows snug against the cabin.
    I wake once when a wind shoots suddenly from the peaks, rattling the stovepipe, plucking at the river’s surface and slamming on through the night. Then the rhythmic wind and the water lull me back to sleep.
    I was very small, and everything was extremely interesting to me. A pack of wolves had been playing near the little line cabin, two days’ short walk from our main cabin. Every morning and afternoon and evening they howled from all directions, but mostly from the hill where Becky and I tobogganed.
    “That’s it. I’m leaving.”
    “Where are you going?” Dad was stirring a five-gallon tin bucket full of dog scraps and grain. It was suspended from a tripod over a bonfire in the clearing. He held the wooden paddle flat in front of him and twirled it once, then twice, like a baton. Then he bowed.
    “I’m getting one, Dad,” I told him, pulling my snow pants over my boots. “I’m getting a baby wolf.”
    Dad followed me down the trail, which was soft and soggy in the spring sunshine. The wolves had a den nearby. Dad’s weight made him sink while I barely scratched the snow’s surface.
    “Go home,” I said. “Wolves don’t like grown-ups.”
    “Nah,” said Dad, shaking snow on us both from an overhanging spruce bough.