She’s so serious.
So concerned.
Stories where animals talk seem like baby-book stuff to me, but I nod at Dvorka and whisper, “Got it.”
The Grizzlies are holding their breath, waiting for this Mokov guy to speak. Even the fire is quiet, not popping or crackling, and the flames seem to be dancing in place, waiting, while the smoke rises straight up.
Finally he begins.
“In the Long Ago, there was no fire in our lands. Lizard was lying in the sun to keep warm when he saw something falling slowly from the skies. ‘What is this?’ he asked as it descended to earth.
“All the people gathered to look. ‘This is ash!’ Coyote exclaimed. ‘There is fire in another country!’
“ ‘We must have fire!’ Rat said. ‘It will keep us warm on winter nights!’
“ ‘But how?’ Rabbit asked. ‘How will we get it?’
“So Coyote made a plan. He and the others followed the winds west, toward the fire. Along the way, Coyote positioned people at stations. ‘Wait here,’ he told Rat at the first station. ‘Wait here,’ he told Rabbit at the next station. He did likewise with the others until at last Coyote arrived at the fire. Many people were dancing around it. He watched patiently, devising a plan to steal the fire. Cleverly, he made a false tail from shredded bark and grasses and entered the dance. The other dancers did not notice anything strange about him until he dipped his false tail in the flames, stole the fire, and fled.
“The dancers, not wanting to share fire, began to chase him. Coyote ran to the first man he had posted and passed the fire to him. This man ran to the next and passed the fire again. And so it went until the fire was passed to Rabbit and then to Rat.
“Still the people chased, demanding fire be returned to them. Rat ran to the top of a tall rock with a sheer face and put fire in a large pile of brush. The people could not reach him and pleaded with him to give their fire back.
“Rat, realizing fire should belong to them all, threw the brush in all directions, where it scattered far and wide and set a spark in all the brush across the lands.” Mokov spreads his arms wide. “And this is why, to this day, you can still make fire from the brush.”
No one says a word when he’s done. They just sit staring into the fire.
“Wow,” one of the Grizzlies finally says. “I’m going to think of that every time I start a fire.”
“Another story?” someone asks.
“Yes, please! Another!” the Grizzlies beg.
So he tells a story about a deadly warrior with a stone shirt who was killing members of a tribe and how Snake found the warrior’s weakness and saved them. As punishment, the stone-shirt warrior’s offspring were turned into terrapin, which Dvorka explains to me is turtles.
And then comes another story about how Packrat got his patches. It’s obviously a story about being deceptive, but I find myself listening to every word. I see myself in Packrat—which is probably the point for all of us here—but, weirdly, I don’t mind. Watching Mokov tell the story by firelight, watching him move his hands or hold them up toward the sky, watching his braids sway like silver snakes on his chest as he speaks, seeing his wrinkles deep with shadows…it’s like he’s something right out of his Long Ago.
There’s also his voice. It flows, soft and warm and deep, and seems to cast a spell around us. About the time he’s done I realize that his stories feel like lullabies. Lullabies from a different world.
Mom used to sing soft, quiet lullabies to Mo.
She used to sing them to me.
A rock forms in my throat when I realize that this feels like that.
Like something from my Long Ago.
Mokov rises to his feet and wishes us peace. We all stand, too, and watch as he turns and walks away, disappearing into the darkness.
I’m up before sunrise, counting out loud at the latrine. John’s sitting by the fire, his man-bun frizzed and frayed, stirring something in his billypot. Everyone else is still in bed.
John keeps an eye on me as I gather twigs and wood from the outskirts of camp and pile them in a clearing away from the other tarp tents. I make a circle out of rocks, and inside it I set up a little tepee of twigs and wood, just like I read about in the handbook. All I need now is to find that cordage. Something I have yet to do because my “room” is a mess.
How many times have I heard that in my life?
But this really is a mess. A dirty, gritty mess. At home, Mom would have threatened and begged and finally broken down and cleaned it, but that’s not happening here. And it’s so bad that even I can’t stand it.
I drag everything from inside the tent, shake it out, dust it off, organize it, and put it back, finally getting the plastic ground cloth laid out flat under everything else.
Nowhere in any of my stuff do I find the “provided” cordage. When I tell John, he says they issued me some and he can’t give me any more. “Are you saying you guys never make a mistake?” I ask. “I’d steal a piece from my tarp cord, but it’s barely long enough as it is.”
“Sorry, Wren” is all I get out of him.
The other Grizzlies and Jude are up now, hanging out with their billypots around the fire, making oatmeal. Jude hasn’t looked too happy lately. And even from across camp I can see the bags under his eyes. Wonder what his deal is.
Whatever.
Like I care?
I turn my focus back to the cooking oatmeal. It smells so good.
It smells so unfair.
I have oatmeal. I have water. I have a billypot and a spoon. I could be making some too, if I could have a little corner of their stupid fire.
Which I can’t, since I’m still on Rabbit.
Which I’ll be on until I can start my own fire.
Which I can’t do without the stupid cordage, and I sure don’t want to waste time making some out of yucca leaves.
I go back to my tarp tent totally tweaked and hungry. But when I kneel down to retie my boot because the lace has come undone, my mood suddenly changes.
Cordage.
Not the stuff they supposedly issued me.
My bootlace!
It’s not flat and cottony like a regular shoelace. It’s round and tough and plenty long enough to string across my bow stick.
I whip it out of my boot grommets, hold it up, and face the oatmeal eaters. “CORDAGE!” I shout. “I’m gonna make me some FIRE!”
Some of them laugh and wave their stick spoons. Jude gives me a halfhearted thumbs-up while John calls, “Inventive!”
I don’t see Dvorka, and Michelle’s just dragging herself out of her tent, looking totally hungover.
“Lazybones!” I call at her. “I’ve been up for hours!”
I hear my mother in my voice, which is weird in a very bad way.
Who says “lazybones”?
Dorky moms, that’s who.
From reading the handbook, what I get is that if I turn the stick in the fire board fast enough, I’ll make a little coal that I can transfer into my “nest” and fan into flames.
So I gather all my fire-kit parts in my extra bandanna and take the handbook with me to my fire ring. Then I sit in the dirt and tie the bootlace onto both ends of the curved stick to make it into a bow, and I twist the middle of the spindle stick into the middle of the lace like the diagram shows. So basically I have something that looks like a crude violin bow with a stick tangled up in it.
Following the directions, I rest the whittled end of the spindle stick in the fire board pilot hole, slip a scrap of wood partly under the notch in the fire board, put the socket rock on top of the spindle with my left hand, put my right foot on top of the fire board to anchor it, take a deep breath, and pull the bow.
In that single pull, the whole thing collapses.
I don’t know why.
I review the diagram in the handbook, assemble the parts again, take a deep breath, and pull.
The whole thing collapses again.
I let out a curse, not knowi
ng Michelle is standing right behind me, ready to assign consequences for my language. All she says, though, is “Your cord isn’t tight enough. It has to be way tighter than you think.”
So I sit back down in the dirt and retie the cord.
“Even tighter,” she says. “It should be hard to twist the spindle in.”
So I pull as hard as I can, wrap the cord in the bow notch, and tie it off.
She nods. “That should do it.”
I have a real hard time twisting the spindle in, but this time everything stays together when I start moving the bow back and forth. The spindle wood squeaks against the fire board. Rrreeerh, rrreeerh, rrreeerh, rrreeerh, rrreeerh, rrreeerh, rrreeerh.
That’s all.
It just squeaks.
“You have to go faster,” Michelle says. “And push down harder with your socket rock. You need friction. Lots of friction.”
So I lean into it, pulling and pushing, pulling and pushing as fast as I can. The cord snakes back and forth around the spindle as the spindle squeaks in the fire board. Rrreeerh, rrreeerh, rrreeerh, rrreeerh, rrreeerh, rrreeerh, rrreeerh.
And then, like a genie rising out of the wood, there’s smoke.
“Smoke!” I cry, thinking that any second the fire board is going to burst into flames.
“Keep going!” Michelle says. “You have to keep at it.”
And then I remember that the fire board’s not supposed to burst into flames. This sawing back and forth is supposed to make a glowing ember that I have to transfer into the tinder-bundle-nest-thing, and that’s what’s supposed to burst into flames.
But…where’s the ember? All I see is smoke. And my arm is getting really tired!
“Don’t stop!” Michelle cries.
“But it’s not working! Where’s the ember?”
“In the fire pan!”
I stop to look.
“No!” she cries, and hits a palm to her forehead.
I pick up the fire board and see a little sooty pile on the piece of wood underneath. “That?”
She sighs. “You were just getting started.”
“Just getting started? My arm is about to fall off!”
“Give it another try.”
So I do.
And I get an ember—a little spot of glowing red in the middle of a small pile of sooty black. I transfer it into the tinder bundle, but the ember goes out.
So I try it again.
And I get another ember.
And the ember goes out in the tinder bundle.
I try once more and the same thing happens. “Why do we have to do this?” I yell at her. “My arm is dead! And what’s wrong with matches? We can have pills to purify water—why can’t we have matches to start a fire? This is stupid!”
She studies me. “Have you had breakfast?”
“I’ve got no food!” I yell at her. “Everything I have has to be cooked! Your rules are stupid!” I point at the campfire, burning away. “Why can’t I just use that?”
She stands up, dusts off, and says, “You’ll get it.” Her voice is calm. Neutral. Like she doesn’t care one way or the other. “And when you do, things will change.” She starts walking off. “If you can start a fire out here, you can start one inside yourself.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She keeps walking. And instead of explaining, she calls, “Soak some oatmeal. Eat it cold. It’s not great, but it’s edible.”
I kick my fire board; I kick the bow.
I hate this place.
I hate it so much.
I eat cold oatmeal. It’s lumpy and gross. It’s not the instant kind, either, so there’s no sugar or flavor. It’s just paste.
I’m wishing I’d saved a few of the dried apricots that Dvorka gave me, but they’re long gone. And adding powdered milk just makes it worse. I flash back to spoon-feeding Mo when he was a baby. His little tongue pushed out more oatmeal than it took in. Now I get why.
Although his oatmeal wasn’t all lumpy-bumpy.
And he didn’t have to eat with a rough wooden spoon.
Gross as it is, I’m still hungry, so I make more. I stick the billypot in the sun and hope some of the building heat from the sky will soften my oatmeal. Then I sit in the dirt in the shade of a juniper tree and watch the rest of the Grizzlies doing some dumb trust-building game. There are blindfolds involved. And zombie walking.
I’d rather eat pasty oatmeal.
After a while, I go to check the billypot oatmeal to see if it’s gone from crispy to pasty. Not yet, but maybe I’ll eat it anyway.
Then I hear footsteps behind me. On the other side of the juniper tree. They sound like running footsteps. Human footsteps. But who would run in this dusty heat? I tell myself it must be some sort of animal, but then I hear panting.
Human panting.
Then there’s rustling and more panting, and the branches of the juniper are bouncing around.
“Hey!” I call out, because now I can see boots.
Boots that are just like mine.
I move closer, and I really don’t get what’s going on until I hear a curse. And another curse. And then a voice says, “Don’t give me up, Wrenegade.”
My breath catches. Only one person’s ever called me that before.
Michelle’s voice comes from behind me, “What’s that?” And then she sees him.
Dax cusses again, dives out of the juniper, snatches up one of my canteens, and takes off running straight through camp and into the open desert.
“Hey! That’s mine!” I shout, and try to go after him, but my one boot is still missing the lace, so I can barely hobble.
“We’ve got a runner!” Michelle shouts, then whips her walkie-talkie off her belt as John grabs his water and goes after Dax.
“It’s a boy!” one of the Grizzlies squeals like a little girl. Trust-building blindfolds go flying, and all the Grizzlies run to the edge of camp to try to get a glimpse of Dax. “A boy,” they say like they’re dreaming.
To them he may be some mythical being, but to me he’s a thief. I had just filtered that water! It’s all I had left!
“I wonder what group he’s with,” one of the Grizzlies says, her voice floating through her own Dreamland.
“Snake,” I tell her.
She gasps and her eyes go wide. “Oooh. Adjudicated.”
“A bad boy,” another one says.
A third one snickers. “Aren’t they all?”
The whole group laughs. And then one of them asks me, “How do you know he’s from Snake?”
“I rode in with him from the airport. His name’s Dax.”
“Daaaax,” they murmur, watching him grow smaller and smaller as John chases after him, his man-bun busting loose, his long hair flying.
Dvorka’s coming to break up our little party, so one of the girls leans toward me and says, “Would you bust out that fire already? Get off Rabbit. We need a little sister.”
“Rules!” Dvorka says, charging in.
“How far’s Snake camp?” one of the Grizzlies asks her. “I think maybe we want to go exploring.” But I can tell she’s just baiting Dvorka away from the rule breaking they did in talking to me, because while Dvorka’s going off about not-even-thinking-about-it, the girl who asked her is giving me a secret grin and jerking her head over to my little bow-drill fire stuff. “Get going,” she mouths.
The truth is I’ve been feeling left out and ignored. Like everyone else belongs and I’m not fit to be in their group. But now I’ve got an excited flutter in my stomach. The other Grizzlies want me to move up to Coyote, to join them around their campfire.
They’re rooting for me.
I eat my soaked oatmeal fast and get back to my fire setup. I twist in the spindle and get a comfortable stance with my foot anchoring the fire board. Then I start sawing back and forth. Faster. Harder. Faster. Wisps of smoke come up, teasing my nose, my senses. Pretty soon, I’m breathing hard and my arm is getting tired.
Faster, the smoke
teases. Make me burn.
Behind me I hear Clang, clang, clang.
A spoon beating on a billypot.
Another spoon and pot join in. Clang, clang, clang. Clang, clang, clang.
They’re beating in time with my sawing.
Clang, clang, clang. Clang, clang, clang.
A third pot starts up, then a fourth, urging me to keep going, to try harder, to go faster.
Clang, clang, clang. Clang, clang, clang.
My arm’s in pain, my heart’s pounding, I’m panting like I’ve run the mile, but I can’t stop now.
Clang, clang, clang. Clang, clang, clang.
Dvorka’s voice beside me says, “You’ve got a cherry. You must. Transfer it into the nest.”
My hands are shaking from fatigue. Shaking as I transfer the glowing ember into the tinder bundle. Shaking as I blow, gently blow, into the nest. The little fibers of grass and bark crawl red and curl. I blow again, and smoke billows through the nest. I blow again, begging it to come to life, begging for a flame.
And then Whoosh.
“FIRE!” I yell at the top of my lungs.
I put the tinder bundle inside my tepee woodpile, where the flame spreads and crackles and pops to life.
“FIRE!” I yell again, and do a little dance while the billypot drums go wild.
There’s a ceremony involved in moving from Rabbit to Coyote. It includes a blindfold—of course—and hiking to a secret place with the other Coyotes.
I’m a little nervous. I’ve heard that coyotes move in stealthy packs. That they lure smaller, unsuspecting animals to remote locations by acting friendly, then circle them, kill them, and tear them to bits.
The dog-world version of school.
It’s slow going, getting to the secret spot. There’s uphill and blindness. There’s whispering.
I hate whispering. At school, at home, in the store…it always feels like it’s about me. Even when it’s probably not, it feels like it probably is.