Red Fox Road

by Frances Greenslade

  I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t ready for bed at all, I told her.

  Shh, she said. She rested her hand on my chest.

  Rest your weary bones. Rest your weary mind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  When I woke up, Buddy was gone. My disappointment was like a punch in the stomach. I felt my lip tremble and a giant sadness ballooned up in my chest, caught hold of my throat and stuck there.

  “He’s just a dog,” I said out loud. Then I yelled “Buddy!” as loud as I could.

  He came bounding out of the woods, his bushy tail swinging.

  “There you are! Do you want some water? Good boy. We’re in this together, aren’t we?”

  When we set out walking, I felt stronger. The sleep had helped. Having Buddy to walk with helped even more. I checked my watch—already quarter to ten. Later than I wanted to be, but I could still get eight or nine hours of walking, with what I hoped would be a short detour to find more water.

  * * *

  The trouble with my mind is, it doesn’t always do what I want it to do. I was on that road, my feet were moving, my eyes were scanning for signs of water, but my mind kept running off, like Buddy, always ahead or behind, scaring up old scents or chasing down something yet to come. It ran ahead to our house in Penticton, where the big maple shades the lawn and the honeysuckle climbs the trellis at the front window, and when the red trumpet flowers bloom, hummingbirds hover in mid-air, darting from flower to flower.

  I ran up the front steps, tugged open the door; Mom and Dad jump up from where they’ve been sitting in the living room, anxious and waiting for me. Mom’s been praying, even though she swore she’d never pray again, and Dad has bitten his fingernails to nothing. We all cry and hug standing there in the sunny living room.

  But that was all wrong.

  None of that made any sense. They knew where I was. It wasn’t like I was the one who was lost. They wouldn’t just be sitting around waiting for me.

  My mind didn’t want to think about what made sense. Where they could be. Why they hadn’t come for me. I didn’t want to think about it.

  High above me, a jet left a trail of white across the blue sky. The road dipped and smoothed a little and I noticed the corrugated steel of a culvert jutting out into a ditch, surrounded by rocks.

  “Buddy!” I gave my best whistle.

  He came snuffing through the underbrush.

  “Look at this. A culvert. What’s a culvert for? To carry away water so it doesn’t wash out the road.” I checked the ditch on both sides; there wasn’t water exactly, but it was damp, a little swampy on the west side. Once the snow melted in the higher mountains, this could be flowing with water.

  “Let’s walk down a bit and see what we can find.”

  I took out my orange T-shirt and tied it to a tree near the road. Then I took out my paper and pencil and marked the time and directions. We were walking west. It was easy walking; there were some stumps here that looked like they had been cut fairly recently. Buddy ran ahead and came back, ran ahead and came back. I decided to follow the stumps, which seemed to be in a pattern. If I had a bird’s-eye view, I could probably tell what it was.

  Quite a few small saplings had sprung up among the stumps, but I began to think I was following a path. Buddy hadn’t come back for two or three minutes. I whistled, then listened, and in the quiet of the sun-speckled forest, I heard the clear sound of slurping. He’d found water.

  “Buddy!” Running toward the sound, I broke into a clearing. A big stack of fresh-cut firewood was piled beside the creek. Sawdust powdered the ground. My heartbeat quickened. Someone was near, or had been, very recently. No footprints or tire tracks that I could see; but the mud was hard-packed and bare, as if there’d been vehicles and foot traffic. Maybe someone had camped here. But there was no sign of a firepit.

  I dunked my water bottle in the shallow creek, listening intently. Water burbled softly over rocks. A few birds trilled in the trees. Buddy slurped and snuffled, shook his head, clinking his tags. Then he crossed the creek and waded through the underbrush on the other side.

  The sun felt good, beating down on me there by the water. I dug out a purification tablet and dropped it in the bottle. Then I peeled off my socks, rolled up my pants and stretched my legs out in the stream. The cold, cold water soothed my tired feet and the smarting wound on my shin. I held my legs in the water until the cold made my head ache, and then I lay on the ground to let the sun warm me up again.

  I woke at ten after three. Slow, stiff, stupid, I pushed myself up. Where was Buddy? Ten after three! I’d wasted most of the day. I doubt I’d covered more than a few miles. I had to get going. But this clearing. Would whoever’d been here be coming back? And where was Buddy? I couldn’t believe he’d leave me behind.

  “Buddy!” I called. And in an instant he burst through the brush in the same place where I’d seen him disappear. He ran to me and licked my hand, his wet tail swish-swashing the ground. Then he crossed the creek again and ducked in at the same place. That’s when I realized he’d picked up a faint trail in the undergrowth that I never would have noticed on my own.

  I shouldered my pack and hopped across the creek. The trail had grown in with willow and horsetail, but a trail had definitely been hacked through here at some point, maybe last spring. I had to push the young branches aside, but otherwise it was easy to follow.

  Suddenly, I was through, and in front of me a white metal wall rose like a mirage. I was at the back of a big, boxy trailer. Two windows with grating faced the woods. Around the other side, a large cleared area spread in front of the trailer. There were metal steps up to a door.

  “Hello!” I called. “Is anyone here?” There were no vehicles and no tire tracks in the mud. I climbed the steps and knocked anyway. “Hello? Anybody here?” Buddy skittered up the steps beside me.

  “What do you think?” The door had a grate over its window, too. I peered inside. “I can’t see anybody.”

  I knew that when our next-door neighbors stored their trailer for the winter, they took the battery and gas canisters off and put them in their shed. I walked around the trailer, but I couldn’t see any batteries or gas. This was a big trailer. It was possible they were inside somewhere. I couldn’t see any way to reach the higher windows.

  Then I remembered the crowbar.

  I might have spent thirty seconds considering whether it was right to use my crowbar to break into somebody’s trailer. I went back up the stairs and jimmied the claw under the latch that had been fastened with a padlock. Three tries and it snapped. I turned the door handle, but that was locked, too.

  It took me a bit more finagling to pry the door open, but it finally gave. Inside felt cool, new and dusty-dry. The place was neat as a pin, clean and disappointingly empty. It was obviously meant as an office or headquarters, maybe for forest workers. A U-shaped desk took up one end of the space. Opposite the door, a small table with two chairs was pushed against the wall. Beside that was a small fridge, empty, the door ajar, and a microwave on a counter. I opened the cupboards above the counter—also empty. Behind me, on the opposite wall, was a sink and another counter. I tried the tap, but there was no water. The top cupboards held a set of plain white dishes, cups and glasses. When I opened the bottom cupboard—bingo! Two cans of pork and beans and an unopened bottle of soy sauce.

  “Woo-hoo! Buddy! We hit the jackpot. Beans! We have beans!”

  I did a quick search of the rest of the trailer. At the back end of it was a bathroom with a shower, a bedroom with a bare mattress on the bed, and an empty closet. I couldn’t quite accept that there would be soy sauce, and no rice. No rice, no electricity, no water. It seemed like this place had barely been used, and then it had been shut up for the winter. Maybe they would be back in summer.

  In a drawer, I found cutlery and a can opener, a box of matches, four tealights and a cheese grater. My fuel was
gone, and I didn’t want to bother trying to get a fire going, so I opened one can, then I opened the soy sauce and poured a few good dollops on the beans. I scooped some out on a plate for Buddy. He gobbled them, nosed the door open and ran back outside.

  Salty, sweet, saucy and delicious—pork and beans had never tasted this good. As I sat at the table eating, I noticed the room had darkened. A few minutes later, I heard the pattering of rain on the roof. Except when I looked out, I saw that it wasn’t rain; it was hail. Buddy came running and settled himself inside on the mat by the door. Within minutes, the mud clearing was covered in white pellets.

  I heard the wind coming before it hit. Then a gust swept over us, tore the door open and slammed it against the outside wall. Buddy scrambled up and scurried over to me. I had broken the latch when I jimmied the door, so there was nothing to keep it closed. I tried to slam it closed, but the wind ripped it back open.

  I had to tie it closed somehow, but there was nothing in the trailer I could use, nothing in my pack that would be long enough. I jammed a chair under the handle, but it wouldn’t stay there. Ducking against the wind, I ran outside and searched the area behind the trailer for a rock. I found one about the size of a pineapple and I carried it back and put it outside the door, then pulled it in as close as possible so at least if the door flew open, it would knock against the rock and be stopped. It worked, sort of. But the door still banged open about four inches, then closed, then banged open again.

  There had to be something I could use. I walked through the trailer again. In the bedroom, the window had blinds. The cords might be long enough to tie to something to hold the door closed.

  The night came on fast and very dark. Lucky, I thought, to be inside and not out there with the wind howling down the road. I looked out but I saw nothing, no stars, no moon, not even the faint glow that would tell me where earth ended and sky began. What a night. I missed my fire. Inside was as black as outside.

  I sat in a kitchen chair in the dark with my hand on Buddy’s soft head. There was nothing to see, but I wanted to see that there was nothing to see. Wind tugged at the door I’d rigged with window cord. It was just the wind, I knew that, but I imagined long fingers reaching in to pry it open. Even Buddy was restless. Every few minutes, he trotted over and sniffed at the crack where the outside whistled in.

  “What’re you doing, Buddy? Can you stop that?” He came back to me each time, and each time I put my hand back on the soft velvety fur of his head.

  The trailer was a better place to be; of course it was better on a night like this to be here rather than under a tree in the woods, and I tried to feel how lucky I was.

  It was so dark and empty, though.

  I got up and fumbled in the drawer for one of the tealight candles. I lit it and put it on a plate that I set on the table. Now I could see my own shadow dancing on the wall. Now I could see that, except for Buddy, I was alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I’m not going to tell about how long and dark and windy that night was or how I worried that a tree would topple and crush the trailer with me in it, how the door banged all night, how I burned all four candles, for nothing, only to see the flames bend and give and bend again with the force of the wind that somehow found its way inside the thin trailer walls, how I prayed and cried a little and called Buddy to sleep with me but he refused to jump up on the bed until I dragged the mattress to the floor and finally he stepped gently onto it and lay down beside me, how I hugged his matted, dusty fur and wished we were outside instead with the other forest creatures who were in it with us, taking cover from the unstoppable wind and the unending night.

  But I have to tell about the stupid mistake I made.

  Buddy’s sharp bark woke me on the morning of the thirteenth day. He was scratching at the door to get out and I assumed he had to pee and he’d been trained to bark to be let out. I unfastened the cord, pushed aside the rock and he scrambled out and took off running.

  “Buddy, wait! Wait for me! Where are you going?”

  I took a few seconds, ten or twenty, to think about what to do—stop and pack my stuff or follow him right away—and in those few seconds, I made the decision to follow him. I knew how to get back to the trailer, and he was after something that my gut told me I should go after, too.

  I ran back along the little path through the underbrush, came out at the creek and hopped over it. I couldn’t see him, but the jangle of his tags kept me on his trail, and anyway, somehow I knew he was headed back to the road. The stumps, coming on them from this direction, were easier to follow. I ran, with this growing feeling in my gut. Maybe my ears had picked up the sound Buddy’s had picked up minutes earlier, but my brain hadn’t quite made sense of it yet.

  And then it did. And I knew a vehicle was coming down the road. From which direction, I didn’t know.

  I put it into overdrive, as Carly would say, and went as all-out as my muscles would let me. I burst out of the bush and onto the road just in time to see a vehicle, black, rattling away from me, heading north, with Buddy in a full-out gallop after it.

  I screamed myself hoarse, flailing my arms like an idiot, long, long after it would have done any good. To be honest, it wouldn’t have done any good from the start and I knew it. Buddy ran for a long time, too, good old dog.

  I sat in the dirt and waited for him to come back and eventually he did. As I waited, I saw the T-shirt flag I’d tied in a tree. Stupid mistake. The only thing that flag was good for was marking the spot where I’d gone into the woods. Anyone passing by on the road would have to be going very slowly and watching very carefully to have seen it. I should have made some arrows with tree boughs, or dragged a fallen tree across the road or something, something, to stop a vehicle, to make them get out and wonder, and then I should have left a note, I should have stayed on the road, I should have never left it, I should have stuck to my plan to be where I said I’d be, to be somewhere I could be found.

  I was so angry with myself, I sat on the road storming inside, kicking the dirt and yelling “stupid, stupid, stupid” for too long, willing the black vehicle to turn around and come back. When it didn’t and it still didn’t and it still didn’t, I went back to the trailer to get my pack and the second can of beans. This time, I didn’t leave the road without first dragging some big branches across it. I hung my T-shirt flag in the middle of them. I didn’t have my pencil with me, so I couldn’t write a note, but I took the time to gather a few rocks and spell out SOS with them.

  Back at the trailer, I threw my things into my pack, scribbled a note of apology for breaking the door and taking the beans, included our phone number so they could contact us to pay for it, and ran back to the road. With each footfall, the words stupid, stupid, stupid rang in my head. Buddy panted along beside me as if he understood everything. That Mom or Dad or both could have been in that vehicle, passed once or twice, went on to look somewhere else, that I was supposed to stay with the truck, that Mom had told me to stay with the truck, that the note I’d left said I’d be walking north along the road and I was not walking north along the road or anywhere along the road. That if I was not where I said I’d be, I was like a needle in a haystack in this wilderness. I would be impossible to find.

  When we got back to the road, I looked up it and down it. My mind was all in a froth, as Grandma used to say. It was a true disaster, the biggest disaster of my life.

  Well, the second biggest. At least the second biggest. The first was chasing Phoebe that last day we spent together at Gem Lake. All through the years I’d told myself she was the one who said, “Bet you can’t catch me.” That was true. But there was more to the story.

  We’d been in the woods. We’d been playing hide-and-seek in among the trees. We had a rule about no running, just to make it fair for Phoebe, who wasn’t allowed to run because of her heart. But I’d dashed from one spot to another when Phoebe was getting warm, and she’d se
en me.

  “You’re it!” she called out. She caught up to me and touched my shoulder. “You cheated. Running isn’t allowed.” Her face wore the look it sometimes got when she was trying to think of something mean to say.

  “You’ve got skinny legs,” she said.

  “I do not.”

  “Yes, you do. I don’t know how they hold you up. I don’t know how you can even walk, let alone run.”

  “You can’t run at all,” I said.

  “I can run. I bet I’m faster than you.”

  “You’ve got a hole in your heart and probably in your head, too. You’re like the Grinch.”

  “He doesn’t have a hole in his heart. His heart is two sizes too small.”

  “Same thing.”

  “I dare you,” she said.

  “You’re not allowed.”

  “I’m faster than you. Watch me.”

  “Mom will be mad.”

  “You’re it.”

  I didn’t know what game we were playing anymore. But I gave her a head start and then I chased her.

  She was right. She was fast. I never told her that, either.

  * * *

  I stood on the road shivering a little, because the day was one of those that are warm and cold at the same time—warm sunshine, nippy air. I felt full to bursting with the disaster it was that I had missed the only vehicle to come down this road in thirteen days. There was nothing I could do. Nothing at all. Absolutely nothing.

  Okay, there was one thing.

  I could make a fire. Right there in the middle of the road. It was probably useless, it was probably pointless, it was probably a waste of time. But I couldn’t stand the idea of doing nothing.

  So I gathered dead brush and piled it high in the middle of the road where it wouldn’t spread to the woods, topped the pile with green branches and lit it. Before long, big billows of gray smoke rose tumbling into the sky.