The Way Back from Broken

by Amber J. Keyser

  The trail sloped upward on an exposed granite ridge. A few stunted trees had managed to worm their roots into soil-filled cracks, but it was mostly open. The midday sun radiated off the rocks, turning the inside of the canoe into a mini-sauna. By the time the trail moved into a more heavily forested section, sweat had soaked Rakmen’s shirt. Jacey’s chubby calves, which were all he could see from under the canoe, had gone from bouncy skips to a dragging shuffle.

  “So how long is it?” he asked.

  Jacey stopped mid-trail. “You told me not to tell you.”

  “Keep moving,” he grunted, “and tell me. I wanna know now.”

  “Nineteen hundred and something,” she said, turning about-face and marching on.

  Kind of useless information, he realized. The pain in his shoulders determined whether a portage was long or short. This one was definitely long. “See if you can find a place to take a break.”

  “Lazy,” she giggled, darting out in front of him.

  “Jacey—” he roared, which only made her laugh harder.

  Birdsong rang out from close by on his left. The melody rose, half-bell, half burbling spring, a clean and promising sound. Far off and to the right, another bird of the same kind answered, and their conversation carried Rakmen around another bend in the trail. Too bad Leah wasn’t close enough to ID it for him.

  “There’s a canoe rest up here,” Jacey called.

  “You’re a lifesaver,” said Rakmen, catching up with her. “Direct me.”

  “See that big spruce and this smaller one here?” Jacey said, patting a trunk. “They’re the supports.” Leah’s natural history lessons had begun to stick. Both Rakmen and Jacey could name the trees and many of the smaller plants that filled the forest floor.

  Rakmen positioned himself in front of the two spruces, tipped the bow up, and rested the stern on the ground. Now he could see the rough-cut log nailed crosswise between the trees about six feet off the ground. He lifted the stern a few inches and edged forward until he could rest the bow on the crossbar. Once it felt balanced, he set the stern down with a gentle thud and scrambled out from under the canoe.

  Jacey had already flipped off her pack and pulled out a water bottle. Tendrils of hair clung to her sweaty cheeks. She slapped at a stray mosquito and handed him the water. “Are we almost there?”

  He shrugged. “Can you dig up some chocolate?”

  Jacey squinted at him. “You mean raid the lunch?”

  “You bet.”

  Looking guilty but happy, she tore into the carefully rationed lunch bag. After this long on the trail, Rakmen saw the logic of Leah’s maniacal packing. There’d been method to her madness of carefully measured scoops of dried fruit and the way she’d counted crackers like the three of them were parrots on a diet. Lunch was efficiently-packed, high-protein fuel, exactly the right amount for each of them. No waste. No excess to carry.

  Rakmen unwrapped the white paper from his precious chunk of chocolate.

  “She’s gonna be mad,” Jacey warned.

  “She won’t know if you divvy out the lunch.”

  That was enough convincing for Jacey to chomp down on hers with her oversized front teeth. “Look,” she said, flashing her chocolate-smeared teeth at him in a big grin and holding out the candy, “a beaver ate my chocolate.”

  Sure enough, her bite mark reminded him of the gnawed beaver sticks she’d been collecting by the armload. Leah made her leave most of them behind in the interest of weight, but Jacey was determined to find the perfect one. Ten of the top contenders were strapped to the side of her pack. From the back, she looked like a well-armed dwarf.

  Rakmen rolled his shoulders and stretched. He was getting stronger every day. He liked the increased definition of his muscles and the way he had grown into the demands of the trail. He liked the simplicity of his daily tasks. Carry the canoe. Paddle. Pitch the tents. Purify water. Light a fire. By now, he knew how to do these things as well as Leah. He possessed something of what he had sensed in the canoeist they had seen from Edna’s dock. Rakmen tucked that feeling into his pocket along with Jacey’s treasures.

  The sound of panting on the trail sent Jacey into a frantic stashing of the lunch. Leah rounded the bend in the trail, oblivious to their subterfuge. “Hey Mom, there’s a rock over here where you can rest.” Jacey bounced back and forth on the balls of her feet, licking her lips to remove telltale signs of thievery.

  Leah backed up toward the rock like a truck to a loading dock. Rakmen fought the urge to make back-up beeps. Leah didn’t usually want to take the pack all the way off because it was so hard to get back on, which meant she had to find a place to rest the behemoth and take the weight off her shoulders, but she also had to be able to stand up again. There was nothing worse than turning turtle, she’d assured them one night around the campfire. When she acted out falling over in her pack, he’d laughed until his sides hurt.

  “Water,” she panted, and Jacey raced over with the bottle. After a long gulp, she asked, “How come you’re so perky? Portage isn’t long enough for you?”

  Jacey flashed Rakmen her best spy look. “Nah, we’ve been resting. Look how cool this spot is.”

  It was, Rakmen had to admit, seriously cool.

  On one side of the trail, tightly-packed spruce grew right up to the rocky path, but on the other side, the land sloped down gently into a wide, circular meadow ringed with other kinds of trees. He could pick out yellow birch and sugar maple. Tall grasses rippled in the breeze like green waves. Hundreds of dragonflies zipped and hovered. It was, Rakmen thought, the kind of place where long-lost lovers ran slow-mo into each other’s arms, or vampires got all sparkly and made out.

  “I can’t look,” Leah groaned. “It makes me want to take a nap.” She hefted herself up from the boulder. “I’m gonna keep going. You two stick together.” She stared hard at Rakmen, reinforcing the command.

  “I don’t go anywhere without her,” he said and then raised a hand to his mouth and pretended to whisper, “because she won’t let me.”

  Jacey elbowed him. “You’d be lost without me.”

  “Don’t be long,” Leah warned and started off down the trail.

  As soon as she was out of sight, Rakmen and Jacey finished their chocolates.

  “You about ready?” he asked.

  “Can’t we explore a little?”

  He looked at the canoe and then down the trail after Leah. “Five minutes.”

  She squealed happily, grabbed his hand, and dragged him into the sunshine.

  He hadn’t really intended to go off on one of her expeditions, but with chocolate coursing through his veins and the sun soaking into his face and arms, he went easily. Au large was beginning to sink into his bones. Maybe you didn’t need to know where you were going or spend too much time thinking about where you’d been. You only needed to move forward. In the last few days, he’d hardly thought about home and whether his parents were managing to patch things together. Interspersed in his notebook with sing-song bird names like cedar waxwing, merganser, and pine warbler were blister on heel, broken flashlight, and too little chocolate. Small complaints.

  Rakmen turned his face to the sun. The light through his closed lids was deep orange. The air around him burbled and buzzed, warbled and whined. On every side, creatures were moving and rustling, living and dying. For the merest pause between heartbeats, it seemed to be alright that living and dying were all tangled up together. Dora was with him in her own kind of aching way.

  A sudden, high-pitched wail sent panic jolting through him.

  His eyes snapped open. Jacey was crumpled in the grass, her face twisted in pain. He raced toward her, a thousand terrible possibilities flickering against his vision.

  He hadn’t been watching.

  He’d promised to watch.

  “What’s wrong?” he panted, wrapping his arms around her. Any second her chest could stop moving, her eyes would go blank, and—

  Jacey leaned into him, moaning. “
I stubbed my toe.”

  “Your toe?” His fear uncoiled then reformed into a hot, angry ball in his stomach. He pushed her away.

  She tumbled off his lap and burst into tears.

  Rakmen pressed his hands over his ears.

  “I’m hurt,” she wailed.

  “Shut up.”

  She cried harder. “You’re supposed to take care of me.”

  “You’re not my sister,” he snarled.

  Jacey curled away from him, her back shaking with sobs. His anger drained away as quickly as it had come. His stomach turned sour. She looked so tiny balled up in the grass, so fragile in a great big world. He couldn’t stand himself.

  He made the world ugly by standing in it.

  Dora had deserved better.

  So did Jacey.

  For days, the trapped feeling had been absent. Now it loomed over him again, threatening to crush the air from his lungs. He shouldn’t be here making everyone else’s life worse than it already was. But he was stuck on this portage, in the middle of nowhere, in his own broken life.

  A large dragonfly buzzed him. Another landed on his arm, twisting its huge triangular head one way and then the other. Its wings trembled slightly. The tiny claws at the end of its legs scratched Rakmen’s skin. To the mosquitos in this meadow, it was a heavily-armored attack helicopter, and yet Rakmen could crush it with one hand.

  He crouched beside Jacey and touched her back. “I’m sorry.”

  She pushed herself to a sitting position, gulping back tears. “It’s okay,” she said in a tiny voice, avoiding his eyes.

  “No, it’s not.” Rakmen rubbed his neck. He brushed her bangs out of her face and wiped her tears. “How’s your toe? Do we need to amputate?”

  She laughed at that and tackled him. They went sprawling in the grass, and Rakmen’s elbow smacked against something hard. It was his turn to cry out. They stopped wrestling and felt their way through the grass. Rakmen saw a dark ridge half buried in grass and dirt. “This must be what you stubbed your toe on.” When he touched it, orange rust came off on his fingertips. “It’s metal. How weird is that?” Rakmen scraped at the dirt around the object. Jacey crawled forward to see what he had found.

  “Let’s dig it out,” he suggested.

  Jacey was already up, stubbed toe and all, running toward her pack. “I’ll get some of my beaver sticks,” she called over her shoulder.

  Rakmen rocked back on his heels. The meadow was a circular depression in a sea of dense forest. From the air, it would be a mere blip of pale green. He couldn’t imagine how such a large piece of metal could have ended up so far into the wilderness.

  Jacey returned, panting and waving two beaver sticks in eye-puncturing gyrations.

  “Hold your weapons.”

  She saluted and delivered a stick. When they were both well-armed, he gave the command to dig. Soon a U-shaped piece of metal protruded from the soil. Jacey flailed along one side of it, sending dirt flying behind her like a dog, while he excavated the other side. Soon, Rakmen could make out a strip of metal eighteen inches long and two inches wide and bent nearly double. Looking closer, he realized that the strip was actually two parts with zig-zagging edges that fit together like interlocking teeth.

  “Halt, soldier,” he said, stilling Jacey’s stick with one hand. Years of corrosion had smoothed the sharp edges the device once had, but something about it made Rakmen queasy. “Let’s take her easy.”

  Jacey squatted beside him, twitching with excitement. Rakmen poked away the dirt in the center of the bent metal. A few inches down he hit a flat, metal circle connected to the ends of the U by thin strips. Expanding the trench in both directions, he found a metal loop welded to one end of the U and, attached to that, a rusty length of chain link.

  Rakmen dug his fingers under the chain and pulled. The earth around the artifact cracked, the stems of the grass breaking and bending as if some animal were digging up from below. He strained against the roots that were twisted in the bent bits of the metal object. Jacey grabbed him around the waist and squeezed.

  He dropped the chain and twisted toward her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m helping,” she said, tightening her grip and burrowing her face in his side.

  He’d been about to peel her away, but instead he put his arm around her. “I’m really sorry about earlier.”

  “I know.” Her voice was muffled against his shirt.

  “Do you want me to get this thing out?”

  She nodded, still clinging to him.

  “I’ll puke up my chocolate if you keep squeezing me. Give me some room to work.”

  She backed off a few feet, red-faced. Rakmen tousled her hair and then wrapped his hands around the chain again. Layers of rust flaked off in his hands, and the peaty smell of dislodged earth filled his nose. With a final heave, the device pulled free.

  “What is it?” Jacey asked, leaning in close.

  Recognition jiggled in the back of his mind. The circular plate, the metal teeth . . . memories of a sixth-grade field trip to an Oregon Trail historic site flooded back. “It’s a trap.”

  “Like a booby trap?”

  “No, an animal trap. See how this part can open like alligator jaws?”

  Jacey’s eyes grew huge. “It’s a good thing we used sticks. What if our hands got chomped?”

  “It’s been tripped,” he said. “Been here a long time too.”

  “I want it,” Jacey announced.

  Rakmen rubbed his sweaty forehead. Of course, Jacey wanted it. The biggest treasure in her collection. “Your mom will never go for that.”

  “Mom!” Jacey gasped.

  “Oh man.” Rakmen knew they’d been at their archeological site far more than five minutes. Leah was probably freaking out. He reached for Jacey’s hand. “Let’s go.” She wiggled out of his grasp and picked up the trap, cradling it in her arms like a baby as she speed-walked back to her pack.

  “You’re not seriously thinking about carrying that, are you? We’ve still got a long way to portage.” She clutched it tighter and lower-lipped him.

  There wasn’t time to fight with her. Not if they wanted to catch up with Leah before she totally lost her shit. “Let me hold it while you put on your pack.”

  He got Jacey situated and pointed her down the trail, wishing that the rusty smears all over her shirt looked less like blood. Before he picked up the canoe, Rakmen took a last look around the meadow.

  Someone had set the trap a very long time ago. Set it and left it or lost it or forgot. A whisper of the long-dead trapper and his quarry rustled through the tall grass. Rakmen shivered. He lifted the canoe and followed Jacey. He did not want to stay here any longer.

  CHAPTER 24

  Rakmen’s anxiety rose as he neared the end of the portage. His legs were crumbling with exhaustion. He hadn’t stopped again to rest because he expected trouble. Leah had probably come unglued when they hadn’t shown up on time.

  He cursed the stupid-long portage.

  And himself for wasting time in the meadow.

  A small bird with a striped head and white throat flitted across the trail in front of him and perched on a fallen log. Rakmen named it without thinking. White-throated sparrow. The bird’s throat pulsed in and out as it belted out a rising, repetitive song. It was so very alive and yet so delicate—like the organ that every second sent blood pulsing through his own body. They were always so close to the knife-edge. A million things could still the heart.

  At the end of the portage, he listened for the sound of crying and heard only the water lapping against the shore. When he set the canoe down and could finally see, Jacey was pulling off her boots and socks, and Leah was examining the trap.

  “This is a pretty amazing find,” she said, smiling up at him.

  He nodded, scanning her expression for trouble under the surface. Nothing. He eased the pack off his back and sat down by Jacey.

  “How come she’s not mad?” he whispered.

  “I didn�
��t tell her you pushed me.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  She waved her stinky socks in his face. “Smell my foot wrath!”

  Rakmen warded her off with the sign of the cross. Once she’d splashed off to look for frogs, he sat down beside Leah for a closer look at the trap. He ran a finger along its teeth. “What was it for?”

  “Beaver,” she said. “The French trappers did a bang-up trade in the early days, and it’s too small for bear.”

  “How old is it?”

  She wrinkled her forehead. “Over a hundred years probably. I’m trying to remember when the settlement on this lake was active.”

  Rakmen was surprised all over again. “People actually lived here?”

  “Some. Not many. The winters are brutal.” Leah unfolded the map on her knees. “We’re right here on Allard Lake. The remains of an old farm are here.” She pointed to a spot on the map opposite the portage. Across the water, Rakmen could see a wide grassy clearing.

  “Is there anything left?” he asked.

  “I think so. Foundations of a farmhouse. A few old timbers.”

  “Can we check it out?”

  “Sure.” They checked the map again and located a campsite near one end of the meadow. “Why don’t we set up camp and then walk over? That last portage wiped me out,” Leah suggested.

  “What’s this mean?” Rakmen asked, poking at a small square with a number four in it printed in the middle of the lake.

  “Four days from here to anywhere else,” said Leah, getting stiffly to her feet. “Come on, Jacey,” she called, “we’re ready to roll.”

  Rakmen stared at the number four. The map highlighted canoe routes in yellow, and he could see that this lake was a kind of hub. Several different routes passed through it. Backtracking with his finger along the last portage, Rakmen traced their own route from campsite to campsite until he poked one finger at the black square indicating Uncle Leroy’s ramshackle cabin.

  It had taken them eight days to get where they were, but they’d taken a circuitous route and had been slow at first. If they had bypassed the Petra River and had taken a portage around several lakes, they could’ve made it here in four days. There was another route, also estimated at four days’ travel time, that led north to a ranger station on Lake Lavielle. A third led to a small community on the western edge of the wilderness area called Branvin, where their food resupply box was waiting for them.