Running Wild

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “Come, Zhòh! Come!” Seth calls.

  “We can’t—” I start to say.

  “He saved our lives,” Keith interrupts. “No way are we leaving him behind.”

  “Zhòh!” Seth calls again.

  It’s true: Zhòh showed fierce loyalty. I don’t stop Keith from steering the raft back to shore. The wolf pup jumps aboard. Seth snuggles him, saying, “Good boy.”

  Keith pushes off and we waft to the center of the stream. I hold my breath, waiting for the current to sweep up under our raft and carry us away.

  TEN

  I TAKE THE pole away from Keith and drape the two sleeping bags over the boys’ shoulders to keep them warm and to dry the bags. I fight off the deep chill in my own muscles by working hard with the steering pole.

  Seth chatters away about the bears, describing everything, almost as if he were painting their pictures. It’s not helpful that his feelings of awe are sometimes bigger than his feelings of fear.

  Keith stands at the front of the raft, gazing north, south, east, and west, as if he’s searching for something. He finally says, “Dad is going to be really mad when he catches up to us.”

  “He won’t catch up to us.” I say, faking confidence.

  “The rowboat is faster,” Keith points out.

  “We have a big lead on him.”

  “I think we should go back,” Keith says.

  By now, midday, the sun has melted the bit of snow that fell in the night, nearly dried our sleeping bags, and thawed my tired limbs. Our raft is whipping along at a nice clip, carrying us to our future. A bald eagle soars on the wind currents overhead. Keeping my eyes pinned on the huge bird’s white head, dark brown wings, and graceful flight, I pretend I didn’t hear Keith.

  “I’m hungry,” Seth says.

  “Me too,” Keith says.

  “That’s why we’re leaving,” I say. “Because we don’t have enough food for the winter.”

  “Dad is getting more meat.”

  “He might not find any game.”

  “We’re big now,” Keith persists. “I can hunt. I can get us five more moose.”

  “That’s even enough for Zhòh too,” Seth cheers.

  “Yep,” Keith tells his twin. “Absolutely.”

  I know better than to keep arguing with Keith. He’s wearing his contrary face, the one where he pulls down his mouth and squints his eyes.

  By dusk our muscles ache from the long hours pushing the steering pole, coupled with the return of evening’s cold air. The evergreens are close on the banks of the stream here, so we camp in the woods, where there is plenty of firewood and the trees give us some shelter.

  Once we’ve built a fire, we roast the second pumpkin and finish up the meat. From here on, it’ll be oatmeal, peanuts, and rose hips leather. After dinner, the boys wrap one of the sleeping bags around their shoulders and sit next to the fire. Zhòh curls up by Seth.

  We had to leave one of the tarps in last night’s camp because of the bear, but we still have one left. I ask Seth to fetch it from his pack so I can rig a shelter before the boys fall asleep.

  “We don’t need it,” he says, his voice extra-high and reedy, the way it gets when he’s trying to put one past me.

  “We do. Please get it.”

  Seth doesn’t get up, the firelight dancing across his face. He’s softly tugging Zhòh’s ears and the wolf pup makes little grunts of pleasure.

  Keith sighs, throws the sleeping bag off his shoulders, and stands. He walks over to Seth’s pack, and takes out the bundle of plastic. As he unfolds the tarp in the firelight, I see that it’s shredded.

  Seth pulls Zhòh even closer.

  Of course. Yesterday morning the puppy was closed up in the pack with the tarp. He tore it to ribbons. We have no shelter.

  “I can see stars,” Seth says. “It’s not going to snow tonight.”

  “There were stars last night, too,” I say, “and it clouded up and snowed later in the night.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Keith says. “We’re going home tomorrow.”

  Home. What does the word even mean? Keith is talking about our one-room cabin up here in the Arctic wilderness. That’s not home. That’s an experiment, Dad’s experiment. Home was our kitchen in Seattle: the smell of simmering soup, books stacked on all the counters, Mama talking on the phone, Dad’s loud laughter. Will New York be home? The encyclopedia only showed pictures of towering buildings, streets jammed with cars, brightly lit signs, and the Statue of Liberty.

  What if Dad is right? What if I’m taking the boys to a life that’s even more dangerous than the one we have here?

  “Whichever direction,” I say quietly, “backwards or forwards, we need shelter.”

  The boys spread out their sleeping bag and crawl in. I’m too exhausted to even gather some boughs to use as a ground cover under our beds, so I shake out my bag on the other side of the fire from the boys, get in, and fall into a deathlike sleep.

  In the morning, my muscles hurt even more than they did yesterday, and my stomach clenches with hunger. At least it didn’t snow again. I wiggle out of my sleeping bag. Back in the woods, I have to change the gauze bandage in my underwear yet again, burying the used one. I don’t like the dull ache in my belly. I was so little when Mama died, but I will never forget her wincing with pain. What if I have the illness that killed Mama?

  Returning to camp, I check for the food bag and see nothing but empty space where it should be hanging. The bag lies on the ground a few yards away, a hole chewed through the fabric, the nuts and rose hips leather gone. Even the oatmeal has been devoured. I mustn’t have hung it high enough, or maybe a wolverine climbed the tree and chewed through the rope. We’ll have to travel the rest of the way to Fort Yukon without food.

  The boys are still asleep. I hide the ruined food bag in my pack and ready the raft. The apron of ice along the stream bank is wider and thicker than it was yesterday morning. The air is frigid. I don’t know how we’ll stay warm without fuel for our bodies. We’ll have to do it by working harder. That way we’ll get to Fort Yukon faster. Maybe we can travel at night, too, by starlight, if it stays clear.

  Dad says that a body can go a long time without food, as long as it has water. We have plenty of that. We’ll be uncomfortable. But we’ll live. I just can’t make any more mistakes.

  I wake the boys, announcing, “Let’s go. We should reach Aurora Creek today.”

  “I told you,” Keith says, not missing a beat. “We’re going back.”

  He stuffs the sleeping bag into his pack, then hoists the load onto his shoulders and walks upstream. “Come on, Seth.”

  Seth says to me, “You have to come back to the cabin with us.”

  “I’m not going back there.”

  “Your choice,” Keith says. He walks another few yards upstream and calls over his shoulder, “Seth! I said come on.”

  “She can’t go to Fort Yukon by herself.”

  Keith keeps walking.

  “You can’t walk all the way back,” I yell. “It’ll take you days. Much longer than it took us to drift here on the current.”

  Keith doesn’t stop.

  Seth stands motionless between us.

  “I won’t spend another winter in that cabin!” I shout so loudly a couple of ravens startle off a low spruce branch.

  Keith finally stops and turns. Seth’s brow furrows and his lips tremble. No one says anything for a long time.

  Zhòh scampers in circles, jumping in the air to snap at wind-whipped leaves.

  “If we go back,” I say, “Dad will shoot Zhòh.”

  Seth’s mouth falls open and he squeaks, “No.”

  Keith puts his hands on his hips and looks skyward. He knows I’m right.

  “I’m not going,” Seth bellows.

  Keith sighs, doing one of h
is imitations of a grown man, and starts walking back toward us. “All right,” he says. “We’ll take Willa to Fort Yukon. We’ll make sure she gets there safely. Then we’ll see.”

  As if he’s in charge.

  “Thank you,” I tell Keith.

  We’re all surprised by the tears in my voice.

  The hug is more like a tackle. Keith throws himself at my waist. His pencil arms go around me. Seth piles on. I squeeze them hard.

  “He was joking,” Seth tries.

  It’s such a ridiculous thing to say, and we all feel such relief, that we actually laugh, our gusts of breath coming out like small clouds.

  “Promise you won’t do that again,” Seth says to Keith.

  “Do what?”

  “You know. Act like you’re going to leave.”

  Keith remains silent as he steps onto the raft, and Seth yells, “Promise.”

  “Okay,” Keith says quietly. “I promise.”

  Zhòh is the last to leap on. I push the steering pole through the sheet of shore ice. The current catches our raft. Once again, we’re off. With any luck, we’ll make Fort Yukon by late tonight.

  ELEVEN

  ONCE WE’RE LAUNCHED, Keith opens my pack to get at the food. He pulls out the gnawed and empty bag, fires me a look as heated as any Dad can deliver, and stuffs it back into the pack, trying to keep Seth from seeing. But Seth has seen.

  “We need food,” Seth whines.

  “I know. We’ll get some in Fort Yukon. I have money.”

  “When? Tonight?”

  I want nothing more than to get them a hot meal. I need food, too, in order to make good decisions. My thoughts feel like watery broth. But we can survive a day without food. We just have to travel as quickly as possible.

  By midmorning, it’s snowing again. The snowflakes land on the surface of the stream, looking like tiny cobwebs before they melt. The ones that land on the raft stick. The ice will start running any day now and then river travel will be impossible. We have to get to Fort Yukon before that happens. I make sure the boys have on their long underwear and that their parkas are zipped to the top. I pull each of their fleece hats down over their ears. Seth doesn’t mind his hearing being muffled, but Keith rolls the sides of his hat up again.

  We take turns pushing with the steering pole. The work exhausts us, and yet it keeps us warm, so we all want longer turns. In the late afternoon, we come to an intersection of our stream with another one. Both streams widen with long snow-dusted gravel bars at the intersection. Big rounded indents cross these gravel bars: bear tracks. I look around quickly. The forest has given way to open country, covered by low, scraggly bushes. Thankfully, I see no brown furry mounds on any of the shores.

  So I allow myself a tiny celebration. We’ve completed the first leg of our journey. This is our turnoff. I close my eyes and take a couple of deep breaths, mustering my hardiest voice to announce, “Aurora Creek! A few hours, at most, on this creek. It flows right into the Yukon. Then it’s a short float to town.”

  “Tonight?” Seth asks again.

  The day is October short and the sun is already low. Plus it’s snowing. Arriving tonight is unlikely. “Maybe,” I hedge.

  I take the steering pole from Keith and push us out of our stream and into the new one. Soon the new stream narrows considerably. It’s much smaller than I thought it would be, and quite shallow. In some places, it’s only a couple of feet deep. But all the waterways are at their lowest at this time of year.

  It occurs to me that this is good news. Our flat-bottomed raft can skim along on the surface, but the deep-hulled rowboat will be grounded. Dad won’t be able to follow us down Aurora Creek. The bright realization makes me shout, “Ha!”

  “What?” Seth asks.

  “We’re getting there,” I cheer. “Not long now.”

  It’s snowing harder and harder. I consider not stopping to make camp for the night. We won’t be able to travel by starlight, that’s for sure, but navigation shouldn’t be an issue. On foot, it’s difficult to find your route in the dark, but rafting doesn’t present many choices. We need only float down Aurora Creek until we come to the Yukon River. The convergence might have strong and swirling currents, though, and the Yukon might be too big to tackle in the dark.

  Still, camping doesn’t make much sense. We don’t have a tarp for shelter. We don’t have any food to cook. And the falling snow will prevent us from making a fire. At least by taking turns doing the work of steering, we might stay warm.

  The stream is narrowing even more. It’s also becoming even more shallow. Twice already the bottom of the raft has scraped the streambed. It’s one thing if Dad can’t get through to the Yukon River in the rowboat, but what if we can’t on the raft?

  With a dark feeling of dread, I begin to wonder if this is the right creek. Even in June this current wouldn’t run full enough to carry a rowboat. I try to remember the map: Were there other streams that forked off from Sweet Creek before Aurora Creek?

  When the raft sticks on the muddy bottom, and this time I can’t push us off, I say, “Okay, guys,” in a loud confident voice, as if we’re right on plan. “We’re stopping for the night.”

  “Here?”

  “Yep.” The water barely comes up to our ankles in our rubber boots as we drag the raft out of the trickle of a stream. I have zero time for panic. The sky is a thick blur of snow and we need shelter.

  “What’s the saying about lemonade?” I ask, as if we’re just playing games.

  “The storm is getting worse,” Keith says, refusing to play. He kicks at the snow piling up on the ground.

  “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade?” Seth asks.

  “Bingo. And snow means we can make a fort.”

  I put a hand under each of their chins and look into their eyes. “Remember what Dad taught us about making an emergency bivouac?”

  I set to work rolling a snowball. Once it’s a foot and a half wide, I roll another one. By now Seth has joined me. I’m thankful his imagination allows him to see the game in anything, even survival. Soon Keith starts rolling snowballs, too. Zhòh joins in, too, digging random holes in the snow, making us laugh.

  A wind kicks up as we work, blowing the snow sideways. My nose runs and my eyelashes catch the snowflakes. We need to hurry. The temperature is dropping, which will make the snow drier and harder to make into snowballs. Plunging temperatures will also suck the heat from our bodies, putting us at greater risk for hypothermia.

  We push the snowballs into a circle with a diameter of about five feet, leaving an opening for the door. We stack more snowballs on top of these, offset so that the growing wall leans slightly in, toward the center of the circle. The snowballs hold each other in place, and it’s not long before I’m carefully setting one on the top of our fort. The boys and I pack more snow into all the spaces between the snowballs. I poke a hole in the top for ventilation. The small door will provide some fresh oxygen, too. Without a flow of oxygen, we could get carbon dioxide poisoning from our own exhaled breath.

  By now I can’t even feel my hands and my nose is numb, too. The wind is blowing hard, whistling its Arctic song. The trees sway and bend, promising a doozy of a storm. A nearby branch cracks as it breaks and thumps to the ground.

  We squeeze through the opening of the fort, dragging our packs behind us. I place the shredded tarp on the floor. At least it’ll provide a little protection. We empty our packs and place them on top of the tarp for another layer of protection from the cold snowy floor. Not the most comfy mattresses, but we need to stay as dry as possible. The sleeping bags, zipped together to make one large bag, go on top. We all slide into the single pouch, with Seth in the middle. Zhòh curls up on top of Seth’s legs.

  As we lie perfectly still, my brothers breathing loudly, I wriggle my fingers and toes, checking for feeling. They ache as they warm, but they do wa
rm. Slowly, I start to realize that we’re fairly snug.

  Neither of the twins mentions his hunger. I don’t mention that I think we’ve taken a wrong turn.

  Seth finally says, “I might be scared.”

  “Might be?” Keith asks.

  “Me too,” I say. “Just a little.”

  We all laugh, which is kind of amazing, given our situation: three children alone at night, in a snowstorm, in the Arctic wilderness.

  “Who wants a story?”

  “I do,” my brave brothers say in unison.

  I start by describing the orphanage where Jane Eyre meets her good friend Helen. I tell about Helen dying. About how Jane becomes a governess and falls in love with her charge’s guardian. About the woman in the attic who turns out to be his wife. About Jane escaping in the night. Running through her own wilderness.

  “How does it end?” Keith asks.

  “Happily,” I say.

  “Save the ending,” Seth says. “Tell it tomorrow night.”

  Keith makes a sound of annoyance. He wants the ending now, but instead of arguing, he asks, “What’s New York like?”

  “When we arrive,” I say, “the first thing we’ll see is the Statue of Liberty. It’s an enormous green statue of a woman. She has a crown of spikes, and she’s holding a torch high in the sky. In her other hand, she’s holding a tablet.”

  “What’s a tablet?”

  “It’s her journal.”

  “What’s she doing there?”

  “She’s a symbol of freedom.”

  “Huh,” Seth says, forming his own picture of the Statue of Liberty.

  Keith says, “What kind of freedom?”

  “Our freedom,” I say.

  Zhòh stretches and turns in a few circles. He settles back down, now on top of me.

  “Oh no you don’t.” Even if he does provide added warmth, I’m not sleeping with a wolf. I shift him over to the boys’ side.

  “What kinds of cabins do they have in New York?” Keith asks.