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“It’s a signal of submission,” Dad said. “He’s saying you’re the boss.” He scowled at the dog. “Took me three damn years to get that dog to listen to what I say.”
“Maybe you should have tried asking nicely,” I said.
Dad grunted, and he shifted around to put his side to me. He started piling up little twigs and stuffing something white and papery from his pockets underneath them, making a sort of cone. Apparently we were done talking.
“No wonder Mom divorced you,” I muttered. He jerked his head toward me but didn’t quite look in my direction, and then he put his head down and kept working. I pushed myself around with my hands and my good leg until I was sitting on the log, and hunched to watch. I wanted to put my back to him and sulk, but I really did want to see how to start a fire. Ronnie’s dad had always just brought a lighter and some of that quick chemical kindling that lights up fast and keeps burning forever. Dad didn’t even seem to have matches.
“There are a lot of different ways to start a fire,” Dad said. It sounded like he was talking to himself, even though I knew he wanted me to listen. “If you’re lucky enough to have a flint and steel kit like mine, it’s easy as striking a spark and being a bit of a windbag.”
He was still angry, but the humor I’d heard in his voice when he talked to Griff crept back with that last sentence. He took out a piece of dark rock and a C-shaped piece of metal. Despite myself I leaned forward to watch as the steel rasped and scraped along the flint, throwing sparks into the papery substance. Bark, I realized—shredded birch bark.
It took a few tries before sparks struck true enough to take, making pinpoints of glow on the bark. Dad bent over, bracing himself on the shore with his palms, and blew. The pinpoints flared and raced along the bark, making ragged gaps edged with molten orange as smoke boiled between the tiny twigs. Then another rough breath out and the glows spat out thin fingers of flame that grabbed at the bottom of the twigs.
Dad kept blowing, but more gently now, and more and more fingers leapt up until they got a good grip on the twigs. Dad started adding larger sticks, balancing them so the little cone wouldn’t collapse.
He narrated everything he was doing as he took the fish and slit it along its belly. He told nobody in particular how to scoop out the guts. He tossed some of them to Bo, who gobbled them up and then nosed over the pebbles looking for more, and then Dad put some of them in a little bag to use as bait later.
“Bo was a gift, you know,” Dad said. He speared the fish on a metal rod from a box in the stern of the canoe and set it propped up over the fire. “Got him when he was just a fuzzy puffball.”
“Oh,” I said, not sure what else I was supposed to contribute. Dad kept the fish turning slowly.
“Man who gave him to me bred dogs to guard against bears,” Dad went on. “Didn’t think much about me going off on my own, and Bo was a little runty, so he put him in my arms. Said that and a rifle was all the protection I’d need.”
I looked at Bo, big-boned and rangy and probably weighing almost as much as me. “Runty?” I repeated.
Dad laughed. “You should’ve seen his big brother. I think he might have actually been part bear himself.”
We lapsed into silence again as Dad turned the fish. He seemed content to sit and turn and sit and turn, but now I was bored and my leg had finally stopped hurting.
I stood up, pushing off so I didn’t put any weight on my leg until everything was lined up, hip and knee and ankle. When the joints were stacked like that they didn’t collapse, and I could bend slowly to make sure that the muscles had remembered how to work.
I dragged myself off down the beach.
“Don’t go far,” Dad said to the fire.
Bo, who’d been sitting at Dad’s side and staring at the fish with his tongue hanging out, lifted himself with a martyr’s sigh and trotted after me. “Don’t trust me not to get myself killed?” I asked him. He gave me an apologetic look, and we set off together.
It was hard to pay attention to my surroundings when I had to pay so much attention to my walking. Step, BIG STEP, step, BIG STEP, step, BIG STEP, then step, WRONG STEP, DRAG, LIMP, step.
Will, my physical therapist, had huge shoulders and swoopy hair, and he wore this big doofy grin all the time. His favorite thing to say was “You can do it! You just need the Will!” like it was the funniest, cleverest thing anyone had ever come up with.
The first time he said it I glared at him. The next three times I rolled my eyes, but by the time we got up to ten, twenty, thirty times I started giggling or groaning. He said that if I was annoyed at him, I didn’t think about how much it hurt, and if I was laughing, I didn’t mind how much it hurt.
I didn’t know if that was exactly true, but it didn’t take long for me to want to make Will proud of me. And so I pushed and pushed, even when I wanted to cry. And then he had to start telling me to take it easy, but by then he’d done the important thing. He’d convinced me I would get better. He even told me it was okay to get frustrated, and to cry, and to want to give up. He gave me a trigger for when I felt like that, so I could get out of it again.
I would let myself feel awful for a while, because feeling awful can feel really good. But I had to decide on an amount of time—ten minutes, five minutes—and at the end of it I had to snap my fingers and say, “That’s enough of that, mopey-head!” in as chirpy and happy a voice as I could.
After that, I was allowed to go back to moping if I really wanted to, but somehow it worked. It wouldn’t have worked for everyone, but whenever I had to declare That’s enough of that! in Will’s crazy upbeat tone, I couldn’t take myself seriously anymore. Which meant I couldn’t stay mopey.
My leg was getting sore, and I stopped. There was a bit of a hill between Dad and me, so I couldn’t see him, but I could see the smoke rising up, and I could smell the fish cooking. I looked out over the lake. The wind dragged a ripple across the surface. Out toward the center a fish twice as big as the one I’d got flopped up out of the water and down again. A duck skidded down into the water not far away and paddled by, and insects skimmed over the surface.
I turned around. The trees were the lushest green I’d ever seen. Their branches were thick and tangled with one another, and they netted shadows beneath them until it looked like evening instead of noon. Birds flickered among the branches. There were at least half a dozen different calls echoing among the trees, and the flat, raspy croak of a crow.
It was beautiful. It was nothing like when I’d been camping and there were twenty camping sites laid out next to one another and some guy’s RV running a generator and daytime TV in the distance. Here the sounds that wrapped around me were wild sounds and the smells were wild smells and there was no light to stain the sky except the sun.
“That’s enough of that, mopey-head!” I declared, channeling my very best Will impression.
Bo looked at me like I’d gone crazy and maybe he should go get help. I grinned at him and scratched him between the ears.
“This totally sucks and my dad is bonkers,” I told the dog. I wanted to be clear on that. I was done feeling sorry for myself, but I wasn’t done being pissed and out of place. “Now let’s go learn how to cook a fish.”
