NOOOO!”
I jump up and curse and pull my hair. I drop back to my knees and pound my fist into the stone. I’m so freaked I don’t even feel the pain.
I’m frantic. I’m pacing around talking to myself. No food. No fire. No warmth. No hope.
I’m shivering now, but I don’t know if it’s from the cold or my raging frustration.
I suddenly get this image in my head. Brian in that book by Gary Paulsen. Hatchet. He’s alone in the wilderness with no matches, no lighter, just a hatchet. He strikes it against stone to make sparks to start a fire.
But we don’t have a hatchet!
Dad knew there’d be firewood at the campsites, so he didn’t bring one. Smart, Dad. Now we’ll just starve out here and become bear food, picked clean by crows and ravens.
But wait!
Wait!
The second to last match. It broke in half!
I drop to my knees and scrabble around like a starving beaver. I’ve got to find that wooden match, the half with the head still attached.
I can’t find it.
I’ve got to find it.
I scurry around in the moonlight, in the starlight, my nose almost to the ground, like a dog.
I find it!
No! It’s the wrong half! The other half should be around here somewhere. Right?
There it is! In a patch of dirt surrounded by low ground-cover. Lit slightly by a ray of moonlight.
I snatch it up like a gold nugget, and squat back down over the fire ring. I hold the match at its end, an inch or so from the head. I try to steady my hand. I’m shivering and shaking all over, but I’ve got to calm down. I’ve got to strike this with the precision of a brain surgeon.
I take a deep breath and force myself to calm down. I can do this. I can do this.
At least, I think I can.
The moon seems to hang in suspension.
I take a deep breath—holding the stub of a match a hair’s breadth above the boulder—and strike. . . .
It flairs up! It burns my fingers. I almost drop it.
But I don’t. I lower it slowly to the tip of twisted paper, holding my breath.
A tiny flame blooms—and it’s enough! It eats into the edge of twisted paper and I cup it from the wind.
“Ouch!” Flames reach up and bite my fingers. I pull my hand away and spit on them. I can smell singed flesh but there’s no time to run to the lake and soak my fingers. I’ve got to keep the fire going.
I gently coax it along with my breath. First the shredded bark catches fire, and then flames crawl along the sides of one piece of firewood, and another, and I gradually blow harder and harder till finally the fire’s blazing.
“Dad! Look! I got a fire going!” But Dad’s still out. “Dad, wake up! A fire!” Dad doesn’t stir, but I decide that’s a good thing. He needs to sleep. And he’s near the fire.
But I have to get him out of his wet clothes.
I open up the sleeping bag and wrestle him out of his jacket first, then I peel off his shirt, take off his sandals, and finally tug off his pants. It’s like grappling with a 150-pound rag doll!
And through the whole wrestling match he doesn’t wake up. That can’t be good.
Then I zip him back inside the bag and tuck his pillow back under his head.
Now I feed the flames with more and more firewood, until eventually a bonfire’s roaring in the night. I admire it for about one minute, and decide it’s time to go fishing.
But first I tear off my hoodie and hang it over a pine branch near the fire, to dry. Then I strip off my T-shirt and hang it next to my hoodie. They drip in the moonlight. I don’t have another pair of jeans, just cutoffs and it’s too cold for those. And I only have the one pair of shoes, my soggy river sandals, so I have to slog around half wet while I dry off with a towel and rifle through our wet bags for shirts. All I’ve got are dirty T-shirts. I layer on three smelly T-shirts and put on a torn windbreaker over them. I’m still freezing my butt off, but it’ll have to do.
I quickly rig up my rod and check on Dad again. He’s snoring, his face glowing in the firelight. With his filthy face and whiskers, and his ratty hair, he looks like a bum who’s given up on life.
But I know he’s not a bum. He tried to save my life.
He tried to save my life! Can you believe that? And almost lost his own life doing it.
So I’m gonna catch him a fish. A prize rainbow. And I’m gonna cook it up and say, Here, Dad. For you!
I stroll off along a path through the woods. I think my chances will be best where a creek flows into the lake, a hundred yards away. I come around the bend just as something crosses my path and freezes.
A lynx!
I stop in my tracks and stay absolutely still. I’ve seen bobcats a few times but this is much bigger, much longer legs, with tufts of fur on its ears and huge paws.
I stare at it. It stares at me. Its eyes in the moonlight burn with a golden fire.
I snap its picture with my mind’s camera, and the lynx springs off into the dark forest.
The moment’s over, but I’ll carry it with me for the rest of my life. A snapshot from the wild. A snapshot from the day my dad tried to save my life, and I ended up saving Dad.
At the creek I look at the moonlight on the lake. It’s awesome. It’s a rippling gold path leading right toward me. I cast my lure into it and start reeling it in.
It feels like I’m casting for the moon.
Almost instantly, my rod jerks and dances in my hands, then bends over till the tip almost touches the water. It feels like a big one! I loosen the drag so the line won’t snap, and watch a slippery muscle of light leap out of the lake and plunge back in. I let it jig and jag, rise, and dance on the water, and plunge back in. Then I start reeling it in again.
It’s twenty feet away.
Ten.
I see its tail swish the surface, and then I realize:
I didn’t bring the net!
If I try pulling it out of the water without a net, it might flip off the hook and get away.
I tighten the drag and prop the rod in the fork of a stunted tree and scramble into the lake after it. It darts and swirls and I snatch at it with both hands before it can snap the line, or tear the hook from its lips.
It squirts through my hands like a bar of soap. I grab the line with one hand, lift my foot, and wrap the line around my leg. Then I lunge for the fish with all the hungry energy of a grizzly bear.
“Gotcha!” I grasp it, as if with claws, and fling it out onto the shore, like a grizzly would.
A rainbow trout, its scales gleaming in the moonlight.
I slosh out of the water after it. It flips and flops on the ground. It’s a big trout, well over a foot long. Its gills work in and out, in and out. It flaps on its side, one eye staring at me. I pick up a rock and knock the fish on the head to put it out of its misery.
It’s not until now that I realize that two fingers on my left hand sting as if they’d been lashed with the tendrils of a jellyfish.
My burnt fingers. A fish I caught for my dad. My dad whose life I saved. A fire I made with the last half of the last match.
Okay. Now I think it’s okay if I feel a little pride.
And I do.