“WE’RE HITTING THE Freedom Road,” Jenny said as she carried her sleeping bag past me to the car. It was something we said whenever we went west on Highway 20. The night before, Mom had begun packing for our camping trip and Jenny was trying to get me excited. Freedom Road was the name the locals had given the highway in the 1950s when they had chopped the route from the coast to the interior, without the help of government, so they could get out with their own vehicles. “Or die trying,” Mom said. The steep drop to the valley was sometimes called Courage Hill. Like Dad had, Mom scoffed at the idea of fortifying herself with alcohol to drive it. “People think liquor makes them better drivers. Idiots. It just makes them care a bit less about going over the edge.”
It had rained during the night and when we got out on the highway, Mom opened her window. A fresh rain scent drifted in; the road steamed in the morning sunshine. “Pour me some tea, please,” she said to Jenny, who sat beside her in the passenger seat. I was in the back. These were our usual places. Dad had rarely come with us when Mom took us camping. He had hardly been in the station wagon at all. It was Mom’s car, and ours, a tan-and-white 1963 Chevy Impala with creamy white seats and brown dashboard and trim. Mom loved the car. She kept the seats clean and had a little garbage can on the hump that she emptied, along with the ashtray if it had been used, each time we stopped at a gas station. She kept good tires on the vehicle, checked her own oil and fluids and wrote her oil changes in the owner’s manual, which she kept neatly tucked into the glove compartment. “But it’s a car,” she’d say. “And cars are made for driving. I’m not going to baby it.” That meant she would take it down most any road where we had enough clearance and there were no sharp rocks that could pierce a tire.
Driving like this, the three of us, it felt like nothing had changed. Jenny poured the tea from the thermos and I settled into my job, which was to watch for wildlife. I didn’t have to be so vigilant at this time of day; dusk was when the deer came out and grazed the open spaces along the highway. Mom’s strong hands held the steering wheel. Jenny leaned into a pillow propped against the door. A sense of safety filled the car. I think we all felt it. Nothing could go wrong and there was no such thing as trouble coming in threes.
“Roll me a cigarette, sweetie,” said Mom.
I smelled the spicy tobacco as Jenny opened the pouch, then the sulfur flare of the match as she held it for Mom. Mom only smoked when she drove or when we were camping, and only hand-rolled cigarettes. Sweet, light smoke perfumed the air like incense, like every other trip we’d taken in the safety of that station wagon, with Mom at the wheel.
When we entered the Redstone Indian Reserve we could see the mountains in the distance ahead.
“I want to stop,” I said. My voice sounded rusty and odd even to me.
Mom’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. Jenny whirled in her seat and put her arms out, as if to hug me. “Maggie, you’re alive!” she said.
“This is near where Dad took me last fall,” I said.
“Okay.” Mom said it almost cautiously, as if the spell of ordinariness could break again at any minute. “Where do you want to stop, Maggie?”
“The road’s just past here.”
Mom slowed the station wagon and made the turn. The track cut straight and flat through a meadow, then entered the woods, the way I remembered. The trees grew thicker, their branches tangled above us.
“Are you sure, Maggie?”
“This is it,” I said.
For a moment, when we came out in the clearing by the lake, I was disoriented. The water was in the right place, but everything else looked different: green reeds piercing the surface of the water, grass grown up where there hadn’t been grass before, trees leafed out and obscuring the entrances to the paths. But then I saw our lean-to, tucked into the shade of some aspens with the entrance facing the lake.
“There it is,” I said, and I jumped out of the car. Mom and Jenny followed, stretching and yawning. Someone had made a fire pit in front of the lean-to with a circle of rocks. Charred logs, mostly burnt, lay in the pit.
“Did you and Dad find this?” Mom asked.
“We built it,” I said.
“You built it? What’s it for?”
“You sit in it,” I said, leading the way. “It’s a shelter. We built lots of different ones. We can all fit in if we squish.” I backed in feet first, leaving my head and shoulders in the opening, then Jenny followed. Mom wriggled her hips to squeeze between us. She was as supple as a girl; the muscles in her thighs showed when she moved, even through her blue jeans. Her forearms, too, exposed to the sun beneath her rolled-up shirtsleeves, were tanned, freckled and muscled. She wasn’t afraid of anything, either; anyone could see that.
The sun shone full on our three heads poking from the opening. Mom rested her forehead on her arms and closed her eyes. The lake lay dead calm, the only movement made by clouds of insects moving in unison above the reeds. In the warm sunshine, Mom was soon asleep. Like Dad had said, the way the sun landed on her hair, she was lit up. Jenny traced a stick through the sandy soil, writing her own name in curlicue letters. I watched for horseflies looking to land on Mom’s bare arms and flicked them away when they did. The lean- to seemed even more solid than the day Dad and I had built it, and I wondered if someone had reinforced it, made it more waterproof. The ground underneath me felt dry, even after a night of rain. Maybe someone had even spent a night in it.
“Dad never took me out to build things,” Jenny whispered. Her voice was matter-of-fact; I didn’t hear any bitterness in it.
“Maybe he thought you wouldn’t like it. I’m the tomboy, remember?”
On the lake, we caught sight of a heron standing near the shore.
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess that was it.”
After Mom’s nap she drove us back to the highway, then west. “Rocks!” I warned, and Mom swerved the car just as a small avalanche came tumbling down the rock face beside the road. One pinged off the bumper.
“It’s like Maggie has ESP,” Jenny said. “She knows things are going to happen before they do.”
This wasn’t new. Jenny liked to say this about me. It gave her the creeps, she said.
“She just pays attention,” Mom said, trying to nip Jenny’s Maggie-is-weird theme in the bud. Jenny could warm to it, and she sounded so persuasive that I started to believe it myself and didn’t even mind hearing her say it. But I did pay attention and I couldn’t relax, like Jenny did, her bare feet up on the dashboard, or sometimes sticking out the window in the breeze.
We began the precipitous descent down the Hill, the famous 18 percent grade. Mom pumped the brakes so they wouldn’t get too hot, but even so we could smell the linings. On the north side of the road the rock face rose up sharply, but on the south a clipped ledge crumbled then dropped, tumbling thousands of feet through jack pine and rock to the bottom of the canyon. When I had the guts to look over, I saw only empty space and treetops. Were there rusted-out bodies of cars down there, those whose brakes had failed or whose owners had bitten off more than they could chew and lost their nerve for just a second? I pictured them, sailing out into clear blue sky, then the moment of pure wonder before they dropped, bounced, once, twice, and rolled, over and over to the canyon floor.
It was dusk when we got to the fir forest, the place Mom wanted to show us. Usually, Jenny and I were boisterous as we settled into a new campsite, abandoning the gear we hauled from the car to run off and explore. Tonight was different. The fir trees around us were giant and unmoving. A thick carpet of moss and needles spread out cleanly beneath them. It was very quiet, very still and the slam of our car doors echoed unnaturally. Even though it was evening, the air felt warm, heavy with the rich piney fragrance of the forest.
“This looks like a good place to put the tent,” said Mom, walking off a square in a flat area among several large firs. Jenny and I stood beside the car, watching her. She looked up. “Do you like it?”
Jenny asked, “Did you used to come here with Dad?”
“No, I found this place myself. Quite a long time ago. Before I even met him. This is an old forest. You can feel it. Bring the tent, girls.”
Jenny and I lugged the heavy canvas tent from the station wagon as Mom laid out the poles and began fitting them together. I liked the familiar oil smell that rose from the canvas as we unfolded it. Mom moved confidently; she knew exactly what she was doing here.
Even before we had the tent all unfolded, we knew where the door was by the patch in the canvas over a hole from a hot ember. “There’s the patch,” said Jenny. “Which way do you want to face?”
“The sun will be coming up over here. Let’s face that way,” said Mom.
She had to turn the flashlight on before we were finished. Pale light still washed the sky above the trees, but didn’t reach the forest floor where we clattered around with our supper dishes and frying pan.
“I could make a fire,” said Mom. “But it’s so warm, maybe we should just make our wieners on the Coleman stove?”
When we didn’t answer she got the stove from the car and began pumping it up. I put our lawn chairs in a semi-circle and Jenny lit two candles in mason jars and set them in the crook of a rotted log. We sat mesmerized by the barely moving candle flames and listened to Mom stir the beans and wieners in the frying pan as the stove hissed gently. She handed us the steaming plates then closed the valve on the stove and the blue flames died.
Our human noises barely made a ripple before the quiet folded in again, like a thick liquid we were moving through.
“Sure is still,” said Jenny, bending her head back to look up at the treetops.
“No coffee for me tonight,” Mom said. “I’m beat. There’s a creek over that way, girls. We’ll find it after we eat.”
The wieners and beans were smoky and delicious. My eyes followed the progress of a beetle making his way up the side of one of the mason jars as we ate.
“Look at that,” Jenny said, reaching for my arm. “It’s pitch black over there.”
When we were done, Mom picked up the wash basin and led the way into the dark with the flashlight. Just a few yards from camp a sandy bank sloped down. We could hear the creek before we saw it, the gentle trickle of slow water flowing over rocks. Mom splashed her face and neck and ran her wet hands over her hair. Jenny and I did the same. Then Mom plunged the basin into the water and let it fill. We stood on the sandy bank watching the creek flowing in the dark.
“What are those little lights in the water?” Jenny said.
“Where?” Mom and I said together.
“Look. Watch carefully. There.”
“It’s starlight!” said Mom. We turned to the open sky above the creek, where a wide path of stars fuzzed the night sky.
I still remember the feeling of falling asleep that night, sunk deliciously into my sleeping bag like I had no bones, like our tent was floating in a still, warm sea, the baked canvas smell enveloping us like a cocoon. Some time in the night I woke to the sound of an owl’s low hoot. Owls were supposed to be harbingers of death, but even that didn’t disturb me. Its call was clear and reassuring. I didn’t move my sleep-heavy limbs but let the peace of this place and the soft breathing of my sister and my mother on either side of me carry me back to sleep.
Bees darted among the wild raspberry bushes as Jenny and I filled our pails in the sunny clearing by the creek after breakfast. The raspberries were firm and juicy; we raced to see who could fill her pail fastest. When we were done, we sat by the creek eating them one by one.
“Have you ever heard of Chiwid?” Jenny asked.
“The old lady who lives outside?”
“Yeah. People see her all over the place, camping out. They say she doesn’t sleep in a tent or anything. Even in the winter. What she does is she makes a little fire in a hole in the ground, then she scrapes out all the ashes and she sleeps in there. The heat keeps her warm till morning. Pretty good idea.”
“I’ve seen her,” I said.
“You have not,” said Jenny.
“I saw her once when I was with Dad. She had all these bundles of stuff she was carrying alongside the road. Dad said he’d offer her a ride but she didn’t like strangers, especially if they were white. He said if we stopped she’d run away.”
“Cool,” said Jenny. “I heard she has a lot of money and she hides it all over the place, like in swamps and stuff. I bet there’s some hidden around here.”
“I doubt it. Where would she get money?”
“Josie’s grandpa knows her and he says she gets money from somewhere. She hardly needs any, living out like that, so she hides it. Josie said maybe she gets the money from her husband because he feels bad for what he did to her.” She looked at me as she said this, as if she wasn’t sure she would tell me what it was he did. She put a handful of berries in her mouth.
“She doesn’t have a husband,” I said. “Dad said she’s on her own, even though she’s an old lady. Some people say she’s part coyote, that’s what Dad said.”
“Maybe she is. But she used to have a husband. She used to be normal. Live in a normal house and stuff.”
I couldn’t hold back anymore. “So what happened?”
Jenny looked at me intently and hugged herself. “This is true. You can ask anyone. But don’t ask Mom because she’d kill me for telling you.”
“Okay,” I said, but now I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear it.
“Her husband was really mean. Josie said she heard her grandpa talk about him. He once saw Chiwid’s husband take a harness and whip a horse with the metal bit, in the head and everything, till the horse kicked him in the stomach. He thought it was funny. He didn’t care who saw. Sometimes he’d say he was going to shoot Chiwid. He’d hold the rifle to her stomach and then their kids had to go running off to get help.”
“She has kids?”
“She used to, a long time ago. Like I said, she used to have a normal life. Anyway, one time her husband was so mad he took a chain, one of those big ones for logging, and he beat her with it. She was beautiful, too. Well, she’s old now, but once she was beautiful. Some people say he was jealous. He didn’t like how other men looked at her and that’s why he did it. He choked her with that chain and almost killed her. That’s when she ran away and she never went back to living with people. It is like she’s a coyote, because she’s spooked like that. She’s afraid to come near people now.”
“What about her kids?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Jenny.
Dad had said that Chiwid was happy. “She likes sleeping out,” he’d said. “Some people say she’s a bit crazy, but she’s right as rain. She’s lived this long. She must know what she’s doing.”
Mom had come down to the creek. She slipped out of her shorts and T-shirt and waded into the water. I put down my berry pail. A chickadee was singing on the other side of the creek.
Jenny took off her runners and tossed them, one by one, beside a stand of willow. “Let’s go wading,” she said, pulling me up by the arm.
Mom sat on a rock with her feet in the water, and as the sun grew hotter, Jenny and I stretched out and let the cool current bubble over us. I thought of Chiwid alone in the bush sleeping in her little warm spot in the ground. I couldn’t decide if I pitied her or envied her.
Night dropped again as suddenly as it had the evening before, and with it the light breeze that had been sifting through the firs fell calm. Mom built a fire, her rustlings and twig-snapping echoing in that strange silence. Worn out, Jenny and I drew our legs up in the lawn chairs with a shared blanket over our knees and watched the heat curl bark into orange embers that leapt into flame, grew and twisted.
“What a perfect day,” said Mom, settling into her own lawn chair.
“Are you ever afraid?” Jenny asked her.
“Afraid of what?”
“Anything. Like bears or wolves or cougars.”
“I’m more afraid of humans,” said Mom.
“What humans?” asked Jenny.
“None in particular,” she said. “There just seems to be more to fear from humans than from any of those animals. Humans are unpredictable.”
After we lost her, I tried to put together a list of the important things Mom told us: Never make big decisions late at night. Don’t touch the sides of the tent when it’s raining. Never lean on a stove because you never know when it might be hot. Don’t drink from a creek if you don’t know what’s upstream. Humans are unpredictable.
A sound outside the tent woke me. At first I thought it was the wind coming up. Then I recognized the low hum of an engine and the soft crunch of tires, moving slowly towards our camp. Mom was still out by the fire. I heard her push her lawn chair back and saw her shadow on the tent as she stood. I held my breath. It seemed to me that if I didn’t let on that I was awake, I would not have to be a part of whatever happened next, or even that it would not happen.
The vehicle stopped and a door opened, then closed with a soft click.
“You nearly scared the life out of me, coming in here with your headlights off like that,” said Mom quietly.
A man’s low voice answered her. “You knew it would be me, didn’t you? Who else knows this road in the pitch dark?”
“What, have you been following me?”
The words alarmed me, but there was a teasing tone to her voice. She wasn’t scared of this man.
I heard the chairs scrape again and then the mumble of their voices wove into the gurgle of the creek. I wanted to get up and look out at them. I thought about lifting the door flap. But I was too close to sleep. I woke again later to the sound of a high wind moaning through the tops of the firs. I tucked my blankets closer. Mom’s soft laughter sounded below the wind. She was still out by the fire. The man’s voice murmured, deep and soft. The fire snapped. I felt cold. When I sat up, Mom was beside me, her body curled warmly between Jenny and me.
I was the first one up and out in the chilly morning. The bright blue sky promised a nice day. Sun filtered through the feathery fir branches. No high wind, only the gentle swaying of the wild rose bushes near the creek. A squirrel scurried along the ground and flew up a tree trunk. Behind the tent, I scanned the earth for tire tracks. I couldn’t see any. Our car still sat on the road, the windshield winking in the sun, and I felt as if I had dreamed the night visitor.
After breakfast, Mom sat sipping her coffee from a blue enamel cup. She closed her eyes as she drank, then tilted her face a little to the sunlight streaming through the fir trees.
Jenny laid two battered tablespoons on the ground between us. “Guess what these are for?”
“Cereal?”
“We already ate. Guess again.”
“We’re going to make something?”
“No—we’re going to look for something,” Jenny corrected. “Chiwid’s treasure.”
“Using spoons.”
“We don’t have any shovels. Anyway, she wouldn’t have to bury it very deep.”
Mom smiled and tilted her head towards us. “Chiwid’s treasure?”
“She must have some,” Jenny said. “Don’t you think so, Mom?”
“I suppose she would. I’m not sure she’d bury it, though.”
“So no one would steal it. It makes sense. She knows the bush like nobody else. She wouldn’t carry it around. That would be too dangerous.”
“And heavy,” I said. “What are we going to do if we find some?”
Jenny’s face fell for a moment, then she brightened again. “I know. We’ll add some money to it—just a bit. And we can write her a note saying we found your money, but we’re not going to steal it. So maybe she’ll start to trust people again.”
“That’s a nice idea, Jen,” Mom said sleepily, and closed her eyes again.
“Why do you want her to trust people?”
“Let’s just dig,” said Jenny.
The day warmed as the sun’s angle widened and lit the pink fireweed along the creek edge and the scrub aspens and tangle of salmonberry bushes growing in over the logged clearings. We dug in the springy fir-needled soil, beside unusually shaped trees and deadfall that we thought would make landmarks for Chiwid’s memory. Some distance away, Mom crouched, in her baseball cap, picking berries. She had found a patch of ripe wild strawberries, late for the time of year, and she ate as she picked, humming happily.
I kept looking for an opportunity to ask Jenny if she’d heard the night visitor. But I didn’t want Jenny to dig into it in her usual fearless, reckless way. Jenny could ask so many questions she’d make herself cry with the answers. I never did that. If I could picture an answer I didn’t want, I wouldn’t even ask.
Mom had hummed yesterday, too, I told myself. Camping with Jenny and me made her happy. But that distant soft pleasure I saw in her as she foraged in among the radiant pink feathers of fireweed and shafts of sunlight—that was something else, I knew. It was not a gift given to her by Jenny or me.