Running Wild Read online

  The publisher wishes to thank Sam Alexander, Gwichyaa Gwich’in from Fort Yukon, for his expert review of the text.

  Margaret Ferguson Books

  Copyright © 2019 by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  All rights reserved

  HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  www.holidayhouse.com

  First edition

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bledsoe, Lucy Jane, author.

  Title: Running wild / Lucy Jane Bledsoe.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Margaret Ferguson Books; Holiday House, [2019] | Summary: “When living in the Alaskan wilderness with her survivalist father becomes intolerable, 12-year-old Willa sets out on a journey of escape with her younger brothers”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019000891 | ISBN 9780823443635 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Survival—Fiction. | Fathers and daughters—Fiction. | Runaways—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Single-parent families—Fiction. | Family life—Alaska—Fiction. | Alaska—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Action & Adventure / Survival Stories. | JUVENILE FICTION / Family / Siblings. | JUVENILE FICTION / Girls & Women.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.B6168 Run 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000891

  Ebook ISBN 9780823443789

  v5.4

  a

  For Mary TallMountain

  1918–1994

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  WHEN THE SUN starts to rise, a dim light leaks through our cabin window, revealing the contents of our lives: four cots with sleeping bags, the black cast-iron woodstove with its pipe shooting up through the roof, a rough-hewn wooden table and four chairs, our cooking pots hanging from the wall opposite my bed. It’s early October, and in a few weeks, the sun won’t rise at all.

  I am twelve years old and live with my dad and ten-year-old twin brothers, Keith and Seth, in the heart of the Alaskan wilderness. We moved here five years ago after Mama died. At first, the hard work, the bright Arctic summer sun, even the intensity of the dark northern winter, seemed to scour away our sadness. Dad’s dream of living off the land, by our own wits and labor, was so forceful it carried us along like a swift current. As much as we missed Mama, we laughed a lot in those early years and Dad tried to make it fun, teaching us how to identify edible plants, helping us build a raft for messing around on our stream, and showing us how to play chess. But over the years life here has gotten harder, not easier, and so has Dad. If we complain, he says, “Humans are animals, nothing more. We need to eat, drink, sleep, that’s it. Just like the bears and crows. The sooner people realize they’re nothing special, the better off we’ll be as a species.”

  I get up and reach deep into my sleeping bag to fetch my notebook. Keeping a journal was Dad’s idea. He called me the family scribe and wanted me to document everything. How the helicopter dropped us off with just the basics, including some food to get us started, a big tent, the parts for our woodstove, a few tools, pots and utensils, packets of seeds, and the encyclopedia set. How over the course of that first summer we built our cabin and planted our garden, hunted for game, fished for trout and salmon, and dried and stored food for the winter. How Dad made our table, chairs, and rowboat from scratch.

  Sometimes when I read these earlier journal entries, I laugh at my big blocky childish printing, with all the corrections and additions in Dad’s handwriting. He hasn’t asked to see my journal in over a year, but even so, I keep it hidden because he wouldn’t like reading what I’ve been writing about lately—the things I want and miss—and that I’m worried we’re not going to survive this winter.

  Dad and the boys have been hunting almost daily this autumn, hiking for miles through the wilderness, searching for moose and deer. With zero luck. Most nights they fall into bed right after dinner and sleep hard. Now Dad is snoring loudly and the twins, so thin they barely mound their sleeping bags, their little-boy eyelashes fluttering with dreams, are deep in sleep. I yank jeans over my long underwear and put on my parka, grab my boots, and slip out the door.

  I forgot socks, but shove my feet into the boots anyway, tie the laces tight, and pull my fleece hat and gloves from my parka pockets. I walk down to the creek, the musical ripple running through our lives. Dad made up its name: Sweet Creek.

  Our rowboat sits on the small pebbled beach. About a hundred yards downstream, the creek bends out of sight. Eventually it flows into a bigger stream that runs into the powerful Yukon River, which leads to Fort Yukon, a town just a short distance from the Arctic Circle. I’ve only been to the settlement once, when we first came to Alaska. Dad makes this journey once a year, in the early summer, after the big melt. He brings back things like beans, rice, peanuts, cornmeal, oatmeal, bullets, matches, first-aid supplies, new boots and clothes. Opening those packages is always so exciting. Sometimes he tucks a few oranges, or a hunk of cheese, in with our staples, treats that last about three minutes. Dad doesn’t like indulgences, but we all love chocolate, and he never fails to buy bags of chocolate chips so I can make cookies. This year I was shocked to see that he also brought back whiskey bottles—Dad’s a recovering alcoholic and had been sober for seven years before Mama died. She always said how proud she was of him for stopping drinking.

  Dad can do the round-trip journey to Fort Yukon in less than a week. While he was away, he used to leave us with Clarissa and Robert Slone-Taylor, who live fifteen miles up Sweet Creek in their own log cabin. It’s my favorite week every year. We play board games, learn new songs, and even perform plays that we make up. The Slone-Taylors have more luxuries than we do, including lots of drawing paper and colored pencils. Seth spends most of the time drawing. Keith likes to help them tinker with the generator, which makes power for their cabin.

  But last summer Dad had an argument with the Slone-Taylors. As we were leaving, Clarissa said that it wasn’t any of her business, and she knew everyone in Alaska carried firearms, but she and Robert both thought the twins were too young for rifles. Dad launched into a tirade, saying that every child as young as five years old in Fort Yukon has his or her own rifle. Besides, Dad carried on, no one tells him how to raise his own children. Consequently, we didn’t get to go to the Slone-Taylors’ cabin this summer.

  “You’re twelve and ten, after all,” Dad said. “Bear cubs leave their mothers and start living on their own at the age of two.”

  He left for Fort Yukon in late June, and he was right. My brothers and I did just fine, even though he stayed away for two weeks this trip. When he wasn’t home on t
ime, I acted as though I’d known all along that he would be gone longer than usual and I told the boys that he had lots of business in Fort Yukon. Of course they asked what business, so I made up answers, like “banking” and “phoning relatives,” and then had to explain what banking is and who our relatives were. Truly, after the eighth day of his absence, I wondered if he’d ever return and worried that he’d had an accident somewhere along the route. I have never been so relieved as I was when he came rowing up our creek in early July.

  This morning I turn my back on the creek and face our small collection of buildings. We are surrounded by forest, but the cabin sits on a level spread of meadow between the creek and the hill where the helicopter dropped us off. There are also three outbuildings near the cabin: the woodshed; the cache, a tiny house with an airtight door on tall stilts with a ladder running up the front, where we store our food to keep it away from animals; and the outhouse. Dad carved a moon on its door, back when he still took time for fun details.

  On my way to the outhouse, I walk past the woodshed. Usually by this time of year we have a big stack of firewood. We do gather wood in the winter, too, but even so, we fell short last year during the coldest month of January, when we couldn’t get out much, and had to ration our fires, going to bed early to keep warm. Dad even burned our encyclopedia set. He did the first volume in a fit of frustration, because the kindling was wet, but when he saw how upset I was it seemed to spur him on, as if my wanting to read all those articles was a weakness. He said the laws of biology were the only knowledge we needed. Every day after that, he burned another volume. I used to love studying the maps, reading about astronauts and stars, finding pictures of Chinese, Namibian, or Guatemalan girls and pretending they were my friends. When I asked Dad about our firewood supply the other day, he waved me off, saying he couldn’t take any time away from hunting.

  After quickly using the outhouse—inside there is a hole cut in a wooden bench suspended over a deep earthen pit—and rinsing my hands in the creek, I climb the hill, kicking through the mat of yellow and brown leaves. At the top, the first rays of sun are spiking above the evergreen horizon. I love that moment when the sunlight first touches me.

  I sit in the crunchy leaves and start writing. The boys are too young to remember much about our life with Mama in Seattle, but I’m not. I write about how I miss Pike Place Market in Seattle, where you can buy every kind of fruit and vegetable, where musicians serenade the shoppers, where we used to stop and chat with neighbors. I miss school and looking things up on a computer. I miss sleepovers and birthday parties. The smell of libraries, all those books that have been held by dozens of hands. And Christmas lights, the way Seattle gets twinkly for the holidays. I miss having my own bedroom.

  I miss Mama.

  I also write about Dad standing right here, on top of the hill, yesterday at dusk, shooting his rifle into the air, shouting at the sky. When I called out that supper was ready, he just looked at me and headed into the woods. He didn’t come back to the cabin until well after dark and then he poured himself a tin cup of whiskey, ignoring the plate of beans and cornbread I’d left out for him.

  When I’m done writing, I stuff the journal into the front of my parka and head down the hill to the cabin. Dad is stoking the fire in the woodstove, and he turns to scowl at me. He has black hair, which he cuts himself without using a mirror, so it stands out in tufts all over his head. He has a long black beard that he never trims. He’s skinny. We all are. But his skinniness is winnowed and ropy; any meat left on his frame is muscle. His hands are scarred and chapped. His eyes are a startling glacier blue.

  “Where have you been, Willa?” he asks.

  “The outhouse.”

  “You’ve been gone a long time.”

  “I took a walk.”

  Seth and Keith are awake, watching from their cots as I take off my parka and sneak the journal under my sleeping bag.

  In one stride Dad’s at my side pulling the journal out. “Why are you hiding this?”

  When I don’t answer he brandishes it in the air over his head. “I asked you a question.”

  “Willa’s the family scribe!” Seth calls, maybe hoping to distract him.

  “I asked why you’re hiding this,” he repeats.

  “You won’t like what I’ve been writing.”

  “What have I told you about keeping secrets?”

  “I’m not keeping secrets.”

  “Secrets are the same as lies,” he says. “And I can’t abide lies.”

  “I haven’t lied—I’ve only written the truth.”

  The boys sit still, waiting to see what will happen next.

  “You’re twelve years old. What do you know about truth?”

  His clear blue eyes, bright with a million ideas, used to reassure me; now their coldness scares me. And yet I can’t keep quiet. “I know a lot.”

  Dad huffs in anger, two ragged expulsions of breath.

  “Give it back to her,” Keith says.

  Dad glares at him, at me, and back at him.

  “It’s hers,” Keith yells.

  “Never mind,” I whisper, knowing I can’t keep Dad from reading it.

  He stares at us, as if his children have grown into creatures he doesn’t understand, then takes my journal out to the front porch, where he begins to read. Though it’s cold out, he doesn’t put on his parka. Dad likes to brag that nothing can kill him. Getting hit by a large branch when he was felling trees to build our cabin didn’t. Accidentally eating a poisonous mushroom didn’t. Falling through the ice into the creek two winters ago didn’t. He thinks the Alaskan air only toughens him.

  “It’s okay,” I tell the boys. “It’ll be fine.”

  But I can’t help worrying what Dad will think when he reads how scared I was that Seth might have gotten gangrene and died the time he sliced his toe with the ax. How Dad forgot all of our birthdays this year. How angry he gets when Keith talks back. How impatient he is with Seth’s dreaminess. How distraught he looked shooting his rifle up into the sky at nothing at all on the hill yesterday. How his grand survival experiment is failing.

  I make Seth and Keith bowls of oatmeal. Soon after they finish, Dad returns and goes straight to the woodstove. He tears out a handful of pages from my journal and shoves them into the fire. He tears out another handful and then another. All my dreams, hopes, stories, and fears are devoured by the flames. The journal is gone.

  TWO

  “BOYS, GET DRESSED. Willa, pack our lunch.”

  Dad taught me to shoot, and I used to hunt with him while the boys tagged along. But when he decided they were old enough to use rifles, I started staying behind because it made sense for one of us to take care of chores. I’ve taught the boys to cook, and they help me when they’re around, but for the most part, food preparation has become my job.

  As soon as they leave, I open the front of the woodstove. The ashes look like a pile of black leaves. A corner of the notebook is unburned but there is no point in pulling that out. I toss in a couple more pieces of wood to feed the blaze before closing the stove door.

  It’s a beautiful fall day, the sky a searing blue. Refusing to cry about my journal, I put my hand over the left side of my chest, where my skin is puffing out into a whole new shape, and count a hundred heartbeats. Then I get to work, sweeping the floor with our homemade broom, hauling water up from the creek, and setting the metal pail on top of the woodstove to heat for washing the breakfast dishes. I clean the outhouse, using another pail of water, evergreen branches for scrubbing, and soap made from rendered animal fat.

  By now, the stovetop water is hot enough for the breakfast dishes. Once they are dried and put away, I head outside and climb the ladder to our cache to take an accounting of the remaining food. Pride keeps Dad from buying many staples on his annual trips to Fort Yukon. He still believes we can catch, kill, and harvest most of ou
r food. But we fell dangerously short last year, and in June I told him he needed to get more food in town. He laughed and said we’d be fine. My garden did well at the beginning of summer; the lettuces formed giant heads, the kale sprouted colossal green leaves, and the zucchinis grew long and fat. Because of the constant daylight during the summer up here in the Arctic, vegetables grow really big. But those are foods we eat as soon as we pick them. Without a freezer, or the means to preserve the food we grow, not much of our garden produce can be stored for the winter. This year the pumpkins and butternut squashes, which can be cached for months, got attacked by pests. The ones that did grow are small. Even the potatoes are only the size of big marbles. I check what’s left of the dried meat. There’s so little: the boys must be sneaking snacks.

  I take a piece of venison and return to the cabin, where I put it in a pot of water to soften up for our evening stew. There’s some leftover cornbread, and it would taste good with jelly, so I walk to the rose hips patch to pick the last of this year’s fruit. After scooping out the seeds, I cook them on the woodstove with cinnamon and sugar. They’re a great source of vitamin C, and they taste good, too. I’ve already made a bunch of rose hips fruit leather that we can eat all year long.

  Once my chores are done, I fetch Jane Eyre out from under my cot. Dad had tossed it to me when we were still in Seattle, packing to come up here. He said, “Take this.” Since then I’ve read the novel cover to cover so many times I practically have it memorized. How lonely Jane was after her best friend, Helen, died. How I wish I could take Helen’s place and be Jane’s best friend. When Dad began burning the encyclopedia, I hid Jane Eyre and now only read it when he’s gone.

  I curl up on my cot and start reading at the beginning, not stopping until the cold gets me up. The fire in the woodstove has burned down to coals. After adding some wood, I look out the window and see that the sky has pearled up, become glossy and opaque. A few snowflakes drift down. I shiver. Soon freeze-up will arrive, turning the streams and even the bigger rivers into solid blocks of ice. This happens quite suddenly, usually around the middle of October. Already, on some mornings, a lace of ice trims the shore of our creek.