As the bread deepened to a golden brown, a satisfied smile flickered on my face. I might just get this self-sufficient thing yet.
When they were done, I slid them off, walked back inside, and dropped one on Blake’s face and one on his chest. With the last two, I returned outside, sat on the log by the fire, took big, eager bites, and stared into the flames. It was funny how something so destructive could be so beautiful.
Next thing I knew, a hand was on my back and I was jerking upright and around. It was Blake.
“Sorry. I keep forgetting.”
Seeing his dismayed face and wilted paws of hands, I couldn’t help but laugh.
“It’s fine.”
He raised the two pieces of toast. “I just wanted to get you back for this.”
I took a big bite of mine and scoffed. “What, for making you toast?”
Sitting down beside me, Blake turned to look me in the eye. “You know for what.”#p#分页标题#e#
“No, no, you’re right,” I said, shaking my head exuberantly. “I won’t ever make you toast again. Don’t you worry.”
He shoved me with his shoulder, and we laughed. His gaze shifted to the fire.
“I see you’ve already mastered the art of fire.”
I lifted the lighter. “I guess you could say that.”
He laughed. “Ah, okay. Looks like today will be a skills day. Let’s start with fire.”
In a few big bites, he finished his toast and then rose and stomped out the fire. He turned to me.
“You ready?”
I gulped down the last of my toast and nodded.
He walked off a bit into the trees, scanning the ground. I followed.
“Okay, first things first,” he said. “For timber, you need dry sticks. Not mostly dry; not more or less dry. The sticks you find need to be 100 percent dry. This is the most important step. If you don’t follow it, you will fail.”
He lifted a stick. “So how’s this one?”
I ran my fingertip across it and, feeling the moisture, wrinkled my nose.
“Nope.”
He patted my arm. “You’re a natural.”
“What about these?” I asked, lifting two sticks.
Blake inspected them with a serious air, though I wasn’t worried. These sticks couldn’t have been drier if I threw them in the oven and baked them for an hour.
“Good,” he finally admitted.
As he scanned the ground some more, he continued his lesson. “Step two: find more dry wood to transfer your flame to. Step three: light and repeat. Basically, you use the flame of each piece of wood to light larger and larger ones. Conversely, you could always light the first small piece of wood and immediately transfer it to a big old stack of logs, but that's trickier.”
I lifted a clump of dandelions and asked, “What about these?”
Blake sighed and put a hand to his face. “I don’t know if you’re cut out for this, Claire…”
Giggling, I shoved him. Then, turning away, I started rubbing my two sticks together. As a small tuft of flame flared up on the tip of one, I turned to Blake with a triumphant smile.
“Oh really?”
A second later, however, the flame had snaked down the stick to my hand.
“Ah!” I cried, dropping it.
One second the lit-up stick was burning on the ground, the next a tongue of fire was surging through the grass toward a tree.
“Claire!” Blake yelled.
Shoving by me, he ran over and jumped on the flame’s far end, stamping it out. When all that remained of the flame was a thick twine of smoke, Blake turned to face me, his mouth a snarl.
“It’s not a joke.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, my one hand still clutching the burned one, my knuckles white.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay. You just…have to be more careful.”
I nodded, wanting to sink into the ground and disappear.
He patted my shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up. You were doing good, and you got the basics anyway. How about we learn some animal tracking?”#p#分页标题#e#
I glanced back at the fire and past it, where the skin of the rabbit from last night was still visible, half-buried under leaves and horrifying.
He patted my shoulder again. “We’re not going to be hunting, so don’t worry. Just tracking; that’s all.”
“Okay,” I said, turning to him with a forced smile. “Let’s do it.”
And we did. Blake showed me the ins and outs of tracking. He showed me how to find an animal’s rubs, scratches, gnaws, and chews on the landscape, how to spot compressions and leaf depressions on the ground. He showed me how to find prints: the shapes to look for, what animal each matched.