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.”
“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?”
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.
The first print we found was a series of diagonal, oblong circles, which Blake identified as a deer’s. After a few minutes of breathless rushing through the trees toward the sound of rustling ahead, he paused, peering through some underbrush.
“Looks like we’ve got a deer and her fawn not far ahead,” Blake said, lowering his voice. “This way.” He disappeared into a thick collection of underbrush.
“Great,” I said, trying to sound enthused and not like I’d been hungry and ready to stop for an hour now.
A few seconds later, however, even my internal dialogue had to shut up. We’d come out the other side of the underbrush. We’d spotted them, the deer we’d been following. The mother and fawn had found just the right place to pause, as if they had led us here to this.