The clouds loosened their steely grip as the Covered Wagon rolled into Washington. Under the sunshine, the greenery beside the road shone a lush grey. The heaviness in the air sparkled and softened like a warm blanket before an especially cozy nap.
The Wagon stopped in a glade and Mom let me out so we could stretch our legs. “Why don’t we go look at the sound?” Mom asked.
I closed my eyes and listened to the wind rustling in the trees and the wave-like whoosh of distant cars. Somewhere nearby, a brook giggled. “I see them!” I wagged. I took a deep breath and pine forests mixed with ocean in my nose. The ocean didn’t smell like My Ocean at home, but more calm, somehow. Closer to my nose, the smoky scent of campfires mixed with the trees.
There was a click behind my ear and an irresistible pull on my neck. I opened my eyes. “Let’s investigate the smells before we look at the sounds,” I decided, pulling the leash in the direction the smoky scent was coming from. “Is that bacon or just the smell of camping?”
“Come on, Spud. Let’s cross before another car comes.” Mom took a step toward the road, putting a little extra pressure into the leash to making a point.
“Of all the sounds, the cars are the ones you want to see first?” I asked, trying to catch up on legs that were still stuck in a daydream.
“A sound is a kind of bay.” Mom stopped, looked both ways like a cautious squirrel, and broke into a run. I trotted after her. When we got to the finish line in the middle of the road, we coasted to the far side. “I thought it would be a nice spot to watch the sunset.”
The beach wasn’t the sandy kind that’s nice for rolling or digging. It was more like a pile of rocks and shells. The rocks were all smooth and round, from breakfast-potato-sized to the pancake shape of skipping stones. The shells were rough, ugly things, like wads of soggy newspaper on the outside, but shimmered with a My Little Pony glow on the smooth, shiny inside. Curious, briney smells caught between the rocks like morsels of food stuck between back teeth.
Mom sat down on a barkless log that looked as old as Dog Almighty Himself and dropped the leash. I sniffed the seaweed and fish doo in the rocks around the log, but didn’t explore very far. I was here to be with Mom, not to smell oyster sweat.
“I do feel better now that the sun’s out.” Mom picked up an especially large shell from between her shoes. When she saw the crack on the end that had been between the rocks, she threw it back into the waveless ocean.
“See? Isn’t it peaceful?” I sat beside her and leaned lightly against her leg like you do when you’re looking at water with someone you love. “I knew the danger was all in your imagination. It’s just like that boy who kept telling people that there was a wolf about, just to mess with them... until he pulled off the most epic prank of all.”
“I really don’t think you understand the point of that story.” Mom picked up another shell and balanced it on my head. She held up a stay hand as she aimed the Witch.
I knew she was just testing me, but no dog could forget a story about a wolf. “Isn’t it obvious?" I tried to scoff, but it was hard to get the snobbiness right without moving my head. “The setup is that the boy keeps promising, WOLF! He shouts it over and over so he can laugh at the suckers who believe him. The townspeople are slower to come each time because they can’t take the disappointment when there’s no wolf to see. The third time is the punchline. When the townspeople don’t come to see the WOLF!, he fakes his death. Then he watches his own funeral.”
“It’s supposed to be a story about what happens when you don’t heed warnings,” Mom said. “You got the funeral part from Tom Sawyer. That’s a different story.”
“I thought it was a story about not annoying your companions by telling them that something’s wrong all the time. The moral is to mind your own business and let a wolf eat his dinner in peace.” I bowed my head and the shell fell off, clattering onto the rocks with the sound of a teacup on the kitchen floor.
“I don’t know,” Mom said, but in that way that’s supposed to mean that she knows I’m wrong. “It seems to me like the danger was real. If we’d slipped, neither of us would’ve made it out of that river alive. This isn’t a game.”
“Everything is a game to a dog,” I reminded her.
We sat and watched the sky turn from grey, to darker grey, to even darker grey while Mom threw stones in the ocean. They were supposed to skip on the water like frogs, but Mom’s rocks always dropped straight into the water like... well... like stones. When the sun was gone behind the sound and the dark began to leak from the sky into the air around us, Mom picked up the leash and led me back toward the Covered Wagon.
We crossed the street and stepped into the dimmer darkness under trees as thick as blackout curtains. The Witch turned on her spotlight, but the ring of light missed my bodacious booty. It swayed across the ground until it landed on a stick. Mom leaned over to pick it up.
“I know the way back to the Wagon without using sticks,” I told her. “Look. You can see it from here. It’s right there.”
The Wagon’s white coat glowed proudly in the gloom.
“I know. But we’re camping.” Mom picked up a fistful of dried pine needles and moved them to her stick-holding hand. “I’m gonna make a campfire.”
“Silly, Mom. You can’t make fire.” She’d tried to pull this trick on me before. She’d twisted gas canisters and twiddled knobs on the stove like a magician showing there was nothing up his sleeves. Then, labrachupacabra, the stove caught fire with a click and a whoosh. I fell for it the first time, but I’d figured out the trick out long ago. “That’s what the gun you keep in the kitchen bin is for.”
“You’re right. I don’t know how to make a fire.” She picked up another stick and used the first stick to scrape off some of the wet dirt that came up with it. “But there are a lot of receipts and old napkins in the van. I bet I could figure out how to set a log on fire before we run out of paper.”
When she had as many sticks as her arms could hold, she dropped the bundle onto the ground next to a ring of rocks. It wasn’t what I would’ve done if I could hold that many sticks in my mouth, but at least her hands were free to make dinner.
While I ate the bowl of kibble she’d prepared, Mom dug around inside the Wagon. She came back out with a cheese sammich, an extra slice for me, and a Walmart bag full of receipts, parking permits, notebook pages, and the mashed-up papers from the bottom of the packpack.
Mom picked up the biggest stick—almost a log, really. It was bigger around than any of my legs, but not as big around as any of Mom’s. She took the roll of paper towels out of the bag and started wrapping the loose paper around the stick, almost like she were making a scroll.
“See?” she said. “If I wrap enough paper around it, I don’t have to know how to build a fire. The wood is bound to catch before the paper burns out.”
She threw the padded log in the ring of stones and pulled the fire gun out of the bag. The gun’s long neck sniffed at the paper like a dog trying to get under the blankies on a cold night. Mom pulled the trigger. Fire burst around the log and lit up the forest.
“See!” Mom hooted. She clapped her hands and her surprised smile flickered in the firelight. “It wor... Oh.”
The flames dimmed and shrank. We watched its remains crawl around the stick like ants for a few moments before the fire disappeared into darkness.
“You did it, Mom! You made fire!” I cheered. “It was so exciting! Do it again!”
“Damn.” Mom looked at the blackness where the fire used to be. “How can something be engulfed in flames one second and not even be singed five seconds later?”
She crumpled up bits of paper and stuffed them around the log like she was making a bed for it. She pulled some of the moss off of another stick and sprinkled the dry strands on top of the log. By the time she was done, it looked like the log was napping in a cozy coffin with a bouquet of stringy moss scattered on top like flowers.
She admired her work in the harsh glow of the Witch’s spotlight before setting it ablaze. She watched the fire surround the log as I watched her eat her sammich. Finally, she remembered my cheese.
By the time the cheese was gone, the fire was almost gone, too, and the forest was full of stink.
“I’ma go wait in the Wagon,” I yawned.
Mom didn’t seem to hear me. I left her making stick-and-paper sculptures on the ground and climbed into bed. It was nice having the bedside door open. I tucked my nose into the warm spot between my knees and let the night snuggle me like an em-pup-nada.
I woke with a start to a howl ringing through the darkness.
I ran so fast to see what it was that the blankie came outside with me, wrapped around my ankle like sleep was begging me not to go. There was a faint glow on the ground by Mom’s feet, but what lit up the frozen scream on her face was the Witch.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Your Facebook page! Somehow they deleted it.” Mom shook the Witch as if to shake some sense into her. “I created an old account that I forgot about, somehow. It was annoying me that it came up first on search, above the one you actually use, so I asked to merge them. Except they merged them the wrong way, so the account we never use is here and the one with all your Friends is gone.”
“Huh?” Mom was talking in that human way that doesn’t fit right between a dog’s ears.
“I spent all day feeling like I was gonna lose you, and now I have! All of your older stories and pictures are gone. All those fun memories and shared moments with strangers! What if you wanted to write a book one day? Your life is over!”
“It is?” Did that mean I could eat all the cheese in the Wagon now that I didn’t have to save some for tomorrow?
“I feel like I’ve lost something I can never get back.” Mom aimed a miserable look at the dognapping Witch.
“But I’m right here,” I reminded her. “Come on, Mom. Why don’t you try the sleeping part of camping? Maybe you’ll be better at it than fires.” I stood at the door of the Wagon and looked back at her longingly to make sure she followed.
“Yeah, right. Like I could ever sleep tonight,” she grumbled, pouring a bottle of water onto the smouldering glow on the ground. The darkness hissed angrily and went silent.
Mom woke me up at what felt like a different flavor of night. “Come on. I can't lie around like this anymore,” she said. “I emailed Charlotte and she got Wilbur to call in a favor. But we won’t hear anything until the business day starts, and nobody in the Bay Area gets anything done before 10am. I need a distraction.”
“Wilbur the magnificent, humble pig?” I asked. “Charlotte’s Web was the original Facebook wall, you know. Is she gonna make a new place for you to post my pictures for others to admire?”
“No, dumdum. You know Wilbur and Charlotte. You stayed at their house one night when you were a puppy. Remember? You spent the night screaming your head off in your crate and they said you were never allowed to sleep over again. Anyway, Wilbur works on the User Experience team at Facebook. He called in a favor to the Family and Friends department to have them recover it. I hope it works.”
“Oh good! See? There was nothing to worry about,” I said. “You can never lose your true love, even on the internet.”
Mom dug in the blankies around her, not so much like she was looking for something, but more like she didn’t know what to do with her hands. She tucked the packpack at the head of the bed where she’d be able to reach it from the driving chair and flounced toward the door like she was late for a meeting. “I need to move around to burn off these nerves. Let’s get an early start and be at the trail by sunrise.”