Chapter Twenty-Eight #3
Imani probed outside with her thickest branch to scoop away some of the snowy soil in front of their hollow to dig a shallow hole to protect the fire.
The soil was solid, so she stabbed at it to break chunks away.
The natural ledge built into the bark above her kept most of the snowflakes from falling into her shallow trench as she dug, a good sign for her fire’s chances.
Making fire was a delicate undertaking, and this wasn’t a fireplace hearth.
But the deeper she was able to dig into the frozen soil for her pit, the more she believed in her unborn fire.
Imani moved her woodpile outside and arranged some of the larger pieces at the bottom of the firepit as her base.
She laid it down crossways to create gaps so the tinder wouldn’t starve for air.
She stacked the rest like a lean-to, leaving an opening for her tinder once it was lit.
With her remaining branches, she would close the gap.
So easy in theory. So hard in practice. Imani reminded herself that she had seen seasoned survivalists go days without being able to start a fire, especially if the wood was damp. Some of her wood might get damp, but it was mostly dry. She had a chance.
She ducked back inside and quickly moved her snowboard back into place to block the gap. Safety might be an illusion, but she felt safer with the boards there. Sharise bent her legs at the knees to give Imani room as she hunched over her large pile of pine needles.
The necessity of movement, of doing, drove Imani’s hands as she bundled the tinder (harder with needles, but she managed), angled her rod, and struck with the metal tool that looked almost like a razor blade, except serrated.
It was always a matter of striking with enough force time after time, never putting faith in a single spark.
It was about faith, like the way she knew Mom was still alive.
That was what the name Imani meant in Kiswahili, she remembered—the Kwanzaa principle her parents had named her after, since it took them so long to conceive her. Faith.
Strike. Again. Strike. Again. Strike. Again.
“Imani…” Sharise whispered, and Imani worried that her sister had heard the Beast outside. “Look.”
Thin tendrils of smoke climbed from her nest of pine needles.
Imani saw a tiny orange glow hidden in the tangle.
Instead of dimming, this spark burned steadily brighter.
It was an ember now, a solid orange core.
Maybe a spark had lighted on a pine needle’s harder sheath and made a home there to feed.
Imani had never gotten an ember so fast!
Gently, Imani picked up the pine needles, struggling to hold the jumble together.
She raised her palms closer to her mouth and blew, thinking of how she’d needed luck so many times today and been denied.
Why couldn’t she have had a lucky shot and killed the Beast?
Why hadn’t they been lucky enough to catch up to Mom?
Why hadn’t luck helped them drive away in the RAV before the Beast could stop them?
Imani would have traded this instant fire a dozen times over.
But fire was the miracle she’d been given—and fire was a miracle, she reminded herself—so she tried to be grateful as lively flames plumed between her hands.
Sharise half laughed, half gasped, both delight and fear. “Be careful, Imani.”
“Move the boards,” Imani said. “Quick.”
Sharise peeked between the slats first, then she pushed the snowboards aside to expose the gap.
Imani leaned outside of the shelter with the pine needles, which were already warm in her palms, turning hot against her bare skin.
But she didn’t rush, or the fire might die.
Slowly, she lowered her hands into the tower of twigs and pulled them away.
Ouch. She shook her hands to ease her overheated palms, still blowing gently to fan the flames.
The fire gorged itself on the tower of her offering. Sparks flurried up, surprising her. Imani fanned sparks away from her hair and helmet, where she still wore her GoPro. Sharise quickly came to her aid, patting Imani to make sure no sparks had caught on her.
The fire was a marvel. To them, it looked like a bonfire.
Waves of heat already baked toward them as the wind gusted slightly, shifting the flames.
But it was contained in the pit, and Imani hoped the exposed bark was too damp for the tree to catch fire.
She had seen survivalists on TV accidentally burn down their own shelters.
“Imani…” Sharise said, tears in her eyes. “You’re amazing. You did it.”
Sharise’s praise would have meant everything to Imani yesterday, whether she would have admitted it or not. Today she only nodded with small satisfaction. Her emotions were frozen while she blocked out the feelings that would make her scream and never stop.
But at least they could warm their hands, and the shelter. The fire might keep the Beast away too. But it was burning fast. She would need more fuel to feed it.
“Keep watch,” Imani said. “I’m gonna see if there’s more wood.”
With her flashlight, Imani returned to the rear of the hollow and scooped out more soil and debris.
Still dry, she marveled. She had assumed that the closer she got to the other side of the trunk, the damper the scraps might be.
She grabbed more clumps of thin twigs—but those would burn too fast. She was happier to find a thicker branch and tugged at it, and it dragged a larger clump of debris clear with it.
An unmistakable narrow animal skull stared up at Imani from the debris with open gaps for eyes.
Any other day, she might have screamed. (But she hadn’t screamed when she saw the dead deer, had she?) She didn’t know if it was a large rabbit, or maybe a fox.
Staring more closely, she realized that what she’d mistaken for a tree branch was a long, grayed bone with a ragged crack at the end, snapped roughly away from some unlucky animal, maybe in one bite.
In her flashlight beam, she saw clumps of coarse white fur tangled in the pile of remains.
Not soft rabbit fur. Probably not fox fur, although she had never seen a fox up close.
Anyway, were foxes white? Maybe in the Arctic, but not here.
It looked like the fur from the Beast they had seen up close.
No one would try to make a coat from this fur.
Did it store its kills here? But how did it get inside this far when it was so big?
Imani was about to turn around to report her discovery to Sharise when she felt a breeze from the left side of the narrow gap.
The air was cool, but there was no light, so the stream of air wasn’t coming from directly outside.
She bent over with her flashlight beam and saw what looked like a gopher hole leading to a tunnel.
The small tunnel looked like stone, not soil.
She could only make out a few inches before the tunnel shifted direction, out of her sight.
More straw like fur was tangled against the tunnel wall. Were there more of these Beasts? Were some of them small enough to fit in here? Imani brought the fur-wrapped twigs up to her nose to smell them. Was that the faintest scent of fetid mud, just like Beast’s terrible smell?
Like a clanging in her head, Imani remembered what Daddy had said last night when he came inside from fixing the generator, his eyes full of childlike terror: Maybe it’s bigger now.
And what if it had led them here on purpose?
What if this was where it wanted them? Now they had points of entry from two directions, not just one.
For the first time since the Beast stopped trying to break past their snowboards, Imani’s heartbeat jogged to alertness, a growing thrusting in her chest.
“Any luck?” Sharise asked over her shoulder. Residual smoke from the fire was seeping into the hollow, so she looked slightly hazy.
“I need to show you something.”
While Imani kept watch at the hollow’s smoky entrance, Sharise examined the bones—the skull and another pile of fragile skeletons that looked like rodents strewn across the ground beneath the pine needles.
And the fur. And the gopher hole. (A Beasthole, technically.) Sharise took it all in, speechless.
“I don’t think there’s more than one,” Imani told her horrified sister as Sharise looked at the tunnel with the flashlight, her hand shaky.
“People would have seen them by now if they were just out here in a pack having babies. I think there’s only one…
and it hides. Maybe it used to hide in here, but it got too big.
These bones are dried up. I think it’s really, really old.
” Imani was making up a story like she had about the imaginary hunters when they saw the deer’s head, but this time her story felt true.
Her story matched Daddy’s, making sense of so much.
“It doesn’t seem really old,” Sharise said. “It moves so fast.”
“Nothing about it is normal. I think it was smaller when Dad saw it… and now it’s huge.”