Raft of Stars by Andrew Graff (good books for high schoolers .txt) 📕

“We could, but it will take us two or three hours to drag the gear and canoe. If we run the rapids, it will take us about two or three minutes. Besides, I ran this stretch when I was younger. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“I think I’m for dragging,” Tiffany said. “Dragging is good. I like dragging canoes.”

Miranda touched Tiffany’s elbow and smiled. “We’ll use the time until daylight to warm up and eat. When the sun rises, if you still don’t like the look of it, you can hike down and I’ll run the canoe myself.”

This denim-clad woman was filled with power. Tiffany felt both inspired and inadequate in her presence. Miranda was like a poem. The inertia, the turn, the confidence. Great poems inspired Tiffany to write as often as they discouraged her. Who could write like Dickinson? Like Whitman? There was something supernatural about a great poem, and there was something supernatural about Miranda too. Tiffany once came across a word in her reading that described the sensation—numinous. It meant to be marked by the presence of divinity, to be more than met the eye, things and words and people indwelt with a larger heartbeat, a larger breath. Once again, all Tiffany felt she could do was totter along behind this woman.

They dropped their gear on a flattened grassy area near a large split stone with a cedar growing from its center. Tiffany watched as Miranda prepared to start a fire. Miranda made a small nest of cedar twigs and birch bark, collected some larger pieces of wood, then crouched with her flint and knife. Tiffany knelt to watch more closely.

“I’ve never seen it done like this,” she said.

Miranda smiled and then paused, appearing to realize she was being asked for more than a mere demonstration. “So most people, if you hand them a rod and a knife, tend to go at it something like this.” Miranda held the tip of the flint into the nest of fibers and feigned a stroke or two along the stationary flint with the spine of her knife blade. “The problem with that is you’ll knock over your tinder in the process. You’ll get sparks, but they’ll scatter. They won’t catch.”

“So what’s the right way?”

“Hold the blade real still near the tinder and pull the flint away from the pile—like this.” Miranda made a fist around the handle of her knife, placed the flint beneath it, and scraped the flint sharply away from the tinder. The knife blade and tinder remained unmoved, and a shower of bright sparks accumulated in the same concentrated spot. They glowed for a moment, then went out.

“Neat, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Here, you can try it.”

Tiffany pushed back, shaking her head.

“There’s nothing to it,” Miranda said, placing the flint in her hand. “And it’d be good for you to practice in case we get separated out here.”

The word separated tumbled along Tiffany’s spine, and Tiffany couldn’t tell if it was fear or excitement. After only a few hours in the canoe, she felt more competent. She laughed at herself—Tiffany, the frontier woman. She pictured herself in a jerkin and coon cap, the desirable mountain woman from a Zane Grey novel, seductive and capable of skinning her own deer. But the thing was, those women all had stables of cowboys pining after them, men they could send outside for more firewood when the weather turned cold. Tiffany had never seduced a man or skinned a deer. Not in real life.

Tiffany took a tentative practice stroke with the flint and was pleased to see a few sparks spray onto the dirt.

“A little more pressure,” said Miranda. “And remember, the flint moves, not the knife.”

Tiffany braced the knife over the tinder pile, wiggled her flint in beneath it, and then, increasing the pressure between blade and flint, drew the flint away from the tinder. An intense shower of sparks piled up on the birch bark. The glow worked its way along the papery tendrils.

“Okay, quickly now, but gently—give it some air.”

“What?”

“Breathe on it.”

Tiffany had seen this in movies, a cowboy blowing on a fire. So she knelt down and nudged air through her pursed lips, as if whispering to it. The glow became brighter and consumed more of the birch bark. She took in another breath and blew again, whispering louder, and the glow found a twig and leapt into flame with a nearly inaudible whoof.

Tiffany sat up, thrilled with herself. The smaller twigs caught and consumed themselves. Miranda showed her how to place larger and larger twigs onto the fire, then sticks, then branches from a white pine, which burned hot and noisily. The flames lit up the darkness, warmed it, tamed and softened it. Tiffany felt less forlorn.

“Nice fire,” said Miranda.

“It is.”

Miranda stepped away while Tiffany admired the flames. She looked at the knife and flint. “Would have been handy last summer,” she said to herself. She’d never allowed herself a large campfire while homeless and squatting in cornfields. She boiled her eggs in creek water over a small camp stove until the stove ran out of gas. By that time, fall had come, and Burt Akinson came out because of the stolen chicken, and after that she started small fires with her Bic, and stole chickens from other farmers. But there was something beautiful, something numinous, about starting a fire with sparks. She could have used that, all of that.

“Say again?” said Miranda, rooting through a pack.

Tiffany shook her head.

After the fire had burned for some time, Miranda raked aside a few coals and set two opened cans of chicken soup on top of them. When the soup was hot, they ate it hungrily, blowing on each spoonful. They added more wood to the fire and watched the sky for any sign of daylight. It wasn’t until Tiffany started toying a few knots from her tangled hair that Miranda disappeared into the darkness and reappeared with the brush.

“I thought we were roughing it,”