Dancing in the Starlight: Part 5

[Gael]

Her name was Jennifer Twoeagle and I found myself very surpised to discover we were virtually neighbors! Her father ran the air charter service next to the lodge and cabins Elspeth and I lived next to.

 

Now, I suppose some of you wonder how I could have gone so long in my life and not run into her before this. I suppose the proper answer is that I had. Definitely in school but, considering I tended to be the target of taunts and other torments, I didn't really notice those few students who didn't do so. And I remind my readers we lived on something around a hundred acres, which was spread along the shoreline much longer than it was deep and the lodge and its holdings were probably twice that much with Twoeagle Air Charters on the opposite side. The only real dealings Elspeth and I had with the lodge was to occassionally go to the little store there for odds ands or an occassional ice cream treat and to gas up our car before heading into North Bay proper. Before I got to know Jennifer, I think I got close enough to see their house and office perhaps once in my lifetime to that point.

 

That changed rapidly after we met.

 

Elspeth saw a change in me as soon as I'd arrived home from school. I told her everything, including the brief food fight. I also confessed that we talked so long, I missed my next class and I had detention after school the next day.

 

I didn't care. Let me be in detention every day!

 

I had a friend!

 

Jennifer's mother had died when she was barely three and her father had never remarried; something quite odd given he was still fairly young, not even thirty, at that time. He had raised her and ran his company. Nothing large; himself and two other men who were pilots and handymen for outpost cabins, three planes and a collection of small boats and motors and supplies for such to take out to these camps with their customers. Jennifer grew up around all this and was very proficient in all kinds of skills. She knew how to not only drive a car or truck, she could pilot an airplane, though she could do none of these legally until she could turn sixteen and get the requisite licenses. During the last summer, her father had let her serve as a guide for some of the campers, chaperoned either by her father or one of his employees (who treated her as a kid sister) and always knew where to find the best fishing spot at any given time.

 

In short, she was every bit the frontier girl.

 

Where we lived was hardly on the edge of civilization; that was a few hundred miles to the north past Cochrane. In those days, though, as in the decades before and times long past that before, it was an area where one learned to be as self-sufficient as possible. My own skills were more than just martial arts and learning to avoid being picked upon. I knew how to drive a car and pilot a boat. I could cook...after a fashion...knew how to can vegetables and fruit, sew, do small odd-job repairs to the house, hunt...

 

It was close to the end of school when we met and our friendship deepened during that time. I met her father and she met Elspeth and they were reintroduced to each other. Friendships grew all around. Master Qing adjusted my training so that I could be with Jennifer. "I can teach you to fight, get you to not fight. She can teach you to actually like to not fight."

 

We went camping that first week after school. Granted, it was a tent in the woods at the edge of the lake a hundred yard dash from my house, but we stayed there, caught fish for our food, gathered wood to cook the food over and basically went as native as we could. Jennifer was Nippissing Ojibwe and I could swear she could hear her ancestor's voices in the woods and waters. Even her father seemed a bit in awe of her talents.

 

I certainly was.

 

We used rods, reels, lines and lures to catch our meals of northern pike, walleye and bass but she also brought a bow and arrows and often did her fishing in that manner. This made me decide to 'show off' and catch a pike by hand.

 

Catching was easy enough, I just had to get one coaxed into shallow water, be a bit patient...and..STRIKE!

 

Holding onto that five pound fish after catching it might have proved a challenge even for Master Qing! I proved not quite a match for a creature so suddenly removed from its natural element and quickly joined it back in the water; getting an indignant tail fin in my face for my audacity.

 

I sat there, soaked and steaming, with Jennifer laughing at me.

 

"The noble wolf!" She howled with laughter. "Diving right into the fray."

 

"If I'm a wolf," I fumed and got out of the lake, "What's that make you?"

 

"A fox, of course!"

 

And the chase was on.

 

I was fast, nimble, I had my martial training and disciplines to call upon. She was a year older. We were about the same height though my legs were just a tad longer. I never laid a hand on her.

 

We were both laughing by the end of our chase.

 

"All right, all right," I admitted, "You're the clever fox and I'm the blundering wolf."

 

"Wolves aren't blundering," She told me as we walked back to our camp. "They are noble creatures, ever ready for the fight even if they'd rather lie about in the sun and sing to the moon."

 

I suddenly felt a lot better and she continued on with wolf and fox lore. And it did fit us. Where I had temper, she had wit. Where I would go headlong into a problem, she found ways to work around them.

 

So, I made myself doze lightly that night while Jennifer dropped off into her normal, deep sleep. Just before sunrise, when I knew she was most deeply asleep, I very carefully pulled her sleeping bag out of our tent, unzipped it, picked her up...

 

And dumped her into the water!

 

The shriek set a flock of mallards flying off in alarm.

 

"Wolves are patient, too, Fox," I managed to tell her through my laughter.

 

Thus, between ourselves, we were no longer Miriya Kyirsocs and Jennifer Twoeagle.

 

We were Wolf and Fox and we were nigh inseparable.