Survive

by David Haynes

  *

  “Wow!” he said. “You’ve done all this today?” He flipped through the pages of her notebook. There were sketches of the land, charts, notes, recipes for pickles, chutneys and preserves. A single lamp burned on the table.

  “We’ll have to relocate the cache. Move it up here.” She tapped the page. “But that shouldn’t be a problem. We can extend it at the same time.”

  “This is amazing,” he said. And it was. “I can trade all the surplus in with Wilkes, see if...”

  He was looking at the plans but saw her turn her head toward him. Of course, he thought, this isn’t about surplus, or about trading beets or onions, it’s about keeping it for ourselves.

  “But I doubt we’d be in that position for a few years yet. Are these chickens?” He pointed at a diagram of a bird. It looked like a child had drawn it.

  She knocked his hand away. “I never said I was an artist, did I? But sure, why not?” She grabbed the book she’d been using as a reference. “Serge wrote little notes in here, taped them to the pages. He kept chickens, built a coop and ate omelet for breakfast every day until...”

  “Until what?” he asked.

  “Wolves got in and ate them.” She winced.

  “Wouldn’t get in if I built a fortress for them,” he said. Her enthusiasm was infectious. So was the thought of fresh eggs for breakfast every day.

  “You like, then?” She rocked back on the chair. It creaked.

  He nodded and closed the book. “I think it’s incredible. You always wanted to be self-sufficient, Lisa. No reason we won’t get there.”

  “No reason at all,” she said.

  Lisa picked up the book again, leafing through it, scribbling a few more notes while Jonesy sipped his coffee. She was good, very good. However she felt about the food situation, she wasn’t going to give in to it. She was a survivor, they both were. If nothing else, last winter had shown that in horrific, crystal-clear detail. She was an amazing woman.

  6

  Jonesy woke first. His head was pounding and someone was pushing the point of a screwdriver into the back of his skull. It was still dark but there was an opaque, ash quality to the air that meant the sun was on its way out of the doldrums. Day was trying to arrive. He reached to the side, onto the packing crate that doubled as his nightstand, and picked up his watch. It was after ten.

  They had come to bed late last night, later than normal. Lisa had been excited and had a case of verbal diarrhea about the garden, and he had swallowed too much of Wilkes’s moonshine. It didn’t feel right to stop her, not when things between them had been...how had they been? Not exactly unfriendly, not exactly loving either. Things had just been. He rolled out of bed. His head hurt too much to think about any of that right now. It was cold, he needed to stoke the fire, get some heat into the cabin and make coffee.

  He picked up his clothes and moved around the bed, glancing at Lisa. She was still asleep, her mouth slightly agape. He couldn’t remember the last time either of them had slept in so late. There was a dim recollection of Lisa getting out of bed in the night, going to the bathroom. She’d told him to go back to sleep when he offered to go with her. He felt guilty but didn’t remember her crawling back beside him.

  Downstairs, Lad was waiting for him. Lisa must have let him in in the night. The dog jumped up, licking his hand, trying to get to his face to plant a big kiss. He thrust his own face into the dog’s thick fur and patted him.

  After the greeting he pushed some wood into the fire, crouching down in front of it and rubbing his hands together. The birch burned quickly, sending immediate heat into the room, but still his breath was visible as he exhaled. He chose a thick pine log next and watched it catch. It would burn slower than the birch, heating the room for longer. Only one log remained in the basket. He would need more to make coffee and cook breakfast.

  He held his jeans in front of the fire for a few seconds before sliding them on over the long underwear he slept in. It didn’t make much difference to their temperature but it made him feel better about it. He grabbed his parka and pulled it on before opening the door and stepping outside. Lad followed him, nuzzling his hand all the way to the shed and his food bowl.

  More snow had fallen overnight but for now it was holding off, and through the trees came the first glimpse of dawn. The resident flock of chickadees, hardy little birds that stayed behind for winter, whistled hey sweetie from the trees and then tumbled off deeper into the forest. Something else, something larger, maybe a ptarmigan, scuttled through the undergrowth and out of sight. The air was clean and fresh, invigorating, and it stung his nostrils.

  By the time he gathered enough logs, placing them in the basket he carried, Lad had finished his breakfast. The Malamute followed him back toward the cabin. He wasn’t stupid, he knew the humans hadn’t eaten yet and who knew what might fall off the table?

  Jonesy reached the cabin steps and looked toward the cache. A set of footprints led up the slope, toward it. They weren’t fresh and snow had partially covered them, making them less distinct. But they looked to be Lisa’s size; the same as the prints at the spring.

  His headache came on afresh, amplified by the wind that whipped through the camp. He walked forward to get a better look in the half-light, following them, first toward the earth closet they called their bathroom and then toward the wooden cache. He took a deep breath.

  “Shit,” he whispered to himself. Had she been wandering about out here in the middle of the night? How long was she out here for?

  He dropped the basket of logs and rubbed a handful of snow across his face. He’d fallen asleep after she went outside and had no way of knowing how long she’d been gone. He felt sick. There was more than enough food. They wouldn’t run out. She should trust him. He picked up another handful of snow and rubbed it across his forehead. She had no reason to trust him. He’d let her down once, very badly. He picked up the basket and carried it inside.

  It was another hour before he heard her stirring upstairs. It had felt like an eternity as he sat by the fire and tried to come up with the right words, the right questions, reassurances. Anything that wouldn’t sound like some sort of trial or accusation. Determined to do this the right way, he listened to her pulling on her clothes. She was scared, that was all, and she had every right to be.

  “Hey, you,” she said, coming from behind and putting her arms around his chest. “Can you believe the time?” She kissed his neck then released him to reach the pot of coffee. “Want some more?” She poured herself a cup.

  Jonesy put a hand over his cup. His body was reacting to the amount he had already drunk.

  “I’m starving,” she said. “How about you? I can make us...” She stopped and looked at him. “You okay?”

  He couldn’t look at her, not yet.

  “Mark?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  Was he making too much of it? Of course he was. Why shouldn’t she go and check the cache whenever she wanted? If that was the middle of the night, then so be it. It didn’t make any difference to him.

  And yet...

  “Have you been out to the cache?” he asked. There it was, about as accusatory as it was possible to be. He turned his head and looked at her.

  She frowned back at him. “What?”

  “When was the last time you went up there?”

  “I haven’t. I haven’t been up there since...well, since we had a fight about it.” She looked confused and then her expression changed. “Why? What’s wrong? Oh God!” She looked terrified.

  He didn’t understand what was happening here. She was lying to him.

  “Lisa, I found the prints, your prints in the snow from last night.”

  Her mouth dropped open. He felt terrible, as low as a snake.

  He took a deep breath. “Were you up at the spring yesterday, too?” He shook his head. “It’s not a big deal but you told me...”

  “No,” she replied. “I told you, I was here all day.” She walked over to the tab
le and grabbed her notebook. “I was working on this.” She held it in the air, walking back to him. “I don’t understand, Mark, why’re you asking me about this?”

  “Your footprints are in the snow, Lisa.” He pointed out of the window. “Out there, and they lead from the toilet to the cache. I don’t know why you won’t tell me...”

  “Show me,” she said.

  His eyes were focused on the snow falling outside. It had been that way for the last hour. “It’s snowing,” he replied. “They won’t be there anymore.”

  But Lisa was already shrugging her arms into her parka. “I want you to show me,” she said.

  He stood up. His stomach was in knots and in his head a heavy metal drum solo was playing at full volume. “Lisa, please...”

  She zipped her coat. “If you’re going to accuse me of something, at least show me the evidence.”

  He stood up and faced her. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I just wondered why you went up there in the middle of the night. There’s no need for all this.” He reached for her but she pulled away. This had all been a mistake.

  “Well, I’m going outside to take a look.” She sidled past him and was out of the door before he could say another word.

  He pulled on his jacket and boots and followed her. Outside, the weather had gone from a decent early morning to something approaching blizzard conditions in an hour. Without snowshoes, he sank into the snow up to his knees.

  “Lisa!” he shouted. She was nowhere to be seen. He followed her tracks around the side of the cabin. She had gone to the outhouse, the door was closed. He waited a minute, looking through the snow to see if any of her tracks were still visible. They weren’t.

  The outhouse door opened and she appeared. It was difficult to see through the white swirl of snow but she might have been crying. He felt as bad as it was possible to feel.

  “Let’s just go inside,” he shouted.

  She shook her head and started walking up the slope toward the cache. The snow came up to the middle of her thighs but she didn’t notice, just kept going. This was senseless. There was nothing to see. It had been a terrible, awful mistake which was going to take a lot of fixing.

  He followed behind, silently. Lad bounded past him, just as he had when he was a puppy in his first snow. This was exactly the type of weather that thousands of years of breeding had prepared him for.

  Lisa reached the cache and stood beside one of the ten-foot aluminum-clad legs.

  “Is this where I’m supposed to have come last night?” she asked.

  He said nothing in reply.

  “Is it, Mark?” Her cheeks were bright red, partly due to the cold and partly due to rising anger.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But...but I know how anxious you are about the food situation, and that’s okay. I am too. I saw the tracks and I thought... I thought maybe we needed to talk about it again.”

  “I haven’t been up here,” she said.

  “But the tracks, I saw your tracks. Here and up at the spring. Why can’t you just say, Mark, I was worried again, I had a panic attack in the middle of the night and needed to make sure everything was okay? I would have come with you. Anytime you feel the need to look at what we’ve got left, just come up here and take a look for yourself. You don’t need to sneak around in the middle of the night, or do it when I’m not around.”

  She took a step toward him, her lips pulled back. “Aren’t you listening to me? I said, I...haven’t...been...up...here.” He had never heard her voice like that.

  He looked away, unable to think straight, the maelstrom dancing in front of his eyes mirrored by the one in his mind.

  His eyes focused on an exposed log. He knew what it was – the trunk of a Sitka that made one of the ladder’s legs. It had moved since yesterday. Only half of it exposed meant it had been shifted in the break in the snowfall. Overnight.

  He looked at it for a while and then turned back to Lisa. He met her eyes as she turned his way. She had obviously followed his gaze and had been staring at it too.

  She shook her head. “Not me, Mark. I swear it.”

  When he tried to speak, he realized there was no moisture in his mouth. It had dried up. He licked his lips, gathered enough saliva to talk but had no idea what to say. Instead he walked over to the ladder, grabbed the end and hauled it over to the store. Lad watched him, tilting his head to the side, appearing to say, Hey, hauling stuff is my job.

  He steadied it against the platform, putting a foot on the bottom rung. Lisa stood beside him. The look of belligerence was gone now, she just looked confused and scared. It made his heart ache.

  He climbed to the top, released the latch and crawled into the dark space. The smell of the preservatives, spices and smoke they used to keep the food edible washed over him. It was a heady concoction and because he had not yet eaten today, his belly grumbled painfully.

  The little space was almost pitch black. He tapped his pocket, feeling it empty, wishing he’d thought to bring the flashlight with him. But then again he didn’t expect to be scratching around inside the cache this morning.

  He waited for his eyes to adjust but the beam of Lisa’s flashlight pierced the darkness before it could happen. He hadn’t heard her climb the ladder. The cache was too small for both of them so she remained on the top rung, peering inside.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  He thought about making some sarcastic remark back, something about her knowing better than anyone how it looked, but then he saw her scared expression. He nodded his head instead.

  She moved the beam over all four walls, taking in the full contents of their store. Jonesy’s freezing breath drifted through the beam like smoke. He had a record of everything that was in here. Not in a book, as Lisa wanted, but in his head. That was enough.

  “Is it all there?” she asked.

  She knew damn well it was all here because she had looked only a few hours ago. Was she recording it somewhere, unwilling to trust his mental record keeping? Maybe he had no reason to expect trust from her anymore, especially where food was concerned, but he wanted it. He needed it. He wasn’t trying to deceive her, so why was she trying to deceive him?

  No, it was dangerous to think like that, she wasn’t deliberately deceiving him. She was frightened they would run out of food, that it would happen again. Whatever he said, whatever he did to provide the reassurance she needed, it would never be enough. Worst of all, it was perfectly understandable.

  He waited for her to stop moving the flashlight.

  “Would you feel better if I let you keep a record? You can have responsibility for this place if you...”

  “What?” She shook her head. “No, I want you to look after it. It’s your job.”

  “And you trust me to take care of it? To keep the record properly?”

  A pause. “Of course I do,” she replied.

  “Then, let me do it. If there’s a problem with it, we’ll sort it together. You don’t need to come...”

  “For the last time, I haven’t been up here!” Her voice was a snarl again. Then she was gone. He felt the platform shake as she climbed down the ladder.

  He sat for a moment, staring at the shadow of a frozen caribou haunch hanging on the wall. It was the last caribou they successfully hunted, a couple of weeks ago. They had worked together well, the trust between them explicit and complete. Something had changed, something had shifted between them and its shadow was more enormous than any grizzly they had ever encountered. It was probably just as dangerous too.

  He reached over and grabbed a sack of stewing meat. He wasn’t hungry anymore but they would have to eat. Who knows, maybe after a good meal they could talk again.

  He pulled the sack down from the hook. To one side of it was the haunch, on the other side there should be three more sacks of stewing meat. There were only two. He shuffled closer and touched the two remaining sacks. One was missing. It wouldn’t be seen right away because it was the last one, at the jo
in between the walls. It was the darkest corner. He worked his way back along the wall, counting the sacks, feeling the shape of the various cuts between his fingers. The record he kept in his mind formed a mental picture of each individual piece of meat and its position in the store. He worked his way around again and then once more, but each time he came back to the same outcome. He was one sack short. One sack of stewing meat and ribs.

  He closed his eyes. Had he made a mistake? Miscounted somewhere, perhaps? The last caribou had been smaller, a younger animal. Maybe it had produced less meat and he’d distributed it among the sacks already here.

  No, he hadn’t done that. All the unused sacks were in the shed, waiting to be filled with meat. He would have butchered the animal and then put the meat into the separate sacks just as he always did. It was the same each time. He didn’t have to think about it.

  He slapped his cheeks and rubbed a hand over his beard. He had just asked her to trust him, to let him manage the cache. He knew what he was doing. And now this. A miscalculation. One bag of stewing meat that would make three good meals between them didn’t exist. He took a deep breath and edged over to the hatch. It either didn’t exist or someone had taken it. The question was, what was Lisa going to do with a sack of raw meat? She couldn’t cook it because he’d know, and it wasn’t the tenderloin they sometimes sliced thin and ate raw. It needed a long slow cook.

  He climbed down the rest of the way. Lad had long gone, both his and Lisa’s prints already being obliterated by the fresh snow. He grabbed the ladder, throwing it down into the snow.

  He was back where he had been half an hour ago. He could speak to her about the missing meat. He could ask her if she knew where it had gone but, given the context, the place they were at, she would assume he was accusing her of taking it. And if he told her he had made an error and miscalculated their supply? She wouldn’t trust a word he said. At that very moment, he had no idea if he had made the error about the meat or if Lisa took it. It was horrible.

  He reached the cabin and paused on the porch. His jeans were drenched and the skin beneath the material was stinging and sore. What he wouldn’t give for a long hot soak in the tub right now. Enough damage had been done for one day; enough damage to last the entire winter. He would say nothing of the lost meat. He opened the door and stepped inside. A guilty sense of relief passed over him when he saw Lisa was not downstairs. He moved closer to the fire and pushed a log into the flames. The heat felt wonderful on his face.