Northern Lights: A Scorched Earth Novel

by Boyd Craven III

  I was sure I knew at least two different ways of making leather... something to do with battery acid, brain tanning and something else. I'd have to take a look.

  “You wish,” I called back to her.

  “No, that's me wishing,” Brian said walking up to the picnic table where he kept the cutting board and fillet knife.

  We'd all gotten very quick and proficient with the knife. It would have horrified any fish and game wardens had they seen how many fish we were cleaning and putting away a day, but the fishing was good, and we were drying them out until they were almost brittle. We didn't seal the bags tightly, hoping that any remaining moisture could leave the bag and not mold the food. That was the hope. None of us knew what it'd be like in the wintertime. We could only guess.

  “Do you think your camp gun can take down a moose?” Jordan asked.

  “Hit anything in the right spot, you can kill it. Remember the story of David and Goliath?”

  “Yeah, the bible story, right? Killed the giant with a sling and a rock,” Jordan answered.

  “Yup. The only thing that worries me is I only have a few hundred rounds of ammunition, and I'm not sure that I'm a good enough shot to hit them in the eye or...”

  “What about the side of the neck, back of the head?” Jordan interrupted, “I've seen you take some really difficult shots at the range. I know hunting is different, hell my hands shake about every time I draw on a deer, but I don't know your gun and you’re pretty decent with it from what I saw.”

  “Yeah, I guess I could, but I'd rather not wound the animal if I miss, you know?” I admitted.

  “I'd rather you take a half-assed, well-practiced shot than starve to death this winter,” Jordan shot back, and I shut up.

  He had a point. I'd always had it drilled into my head that a .22 was a squirrel only gun or for small game like rabbit or chipmunk, despite having a ton of different shells for it. I went silent and started thinking. There was a book I read about a guy named Heimo Korth who lived somewhere in Alaska. He’d used a .22 for just about everything except bear.

  “You're right, I remember reading about this guy who used a .22 on almost everything. I was thinking, yeah, he's pretty hardcore and he's way the hell up in Alaska.”

  “We're way the hell up north, in Canada,” Jordan said, what's the difference?”

  “You're right. That shot would shatter the spinal column, and I've got some good loads I brought up with me.”

  “What are we going to do with all the meat?”

  I thought about that and looked at the smoker and then the dehydrator. Dried meat was a staple of the American Indians. They made smoked jerky, kind of the same way we were doing it, just a little more primitive. They would build racks and start a smoky fire beneath the racks and put big thin strips of meat across the rack and let the smoke, heat, wind, and the sun dry the meat out until it was brittle, usually two or three days. The trick was not to let the heat get so hot that the food was actually cooking but to just dry it out. The smoke coated the meat so the flies wouldn't lay eggs on them, and it added flavor.

  “Same thing we're doing with the fish,” I said, “Smoke it, dry it, fry it up fresh.”

  “You want a steak burger, don't you?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted, “I really do.”

  “Hey, Grizzly Adams, come check out this flour!”

  I brushed my hands off and walked towards the cabin. When I got in, I saw that Tracy and Jordan had cleared out the large area of the cabin floor, pushing the table against the wall with the chairs stacked on top of it. I knew Brian had been working on the cattail roots, and Tracy had been taking the thin stalks in for some project she had in mind. She wasn't talking but this was the first time I had been invited in. I know she got embarrassed if she tried to do a project and it failed, but asking me to stay out had me thinking at first that she was setting me up for an elaborate prank.

  What I found, though, was a bit mind blowing. Tracy was sitting on the floor while Brian was working on a pot full of boiling roots. He was boiling the starch out of the roots, where we’d mash them up roughly and let things simmer and dry out the white paste and grind it into flour. What Tracy had done… Oh boy. My mind was blown.

  A long mat had been made out of the stalks of the cattails. She’d weaved a panel at least six feet tall and six feet long.

  “Pretty cool huh?”

  “Privacy wall?” I asked her, noting that the stalks of the cat-tails looked like some sort of elaborate fancy craft creation people would pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for.

  “Well, maybe eventually. See, we ran out of stuff to insulate the wall. We make panels like this and then stuff the leaves behind them…”

  “That’s brilliant,” Jordan said from behind me.

  “That’s pretty awesome,” I admitted.

  She stood and stretched, her hands brushing the low ceiling of the cabin, making the leaves above it rustle. Brian put his spoon down and pulled her into a big hug and kissed the top of her head.

  “Do you think it’ll work?” she asked me.

  “Yeah, I think it will,” I said, walking over.

  The edges were of course loose to some extent, but the ends had been cut off with a knife so it looked even, manmade.

  “Help me stand it up,” she said.

  I expected it to flop around and was surprised it was pretty stiff. We stood it up easily.

  “Don’t just stand there, Jordan,” Brian scolded. “Go get the hammer.”

  Jordan flipped him the bird and went to the sink, where we’d stored some of the more commonly used tools and knives. Six nails later, we had it tacked into the middle. We left the top loose to make stuffing leaves in the space between the wall studs easier, and the panel almost reached the top of the uninsulated wall.

  “We’ve got room to move the table back now,” I told Jordan who was fixing to walk back out the doorway.

  “All right, all right,” he took one end, I took another, and we moved it back in place.

  “You’re going to have to move that when we start bringing in leaves,” Tracy told me.

  Jordan shot me a triumphant look. “Don’t take this the wrong way man, but I’ve got a project I want to check out. She needs that table moved again…”

  “No worries,” Brian told Jordan. “I’ll give him a hand if he gets overzealous.”

  “You better shake your shoes out in the morning too,” I said pointing to Brian and walked out, listening to Tracy cackle.

  “You want to come along?” Jordan asked me.

  “Let me build up the fire a little so we can add coals in a bit.”

  “Sure, you got your camp gun with you?”

  “In my pack, will we need it?” I asked him, my interest piqued.

  “I don’t know, it wouldn’t hurt, I mean, we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Ok,” I added a few logs to the campfire ring, so I’d have hot coals for the smoker and then got my gun out.

  I put it together, Jordan watching me constantly.

  “What kind of ammunition do you have in it?” he asked.

  “I was going to load hollow points, but I have ball ammo if you think we’re going to be scaring up something bigger.

  “No, I was just wondering.”

  * * *

  He led me to the northwestern side of the lake, past where we’d been dumping the fish guts. I was nervous walking through the area, but once we were passed it, I started to relax a bit. The woods opened up a little, the trees not so close together, and then a hillside meadow opened up before us. It’d taken us a good hour to walk there, but the view was spectacular. The sunlight hit the lake, turning it into a sheet of undulating gold, its rays reflecting almost white. In all, I wasn’t sure the day could have gotten much better. Until it did.

  “You’re looking the wrong way,” Jordan said.

  I turned around to find him crouched in some low bushes that came up almost past his knees. I looked at him, puzzled.


  “What is it?”

  “You still have those clear plastic bags in your daypack?” He asked me.

  I nodded and pulled one out, handing it to him. He nodded and reached into the bushes. Curious, I watched as his hands moved, picking something. He held his hand out and I showed him my upraised palm. A small handful of blueberries dropped into my palm.

  “What, how…?” I asked.

  “My parents’ had some of these growing wild when I lived in Wisconsin. I knew they had blueberries up here, but I wasn’t sure that’s what these were. I caught sight of the opening when we were pulling the cable up from the plane and the boat drifted while you were… swimming,” he said with a grin.

  I popped one into my mouth and puckered. It was sour.

  “These… are kind of awful,” I told him, giving him a few to try.

  “Not fully ripe,” he said, “I wanted to see if they were almost done. If we wait till they are full on ripe, we’re going to have every bird in Canada landing here eating all of these up.”

  “What’s the good of eating these if they taste like crap?” I asked, smiling.

  We’d need something, anything, for the vitamin C. I’d read that you could get a good source of that from the liver of some animals and organ meats, but I didn’t want to test that out. So much of what I knew was from books and not a lot of practical knowledge. I really wished I wasn’t such a Mall Ninja sometimes.

  “I think in a week or two they will be just about ready. I haven’t been keeping up with the dates, but it’s got to be almost August now.”

  “Yeah, it is,” I said.

  “See, it’s not just the winter months we need to survive,” Jordan said, “If it’s anything like Northern Wisconsin, the spring weather you are used to doesn’t start until May or June.”

  “So you think we’re not putting up enough food?” I asked him.

  “I think we’re going to run out of place to store all the food we’re putting up, and I’m worried that we’re going to still run low. If the ice doesn’t break up, how are we going to fish? I don’t know how much the traps are going to bring in because we’ve yet to set them. I know winter time is supposed to be big for it— “

  I cut him off, he was rambling and his words were coming out in a rush. I knew the tension and worry had built up in all of us. Our fly-in was over, and yet we were still stuck out in the middle of nowhere. I guess the reality of the situation had begun to sink in. Maybe that’s why Tracy had finally gotten on board with things where at first she was skeptical.

  “Dude,” I said, “If you think they are ripe enough now, let’s go ahead,” I told him, leaning the AR-7 against a tree at the edge of the field.

  A flash of relief flooded his features and I just gave him the nod and kneeled down next to him, pulling out a clear bag of my own from my daypack.

  “If they aren’t dark blue/purple, don’t pick them. It would suck to have to come find and pick these in the middle of winter, so just don’t.”

  “Will there be any left in the middle of the winter? Won’t the birds get them all?” I asked.

  “No, the ones that ripen too late in the season are usually safe. There probably won’t be that many, though. Bears like these as well, so when they are ripe, the bears are probably going to be out in full force so that’s why I think now would be a great time.”

  “Makes perfect sense,” I told him.

  I started picking. After a while, I realized that there was something calming and serene about moving about, pulling the berries and putting them into the bag. It wasn’t the soft sounds of the birds calling to each other, nor the wind rustling the leaves and pine boughs of the trees on either edge of the hillside meadow. We were gathering our own food, and we were actually living the life that I’d only read about in books.

  My side of the mountain, Hatchet, the nonfiction stuff about the guy in Alaska, the Grizzly man… The other thing I’d noticed was how much more I was pulling up my pants. In two weeks I’d lost probably mostly water weight, but I’d been living on a diet of rice, fish and, once in a while, biscuits from my dwindling supply of flour. We’d used it sparingly because we were gathering enough starch from the cattail roots to see if it would make a difference or give us digestive issues.

  “What are you thinking man?” Jordan asked me after a while.

  “To be honest, I think you’d think I was crazy if I told you,” I admitted.

  “No, hit me with it,” he said.

  “We’re stuck up here right now. Something Earth-shattering has happened to the nation, maybe the world, and all I can think is… Damn, this is fun and it’s the life I always kind of wanted to live.”

  The admission was out, and my cheeks burned with embarrassment. What I thought of as fun wasn’t what everybody else probably did. I’d always wanted to live off the land, live in the rough and wild. I’d been unable to do that with my real life problems weighing me down, so much of what I knew was theoretical or from books and didn’t have a big basis in real life. Almost everything I’d tried out though had worked. Tracy’s experiment with the thatch style wall worked. The smoker and dehydrator worked. The insulation would work. We could do this, we could survive.

  “That doesn’t sound so crazy, man. There’s only two things missing from my life now, that’d make it perfect.” Jordan told me.

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?” I asked, curious and relieved that I wasn’t so far out there.

  “That there are no women around here, and no, Tracy doesn’t count… and I’d like another ten cases of beer.”

  I laughed, startling a small group of birds into flight. Jordan stood up with almost a quarter of the five-gallon bag full. I stood and stretched, feeling the tendons popping in my joints. My bag had just a little bit more in it, but I’d gone about it with a mindless determination, letting my thoughts wander and my hands do the work.

  “How you want to preserve these?” Jordan asked.

  “Dehydrate them tomorrow, make raisins out of them?” I asked him.

  “Sounds good to me. Let’s go back before it gets dark. It was a long walk.”

  “Yup,” I agreed.

  It had been a long walk, but it had been made easier by game trails that ran the water’s edge. If we had been going through heavy brush, it never would have been as quick, but we’d been lucky so far this trip. I hoped our luck would hold out for a while longer, or maybe all winter. I knew that probably wasn’t possible, but so far, Murphy of Murphy’s law hadn’t reared his ugly mug. Hopefully, he was still stuck back in Michigan, having missed the trip completely. One could hope, anyway.

  8

  The first batch of blueberry raisins wasn't done enough, so I put the screen door try back in the top of the dehydrator. The berries had some real pucker power, but something in my body ached as I put them away and shut the door again. My body seemed to want them. I knew that eating too many at once, especially if they weren’t ripe, might give me digestive issues so I settled for a small handful as a sample.

  We’d sort of let the firewood gathering go, because of food and other projects, so Jordan and Brian were on firewood duty to catch up. We had no idea what the R value of the now insulated walls and ceiling would be, and no way to guess how much firewood we’d need inside the cabin during the winter months. We did know what it took to keep the smoker going all day, so we used that as an estimate and figured on doubling or tripling that.

  Even then, it might not be enough, so we were going to stack up three sides of the cabin and start stacking inside the cabin when things got cold outside, and make more room as we went. I’d lost track of time, but I guessed that it was August. It had gotten cool at night, enough that we were almost ready to light a fire to take out the chill, but every one of us felt the ache from cutting and splitting firewood. It was a resource that we didn’t want to waste.

  Tracy had left on her own with the shovel for more cattails. I’d given her the AR-7 after showing her the basics. I was on my own and
, for once, I felt the pangs of loneliness. When we’d rented the cabin for the fly-in trip, the brochure had said there was a trail that leads on almost half a mile portage to a new lake. We were welcome to drag or carry the aluminum boats to the other lake as long as we returned them. We’d all asked how heavy the boats were, and dismissed any thoughts of portaging when we found out.

  Still, I’d been back behind the cabin and I’d found the start of the trailhead, but it was obvious that it hadn’t been maintained very much in the last couple of years. Finding myself with a few hours to kill, a feat that happened to us more and more, I set off with my knife and a daypack with two bottles of water. Finding the first marker was easy. Somebody had used a bright eye, basically a thumb tack with a bright reflective surface pushed into the bark of a tree. Using that as a starting point I walked down the trail, looking for another one.

  I didn’t see it, so I turned and found the tree that had the first markings on it and tied an orange plastic ribbon on it. It was marking ribbon; cheap and weighed almost nothing. I always kept a roll in my day pack for reasons just like this. A good way to get un-lost if you find a string of ribbon. It’ll lead you to a blind, or lead you out of the woods. In this way, I was going to give myself breadcrumbs to find as I returned.

  “Wish there was more light in here,” I grumbled.

  The leaves hadn’t turned yet, but they would soon. Once they dropped, it wouldn’t be long until the snow fell. I walked in a semicircle and stopped when I found what looked like a mark hacked out of the bark of a tree. I stopped and turned, finding the orange ribbon about twenty feet behind me. I freshened the mark on the woods bark, exposing the lighter colored wood, and hung an orange ribbon on the tree branch above my head and then looked.

  A small game trail had led between the two markers, but small brush and deadfall had obscured the trail. The small animals had made new trails to avoid the new obstacles, taking the path of least resistance. I couldn’t do that since the trail led to a specific location, so I set out again, in the general direction that lined up with the first two markers. The third one I almost missed; the tree that had been marked had broken in the middle and fallen. A wind storm or something had snapped the top of the tree off. I almost didn’t even look at it, but when I couldn’t find a mark I’d started circling until I saw it.