Northern Lights: A Scorched Earth Novel

by Boyd Craven III

  I didn’t know who was back at the cabin, or why, but they were there and almost immediately got a flare up into the air. We had four rounds for it and the directions, but more than two shots would start to melt the barrel of the orange plastic gun.

  “I hope so. Look, the jet is altering course!”

  We watched for close to ten minutes. The jet made a slow lazy circle between the two lakes. Another flare shot off into the air and the jet rocked its wings left to right and then straightened out after one more rotation and left the area.

  “Do you want to head back?” I asked her.

  “No, let’s go ahead and have our night. They won’t be back today,” she said.

  The way the sun was setting and the way the light reflected off her eyes caught me off guard. I moved forward to the middle bench beside her, kissing her deeply as the northern lights started coming out to light up the night sky.

  15

  The sun wasn’t up, but we already had the boats loaded. We were towing back one of the canoes packed full of the rest of the supplies we’d found at the old cabin. I’d not tried the old radio yet, but I’d found the alligator clips to hook it up to the small lawn mower battery we’d found in one of the metal drums. The other thing that had me excited was the traps.

  Sure, we were probably going to be rescued, but I’d let somebody else worry about returning the supplies. If, for some reason, it took more than a few days, I’d start putting out the traps and life would be normal. Well, as normal as it ever was going to be. I worried what being rescued might mean for Denise and me.

  I hadn’t been looking for a relationship, and I really didn’t have one, but in another way I did. Since I met her, I’d felt this connection with her and yes, there was a comical first meeting, but that meeting had turned into friendship and then it had deepened into much more. I don’t exactly know when it happened. It seemed rather fast but, in fact, we’d been together for every day since their mother died, and I was fond of her from the first day, so it was even further back than that.

  The thought of being rescued was both exhilarating and terrifying. It was all we’d talked about as we shared the sleeping bags at the trapper’s cabin after we’d made love… but what about after we were rescued? I mean, would she want to stay with me, or go back to her old life? None of us knew what the rest of the world was like anymore. Would we just simply have that one night to remember forever?

  That was the big reason I didn’t want to turn the radio on. I didn’t know, and I was scared to know. What if everything back home was normal and our situation was a localized thing? I had to know eventually, but not just yet.

  “Thank you,” I told Denise.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “For everything,” I told her, meaning it.

  “You’re goofy,” she told me smiling lazily, her arms hugging her torso as the morning chill cut through our clothing.

  “Usually.”

  “Look who’s waiting for us,” she said looking forward.

  At the sandy landing, maybe half a mile ahead of us across the open water, were two figures standing there, waving lazily.

  “I wonder…”

  “Let’s just find out,” I told her. “Let’s not buy too much trouble.”

  “Or hope too much.”

  * * *

  Brian and Tracy were smiling, waving at us lazily until we’d waved back in half a dozen different times. They were grinning ear to ear.

  “Whoever was on the flare gun, that was awesome,” I told them as soon as I cut the motor and let our momentum beach the boat.

  “Tracy ran back to use the facilities and heard the jet.”

  “Did they, I mean are we…” Denise started.

  “No, no. We just got up early to give Jordan and your sister some time alone.”

  Denise raised an eyebrow. If I wasn’t mistaken, the look she was giving them was called the stink eye. It was a look I’d often gotten after telling Tracy how horrible her cooking was.

  “She’s a big girl. She’s almost 27,” Tracy said.

  I’d never asked Denise her age, but as she was the older sister… I’d thought she was younger than that. Note to self, figure things out.

  “Oh, I wasn’t complaining,” Denise said, “I’m sure they’ve snuck off into the bushes or meadow a couple times.”

  “As have we,” Brian admitted. “There’s just no privacy in a one room cabin.”

  The conversation was going places I didn’t want to be involved in so I did what I always did; changed the subject.

  “The radio wasn’t a two-way, but it’s an old shortwave. If the battery works, maybe we can listen in and see what’s going on… if that plane put out the bat signal and a search party is coming.”

  Eyes shifted back to me and I grinned. Winning.

  “You didn’t try it out already?” Tracy asked me, “Why?”

  “He had his hands full,” Denise answered and Tracy nodded with a knowing grin.

  Just like that, we were back at sex. What was I, 20 again?!

  “I was worried that I wouldn’t hear anything if it worked,” I told them, “What if there isn’t anybody out there?”

  “But that jet had to have come from somewhere,” Tracy pointed out.

  “I know, I just wonder if it came from somewhere within range of our radio. We’re pretty far north.”

  “There’s the Ojibway reservation north of here,” Denise told me, “I just thought of it, but they would have radio and off-grid facilities, wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t know much about them, but I thought about it a while back. Forgot about them actually.”

  “They bring in their supplies by DC-9s when the ice freezes up on the lakes. Our fly in guide said he did supply runs up there,” Denise told us.

  “Is there any way to get there?” Brian asked me.

  “To the tribal lands? I don’t know where they are exactly. I don’t have any maps and the GPS is fried.”

  “Yeah, but maybe after seeing the flares word has gotten back to them and maybe they’ll be mounting a rescue mission,” Tracy said staring into the sky.

  I got out of the boat and held out my hand for Denise. She took it and stepped out herself. I grabbed the still zipped together and tied into a small package sleeping bags and our two backpacks. Denise grabbed a bucket that held the battery, the battery acid jug, and radio. She tried lifting two of the bundles of traps with her other hand but it was too much weight. She put one down.

  “Hold on She-Ra, we’re here to help,” Tracy said and took what she could.

  Together the girls started off down the trail. I stood there watching and thinking until they were out of sight.

  “I’m assuming you had a good night, I mean, she seems happy. Why the hell are you looking so down?”

  “What happens when we get rescued? That plane had to have seen us.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked me.

  “Do Denise and Tonya go back to their old lives? What do we do?”

  “We’ve changed a lot man; nothing is going to be the same,” Brian said, the smile leaving his face, “And it’s not just physical.”

  He was right, we’d all dropped a ton of weight, me probably more so than the rest of them because I was the heaviest of the group. I’d thought I had a good twenty or thirty of excess when we flew in, but I was pretty sure I was down way past that. It wasn’t just starvation; it was a lack of variety and grueling labor every day.

  “I know,” I told him, “I mean, I can actually be in the same room with Tracy now and not want to pinch her head off.”

  “Yeah, I think you two argue now more out of habit than any real beef. That’s not what I’m talking about overall, though. What’s bugging you?”

  I hesitated before answering, “Do you want to be rescued?”

  A shocked look came over his features and he opened his mouth and closed it a couple times. Instead, I asked another question.

  “If you could live
today over and over and over, would you? Do you want to go back to the normal 9-5 job, the car payments, the headaches and everything else?”

  “We have no idea what the winter’s going to be like though,” Brian told me, “We have no clue if we’ve put up enough food or not enough. These past few months have been relatively easy, but this is the tourist season up here. It gets bad.”

  “I know, I know,” I told him, “It’s just that everybody always asks me what I’m thinking, well, that’s what I was thinking. If I could have yesterday and this morning to do over and over like that old movie Groundhog Day, I’d do it. When the snow falls, I’m probably going to be the first one to get cabin fever and dream about lovely Southern Michigan where it’s warm and temperate winters don’t dump eight feet of snow…”

  “You’re exaggerating now,” he told me, “But I know what you mean. You worry too much.”

  “I know I do, but me being a worrywart is what led me to prepping.”

  “And your prepping and peepshow led you to meeting Denise, another fellow prepper. What are the chances of that, man?”

  I thought about that. The chances of meeting someone, anyone, this far north and this remote was very small. I couldn’t even find the cabin on my own last night so I could have been stuck up here for years if I hadn’t walked upon Denise bathing on the Sandy Beach. And then to meet a woman my age roughly, who was also a prepper?

  “Divine intervention,” I made a half statement and question.

  “Divine something,” he said with a smile, and reached down to grab his portion of the load and walked back towards our camp.

  After a moment, I followed.

  * * *

  After a week, our spirits had started to fall. After two weeks, we fell back into the normal routines we’d had. The two plastic garbage bins we’d buried were close to overflowing with food. We’d quit eating so much fresh food, even though it was available, and ate the oldest of the smoked fish. We learned quickly what spoilage looked like and made a pact to collect the big broad maple leaves whenever we could find them for the outhouse. Just in case. Nobody wanted to use snow in the middle of winter.

  I also started a trap line, which was much more than the snares that would bring us in the occasional rabbit. In fact, the elk we got gave us so much meat, I pulled the trap line until we had smoked and dried everything we had. The one thing that really worried me, though, was the Dehydrator. It was not warm enough outside and didn’t get warm enough inside the unit to effectively do its job, so we were left with the smoker.

  I didn’t want to ruin the dehydrator by converting it into a smoker, but after seeing part of the elk almost go to waste, we did it. I did save the screens and set those aside to be repurposed in the spring time if we were still here and Tracy, who’d become our resident weaver of cattail shoots, made us up more racks like was in the original smoker.

  “You’re just mad because we’re going to have to clean the smoke residue from the inside,” Tracy said on more than one occasion.

  She was picking on me, but I just smiled. I was refusing to be baited because the winter was coming and I wanted to do everything I could to not have to get stuck in a cabin with three moody women. If we could change our habits of sniping at each other before that happened, maybe it would go peacefully.

  “Are you going to make some privacy panels?” Jordan asked her.

  “Yeah, I’ve got one of them almost done now.”

  The panels were going to be in front of the three bunks. With it getting colder every day, privacy was becoming more and more scarce. Both Jordan and Tonya and then Brian and Tracy had made overnight trips to the other lake, but once the ice froze and the snow covered everything, we’d be locked in.

  “You show me traps?” Tonya asked me suddenly.

  “Sure. You mean the leg hold traps?” I asked her.

  She made the yes motion that I’d come to associate with ‘knock knock’, only facing the tabletop.

  “Sure thing, but maybe you ought to hold the gun on this trip,” I said.

  “I’m in,” was chorused by everyone.

  I couldn’t blame them. I was pretty much recovered from my ordeal with the bear, and could go out more and do a lot more physically. Really, waiting for my hand to heal had been the worst, and the marks on my face took a while to heal.

  “Somebody bring the flare gun then,” I said, “Look what almost happened last time.”

  “Last time we got our hopes up,” Tracy pointed out.

  “Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t seen any more planes,” Brian piped in.

  “How do you know they don’t have a satellite beaming down at us?” Jordan asked.

  “Oh God, I hope not… we’ve been using the sandy beach to wash up,” Denise said poking me in the side.

  “Well, it’s not only for bathing…” I slipped up and said, and everybody grinned.

  We were back to talking about sex again. Dammit. I couldn’t believe I’d done that.

  “Sure, I’m going to check on the traps in an hour or so, or we could all just go now?” I said.

  They loved the idea so we all headed out. I set my trap line near where the bear had attacked me. For small game, the meadow would be a perfect place for them to hide and feed. There was plenty of busy blueberry plants to hide within and where there was small game, there was larger game. I was hoping to start trapping Mink, Lynx and other fur-bearers with some of the larger traps because none of us had coats… Just a couple sweaters apiece.

  I made sure the camp gun was on safe and gave it to Tonya.

  “Make sure if something is eating my face to do what you did last time,” I told her and she grinned.

  “Make sure to run the next time you see a bear, don’t tackle it,” Denise told me.

  Oh, it was going to be fun!

  We went past the snare lines and, in the last one, the one that we were getting bait for when the bear attacked, was a nice fat rabbit. Tonya squealed in excitement and rushed to reset the trap if the line wasn’t messed up. Sometimes when using snares, the line gets damaged, but rabbits are generally not that hard on the lines. Snares are usually disposable, one-use items, especially for medium to larger animals that put a kink in the line.

  I explained this to everyone, but it was the second or third time I’d told it to Tonya. She’d been fascinated with the trapping aspect, which surprised me. She didn’t like to hunt so much, but she was learning how to spot game trails and I’d given her several snares for her to try different trapping techniques of her own. With the cable and supplies we had from the crashed plane, I wasn’t going to run out soon.

  “Ok, so I marked the trail out with orange streamers for the trap line,” I told them as we got to the meadow.

  “Like you did the trail going to the beach?” Tracy asked.

  “Yeah. I put them high up in the trees so it won’t startle or scare small game.”

  “What are you trapping for?” Brian asked me.

  “Right now? Honestly, fur-bearing animals and anything that we can use.” I answered.

  I’d brought along a couple extra traps just in case one of the anchoring lines came loose or a trap was lost.

  After five minutes of hiking up the meadow, I pointed out the first streamer off to the left. It had been a hard place to start the trap line because it was where I was standing when I noticed the bear charging up the hill towards Tonya. Still, what I’d noticed was all the small game trails. Until we had enough furs dried, scraped and smoked, we weren’t going to make a batch of tanning solution and a few more rabbits would make it enough to try it out.

  “There’s an orange streamer,” Brian said pointing further down the small trail.

  “That’s the first trap set,” I told them.

  We walked up and I stopped in front of it.

  “Where’s the trap?” Tracy asked, crowding in behind me.

  “See that shiny circle of metal?” I asked her.

  “Yeah?”

  �
�It’s right under that. I covered it up loosely with dirt and leaves.”

  “What is that, a piece of metal?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I cut it out of an old can and rubbed the corrosion off on a rock to make it shiny. Raccoons like shiny stuff so the idea is he walks up, reaches to grab it…” and I poked the shiny metal disk with a stick and the trap sprang, snapping the dry stick in two.

  “That’s just going to cut their hands off,” Tracy said, disgust in her voice.

  “No, a dried stick isn’t as tough as bone. It doesn’t break anything, just holds them until I come along.”

  “And do what?” Jordan asked me.

  “Pop them in the head with the .22 or club them,” I admitted.

  “Club them?” Denise asked me.

  “Well, I haven’t yet but, if you aim right, one blow breaks the neck and they’re just as dead as getting shot with a .22,” I said, hoping she wasn’t disgusted with me.

  “If I run my own traps, I’m borrowing the gun, I’m not sure if I can bop a rabbit in the head,” Denise said.

  “It isn’t for everybody,” I admitted. “But we’ve only got so much ammunition. There may come a day where…”

  “We know Brian,” Tracy said, coming to my defense.

  Her husband nodded at her as if to say he agreed. Then I showed them how to reset it. With the trap sprung, I moved it and then used my hand to push aside the loose soil and leaves, leaving a shallow depression on the forest floor. Then I showed them how the two bars on either side of the jaws worked. You press down on one, and the other hooks to the trigger which holds the jaws down. Since the one we were looking at was already anchored with a cable to the tree, I just pointed out how I did that.

  The hard part was the sifting and covering the trap. New traps are almost useless. They smell like cutting oil and there isn’t a lick of corrosion on them. Any metal the animals encounter is going to be rusted to some degree or another, and the rust actually helps camouflage the traps some, as long as it isn’t deeply pitted. Still, it wasn’t enough sometimes. That’s why I started pushing sand in the edges of the shallow depression until the trap was filled up to the edge of the jaws and the trigger.