Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  Although perhaps not, for the massive snowfall had reshaped the land. Or, rather, robbed it of shape: what had been an undulating terrain of low hills and shallow valleys dotted with individual spruces and firs had smoothed into a vast glittering plain rippling away in every direction. Hollows had been filled in and hills graded until they were little more than dimples and bumps. The only dark spots—stripes really—were the shadows cast by the undulating drifts, which painted the land like the back of a skunk. Only the sun was in its familiar place, obscured behind a thin, even layer of cloud from which scattered flakes still fell, and it was this the man used to navigate. He was a day’s walk from his tribe’s encampment. The snow impeded his progress, but he believed that if he traveled through the day and night he could reach it. Certainly the snowshoes aided his journey, though they were awkward and taxing. Because they were framed with a single piece of bent wood, they were wider than they should have been, which forced the man to walk with his legs splayed far apart, and they lacked an upturned tip, and scooped up large amounts of snow unless he lifted his foot directly off the ground before moving it forward. Still, by the time the sun reached its zenith the beginning of the man’s trail had long since disappeared behind him. The snow had stopped falling, although the wind remained strong, and when it gusted it raised incandescent phantoms that arced and dove like breaching whales.

  Sometime in the afternoon the lattice began to loosen on one of the shoes; not long afterward it gave way completely. He tried to repair it but the strips of bark fell apart in his hands and, since one snowshoe is no better than no snowshoe, the man cut the second frame off his boot and started forward again. With his first step he sank to his thigh in the fresh powder, and he realized he would have to dig a path as he walked. He retrieved the intact snowshoe and used it to shovel snow from in front of his legs, and in this way he progressed, slower than before, but steadily, until the second snowshoe unraveled around dusk. Then there was nothing the man could do but labor forward as best he could, pushing the snow from his thighs with gloved hands and lifting each leg with the high-kneed step of a wading heron. He sweated inside his layers of fur, relieved his hunger with the pieces of seal left in his pouch. When his mouth was dry there was the snow all around him.

  It was nearly dark when he came upon the trail. By then he was no longer sure he was heading toward his tribe’s encampment. Certain landmarks he had expected—a hillface that should have been visible above even this snowfall, the forest in which he had found the caribou’s track—had failed to materialize. The trail came from the left, angling back in the direction from which he had just walked, and led to his right, southwest of his current trajectory. The man knew other members of his tribe had ventured out the day before, some to hunt, others to gather wood, stones, mussels. It was his hope that the trail had been made by a fellow tribesman or –woman who, like him, had gotten caught in the storm, and was perhaps surer of the way back to camp than he was. Additionally, the walker, though not equipped with snowshoes, had managed to wear something of a path through the snow, which would make the man’s progress easier. The light was falling rapidly and so was his strength. Nothing but unbroken snow lay in the direction in which he had been heading. The man decided to follow the new path. As he merged with it, he did not despair.

  Like the parable’s protagonist, the novices stand at a crossroads, the point at which the man ceases to be a Paleolithic ancestor and transforms into an allegorical hero. The next step he takes will complete the first revolution of the circular path he has unknowingly traveled; the step after that will begin to wear the trench into the snow that seals his fate, forcing him to confront one of the existential dilemmas at the core of civilization: persevere despite the absence of hope, or give up and forfeit what it means to be human?

  Questions remain, however: have the novices gone back far enough? And is the path they have excavated the right path, or is it, like the one the man now sets off on, a false lead? Narrative tenets point toward an exploration of the next leg of the man’s journey, but few novices choose to pursue it at this juncture. Rather, they backtrack, checking for missed signs. Unlike the man, they have the luxury of time.

  Indeed, time is built into the lesson, as it takes a dozen or more meetings for even a large group to assemble the narrative framework of the parable. Sessions may last many hours or be over in a few minutes, depending on the master’s schedule or mood or his assessment of the novices’ progress. On occasion a member of the group will miss a session, and it is up to the others to fill him in. These conversations are instructive in their own way, as the novices who received the information directly from the master quarrel over what was said, accusing their peers of misremembering or, worse, misinterpreting—by which they mean simply interpreting—what they heard. Sometimes a day or two passes between meetings; sometimes weeks go by. These intervals are considered as instructive as the meetings themselves, because the downtime gives the novices opportunity to contemplate what they have learned. The world of the man lost in the snow grows in their imaginations until, as one novice once put it, “It comes to life inside your head.” The novices feel as though they have a three-dimensional view of the man: from all around him, from the sky, from beneath the snow and frozen ground. But later, as more time elapses and more information is learned, “You come to live inside the story,” according to the same novice. Instead of looking at the man, the novices see his world through his eyes. They understand the decisions he made subjectively rather than through storytelling’s omniscience. This limits the scope of their knowledge, but makes it more personal. Their empty stomachs spasm, their thighs and calves burn with the labor of their march. Sweat freezes on their eyebrows and drapes their cheeks like tinsel.

  It’s usually at this point that some empathetic novice, trying to find a kinship with the man lost in the snow—which is to say, trying to make the man more like him—seeks the flaw in the man’s reasoning:

  Q:Had the man encountered any other paths since he became lost in the snow?

  A:No.

  Q:And had the man seen anyone else since he became lost?

  A:No.

  Q:Had he been keeping watch for other people as he walked?

  A:Yes.

  Q:Then would it not be logical to conclude that the path in front of him was his own, given that, if there was another person in the snow, the man would have had ample opportunity to see him or her?

  A:Yes.

  The novice feels an initial sense of elation: exposing a flaw in logic is, after all, a primary goal of the traditional dialogues from which the “Parable of the Man Lost in the Snow” derives its format. But what has been learned by ascertaining something that was obvious from the beginning? Is the man lost in the snow stupid? Ignorant? Desperate? Too weary to think correctly? None of this matters, nor is it even ascertainable. Often two people choose the same course of action, one by true reasoning, the other by false. Yet if either fails or succeeds, it is not because of acumen (or lack thereof), but because of the action taken. And, of course, sometimes there is no right answer. No solution. Sometimes a person’s fate is beyond his or her control. Thus the group is back where it started: with the man at the juncture where he failed to recognize his own footprints and chose to follow them. Although perhaps they have learned a valuable lesson: their task is not to pass judgment on the man, nor to attempt to figure out what he should do when he realizes he is trapped in a trench worn by his own passage. Only what he will do.

  But the previous line of inquiry reflects a wakening curiosity about a different aspect of the parable’s protagonist. Humanity is distinguished by its ability to reason, but also by its ability to feel, and the novices, having explored the logical aspects of the man’s predicament, now turn to the psychological. Initially their goal is to humanize the subject of the parable, but as their questions progress they discover that what they are really trying to do is assess his humanity
. The story’s historical moment cannot be pinpointed. The master tells the novices that the man counts the years but does not number them; he says that if calendars exist at the time the incident occurs, they are unknown to the man and his tribe. The presence of clothing and compound tools locates the story well after the Upper Paleolithic Revolution of fifty thousand years ago, the so-called “Great Leap Forward” that saw the emergence of language, symbolic thinking, and other characteristics of behaviorally modern Homo sapiens. The hafted axe and snowshoe are the most distinct temporal markers, since both are believed to have been invented no later than six thousand years ago—some four thousand years after the end of the last Ice Age, a geological event, and the Stone Age, an historical one. But such tools were still widely used by subarctic peoples at the end of the nineteenth century, and even into the twentieth, and the only thing the novices know for sure is that the parable’s protagonist is, anatomically and anthropologically, “modern.” But how modern? How like the young men who are evaluating his actions is he? And, perhaps more to the point, how different?

  The novices return to the beginning of the narrative, when they found the man trailing a herd of caribou. They make an exploratory inquiry:

  Q:Was the man a hunter?

  A:No.

  The response surprises the novices. They parse the master:

  Q:But the man had been trailing a herd of caribou, armed with a bow and arrows? His intention was to kill one or more of them?

  A:Yes.

  Q:In other words, he was hunting them?

  A:Yes.

  Q:How, then, was the man not a hunter?

  A:The man hunted, but he neither identified himself nor was identified by his tribe as a hunter.

  Q:So he performed multiple tasks in his society?

  A:Yes.

  The master’s response tends to elicit an a-ha! moment in at least one of the novices.

  Q:Had the man been hunting when he first found the caribou’s trail?

  A:No.

  Q:What had he been doing?

  A:He had been gathering firewood.

  Q:Of his own volition? Or had the task been assigned to him?

  A:He had been asked to do so by his tribe.

  Here is the first glimmer of psychology the story has offered—or, at any rate, that the novices recognize. (The novices do not count the lack of despair the man felt as he merged with the second path, for it seems to them that, whether the path was his own or not, the man was clearly doomed. Night was falling and there was no sign of his tribe. The snow was deeper than he was tall, and he had been walking all day, and was two days without a proper meal. Any rational person—any person the novices recognized as a person—would have despaired.) Eagerly they probe this new lead. They learn that it was late in the hunting season, and the man’s tribe had not laid in the usual store of provisions. They made a small group, numbering just twenty-six souls, and, owing to a confluence of accidents, illness, and skirmishes with other tribes, women outnumbered men, and children made up over half the group. Most of the adults would probably survive the winter, with some degree of privation—possibly extreme, if the season was long or harsh—but one or two children would surely die. The days were shortening rapidly, and during the lengthening nights the man could not help but think of the boreal darkness ahead. It would be his first winter as a married man. His uncle had drowned that summer, and the man had agreed to take on his aunt and her daughter. The man had done this partly out of filial duty—the man’s father was long dead, and his uncle had served as head of household since the man was a child—and partly out of a desire to take his first sexual partner. There were no other available women in his tribe, and if he did not take his aunt he would have to wait until the beginning of the next hunting season, when his tribe would encounter other groups and he could attempt to barter for or steal a woman. Additionally, taking his aunt gave him a claim on her daughter, who was not far from puberty, meaning that in a few years the man could be the head of a large household, with sons to provide meat for him in his old age. But that was all in the future. For now, it was his responsibility to provide for his wife and cousin, now stepdaughter, which is why, when he encountered the caribou’s trail, he decided to follow it: firewood can be had all winter, but the caribou and other ruminants would retreat farther south than the man’s tribe was free to travel.

  The track was crisp in the patchy snow, suggesting the herd had been by recently. The man assumed it had passed through earlier that morning on its way to shelter in the nearby forest. He was wrong about that: the day, like the past several, was cold and windless, meaning there had been nothing to disturb the trail left by the caribou, which had passed through the previous night, on their way through the forest to forage in the tundra beyond. The man realized this as soon as he emerged on the far side of the forest and saw that the caribou’s trail disappeared into the vastness of the tundra. By that time, however, it was no longer possible for him to complete his assigned duty—chopping firewood, an onerous task—and return to his tribe’s encampment before nightfall, so he decided to press on in the hope the he would come upon the herd sheltering in the lee of one low hill or another. He knew that people would worry when he failed to return that evening, but he knew too that if he returned with one or even two caribou pulled on a sledge behind him, he would be hailed for the days of hunger he would save the tribe during the coming winter. Later, when the storm appeared, he knew that would no longer happen, but after he had taken refuge inside his lean-to he comforted himself with the skill and speed with which he had erected it. It was better to come back with meat than with firewood, certainly, but it was also better to come back alive than not at all, for the addition or subtraction of a single able-bodied adult could make the difference in the survival of the tribe’s youngest members. Still, it was bitterly cold before the snow accumulated enough to insulate his shelter, and each time the wind gusted the man was terrified that the flimsy frame he had thrown together would be torn apart. Snow sifted through the boughs and sputtered on his fire. His supply of fuel was not as large as it should have been.

  As the snow began to accumulate, though, as the perilous shaking quieted and his shelter warmed up, he grew calmer, and he selected the longest arrow from his quiver to clear his smoke hole. This arrow had always brought him luck: unlike most projectiles, which are broken or lost during the course of a hunt, this one had come back to him more times than he could remember. It had pierced the sides of innumerable deer, caribou, elk, and moose; also hares, foxes, wolves, and, on three different occasions, bear. So successful had this arrow been that the man had taken to trimming the other arrows in his quiver so that this was always the longest, and the first he reached for, and he fletched it with two white feathers from a snowy owl and a black one from a corvid—rare feathers, normally reserved for ceremonial uses—so that it would stand out in a downed beast from those of the other men in his tribe. When the arrowhead needed to be replaced he used only amber chert, the stone from which its first head had been fashioned, and when the shaft grew brittle he replaced it with tamarack, a deciduous wood significantly more scarce at that latitude than spruce or fir, but much more durable. So dear was the arrow that the man hesitated before using it to clear his smoke hole. The half-melted snow would dampen the coil of dried gut that bound the head to the shaft, softening it, and possibly weaken the wood as well. He decided to use it anyway: when he got back to his tribe, he could replace the binding if need be; the wood; the head. His luck would hold.

  The snow thickened atop the lean-to. The stones lining his firepit grew hotter and spread their heat to the stones supporting his platform. Even after he removed his anorak and trousers he was still drowsily warm, and he dozed off and on, a sliver of blubber softening between his bottom teeth and lip, his nose filled with the spicy scent of a handful of needles he had tossed on the fire. The storm had become an invisible hum from
which he had made himself safe. He had harnessed it like the northern tribes, using its own force to protect him. He looked forward to telling his tribe of his resourcefulness. He imagined his wife’s cries of relief when he showed up alive. He had never taken much notice of her before his uncle died, or at any rate had never considered her as a wife. During the winter the family slept in one room. He had heard the sounds of her coupling with his uncle and smelled the mineral odor of her fertility; had been present when two of her three children were born. But though she was only a few years older than he was, he always thought of her as a member of his parents’ generation. Her belly was stout and her breasts softened from the children she had borne and suckled. Her face, though smooth and open, had been solemn since her two oldest children had died in a famine five winters earlier. Even when he agreed to take her on he was thinking more of her daughter than of her, and he suspected his aunt understood his motivation because, their first night as husband and wife, she slid her pallet next to his and positioned herself with her back to him before pulling her daughter into her belly and folding an arm around her. But during the night he awakened to fingers on his body. He must have turned toward her in his sleep, and now her broad soft back pressed against his chest, and the curve of her buttocks filled the hollow of his groin. He did not understand what was happening until she lifted her leg and deftly pulled him inside her. He had not expected it to be as warm as it was, as soft and welcoming, and, stunned by the sensation, so entirely foreign that it did not, that first time, register as pleasure, his body stiffened like uncured leather. His wife rocked her hips back and forth; it was over almost as soon as it began. His hidden ejaculation took him by surprise, and when he called out it was as much in confusion—fear, really—as anything else. From farther down the room he heard a quiet laugh. “You are a man now,” his mother said. “Now go back to sleep.”