by David Vann
The other islands, his father said. You can see them much better from here.
Where’s the mainland?
A long ways behind us, past all of Prince of Wales Island and some other islands, too, I think. In the east. That’s one thing we won’t see much of, is the sunrise. We’re in shadow until midmorning.
They stayed there a while longer looking out and then grabbed their rifles and started climbing again. Small wildflowers crumpling beneath their boots and hands, moss and the blueberry that wasn’t yet in season and odd grasses. There were no animals around that Roy could see, and then he saw a chipmunk on a rock.
Hold on, Dad, he said, and his father turned. Roy reached back and flung his stick. It went wide of the chipmunk about ten feet, bounced several times, and stopped about fifty feet down the mountain.
Oh, man, he said, and he left his rifle, retrieved the stick, and returned.
I guess we won’t count on that getting dinner for a while, his father said.
As they rose higher, they started hearing more wind and a few small birds flitted past. They still weren’t on any kind of trail.
Where are we going? Roy asked.
His father kept hiking for a while and finally said, I guess we’re just going up to the top and have a look around.
Farther up, though, they hit the cloud line. They stopped and looked down. It was overcast everywhere, and no bright light, but the low areas were clear of fog and cloud, at least, and warmer. Here on the edge great fans of cloud reached down and then were blown past. Above only a few faint outlines and then everything was opaque. The wind through here was stronger and the air damp and much colder.
Well, his father said.
I don’t know, Roy said.
But they continued on higher into the clouds and cold and still there was no trail. Roy as they passed tried to make from the dim shapes around them bear and wolf and wolverine. The cloud enclosed him and his father in their own sound so that he could hear his own breath and the blood in his temples as if it were outside of him and this too increased his sense of being watched, even hunted. His father’s footsteps just ahead of him sounded enormous. The fear spread through him until he was holding his breath in tight gasps and couldn’t ask to go back.
His father kept hiking on and never turned. They climbed past the tree line and past the thick low growth to thinner moss and very short hard grasses and occasional small wildflowers showing pale beneath. They hiked over small outbreaks of rock and finally mostly rock and they climbed up steeper cairns holding the ground above with one hand, their rifles in the other, until his father stopped and they were standing at what seemed to be the very top and they could see nothing beyond the pale shapes below them disappearing after twenty feet, as if the world ended in cliff all around and nothing more could be found above. They stood there for a long time, long enough for Roy’s breath to calm and the heat to go out from him so that he felt the cold on his back and in his legs and long enough for the blood to stop in his ears so that he could hear the wind now passing over the mountaintop. It was cold, but there was a kind of comfort to this place in the way it enclosed. The gray was everywhere and they were a part of it.
Not much of a view, his father said, and he turned and they descended the way they had come and they did not speak again until they were out of the clouds.
His father looked across the low saddle extending to the next ridge and then at what they could see behind this saddle, more mountains beyond and uncertain in the gray. Maybe we should just head back down, he said. It’s not very warm or clear, and there don’t seem to be many trails.
Roy nodded and they continued down through the low growth to the small forests at the mountain’s base and along the game trail to their cabin.
When they got there, it didn’t look right. The front door was hanging slantwise on one hinge and there was trash on the porch.
What the hell, his father said, and they both jogged over and then slowed when they got up to the cabin.
Looks like bears, his father said. That’s our food on the porch.
Roy could see ripped garbage bags of dry goods and the canned goods spilling out the door over the porch and onto the grass below.
They might still be in there, his father said. Put a shell in the chamber and take the safety off, but don’t get jumpy on me, and keep the barrel down. Okay?
Okay.
So they levered in shells and walked slowly toward the cabin until his father went up and banged on the wall and yelled and then waited and nothing moved or made a sound.
Doesn’t seem like they’re here, he said, but you never know. He went up on the porch then and pushed the broken door aside with his barrel and tried to peek in. It’s dark in there, he said. And bears are dark. I hate this. But he finally just stepped in and stepped back out again quickly and then slowly stepped in again. Roy couldn’t hear a thing, his blood was going so crazy. He imagined his father thrown out the front door with the bear after him, his gun knocked away, and Roy would shoot the bear in the eye and then in the open mouth, perfect shots the way his father had told him he would have to aim to kill a bear with a .30-.30.
His father came out again, though, unharmed, and said the bear was gone. He tore up everything, he said.
Roy looked inside and it took a few minutes for his eyes to adjust but then he saw their bedding all torn up and food everywhere and the radio in pieces and parts of the stove taken apart. Everything wrecked. He didn’t see anything that was still whole, and it did not escape him that this was all they had to live on for a very long time. They had no way of calling anyone else now, either, and they had no place to sleep.
I’m going after him, his father said.
What?
There’s no sense in putting everything back together if he’s still out there and can just do this again. And it might not be safe for us, either. He might come back again at night looking for more food.
But it’s late and he could be anywhere, and we have to eat and figure out what to sleep in and…Roy didn’t know how to continue. His father wasn’t making any sense.
You can stay here and put things together, his father said. And I’ll be back after I kill the bear.
I have to stay here by myself?
You’ll be all right. You have your rifle and I’m going to be following the bear, anyway.
I don’t like this, Roy said.
Neither do I. And his father took off. Roy stood on the porch watching him disappear up the path and couldn’t believe what was happening. He felt afraid and started talking out loud: How could you just leave me here? I don’t have anything to eat and I don’t know when you’re coming back.
He was terrified. He walked around the cabin like this and wanted his mother and sister and his friends and everything he had left behind, until finally he was getting cold and hungry enough that he stopped, went in, and started inspecting the sleeping bags to see if anything was usable.
His father’s bag was still almost in one piece. It had only a few small tears in it. But his own bag had been used as some kind of toy. The upper half of it had been shredded and the stuffing strewn all over the room. He could use the bottom half still, he thought, but there would be no way to repair the rest.
The food was almost all wrecked. Some of the bags of flour and white sugar and salt were still intact, but only some of them, and the brown sugar for smoking had been eaten completely. There were still some cans of food that had only been dented, but most had been punctured.
Roy put the pieces of the stove back on that had been knocked off. He started a fire in there, put the only two cans of unopened chili in a pot that wasn’t too badly dinged up, heated the chili, and sat out on the porch waiting for his father.
When it got dark and still his father wasn’t back, Roy reheated and ate the chili, both cans because he couldn’t stop. I ate your chili, he apologized out loud, as if his father could hear.
Roy stayed up that night, in his father’s
sleeping bag on the porch with his rifle across his knees, and still his father didn’t return. When morning came he hadn’t slept and he was hungry and felt sick and very cold from being out on the porch, so he went inside.
The radio wasn’t hurt too badly. It had just been sat on or something, it looked like. But still it might not work anymore. Roy couldn’t tell. He wanted to be able to do something, something useful, but he just didn’t know anything about the radio. So he went back outside in his boots and his warm jacket and hat and gloves, all of which were still okay, and he started sawing shingles. He kept his rifle near him with a shell already in the chamber and the safety off and he sawed and thought about shooting his gun into the air a few times. His father would come then, but he’d also be angry, because the shots would be about nothing. He wanted his father just to return. He didn’t like this at all. He had no idea what to do.
When it was afternoon, he had made only a few shingles and had a blister on his thumb. The shingles were impossibly difficult. Something wasn’t right about how they were doing it. His father hadn’t come back and he hadn’t heard any gunshot, so he got up to write a note saying, I’ve gone looking for you. I’ll be back in a couple hours. I’m leaving in the afternoon.
He set off the way his father had gone, but he realized quickly that he had no idea which way to go. He looked at the ground and could see faintly the signs that they had walked here yesterday. Occasionally a bootprint but mostly just torn-up dirt and flattened grass. He followed this trail, though, to where the mountain started and there was no way of seeing any track in that spongy stuff and he hadn’t seen any trail heading off the main one, so he sat down against the mountain and tried to think.
His father hadn’t left him anything to go on. He hadn’t said where he’d be going or for how long. So Roy just sat there and cried, then walked back down to the cabin. He tore up the note and sat on the porch looking out at the water, and he ate some bread and peanut butter and scooped up a little of the jam from where the jar had been smashed on the rocks below the porch. Ants and other bugs had gotten to most of it, but he saved almost a spoonful of stuff that looked okay. He got back on the porch, ate it, looked out toward the setting sun, and waited.
His father returned just after dark. Roy could hear him coming down the path and he yelled out, Dad?
Yeah, his father answered quietly and came up to the porch and stamped his boots and looked down at Roy with the rifle across his knees.
I got him, he said.
What?
I got the bear, up in a draw about two mountains over. Got him this morning. Did you hear the shots?
No.
Well, it was a ways.
Where is he? Roy asked.
Still over there. I couldn’t carry him back. And I didn’t have my knife. Just the gun. I’m sure hungry now, though. Do we have any food left? Did you catch any fish?
Roy hadn’t thought about fishing. There’s a little bit left, he said. I’ll heat something up for you.
That’d be great.
Roy went to work then on heating up a can of cream-of-chicken soup, their last can of it, with a can of corn and a can of string beans. His father had his flashlight out and was working on their lamp. He must have smelled the paraffin and given it a bat, he said.
By the time the food was warm, the lamp was operational again and they could see inside the cabin.
What did it look like? Roy asked as he set their food down on the floor.
What?
What did it look like, the bear?
Just a black bear, not very big, a small male. I saw him down below me late this morning, rooting around the bushes. I hit him in the back with the first shot, and it knocked him down but then he was thrashing around a lot and screaming. My second shot hit him high in the neck, and that killed him.
Jesus, Roy said.
It was something, his father said. Next time, we’ll have to skin one and salt and dry the meat. Any salt left, by the way?
Yeah, we have a bag of it still.
Good. We can also just leave some saltwater out in a pan and let it evaporate on a sunny day, which should come about twice every million years.
Ha, Roy said, but his father didn’t look up from his food. He seemed very tired. Roy was, too. That night he fell asleep almost immediately.
He dreamed he was chopping up bits of fish and every piece had a small pair of eyes and as he chopped, there was a moaning sound that was getting louder. It wasn’t coming from the pieces of fish or their eyes exactly, but they were watching him and waiting to see what he would do.
Roy woke to his father moving stuff around their cabin, cleaning up and sorting things out. He yawned and stretched and put his boots on.
That bear cleaned us out pretty good, his father said.
I’ll have to fix my sleeping bag, Roy said. He had slept in the bottom half of it with all his clothes on, including his jacket and hat and a small blanket his father had thrown over him.
Yeah, that and the radio and the door and my rain gear and most of our food. We’ll have to fix it right up.
Roy didn’t answer.
I’m sorry, his father said. I’m just a bit discouraged by this. He spoiled a lot of our food, and some of it could have been saved yesterday but now the bugs are all in it, so we’re going to have to just throw it out. We have freezer bags, you know, that you could have put some of this stuff into.
Sorry.
That’s all right. Just help me sort through it now.
They continued sorting, and what they had to throw out, they carried in a garbage bag a hundred yards away and buried in a pit.
If another bear comes along, maybe it will smell this first and come over here and dig and we’ll be able to shoot it before it gets over to the cabin.
Roy wasn’t real excited about shooting more bears. The last one already seemed like a waste. Do you think that bear you got was the bear that did this? he asked.
His father stopped shoveling for a moment. Yeah. I tracked it. But it could have been a different bear possibly. I lost the trail a few times and had to pick it up again, and it is pretty odd that that bear was so far from home. So we should keep a lookout just in case.
Roy decided he wasn’t going to shoot unless the bear was attacking one of them, especially if they weren’t going to skin it and eat it. How much did it scream when you shot it?
That’s not the kind of question you ask.
When they had finished burying the wrecked food, his father walked back to the cabin and put the shovel inside. They stood on the porch then and looked out at the water, which was still and gray.
We need to get our food situation together, he said. You can start fishing and I’ll work on the smoker. We need the wood shelter, too, and we need to cut some wood, but I can’t do everything at once, and first we need to eat. If you catch anything, gut it for eggs and put out another couple of lines on the bottom with the eggs. Just tie the lines off to something and we’ll leave them there around the clock.
So Roy went to the point again and cast across the mouth. It was a long time of catching nothing. He started by staring at the water as he fished, feeling like a fish would be there any moment, as if he could wish one onto the end of his line, but then he started looking off across the channel at the islands. There were a few whitecaps farther out, and in the distance, at the edge of the horizon, a fishing boat passed. It was far away, but Roy could see how it was humped up in front and he imagined even that he could see the spreaders, but that was just imagination. And then he was daydreaming about how he’d have to shoot their flares off this beach and try to get the boat’s attention because his father had been gored by a bear and half eaten, and then a fish finally hit and he pulled it in, surfing it fast across the water, its head wagging, because it was only a small Dolly. He got it on the rocks and would normally have thrown it back, it was so small, but they needed anything they could get at this point, so he smashed its head and slit it from its assho
le to its gullet to see if it had eggs. It did, which was lucky, though they were very small and not many of them. He cut them out, left the fish and his pole, and walked toward the cabin to set the bottom lines, but then he could hear the wings coming down and turned and ran but wasn’t fast enough. The eagle already had his fish in its talons and was lifting off with its huge brown wings before Roy could get there. He picked up a rock and chucked it at the eagle to make it drop the fish but he missed by too far and the eagle lumbered off across the inlet to a tree on the point and landed and sat there watching Roy while it ate the fish.
Roy considered the shotgun, but even maddened and feeling they were desperate for food and fearing what his father would say about losing the fish he didn’t want to think about shooting a bald eagle.
He got an extra spool and hooks from the cabin to set the bottom lines.
Get something? his father called from the back.
Yeah, I got the eggs to set the lines, but it was only a small fish and when I turned away the eagle grabbed it.
Shit.
Yeah.
Well, go catch another one.
I’m planning on it.
He put big sinkers on the bottom lines and hurled them out by hand. He hoped the water was deep enough. He set two right out in front of the cabin and tied them to roots, then walked out to the point again and threw a line into the mouth where he’d been fishing and trailed it clear back to tie off to a tree. The eagle was still sitting high up, watching him.
Then Roy picked up his gear and walked farther down the shoreline, more than half a mile of slow going over the rocks and in some cases up into the woods to get to the next small inlet. Here when he cast over the mouth and trundled in, he got something bigger right away. It pulled sideways at the line heading out to sea, the reel singing, until Roy realized his drag was just set too loose and he tightened it up and then the fish still pulled but Roy had no trouble horsing it in. It jumped twice just as it was pulled in close to the beach, two twists into the air, the head ripping back and forth trying to free itself. It was an early pink salmon, very silvery and fresh. Roy walked backward with his rod tip high to pull it up smoothly and quickly onto the rocky beach. It flopped wildly and threw the hook, but by then it was too far inland and Roy ran over to scoop it quick by the gills and throw it farther up the beach, where it lay gasping and wild-eyed and he smashed its head three times with a rock until its body arched quivering and bloody and then lay flat. Its muscles still spasmed every few seconds but it was dead.
