Frostbite

by David Wellington

  “Dzo,” she repeated, thinking it must be a traditional greeting.

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  Chey squinted in frustration. Dzo must be his name, then. It sounded a little like “Joe” but just different enough to be hard for her to pronounce.

  “I’m Chey,” she said. “It’s short for Cheyenne.”

  He smiled for a moment, then gave her a friendly nod. Then, without offering her a hand up, he went back to his fire and sat down. He lay food carefully in the skillet, not even looking at her.

  Chey tried to think of something to say that would express her indignation but without offending him to the point where he wouldn’t help her. When she failed to think of anything appropriate, she painfully rose to her feet and limped over to where he sat. She waited a while longer to be invited. When he said nothing more, she gave up and sat down on a rotten log next to his fire. The warmth it gave off was almost painful as it thawed out her frozen joints, but welcome all the same.

  For a while she just sat there, hugging her knees, glad not to be walking anymore. Dzo didn’t seem to mind her presence, but he didn’t offer her food or ask if she was okay, either. Chey was cold and starving and as near death as she’d ever been, but even in her diminished state she could wonder at what was wrong with this guy. Didn’t he see how badly she needed help?

  “Wolves,” she said. “They nearly got me. One kind of did. There was this pack of wolves—they followed me—”

  “Wolves?” he asked. “You were attacked by wolves?” He sounded as if he was asking if she’d seen any interesting wildflowers on her way to his camp.

  “Yeah. A whole pack of them,” she said. “And then, this one, this big one—”

  “No worries there,” he told her. “A wolf will never attack a human being. Even out here, where they’ve never seen a human before, it just doesn’t happen. You just don’t look like their food. Most likely they were just curious, or they were trying to play with you. That’s all.”

  Her leg was proof of the opposite, she thought. But then again, it hadn’t been a normal wolf that had gotten her. She thought about trying to explain what had happened, but she wasn’t sure he would believe her. “I know what I saw!”

  It was the best defense she could think of. It didn’t seem to make much of an impression on him.

  “I don’t,” he said. “I wasn’t there.”

  She closed her eyes and tried to summon up some kind of calm rationality, some piece of perfect logic that would break through his surreal refusal to understand what was going on. “Look,” she said, and then didn’t know how to proceed. “It doesn’t—it doesn’t matter what I saw. I’m still lost,” she said, finally.

  “You’d kind of have to be,” he told her. “Otherwise why would you be out here?”

  She nodded, uncertain of what he meant. “I’m in trouble,” she added. “I’m hurt.”

  Dzo looked up as if he’d just realized she was talking to him. His eyes went wide and he studied her ankle for a second. She held it up for him, let the light from the fire glisten on the dried blood that coated her pant leg. “Oh, boy,” he said, finally. “Now you’ll forgive me, I hope. I don’t meet many new folks up here. My whatchamacallems—my social skills—are a little rusty, yeah?” He rested one fur-gloved hand on her shoulders and she almost sank into the touch, she was so glad for a little human contact after so long alone in the trees. The hand lifted away immediately, though, and then patted her shoulder two or three times. “There, there,” he said, and looked away from her again.

  Was he mentally handicapped, she wondered, or just unbalanced from being alone in the woods for so long? Her immediate survival depended on this man. She was pretty close to despair. Struggling with her emotions, she dragged up the story, the one she’d practiced so many times she half believed it herself. She used recent real events to flesh out the bare-bones details. “I was heli-hiking out of Rae Lakes. It was a ‘North of 60’ adventure package, right? They take you up north, about as close to the Arctic Circle as you want to get, so you can see the real wilderness, the primeval forest and stuff. Drop you in the woods with some supplies, give you a map, and tell you where they’ll come pick you up. And then when we were done they were supposed to fly us to Yellowknife for a spa day before we had to head back to civilization. For the first couple of days of hiking it was okay, I guess. I mean, I was having fun even if it was way too cold. Then out of nowhere it went to utter hell. I got separated from the rest of the group. I got lost.”

  She closed her eyes. Clutched herself a little harder. Went on.

  “I was climbing up this valley and then there was just all this water. I was carried away and my pack was—anyway, I washed up a little way downstream with no gear and no way to contact the helicopter to come pick me up. I knew they would send helicopters to look for me, but this part of the world is just too big and too empty. They were never going to find me. If I wanted to live I had to walk out of there.”

  Dzo nodded, but he was watching his frying pan.

  “I had to find other people, people who could get me back to safety. I had lost my good map in the river, but I still had a brochure from the heli-hiking place with a sort of map on it. It said if I walked due north I would eventually come to a place called Echo Bay.”

  That got his attention, though not necessarily in the way she’d hoped. Dzo let out a booming laugh. “Echo Bay? Why’d you want to go there, of all places?”

  “It was the only town on the map,” she insisted. “Here, look,” she said, and pulled the crumpled, water-stained brochure out of her pocket. She smoothed it out on her thigh and showed him—the map included the roads around Yellowknife, and Echo Bay and the enormous lake beyond it, and a whole bunch of white space in between. She’d been in the white space for days now. “It’s on the shore of Great Bear Lake, on the eastern shore—”

  He held up a hand to stop her. “I know where it is, and I know your orienteering skills are crap, lady. You overshot your mark by a couple hundred klicks.”

  “What are you talking about? It was due north of my position.” She grabbed the compass on her zipper pull and waved it at him. “They told us as much when they dropped us off, if we walked far enough due north we would get there. I followed this every step of the way.”

  “You were following that?” He started giggling. At her. “That thing points at magnetic north,” he told her. “You wanted true north.”

  She could only stare at him as if she had no idea what he was talking about.

  He sighed and held up his hands as if to say, what can you do with these southerners? “Magnetic north, that’s centered on the pole of the planet’s magnetic field, okay? That’s where your compass is pointing, where it’s always going to point. But the magnetic field doesn’t line up perfect with the actual axis of the earth, the imaginary line that it rotates around. The magnetic field pole and the axis are a couple hundred kilometers away from each other. So the compass doesn’t point north at all, really. Maybe down south where you come from nobody’s ever heard of the difference, but up this far you always have to compensate when you’re using a compass. You know that if the compass says north, you actually want to head a little bit to the west, right?”

  “Okay,” Chey said, not really following.

  He shook his head and turned to look at his skillet again. With his bare fingers he flipped its contents over so they cooked evenly. “You keep following that compass and you’ll end up in Nunavut. Which, believe it or not, is even emptier than this place. Wow, lady, it’s kind of a miracle you survived this long. Considering how stupid you’ve got to be.”

  He winced when her face darkened in anger.

  “Hey, hey now, I’m sorry, like I said, I’m no good with people,” he told her. “Lucky for us both, I’m better with a compass.” He laughed again and pulled a strip of something pale and greasy out of his skillet. “Here, eat this,” he said, nearly dropping it in her lap. “I’m sure you didn’t bring enough food
, either.”

  “Thanks,” she snarled, but she bit into it. It wasn’t meat, whatever it was—it had barely any taste at all. “What is this?” she demanded, even as she took another bite.

  “It’s the inner bark of the lodgepole pine tree,” he informed her. “Totally edible, I promise. Just about the only thing you can eat in this forsaken wilderness.”

  She’d been looking forward to back bacon, but she supposed she couldn’t complain. Well, maybe a little. “You couldn’t hunt for game?” she asked, as she chewed vigorously on the stringy vegetable matter.

  He pulled his furs closer around himself, then smiled very wide when he said, “I’m a vegetarian.”

  6.

  Dzo let her lean on his arm as they hiked out of the clearing. It was a blessed relief not to have to put her full weight on her hurt ankle. It still throbbed like mad, though, and she was terrified it might be getting infected. She didn’t want to take another step on it if she didn’t have to. If he faltered, or if she lost her grip on him, it was going to hurt badly, but he didn’t let that happen. He was shorter than Chey, maybe ten centimeters shorter, but his shoulder felt hard as a rock and she got the impression he could easily have carried her. Not for the first time she wondered who this guy was, and where he’d come from. She tried asking, but his answer didn’t make much sense to her. “I came up from the water down there,” he told her.

  “No, but originally,” she said, thinking she needed to be very careful to be as literal as possible when talking to him.

  “Gosh,” he said, and looked up at the trees as if trying to remember. “That was a long time ago. I think there was less water back then. Everything was so dry.” He shrugged. “Things change, you know? Places change. Especially up here. Seems like it’s different every summer.”

  Her leg hurt too much for her to want to quiz him further. She decided it was enough he was there, and that he could save her, and she lapsed into silence as they trudged along.

  They headed along the course of the trickling stream. The water was cold and very clear. Red pine needles spun on the surface and caught on exposed tree roots and then slid past them again. Insects skimmed along the surface or walked on the water with hair-thin legs longer than their bodies. None of them were biting her, so she ignored them.

  Not so very far away from the stream ran an abandoned logging road. It didn’t look like much to Chey—it definitely wasn’t paved, and must not have been graded in years, judging by its rough surface. Mostly it was just a winding lane, a ribbon of fallen pine needles where the trees didn’t grow quite so closely together. You had to follow it carefully with your eyes to see it at all, but Dzo assured her that to the animals of the forest it was like a six-lane superhighway. “I’ve got a friend, now, who’s only about twenty klicks from here. He can patch you up right quick,” he assured her when she demanded to know where they were headed.

  “Twenty kilometers?” she gasped. On her ankle she’d be lucky to get twenty more paces. He just nodded, making no attempt to reassure her that she could do it—and then led her to another clearing, where his pickup truck waited. She was so relieved to see the vehicle that tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes, dehydrated as she was.

  It looked like she wasn’t going to die in the woods after all.

  The truck had little to recommend it other than its very existence. The body was the color of old rust, more brown than red. The bed was strewn with dirt and dead leaves and organic debris, and the passenger’s side window had been replaced with yellowing plastic, held on with layer after layer of peeling invisible tape. Chey had never seen a vehicle so old and decrepit that was still capable of driving before. When Dzo turned the old screwdriver that had been jammed into the ignition lock the engine started up just fine, however, and once they were under way the truck’s chained tires grabbed the snowy ground and held tight.

  They rolled down the path doing no more than fifteen, Dzo keeping one easy hand on the wheel while the other drummed slowly and rhythmically on the outside of his door as if he were keeping time. The trail wound back and forth and seemed to cut back across itself. To Chey it constantly looked as if the trees would close in and cut off their forward progress altogether, but then they would chug around a corner, dead tree branches rattling and scraping at the roof, and then there was always more path ahead of them. Dzo never spoke and Chey didn’t have much to say herself. Before she knew it she had put her head back and collapsed into sleep.

  When the truck braked for a stop her head flew forward and she snapped back to consciousness. For a second she couldn’t remember where she was, or what had happened to her, but it all flooded back when her ankle twinged and searing pain shot up all the way to her hip. She looked around and saw that the light had changed—she must have been asleep for hours. The plastic in her window warped what she could see outside, but it looked like more of the same, trees pointing up at strange angles, the ground choked with underbrush. On the other side, to the left, though, the trees had been cut back to make a neat little patch of open ground. A wood-framed house with red shutters stood in the middle of the clearing, with an outhouse to one side and a pair of low sheds to the other. Bluish smoke reefed up out of one of the sheds, dribbling out of its poorly sealed eaves, and she thought it might be on fire. But Dzo didn’t seem alarmed, so she guessed it was supposed to do that. Maybe it was a smokehouse or a sweat lodge or something.

  “Is this where you live?” Chey asked.

  “Nah,” her savior told her. “It’s my friend’s place, like I told you. Mostly I sleep rough, but he’s a civilized type, likes an actual bed with a pillow.”

  It sounded like heaven.

  Dzo jumped out of the truck without a word to Chey and pulled his white mask across his face before running up to the door of the house. His furs swung back and forth as he pushed open the door and popped his head inside. He shouted “Hello” a couple of times, and then, “Hey, Monty, you around?” No answer was forthcoming. He trotted around the side of the house and was gone from view.

  Chey wanted to follow—she didn’t relish the prospect of being alone, even for a second longer—but she didn’t dare try to walk on her hurt leg. Leaning forward to peer through the muddy windshield, she studied the roof of the house. The shingles looked immaculate, as if the roof had just been repaired. She did not find what she was looking for—satellite dishes, radio masts, shortwave antennae, anything of the kind—which made sense. If she was where she thought she was, there would be no direct connection with the outside world at all.

  When Dzo didn’t come back after a few minutes she decided she was going to have to make her own way over to the house. Maybe, she told herself, it would be warmer inside. Maybe it would have central heating. Or at least a wood-burning stove.

  She eased her door open and then jumped down onto the packed earth of the clearing, careful to land on her good foot. She smelled wood smoke and pollen, and somewhere nearby another smell, a musky animal odor. She heard a footstep crunch on fallen pine needles and she gasped as she spun around, hopping like a spastic. There was someone behind her.

  He was a slender young man dressed in a gray cotton work shirt, jeans, and a pair of undecorated cowboy boots. His hands, which she saw first, were rough and dirty, but the fingers were thin and sensitive. He had a pale face and coal black hair, cut short and combed neatly, with a part to one side. His cheeks and forehead were smooth—he couldn’t be over forty, she thought—but deep cobwebs of wrinkles surrounded his eyes, as if they were much older than the rest of him. The eyes were clear and inquisitive and in color they were an icy green she had seen before. Oh, yes, she would never forget that color.

  They were those eyes.

  Gotcha, she thought to herself. She kept a tight rein on her emotions and let nothing show in her face.

  7.

  Chey smiled at the householder. “Hi. I’m Chey,” she said. “Cheyenne Clark. You must be Monty,” she went on, holding out her hand. He took it and
shook it once, a ritual he barely had the grace to complete. His grip was firm but not crushing—the handshake of a man who had absolutely nothing to prove.

  “And you must be Dzo’s latest find.” He looked her up and down and his eyes stopped on her hips. If he lived out here in these woods year-round (and he did, she knew, she was certain of it), she wondered how long it had been since he’d last seen a woman. “My friends call me by my Christian name, Montgomery,” he told her, turning away, toward the house. He walked away from her as he spoke. His body language told her she could follow if she wanted but he didn’t care one way or another. His body language was lying, and badly. She could feel his attention on her, even with his eyes turned away. “I don’t know you. You can call me Mr. Powell. What’s taking you so long?” he said, finally turning to look at her again. On her bad ankle she couldn’t keep up with him.

  He looked at her again and this time he noticed her blood-stained sock and her swollen leg. “Damnation,” he said, so softly she barely heard him. As softly as the noise the pine needles made when they hit the ground.

  He came over to stand very close to her, close enough she could smell him. He didn’t stink like a mountain man, but he wasn’t wearing any deodorant or cologne or even aftershave. Mostly he smelled of wood smoke.

  He bent down and started unlacing her boot. That hurt, a lot, but he didn’t stop even when she whimpered and leaned back against the hood of the truck. With one quick yank he pulled off her boot, and then her sock.

  She didn’t want to look. She did not want to see what she’d been dreading—the angry wound, the purple suppurating flesh around it. The black-and-yellow mottling where her ankle had swollen up until the skin was ready to crack open.

  “This isn’t so bad,” he said.

  Was he humoring her? She didn’t think he was the type. She risked a glance downward.

  Her ankle was smeared with dried blood, but not as much of it as she’d expected. There was a scar running along the outer side of her ankle, thick with raised tissue, but…but it looked old. It looked like it had healed over months ago. There was no swelling, nor any sign of infection at all.