The native returned a few minutes later with a somber expression.
“Hot springs. Weak ice. River take him.”
The four men remained at the campsite for another day until Rhee was fit to resume the journey. When he did, the taciturn, bitter Mark Rhee of old was back.
* * *
No sooner did they resume the journey to the southeast than they sensed a change in the weather. That night, a thin halo surrounded the full moon, and Linder could see the fingers of high clouds streaking in from the north.
“Snow moon,” Scotty pronounced. “Snow storm here tomorrow. Must find shelter tonight.”
The men made good time all day, now that they had three pairs of snowshoes for four men and a weakened Burt no longer held back the pace. One less mouth to feed, as well, Linder thought, but felt ashamed immediately after. As Scotty had said at the outset, each man in the group had something vital to contribute, and now that two of the original six were gone, the team would be poorer for it.
When the storm broke, the men were encamped in a forest under a lean-to erected from fallen trees and fir branches. Food was low again, as fish had become scarce, and Scotty had not replicated his early luck in bringing down a hare. At the same time, the terrain had grown steeper, with ice-encrusted rocks adding to the danger and requiring frequent detours.
As the snow fell, the four men talked for hours about their plight and how far they had to go before reaching Fort Liard and the outskirts of civilization. When conversation flagged, the stillness of the brooding mountains seemed to engulf them. Linder did his best to resist feelings of self-pity while wrestling with a desperate fear that now, with hundreds of heart-breaking kilometers behind them, the tide of fate might have turned against their desperate project.
While he suspected that Browning and Rhee, and perhaps even Scotty, might suffer their own private pangs of despair, none showed signs of wavering. With each dawn, the outlook always seemed to brighten for a while. Though fear still lurked in some dark corner of his brain, movement and action and the application of rational thought to daily challenges kept it at bay.
After the storm, desperately short of food and sensing that the Liard River basin might lie just ahead, the team fell prey to a compulsive urge to keep moving to the point of exhaustion. The flames of obsession were stoked anew each time one of them uttered a cheery “Keep it up” or “Not far now” to the others. No one pleaded for a few minutes of rest. They just went on, walking the stiffness out of their joints and the chill of the dark hours from their spent bodies.
But as fatigue set in, each new irritation piled onto the one before and their nerves became as tightly strung as piano wires. At night, they were too agitated to sleep but by morning, they felt too drained to get back on their feet. Any one of the four might have succumbed and drifted into a deadly sleep but, as somebody else was always slogging forward, all four kept pace.
“We’ve got to keep moving while we still have light,” Browning urged as the sun sank below the ridge. “We must make it into the next valley before dark.”
Around the next bend, they came upon a mighty waterfall, where the water broke free from the ice and plunged nearly a hundred feet into a churning pool. Scotty directed the others to wait while he scouted for a traverse that would avoid a frontal assault on the granite cliffs to either side of the falls. The men were only halfway across the traverse when darkness fell and they dared not continue for fear of slipping on the rime-encrusted rock.
They found shelter for the night on a broad ledge where snow had accumulated in deep drifts. Though the snow was not deep enough to permit burrowing, the men punched through the hard crust to create a shallow dugout for huddling together out of the wind. To their dismay, the lack of wood nearby made a campfire impossible.
Before long, Linder felt as miserable as he had been on the coldest night of his forced march from Ross River to Camp N-320. But now, no food wagons were on hand to offer hot coffee and oatmeal. Though sleep lay on his eyelids like lead weights, he remained awake, sitting cross-legged with arms linked through those of Browning, Scotty and Rhee, knowing that to doze off meant risking death from freezing. Each man became his brother’s keeper, watching for nodding heads and drooping eyes. Three times Rhee, the arch-sleeper, let his chin sag and snored, and each time Linder elbowed his ribs and jostled him back to consciousness. At intervals, the men rose and jogged in place, stamping their feet to restore the circulation to their stiff limbs.
In the dismal pre-dawn, cold and fatigue set Linder shivering uncontrollably from head to foot. Breaking loose from the others, he probed in the snow for his rucksack and threaded his frostbitten hands through its straps.
“Let’s get going to some place where we can light a fire,” he said to no one in particular. “I don’t think I could handle another night like this.”
Each man received a chunk of frozen fish to chew for breakfast and set off behind Scotty toward the next ridgeline. But no sooner had they begun to warm from the exertion than the track ended abruptly on a foot-wide shelf overlooking a dizzying drop. As Scotty halted at the brink, Rhee plodded ahead blindly like a sleepwalker and nearly drove Scotty over the edge. By some minor miracle, Scotty caught hold of a rocky outcrop and righted himself. Then he shrugged, flashed a sheepish smile, and waved for the others to reverse direction and follow their tracks downhill until a new route could be found.
Despite his relative youth, physical conditioning, and innately hardy constitution, a few months in the camp system and weeks in the wilderness had drained Linder’s last reserves of strength. He possessed enough self-awareness to know that, when the stresses of cold, hunger, and exhaustion exceeded his limits, his mind tended to withdraw from rational thought and take refuge in distant memories and dreams. Though this dissociation posed dangers, he was beyond caring now and allowed his mind to run free.
For hours that day on the mountain, Linder lost all touch with his surroundings while his body moved along under some instinctive pre-rational control. Later he pieced together recollections of it, as if observing himself and the other three men from above, spotting the correct path forward as if lit from beneath the snow.
Then he remembered soaring high above the Mackenzie Mountains and flying south at an impossible speed to descend upon a small town that he knew intuitively was located in Utah. As his descent slowed, he found himself headed for the steeply pitched roof of a rundown row house. Instead of colliding with the roof, he passed through it and landed without perceptible impact in the kitchen, where a slim, dark-haired woman stood at the stove cooking something for herself and her teenaged daughter.
Though both women had their backs turned to him, a mental image of their faces flashed in his mind, and he recognized them instantly as Patricia Kendall and her daughter, Caroline. Around Patricia’s head he saw a cloudy swirl of grayish mist and sensed feelings of frustration, stress, depression, and remorse, while Caroline’s head and shoulders were shrouded in an amber glow that conveyed boredom, confusion, blocked expression, and stunted growth. He felt a sudden upwelling of empathy for the two women as images of their cell beneath the American Embassy and their crowded barracks at the Kamas labor camp flashed before his mind’s eye.
In an instant these fleeting impressions of the women blinked out and he was cruising along a divided highway past a sign for Interstate 80 and another that read “Coalville Next Exit.” In the next instant he was back in his physical body, tramping up a snow-covered trail. But now, he realized, the trail was descending gently and the sun was well above the horizon, and in the distance over Will Browning’s shoulder he glimpsed the frozen expanse of a great river that he knew had to be the Liard.
Though the confluence of the Nahanni and the Liard would be at least a day’s hike away, the sight gave Linder renewed strength. And as if to confirm that the team’s luck had truly changed for the better, Scotty also chose that moment to stop abruptly, fall to his knees, and bend forward like a Muslim praying to
Mecca.
While Scotty muttered in a plaintive tone that seemed more sorrowful than thankful, the other men waited to catch their breath. At last Scotty rose.
“Do you know this place?” Linder urged. “Is that the Liard up ahead?”
“Once I live not far from this place with wife and little girl. I bury them in valley long time ago.”
“I’m sorry, Scotty,” Linder offered. “Would you rather not stop there? Should we pitch camp up here instead?”
“No, we camp in valley. Here no good. I think we find good luck down there.”
The Kaska led on with renewed vigor and, when they reached the lower slopes, Scotty slowed from time to time as if to detect hidden traces of a long disused trail. They passed through stands of pine and spruce into snow-covered meadows and frozen bogs until, upon entering an aspen grove, Scotty made a most extraordinary discovery: a one-room log cabin with a sagging roof. Outside was a wooden sign carved with the legend: “Protected Forever! Nahanni National Park Reserve.”
According to Browning, the hut had likely belonged to Parks Canada, the governmental body once responsible for managing the former Nahanni National Park Reserve. After the President-for-Life’s blitzkrieg-style Canadian incursion, Canada’s government had ceded control over vast areas of the Yukon and the Northwest Territories to the United States. Under the authority of the hastily signed North American Defense Treaty, Canadian military and police forces withdrew to the south, and the U.S. military forcibly removed inhabitants of these remote lands, closing off public access to all national parks within. In place of campgrounds and hiking trails, the North Country’s new caretakers erected military bases and corrective labor camps, giving the phrase “protected forever” an altogether different meaning.
The log cabin was so remote that it did not surprise the four fugitives that, in five years, no one had broken into it. Though the windows were locked and well sealed, Browning had little difficulty jimmying open the door. Inside, the place smelled of mildew but it was so sparsely furnished with rough-hewn pine tables, benches and bunks that Linder saw little inside that could molder.
Rhee was the first to explore the kitchen and soon came upon a row of covered plastic bins filled with foil laminate packets of dehydrated foods. Browning searched the closet and found axes, saws, hatchets, canoe paddles, fishing rods, and a tackle box full of fishing gear. Linder rifled through a cheap chest of drawers and found it was full of resealable plastic bags stuffed with spare socks, polypropylene long underwear, t-shirts, and other men’s clothing. On a coatrack nearby hung several spare windbreakers, anoraks, fleece pullovers and, in a wicker basket underneath, lay an assortment of old hiking boots.
Meanwhile, Scotty examined the woodstove and peered up its chimney.
“Mark,” he said to Rhee with the trace of a smile. “Bring snow for water and search kitchen for coffee. I go find wood for fire.”
Rhee nodded and emptied a plastic washtub to take outside and fill with snow.
“I’ll rustle up some soap and towels so we can all get clean,” Browning joined in. “We’ll want to deep-six the jumpsuits and pick out all new clothes. And if anybody finds scissors or a razor before I do, give me a shout. This beard has simply got to go.”
Linder continued emptying the chest of drawers and sorted through the clothing to find something in each man’s size that would make him look like a hunter who had lost his way in the wilderness. After removing each drawer, he inspected it on all sides to insure he had not missed anything. Linder had searched the residences of too many suspect insurgents to drop his habit of thoroughness now.
The extra care was rewarded when he upended the last drawer and found taped underneath an envelope containing ten fifty-dollar Canadian banknotes. For a moment, he thought of taking them for himself and looked around to see if he had been noticed. Though he had not, he felt ashamed that he had even thought of cheating his teammates and rose with the envelope in hand.
“Three guesses. After food, soap, and a change of clothes, what would be the next most valuable thing for a bunch of escaped prisoners like us to have?”
“Whiskey?” Browning quipped.
“A shotgun?” Rhee asked.
“A map, maybe?” Scotty added with a rare smile.
“All wrong,” Linder replied. “Cash, and we just found five hundred bucks worth to buy whatever we need and get us where we’re going. Now, all we need is the whiskey, so we can have us a celebration.”
Though they did not come across any whiskey, Browning did find a tattered roadmap of western Canada, a pair of scissors and pack of disposable razors. So, after each had eaten a good meal and removed weeks of accumulated grime with soap and washcloth, they took turns giving each other shaves and haircuts before changing proudly into clothes that, for the first time in many months, did not mark them as prisoners. Then they cut their coveralls into pieces and fed them to the stove. And with full stomachs, freshly shaved cheeks, warm feet, and a peace of mind none of them had felt since their long journey began, the four men surrendered at last to a sound and untroubled sleep.
S15
Man has greater endurance than any animal. Camp saying
LATE MARCH, NORTH OF FORT LIARD, NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
In the north, trees die lying down like people. The taller ones prop themselves up on bared roots spread flat across thin stony soil like the claws of a monstrous bird. Each summer the permafrost retreats by a fraction of an inch, allowing tiny root tentacles to penetrate deeper and tighten their grip. But over time the tallest trees become easy prey for strong winds, toppling them onto a soft bed of bright green, yellow, or crimson moss that in due time covers them like a shroud.
Only the shorter trees, stunted and gnarled from their seasonal orientation toward the sun’s rays, stand firm and strong. But such an intense struggle for survival renders worthless the wood of such trees. It resists the axe, cannot be made into useful implements, and does not even burn well as firewood.
Linder thought of Scotty as one of those gnarled trees, while he and Browning and Rhee, though tall and strongly built, remained at the mercy of the wilderness. The comparison came to Linder when he tried to arouse Scotty from sleep on their first night in the open after three nights in the cabin. Usually Scotty was the first to rise and Linder wondered if the Kaska’s inexhaustible reserves of stamina were finally running out.
All day along the trail, Scotty wore a meditative look and spoke even less than usual. During their midday rest, Linder saw him cast a brooding look across the Nahanni. While the others ate, Scotty remained still.
“Have you been to this place before?” Linder asked in hopes of drawing him out.
“One summer long time ago I live here with wife and daughter,” Scotty replied. “Their spirits live in river now.”
“Is that a good thing?” Linder questioned.
“No good, no bad. They wait here now, move on soon,” Scotty replied before rising and heading back toward the trail.
The next morning, when Scotty did not answer his wake-up call in the pre-dawn darkness to stand watch, Linder came closer and noticed a gray cast to the old man’s face. Only when he touched the man’s cold flesh did he realize that Scotty had died in his sleep. His wife and daughter had waited for him, and now the spirits of all three could move on.
Before breakfast, Linder, Browning, and Rhee carried Scotty’s body up a hill overlooking the river and buried him under a pile of rocks to protect it from scavengers. When the pile was complete, Linder asked the others to wait while he said a few words over the grave.
“This is a message to the spirits who guided our friend Scotty to this place,” he began self-consciously, twisting his new fleece-lined hat in his hands. “We thank you, as we thank Scotty, for the many times our lives have been spared since our escape. Now that Scotty is gone, we ask that you continue to watch over us in this vast wild land and inspire us to be as good to one other as Scotty was to us. And lead each of us to fulfill th
e destiny we came here to fulfill, so that our efforts, and Scotty’s, will not be without meaning. This we ask most humbly. Amen.”
At that, Linder turned away and started back down the hill to the cabin, feeling ashamed at having paid so little respect to the old Kaska while he was alive. Since joining them, Scotty had taught the men basic survival skills, helped harden them to survive on minimal rations and, by bringing them to the ranger’s cabin, had left them with enough supplies to continue their journey through the populated areas ahead.
The dangers that the three survivors faced now would differ from the ones that Scotty had helped them overcome. But by now each understood that, for any or all to reach freedom, he would need to trust the others, share all he had, and act as one.
* * *
Late in the day, they came upon the confluence of the Nahanni and the Liard Rivers and spotted the first signs of civilized life since escaping MacTung. On the far bank of the Liard, they caught sight of houses, telephone poles, upturned boats, parked snowmobiles, and columns of white smoke from workshop chimneys rising pencil-straight into the sky. The terrain was flat here, and dotted with stands of oak, birch, willow, and lime trees.
In the fields along the river, warm moist air from the south had laid bare the dirty yellow rags of fall, with tufts of dead grass poking out where the snow had melted. And slowly, by degrees, Linder noticed a ringing in his ears and a dull ache in his fingers, toes and face, where circulation was returning to places that frostbite had gnawed during the winter months.
The fugitives decided to bypass the settlement for fear of being reported to police by suspicious townspeople and set their course to flank the main highway leading south to Fort Liard. They scouted their route warily, choosing side roads where possible and avoiding those with telephone poles, which tended to draw greater traffic. Frequently, they saw people moving in the distance and sometimes heard men’s voices calling to one another.
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