by Pete Fromm
I remembered my boast to my parents—that if something bad happened I would simply have to walk out, or even crawl if I had to. I knew now that if whatever was happening to me was something that would kill me I wouldn’t be doing any crawling. I would simply die.
The vomiting began early in the morning, racking my guts until I thought I was turning inside out. But afterward, lying back in bed exhausted, I felt a little better. By ten I managed to get myself dressed and totter all the way to the outhouse. I sat down shakily, glad to have made it this far. Hugh Glass had crawled hundreds of miles after his mauling. I hadn’t been mauled, I’d just eaten dinner, and here I was delighted I’d made it eighty yards.
The morning staggered on, a routine of squatting in the snow and vomiting, clasping my sides in between, trying to keep myself from blowing up. By noon the sun came out and after a trip to the outhouse I felt a little better and decided I’d try walking to the channel, just to see if things there were all right, just to feel the sun a little longer. I pushed myself, running from the words ‘often fatal,’ thinking that if I could convince myself I felt better it would be a sure sign I had simple food poisoning. I doubted botulism would let me feel better before finishing me off. And if I had a ruptured appendix, I assured myself, I’d certainly be dead by now.
I sat down on the bridge over Indian Creek and saw that nothing had blocked the headgate overnight. I lay back and closed by eyes, then had to curl into a ball to ease my stomach cramps. For the first time ever I wondered if I would really die, and decided I probably wouldn’t know about it if I did, sick enough to be more curious than scared. The smell of the creosote in the bridge timbers wrapped around me, its sharpness somehow pleasant, and I fell asleep for the first time that morning.
When I woke a full hour had passed and the sun was gone. The wind had picked up and I shuffled back to my tent just before the hail struck. I had to pin down the tent flaps with firewood and by the time I got back to my bed I was sweating and trembling again. But I hadn’t thrown up for several hours, and that felt like some kind of achievement.
The storm passed quickly and by later afternoon I dragged myself outside again and lay down beneath a tree, the sun the only medicine I had. I brought my first-aid book with me, but didn’t bother to open it. This was a wait-and-see game, nothing I could put a bandage on.
Soon another squall followed along, driving me back inside. I tried to read something light, lighter than first aid, but the pain made the words swim.
By evening the cramps began to subside and by night I was fairly sure I’d survive. But as the darkness settled in around me, I began to wonder. If I was truly deathly ill, an appendicitis or something, how would I make the decision that this was the real thing, that I had to make a move to survive? I thought I’d probably underestimate any illness. Accidents would be pretty straight forward—either the bleeding stops or it doesn’t. Illness I knew far less about, and though I doubted it, I hoped that if the time came it would make itself obvious.
I could still remember my pride at hiking eighty yards to the outhouse and I fell back to sleep wondering what good it would really do to know that I was in mortal danger. I’d have to be able to make it at least the ten miles to the phone at Magruder. I wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance.
I didn’t sleep much that night, but the next morning I felt pretty good—empty, but good. I ate tentatively, a piece of frying-pan bread, nothing more poisonous than flour, baking powder and water, and though I hated to do it, I threw out every bit of food I’d made before I got sick. Nothing was worth risking that again. From now on, I knew, I’d study each bit of food before using it, unable to tell a thing, but wondering what it held in store.
I got my strength and confidence back over the next few days and I was soon out hiking again, but I stayed fairly close to home, almost glad the drizzle returned, giving me a reason to hold to a routine of cooking and reading.
18
On the morning of the twenty-seventy of March I was into my last cup of coffee, caught up in The Hound of the Baskervilles and surrounded by the patter of rain on the canvas, when a sudden rip of shooting tore through my meadow. Six shots rang out as fast as someone could pull the trigger and I was out of my chair, crouched, wondering what to do before realizing there was only one person who might make an entrance like that.
Rader.
I poked my head out of the tent and saw Rader and Sponz on foot in the middle of my meadow, already beginning to laugh. I grabbed my black powder revolver and ran out into the meadow, waving it over my head and shouting, wishing it were loaded so I could return the salute.
We stood in the rain in the meadow and they tossed a bottle of whiskey to me, a holdover tradition from the mountain man book days. As I uncapped the bottle I realized these guys were still in those romantic book days. So was I, really, as soon as I was with them, and I tipped the bottle back for a choking swallow.
After we got through “How’s it going?” I managed to ask them what in the world they were doing. What were they here for? How had they gotten in?
That set them to laughing again, and they had another snow machine story to tell. This time they’d rented two, and they’d raced all the way in until they got to the slides. They’d snuck around some but had finally left their machines a few miles upriver and hiked in the last little ways. “Only crashed a dozen times or so,” Rader said.
We walked back into the tent then and Rader picked up a piece of frying-pan bread I was about to have for breakfast. It wasn’t pretty—a six-inch-wide disk, about an inch thick, variously browned and blackened, about the weight of a discus. Rib-sticking stuff. Rader weighed it in his hand and said, “Ah, another delicate pastry.”
They asked what had been going on in here and I dug into my hiding place and retrieved the skin of the bobcat. Rader, who knew about such things, couldn’t get over the size of it. It was worth a fortune, he told me, probably four hundred dollars. Two months’ wages. I told the story of the cat’s trip off the cliff, of his dragging himself toward me, and they marveled even more. I watched them admire the beautiful fur and wondered what it would feel like selling it, letting it go forever.
But finally, we sat down and I asked again what was going on. Were they just killing another long weekend?
Rader glanced at Sponz, grinning. He shook his head. “Getting married,” he said. “Saturday.”
He let that soak in a second before asking, “Wanna go?”
I glanced at one and then the other, and I knew they weren’t kidding. “You really came in here to take me out?” I asked.
He nodded and I asked how it would work—when would I get back, how would I get back, all the logistics of it—and we sat around my little table and planned. Rader told me to grab the bobcat skin and within half an hour we were back at their machines, piling on. I held Boone across my lap, pinned against Rader’s back, before I really had a chance to realize what I was doing or where I was going.
We tipped over on nearly every slide, until I started walking even the easiest looking ones. Our ribs ached before we reached Magruder, laughing so hard at each other as we’d pick ourselves out of the snow and set the machine back on its skis. We didn’t have a clue what we were doing. And, for once, there was no one here to see that.
Once we turned up Deep Creek toward the pass, the slides gave out and we had smooth sailing. It was an odd feeling to skate past the landmarks up to the pass, shooting by places like Slow Gulch and Blondie’s, places I hadn’t seen since December, when I’d chased after my dad and brother. As we passed the places I told Rader the stories and he’d shake his head, asking if I was kidding. I started to feel better about those desperate days. Maybe now I finally had a story of my own, something I could tell about, something I could wow my friends with. Suddenly though, I wondered if it was worth it, worth what my dad and brother had gone through. I wasn’t sure, and I doubted I’d tell many people more than a few of those stories. It wasn’t something that could be
understood right off.
On the down side of the pass, back in Montana at last, Sponz shot by us, hotdogging. He zoomed out of sight and it was nearly a mile before we saw him again, staggering around on the road, looking for his snow machine, his cap crunched down, nearly covering his dazed eyes.
We dismounted and rounded him up and sat him down. We found his snow machine off the road, nearly buried beneath a tree. He’d been bounced off on a divot and the machine had driven itself off the road. By the time he got up, punch-drunk from landing on his head, he could not guess where it had possibly gone. Once we figured he was probably going to be OK we chugged on, a lot slower than before, keeping each other in sight.
When we reached the Deerslayer we loaded the machines onto the rented trailer and took off. I could hardly believe how fast everything went. We’d covered a two-day walk in a few hours. Rushing up out of Darby I looked off to the west and saw Trapper Peak, still heavy under its snow. Finally I was seeing its other side, from the Bitterroot Valley, and in little more than an hour we were back in Missoula.
We stopped at Sponz’s first, where I took a shower. It was such a far cry from my miserable little sponge baths that I stayed in until Sponz asked if I’d gone down the drain. He sat on the toilet, filling in stories while I steamed. When the hot water finally ran out I had to borrow his clothes. Out here the layers upon layers of wool and my knee-high moccasins only served to draw stares.
Sponz and Rader were both beat from the day of snowmobiling and we went to bed early. Rader went to his apartment, taking Boone with him because dogs weren’t allowed in Sponz’s room. I slept on Sponz’s floor.
The next day started with a call from Rader, telling me that he’d let Boone out in the morning and she was gone. While Rader said he’d put messages around and called the radio stations I picked at the gluey edge of the emergency number sticker on the phone, thinking of Boone howling through the night at the Paradise lion camp. “OK,” I said, hanging up. There really wasn’t anything else we could do. She’d never been out in Missoula before, and there was no particular place we could look. We drove around for a few hours anyway, without seeing a trace of her. I walked through campus, an open place full of dogs that I thought might attract her. But I kept bumping into friends and soon the party grew unavoidable. I let myself go with my friends, hoping for a phone call from whoever might find Boone.
The next several days fell into a pattern as steady as the routines I’d made to kill time in my early days in the Selway. In the morning, at first light, I’d walk alone through the quiet town, searching for Boone, wondering what she was going through. I crossed the bridge over the Clark Fork, the river bigger and farther away than I was used to. I saw ducks and felt naked without the rifle on my shoulder. I dropped down to the river and searched there for Boone, turning corners hoping to see her charging back to me through the snow and brush, as she would after a deer chase had been impossible to resist. But there wasn’t any snow here, and Boone didn’t charge around any corners.
As each day passed into night my time was taken up by all the people who’d spent weeks sending me off in the fall. I had a dinner date with a girl I’d met shortly before going off to the woods, and once in the restaurant I couldn’t get over the number of people, so closely spaced. I grew uncomfortable standing in line at the salad bar, not used to people standing behind me, not used to having to watch out for anyone besides myself. In the Selway every glance of movement meant something—something was there, something was happening. Here it was just movement, everywhere.
Back at the table I studied the line, realizing it was just a line, that no one here had sinister intentions. I noticed the tight jeans the men wore, the stars cut into their back pockets. They wouldn’t last a second in the mountains, and they’d soak up water like a wick, freezing whoever wore them. At the same time I knew it didn’t make any difference, that they’d never be worn there.
I felt funny about being waited on, about having everything set before me all ready to eat, without having to lift a finger myself. But I got over that as soon as I stared my salad. I’d forgotten how badly I missed fresh food.
After the dinner we walked through the night looking for Boone, my date as worried about her as I was. I thought of Beau, Brian’s dog, lost on his first lion trail in the mountains. I wondered what Boone was trailing on her first trip out of the mountains. At least there were no coyotes here.
The wedding went fairly smoothly, though Rader and I didn’t sleep the night before it. Sponz saved the day by hauling Rader through a shower and dressing him in time for the ceremony. I stood in the background, my borrowed suit tight around my neck and shoulders, woozy from the endless late nights, still trying to watch everything, the two of them at the altar, wondering when this had all happened, how they had gone from a date or two to marriage in what seemed, now that I was out, to be hardly any time at all. As the priest rattled on I worried about Boone.
The party rolled on through the weekend and I rolled with it, stunned by all there was to see, by all the people and all the talking. I told a few stories about what it was like back in the Selway, but I grew quiet in the crowds, leaning back against walls, trying to keep my eye on all the movement. The Selway wasn’t the easiest thing to describe and these people were the same people I had left, full into the college party crowd, masters of fun without thought.
There was no word of Boone.
The Monday after the wedding, things settled down. The college kids went back to class and the parents went home. Rader and I went down to Pacific Hide and Fur with the bobcat skin. I’d never seen a fur buyer and I watched as he fluffed out the pelt, measuring, pointing out invisible flaws.
He put on a show before making his first offer—four hundred and twenty dollars. I was a little startled, but already I’d begun to have second thoughts. When the buyer began to talk about tagging and licenses, bitching about the hoops the Fish and Game made him jump through, I became less and less certain that I wanted to sell the skin.
Finally, when the buyer determined we didn’t have a tag, Rader took over, getting the guy to admit they had ways around it—although he also said that they sure wouldn’t pay premium price for the risk. How close to premium, Rader wanted to know, and the buyer thought maybe he could risk one hundred and fifty bucks.
That tore it. I picked up the skin, beautifully fluffed and combed by the buyer’s expert hand, and we headed out. I thought of the old cat, hanging on to the deer’s back, his teeth too worn to finish his kill, refusing to give up even as the deer ran off the cliff, even as I approached his shattered body with a rock, turning to swipe at Boone with his claws out and ready. There was no point in selling it. Anyone who saw it afterward would only see pretty fur. I didn’t need money so badly it was worth killing the cat’s story.
Rader tried coming up with alternate plans, and I played along rather than trying to explain that I wasn’t going to sell it. He was married now, and had to worry about money and security and things like that. And he hadn’t seen the fierce yellow slits of the bobcat’s eyes. We walked back to campus for Rader’s class and I switched the subject rather than going into any of that. It seemed a thing a person would either see or not see.
After dropping Rader off I started my hopeless rounds of the campus, searching through the dogs for Boone. I bumped into another friend in the central oval and as we were talking he suddenly looked over my shoulder and said, “Hey, isn’t that your dog?”
I spun around in time to see Boone trotting toward me, smiling the way dogs do, as if she’d just come back from one of her little tours around our meadow. She’d been gone four days. We rumbled through the center of the campus, tearing up the soggy grass.
Once Boone showed up I was ready to go back in to the Selway. I had the fish to worry about and I was tired of imposing on people out here, staying at Sponz’s, hanging out with Rader the newlywed. I was tired of drinking and talking. I wanted just to sit in my tent.
No one
could afford renting two machines again, or even the trailer to haul them on, so Rader and I borrowed a disintegrating truck and limped it down to Hamilton where we rented a single machine. We pushed it into the back of the truck and by noon were at the end of the plowed road, thirty-five miles from my tent. It was a warm, sunny day, the snow already slick on top, crusted hard below. We’d had one more going-away party that couldn’t be beat the night before, the same as in the fall, and we were both tired, feeling pretty puny.
We go the machine fired up and started for the pass. The snow was sticky beneath the slush, grabbing at the skis, and within a mile the machine lost its power. We jettisoned Boone but she was able to keep up with us in an easy trot.
Within another few hundred yards the machine just stopped. The engine would race, but we would not move. Rader and I got off and looked at each other. We opened the cowling and saw that the belt was still there. That’s about all he’d learned to repair. “Might’ve burned a hole in the cylinder,” he said.
The man in the rental shop had warned about that, about the tough snow conditions, about trying to haul two people around. He’d recognized Rader, seemed to recall something of the battered machines he’d returned before, but not quite enough.
We let the engine cool, Rader sitting on the black vinyl seat while I dropped down into a snowdrift, comfortable back in my layers of wool. We talked some, finally alone, not drinking, making sense. We talked mostly of marriage, which was a new thing, something unknown, as hard to comprehend as my winter in here had been for me in the fall. Frightening for the same reasons.
