by Nick Cole
That’d be the easy way, Boy. Never take the easy way.
He held up a handful of oats to Horse. Horse sniffed at them but refused to eat as he turned his long head back to the fire.
Okay, you rest for now.
Outside the storm blasted past the ledge. Everything was white and gray and dark beyond, all at once.
When he found the snow-covered bear, he began the work of removing the skin.
He completed the cut up onto the bear’s chest. He cut the legs and then began to skin the bear from the paws up. His strength began to fail as he worked the great hide off its back, but when he came to the head, he made the final cut and returned to the cave to warm himself again. He took a handful of the oats, watching Horse’s sleeping eyes flutter, and ate them, chewing them into a paste and swallowing.
Returning to the wind and the night, he dragged the skin into the cave and laid it out on the floor.
I can work here for a while and be warm by the fire.
But he knew if the meat froze on the carcass he would never get it off the bone.
For a long time after that, he crouched over the bear, cutting strips of meat. When he’d gotten all the usable meat he washed it in the snow and took it back into the cave. He spitted two steaks and laid them on the fire.
Into the cold once again, he cracked open the bear’s skull for the brains and took those inside, placing them near the skin.
For the rest of the night he worked with his tomahawk, scraping the skin of flesh and fat and blood. When all of it was removed, he stepped outside, carrying the waste to the edge of the cliff and dropping it over the side.
The storm had stopped.
It was startlingly cold out. His breath came in great vaporous clouds that hung for a moment over the chasm and the ice-swollen river below and were gone in the next. The stars were close at hand. Below, the river tumbled as sluggish chunks of ice floated in the moonlight.
He washed his hands in snow, feeling both a stinging and numbness on his raw flesh.
He stood watching the night.
Clouds, white and luminous, moved against the soft blue of the moonlit night. Below, the river and the valley were swaying trees and shining shadows of sparkling granite. I am alive, he thought. And this is the most beautiful night of my life.
DAWN LIGHT FELL across the ledge outside the cave. The Boy looked up from the skin he’d worked on through the night. The light was golden, turning the stone ledge outside the cave from iron gray to blue.
He felt tired as he returned to the skin once more, rubbing the brains of the bear into the hide.
“This is all I can do to cure it,” he said aloud in his tiredness, as if someone had been asking what he was doing. As if Sergeant Presley had been talking to him through the night. But now, in the light of morning it all seemed a dream; a dream of a night in which he worked at the remains of a bear.
But I have not slept.
“There is too much to do,” he said aloud.
You done everything, Boy. Now sleep.
The Boy lay down next to the fire and slept.
17
IN THE DAYS that followed
He rubbed ash from the fire into the hide of the bear.
He smoked meat in dried strips.
He swept the cave with pine branches.
He had to lead Horse down the mountain to drink from the river at least once a day. He could think of no method to bring Horse enough water.
Winter fell across the mountains like a thick blanket of ice.
The Boy constructed a thatched door to block the entrance to the cave.
At night he stared at the wall and the moving shadows in the firelight.
By the time he’d collected firewood, watered Horse and foraged enough food, the daylight was waning and he felt tired.
In the night he enjoyed listening to the fire and watching the shadows on the cave wall.
Winter had come to stay, and it seemed, on frost-laced mornings and nights of driving sleet, that it had always been this way, and might continue without end.
18
ONE NIGHT, AS the wind howled through the high pines, he took Sergeant Presley’s bundle out of his pack.
He stared at it for a long moment, listening to the wind and trying to remember that autumn morning when he’d found it next to the body.
Take the map and go west, Boy. Find the Army. Tell them who I was. Tell them there’s nothing left.
In the bundle was a good shirt Sergeant Presley had found and liked to wear in the evening after they had bathed in a stream or creek and made an early camp. That was the only time Sergeant Presley would wear the good shirt he’d found behind the backseat of a pickup truck they’d searched in the woods of North Carolina.
Red flannel.
This my red flannel shirt, Boy. Shore is comfortable.
The shirt would be there.
The map. Sergeant Presley’s knife. The shirt.
He undid the leather thong on the bundle and tied it about his wrist.
The soft cloth bundle opened and out came the shirt, and within were the knife and the map. And there was a leather thong attached to a long gray feather, white at the tip, its spine broken.
He laid the knife on his whetstone.
He laid the map on another stone, one he ate on by the fire. He left the broken feather and its thong in the bundle.
He held the shirt up and smelled Sergeant Presley in a draft coming off the fire.
He took off his vest and put on the shirt.
It was comfortable. Soft. The softest thing he’d ever felt. And warm.
He sat by the fire.
When he took up the map, he stared at it. He had seen the map many times, but always when it was laid out, Sergeant Presley was making a note, or muttering to himself.
The Boy unfolded it, laying it on the ground. It was large. It was both hard and smooth. In the light it reflected a dull shine.
He stared at the markings.
Above Reno he read:
CHINESE PARATROOPERS. DUG IN. BATTALION STRENGTH.
Over Salt Lake City, in the state of Utah, he read:
GONE
Over Pocatello, in the state of Idaho, he read:
REFUGEE CAMP FIVE YEARS AFTER. OVERRUN BY SLAVERS.
Above this, across the whole of the northwestern states, was a red circle with the words WHITE SUPREMACISTS written in the center.
Across Omaha in big letters was the word PLAGUE, and then a small red face with X’s for eyes. There were red-faced “X eyes” listed over place names all the way to Louisville, in the state of Kentucky.
At Washington, D.C., he found an arrow that led into the middle of the ocean. Words were written in Sergeant Presley’s precise hand.
MADE IT TO D.C. IT’S ALL GONE. BUNKER PROBABLY HIT EARLY IN THE WAR. NO REMNANTS OF GOV’T AT THIS LOCATION. TOOK ME TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS TO MAKE IT HERE.
On the back of the map the Boy found names.
CPT DANFORTH, KIA CHINESE SNIPER IN SACRAMENTO
SFC HAN, KIA CHINESE SNIPER IN SACRAMENTO
CPL MALICK, KIA RENO
SPC TWOOMEY, KIA RENO
PFC UNGER, MIA RENO
PFC CHO, MIA RENO
PV2 WILLIAMS, KIA RENO
And . . .
LOLA
THERE WAS NO mention of Escondido’s “Auburn” on the map. The Boy traced the highway marked 80 as it crossed the mountain range and then fell into Sacramento in the state of California. After that, the road ran straight to Oakland. Written over Oakland, the Boy found I CORPS. Across the bay in San Francisco, circled in red, he saw the word CHINESE.
He stared at the broken feather and experienced the fleeting sensation of a memory. Which one, he could not tell.
19
HORSE HAD NOT died.
Winter broke and the Boy could hear ice crack in the river below. It was still cold.
The Boy led Horse to the bottom of the small mountain, down its icy ledges, watching Horse to m
ake sure he didn’t slip. There was only one close call, near the bottom. In the silence that followed the recovery, Horse seemed angry at his own inability and cantered off into the forest, snorting and thrashing his tail.
The Boy let him go, knowing Horse needed to forget the incident as much as the animal wanted the Boy to never remember it.
He was embarrassed, thought the Boy, keeping even the look of such a thought to himself.
For the rest of the morning they rode the snowy forest carefully. In the early afternoon, they crossed the river and came upon the great curve of the highway that climbed upward toward the pass. For a while the Boy left Horse to himself, letting him crop what little there was to find.
This is good. We need to be back on this road again. Even if just for a few moments of sunshine. It feels good to have the road under my feet and Horse’s hooves. We have been too long away from the road.
He wandered back to their old camp.
Against the cliff wall, the Boy found the drawing of Sergeant Presley near the snow-covered remains of Escondido’s charred lodge.
That evening back at the cave, as both he and Horse drowsily watched the fire, he took a piece of charcoal and shaved it lightly with his knife.
He considered the wall of the cave and saw no face or image in the flickering light. And yet he wanted to draw something.
He thought of the bear and quickly dismissed the thought. There were nights when he awakened in the dark and the bear was chasing him across the forest floor, and no matter how hard he urged his withered leg to move, it would not. Usually he awoke just before the bear caught him, but there were nights when he didn’t, and in those nightmare moments, he could feel the bear’s hot embrace, and the terror seemed a thing that would swallow him whole.
So he did not need a reminder of the bear.
He drew the mane first. The mane of the Big Lion. The male. That was what he remembered most in the times when he thought back to the night the lions surrounded him.
Next he added the eyes, the eyes that had seemed so cool and yet communicative, and then the teeth and the body, and the shadows that were his females. He drew the female who had watched the big male. She had been at his side, still watching him. They were together.
When the Boy was finished he lay on his back, watching the portrait of the lions, remembering them this way and forgetting the skins and the blood of that hot day.
ON THE COLD morning when they finally left the cave the Boy was wearing the skin of the bear over his back and down his left side. The withered side.
This way others won’t be able to see where I am weak.
That’s camouflage, Boy, camouflage.
They rode out past the bubbling river and up the slope, onto the rising highway.
It was a cold day, and the wind came straight down the old highway, but the skies above were blue. Soon they left the familiar, and each new curve in the road was a strange and almost alien world of chopped granite, high forests, and cold, deep mountain lakes.
Winter can only last so long, and life in the cave would have made me weak, the Boy thought.
Horse can no longer survive on what little grass I can dig out from underneath the snow. For me, the bear meat is long gone and even the fish from the stream seem harder to catch because there are so few now.
For most of that day they rode high into the mountains, and in the evening they camped under the remains of a broken bridge.
The fire was weak and the air was cold enough to make him think maybe they’d left the cave too soon, but Horse seemed stronger in the evening than when they first began the day’s journey.
It was good for him to work so hard today.
The Boy slept, waking throughout the night at each new sound beyond the firelight.
IN THE MORNING they came upon a pole covered in the skulls of animals and garlands of acorns; a marker set in the dirt by the broken road.
You know what that means, Boy. Someone’s land.
High above he could see the pass that leads down into the foothills beyond. Beyond the pass, the city of Sacramento and finally on to the bay and I Corps.
I could ride hard and bypass the people who live here.
It was later, as they rode steadily up the broken grade, that the Boy realized they were being followed. Across the valley he saw movement. But when he stopped to look he saw nothing. Still, he knew they were watching him.
There was little left of the bent highway that once crossed over the pass. What had not been covered in rockslide had fallen away into a dark forest below. The years of hard winter had taken their toll on the old highway.
Men came out from the forest floor. They made their way to the foot of the trail the Boy was leading Horse down. Horse, sniffing the wind, gave a snort, and when the Boy looked behind, he saw more men coming out along their backtrail, high above them on rocky granite ledges. They carried bows, a weapon he couldn’t use because of his withered left hand.
The men were dressed for hunting: skins and bows. They were dark skinned, but every so often he saw fair skin among them.
Near the bottom of the trail he mounted Horse and adjusted the bearskin across his left side.
At that moment he thought it would be nice to have a piece of steel from an old machine he could hold onto with his left hand beneath the skin. A beaten highway sign with a leather strap perhaps.
He took hold of the tomahawk with his strong right hand, letting it hang loosely along his muscled thigh.
The men were mostly short and bandy legged.
All were covered in wide, dark tattoos that swirled like the horns of a bull on their bare skin.
A leader, long hair falling against the dark sweeping horns that coursed and writhed in ink across his considerable arms and torso, stepped forward and raised his hand.
Was this a warning or an order?
Be ready, Boy, you got speed with Horse, but arrows move just as fast. Maybe even faster.
In the end, he faced a semicircle of hunters and knew there were more behind him.
It’ll show weakness if you turn your back to check, Boy. It’s an interrogation. They just want to ask questions.
“Wasa llamo?” shouted their leader.
The Boy remained staring at them.
In the years of travel he had heard many languages. Sergeant Presley had taught him to speak English, though the Boy remembered that what his people spoke was different and yet the same.
“English, Boy. English!” Sergeant Presley had barked at him in the first years. One day, without remembering when, specifically, the Boy noticed Sergeant Presley never barked again. That lost language he had once spoken was yet one more thing the Boy could not remember about his people, just as he could not remember when he had first seen the feather in Sergeant Presley’s bundle and what, if any, was its meaning.
Who am I?
Focus, Boy. All that’s for another time. That’s who you were. Live past today and you might find out who you are.
“Wasa llamo?” barked their leader again.
The Possum Hunters had used llamo to mean “name.” He had learned enough of their language to get by during their year among them, enough when playing with their children.
The men jabbered among themselves, rapidly, like birds. It was too fast but the Boy caught words that may have once been English; words the Possum Hunters had also used, others that sounded completely different.
“Wasa llamo?” roared their leader.
Boy is what they called you, he heard Sergeant Presley say.
I have always just been Boy. It was enough.
And yet the broken feather from the bundle had once meant something to him.
“WASA LLAMO!” screamed the leader, unsheathing a curved hunting knife. It gleamed in the afternoon light of the bright sky. It was an old thing, a weapon from Before.
The leader turned to his troops, muttering something. The semicircle withdrew. It was just the leader now, facing the Boy.
The
Boy tried to remember the words of the Possum Hunters. Words he could use to identify himself.
What was friend?
What was Boy?
How would he describe himself?
He remembered the children being warned to be careful of the bears that prowled the deep woods. “Oso,” he’d heard their mothers calling. Beware the oso. And the Possum Hunters, the men, had called themselves cazadores.
“Oso Cazadore,” said the Boy in the quiet of the high mountain pass.
Silence followed.
The Boy watched the troop exchange glances, muttering, pointing at the bearskin.
The leader, his face like a dark cloud, shouted a long stream of words at the Boy, their meanings lost.
Until the last word.
The Boy heard the last word clearly.
“Chinese!”
As though it were an accusation.
An indictment.
Then the leader shouted it again in the still silence and pointed over his shoulder toward the west.
“Oso Cazadore,” said the Boy again.
The leader laughed, spitting angrily as he did so.
Another string of words most of which the Boy did not understand and finally the word the children of the Possum Hunters had used when calling each other liars.
Pick the biggest one, Boy. When you’re surrounded, pick the biggest one and take him out. It’ll make the rest think twice.
The leader was the biggest.
The Boy dismounted.
Horse could take care of himself.
The Boy pointed toward the leader with his tomahawk.
The leader crouched low, drawing the blade between them, waving it back and forth.
Holding the Tomahawk back, ready to strike, the Boy circled to the right, feeling his left leg drag as it always did after he had ridden Horse for long periods of time.
Get to work, lazy leg! Be ready.
The leader came in at once, feinting toward the Boy’s midsection, and at the same time dancing backward to circle.
The Boy moved his tomahawk forward, acting as though he might strike where the leader should have been. Sensing this, the leader flipped the knife and caught it in his grip, ready to slam it down on the unprotected back he knew would be exposed if the Boy struck with his full force at the feint. Instead the Boy shifted backward, willing the weak left leg to move quickly. Once he was planted, he raised the checked tomahawk once more and slammed it down through the wrist of the leader as the man tried to regain his balance from stabbing through thin air.
