by Peter Geye
“It’s still dark out,” Gus said.
Harry turned his attention back to shaving. “It’s damn near six.” He took another stripe of his stubble with the straight blade.
“I’m not getting up yet.”
“You won’t sleep at all if we’re freezing our balls off.”
Gus rolled over. “No more telling me what to do. I don’t even want to talk to you.”
“You’ll be a lonely son of a gun up here, you quit talking to me.”
“Right. Because your stories are so good.” Gus kicked free of his sleeping sack and stepped from the bunk. He went right past his father and out the door to take a piss and came back in while his father was finishing on his neck.
“Don’t be a pantywaist, Gus. We’ve got work to do. You could wake up tomorrow with a foot of snow on the ground.”
Gus poured himself a cup of coffee and watched as his father toweled his face.
“Get back at those birches, eh?” Harry said. He pulled his pants on over his union suit.
Gus took a sip of his coffee and offered his father a gallant and challenging stare. “I’ve told you there will be wood. I’ve told you ten times. But I’m not going over there in the dark. It’s pointless.”
Harry hung the towel from its hook next to the window. “You’re afraid of the dark now, too?”
“What else am I afraid of?” Gus shot back.
Harry was deliberate in his response. He put his shirt on before he spoke. He sat down to tie his bootlaces. “Far as I can tell, you’re afraid of what’s true.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of,” Gus said. “I’m afraid I’m in the middle of nowhere and my dad—who tricked me into coming here—is going nuts. That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“You’re not seeing things right.”
Furious, Gus couldn’t stand the ridiculous expression on his father’s face. “You were just standing at the window there, staring at yourself. What did you see?”
“An old fool, that’s what I saw. But an old fool who’s ready, which is more than you can say. I saw an old fool who understands what’s coming.” He donned his sweater and his red hat and stood over his pack. He pulled out the Ruger in its holster and ran his belt through the loop. “You had any sense, you’d start looking for what’s coming, too. And it might not be the worst idea to train your eyes to see in the dark.” Then he walked calmly out the door.
Gus went to the window and watched his father’s shadow move around the shack. He wanted to follow him. To assault him. To scream. To do some goddamn thing. But he stood at the window instead, drinking his coffee and waiting for the light.
—
But he was back under the bur oaks before the sun was up. He’d left the saw and hatchet at the shack and had the Remington over his shoulder. The gun was loaded and he had six cartridges in his jacket pocket. His hunting knife hung from his belt. The book of maps was in the leg pocket of his army pants.
On the edge of the stand, he found a pile of deadfall and made it his blind. A breeze came through the trees onto his face. He scanned the clearing and watched it fill with the morning’s light. He kept his ear cocked to the wind, the Remington leaning against the tree trunk.
Then he studied the maps one at a time. There was nothing in them to remind him of the miles and lakes and rivers that had led them to the shack. The memories of traversing the borderlands were already disappearing. It would be years before they would return to him with any sort of fluency, and by then he was certain that in the decades between that morning in the bur oaks and the present day his memory had reshaped some of the facts. He was just as sure that his memories had failed him altogether in other respects. But certain memories were not prey to fallibility. That morning in the bear blind was one of them.
He spent a long time in the blind parsing their situation. He admitted his fear because he could feel it so plainly. And it was worse now, with the threat of Charlie Aas imminent. The pistol on his father’s belt was as frightening as any white water they’d had to paddle, as ominous as any wind-torn night. But he felt something else accompanying the fear, something transformative, a certain firmness of spirit. His shoulder muscles danced.
He remembered looking back through the woods, back toward the shack, and thinking that the pistol seemed ludicrous. Like maybe his father thought he was still in Luxembourg and the Huns were about to step out of the forest to besiege their fort. He remembered thinking that his father was a fool.
But if he was a fool, he had no advantage on Gus. At least not on that day.
Who could say how much time had passed in the blind? An hour, maybe two? But when the bear emerged from the darkness of the woods, when she buried her snout in the fallen leaves and acorns and sat on her fat haunches and ate like a glutton, when she moved from one spot to another and another and several more, Gus watched from the blind, and when he got up and stepped over the deadfall and walked toward the sow, the wind blowing in his face so she had no scent of him, the Remington still leaning in the notch against the tree, one step farther behind him with each stride he took, when all this had passed and finally she looked up and fixed him with her soft eyes and stood on all fours, and when he moved toward her like maybe they were grappling partners, him smiling and rubbing his hands together like it was time to get at it, when that bear snorted once and huffed once and turned and hurried back into the darkness she’d come from, after all of this Gus stood there yowling like a madman and felt certain that facing the old sow had its provenance in his own ancestral blood.
—
A week or more passed with hardly a word between the two of them. Each morning Gus went back to the oaks and waited for the bear to return. Though her sign was everywhere—more scat, trees clawed to hell, tracks trailing into the denser woods beyond—he didn’t see her again until the day the first lasting snow came. By then he’d worn a path from the shore into the oaks and made a regular shanty of the deadfall blind. He took his spot that morning, while the snow began, and waited. When the bear didn’t show, he figured she’d gone into hibernation, what with the cold, fresh weather. So he left the blind an hour after sunrise, had sawed three inches into his oak, and was already sweating when he heard her grunts. There, not twenty yards behind him, sitting on her flanks, staring at him with her dark eyes, her nose and ears twitching, the bear waited. Gus looked quickly at the Remington resting in its notch in the blind, the barrel camouflaged by the dead branches.
The bear grunted again and ran a paw through the snow like she was drawing a line. She was larger than he remembered. He jimmied the saw blade from the trunk and the bear sat up as though prodded, took a step toward him, shuffled back, then another step forward, her nose low to the ground, her eyes never once leaving his. Gus could hardly draw a breath.
A long moment passed before he found his wits and moved slowly toward the blind. The bear stood watching on her hind paws, but he kept walking slowly, and backward. When he got there he reached for the gun. The bear took another step toward him.
The twenty yards between them might as well have been twenty inches, given how near she felt, so close he could smell her and see the wet of her eyes. And she felt nearer still when he raised the Remington to his shoulder and sighted her, first through the scope and then with both eyes open down the barrel. Her eyes remained fixed in return.
By that time in his life, Gus had killed over a dozen deer. Countless grouse and ducks and wild turkeys. A stringer of hares each winter since the fourth grade. He could hit a soup can from a hundred yards even with a stiff wind on his cheek. When he lowered the gun barrel after pulling the trigger, there was no earthly reason that the bear shouldn’t have been lying in a heap. But she wasn’t. In fact, by the time he ejected the spent cartridge and levered another into the chamber and raised the rifle again, the sow was already near the dark edge of the pines. Gus blinked and she was gone.
The air reverberated with the shot. His hands thrummed. He checked the magazine to p
rove he’d actually pulled the trigger. One cartridge was indeed spent. Five remained. He walked slowly to the spot where the bear had stood. Blood had sprayed across the snow and followed the footfalls running toward the dark woods. The drops might as well have been electric lights, so bright were they against the snow.
He patted his hip to check for his knife, loaded another cartridge into the magazine, and followed the tracks into the woods. The pines were so dense so soon that it seemed impossible the bear could have shouldered through them, but her bloody trail kept unfurling before him. The trampled saplings and low-hanging boughs offered more proof of her passage. Gus pressed on.
After some time clearings between trees opened and the bear’s gait lengthened. She was still bleeding, but not as much. His shot hit her in the right shoulder or ribs, since the blood trailed on the starboard side of her tracks, a stain for each new stride. The terrain began to arch and fall. Boulders the size of the bear herself cropped up, covered in snow, and more than once Gus startled at the sight of one. He walked for a quarter mile before the land dropped into a sharp valley where a wide creek ran along the bottom. He could see where the bear had paused on the shore. A pool of blood had already cooled in the snow, and Gus could see where her haunches had rested while she drank. He stopped for a moment himself, took a drink from his canteen, and wiped the sweat from his brow.
The snow had stopped and he felt a fleeting relief. It must have been past noon, judging by the light behind the clouds. They promised nothing if not more snow. As if thinking this had made it so, light flakes began blowing through the trees above, bringing with it a different tang to the air and a new kind of dread.
He hiked upstream first, looking for the trail of blood to begin again on the opposite bank. For fifteen minutes he cased the shore, then backtracked for an hour until he spotted her trail heading up a steep embankment, above where the creek’s course narrowed into a sault choked with boulders and driftwood. It was by then snowing hard, the bear’s blood pinkening under the white of it.
The hillside rose steady and steep for perhaps two hundred feet. Pines and spruce again, thick and dark. He crossed the creek over the sault on a snow-covered log and he prowled the dense woods for hours. The snow had stopped and started three times before the sky lightened. When the sun came out it was already resting over the southwestern treetops. Gus was ravenous and tired and had lost the bear’s trail entirely. Obeying one law of the woods, he’d violated another, and now he was lost. As sure as the sun would set, he would have to spend the night in those woods. And with what? No food. An empty canteen. No cover. He had his hat and gloves, but he’d sweated through his shirt and long johns and his boots were soaked from the snow.
Harry would have heard the shot and assumed he was now tracking his prey or field-dressing his kill. He’d have taken it for granted that Gus would leave enough time to get out of the woods in the daylight, would’ve left the carcass behind when dusk approached. Harry wouldn’t start worrying until sunset, and even if on some instinct he’d paddled across the bay and discovered Gus’s canoe and then the bur oaks with hours of light left, the snow would’ve covered the tracks, the bear’s and his alike.
—
He needed shelter. And fire. He was sure of this, if nothing else.
So he wandered through the gloaming. Just down a slope he found a spruce, its boughs dead and rust-colored and covered with snow. He walked around it. The tree had snapped eight or so feet aboveground and the trunk rested against the hillside. Gus crawled under the boughs at the open end. Four feet inside, the ground was dry. He broke dozens of dead limbs to clear enough room to stretch out, which he did. Through the interstices of the boughs above he caught the first moments of darkness as they arrived.
Years later, what he remembered most was his simple and unadulterated fear, unaccompanied by any other emotion. At times it felt like a physical thing, as real as the dead tree or the snow. For a spell he lay in the grip of it, unable to open his eyes, much less start a fire. But he must have moved. He survived, after all.
He didn’t recall building the fire or stockpiling the wood to burn through the night, or melting snow in his canteen, and knew he had only because it was half full in the morning. Nor did he remember stripping down to his skivvies and hanging his wet clothes near the fire to dry, though he did recall waking nearly naked and shivering only inches from the flames. And weeping long enough that his clothes had dried and he put them back on and he felt parched.
He thought a lot about the bear that night. How, if he hadn’t been in the woods to shoot her that day, she might have finished her acorns, taken a long study of the falling snow, and come to just such a place as that fallen spruce, where she would have curled into herself and settled down for the winter without need of a fire to keep her warm.
He remembered waking and his fear still looming there in the fire’s warm light. He cursed everything that night. His father. His mother. The maps. The canoes. Charlie Aas. The bear and the woods and the snow. He cursed the stars, too, when they showed on and off from behind the clouds. Their brightness made the night somehow more sinister than the sheer darkness, lighting up the snow and shining back blue and reminding him with every tiny wink how lost he was.
It occurred to him more than once that he would never be rescued. That the woods and the night had swallowed him and that he was already lost forever and just didn’t know it yet. He would die curled up under the tree, starved or frozen or both. Years later, it struck him how unlike the bear he was in this respect, how fragile the night made him.
He told me—slowly, very quietly—that he thought often of how many nights had passed between then and now. He allowed that if he’d ever seen any evidence of God it was in his shivering and intermittent sleep that night under the tree. All of it—the fire and snow and stars and moon and darkness all around—hinted at such. But even more than these physical things, it was the feeling that accompanied him as he prayed that tested his doubt. He prayed clumsily, ardently, all through the night. He prayed like a beggar. And he had never felt so alone or so far away or so helpless as when uttering those words. The words themselves he could no longer recall. But the vulnerability alongside them? That feeling stayed with him in the years since, whenever some danger presented itself. And thus he had his religion. And thus his God had always been an orphan to the ones found in the holy books.
—
Gus woke to the sight of his father walking toward him. Walking and then running and then throwing a sleeping sack over him. He kissed him on the cheeks and forehead until Gus pushed him away. Harry pulled off his coat and wedged it under his head. Then he stoked the fire with all the wood that remained, blowing into the embers until the flames grew as tall as he was. He took a chocolate bar from his hip pocket, ripped it open, and broke a piece off, then knelt and put it in Gus’s mouth. His son took the rest of the candy from him and sat up. He guzzled from the canteen and stuffed the rest of the chocolate into his mouth.
“What the hell, bud?” Harry said.
One of the logs toppled from the fire and Gus kicked it back into the flames.
“We’re a long way from the shack,” Harry continued. “And there’s six inches of snow on the ground.”
Gus’s mouth was full of candy. He couldn’t have spoken even if he’d wanted to.
“Your tracks are almost gone. It’s a miracle I found you.” Harry was pressing back tears as he spoke. “If not for the fire, bud, I might not have.” He gazed into the fire and followed the flames as they turned to smoke and rose into the dawn. The sky was purple and clear.
“I shot a bear,” Gus said, wiping chocolate from his chin. “I was tracking it.”
Harry was still staring at the smoke. “And you didn’t notice it getting dark?”
“I—”
“You didn’t notice the snow?” Again he pressed back his tears. “You should’ve known better than to do just about everything you did. I taught you better than that.”
/> Gus turned away. “Yeah, most of what you taught me isn’t really holding up out here.”
Harry waited for Gus to look back at him. “You’re right about that,” he said when Gus finally met his eyes. “I guess I thought we were back on track.”
“There’s no track,” Gus said. “Not that I see, anyway.”
Harry nodded. He came and sat down next to him.
“I know I shouldn’t have shot the bear. That was stupid.”
Harry nodded again.
“I know I shouldn’t have tracked her till dark. I know all that stuff.”
“You warming any?”
Now Gus nodded. They sat there beside the fire for a long time before Harry said, “There’s something you should see.”
Gus stood and wore the sleeping sack over his shoulders like a cape as he followed his father for a minute or two, until they came to the hilltop. Gus took in the steep drop to a lake that appeared black as coal against the snow-white world around it. Then he noticed tracks along the ridgeline between the bent pines.
He looked at his father, who pointed to where the tracks first appeared and gestured for Gus to move ahead. After twenty paces he was standing beside the dead bear. She was blanketed in snow, her snout resting on her forepaws. They weren’t a hundred yards from where he’d slept the night before.
“There’s your girl.”
Gus could see where his father had brushed the snow away to reveal the bullet wound on the sow’s right flank, where blood had frozen in her matted coat. He knelt and swept the snow from her face. Her eyes were closed.
Gus stood and knocked the snow from his trousers, then looked back at the fire through the woods.
“You okay?” Harry said.
“Yeah. Or I’ll be okay. Why not?”
“Listen,” Harry said. “For everything you did wrong last night—for everything that went wrong last night—there’s one thing you got right. You survived. You did everything right after you got lost.”
“Maybe,” he said.
His father rested a hand on his shoulder and they stood there in silence until Harry took one of the bear’s hind legs and told Gus to grab the other. Together they dragged the bear back to the fire.
