by Peter Geye
He put his hand over his heart and said, “How about I take you to lunch before I fill up with my other foot in my mouth?”
Turns out Gus came to town that morning with a relic of his own. We sat in a window booth at the Blue Sky Café and ordered coffee and he pulled from a letter-sized envelope an old composition notebook of the sort schoolchildren once used. The pages were so old and timeworn it seemed a sigh might turn them to dust.
—
That season on the borderlands began witchy. Snow piled knee-deep in the woods. The sun and moon in their orbits hung lower, just above the tree line, for shorter stretches each day, dawn and dusk fading through all manner of purple horizons, cold getting colder but only yet suggesting what surely would follow. The world seemed restless. And because their firewood was stacked high and the bear meat abundant in the cache, because Harry had built a three-foot-square box and lid to insulate the hole he’d kept open in the ice offshore, because they’d found their routines—for hauling water, cooking their food, stoking their fires—they fell into a kind of early-winter daze. Which in turn made Gus restless. After all, there were only so many games of cribbage they could stand, so many half-conversations, so many quiet hours reading the few books they’d brought along, so many songs he could play on his mandolin. So he went skiing.
Those first couple mornings he made circuits up and down the long lake. He reckoned it was about eight miles from the bay’s entrance to the southern end, and another three to the north. The winds that had dogged them for most of their time at the shack had abated, and in their absence a pair of gentle snowfalls had made the skiing conditions idyllic.
On those mornings his solitude was colossal and spectacular. The trees alongshore stood skeletal and shadowed and unalive. Even the green pines appeared black in the flat and sorry light. On certain moments during these tours he felt a kind of exultation he could liken only to the night he made love to Cindy Aas, moments when he felt so emptied and so full and so alone and so ready to push on, when he forgot where he was or who he was. Not in one of them did he care. Just the opposite was true. He thought that if the world ended he could go on here, even without the birds or the deer or the tracks of deer or the tracks of any other living thing. And there were moments when he forgot that he himself was a living thing, when the white plumes of breath that flowered with each push on his ski poles and each kick of his skis seemed more a part of cloudy sky than his own body—and these were the best moments of all, because it was then he could think without feeling foolish that it was all a dream. But he’d lower his eyes and see his own tracks from the days before unfurling and be reminded that he was not dreaming. That he was, in fact and against all odds, a part of that world.
After days of skiing only on the long lake he began venturing beyond. He’d wake in the morning before his father and, with nothing more than the field glasses around his neck, the pistol holstered on his belt, his father’s compass in one pocket of his army pants, and a shank of fried bear meat wrapped in cheesecloth in the other, he’d clip into his skis and pole south toward the rising sun, often meeting it before he reached the shoreline, and once there he’d sight a line into the naked winter woods.
Stripped and bare, the woods were easier to traverse than they had been on their route coming in. He could see the game trails and gully washes and vacant creek beds and he followed them, always with thoughts of his lonely night with the bear. But he was careful, and so despite his nagging fear he kept going. He found other lakes and streams and skied across them and still farther into woods. Hours and hours he would go, marking the day against its light, always ready to turn back on his own tracks with enough time to retrace them before dark.
Only when he returned and drank long from the pail of water and told his father about what he’d seen, only after he’d eaten his dinner of rice and bear, only after he sat with his cup of coffee and his mandolin unstrummed on his lap, did he realize how strong he had become, and how much stronger he could still get.
On this point he made sure I knew he wasn’t boasting. In fact, he was almost apologetic. But it was not an unimportant part of the story, he assured me, that he was filling into his flesh that season, that, by virtue of his paddling and sawing and carrying and skiing, he was developing a fitness that would have a real consequence for the story he was approaching.
One of those mornings he left earlier yet, the sky raining starlight. He skied the lake and into the by then well-trod break in the woods. He passed through the woods and onto the next lake and then another before the sun was up. He paused on the north shore of that third lake, his tracks from days before heading up the western slope. The land to the east rose sharply, and in the distance he could see a proper cliff jutting into the brilliant morning. The tracks and packed snow beckoned but instead he pushed into the untrod snow, hugging the shoreline still in shadow.
When he went into the woods at the end of that lake he did so without benefit of skis. He took one bearing with the compass and then looked for the earth to rise, which it did, as he did as well. After an hour he stood on the edge of the cliff, looking down on a lake beneath him. The wilderness spread before him in great, gray undulations. He reckoned he could see for thirty miles. Half of the distance home, if he were a bird. Even in the bright sunshine the world was dull and long and hopeless, and for the first time since he’d been in it he saw it for more than it was. For all that it was.
He looked in the opposite direction through the trees, north toward his father and the chanced-upon shack. How far would they have gone if Gus hadn’t taken his toilet on the shore that morning? He knew the wilderness never ended in that direction and wondered what that said about his father. Maybe he was crackers. Maybe, Gus thought, he was trying to kill himself. Maybe the whole story of Charlie Aas, of his murdering his brother, of his plans to ruin this wilderness, maybe all that was pure fiction and his father had actually brought him out here to show him how barren the world was, how far away you could get. Maybe his father had already gone too far in his own mind, and so what difference did it make to him how far he went in the wilds? Maybe he was waiting now, not for Charlie, or winter, but for oblivion to come meet him.
Maybe they’d spend the rest of their lives waiting.
He looked back out over the distance. He studied the contours of the hills. He marked the two lakes he could see. Small lakes. He imagined skiing to them. Beyond them. He flexed his arms and shoulders, reached back to feel his hamstrings, bent at the waist and put his nose on his knees and felt the muscles stretch and burn. When he looked up again he saw that wilderness as if for the first time. It was the wilderness of the soul. His soul and all the world’s soul. It was untamable and ungovernable and unforgiving and it didn’t give a damn about him and his proud thoughts. It was not an idea. It was real and had to be lived in, not just visited. No, not lived in. Survived. He had to survive. So he took his compass out again and held it once in each direction and reckoned the world was just that simple if you let it be.
—
The next morning he left the shack with one of the Duluth packs strapped to his back. It held the tent and his sleeping sack and a canteen of coffee, a hatchet and saw, and the lantern. And, wrapped in a sweater, his father’s book of maps with a composition book and a pencil folded in the moose hide. While he packed it up the night before, his father asked what he was doing.
“I’ve been skiing south of here. Climbed a cliff yesterday and saw some territory that I want to get to, but I’ll need to camp overnight to get there. Just the night. Maybe two.”
“What territory?”
“There’s a big cut of the woods that burned. I want to see it up close.”
Harry smiled. “You remember that night you got our bear?”
“Yeah, and it won’t happen again.”
“You know that how?”
“I’ll be careful.”
“You’ll be careful.”
Gus lifted the Duluth pack, testing its weight. �
��You can come with,” he said.
“I’m partial to our digs here.”
“Suit yourself, then.”
Harry looked at him for a long moment, reconciling himself to the fact that in dragging Gus up here he’d forfeited the right to tell him what to do or not to do. Still, he was his father. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea, camping overnight. The weather could turn. What if you got lost?”
“I’ve gotten pretty familiar with that stretch of woods.”
Harry studied him again. “What is it you’re really looking for, bud?”
Gus might have answered that he merely wanted the adventure. But that wasn’t true. He might have said he wanted to face his fear, or make discoveries, or simply see as much of the borderlands as he could. But all of that was also untrue. He couldn’t have said any of it and believed himself, much less expected his father to. Decades later, he knew he was simply obeying his instincts by going off into the forest alone. As though he were merely another beast roaming those woods. “I’m not really looking for anything. I just want to go see,” he finally said.
Which was both true and an answer that satisfied his father. Enough that when Gus left with the Duluth pack in the morning Harry only patted him on the shoulder and said, “Be careful, eh? I’ll see you tomorrow.”
By the time he made camp nine hours later—all the daylight spent and a new and bitter cold bearing down—Gus was afraid again. Not of the wilderness or the cold, but because his father had let him go.
He’d stopped twice to sketch the shape of the lakes and mark the entrances into the clearings. He’d climbed the same ridgeline that he had the day before, and blocked out the landscape on a separate sheet of paper. He used the field glasses to scan the distant hills and the compass to assure himself that he was looking either south or east.
Once he got nestled in the tent, the flap pulled back and a fire at its mouth, his belly full and his coffee warm, he had figured out what he was doing out here. He redrew his earlier sketches in the back of the composition book, guessing at distances traveled and seen, detailing any dramatic rises, and any other features of the terrain that warranted attention.
—
“The next morning I skied what must have been another fifteen miles. Always, always south or east. If I came on some impediment—an impassable stretch of woods, a hill too daunting, whatever—I’d backtrack until I found a route that kept me on course. South or east. No exceptions.”
I had flipped through most of the composition book and could well imagine him sitting alone as a boy in the middle of the wilderness, charting his path home. Of all the things I knew about that season and about Gus, this was the most impressive. Even more so than what was to come.
“Anyone who’s ever been lost understands the first rule of the cartographer,” he said, motioning to the waitress to refill his coffee mug. “I understood it instinctively, and since I gave no credence to my father’s maps—which, I might add, I carried with me and consulted often—I was free to follow that first rule without any hesitation. It was a simple undertaking. I had to figure out how to get home when the time came. With no tools at my disposal other than the binoculars and the compass, the task was as simple as could be. Get from here to there, from A to B. From the shack to the Burnt Wood River.”
The waitress topped off his coffee and he continued. “I thought often those days of how uninterested I’d been in our route. How trusting I’d been of my father and his plan and his book of maps. I can’t say I felt foolish, though maybe I should have, but I was definitely aware that if we were ever going to get out of there, it would be because I’d figured out how to do it.
“Three nights I was gone that first time. Three nights and maybe twenty-five or thirty miles. It occurred to me more than once that we’d only just settled in and here I was looking to get out. At the time I wasn’t proud of this. I saw it as a deficiency in my character. But it was merely my nature. I came by it through no choice of my own, just as my father had no choice in his. To get rid of it you’d have to go back a thousand years and across all the miles of the Atlantic Ocean, through all our ancestors and all the qualities of the Northern European people in general.” He smiled. “You know something about this particular quality of our people, Berit Lovig. You know it just as well as I do.”
“You’re talking about more than getting to church on time.”
He smiled again, more broadly, and nodded. “I haven’t been to church twelve times in my life. What I’m talking about is who I am, and how not even those borderlands could rid me of that.”
“Did those borderlands take your father’s true nature away from him?”
He thought for a moment. “I suppose my father thought he might feel better up there. Better as in happier, or more capable, or at least more himself.” He thought a bit more. “Or maybe he thought he could escape his nature. Just forget who he was. And maybe he did. But any thoughts like this he might’ve had were afterthoughts. Whatever he thought he’d find there he knew would come with Charlie and all that he’d bring with him.”
He gazed for a long spell out the window at the winter waves coming over the breakwater. “The truth is, after everything that happened, he still came back the same man that went up. Even if he spent some time being someone else. But you don’t need me to tell you that.” He smiled. “You knew him better than I did. Lately, I mean.”
“I spent more time with him, but I could never have known him better.”
He smiled again. “It was twilight when I got back to the shack after those three nights away. It had been cold. Probably below zero the whole day. And when I walked in and closed the door behind me, I caught my reflection in the window glass. It had been snowing all afternoon, and I was white as a ghost. My whiskers were covered with icicles. My hat was well frosted and covered with snow. My coat, too.
“My father was standing at the stove. There was this delicious smell in the air”—he waved his hand in front of his face as though to summon the remembered smell—“and he had a shit-eating grin on his face. He said he was glad I made it back, as he didn’t want to have to eat both grouse himself.
“I peeled off my coat and hat. Emptied out the Duluth pack. Put everything back in its place. Secreted his book of maps and my own new drawings under my sleeping sack after I spread it on the bunk. Finally, I walked over to the stove. ‘Grouse?’ I said. ‘We couldn’t have bear for Thanksgiving dinner, now, could we?’ he said, turning to me. ‘Did you find our old trail out there?’ He nodded toward the door. I shrugged and told him, ‘I couldn’t say. I was just wandering around the woods.’ ”
Gus finished his coffee there in the Blue Sky Café. He set the empty cup on the table and pointed the handle so it faced south. I noticed that. Then he shifted it east.
“We ate that grouse sprinkled with salt and pepper. Just grouse and coffee. He told me how he’d been passing by a clearing up in the woods when one jumped from under a bush. He shot its head off. Two hours later, he’s coming back and another comes out of the same damn bush. He shot its head off, too. And so there we were, eating Thanksgiving dinner at the shack. He didn’t ask me about the days I’d been gone except to wonder if I’d seen anything exceptional. That was his word.
“ ‘Just the cold and snow. I guess it’s winter now,’ I said.”
Gus picked the coffee cup up off the table and looked into its emptiness. “He had an answer for everything, my old man. He might have just agreed. Said, Sure, it’s winter now. But instead he reached for his little birch calendar.” Gus paused and shook his head. “ ‘Winter?’ he said. ‘Not yet, bud. We’ve got three weeks before winter.’ ”
GUS MADE surveying his occupation between Thanksgiving and Christmas, weeks of hush and white and a kind of coldness he’d never known before. Sometimes he was gone for a day, sometimes two or three. Once, he was gone for four nights and crossed the Laurentian Divide. He knew because he came to a river whose south-rushing saults he couldn’t cross. His
trails in the woods and across the frozen lakes gained permanence. He camped at the same spots and set fires on the heaps of old ashes. The snap of those fires was often the only accompaniment to the silence, and in that faint rasping he heard music unlike any he’d ever known before and to which he composed lyrics he’d never sing. He never once saw another breathing creature that wasn’t black-winged and aloft.
Going by an island on a large lake one morning, he saw a dead-looking tangle of blueberry bushes alongshore. The mere thought of a handful of berries caused him such despair that while his mouth watered he nearly wept out of want and felt like a child. If he’d learned anything it was to not want, so he pushed ahead on his skis or snowshoes and found the next vantage.
Sometimes that was a ridgeline, or a bald knoll, or the notch of a remnant white pine he climbed. Thirty or forty feet off the ground, he compared his father’s maps with the land and lakes that spread before him. Sometimes there seemed a likeness, but mostly he resorted to his composition book and kept drawing what he saw. On the coldest and brightest days, in the early or late hours, he was blinded by sun dogs that he could only think of as the sort of light he’d likely see at the end of his life. He’d stare into those halos like they had something to tell him, about not only where he was going but also right where he was.
He often thought of the voyageurs his father so admired. And considered how their maps told stories of where they’d been or wanted to go, of who they aspired to be and what they wanted from the world. He thought of their courage and their brute strength—things of legend—and also of their limits, which must have been considerable as well. He wondered if they left wives and children behind, living their lives only looking forward, and he wondered what secrets they kept. He thought their stories were better told on a map than in a song.
One day he discovered pictographs along the umber cliffs above a long lake: a moose chased by three wolves, the sun shining down like God. An hour later he came across a windblown shoreline and in its dark granite he could feel what passed for midday warmth. He sat down for a bite to eat, and when he looked at the rock between his knees he saw the vertebrae of some extinct creature, doubtless brought here by a receding glacier. From how far north, and how long did it take that glacier to get here, what force moved it? Instead of feeling less substantial than ever, he felt powered by a force akin to the glacier and knew this somehow was thanks to his own patience. Buoyed by this thought, he looked out before him and drew what he could see of it. The composition book was more than half filled now. Each lake numbered instead of named. Each creek and stream and river noted as frozen or free-flowing, each rise in the land marked as passable or not.
