by John Hunt
“We should bring him back here and put him in a grave,” said Dad.
“Why don’t we dig a grave back there?” asked Jessie.
“So do we have two graves down there then,” asked Mom, “one for him and one for the guy who shot him? Or do we only bury him, and not the guy who was out of his mind with starvation?”
“We can’t dig graves around here, in this ground, with a spade, it’s frozen solid,” Matthew commented.
“So should we just leave the bodies there?” Bess asked. “Nature will take care of it. That’s what you guys keep saying, isn’t it? Work with nature?”
Louise interrupted. “It’s generally accepted that when a valued member of the tribe dies, or indeed any member, that some kind of ceremony is in order. Otherwise there’s nothing to bind the tribe together. If we just leave them, without anything – there are animals who show more respect than that.”
I jerked myself up and interrupted. “This is what we’re going to do. He’s inside the cabin, I’ve taken out anything we might need. His killer is inside there as well. We’ll take the body from the other cabin into it. Then we’ll burn it, like a funeral pyre, like the Vikings used to do. Down to the ground. I would’ve done it yesterday, except I thought you might want to be there for it. You can’t stop me on this. He was my friend. I think it’s what he would’ve wanted. Anybody who wants to come with me, we’re leaving tomorrow morning. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Dad raised his eyebrows, but no one objected, and I walked out.
The next day, luckily, the weather was brighter.
“This is the first time we’ve all been out together,” I said. “We’ll probably be back tonight, but we’ll take rations for three days. Louise, your hip isn’t going to make it, you can travel on the sled, we’ll have two pulling. We’ll take another sled for the gear. Jessie, could you check that everyone’s dressed well enough. I don’t want us coming back with frostbite. Particularly Louise, as she won’t be moving. Now, let’s get things together.”
We all trekked over to the cabin in a somber mood. It was hard going, so we split into two parties, myself and Jessie up ahead, with the others following at their own pace. Jessie and I collected the other body on the sled and started piling up burning material inside the killer’s cabin. By the time the others arrived, we were ready to go.
His hands were frozen rigid, but I put his favorite wood-carving chisel into one, and a piece of jerky in the other. I set fire to the pile of straw and wood in the cabin and stepped out. The flames soon took hold. Within moments they were licking up the walls, reflected in the snow. Soon, it was a furnace, the wind lashing the flames, whipping the sparks high into the air and we had to step back some yards. The structure collapsed in a roar of fire, and then started dying down. After a while, just the embers were left, glowing in the grey desolation all around. The temperature dropped down to the minus fifteen of the surroundings.
It was zero dark thirty. We had to help Louise back on the sled. It took us hours to get back, trudging through the snow; Dad and Matthew, Jessie and myself, taking it in turns on the ropes. I did most of the work; it helped, but my mind still churned over. The path ahead looked bleaker. I was going to have to be responsible. Was I ready for it? The grown-ups – Dad, Mom, Matthew, Louise – I loved them all. But they couldn’t manage out here by themselves. Bob had always been right. There was room in this new world for sentiment, for love, but not for weakness. In a moment of clarity, I knew I had to step up to the plate, or we were all going to die.
The sky was blazing white with stars, the Milky Way streaming across the heavens, a pathway to other worlds. I pulled like an automaton, homing for the lodge without thinking about it, the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, angled to my left. All those suns, so far away, with their own planets, billions of them. Memories of a science lesson at school came back to me, along the lines of “Throw a pea into the Atlantic Ocean, and that’s the size of Earth in the solar system. Then make the solar system the size of a pea, throw it in again, and that’s the solar system in our galaxy. Then make our galaxy the size of a pea, and throw it in again. That’s our galaxy in the universe.”
And on this microscopic speck of dust, with billions of people on it, one had just disappeared, returned to ash. And it hurt me. The last time I’d been on a night trek, after killing the moose, I remembered feeling so happy about it. Now, after another single shot, I’d never felt so bad.
We were such a small huddle of a group, struggling through the frozen snow, completely isolated, not much different from the humans who first came into Alaska from Siberia several hundred generations earlier. They probably had better clothes, but we had the same transport, the same thoughts, the same loves and hates, the same uncertainties. And as the world wheeled through the heavens, the clock of time seemed to tick back, forwards, back again, and I thought that nothing ever really changes. This was the future, repeating the past; a tiny group, carrying its old and infirm, in a hostile universe, heading into the unknown.
PART FOUR
SPRING
FIFTY
Bob’s death, and my second killing, put some iron into my soul, which even Jessie couldn’t remove. Our relationship changed subtly. She was still the center of my life, but I had a larger purpose now, into which she fitted. I think she understood that, and it made us stronger rather than weaker. Killing Mr. Trinker had seemed like an accident, like something I’d have to account for, but could just about explain. This had been different. I could still explain it, but now I thought that the explanation didn’t matter. I’d do it again, as often as was necessary.
When I was out now, I looked at the world through Bob’s eyes. It really was as if he was still with me, and I didn’t bother using the compass anymore. There were a myriad ways of finding your direction, from remembering landmarks, the lie of the hills, the way the wind and sun shaped the trees, the movement of water, the direction of snowmelt, snowdrifts and shadows, the orientation of the anthills, the position of lichen and moss on the trees – it was becoming second nature to me. Besides, I felt Bob walking alongside me, his occasional sarcastic barbs opening my eyes to the life around.
I didn’t see “wilderness” anymore, in the sense of human absence, but I did see the “wild.” It wasn’t empty of life, it was full, as full as it could possibly be. But it was life at the margins. Every living thing on the surface, above it, beneath it, had its own mechanisms for survival, had evolved for that purpose, treading the finest of lines between life and death. There was no “comfort zone” in this world. It was hard, and the weaker went to the wall. There was no welfare out here, no support services. You had to fight for life. It was a zero-sum game. For one animal to live, others had to die. That was the DNA of nature. There was never any Garden of Eden. We had to relearn how to live.
And people were weak. Even Mom and Dad – we were all weak. I loved them, more than ever – I don’t think I really knew what that meant back in Anchorage – but I became more aware of the grey in Dad’s hair, of how he sometimes lost his specs, the slight tremor in his right hand, his bad cough. Of the way Mom tried to conceal her unhappiness in this wilderness country by being cheerful and raising everyone’s morale, of Matthew’s uncertainty in this different landscape, and Bess’s fear.
Here, on the one hand, life had no intrinsic value. On the other hand, it was everything. We had to find again our place in this web. I moved from thinking, “this is beautiful, but I’m scared of being prey,” to thinking “this is my world, I’m part of it, it’s part of me, and I’m the predator.” This was the real world now, of bears and wolves, grunts and screams, cold and hunger, exhilaration and despair. We had to be sharp every day, every minute, senses alert, thinking ahead, there weren’t any second chances.
I struggled to remember the boy I’d been – hesitant, obedient, shy, collecting stamps. It was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope, at someone in the distant past. Still “me,” but at the other en
d of a long tunnel of time. We never openly discussed it, but I sensed a shift in the dynamics of all our relationships from then on. It was tacitly understood between us now that things weren’t going to be easy, there was no going back to the old days, and we each needed to be all-rounders, as far as we could. We shared the cleaning, the sewing, the hundred tasks that needed doing every day. But we also gravitated into the things we were best at. Dad, for instance, could shoot, but had little sense out in the open of what to do, where to go. Matthew could fire a rifle, but couldn’t hit the proverbial barn door. Mom could shoot, in theory, but we all felt safer if she wasn’t trying to. So I became, by default, the provider, along with Jessie.
We generally went out hunting together now; she wasn’t as good as me with the rifle – I was feeling more confident all the time – but she had an eye for it as well. We were both increasingly fit – Jessie had been good on the track, back at school. She was faster than me, if she put her mind to it, and we were both out all the time, ranging about rather than sitting at a desk. What with checking out the traps in a ten-mile radius every couple of days, we soon came to know every ridge, ravine, river and hummock like the back of our hands. In February, the sun began to return, with amazing sunsets. By now the squirrels and jays around the lodge were almost tame and would take nuts from Sue’s hand, which thrilled her. She had the knack of standing totally still for minutes at a time while they picked from her hand, even settling on her shoulder.
The following month the rivers were still frozen, the waterfalls were solid ice, but the air was softer, the glaciers sparkling blue in the light. Almost imperceptibly at first, the sun got a little warmer, the days a little longer. The winter underwear was put away and we could hang the laundry outside to dry. In April we were getting up to fourteen hours of sunshine a day, when it wasn’t raining, and the snow started to melt. It was break-up time. It began at the tips of the stalactites all around the lodge roof, with a single drip once every few minutes. The ground turned into impassable mush, which we couldn’t get through even on show shoes, except on our hard packed trails. The lake began steaming in the low-lying sun. There were still heavy frosts, but the ice began to shift in the rivers, leaving pools of water on top, till you couldn’t see where to step in case you fell into deep open water. Along the cracks, the slab edges pushed over each other, till they looked like miniature versions of Antarctica, with jagged slopes and peaks. The volume of water increased and soon – now a dirty brown rather than the gin-clear of winter – it was roaring down the valleys and you could hear the grinding of the boulders being swept along the bottom. The Portage River became impassable, with icebergs the size of cars tumbling over and over as they were carried in the torrent down to the sea. The hillsides were a riot of shades of green, the dark green of the pines turning to light green, yellow at the tips. We hunted down one side of it nearly as far as Whittier. We had to change from our light, dry, warm, mukluks into thigh-high waterproof boots that we’d brought from Anchorage. We had the polytunnels back up and some vegetable shoots were poking out of the ground, promising a change in our diet of mostly fish and meat.
A couple of times we visited the cabin which we’d burned, with the three bodies inside. There were just charred timbers left. There was a gap somewhere, we were missing something. What could I say in his memory? I found a nice, flat, granite slab and started chipping with chisel and hammer.
BOB, FRIEND AND MENTOR, LIES HERE. MAY HIS SPIRIT LIVE FOREVER
“He’ll always be with us,” said Jessie, reading my thoughts, as she cooked some fish we’d caught that morning over the fire.
“It’s not the same though,” I told her morosely as I finished digging out the words from the stone. It had taken me three days, while we camped out there.
“No, it’s not. But I’m starting to think like Louise, even like your Mom. He’s out there somewhere, watching us. We’ll survive, like he wanted us to. And we always have his memory in us…that’s all we have, that any of us have.”
“What use is a memory? It’s his help we need.”
Jessie came over, took my face in her hands and kissed me on the lips. “Don’t go getting weak on me, Jim. Memories make us. You remember what you told me about how Indians would make cairns or fires in the desert, so they could look back and check they were travelling in a straight line? Those are our memories. We’re going to make our own now. I know what we can do. We’re going to get there. And you’re going to believe in yourself.”
We placed the slab on top of a cairn of stones. Jessie collected some spruce branches for the fire as I thought about him, wondering whether there really was a world beyond this one, and if so, whether it was the Christian idea of heaven, which I couldn’t understand, nobody ever seemed to try and explain it – where was it? Why? What did people do there? Valhalla made more sense than that. I couldn’t imagine Bob being happy in heaven – maybe he’d gone to the spirit world of the native Indians or been reincarnated in a new baby, as many believed in these parts. Out here, in the bush, it was easier to believe like the Indians – everything was dying, decomposing, growing again. Every atom stayed the same, just recombining in new earth, beetles, trees and people. Bob’s ashes would feed the grass, which would be grazed by deer, which we would shoot and eat, so we were all part of everything, forever.
We were lying on grass in a clearing of cottonwoods, where the snow had melted away. Jessie had her arm around me. Not far from us two cranes were courting: musically chortling, bowing, skipping, leaping. I thought they looked like the civilized couple, compared to us, going through their elegant rituals. I started stroking her breasts. She pulled off her shirt and then her pants and we made love, frantically. Death, love, life.
FIFTY-ONE
Or might he come back as a bear? I wondered about that. Particularly as the first adult male bears started to come out of hibernation. He’d always seemed like a bear to me, a bit reclusive, solitary, unpredictable, but fierce and loyal.
A few days later, we were woken by a commotion. There was the sound of growling and rifle shots, growing to a crescendo, a roaring, as if the hounds of hell were around us, and shouting. I jumped out of bed, my heart pumping, grabbed my rifle and ran outside our cabin, heedless of the stones underfoot, putting a round in. Then I heard the deep-throated boom of the Remington 870. I turned the corner of the lodge and Matthew and Bess were ahead, the smoke of the gunshots still in the air, a big grizzly slumped, tangled in the barbed wire. It was huge, looked like as big as a moose, several times the size of any of us. It had pulled down about thirty feet of fence. Half a dozen posts had been splintered off or pulled out of the ground. Another half dozen leaning drunkenly.
“Bess killed it,” Matthew said, looking astonished, shaking, the reaction setting in. “I heard it trying to get through the fence. It was trying to climb it. I wounded it and it went mad. Bess came out after me, and she shot it. She shot it real good.”
I looked at Bess, she was trembling. “I didn’t want to do it. Gosh, my shoulder really hurts.”
“Bess, thank you.” I put my rifle down and hugged her. “I don’t know what to say. You got one before I did. Well done. That was an amazing thing to do. Especially choosing the shotgun. Really quick thinking. You’ll probably come up with big bruises on your shoulder.”
She looked at me curiously, and I realized I was naked.
Jessie had joined us, carrying a rifle, she’d taken the time to put my shirt on.
“Wow, Bess. You killed this bear? It’s ginormous! You’re a hero.”
Louise, Sue, Mom and Dad were out a moment later.
“Look at those teeth,” Sue gasped. The canines were as long as my fingers.
“Why’s it so scraggy? Is it diseased?” Mom asked.
“He’s shedding his winter coat,” I replied, “you can see the new, dark one growing out underneath. It’s one heck of a big one. Scares me just being close to it here. Jessie, could you get an ax, clippers, spade? We’ll need to get
it off the fence and then replace those posts. Thank God we had the fence there. At least it was slowed down for long enough.”
“And you’d better go and get some clothes on first, Jim,” Mom replied sharply. “You’re scraggier than that bear is.”
When I got back, dressed, a few moments later, everyone was still standing in a circle, a few yards away, all too nervous to get close. “Get a grip,” I said to myself, and walked up to it. Tentatively, I put my hand on its head. The fur was deep and bristly. It was clearly dead, eyes staring, but still seemed to exude power and strength.
“This isn’t the same thing as a deer,” I said to Matthew, later. “How do we deal with them?”
“In one of the cabins we raided I found this old copy of Hunters Pocket Guide to Field Dressing,” he replied, looking up from the book he was reading. “There’s more fat on a bear than a deer. When we’ve taken off the head and paws, we suspend it from its hind legs a few feet off the ground, cut off the fat in pieces and keep it for lard. I can use that. We cut off the muscles that run along the spine from the bottom of the rib cage to the hind legs for steaks, and dice the rest. If we work on it together, it’ll be easier.”
We peeled off the rib meat and cut it away from shoulder, hip joints and limbs. Over the following days we dried the meat on racks, packed it into bags, and as the ice cave was now warming, we trekked to the glacier where we dug a deep hole, packed it in with ice and built a cairn of boulders on top to keep it secure as a reserve supply.
With the skin, we had to move quickly, before it started to decompose. We first scraped off the remaining flesh and fat with a fleshing blade, being careful not to scratch or puncture the hide. We boiled the brain in water till it was like soup. Then we washed the skin, bored holes around the edge and stretched it onto a drying rack for about a week. Then we scraped the hair off, washed it again, squeezed it dry and rubbed the brain oil over every inch of it. We let it soak in for a couple of days, then stretched it on the rack again, running a heavy stick over it for a couple of hours to get it nice and soft. When it was good and pliable, we sewed up the edges to make a bag, inverted it over a frame with a fire underneath, and smoked it for half an hour or so, then turned it inside out and did the other side. Hunter style, we put the head up on a peg in the lodge, with a sign underneath: “Killed by Bess Harding, age 15”.
