by Jamie Carie
We set up camp later than usual that night and were all as sleepwalkers in our chores. One of the sleds held the food for the group, only to be touched by Buck, whose responsibility it was to dole out the rations for dinner each evening.
I watched him surreptitiously in a degree of safety since Jonah was propped up near the fire, grimacing with the pain of thawing feet. Buck’s movements held me entranced: the controlled, supple grace of wilderness-honed muscle; his moccasins clinging to his calves; the fringe and subtle beading of his jacket that a lesser man would look foolish in; the chest and shoulders that fell back, erect and sure . . . the face of a man who knew himself, who spoke his pain out loud, his every word sounding like truth.
My heart thudded in my chest, louder and stronger than it had through all the travails of snowbound marching. God help me, I had to get a hold of myself. Jonah would never let me go, and besides, a man like Buck wouldn’t want me.
But I couldn’t look away. He peeled back the frozen tarpaulin to inventory the food as he did every night. His face became tense, his movements swift and economical and . . . angry. Something was wrong. I could sense it in the way he rechecked his work. Buck never wasted precious energy. Something had to be wrong.
I found myself walking toward him. I didn’t stop until I was close enough to see his breath, a cloud of vapor in the frosty air. I breathed it in, shameless in wanting the only part of him I could have. “Buck,” my voice faltered, and I wondered if I really wanted to hear the answer, “what is it?”
He froze, staring at me, the connection palpable. “The beef is missing and some of the flour too. We won’t make it without that food.”
Forever ruthlessly honest.
I didn’t quite know how to reconcile it, this constant truth facing after a life built on lies to keep Mother and Jonah feeling safe, but Buck continued. “There is enough for each of us to have a couple of biscuits. If the hunting party doesn’t come back with some meat soon, the weakness will overcome us all.”
It was strange being someone’s helpmate, someone’s confidant. I had always held my own council and made decisions for my family the best I could, working with and around Mother and Jonah’s inabilities for a normal life. What would it be like to share thoughts and feelings, to come to conclusions together? I could barely imagine the comfort of it, to have someone to hold life’s reins with me. Someone who loved me and cared what happened to me as I him. The thought took my breath away.
Buck handed me the remaining flour. “Make up some bread with this, two small biscuits per person. Give them one tonight and we’ll save the other for tomorrow at noon. I’ll handle the rest. Don’t say a word.”
“How did this happen? Who did it?”
“I have a good idea.” Buck nodded toward a man. “Who among us lacks the pinched-faced, weak limbs of near starvation? I see only one man who has enough energy left over to glare at me at the end of the day. I know of only one man who could convince himself that he has more reason to live than the rest of us.”
I looked to where his words led. Sinclair. Of course.
As the biscuits were passed out, Buck stared back into the questioning, gaunt faces with stoic briskness. “We’re cutting back. Have to make it last in case we don’t get fresh meat.”
Buck waited until everyone was bedded down and asleep before making his move. He was responsible for the well-being of the members of this trek, and he wasn’t about to let one man ruin them. Sinclair didn’t know who he was dealing with if he thought Buck would let him get away with the stolen food.
He eased from his bedroll, then stood, breathing in the bitter air, reaching for the cold handle of his pistol. He crept over to the sleeping form. Sinclair was using his pack as a pillow, but Buck was ready. He aimed the pistol at Sinclair’s nose and slid the heavy canvas out from under the man’s head.
Sinclair woke with a start, rose to the click of the gun being cocked, and then jerked back as it was rammed between his eyes.
“Whaaattt?”
“Don’t move a muscle.”
Buck pressed the gun hard against the big man’s forehead and, with his other hand, dumped out the contents of the bag. He pawed through the articles, mixing them with snow. He couldn’t believe it. No sign of the stolen food.
Turning on the man, he bit out, “I know you stole the food, Sinclair. Listen carefully. If a single man dies on this trail due to starvation, you will pay in kind. Do you understand? You had better sit up the night and pray God’s blessing on the health of this group, or so help me, I will kill you now.”
He wouldn’t really kill the man, of course, but the threat seemed to work as Sinclair’s eyes widened and his face went white. “I didn’t steal anything. I’m as hungry as the rest of you.”
Buck stared at him long and hard. “You a praying man, Sinclair? ’Cause I thought I just told you to get to your knees.” Buck held the gun on the man and waited.
Sinclair scrambled up, clasped his hands together, and closed his eyes in apparent obedience. That should keep him busy for a while.
Buck backed away toward his bedroll. He glanced around at the sleeping forms, his gaze settling on Ellen. Lord, we need fresh meat or to find that food. I couldn’t bear it if I let another woman under my care die.
The morning brought a heavy snow, the kind that covered us like a fluffy, deadly blanket. I rose from the suffocation in a jerking movement of arms flailing, lungs taking gulping breaths, my hands brushing the snow from my nose and mouth in a panic. I counted the other rising forms, seeing Jonah turn and struggle beside me.
That day the snow was deeper than ever before. I watched Jonah as we stumbled through it, the hair of his beard poking out in stark contrast to his ashen skin, his breath ragged, his eyes as black as death. We both knew it, but I dared not say anything. Jonah might yet have the strength to command the pretend world.
A laugh of hysteria bubbled from my throat. My frozen fingers pressed against my mouth, trying to suppress it, but I couldn’t. There was no use pretending anymore. I leaned away from him and stared into his empty eyes.
“You’re dying,” I said in a soft and sudden rush. I reached out to touch his face, trying to remember the little boy I had played with as a child.
His black eyes found mine, his pupils so dilated the darkness took over the brown irises. It was as if he weren’t there anymore, as if someone else was.
Fear washed over me in a thousand prickles. I moved away from him, staggering but upright. I could still feel my feet.
He stumbled. He fell, flailing in the snow, like a drowning man. I watched . . . horrified and hopeful . . . hating myself . . . and holding my breath. Fate had finally stepped in. I was about to be free.
He landed facedown, unable to turn over. I could save him. I could walk over, shove his shoulder, and give air to his lungs, but what was the point? I couldn’t carry him any longer.
If I was going to survive, I would have to sever the anchor and move on, as light and free as a snowflake on the wind.
His sudden rally sent a shock of fresh fear through me. I stilled and stared as he rose out of the great white and plowed toward me.
I ran. Feeling his breath on my neck, I stumbled through the knee-deep snow.
His panting was loud, heavy, and hard on my heels, catching me, throwing his weight onto my back, making me fall face-first into the bitter cold.
I struggled, trying to outmaneuver him, knowing that even in his weakened state, some evil force strengthened him enough to smother me for my moment’s betrayal. I’d never done that before—chosen my need before his. He would kill me for it.
We wrestled in snowflakes: cold, heavy, lung-filling, air-robbing beauty. A man, with a man’s desperation and a woman with a woman’s hope and a force of nature that could bury us beneath it all. We wrestled in snowflakes.
Chapter Three
I stumbled into camp, my only company the wind that sought out my exposed skin and took my breath with it as it rose, sing
ing, back up into the snow-covered mountains surrounding us. I knew Buck had been watching for me by the way his shoulders relaxed when he saw me.
“Where’s Jonah?”
“I left him.”
Did I say it with joy? How many times I’d envisioned those words, the circumstances that might cause them, the people I would say them to. I didn’t know he would be dead when I said it.
“You left him.” Buck stared long into my eyes.
I swayed with exhaustion and elation and all of the wretched, glorious truth of it. The words tumbled out like a long-stopped fountain. “He fell. I cut him out of the traces, like you do with the dogs when they fall and . . . and I left him there.”
He gripped my face between hard, warm hands, strong and knowing hands. “Is he alive?”
I shook my head, knowing the look in my eyes was as wild as I felt. “He’s dead. My brother is dead.”
“You are sure? We could send out a search party . . .” He left the words hanging, both of us knowing that no one had the strength to go back. It would be a miracle if we could continue to go forward.
I shook my head, tears of freeing rain rolling down my cheeks. “I should have dragged his body here so he could have a decent burial. I should have—”
Buck shook my shoulders, his gaze piercing like blue lightning. “Ellen, listen to me. He was dying. We all saw it. It was only a matter of time.” He squeezed my shoulders in a tender-tight grip. “You couldn’t have dragged him and you know it. You did the only thing you could.”
I shuddered, shaking from head to toe, nodding at the truth of his words while my eyes overflowed with tears that instantly froze on my cheeks.
“Okay then.” He took me into his arms where it was warm and safe. His shoulder felt just as I had imagined it would.
After a long while Buck led me to the fire and pressed both Jonah’s and my last biscuit into my chest. “Keep up your strength; he would want you to have it. God knows I would have done anything to save my wife.” He added the last in low bitterness as he raised the bread to my mouth.
I chewed the frozen morsel out of duty, my gaze locked to his, knowing Jonah would have wanted me to choke on it.
The snow again covered us while we slept, blowing bits of dancing elegance and deadly ice. The freckle-faced farm boy, the youngest among us, and two dogs didn’t rise in the morning. As we stood in a circle around their snow grave and said a prayer, exhaustion made me too wrung out to even cry.
Buck’s prayer sounded like everything he did—sure, confident, that balance of humility mixed with a bone-deep, trusting faith that rang with the knowledge of who he was as a man and where he stood as a creation of God.
I’d never known either.
I laid a wreath of leafy, frozen stems, their leaves slick and solid with ice, upon the mound that would serve as a grave, and then we all turned and packed up for another day of laborious marching.
“Buck, how long ago did your wife die?” The question escaped my vocal chords even though I knew I shouldn’t be talking. It was wasteful and greedy to ask him questions when we should reserve each heartbeat for the test ahead.
He glanced over at me, met my eyes, and seemed to be weighing whether to start this conversation. “Last spring, about seven months ago.”
“Were you married long?”
Buck gazed straight ahead, but I saw the infinitesimal nod. “Going on five years.”
I was quiet, thinking about that. My parents were married about the same amount of time before . . . before my father left. I was three and Jonah five. I had little flickers of memories of my father—the feel of his beard against my cheek, being lifted into the air and shrieking with terrified delight as he spun with me above his head, my mother’s face when he left for work one day and did not come back. The look on her face a month later, a year later, and at the end of her life. Her eyes had gone from pain-filled questioning to lifeless stone.
“You never married?” Buck’s question interrupted my memories.
I shook my head in a quick movement. At twenty-four I supposed I was an old maid. “With her last breath my mother made me promise to take care of Jonah. He didn’t like it if a man started showing interest in me. We moved twice to different cities when a man seemed determined enough to begin courting.”
“You had to take care of your brother? Shouldn’t it have been the other way around?”
I tapped my forehead with my finger. “Jonah wasn’t quite right after my father left us. Something snapped inside him. I didn’t know what to do, how to help him, and by the time my mother died, he couldn’t hold a job for very long. He wouldn’t eat or bathe. He always thought people were watching or following us. He especially didn’t like it if a man showed any interest in me.”
“So, you’ve never been in love?”
I laughed and it sounded more bitter than I liked. “Never even been kissed.”
Buck stopped, his gaze locked with mine and then dropped to my lips as a gradual thoughtfulness spread across his face.
I blushed and dropped my gaze, more out of breath than the marching was causing.
He reached out and took my snowy, mittened hand in his, his look of calm assurance telling me he didn’t care that the men behind us would notice and speculate. “I reckon that will change someday.”
He sounded bemused instead of the sadness that thickened his tone when he spoke of his wife. I wasn’t sure if he thought he would correct my lack of experience or someone else, now that my warden was gone. A part of me hoped he was referring to himself, but another part of me knew his heart still belonged to another. I pulled my hand from his grip, and we started walking again.
“What was your wife’s name?”
“Kalage was her Tlingit name, but the English name she went by was Deborah.”
“Which name did you call her?”
Buck flushed, looking embarrassed for the first time.
I raised my brows at him. “You can tell me.”
Buck turned his head and mumbled something. “It sounds silly.” He sped up our pace through the knee-deep snow.
“I won’t think it’s silly.”
“I called her my Little Two-Face because she was so quiet and shy in front of others and so stubborn and sure of herself when it was just the two of us.” He chuckled. “Once she smacked me over the head with a frying pan, and no one would believe it of her when I told my friends why I had a lump the size of a goose egg on my head.”
“A frying pan?” I widened my eyes at him and laughed. “What had you done?”
Buck shrugged and then cast a glance toward me with a glimmer of humor in his eyes. “I only said I didn’t like her cooking. She made these horrible-tasting Tlingit meals, and one day I had choked down the last one. I told her to learn how to cook like a regular American woman.”
A laugh escaped my throat. I would have liked her. “And did she? Learn to cook like you wanted?”
Buck sobered. “She didn’t have time. Though I think she would have. She was shot a couple of weeks later.”
“I’m sorry, Buck.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Is that why you are going to Dawson City? Are you tracking them?”
Buck studied me for a moment, assessment in his eyes. “I can’t go on with my life until I confront her killer. I need to know how any . . . person . . .”—he struggled to continue—“could be so careless, so”—his fists balled up and his throat worked—“heinous as to shoot someone and then run off.” His voice lowered to rough rasping, and his eyes filled with tears as he stared into my eyes. “Maybe I’ll be careless. Maybe my gun will slip as I’m forcing the story out of him and hauling him to the Northwest Mounted Police office. Maybe so.”
His words made me shiver. It felt colder now, the air sweeping in and stinging the exposed skin of my neck. The gray sky above me held nothing but more emptiness.
It was the sixth day of the snowbound march. Just one, maybe two more days, and they should reach D
awson City. Buck took out his compass and watched the needle shiver as if it were freezing, then point northeast.
He took shallow breaths, noting that the temperature was dropping. Any deep breaths brought spasms to his lungs. Lord, this isn’t good. It isn’t good at all. No food and the temperature dropping. We need fresh meat and a warm breeze, Lord. And we’re going to need both soon.
Buck turned toward the group, all readying for the day’s march, and scanned the men, assessing their strength. They were all moving in a slow-motion daze, but he called over the strongest three.
“I’m sending the three of you to scout for fresh meat.” He looked each one, direct and hard, in the eye. “I don’t need to tell you how badly we need this, and I’m depending on each of you to stay strong and do your best.”
They nodded somber agreement.
“Fan out and continue northeast so you don’t fall too far behind the rest of us.”
“Someone needs to question Sinclair, boss. We all know he did it.” Ronnie Nelson forced the words between clenched teeth.
Buck nodded. Word had spread that someone had stolen provisions, and suspicious eyes hardened by the restless desperation of hunger followed the one man they all thought responsible. “Believe me, I did. If he stole the food, he either ate it or cached it somewhere because he doesn’t have it. There’s nothing else to be done about it, and we’re wasting precious energy worrying about it. Let’s focus on getting some fresh meat, okay?”
The men nodded in a grim fashion and trudged off to fetch their guns.
Buck sensed eyes on him, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. With a quick movement he turned.
Sinclair.
The man stood a few feet behind him with a strangely dilated gaze. Buck let out a breath and took a step toward him.
Sinclair shrieked and held out a quivering hand that said stop.
