by John Smelcer
But the old man knew better. He knew that without the fire the wolves would return, find him frozen like the moose hindquarters on the sled, and that they would fight over bits and pieces until there would be little for his son and grandson to find when they came into these hills in search of him after the cold had moved out of the valley.
Around noon, his fire gone save a glowing mound of embers and the very small ends and bits of twigs, the old man sat with his back against the tree, much as he had done for the past days, but now he had nothing to insulate him from the ground. He was very cold, and he huddled and tried to keep his body heat close. There would be no more fire, no more reprieve from winter. Finally, he was at his end. All living things must come to this lonely moment. Even the wolves that would no doubt fall upon him this very day, this night for certain, would in the next few years meet their own ends as well. The tiny shrew whose tracks encircled the tree would meet its end, most likely by the owl that called his name every night and that one day would wake and fly no more, and end. The irritated squirrel had already met its end. So, too, had the moose he had killed up the trail. The end came to everything that lived. Especially in these white hills where the circle of life was undisturbed, like the deep snow on the field.
And it would come to Albert Least-Weasel too.
Halfway toward a worried and dark sleep—sitting with his back to the tree, arms wrapped around himself and chin resting on his knees, his hood pulled tightly closed—he became aware of a sound, almost nothing at first. The old man felt himself wonder if this was the sound of his ending, a sound wolves and shrews and owls also hear at their ending, a kind of universal sound in the ears of all living things. But after a minute he looked up, pulled his hood back, cocked his head, and listened hard outside himself, above the sound of a slight breeze and his own breathing.
It was the unmistakable sound of a snowmobile far away. It was coming up into the hills. He turned his ear toward the sound, downhill, and strained to listen. Someone was coming. On this coldest day of the year, someone had left the village to come find him. The old man struggled to unbend himself and stand, to look down the trail as far as he could. His old body ached.
But then the sound dropped to a lower, more consistent level. It was so low that the wind blew it away like a brittle leaf barely hanging from a limb. He could still hear it when the wind let up, but it didn’t seem to be moving. He knew where it was. It was at the fork less than two miles away. He imagined the driver trying to decide which trail to take. Left or right. One valley or the other. After a minute, the sound became louder, was on the move again, and it seemed to be coming toward him. But a short time later, the sound seemed to be moving in a different direction, away from him.
The diminishing sound was now going in the wrong direction. It had been an even chance to pick the trail that led to this tree, but even fate, it seemed, was against his rescue.
Least-Weasel listened to it fade off into the next valley. Then he stirred up the remains of the fire with his heel until he could see red beneath the grayish ash. He bent over and pushed his hands into the ashes and found some sense of warmth nestled at the heart. Even this little heat would soon be gone. The old man hunkered over the dying heat until the remnants that held it turned gray and cold. He figured it would take a good three or four hours before the snowmobile would return to the fork and begin to search this valley.
He had only to survive that long.
But it would be difficult without fire or shelter, and his reckoning, in the afterglow of his earlier elation, was that the challenge was beyond the capacities of his aged and unwilling body. His hands were fine for now, but he had not been able to feel his toes for the better part of the day, and he had trembled mightily during the last hours before dawn. With so much of his energy already lost, he had little strength remaining with which to put up a long, hard struggle. “Heroism is the task of the young,” he thought. Life is precious, but wolf or man, young or old, everything that breathes must, finally, accept the end. It is not simply the Law of Nature, it is the one common thread that binds all living things. Even the tallest trees in the forest, hundreds of years old, will one day reach up to the sun no more.
The old man sat back against the trunk and huddled again and closed his eyes. A strange memory came to him, one he’d not thought about for decades. Some thirty years before, one of the men from the village went up to his trapline. When he didn’t return after a week, his relatives went looking for him. But they did not find him. More men from a village upriver joined them because his wife was from there, but he was never found. A few years later, Least-Weasel was hunting in that area and found a skeleton under a tree far from the main trail. It was white and dry and picked clean. Many of the longer bones were missing, but the skull remained, and there was a badly rusted rifle still leaning against the tree. It had the initials of the owner carved into the stock.
Albert Least-Weasel, then a much younger man, took the skull and the rifle back to the village, and the sons of that man knew that these things belonged to their father. For whatever reason, they nailed the white skull to the top of their meat cache, a small log house on tall legs, usually raised about seven or eight feet off the ground so that animals cannot steal its contents of dried meat or fish. Almost a year later, the largest grizzly bear they had ever seen stepped from the leafy forest, stood on its hind legs, and rocked that cache until it toppled, spilling its store of moose and salmon. The great bear ignored the food, and, taking only the skull, gingerly tucked it between his yellow teeth and padded quietly back into the forest.
No one really knows why it happened or what it meant, only that it did happen. Perhaps the man’s spirit became that bear and simply reclaimed what was rightfully his. The family still had an old black-and-white photograph of the skull nailed atop the cache to prove the story was not myth or legend.
The man wondered what story they would tell about him. Would it be a tale of courage and strength or one of foolishness in old age?
For the next hour or two, the only things that moved were a lone raven and the man’s huddled shadow slowly following the tree’s as the low sun rounded the curve on its ancient path. The breeze came suddenly in small gusts and carried away the ashes of the fire like powdery gray snowflakes, until there was only a dark hole where the fire had burned itself into the ground, like a sled dog digging into the snow to hide from the wind.
The old man’s snowmobile and sled full of gear, including the protruding ax handle, sat quietly. Sometimes he thought he could hear the wind carrying the song of the ax, singing the way it does when it splits spruce or birch. But it was only a lonely raven cawing out in search of any other living thing. It did not look on the man as living. It knew what the tree had known for some time, knew what the wolves in the bright hills knew as they came down through the scraggly forest, over deadfalls, toward the wide field of deep snow and the old man freezing and chained to a tree.
He could see them far up in the valley, at the timberline, coming down, weaving in and out, and passing one another, sometimes in formation like geese. They were coming to him, and this time he would offer little fight, like a week-old calf or a very old moose or caribou that cannot run.
For the first time, a thought arose in his mind that he would never again see his home or his wife. And the thought made him sad.
Then, softly at first, softer than the ax’s singing, he heard something. It came only for a second, then vanished, and then came again, until it was constant and droning.
It was the snowmobile. It had gone to the end of the trail, found only the untracked white emptiness, and was returning to the fork. It would arrive upon this field within minutes, but by then it might be too late.
The old man looked up the valley, saw the gray-coated wolves coming, studied the speed of their graceful, loping descent, turned his ear toward the sound of the snowmobile and judged its speed. It would be close, he thought, so he gathered his remaining strength and slowly
stood up. He felt as cold and brittle as an icicle. He rubbed his thighs and felt nothing. They were frozen. He tried to move, but his legs would not do as they were told. So he stood there, teetering, trying to steady himself. He reached for the spear, but his hands could not grasp it. His fingers would not open or close, so he hooked it in the crook of his arm, cradled it under his right arm against his ribs as tight as he could, and let the spear lie loose across his left forearm close to the wrist.
He would fight. No matter that it was his time, he would at least make the wolves work for their meal, the way all things, even when old or crippled, struggle for survival.
They were close now, already at the far end of the field, emerging like gray ghosts from the trees. They were coming fast, determined, and their eyes saw only the tree and the man and the wide distance between.
On the other side of the field, much farther away than the pack, a yellow snowmobile emerged from the tree line, its dim headlight bouncing in the fading light of dusk.
Albert Least-Weasel stood as tall as he could, like a small animal trying to look big. He pressed the pole as tightly as he could against his side, and though he could not feel the pressure, he knew that the spear was snug and that it would not easily be knocked loose from its hold. He turned up his wrist so that his frozen hand made a kind of rest for the front of the spear, turned himself toward the wolves, crouched slightly for leverage and balance, and held his breath until there was no sound in the world but the rapid beating of his heart and the quick panting of wolves.
In a wide field of deep snow, in the white rolling hills above a great winding river somewhere in the far north, an old man waited while time slowed, while the very speed of light slowed, until there was nothing but time and no time at all and a snowmobile and a tree and hungry gray wolves, and an old man holding his breath and waiting.
From the tree line on the riverward side of the field, Johnny stood, squinting above the windshield. Faraway, he could see his grandfather’s snowmobile and the dark shape of a man standing beneath a great tree, and a pack of wolves springing through deep snow toward him.
Their approach wasn’t cautious, as it had been before. They knew that there was little fight left in the old man. This time they went straight at him, biting and ripping and clawing. Johnny couldn’t make his machine travel any faster, and though he was still too far away, he began to yell at the top of his freezing lungs while the flat white distance between them closed.
The sound of the distant machine and the screams of curses meant nothing to the wolves as they closed on the old man in a tight, vicious circle. Their snarling and growling, together with the terrible clanking of the chain as the old man punched and kicked and stabbed with his now-broken pole in his frantic struggle for life, drowned out the sound of the rescuer’s approach.
Johnny pulled up behind his grandfather’s machine and sled. Without turning off the engine, he jumped from the machine, pulled his rifle from its scabbard, quickly worked the lever action in one swift motion while stepping toward the tree, and fired into the crisp winter air. The first shot startled only one wolf, which turned and flashed its teeth. But the others did not stop their attack. Johnny stepped closer and fired again. This time they all stopped, turned around and saw the man, heard the idling snowmobile for the first time and the angry words of the man calling to them. They smelled gunpowder and steel.
When the young Indian shot into the air yet again, they ran away, back up into the white hills from where they had come—back up to where the moon sat on the clean-lined edge of a steep ridge.
Johnny ran through the deep snow to his grandfather, who had fallen backward into a half-seated, half-lying position. He leaned his rifle against the great tree and spoke to him.
“Are you all right, Grandfather?” he asked.
The old man looked up into the face of his desperate grandson, nodded slowly, and said nothing. His parka sleeves and his pants were ripped and his hands and arms were bleeding.
Johnny saw the trap and the chain bolted to the tree. Instantly, he understood why the old man had not returned to the village. He ran back to his snowmobile, grabbed his sleeping bag, and seized the long-handled ax from his grandfather’s sled. Returning, he knelt beside the wounded figure and wrapped him snugly in the sleeping bag. The old Indian leaned forward, making himself small within the warming layers.
While his grandfather rested and warmed, Johnny studied the trap. In fighting off the wolves, the sharp, metal teeth had worked their way through the boot leather and insulation into flesh and bone. Johnny was concerned about releasing the tight-springed trap, that doing so might do more harm than good, so he decided to leave it on until they reached the village.
Instead, the young man hacked into the frozen trunk of the tree around the steadfast, rusted bolt, while the old man, still and huddled within the wrapped sleeping bag, watched the sun’s quiet descent, saw its distant burning on the edge of the frozen world before it disappeared.
Johnny heard something in between swings of the ax. It was very faint. Almost imperceptible. He stopped for a moment to listen. It was the old man singing a song in their Indian language. The young man leaned closer so that he could hear. He recognized the song even though he did not know the words. He listened until a cold gust of wind reminded him of his burden, and he went back to work on the unyielding tree.
Within minutes the bolt fell free.
“Hold on,” he said to his grandfather while he rushed to clear the sled and hitch it to his own machine. He found his grandfather’s sleeping bag among his survival gear and quickly unrolled it inside the belly of the sled, which would now serve as a stretcher. Then, with the engine stopped for safety, he poured the extra fuel into the gas tank, almost filling it.
The building silence was deep but not comforting. Now Johnny could hear the quietness of the field and his own rapid breathing. The tightness in his throat made the sound louder than it should have been.
Then he went to his grandfather to carry him to the sled, but the old man did not look up from beneath his blanket wrap. He sat still and quiet below a ceiling of spruce trees and stars, bent over, head drooped.
He would not speak or sing again.
Somewhere, high up in the branches above, Johnny heard an owl.
He sat with his arms around his grandfather. His breathing had become inaudible and the world was quiet and peaceful and beautiful. Johnny sat and cried for a long time in the freezing darkness with his arms around the old man, feeling sad and angry and guilty that he had not listened to his own heart. He should have come days ago. He knew that the land was dangerous and that danger comes quickly, all of a sudden, like an avalanche or a flash flood. Now the mountain had taken two lives from his life. He could blame the cold and the wolves, but he also blamed himself.
When he was done crying, Johnny stood up, wiped his face with a parka sleeve, and used the ax handle for leverage to release the trap’s deep bite, pulling the old man’s mangled foot from its grip. He dragged his grandfather over to the snowmobile and carefully placed him on the sled, covered his body with the sleeping bag, and secured him with rope. Then he stood in the quiet field looking around him. He saw a raven sitting on a faraway tree and the wolves standing on a moonlit ridge, watching him. He looked down at his grandfather, saw how small he looked now, a man who had been so strong in life. He thought about life in the village, how the place was like a trap, its sharp teeth forged from the fire of two worlds colliding.
His mind filled with thoughts, Johnny pulled his thick gloves over his cold hands, raised his fur-lined hood over his head, and yanked the starter rope hard. The machine sputtered to life, belching blue-black smoke as it made a broad turn in the somber field. With only light from the moon and a dim headlight as guides, he slowly descended from the white hills, down toward the wide, sleeping river, and home.
And the silence of the land moved with him.
GOFISH
QUESTIONS FOR THE AUTHOR
> JOHN SMELCER
What did you want to be when you grew up?
At first, I wanted to be a military officer like my father, but I quickly learned that what I really wanted was to be a teacher. I’ve taught college literature and writing for the past eighteen years.
When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
My mom says I was writing and illustrating little books when I was just six or seven. I didn’t really start writing until my late twenties, and then mostly poetry. I didn’t try my hand at fiction until I was forty.
What was your worst subject in school?
This is funny: English. I remember my high school English teacher saw me one day after I’d earned my degree in English and education. She couldn’t believe that I majored in English. She said I was one of her worst students.
Where do you write your books?
That’s really changed over the years. At first it was always at my desk in the den and always, always at night after my wife and daughter settled down for the evening. I’ve written the last three books at coffeehouses on a laptop.
When you finish a book, who reads it first?
My friend Bard Young, who lives 3,000 miles away in Tennessee, is the first person to read any book I write. I value his feedback more than anyone else.
Which do you like more, cats or dogs?
For ten years my family had two cats and two dogs. I always thought of the cats as my wife’s pets; the dogs were mine. In fact, the dogs, Tik and Sagan, went everywhere with me, sitting up front in my pickup truck.
