Brian's Winter

by Gary Paulsen

  Moose. He knew instantly. He had seen moose several times since he had been attacked last summer. Once he had seen a bull with a rack so large that Brian could easily have fit between the antlers; the rest had been cows. They were all unbelievably big, and after he’d been attacked by the cow along the lake he’d given them a wide berth. When they got angry it was like having a Buick mad at you.

  But, he thought—just that at first. But.

  But what? But the moose are smaller now? But I’m tougher now? He shook his head, pushed the thoughts away, the sneaky thoughts, the ones that said he was hunting meat for food, moose were made out of meat, he had a larger bow, primitive people hunted moose with weapons like his, he was different now.

  He heard the sound again. A breaking limb. Close, maybe thirty yards, and he crouched down and looked along the snow as he had for rabbits.

  There. A brown leg moving, then another, like small trees they were, suddenly moving small trees.

  He held his breath and crouched, watching. He could not see more of the moose, just the legs, and as he watched they moved off to the left a bit, hesitated, then turned left again and started moving slowly.

  Directly at him.

  Ahh, he thought. There it is—like it or not I am about to hunt moose. His stomach tightened and he stood and quickly glanced at his position. The brush was too thick for him to run even if he had wanted to and the truth was he didn’t want to. He was different, he did have better weapons—and there was a lot of meat on a moose.

  No room, he thought, to maneuver or to shoot. He moved his head to the right and all he could see was thick brush, then to the left, and it was the same.

  No. There, a small opening. Not four feet across and about four feet off the ground—almost a tunnel through the brush—but if it all worked right, all worked exactly right, he might be able to get a shot.

  He moved to the left and stood facing the opening, leaned the killing lance against a nearby bush, held the bow up—with the top tipped slightly to the right to keep it out of the brush—and put his best arrow on the string ready to draw and waited.

  And waited.

  Time seemed to stop.

  Somewhere to his left he heard the soft sound of a bird’s wings, then the scratchy sound of a chickadee.

  Brush cracked directly in front of him but he could see nothing.

  Another bird flew past.

  He aged, waiting, and now he heard the moose stepping, its hooves shussh-shusshing in the snow, and another breaking branch and then a line, a curved line as the side of the moose’s front end came into view in the tunnel.

  Brian tensed, his fingers tightening on the string. The edge of the shoulder moved slowly, ever so slowly to the left, bringing more and more of the moose’s chest into view.

  A third there, then a half, then two thirds and then the whole chest.

  Brian drew the shaft back.

  A cow, his brain registered, a large cow moose. No antlers. A little spit dripping from the side of her mouth. Brown eyes looking at him but not seeing him, or at least he hoped not.

  Twenty feet, no more. Six, seven paces at the most.

  He released the bowstring.

  He could see it all later in his mind’s eye so it all must have registered but when he did it everything happened so fast—and yet incredibly slowly—that it all seemed one event.

  The arrow jumped from the string and he saw the feathers fly straight away from him and at the moose and slam into the moose’s neck just above the center of her chest and in that instant, in the same split second, the moose caught the movement of the bow and arrow and Brian’s head and charged, so fast she almost met the arrow.

  If Brian had expected the brush to slow her down, or the arrow striking her to handicap her, he was sadly mistaken. She was at him like a cat, so fast that she seemed a blur, and yet his mind took it all in.

  I hit her. The arrow hit her in the neck. She’s charging. She’s charging at me. Another arrow. No, no time. The lance. That’s it, the lance.

  He threw the bow aside and reached for the lance, all in one motion and all too late. He felt his hand clamp on the shaft of the lance and at the same time she came out of the brush on top of him. He had one fleeting image of a wall of brown hair with the feathers of the arrow sticking out of the middle and he went down.

  He would never know what saved him. She was gigantic and on him and he thought she would crush him, mash him into the ground. But either the arrow hampered her movement or her momentum carried her too far and she went on over Brian and had to turn and come back at him.

  He was hurt. His leg, his shoulder, yet he could move, and he rolled, still holding the killing lance, and came up to a kneeling position. He raised the head of the lance just as she hit him again.

  One image. She threw herself at him, her eyes red with rage, and he saw her run onto the lance, the point entering her chest just below the arrow. Then her head hit his forehead. Brian saw one flash of white light, as bright as all the snow, then nothing but pain and darkness.

  Chapter

  TEN

  A great weight. Something heavy on him. His mother was calling for him to come back. He was little again, a small boy and playing outside, and his mother was calling for him to come inside but he couldn’t move because there was a huge weight on him, holding him down, keeping him from coming home . . .

  Brian opened his eyes slowly, closed them against the brightness and the pain in his forehead, then opened them again.

  It was, he thought, the same world. Snow all around, bright sun, he was breathing, had a pounding pain in his forehead—it reminded him of the plane crash—and had what appeared to be an entire cow moose in his lap.

  He twitched when he looked down at her. Her eyes still looked mad, and her head plowed against his chest. But he realized she was dead. He started to examine his own situation.

  Nothing seemed to be broken. He could not at first believe this and moved his arms and legs several times to make certain, then squirmed his way out from beneath the moose. She was lying half on him, her head on his chest pushing him back, and when he stood it was the first time he got a long look at how big she was.

  From nose to back end he guessed a good eight or nine feet, maybe more. He paced her off and came up with four paces in length, counting her legs, which were sticking out a bit.

  Maybe ten feet. And she was taller at the shoulder than he stood.

  He wondered for a moment if she was the same moose that had attacked him earlier in the summer and tried to feel that she was, tried to feel some animosity toward her. But the truth was that killing her made him sad—elated and sad all at once, as he had been with the wolf-killed doe.

  She was ugly and beautiful at the same time, lying there in the snow, blood from her chest wounds smeared where she lay—an ugly beautiful animal, and she was ended now. He had killed her, ended her life so that he could live, and he felt as bad as he felt good.

  He turned away for a moment, shook his head and then turned back. There was much work to do and for a moment he thought it would be impossible. It was perhaps half a mile back to camp and there was absolutely no way he would be able to drag her.

  He tried lifting a back leg and it was all he could do to get it off the ground. Dragging her would be simply impossible. She must weigh six or seven hundred pounds.

  He would have to cut her up here and take her back to camp in pieces and that nearly stopped him. How, he thought, do you cut a moose up? Never in all his life had he ever thought about cutting a moose to pieces. Where did he start? There were no dotted lines the way there were in the diagram at the meat market . . .

  He thought on it a full five minutes, looking at her lying there, and finally realized he could do nothing until she was skinned.

  He used the knife to slit the hide from the neck, down the chest and belly to the back end. He had to cut around the lance—which had broken off after driving into her—and the arrow shaft still sticking out bec
ause they wouldn’t pull free.

  The skin came away harder than with the doe, was thicker and had to be cut loose as he skinned, peeling it back a half inch at a time all along her body. When he cut along the belly the knife slipped and cut the membrane holding the stomach in and her guts fell out on his feet, steaming, and he went ahead and pulled them the rest of the way out, amazed at how much there was inside her. The liver alone weighed more than two rabbits and he set it aside to cook later.

  With the guts out of her she was easier to move—still very hard, but some easier—and he quickly developed a rhythm for skinning. Pull on the hide, slide the knife along, pull, slide, pull, slide. In half an hour he had lifted the hide completely off her right side, cutting it around the neck just under her head, and folded it over her back, completely exposing her right side.

  He had never, even in a butcher shop, seen so much meat in one place. She was a house of meat. Again he lifted the back leg and couldn’t move her, even with the guts out. But as he lifted the leg he noted that there seemed to be a seam where the leg joined the body, a junction, and he put the knife there and cut and the leg lifted away from the body.

  He kept lifting and cutting, all around the top of the back leg, pushing up as he did so until it was joined only at the hip socket, which rotated freely, and he cut around the socket with the knife, and it popped loose and the leg lifted completely away.

  Just that, her back leg, was heavier than the doe, and he realized it would be hard to get the leg back to the shelter.

  This would be a long job. He decided to pull the leg back and then return to finish up. An all-night job. And it would be cold.

  He took off with the leg and used nearly twenty minutes just to pull it to the shelter and was almost exhausted when he got there. He stored it along the wall and went back to where the body of the cow lay.

  It was now midday and he was starving. He took fifteen minutes to gather wood and start a fire near the carcass and when it was blazing well he cut a strip of meat from the rump near where he’d lifted the leg off and hung it over a stick so that it was nearly in the flames.

  He went back to cutting and skinning while it cooked. He cut away the right front shoulder—it lifted off much the same as the rear leg, the shoulder blade cutting away, and then the leg, and he dragged it back to camp and when he returned, the meat on the stick was perfect: burned a little on the outside and cooked clear through.

  He cut pieces off and ate it standing there, looking down at the rest of the cow, and he thought he’d never tasted meat so good. It was better than deer or rabbit or foolbirds, better than beef. And there was fat on it, more fat than the doe had, and he craved fat, ate one piece of fat alone that was hanging on the side of the meat and had cooked separately and still craved it. He cut two large pieces of fat off the carcass and hung them over the fire to cook while he went back to work.

  With the right legs gone she was lighter and by lifting the legs on the ground he found he could just roll her over to get at the uncompleted side.

  Once she was over he skinned the side as he’d done the first one, working up to the back after cutting around the legs until the hide was completely free of the carcass. Then he cut the legs loose, dragged them one at a time back to camp and returned to the body of the moose in darkness.

  Finding his way was no problem because there was a half-moon and it lighted the snow into something close to daylight. But the cold came now and he had no gloves. His hands chilled as he worked on the damp meat and he had to warm them over the fire often, which slowed him, and by midnight everything in him screamed to stop.

  But the cow was a treasure house of food and hide and he wasn’t about to leave her for the wolves, or the bear if it came along again. So he kept working.

  With the legs and rump gone the remaining part of the carcass was not too hard to handle. He used the hatchet to chop through the spine in two places and separated the back, middle and front end and it amazed him how much all animals were alike. She was immense, but the cow was built almost like a rabbit, with the same basic layout.

  The same design, he thought, grinning, and supposed if he were on all fours he would look the same.

  He cut her head away with the hatchet and dragged the front section of her body, the rib cage and the hump meat on top of her shoulders with it, back to the camp and then the rear end and the center at the same time.

  That left only the hide and head. The head he could come back for tomorrow and he set off with the hide at probably four in the morning.

  It was the worst. It was staggeringly heavy—he couldn’t lift it—and dragging it back to camp, with his bow and arrows on top of it, exhausted him.

  At camp he looked at the pile of meat and hide next to his shelter wall, smiled once, shucked out of his rabbit-skin shirt, crawled into his bag and was in a deep, dreamless sleep in seconds.

  A good—no, he thought, his brain closing down, a great day. A meat day. A moose day. He would sketch it on the shelter wall tomorrow . . .

  Chapter

  ELEVEN

  The cow proved to be a godsend. The next day Brian awakened in midafternoon starving and not sure it had all happened—although his body felt as if he’d been sleeping in a cement mixer. Every bone and muscle seemed to ache. But the moose was all there, leaning against the side of the shelter.

  He was starving and made a fire outside. He used the hatchet to chop out a section of ribs and cooked them on a stick over the flames and ate them when the fat was crackling.

  “All I need is some barbecue sauce,” he said aloud, grease dripping down his chin. “And a Coke . . .”

  When he had first come out of the shelter it had been partly cloudy with the sun shining through gray wisps of clouds, but while he ate, the clouds became thicker until there was no blue and he felt a few drops hit his cheek.

  “Not again—not rain . . .”

  But it was. It didn’t pour at first and he took the rest of the day to get in firewood—he had found a stand of dead poplar, all dry and easy to burn but still about a half mile away, and he dragged wood until it was dark and the rain was a steady, miserable, cold downpour.

  He made a fire inside the shelter with coals from the outside fire and soon it was warm and toasty. He hung the rabbit-skin shirt up to dry and lay back to wait the rain out. Having worked all night the previous night and slept most of the day, he wasn’t sleepy and thought that the rain seemed light and would probably end by daylight and when he finally dozed off, warm and snug in the shelter, it seemed to be coming down more lightly all the time.

  But at daylight it hadn’t stopped. He looked out at the drizzle—it had melted all the snow off and everything was a mess and now it had become cold and the rain was freezing into ice on the limbs and grass and he was glad that he had plenty of wood pulled up and a dry place to live.

  It rained for a solid eight days, cold and wet, and if he hadn’t had the shelter and meat he would have gone crazy.

  And in a strange way it never really did stop raining. Each day it got colder and colder and the rain kept coming down and Brian could hear limbs breaking off with the weight of the ice on them and just when he thought he could stand it no longer the rain turned to snow.

  Only this time not a soft snow. A wind came out of the northwest that howled through the trees like something insane, actually awakened him in the middle of the night and made him sit bolt upright in fear.

  The snow was small and hard at first, driven needles that seemed to cut his cheek when he looked outside, and then changing to blown finer snow that found ways to seep into the shelter and melt hissing on the fire.

  He was not idle. He had dragged in enough wood to last if he was careful, but by the second and third day he was going stir-crazy and was looking for things to do.

  Luckily there was much that needed doing. His clothing was far from adequate. The rabbit-skin shirt was like paper and ripped easily—indeed had been torn in several places during the moose at
tack and needed restitching—and Brian, with great effort, stretched the moose hide out in the rain and cut it in half and brought the rear half into the shelter.

  The hide was still wet from being on the moose, hadn’t had time to dry, but the fire and heat in the shelter worked fast and within a few days it had dried sufficiently to work.

  It was stiff and thick and while it was still damp he cut a rectangle for a moose shirt, stitching it down the sides with moose-hide laces, making it larger than the rabbit-skin shirt. He did the same kind of sleeves and then made a crude hood, which he stitched around the head opening.

  He did all this with the hair side in and when he put the rabbit-skin shirt on underneath and then the moose-hide parka on the outside—even with the moose hide still uncured—he could feel his body warming up instantly.

  He also nearly went down with the weight. He figured the coat weighed at least thirty pounds, maybe more, and decided he wouldn’t be doing much running in it.

  The snowstorm lasted three days on top of the rain and Brian worked on his weak spot—his hands. He used moose hide and made a pair of crude mittens by using his hands for a pattern and a piece of charcoal to draw on the hide. The thumbs were so large he could almost stick his whole hand in the thumbhole. These he made with the hair side in and fashioned them large enough to allow a second set of rabbit-skin mitts to be worn inside. The mittens were so big they kept falling off his hands and he used moose hide to make a cord that went over his shoulders and held the mittens up if he relaxed his hands.

  This was all hard work and kept him busy for days, but worse work was the hide. As it dried it started to harden and it turned into something very close to a board.

  He worked it back and forth over a rounded piece of wood as he’d done with the lacing and this process, trying to soften the dried moose hide, took longer than sewing up the clothing. And in the end he had to settle for less than he wanted. He had the hide loose where it counted, in the armpits and elbows and the hood, but much of the rest of it was only half supple, stiff enough so that he felt as if he were wearing a coat of armor and still stiff though he worked on it for hours when at last the storm ended.