Kept

by D. J. Taylor

  There was snow during the night; only an inch or two but enough to cover the tracks that he had made the previous day in walking down to the trail. As he ate his breakfast, sitting over the embers of the fire with his coffee cup balanced on his knee, he reflected that the boys certainly had been gone a long time. He was aware as he did this that two thoughts existed simultaneously in his head: the one that the boys must have found something unexpected with which to occupy themselves along the further reaches of the trail; the other that there was something sinister in this absence. It was a windy day, with more snow drifting in almost horizontally across the grey landscape, but several times he tied his muffler about his ears, put on the raccoon-skin hat that he had purchased from the factor at Fort McGurry and walked down to inspect the trail. Each time that he returned he added another log to the fire and sat by it warming his hands and brooding.

  In this way two or three more days passed. His sense of anticipation, he now discovered, had become all-consuming. Half a dozen times in an hour he found himself wandering down to the trail and staring out into the distance to the point where it lost itself in the horizon of trees and leaden sky. The strangest thoughts ran through his head. One was that the boys had simply deserted him. And yet he fancied that had the boys wished to do this, they would not have left him to guard their provisions. Another was that they had lost themselves on the trail. But he knew, too, that the one to whose leadership they all deferred had come this way half a dozen times before. It was all very mysterious, he assured himself. Thrown back upon his resources, he became suddenly absorbed by the environment in which he found himself. He began to notice things. He noticed that when he cleared his throat and spat, for in common with most men in that region he had taken to chewing plugs of tobacco, the spittle cracked when it hit the ground. This suggested to him that it was very cold indeed. Separating the bark from one of the logs that lay piled up in the cabin’s lean-to, he saw that scurrying beneath it there were insects of a kind he had never seen, and observed their bewilderment as they were exposed to the chill air. He saw, too, the way in which the time of the rose-coloured sky grew shorter and the hours of daylight continued to diminish. All this told him that winter was coming perilously close and that it would be as well for the boys to return.

  And then he would tell himself that he was an old woman, that he had food, firewood and a rifle, and that soon there would be an explanation of the mystery. It occurred to him that he had better take an inventory against the boys’ arrival, and so, laying out the items on a square of tarpaulin as the fire burned and crackled beside him, he made a list of everything he could find in the cabin. There were, he discovered, at least a dozen strips of fat salt pork, a couple of canisters of biscuits, a sack of flour, beans, a large box of sulphur matches and something under a dozen cartridges, together with the sun-cured fish, intended for the dogs but which a man could eat if he had a mind. This reassured him, and yet he knew that the pile of foodstuffs had substantially diminished since he had last examined it. The theory of existence in the wild had been explained to him by an old-timer he had met at Fort McGurry. This was that one subsisted on iron rations, supplemented by such fresh meat as was available. But what if there was no fresh meat? This was not something that the old-timer had cared to speak about. When he had finished counting the provisions, he laid them out upon the upturned tarpaulin and counted them a second time.

  One morning he awoke with a sensation of deep unease. Previously he had known exactly how long it was that the boys had been gone. Now he realised that he had forgotten the precise number of days. Was it seven or eight? He could not be sure. It occurred to him that he should make a mark with his knife on the door frame to remind him, and so, drawing the blade from its covering, he cut a series of notches into the timber, seven at first, then adding an eighth as he became certain that eight days had passed. When he had finished he sat down and admired the notches, which were deep and evenly spread, only to be assailed by another spasm of unease. It was seven days, surely, that the boys had been gone. Very well, he would remind himself not to cut another notch on the following morning. Placing the knife back in its leather scabbard, he went and stood by the door and looked out across the snow towards the eaves of the forest. There were tracks in the snow, he noticed, that had not been there the previous night, but, newcomer to the land that he was, he could not tell which animal had made them. He supposed that he should take the gun and go looking for meat, but the sky threatened more snow and he acknowledged that he felt sluggish and out of sorts. He would sit by the fire, he told himself, and read and brood, and perhaps as he read and brooded he would hear the noise of the sled bowling down the trail of the dried-up watercourse, and the boys would come.

  Accordingly, he spent half an hour chopping more wood until a pile of split logs three feet high lay beneath the canopy of the lean-to, and then sat by the fire reading the keepsake that his sister had presented to him and the volume of Tennyson’s poems. The poems, of which he had formerly taken no great notice, seemed to him extraordinarily fine. He read several of them two or three times and thought in a very melancholic way of the person who had given them to him. It occurred to him that it would be amusing to read them aloud, as he had used to do at school, standing up at his desk as the master watched him from his dais, and so he opened his mouth and spoke a few words of one, looking as he did so into the depths of the fire and seeing the schoolroom and the faces of the boys and the great window and the meadow behind it. As he did so he saw, quite distinctly, the face of the person—the female person—who had given him the book. But his voice seemed small and pitiful in the silence that surrounded him, and after a line or two he stopped, rather shamefacedly, and put some more wood on the fire. The day wore on, and he continued to sit by the fire, alternately brooding and dozing until darkness fell. He was aware, as he rolled out his blanket and settled himself to sleep, that something he had expected to happen had not happened. The boys had not come! Never mind, they would come tomorrow. Outside he could hear the wind howling in the trees.

  In this way more time passed. Quite how much time he could not say, for he found that he became lax at cutting the notches into the timber of the door frame. Or rather not lax but cautious. He would stare at the neat line of indentations unsure as to whether he had added to their number that day or not. Sometimes at the conclusion of this staring he would add a notch, sometimes not. It was the same with his routines. Sometimes he would awake from his half doze before the fire to find that he had let the pile of wood run down almost to nothing, and then a panic would seize him and he would spend an hour or more chopping a great pile of logs and arranging them in the lean-to. He supposed that he was becoming a little out of sorts, a little jittery at the silence and the grey landscape beyond him. And yet he continued to look ahead, to plan intricately in his mind what should be done in the days after the boys arrived and they set off back along the trail to Fort McGurry. He found a fragment of mirror, no more than an inch square, in the pack in which he stored his bedding and, examining himself in it, discovered that the beard he had begun to grow when he had first come to the wild reached down almost to his breastbone. Well, he would shave that off when he got back to Fort McGurry. The thought tickled him, and he imagined himself calling for soap and hot water and the boys laughing at him as he set about his task. He continued to smile about it as he chopped the logs, built up the embers of the fire, read at his little volume of Tennyson and made an inventory of the pile of provisions.

  One day—he did not quite know how long had passed since he had last done this—he found himself standing before the timber door frame and counting the notches. There were twenty-one. The number startled him, and he counted and recounted, thinking that there must be some error in his computation. The realisation of his predicament stole upon him by degrees. He was in a jam, he supposed, a high old jam, and he must settle down and decide what was best to do. In the meantime, though, he would chop more logs and make a furthe
r inventory of the supplies. The calmness of his demeanour as he did this surprised him as much as the long row of notches on the timber door frame. It was as if the person chopping the wood and calculating the extent of his provisions was someone else at whom he stared from above. The situation did not seem to have anything to do with him. But he was startled, again, by the sparseness of his inventory. Only a single canister of the biscuits remained, together with half a dozen pieces of pork, twice that amount of fish and some flour. Had he really eaten that much while the boys had been gone? Looking at the food as it lay on the tarpaulin, he conceived a notion of himself living frugally in the cabin through the winter, of being found by the first horseman who came riding along the trail in the spring and explaining modestly how he had survived. But the dwindling supplies scared him. That night he ate only a couple of biscuits and the half of a sun-cured fish before unrolling his blankets and settling himself to sleep.

  In the morning he felt more confident than he had done for many a day. It seemed to him that he knew more about the functioning of his body than he had ever known before. He watched his fingers as they moved over the buttons of his coat. Sitting by the fire drinking his cup of coffee, he was conscious of his heart beating and a vein pulsing in his forehead. This comforted him, for it spoke of life and movement rather than the inertness that lay beyond the cabin door. Then, turning to refill the coffee pot, he made an alarming discovery. There was no more coffee. For a moment he brooded over this discrepancy, even searching a little among the canisters and the provision packets to see if he had overlooked anything, before, as it seemed to him, resigning himself to this new feature of his existence. He would have to do without coffee. Outside in the grey light there were a few snowflakes falling, and he watched them for a while, thinking how sombre and melancholy the land seemed. The sight reminded him of the routine he had previously followed, and he made his way down to the riverbed and stared northwards along the trail. With the snow the track had all but disappeared, he noted, only a faint depression in the lie of the land showed that it had ever been there.

  A sudden sense of purpose overcame him. He would have to do something, he realised, take some decisive step before the snows came and covered him as they had done the trail. Surprised at himself, for he did not quite know from where the impetus had come, he found himself seizing an armful of discarded branches and an axe and fashioning a makeshift sled. There was a length of rope in the cabin, and he used this to lash the pieces of the frame into place. With what remained of the rope he constructed a harness that he could fasten over his chest and shoulders, enabling him to drag the sled behind. The sight of the sled lying on the patch of ground before the cabin door cheered him. The light was beginning to fade, and the outlines of the trees receded into darkness. Tomorrow, he thought, he would rise at dawn, pack what remained of his provisions onto the sled and set off down the trail towards firelight, warmth and human voices.

  Somehow, though, he did not do this. It was difficult to explain how this came about, how he had conditioned his mind, as he thought, to do one thing and yet how another, unconscious conditioning had compelled him to do something else. Midmorning on the next day found him once again sitting before the fire and brooding over the little volume of Tennyson. Wondering at his behaviour, he went and examined the sled again, silently appraising the curve of the birch-bark runners. The sky, he noticed, had already turned grey, which meant that there was snow coming. It would be foolish, he thought, to attempt anything today. Much better to stay by his fire. Wandering over to the lean-to, he was puzzled to find that only a handful of logs remained. Reproaching himself for this negligence, he set to work to replenish the pile.

  The fire had burned almost down to nothing when he woke the next morning, and there was a great numbness in his limbs, despite the blankets and the coat that he had thrown over himself before he went to sleep. Thrashing his arms against his sides and stamping his feet on the ground, he built up the fire once more and the numbness receded, but the memory of it remained. It really was extraordinarily cold. He had heard of there being terrible cold snaps in the wild when birds fell frozen from the sky and animals survived only by burrowing under the drifts of snow, and he wondered if this was such a cold snap. There was no wind today, and though he was not an imaginative man, it seemed to him that the land had a terrible gauntness, a desolation that he could no longer bear to observe. Again, not quite knowing from where the impulse came, he found himself assembling his belongings—his teakettle, his canisters of food, his box of sulphur matches, his store of cartridges—on the sled. When he had arranged them to his satisfaction, he took the tarpaulin and fashioned it into a cover. The sound of the snow crunching beneath his moccasins reminded him of something else that he needed, and plunging off into the eaves of the forest, he returned with another armful of brushwood. From this, with the aid of various twists of rope and twine that remained to him, he constructed a pair of snowshoes.

  Curiously, having finished these preparations, his sense of resolve began to recede once more. He looked at the fire again and at the timber of the cabin door, felt for the little volume of Tennyson that was stowed in his jacket pocket and reflected that perhaps he was being a trifle hasty. He wondered how far away Fort McGurry was, wishing that he had paid more attention to the maps that the boys had examined in the early days of their excursion. It could not be more than seventy miles, he thought, say eighty at the outside. And even walking over fresh snow and encumbered by snowshoes, a man ought to be able to travel at fifteen miles a day. These calculations reassured him, but they did not reassure him as much as he wanted them to do, and he wished that he had a proper sled and a team of dogs such as those that the boys had taken with them when they disappeared up the trail all that time ago. He wondered idly—it was something he had not considered for several days—what had become of the boys and why they had not come back to find him, glancing all the while at the timber of the cabin door and at the embers of the fire. He wondered if he ought to leave a message for the boys, and so, tearing out a flimsy blank sheet from the back of the little volume of Tennyson, he settled down by the fire, so that his fingers would not become numb, and scribbled on it with a stump of pencil: RETURNING TO FORT MCGURRY—R.F. This he secured to a rusty nail on the back of the door frame. Seeing the note emboldened him in a way that his previous preparations had not. Casting a final glance around the cabin, strapping the rifle over his shoulder and settling the harness of the sled on his chest, he set out down the short incline of the frozen hill and pulled out onto the trail.

  The pale Arctic sun was at its zenith, and a great silence seemed to have fallen over the land, even greater than the one he had remarked on his first day in the cabin. He was aware, as he moved, that he was frightened of the silence and yet, at the same time, feared to combat it, and that in setting his feet onto the surface of the snow he aspired to soundlessness. The noise of his breath irked him. He was forever dragging the runners of his sled into fresh grooves so that they would move more smoothly. The trail, he was relieved to find, was still discernible: a faint, sunken line in the snow that ran on past belts of dark fir trees and occasional banks of undergrowth. Once a white hare broke from cover and bounded nervously across the path. Aside from this, nothing moved. Two hours of daylight remained to him, and in this time he calculated that he covered five miles. Then at dusk he dragged the sled into a cluster of spruce trees to the right of the trail and set up camp for the night. He was methodical in this, for he was wise enough to know that his survival depended on it, that it was imperative for him to stay warm and by staying warm to recruit himself for the rigours of the next day. He was aware that even five miles dragging a sled over his shoulders had exhausted him, and he knew that to overexert himself would be a foolish thing. Accordingly, he chopped a good pile of wood, lit a fire and cooked his frugal supper. When he had done this, his spirits lifted. He was out on the trail right enough. Four days or perhaps five would see him home. His only regret
was the absence of coffee. He had never thought there would be a time when he would miss coffee so much. But apart from this, and the piercing cold, which caused him to huddle himself ever closer to the fire, he thought that he was comfortable enough. If the boys could see him, he told himself, they would be pleasantly surprised at how a chechaquo could adapt himself to the land. Half dozing over the fire, he imagined himself striding into Fort McGurry and the look of surprise on the factor’s face.