“Yep, but there’s bound to be a better crossing upstream.”
“How far?”
“I dunno. A mile or two.”
Stu groaned. “We’re already soaked, why don’t we just cross here? Couldn’t be higher than our waists. We could use the time it would take to walk the extra mile or two to rest. Your determination to make this a death march is garnering diminishing returns with regard to my pace.”
Blake furrowed his brow. “I’m not sure exactly what you just said, but why don’t you go ahead and wade on out there. I’ll watch and see how you do.”
“Why do I sense disdain and ridicule?”
“Why do you have to talk like goddamned C-3PO?”
“I don’t need a lecture.”
“That’s just good ol’ garden variety sarcasm.”
“Fine. I’ll head over to the other side and enjoy a much-needed respite while you go the long way around.”
“Fine.”
“Good.” Stu started out into the river. After a few steps, he teetered on the slippery rocks.
“I’m not fishing you out,” Blake advised.
“Didn’t ask you to.”
The water was up to his knees now. Stu looked back. Blake was pacing on the shore. Finally the big man couldn’t contain himself any longer.
“Stop!”
“What?”
“Just fucking stop, okay?”
“I’m up to my thighs, and it’s no problem.”
“Sure. The current will run around and through your legs until it gets up to your crotch, but once it gets up into your torso, it becomes a wall of force you can’t fight. Next time your foot wobbles on a rock, it will knock you down so fast your head will swim, and the rest of you too.”
“Good for a laugh then. But I know how to swim.”
“No. Not funny. It don’t matter that these aren’t rapids. If you go down and get swept up against a snag, the weight of the water will pin you and you’re done.”
Stu scanned the river. Logs and other woody debris dotted the downstream stretch like an obstacle course. The water did indeed feel powerful pushing on his thighs. It pressed so hard against him that it rocked him back and forth, and he wasn’t even halfway yet. He watched the current pull a yellowed leaf along and then suddenly suck it down beneath a massive tangle of branches.
Am I really as fragile as a leaf floating in a small river?
“Besides,” Blake called from shore, “if you get dunked and soak your pack, I’ll have to spot you my only spare set of clothes, and I wore them all last week without washing them.”
“All right!” Stu edged out of the middle of the river. “I’m coming back.”
“Good. Crotch or lower before we cross. Let’s move on. No need to test yourself here.”
Stu splashed out of the water and fell in step. “What do you mean by ‘test’?”
“Some men come to Alaska to get away. Some men come here to test themselves. Isn’t that what you were doing? Extreme executive camping?”
“The cabin was supposed to be furnished. It shouldn’t have been quite so extreme.”
“Pussy camping. Same thing, only watered down.”
“It was just supposed to be week in the woods to relax.”
“If you wanted a week in the woods and relaxation, you would have gone to New Hampshire or Vermont, somewhere closer to home.”
“What about you? You don’t exactly have an Alaskan accent.”
“Oregon.”
“Hey, I went to school there.”
“Whoop-de-fucking-doo.”
“So why are you here?”
Blake kept walking and didn’t answer, but Stu was feeling his oats.
“Why—”
“Not your fucking business.”
“No need to get agitated.”
“I ain’t agitated. It’s just not your fucking business.”
“I assume you fall in the ‘getting away’ category, then.”
“Not. Your. Fucking. Business.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Fuck you.”
“You know, your swearing doesn’t intimidate me. The dirtbags I used to send to prison swore all the time. Anyone can do it. Fuck. Fucky-fuck-fuck. Fuckity-shit-bastard-twat.”
“Nobody says twat anymore.”
“I say twat.”
“No, you don’t. You’re just saying it to pretend you cuss like a regular Joe, which you don’t because you aren’t.”
“How do you know I don’t?”
“It doesn’t sound right coming out of your mouth. And, by the way, if you do it over and over, it just becomes white noise anyway.”
Stu smiled. “Exactly.”
Blake glared at him as they walked. “I liked you better when you were pukin’ too much to talk.”
* * *
That night Blake left camp to lay a trap while Stu started the fire. He said it was time they ate a little meat, and Stu heartily agreed. When they woke up, they’d have something if they were lucky. Stu gathered some dry grasses and shredded them to make a tinder nest. Once he had it going, he stacked kindling in a tepee shape over it. Two bigger logs went on after orange flames were dancing over the sticks and red coals had spread along their length. He made certain there was a wide circle of bare dirt around the shallow pit he’d dug, and then he went to look for Blake.
His de facto friend was nearby, standing motionless. He seemed to be closely examining a tree.
Stu approached and whispered to him. “Are you looking for animal signs?”
“Nope. Taking a leak.” Blake zipped up and turned.
“Oh. Where’s the trap?”
Blake shook his head. “You’re standing on it.”
“Ah! Sorry.”
“Forget it. I’ll reset the damn thing. Wait. No, you do it. Maybe you’ll learn something. Grab that snare.”
“It’s just a wire.” Stu picked up a small circle of copper wire he’d stomped into the dirt.
“A wire snare. A five-inch loop of copper on a slide twist-tied to this branch. Now, hang it three inches off the ground.”
“Where’s the bait?”
“No bait.”
“You’re screwing with me.”
“I screw you not.”
“Then how do we get a rabbit to hop into it?”
“We don’t. It’s hard to change Fluffy’s habits, but it’s easy to figure out what they are. This is where she likes to run. So we set the trap where the rabbit lives, and she just does what she does every day, and bam! We got’er. That’s why placement is so important, and why you should watch where the hell you step. Do you see the narrowest point in the bunny trail?”
“What trail?”
Blake bent and pointed. “Rabbit pellets there. Faint paw print there. Grass bent here. Narrow opening. Path of least resistance through the shrubs. That’s a trail.”
“And you just hang it in the way?”
“Yep.”
“They don’t sniff it?”
“I don’t know. But if they do, they must not care how it smells, because they still walk right through it.”
“Does it always hold?” Stu recalled his possible fish that might have gotten away. How hungry he’d been. How disappointed.
“A startled animal will flee first. When it feels the wire around its head, it will run forward. That snugs this baby right up, and wire doesn’t loosen with slack.” Blake glanced at the sky. “It’s getting toward late evening. That’s when the hoppers show. You wanna stake it out and maybe see your supper get caught?”
Stu felt a curious excitement, like a grade-school boy. “Okay. I’ve got a few minutes.”
Blake snickered, and they set themselves up in a comfortable spot uphill and downwind. Then they sat.
Stu watched Blake, who watched the trap. The big man had, undoubtedly, watched hundreds of traps, and seen as many animals, yet his concentration was complete. He was neither eager nor bored; it was more like meditation, a
perfect balance between the two that held him in a state of suspended animation.
After a few minutes Stu fidgeted. “How long?”
“Maybe an hour. More if you talk.”
Stu nodded. He hadn’t experienced an hour of silence for as long as he could remember. Even when researching in the office, there was traffic noise from outside, or Clay was chattering into the phone. When he’d been at the cabin, he’d been banging or stomping or vomiting most of the time. He remembered how out of place his voice had sounded after just a few minutes. Even while fishing, he’d paced and kicked dirt and thrown pebbles. Now he tried just sitting silently.
It was hard at first. Every instinct told him to impose his existence upon the world around him. I’m here! I exist. I matter. Every boy gets a turn to speak. It’s rude not to say something. But Blake ignored him, the woods went on without him, and he finally realized that he did not matter. In the silence it was suddenly clear. The world didn’t care. Blake was good at it, motionless, a tree. He didn’t seem to want to exist or matter or care.
And so, for the first time in his life, Stuart Stark sat silently with another human being for an entire hour, so quiet that he could hear his own heartbeat and the breaths of his companion.
As his own silence deepened, the forest sounds grew louder. After twenty minutes he could track the whisper of the rising breeze through the treetops as it came down from the mountain. A water droplet plunked onto the soft loam twenty yards away to his right, and he heard it hit. The biggest of the trees spoke in low groans and occasional light snaps as they grew and bent under their own weight like old men with aging spines. And when the rabbit approached, Stu heard it coming.
Aside from a slightly deeper breath, Blake didn’t acknowledge the animal when it came into view. Nor did Stu, and he was proud of himself for it. Scaring the hopper away would have been a rookie move. The rabbit picked its way up the trail casually, not wary like in a nature movie, not sniffing the air for danger. It was just doing what it did every day, like Blake said. The rabbit poked its head through the snare, and when it felt the wire, it charged ahead, tightening the noose around its own neck. Stu watched it struggle, caught in the trap.
Blake finally moved. He tilted his head slightly and raised one eyebrow. “Rabbit, Stu.”
Stu tried not to seem eager, but he was the first one down to the snare. He stood over the rabbit, trying to appear nonchalant. “What now?”
“It’s scared. Kill it.”
Stu glanced back at the barrel of the .30-06 hanging over his shoulder.
Blake shook his head. “Grasp it behind the neck and by the hind legs. A quick reverse yank.”
Stu took hold of the rabbit, but dropped it when it squirmed. He didn’t look up—he knew Blake would be glaring. Instead he grabbed it again firmly and wrenched the neck backward. There was a light crack, and the bunny went limp. When Stu was certain it was dead, he looked up.
Blake didn’t congratulate him. Instead he handed Stu his hunting knife. “You caught it, you clean it.”
The blade was bright and well honed, but the handle was a worn hunk of wood, obviously a heavily used homemade replacement for the original.
Stu hesitated. “Since this is our dinner, wouldn’t it be best if you did it? I don’t want to screw up the meat.”
“You won’t.”
“Do you have gloves?”
“I don’t want to get my leathers all bloody.”
“But my hands—”
“You can wash your hands.” Blake pointed to a nearby stream.
The incision was made laterally around the midsection, the impossibly sharp knife sliding through fur and flesh without any sawing back and forth. Then, at Blake’s insistence, Stu took hold of either side of the parted skin and pulled forward and back. The forward fur came loose more easily than Stu could have imagined, and he peeled it away from the muscle and meat with one smooth motion. It felt eerily like pulling a small dress up over its head. The haunches were tougher, but the same principle applied, and soon he had a reasonable facsimile of a meat counter display with an apron of fur hanging from each end. He severed the feet and head along with the fur using the hatchet, and when it looked more like a skinny chicken ready for roasting than a murdered mammal he felt much more comfortable.
Gutting the thing was the worst. Stu had to pull out its steaming organs, entrails, and even waste pellets with his bare hands. As the warmth of the rabbit’s life poured across his palms and fingers, he had to fight the urge to gag.
Pussy move. Don’t do it. Stu discovered that rinsing the carcass in the stream while he removed the guts made the process less messy. They floated away as he dug them out. Although he still had the stomach-wrenching task of ripping them free. Blake was watching him, as if waiting to see if he would chuck. But Stu kept the rising bile under control. He felt good about it; they had a week on the trail ahead of them, and he was already gutting prey while keeping his lunch down.
“Did you know you can eat the eyeballs for water?” Blake said.
And up it came.
* * *
They pressed on day after day at a pace Stu thought unreasonable for a recently ill attorney who could have stood to lose a few. And he wondered if Blake would have stopped at all had they not spotted something even Stu knew was very strange.
“What is that?” Stu said.
“New one on me,” Blake grunted.
Stu squinted to see from their perch atop one of the field’s small hills. Below, two narrow rivers slammed together at a right angle and, fifty yards downstream, the water poured over a wide four-foot drop. On the bank just below their merger lay a one-man mini-tractor of some sort, tilted onto its side like a neglected child’s toy. It had two tracks, but no blade or bucket, and the cab was completely enclosed in an awkward square of Plexiglas.
“River restoration project?” Stu guessed.
“Don’t need no restoration way out here. Everything’s as natural as it gets.”
“Someone building a cabin?”
“By a river with a meandering bed. Doubt it.”
“What’s a meandering bed?”
“The course of the river changes year to year, depending on runoff. Next year this river might be clear on the other side of the field.”
“Well, whoever it is, it’s someone who might be able to call home. Anyone who can get a tractor out here probably has communication with the outside world. Let’s get down there.”
“Fools rush in.”
“We don’t have to rush. We can walk.”
“I’m still trying to figure out what it is.”
“And the solution, it occurs to me, would be to go down there and see.”
“It’s not normal for me to run into someone way out here. Let alone twice. A lot of people come north so they don’t have to run into other people.”
“You thinking pot growers?”
“Don’t know what I’m thinking, but when I think it, you’ll be the first person I tell.”
Stu held up the .30-06 to get a closer look, then remembered he was wearing a mesh hat. He pulled the netting up, put his eye to the scope, and scanned the riverbank.
Blake snorted. “Hope you’re not gonna shoot, because if you hold a gun loose against your shoulder like that, the kick will leave you a bruise to remember.”
“I’m just looking,” Stu said. “But thanks.”
“Here, let me have a gander.”
Blake took the gun. Stu noticed that the big man snugged it up tight against his shoulder, and he felt a little stupid.
“What do you see?”
“A Kubota KC 250,” he said without hesitation.
“Wow. How did you know that?”
“It’s painted on the side.” He kept his eye in the scope. “The tracks are filled in with dried mud, so it’s been sittin’ there a few days.”
“What do you think?”
“Nice piece of equipment. Probably cost as much as a new car. Nobody would le
ave it out here tipped over in the mud beside an unpredictable river with winter coming. And this ain’t the right place for growing weed, unless they’re building a greenhouse. And there ain’t been any fill or grade work done along this stretch of water that I can see.”
Blake rose and handed the gun back to Stu. “Keep that handy, but point it up or down so you don’t shoot me.”
He strode down the hill, leaving Stu to catch up. They approached the scene cautiously. Stu noticed dark fluid leaking from the underside of the tractor. Something brightly colored littered the ground on the far side.
“This place feels bad,” Blake said as they drew near.
“What do you mean?”
“Just my nose telling me something’s wrong. People button up their camps and projects when fall comes. This is … unbuttoned.”
They swung around in front of the Kubota. The scattered colors littering the ground were cloth.
“What are those, rags?” Stu asked.
“Look, the door is broken.”
The Plexiglas panel that served as the entry to the cab hung askew on its hinges. The gun wouldn’t be necessary, Stu thought; the cab was empty. Blake leaned inside, then he backed out, grim-faced.
“What?”
Blake jerked his thumb at the cab and stepped away. “Better see for yourself.”
Stu inched forward and peeked inside. More dark fluid was smeared across the floor of the cab, though it had dried after a couple of days’ exposure to the air. And a video camera was mounted on the dash. The camera was switched on but dead, its battery clearly drained. Stu wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but the bad feeling Blake sensed was beginning to creep up on him, too. From the evidence at hand, it was clear the machine had been abandoned suddenly. But it wasn’t until he spotted the red handprint on the seat that his heart leaped into his throat.
“Oh God…”
He yanked his head out and stumbled backward. Blake caught him. Stu shook him off but continued to stare at the ruined Kubota. As he did, other clues came into focus. There were long scratches on the Plexiglas door he hadn’t noticed before. The devastation wrought upon the hardware store hinges was mighty; they were twisted almost beyond recognition, with one galvanized metal bolt torn completely from its guides.
“Th-there was a man inside,” Stu stammered.
Impasse Page 17
