A Cold War

by Alan Russell

  “Like any animal, you chose the path of least resistance. I let the animal think it’s making a choice, but all the while I’m pulling the strings. I funneled you along and used debris to narrow the path, making you go where I wanted. With some of my traps, I use guide sticks. That’s what I did with you, but I had to use what was on hand, so I set you up with construction material and trash.”

  “I was preoccupied. I was concentrating on something else.”

  “That’s how you get your prey. The animal you’re going after might be on the scent of something. Or maybe it wants to get back to its den and is traveling along a path it’s been on a hundred times before. The only difficulty with getting you was that when you work with snares, you usually try to get the animal to put its head through the loop. They get snared, and the garrote does the rest. I couldn’t do that with you. And I couldn’t use a spring trap. So I had to work it so that you would put your foot into a snare. I made you step over a perceived obstruction right into my snare.”

  By the sound of his voice, Baer was remembering his handiwork proudly. It made her both angry and embarrassed. He’d played her like a rat in a maze.

  “Most animals aren’t as easy to take as you were,” he said.

  Inside of her gloves, Nina clenched her fists. Baer was using his hands for a different purpose. He made loops from the wire, measuring them with four of his fingers. Then he walked over to a nearby stand of trees, found a snag, and started stripping off its branches.

  “If we want to catch us a brace of bunnies,” said Baer, “we got to be smarter than our prey. Dead sticks are better than green ones. You don’t want the rabbit eating. You want him going into the snare.”

  Baer speared the stick in the ground and then positioned the snare, using two small sticks to prop it up. He slid the sliding noose with apparent pleasure, and Nina found herself grinding her teeth. The bruises around her neck had almost faded away, but she hadn’t forgotten. She would never forget his brutality. Her being pregnant had stopped his attacks. As far as Nina was concerned, that was its only benefit.

  He began positioning sticks and branches to the sides of the snare. “If everything goes right, our bunny will walk right into the hangman’s noose. I’ve made the snare short enough that our rabbit can’t bite the wire.”

  He tested the noose. “Usually our Playboy Bunny panics, and she strangles nice and quick.”

  She heard the insinuation in his voice and responded to it by walking away. She’d traveled the route of Baer’s traplines enough times now to know the general direction in which they ran.

  “Hope you don’t get caught in a spruce trap,” he said. “That’s not a good way to die.”

  Nina kept walking, but Baer caught up with her a few minutes later.

  “Aren’t you quick as a bunny?” he said.

  “What’s a spruce trap?” she asked.

  “It’s also called a tree well,” he said. “Why do you think I’m always telling you to stay clear of trees and their overhangs?”

  “I don’t know why. You’ve never bothered to explain it to me.”

  “Spruce traps are pockets that form near a tree, but you usually can’t see them because they’re hidden by a layer of snow. That’s why it’s always good to stay clear of trees, and when you can’t, you should be tap, tap, tapping around them like a blind man. I’ve heard tree wells kill more winter backpackers than anything else. They fall in the well and suffocate. They learn their lesson too late.”

  Baer sounded amused. Nina hoped she could use his smugness against him. They started out again, and when they came to a streambed, Baer began setting his spring traps. Nina had come to realize that he used different-size traps for the different prey he was going for. Marten seemed to be his preferred prey. Before setting his traps, Baer studied tracks and trails. In addition to securing them to the ground, he also set up leaning poles, placing the traps on platforms above the ground. In one spot he used a hollow log and positioned the trap just outside the wooden opening.

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” he said, “and the marten.”

  But at that moment Nina wasn’t listening to him. In the distance she could hear a baby crying. She didn’t think about the potential of being rescued by other people. The only thing that mattered to her was that here in the wild was a child in need.

  “It’s a baby!” she cried.

  Baer started laughing.

  “Listen!” Nina said, not understanding his amusement. “Can’t you hear? It’s a crying baby!”

  “It’s a horny male porcupine,” said Baer.

  Disbelieving, Nina said, “What?”

  “That’s his mating call.”

  Nina waited to hear the cry again. After half a minute, the silence was broken by the wail. Now that she was listening critically, she could tell it wasn’t a baby after all.

  “You know how porcupines mate?” Baer asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Very carefully,” he said.

  Baer seemed confident about the prospects of the day’s last site. “Sometimes trappers have to be like farmers,” he said. “You prepare your crop.”

  “And how did you do that?”

  “I picked a likely spot where I put down a lot of husks, chaff, and sawdust, and whenever I came by, I amended the bed with seeds, crumbs, berries, and cabin trash. What you’ll see is almost like a compost pit that’s about twelve feet around and maybe three inches deep. It didn’t take long before all sorts of vermin set up home in my compost pile. The voles are everywhere. And that’s brought a host of predators. Yesterday I saw tracks of mink, marten, fox, and lynx. They’ve all been coming around to feed on the voles and mice. I’m counting on a good end of the day.”

  Nina saved her breath and nodded. As a distance runner, she’d trained in altitude, but in this wilderness she was struggling to keep up. She wasn’t sure if it was the terrain, the conditions, or her pregnancy. Even with her snowshoes the ground seemed to pull at her and make every step a challenge, but she wasn’t going to concede to Baer that she needed a break.

  She heard some strange groaning, and for a moment thought it was Baer who was struggling, but the sounds weren’t coming from him. This time she didn’t react as quickly as when she’d heard the porcupine. She listened to more unearthly groaning, and then what sounded like whistling.

  Baer saw her looking around and trying to search out an explanation. “The water is talking,” he said. “It becomes noisy this time of year. It knows it’s giving up the ghost.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The creeping cold is applying the brakes. It’s making it difficult for the water to breathe. The ponds and lakes have mostly iced up. What you hear is the last of the running water. It’s offering up its gurgled, dying complaints.”

  Nina was surprised that Baer almost sounded poetic.

  “Our honey hole is just ahead,” he said.

  He increased his pace, anxious to see what was waiting for them. Nina had to jog just to stay close to him. Then he slowed up.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Nina tried to see what he was seeing. There was nothing. And then she spotted the big paw prints.

  By then Baer had reached the empty first trap. “Shit!” he screamed, and kicked the trap. The second trap was empty, as was the third, fourth, and fifth. All the traps had been sprung.

  “That she-bitch is dead,” he said, spitting on the ground. “When I catch up to her, I’ll make sure she dies a slow, painful death. And afterward I’ll cut off her head and put it on a pike.”

  Nina knew better than to ask questions. She watched as Baer went around kicking traps and mouthing oaths. She’d seen him angry before, but this was the first time she’d seen him lose his control.

  “Fucking she-bitch,” he said over and over, as if that should explain everything.

  Nina studied the ground. They weren’t bear prints, but they were large, like a dog on steroids. But even to her untrained eye, she cou
ld see that something looked wrong with some of the paw prints. The impression looked incomplete, as if half the paw was missing.

  “That’s right,” said Baer, answering Nina’s unspoken question. “She-bitch is missing half of her left paw. Last year I had her in one of my traps. And she made the choice to gnaw away a good part of her foot to get free. I didn’t think she’d survive with only half her front paw. It’s tough enough surviving with four good legs out here. But the she-bitch made it.”

  His laugh was bitter. “And she’s not one to forgive and forget. Twice last year the she-bitch sprung all my traps. And she always likes to leave me a calling card.”

  The pile of shit sitting in the middle of the clearing wasn’t the only thing the wolf had left. There were yellow trails all around the sprung traps.

  “Don’t eat the yellow snow,” Baer said, pretending insouciance.

  Nina knew it was an act. She knew he was still raging. She kept her eyes averted from him, but not because of his glowering. She was afraid of him seeing how happy she was.

  “The she-bitch signed her death warrant,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m going to hunt her down.”

  Nina thought of Elese. Her secret sister had advised her to find her totem.

  I am a wolf, Nina thought.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Morning sickness came on hard, and Nina woke up vomiting into a pan Baer had left in her pen.

  Children had always been a “someday” proposition. It scared her to think that there was now an unwanted ETA.

  Even though it wasn’t yet dawn, Baer had gotten up when Nina began retching. He threw on his clothes and prepared his pack.

  “You’ll be staying here today,” he said.

  As sick as she was feeling, Nina wanted out of her cage. She came away with more knowledge from every outing, and that gave her confidence that she might be able to escape.

  “Why?” she asked. “Being cooped up isn’t good for me or the baby.”

  “One day won’t hurt either one of you. I’m taking the team and going after the she-bitch. We’ll be covering a lot of territory.”

  Nina felt her stomach lurch, but it wasn’t morning sickness. She was afraid for the wolf. The animal had escaped from Baer’s trap. It was a survivor. And not only that, the wolf continued to defy him. Maybe she could find a way to sabotage the hunt.

  “I know about covering territory,” she said. “I’m a runner. I’ll keep up.”

  “Yesterday was an easy outing, and you weren’t able to keep up. Today will be twice as hard.”

  “I’ll be up for it. I’m just getting back into shape after being locked up too long in your jail.”

  He shook his head. “Tomorrow you can walk until you drop, but today the she-bitch gets all my attention.”

  Nina didn’t like his name for the wolf. I’ll give her a worthy name, she thought.

  Baer walked over to her cage and began unlocking it. “You got five minutes to do your business while I string up the team,” he said.

  It was possible the wolf would be dead by the end of the day. Spending time coming up with a name could be just a waste of time. But despite that, Nina felt compelled.

  “I wonder if children are still raised on the story ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’” she said to Elese. “I remember how scary the big, bad wolf was. And that’s how I thought of wolves until I saw this old movie called Never Cry Wolf. I believed wolves were scary and mean and vicious. But that movie changed my whole perception of wolves.”

  Talking gave Nina something else to think about other than her roiling stomach. Baer had left her a plate of jerky and dried berries. Right now she couldn’t even look at the food without feeling ill.

  “I keep thinking about how the wolf chewed away part of her foot in order to get free,” she said.

  She took off her glove and looked at her own maimed finger.

  “I’m going to start looking at my hand differently. I was ashamed of seeing my maimed finger, but not anymore. It’s a symbol. The monster’s traps maimed us both. But the wolf hasn’t stopped fighting him, and I’m not going to, either.”

  The wolf had escaped Baer’s metal jaws in the only way she could.

  “How about ‘Freedom’?” said Nina. She let the silence build for a few moments, as if listening to an answer from Elese. Then she nodded her head and said, “Yes, politicians have cheapened that word.”

  Nina wondered if she was including her own fiancé in that assessment. During her short time being part of Terrence’s world, she’d already attended enough political events to make her cynical.

  “What about ‘She Who Can’t Be Trapped’?”

  Nina waited a moment and then sighed. “Yes, that is long,” she said.

  She tried out another name: “‘The Great Houdini,’” she announced, and then made a face. After a moment’s thought, she came up with, “‘The Great Howldini.’”

  No and no, Nina thought. But then she found herself smiling.

  “‘Lady Liberty,’” she said, and thought about that for a moment. “That’s close, but it’s too symbolic and it’s too human.”

  And then Nina clapped her hands. “‘La Loba,’” she announced. “Yes, that’s it.”

  Nina spent most of the morning studying Elese’s maps and survival tips. In some ways it was putting the cart before the horse, but she had to be ready to act if any chance presented itself. She studied her sister’s words as if cramming for finals.

  Or The Final, thought Nina.

  She came up with mnemonic connections to help her remember. For moss and north, she thought of the abbreviation of Minnesota, MN; to remember water generally moving from north to south, Nina took the first letter of each word and made the word WaNeS; clouds moving west to east had her thinking CaWEd.

  When she was finally satisfied that she’d studied everything to the point of having memorized it, she turned to the penultimate page of Elese’s journal. Her sister had titled this next to last entry “The Great Escape.” Nina wished she could be sure Elese had been writing about getting away, but in rereading this entry, she’d found something ominous in her words. Had she been writing about dying?

  For the longest time, I have been planning my escape. In order to be free of the monster, I believed it would either be necessary to kill him or to make sure I had enough of a head start that he couldn’t catch me.

  I spent countless hours mulling over what you are likely thinking about right now. Could I find a way to lock the monster in the cabin? Could I burn the cabin down with him inside? Could I do an outhouse run at night and use the darkness to escape? Could I somehow trap him? Was there a way I could engineer an escape and then use myself as the bait to ensnare him?

  There were always so many scenarios and so many things to think about. And of course, I was afraid of failure, knowing how severe his punishment would be. Getting away was only the beginning, and possibly the easiest, of my difficulties. How do you survive for long enough to get back to civilization? There are no street signs out here; there are no roads. There are rivers to surmount and mountains to cross. There is the threat of wild animals, and the even bigger threat of the cold. Break a bone, and you die. Fall in the wrong spot, and you never get up.

  Everything changed when Denali died, though, because I no longer had to be scared for him. And I no longer had to be scared for me.

  Part of me died. Or all of me died. I can’t be sure which is closer to what I now am. Some days I feel alive; other days I am a ghost.

  What will I be escaping to? My boy is dead. And Greg seems more of a dream now than anything else. Maybe he always was a dream. That’s how it feels. And it’s been so long. For his sake I hope he has moved on.

  Can a ghost escape? I suppose I will try. It will certainly be easier now. Since Denali’s death the monster no longer locks me up. He lets me come and go. The opportunity to get away has never been easier. But I wonder when I am out there if I’ll have the will to go on. I am certain of one thing
, though: when I leave I won’t let the monster bring me back alive.

  Sometimes I am convinced that I am already in the underworld.

  When I was a girl, I loved reading about the myths. There were these goddesses I thought were so incredible, like Diana and Aphrodite and the Fates and the Muses. But even the gods and goddesses had problems. It wasn’t like their lives were perfect. Even the gods could be star-crossed.

  One myth that has always stayed with me is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. It bothered me as a girl. And it bothers me even more now. Like Eurydice I was taken by a monster at my wedding. Eurydice died when she was bitten by a serpent. The venom that struck me down came from a thousand different bites and was slower-acting.

  Orpheus, the son of Apollo and Calliope, couldn’t accept Eurydice’s death. He traveled to the underworld and used his music to convince Hades to let him deliver Eurydice from death, but with the proviso that he could not look back until both he and his bride were free from the underworld. In the end Orpheus blinked. He looked back and lost his love.

  Too often that is what I do these days. I look back. I remember Denali and can’t help but think that I do not want to live in a world where he does not exist.

  Nina wiped away her tears and then rolled the booklet up and hid it away. It was already getting dark outside. Every day was shorter. Every day finding light became more elusive.

  Her stomach rumbled. Half the day she felt sick, and half the day she felt hungry. She tore into the jerky and finished all of it. Afterward she wrapped the furs and comforters all around her and fell asleep.

  She awoke with a start in what felt like the middle of the night. It was as dark inside the cabin as it was outside; Nina held up a gloved hand and could barely see it. Nearby she could hear dogs yelping. Their howls made her shiver. They were crying out their hurt and fear, sounds she only heard when Baer beat them.

  Nina listened while Baer chained up the dogs. She pretended to be asleep even after he stormed inside and started banging around pots. His breath came out in aggrieved huffs and puffs, like an old locomotive train starting up. He got a fire going in the woodstove and then used his big knife like an ax, cutting into a side of meat. Nina’s ears told her all this. She didn’t need to look to know Baer’s routine. After a long day on the trail, he was preparing to make sure the dogs were fed and hydrated. Each would be getting its own big bucket of meat soup.