by Alan Russell
Nina drank the hot water and chewed a piece of jerky while she fed the fire. She was sitting on a caribou hide on the lee side of a knoll. The water wasn’t hot enough to warm her, but it did make the cold a little less pervasive. She removed her gloves and brought her fingers close to the fire, working and flexing them until they didn’t feel like icicles.
She guessed that daybreak was at least three hours away. In two hours she’d stop again to drink, warm up, and take a short nap. She’d make a bigger fire to warm her feet and would put on fresh socks. If she was to survive the Ice Age, she had to stave off gangrene, trench foot, hypothermia, and frostbite.
Nina drank more of the hot water. “I’m tired, Elese,” she said. “And I’m having trouble thinking. I’m hoping it’s just exhaustion, but it could be an early sign of hypothermia, with the cold short-circuiting my brain.”
At least she knew where she was. She’d traveled this way to get to the trapline maybe fifty times. But in a few hours, she’d be in unknown territory. “That’s where you’re really going to have to guide me, you know. I’ll have you, your clouds, the weather and stars, and your moss to guide me. It almost sounds like a scavenger hunt, doesn’t it? Did I ever tell you about the scavenger hunt my mother organized for my fourteenth birthday?
“I wonder what Mom would think of this scavenger hunt. The stakes are a little higher, I’m afraid. And if I don’t find one specific item, I’m dead.” Nina finished her drink and got to her feet. She felt more alert now. There was no need to put out the fire or try to hide it. If Baer was coming after her, he’d find it. After cinching up her backpack, she started walking.
Hours later after her third stumble, Nina decided it was time to stop for a break. Although it was still dark outside, the horizon was lightening. Dawn probably wasn’t much more than an hour off. After choosing a spot that was partially sheltered from the wind, she set about making a campsite. She found some boughs for insulation and set them out on the ground. Then she laid down the tarp, caribou hide, and reflective blanket.
Nina took the granite ulu with her to gather materials for a fire. After cutting away bark for tinder, she used the ulu’s heft to bring down some small branches. In a few short minutes, she had a blazing fire, and then she went and gathered more wood.
With a grateful sigh, she settled in front of the fire. Its welcoming warmth allowed her to take off her boots. There was no feeling in her toes, and Nina began vigorously massaging her feet. The heat and the rubbing brought back enough sensitivity to allow her to wiggle her toes. Still, Nina knew any victory over the cold was only temporary. She put on fresh socks and then restoked the fire.
She wouldn’t be able to go on much farther without some rest. She settled down for her nap. Her wake-up call would be the fire’s dying out. She didn’t want to sleep more than an hour anyway, and when the fire was down to coals, the bitter cold would get her up.
But it wasn’t the cold that woke her. It was a nightmare. She awoke screaming, but waking didn’t bring her relief. Nina scanned the surrounding area. There was no sign of the monster, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.
Dawn was showing itself, such as it was. The sun was pale, lifeless, and anemic. It felt like a mirage, an illusion of what she wanted.
Nina did a few halfhearted stretches and tried to get some feeling in her digits. She stoked the fire and then went and gathered more fuel. When the fire was sufficiently burning, she filled her small pot with ice and dense snow and placed it atop the coals.
Drinking enough water and taking in calories was critical to her survival. She broke off a piece of jerky and began working on it with her teeth, but it was like chewing on petrified wood. The hardtack would be even worse. Instead of breaking her teeth over her food, Nina dropped two pieces of jerky into the water, along with one of the hardtack biscuits. The hardtack dropped like a rock to the bottom of her pot.
It took the water a few minutes to boil. Nina drank directly from the pot, sipping jerky broth and pretending she was eating bacon with a biscuit. For once she didn’t have morning sickness. She didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not.
“Is he out there already, Sister?” asked Nina. “I’m thinking he carefully planned for this hunt and set out before dawn. I’m hoping that my walking most of the night gave me a four-hour lead. So, what am I waiting for?”
She sighed, exhaling a vapor trail. Yes, she was tired, but that wasn’t it. She was afraid. From here on she would be going into the unknown.
It seemed the right time for gallows humor. “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” she said.
“And Baer,” she added.
He was enough reason for her to not linger. She packed up and started walking; the snow crunched under her snowshoes. At least it would be hard for him to sneak up on her.
The extreme cold had made the snow exceedingly dry, and whenever the wind kicked up, it swirled the powdery snow and ice crystals into the air, making it difficult for her to see. At the moment there wasn’t much wind, but that could change at any moment.
Fog obscured the day’s light. Nina hoped it would burn away, but seeing as it was well below zero, she wondered if there was enough sun to burn away anything other than hope. The haze was such that she could barely make out Mt. McKinley. If it hadn’t been the highest peak in North America, it wouldn’t have even been visible.
“There it is,” she said. “You referenced McKinley on some of your maps. You thought it was hundreds of miles to the southeast. But I have a different goal. If your accounting is right and your map drawing is accurate, my goal is fewer than ten miles off. Now I’ve got to try to get there while it’s still light. That’s a lot of walking in these conditions.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve studied your maps. I know the Tanana River is to the north and the Katishna River is to the east. And you referenced such spots as the Muddy River, Moose Creek, Lake Minchumina, and Geskakmina Lake, even though you never visited those places. All you had was Baer’s accounts of them.
“But you did spend time at today’s destination. And from what you drew, the way seems straightforward. All I have to do is travel west to Moosejaw Lake, and then a mile beyond that is Panhandle Pond, and from there I need to follow Sourdough Creek north. Easy-peasy, right?” she said, trying to convince herself.
Nina looked around and shuddered, from the cold or from the desolation around her.
“I’ve been running my whole life,” she said. “I wonder if that’s some kind of metaphor.”
She laughed. “Quite a strange time to be getting philosophical, isn’t it? I’m walking across an icy desert with a monster closing in on me, and I’m being introspective.” She adjusted the backpack on her shoulders. “If I survive, I wonder how Terrence will react when he sees me. His family wasn’t convinced I was Donnelly material before, so what will they say now? I’m sure they’ll say I should put everything behind me and not look back. But what would be the point of my having lived through all of this to not remember it?”
She thought about that for a moment. “I remember the old me, and I wonder about that person. I have changed. I am not the person I was anymore. And I think that’s a good thing. That person I used to be had just about everything she could want, except the awareness to know it.”
Nina found herself laughing, probably more out of tiredness than anything else. It wasn’t as if she’d been visited by her own version of the ghost of Jacob Marley. But her abduction had certainly given her time to think.
“When I became engaged to Terrence, all those magazines wrote about my so-called storybook life. No one saw this chapter coming. Woman proposes and God disposes. Woman plans and God laughs. I guess God must have thought I was in need of humbling. But I’m being silly, Sister. The same thing happened to you. Neither one of us did anything wrong.”
Nina stopped talking. It hurt to talk. The air was so cold it even hurt to breathe.
Weather conditions worsened during the day, makin
g it harder not only for Nina to walk, but to see. The wind had picked up, pushing around the ice crystals and snow. A creeping fog made visibility that much worse. It had gotten to the point where taking a step was a guessing game, and Nina felt like a toddler trying to learn how to walk. Not being able to see the ground in front of her threw her off-balance. Luckily for her, the whiteout conditions were intermittent. She could see one minute, but not the next.
But what if the whiteout conditions worsened to the point where she couldn’t see at all?
As she kept walking, Nina remembered the various pieces of advice offered by her high school and college running coaches. Each had their favorite sayings, and Nina heard their voices in her ear.
Push through the pain.
Oh, I am pushing. But pain is pushing back.
You can always give more.
I am trying. I am trying.
Pain is temporary.
But when will it stop? Every step hurts.
One step at a time.
Why is it that drunks were told the same thing?
A winner runs through it.
Yes, especially when second place is death. The only question is whose?
Nina looked behind her. She saw nothing to indicate Baer was coming after her, but that little voice said he was catching up.
A lump constricted her throat. For the past hour, it had been growing. It was the kind of lump you felt when you cried. It was the kind of lump you felt when you were afraid.
“I’m scared, Sister,” she said. “Am I lost? Shouldn’t I have come to one of your landmarks by now? With this fog and ice, I can’t even be sure I’m not walking in circles.”
She wondered if Elese had seen that movie about the young man who died in Alaska’s wilderness. Into the Wild. Ever since Jack London had started writing, it seemed that every Alaska story had to have Wild in its title. It was a sad movie. If she didn’t make it, would there be a sad movie about her and Elese?
“It’s hard not to think about death,” she said. “Somehow I’m afraid I missed Moosejaw Lake. On your map it looked like a large body of water. Could I be that disoriented? Should I turn around? But if I do that, won’t I be walking right into Baer’s hands?”
The growing lump in her throat felt like some huge goiter. It pressed on her throat and made swallowing difficult.
“I was so focused on plan A, I never thought about plan B.”
Nina forced herself to stay the path. This was a marathon. You ran the race. You found a way to finish. She tried to concentrate on running clichés, and not her doubts. Runners don’t get rained out; they get rained on. Tom Hanks had said there was no crying in baseball. Her coach had said, “There are no time-outs in running.” Her favorite running quote had been on a T-shirt she’d worn: My sport is your sport’s punishment.
It was then, through the white haze, that she caught a glimpse of what looked like a frozen lake. A moment later the body of water disappeared from view, and Nina wondered if she’d been seeing things. But then her lake reappeared, and the lump in her throat shrank enough for her to be able to swallow again. She’d found Moosejaw Lake, or at least hoped she had. It wasn’t as if there were any signs identifying the spot, and neither was there any jaw of a moose to be seen. But she felt certain this was where the X had been marked on her secret sister’s map.
“Thank you,” she whispered to Elese, and to the universe, and then began looking around to find the best spot to make camp. She settled on a stand of frosted spruce that offered partial shelter. First she made sure there were no spruce traps waiting under the tree. Then she took some of the spruce boughs and placed them under her. It took Nina longer to make a fire than usual. The near-whiteout conditions made her stop and start. It was almost like an enforced game of peekaboo, with her seeing one minute and not seeing the next.
When she had a roaring fire going, Nina felt better than she had since fleeing Baer’s cabin. She stretched her fingers and toes toward the flames; any closer and her flesh might have sizzled. There was something hypnotic about the fire, and Nina realized she was speaking to the flames:
“Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
“If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes . . .”
When she realized she was reciting from “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” she almost started to cry. Brainwashed, she thought hysterically. I’ve been brainwashed.
The fire hissed, objecting to the snow crystals heaved at it by the wind.
She drank as much water as she could, forced herself to eat more jerky, and warmed her limbs to the point where they weren’t completely frozen. Still, there wasn’t a part of her body that didn’t hurt.
“I could make camp here,” she said after a while. “If the monster wasn’t out there, I would say that was the safe thing to do. As much as I don’t want to leave this fire, I think I should stick with our plan. Even if the spring trap did wound him, that wouldn’t stop him, nor would this weather. He’s coming.”
She blinked a few times. Even my eyes hurt, she thought. Maybe life was imitating art, and her lashes were freezing like in those lines from Baer’s goddamn poem. But that wasn’t it.
The swirling ice crystals were irritating her eyes. Trying to see through the whiteout conditions had certainly caused some eyestrain. Her face was covered, but she didn’t have on the sunglasses Baer always wore. Could she be on the verge of becoming snow-blind?
Taking a stick, Nina sifted through the coals and ashes of the fire until she had a pile of soot. She’d seen athletes using eye black to reduce glare and decided to do the same. She rubbed the ashes all around her eyes. She had no mirror, but was sure she had to look like a raccoon.
Groaning, she got to her feet. Baer was coming. As long as there was light, she had to keep moving.
The lump in her throat had returned. Once again Nina was afraid she was lost.
“Am I going the right way, Sister? If Panhandle Pond was where it was supposed to be, I think I am. But the pond didn’t look like it was in the shape of a panhandle. Maybe it never was, though. Maybe it was named after a panhandler.
“Of course, winter masks what everything is supposed to look like. That’s what I told myself. But if I continued from there, this should be Sourdough Creek.”
She turned in a circle. This creek looked more like a river. Was everything just bigger in Alaska? On Elese’s map the creek appeared to run directly north. But as far as Nina could gauge, this creek seemed to meander in a more easterly route.
“You said Baer’s hunting shack was within sight of Sourdough Creek. But I could have walked right by it in the fog, with these goddamn whiteout conditions. Or I could have missed it while detouring around trees and snowbanks.
“And now the sun will soon be setting. This isn’t Sourdough Creek. It’s Shit Creek. And I’m up it without a paddle.”
Nina kept walking, her eyes searching for Baer’s elusive hunting shack. Elese had said it was a small, primitive structure. Maybe the wind had blown it down.
“It’s there,” said Nina, wanting to believe. “You wrote that it was his port in a storm, his insurance policy. You said it was closer to get to it from the trapline than to try and return to the cabin. That means it should be here.”
But what if it wasn’t here? Could she create a shelter to survive the cold night? Soon it would be dark, and it would stay that way for the next sixteen hours. She needed to find a good spot to make the best possible shelter. Before too long she’d be walking blindly.
Through the lump in her throat and the dying light and the wind-driven ice flakes, Nina strained to see. Her eyes hurt now more than they had all day.
Sometimes no matter how hard you look, what you want to see just isn’t there. It was like that when her cat disappeared. Callie was a sweet calico that chose Nina to be her favorite person in the world. All through middle school Callie had curled up and gone to bed with Nina.
And then her beloved cat had s
imply disappeared. She and Luke had put up posters, gone to the animal shelters, and organized search parties around their neighborhood.
For months Nina had kept looking for her cat. There were a few times when she was sure she heard her or glimpsed her from the corner of her eye. But Callie never came home. It was likely that some predator, probably a coyote, had struck.
How she had looked for that cat! Nina had wanted a miracle. That hadn’t happened, or at least not really. It was only in one of her dreams that Nina reunited with Callie. “I looked everywhere for you,” she told her cat.
Now she saw something. Not more than twenty-five yards away, she could just make out Baer’s hunting shack. All of these years later, it felt as if she had finally found her beloved Callie.
The emergency provisions were scant, but to Nina they seemed heaven-sent. There was some pasta and a few pounds of black beans and lentils. For seasoning there was salt. All of the food was sealed in plastic bags, stored in a vermin-proof plastic container, and put away in a crate.
But Nina hadn’t traveled to the hunting shack in the hopes of finding food. She was there for something else, something that wasn’t immediately visible.
“You saw it, Sister,” Nina said. “You wrote about it. You saw him cleaning it. It’s still here, isn’t it? It has to be here. It’s my only chance to even the odds.”
Elese had described the gun and this hunting shack as Baer’s insurance.
“But he wouldn’t leave it out in the open, even in this remote place, would he? He’d be afraid that in the summertime, some hunter might stumble upon this shack.”
The structure was about sixty square feet. It wasn’t even sparsely furnished. There were no tables, chairs, or beds. The shack was empty, save for a portable woodstove made from a thirty-gallon steel drum. The woodstove was supported by a tripod arrangement of wooden legs wrapped in wire. The opening at the top was a hole about six inches in diameter, where you would rest a pan or pot. From what Nina could determine, the fuel was placed in the bottom of the drum.
