When darkness had fallen, mother and son leaned wordlessly into the fire, their gnawing hunger hunkered conspicuously between them like a physical presence. Somewhere in the distance, under cover of the moonless night, the wolves were yelping and baying, letting their own hunger be known, as N’ka fed more sticks to the fire and tried to rally some optimism.
“Someday the struggle will be over,” he said, as if he actually had any insight into the cruel machinations of this world, let alone any control over it.
N’ka understood that if he was to lead effectively, to guide them responsibly to safety, he mustn’t betray the full depth of his doubts, though he knew, too, that his over-confidence could prove to be their folly. The foundation of N’ka’s certainty was beginning to show cracks, and more troubling still, it seemed that fear was starting to seep through those cracks.
They’d lost track entirely of the others onto whom N’ka had pinned all their hopes. The little girl was gone like an apparition, and with her the promise of belonging. N’ka had only the vaguest of idea where he was leading them. But the landscape did appear to be getting greener; N’ka was sure he was not imagining that. The shrubs and scrubby vegetation at the edge of the ice seemed to be growing denser. The trees, though still scattered and few, seemed to be growing heartier, their trunks thicker and their canopies fuller. N’ka looked for reason to hope in every exposed rock, every sliver of green.
That night he dreamed that the sky and the ice were as one vast and seamless space. N’ka found himself alone amidst a boundless nothingness. He had no visible form, nothing by which to differentiate himself from the endless iteration of sky. There was no amplitude to define his position. He did not know if he was moving, or if he still existed within the space. He did not know if anyone or anything else existed in this place.
In this dream, N’ka felt lost, adrift in a meaningless eternity. He yearned desperately for something perceptible, for anything or anyone, a sound, a movement, the tiniest spot of color.
Abruptly, the stillness gave way to a deafening disturbance, like the grinding retreat of glacial ice, slow and steady, through mountain rock. A crack opened in the nothingness, as a zipper-like tear formed in the fabric of the sky.
And then, silence again. The space was no longer seamless. There was now depth by which to navigate. Cautiously, N’ka’s formless self approached the breach, a sliver of pale blue sky, and slipped through the breach.
When he arrived on the other side, N’ka occupied his human form once more. The world around him was verdant and swimming with life. Trees of unimaginable size reached toward the sky. Strange creatures, never imagined, hoofed and horned and winged, populated his dream world.
N’ka found himself in this new world, standing on the banks of a river that was somehow itself a creature, with quivering silver ribbons running just beneath its surface.
S’tka awakened at sunrise, with N’ka still snoring fitfully beside her. Sunrise was a bit of a misnomer, since the dawn was shrouded in the same inexorable fog that had obscured much of their travels. The fire was all but dead. Her bones were all but completely numb, her blood running thick and slow through her veins. Crystals of ice had formed in her eyebrows. Certainly they could not last much longer under these conditions. How many more hopeless dawns could she endure before her spirit and her body quit on her?
When S’tka attempted to move in order to set about reviving the fire, she found that she was so stiff that she could not even manage to assume a sitting position. It was as though she was truly frozen, like old O’qu’a, when they found his body, pale blue and stiff as wood, in a field of snow.
Too weak to budge, S’tka lay helplessly at the edge of the smoldering embers, waiting for N’ka to awaken.
Somewhere deep in the cloak of fog, maybe a mile off, maybe less, she could hear the restless yammering and yipping of a wolf pack.
When N’ka finally stirred from sleep, S’tka immediately solicited his help getting up.
“Here we go again,” she said.
But even with N’ka’s assistance, she still hadn’t the strength to stand, let alone walk across the frozen wilderness for untold miles.
A dark pall seized them both as the realization took hold. She could go no farther on her own power. N’ka fed the fire, taking inventory of the grim possibilities.
“Leave me,” she said once more, reading his mind.
“Shush,” he said, furrowing his brow in concentration as he scoured the fire for answers.
“You can come back for me.”
This time N’ka did not even offer a reply. Instead he stared intently at the lapping flames, as though he could coax some answer from their warmth. After a moment, a possible solution presented itself and N’ka immediately set to work. The stunted stand of spruce proved to be a saving grace, as N’ka constructed the crudest of sledges from limbs gathered and claimed. Lashed together with strips of hide, the carrier was surprisingly sturdy, and should be sufficient for sledding his ailing mother over the ice. Though the endeavor cost them two hours of valuable light, the effort allowed them to proceed, albeit slowly, over the ice.
As the fog began to lift, N’ka rolled the dead weight of his mother onto the contraption and covered her in a mound of piebald hides.
“Leave me in peace,” she pleaded.
“This is not peace,” he said, even as the restless wolves repined somewhere in the distance.
“I will only hold you back,” she said.
“So be it,” he said.
He took hold of the crude leather reins, fashioned from strips of hide, and began conveying her ponderously over the ice.
Today was the day, he told himself. Today their journey would end, for better or for worse.
No Quit
By the dawn of the new year, the winter landscape had lost its cheer, and the bruised sky pushed down upon them, turning the powder to ice, while the frigid wind from the north howled up the canyon to savage their encampment on the plateau. Once again their food stores had dwindled to practically nothing. The sallowness of Bella’s cheeks was a daily reminder to Dave that circumstances were now more dire than ever. Town was all but inaccessible in these conditions, and the game had months ago fled the higher elevations, while the salmon run, not the bonanza Dave had hoped for, had petered out in the middle of December. Lately, all Dave had managed to pull out of the river was a few measly cutthroat, hardly enough to sustain them through the heart of winter.
At night, huddled in their dreary cavern in a puddle of lantern light, Dave and Bella heard the wind whistling through cracks in the rock, as it roared past the mouth of the cave. And when the icy squalls finally relented, a deathly, frozen silence fell upon the high country. Not so much as the restless stirring of a chipmunk or the trilling of a marmot broke the stillness. The little creek east of the bluff froze solid. The path to the pit toilet was a skating rink. The whole world was ice.
What firewood remained was mostly green. At the risk of his fingers, Dave split the wedges as thin as humanly possible, but they still resisted the flame. With little to eat, and little to warm them, and spring still months off, something had to give. For the first time since they began their life in the wilds, Dave began to entertain the possibility that he was beat. Everybody had been right: Jerome, Travis, Paulson. The mountains were no place for a man and a little girl in winter.
Still, Dave simply didn’t have the quit in him, and never had, not even in the fourth quarter against Mount Vernon, so gassed from playing both sides of the ball that he was sure he didn’t have another snap left in him, and not when he was flat on his back in the desert, paralyzed by his own apathy as the cries of his brothers reached his ears. He always found a way, if not a reason, to keep going. He never abandoned the cause.
And so he awoke at dawn one still morning, and in a flurry of industry he split and stacked and shoveled. He built a fire, and warmed the broth, and doled out the last stringy shreds of salmon jerky. Then, donning his snowsho
es and retrieving his pack, and the .458, freshly oiled, Dave committed himself to a hunt that was bound to be fruitless, though he had no choice but to convince Bella and himself otherwise.
“I’m going after game,” he said to Bella.
“Can I go?”
“No, baby, you’ve got to stay here and guard the camp.”
“Guard it from what?” she said. “You’re just saying it that way to make it seem like it’s a real job.”
“Baby, please.”
Bella crossed her arms and stared iinto the flames.
“Same old story,” she grumbled.
“Now, c’mon, sweetie,” he said. “We’re a team. We depend on each other. I’ll be back before dark, okay?”
Bella continued to stare sullenly into the coals.
“Okay?” he said, once more.
“Fine,” she said, spitting into the fire.
Poor kid, thought Dave as he began descending the face of the bluff. Ought to have let her come along, though God knew it could only diminish the already astronomical odds of finding any game this late in the season. He’d have to go clear to the bottom of the basin to have any luck at all.
Halfway down the face of the bluff, Dave lost his purchase on the frozen hillside, and began sliding down the incline, his heart beating furiously, before he finally managed to stop himself with the drag of his snowshoes. Dusting himself off, he tramped through the deep snow of the meadow, then proceeded ponderously up and over the hump, short of breath by the time he descended the leeward side and dove down into the upper river valley.
When he finally reached the east bank an hour later, he progressed downriver through the canyon toward the bottomlands, where, in another twenty minutes he emerged in a wide, snow-covered pasture at the foot of the basin. Here, to his disbelief, he picked up a group of tracks that numbered at least two deer, possibly three. He began pursuing the tracks north until they disappeared into the wooded fringe at the base of the hillside. Ducking into the forest, Dave wended his way up the incline, between the trees, trampling fern and salal. The snow was shallow beneath the canopy, and the tracks were nowhere to be seen.
Dave was discouraged by the time he crested the hill, and the terrain dipped down toward a narrow swale. No sooner had he begun to ease down the incline when a sudden movement stopped his heart. Not thirty yards to the north, frozen in their tracks, Dave spotted a doe and two yearlings. Such good fortune defied reason. After luckless seasons of endeavor and unrewarded patience, weeks spent squatting motionless in the meadow, whole days spent lying in wait amongst the tall grass, here, at this desperate hour, Dave had somehow bumbled into his deliverance in this seemingly lifeless frozen hinterland.
Deliberately, he crept forward so as not to startle the animals, until he was within fifteen yards of the nearest fawn. It would probably take a headshot at this distance, even with the .458. Breathlessly he leveled the barrel and held the fawn steady in his sight, until he quieted his heartbeat to a faint pulse. When he pulled the trigger, the report shattered the chill silence, echoing through the basin with a whip-like crack. The yearling dropped instantly, as the mother and the other fawn scattered up the wooded incline in a ruckus of hooves.
Dave scrambled through the understory to his kill, where he set the rifle aside and unburdened himself of his pack, then dropped to his knees and set his gear out beside him. With one long incision up the belly, he began dressing the carcass, working quickly and efficiently through the paunch, and dredging the organs out through the windpipe. When the cavity was clean and patted dry, Dave wrapped the carcass in the big, green tarp, and immediately began the long journey back to the bluff.
The going was slow, as Dave dragged the hundred-pound tarp up and out of the gulley, then through the cluttered forest with its countless snags and uneven ground. The wide pasture ahead granted him a half-mile reprieve, but soon he was fighting his way up the canyon over uneven terrain. Despite his exhaustion, Dave’s heart thrilled at this miraculous good fortune, his mouth watered at the prospect of a steak, his stomach turning somersaults in anticipation.
“Hahaha, yes!” he cried aloud, letting go the tarp with one hand to pump a fist in the air. “Goddamn right!”
He paused to look up and over the first range, with its wedge-shaped valleys, to the rock-studded ridge running north-to-south like the spine of a dragon, five thousand feet above. It was truly immense, this wilderness, its breadth and grandeur almost impossible to conceive. It could crush your fortunes and bury your body and erase you for all time. It seemed to care little for the life that dared to populate it, yet it was not entirely heartless.
How pleased Bella would be, the poor thing, to gorge herself on fresh meat! The little fawn had saved them; it represented a new beginning for Dave and Bella, a harbinger of prosperity to come. They would no longer freeze, or starve, nor hunker in despair. From now on they would own the winter, they would beat the frozen world into submission. These were the thoughts that warmed Dave’s blood and hastened his progress through the canyon and over the hump, and across the meadow to the foot of the bluff.
Snags
Bella passed the morning mindlessly out on the bluff, stirring the fire and petting the cats, moving fluidly between her worlds. Around noon, she took to scanning the canyon for the prospect of her dad’s return, hopeful that any moment he would crest the hump, triumphantly dragging his kill.
But he did not appear.
By afternoon, she began to worry. What if he’d lost his way again, without her to right his course this time? What if he was injured, or worse? Her anxiety steadily gained momentum as the day wore on. At least a dozen times she called out to him, only to have her own voice echo back through the canyon. She debated going after him but deemed it wiser to stay put as he’d instructed her. Such was her distraction late in the afternoon that she could no longer seek refuge in the otherness. She stationed herself once more at the edge of the bluff and surveyed the canyon obsessively.
Finally, a half-hour before sunset, she spotted him, plodding across the meadow, just as she had hoped, dragging the hump of his green tarp, trailing a swath of blood through the snow.
“Daddy!” she called out as he neared the bottom of the bluff.
He waved to her and she could see him smiling from a hundred yards away.
He did it. Of course, he did. How could she ever have doubted him, when he had yet to fail her?
From the lip of the bluff, she watched on eagerly as he began his ascent, hugging the snowy hillside as he strained to haul the cumbersome tarp up after him, cussing frequently beneath his breath.
“What if we tie a rope on it,” she called down to him.
“Haven’t got enough rope,” he managed between grunts.
Halfway up, he halted his progress momentarily to re-gather his strength.
“Talk about heavy,” he called up to Bella. “I hope you’re hungry, baby. We should be eating good for weeks.”
Before Bella could answer him, everything went suddenly wrong. Bella watched on helplessly as her dad lost his footing, and instantly began a rapid slide down the face of the bluff. Letting go of the tarp, he fumbled desperately with his arms and legs to stop himself as he picked up speed.
“Daddy!” she hollered.
Twenty feet from the bottom, his slide came to an abrupt stop when his snowshoe snagged a rock, and his downhill momentum catapulted him backward, head-over-heels, to the bottom of the embankment. He landed with a dull thud on the snowy ground, not twenty feet from the twisted deer carcass, which had been thrown clear of the tarp. There he lay perfectly still, his right leg jutting out at an impossible angle, as the agitated snow settled back to earth around him.
With little thought of her own peril, Bella clambered crabwise down the hillside without incident, where she found her dad conscious but dazed, his face covered with cuts and scraped raw on one side. Below his right knee it looked as though the bone had been sheared in half, with one bloody end jutting out thro
ugh a gash of bloody flesh and muscle. Already the tissue was discolored. The sight of it caused Bella to retch.
“How bad is it, baby?” he said calmly.
“Really bad, I think,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t worry. It’s not as bad as it looks, okay? It doesn’t hurt much. But Daddy’s gonna need your help.”
“What do I do, Daddy? I don’t know what to do!”
“Stay calm, baby, that’s the first thing. Do some star breaths.”
Bella inhaled deeply through her nose, held her breath for a beat, then exhaled slowly.
“That’s it, baby, again.”
Bella repeated the sequence three times, until she felt her tummy begin to soften and her shoulders slacken.
“There you go,” he said. “Now, baby, first I’m gonna need you to wrestle this pack off my back so I can lay down flat. Try not to move me too much, okay?”
Getting the strap over the exposed arm was not difficult. It was the arm pinned under him that was tough. But after a few minutes she managed to get the pack free of his body, and helped him to lie down flat.
“Now, I’m gonna need you to prop Daddy’s head up so I can see, okay? I want you to put your hands under Daddy’s head and lift it up just a little.”
“Daddy, I should go for help.”
“No, baby, it’s gonna be dark soon. We gotta stay right here. I’m not gonna be able to move just yet, baby. I’m gonna need you to bring me some blankets, can you do that?”
Bella nodded.
“And some water.”
Again Bella nodded, even as her chin began to quiver.
“Baby, don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s gonna be okay. We just need to stay calm.”
“Okay,” she said, fighting back the tears.
“Be careful going up and down that hill, it’s really slick, baby. Don’t try to carry everything at once. Just take it slow and steady, okay? Really dig your feet in.”
Legends of the North Cascades Page 25
