Brian's Winter

Chapter ONE

Fall came on with a softness, so that Brian didn’t realize what was in store — a hard-spined north woods winter — until it was nearly too late.

He had never thought he would be here this long. After the plane crash that marooned him in the wilderness he had lived day by day for fifty-four days, until he had found the survival pack in the plane. Then another thirty-five days through the northern summer, somehow living the same day-to-day pattern he had started just after the crash.

To be sure he was very busy. The emergency pack on the plane had given him a gun with fifty shells — a survival.22 rifle — a hunting knife with a compass in the handle, cooking pots and pans, a fork, spoon and knife, matches, two butane lighters, a sleeping bag and foam pad, a first-aid kit with scissors, a cap that said CESSNA, fishing line, lures, hooks and sinkers, and several packets of freeze-dried food. He tried to ration the food out but found it impossible, and within two weeks he had eaten it all, even the package of dried prunes — something he’d hated in his old life. They tasted like candy and were so good he ate the whole package in one sitting. The results were nearly as bad as when he’d glutted on the gut cherries when he first landed. His stomach tied in a knot and he spent more than an hour at his latrine hole.

In truth he felt relieved when the food was gone. It had softened him, made him want more and more, and he could tell that he was moving mentally away from the woods, his situation. He started to think in terms of the city again, of hamburgers and malts, and his dreams changed.

In the days, weeks and months since the plane had crashed he had dreamed many times. At first all the dreams had been of food — food he had eaten, food he wished he had eaten and food he wanted to eat. But as time progressed the food dreams seemed to phase out and he dreamed of other things — of friends, of his parents (always of their worry, how they wanted to see him; sometimes that they were back together) and more and more of girls. As with food he dreamed of girls he knew, girls he wished he had known and girls he wanted to know.

But with the supplies from the plane his dreams changed back to food and when it was gone — in what seemed a very short time — a kind of wanting hunger returned that he had not felt since the first week. For a week or two he was in torment, never satisfied; even when he had plenty of fish and rabbit or foolbird to eat he thought of the things he didn’t have. It somehow was never enough and he seemed to be angry all the time, so angry that he wasted a whole day just slamming things around and swearing at his luck.

When it finally ended — wore away, was more like it — he felt a great sense of relief. It was as if somebody he didn’t like had been visiting and had finally gone. It was then that he first really noted the cold.

Almost a whiff, something he could smell. He was hunting with the rifle when he sensed the change. He had awakened early, just before first light, and had decided to spend the entire day hunting and get maybe two or three foolbirds. He blew on the coals from the fire the night before until they glowed red, added some bits of dry grass, which burst into flame at once, and heated water in one of the aluminum pots that had come in the plane’s survival pack.

“Coffee,” he said, sipping the hot water. Not that he’d ever liked coffee, but something about having a hot liquid in the morning made the day easier to start — gave him time to think, plan his morning. As he sipped, the sun came up over the lake and for the hundredth time he noted how beautiful it was — mist rising, the new sun shining like gold.

He banked the fire carefully with dirt to keep the coals hot for later, picked up the rifle and moved into the woods.

He was, instantly, hunting.

All sounds, any movement went into him, filled his eyes, ears, mind so that he became part of it, and it was then that he noted the change.

A new coolness, a touch, a soft kiss on his cheek. It was the same air, the same sun, the same morning, but it was different, so changed that he stopped and raised his hand to his cheek and touched where the coolness had brushed him.

“Why is it different?” he whispered. “What smell…”

But it wasn’t a smell so much as a feeling, a newness in the air, a chill. There and gone, a brush of new-cool air on his cheek, and he should have known what it meant but just then he saw a rabbit and raised the little rifle, pulled the trigger and heard only a click. He recocked the bolt, made certain there was a cartridge in the chamber and aimed again — the rabbit had remained sitting all this time — and pulled the trigger once more. Click.

He cleared the barrel and turned the rifle up to the dawn light. At first he couldn’t see anything different. He had come to know the rifle well. Although he still didn’t like it much — the noise of the small gun seemed terribly out of place and scared game away — he had to admit it made the shooting of game easier, quicker. He had a limited number of shells and realized they would not last forever, but he still had come to depend on the rifle. Finally, as he pulled the bolt back to get the light down in the action, he saw it.

The firing pin — a raised part of the bolt — was broken cleanly away. Worse, it could not be repaired without special tools, which he did not have. That made the rifle worthless, at least as far as being a gun was concerned, and he swore and started back to the camp to get his bow and arrows and in the movement of things completely ignored the warning nature had put on his cheek just before he tried to shoot the rabbit.

In camp he set the rifle aside — it might have some use later as a tool — and picked up the bow.

He had come to depend too much on the rifle and for a moment the bow and handful of arrows felt unfamiliar to his hands. Before he was away from the camp he stopped and shot several times into a dirt hummock. The first shot went wide by two feet and he shook his head.

Focus, he thought, bring it back.

On the second shot he looked at the target, into the target, drew and held it for half a second — focusing all the while on the dirt hump — and when he released the arrow with a soft thrum he almost didn’t need to watch it fly into the center of the lump. He knew where the arrow would go, knew before he released it, knew almost before he drew it back.

From my brain, he thought, from my brain through my arm into the bow and through the string to the arrow it must all be one, and it is all one.

Three more times he shot and the arrows drove into the center of the hummock and then he was satisfied.

He left the camp again, put the sleeve quiver made from his old windbreaker on his right shoulder and walked slowly, watching, listening until he saw the curve of the back of a rabbit near a small clump of hazel brush.

It was too far for a shot and he quickly averted his eyes and froze for a moment before moving closer. He’d learned much from the woods, from mistakes, and one thing he’d come to know was that game spooked if it “felt” that it was known. It was always better to look away, move sideways instead of directly toward it, and he worked now to the left, letting the brush cover his movement until he was no more than fifteen feet away from the rabbit.

He drew the bow, aimed for the center of the rabbit and released when he felt the arrow would fly right.

It took the rabbit almost exactly in the center of its chest and drove through cleanly, killing it almost instantly.

They were not all this clean, the kills, and he was grateful. He had not grown accustomed to killing in spite of how much of it he had done.

He had learned this: Nothing that lived, nothing that walked or crawled or flew or swam or slithered or oozed — nothing, not one thing on God’s earth wanted to die. No matter what people thought or said about chickens or fish or cattle — they all wanted to live.

But Brian had become part of nature, had become a predator, a two-legged wolf. And there was a physics to it, a basic fact, almost a law: For a wolf to live, something else had to die. And for Brian to live it was the same. His body was a machine, it needed food, needed calories, and for that to happen something had to die. But sometimes it did not go well. Sometimes the arrow did not hit a vital place — did not hit the heart or lungs — and the rabbit or grouse died more slowly. The first time this had happened a kind of panic had taken him. He had shot a rabbit through the middle, the stomach, and it had tried to run and then had flopped around and he had shot the rabbit again and again, pounding arrows into the poor thing until it had at last died and when he’d cooked it and eaten it — as hunger forced him to do — the rabbit had tasted like wood and made him so sick he nearly threw up.

It was the only thing he had liked about the rifle. It killed quickly, caused a kind of wound shock that stunned as it killed.

But he was once more with the bow now and the silence of it brought him back to being more a part of the woods and he moved easily as he carried the dead rabbit back to camp.

It was afternoon by the time he had the fire rekindled and had set to cleaning the rabbit. Much had changed since he had retrieved the survival pack from the plane. He had a hunting knife now, and that made cleaning game much easier and faster.

He still wasted nothing. He used the knife to split the rabbit down the middle of the belly and skinned it carefully and then gutted it, using the curve of the knife to clean out the cavity. The head and lungs and intestines and stomach and liver he set aside for fish bait and food, as well as the heart. Then he cut the body up into pieces, carving it at the joints, and put them in a pot with fresh lake water, which he set on the fire to boil. He had found it best to boil everything. Initially he had cooked meat over the fire on a stick — something he had seen in movies and on television — but it was the wrong way to cook. The flame heated the meat and all the juices — all the vitamins and nutrients — dripped into the fire. Everything was wasted. But by boiling the meat he made a stew and when he drank the juice-broth he not only had a rich soup but something to sip as well.

He leaned back against the rock wall next to his shelter opening and took a minute to think while the meat cooked. It amazed him how little time he had to do that — sit and think. It seemed the longer he was in the woods — he had marked sixty-eight days counting this day — the more there was to do. Firewood was an endless chore of course — he kept the fire going whenever he was there and banked it when he left. And since he had burned all the easy wood, the wood close to camp, it took longer to bring wood in. But that wasn’t all of his life and it seemed that everything he had to do doubled.

He would get up, check his fishing lines, and remove any fish to store in his live-fish pool along the shore. Then see to airing out the sleeping bag and tend to his toilet and hunt for the day’s meat and clean it (if he made a kill — he often did not) and cook it and stretch the hide (if it was a rabbit) to dry and eat and bank the fire for night and another day was gone…

Just stopping to sit and think was a rare thing. At first he didn’t like it much because it brought memories and made him homesick, made him miss his mother and father and other life. But now he relished the time, and he spent it this day doing something he called “visiting.” He would pick somebody back in what he thought of as “the world” and sit and have an imaginary chat with him or her. Usually it was his mother or father, sometimes a friend and once or twice a movie or rock star.

Initially he worried that he might be going crazy. But then he decided if you felt you were crazy you weren’t really crazy because he had heard somewhere that crazy people didn’t know they were insane. So he went ahead and had the visits.

He sat now and visited with his mother. By looking across the lake and letting his eyes go out of focus he could visualize her face, hear her laugh, and he sat chatting in his mind with her, asking how she was doing, telling her of his life now, and before long he was surprised to see that the meat had cooked.

Brian took the pot off the flame to cool and went down to check the fishing line. There was a small panfish on it — it had blue gills — and he took it off the hook and put it in the holding pen with the others. It was his only “saved” food, the little pool of fish, and no matter how small the fish, he kept them all. He had learned that as well — food was everything. Just everything. And none of it, not even the smallest fish, could be let go.

When he arrived back at the shelter the meat and broth had cooled and he ate quickly. Flies had come when he gutted the rabbit and they stayed for dinner while he ate. He brushed them away as he ate the meat from the bones and drank the broth, a full quart. They followed him as he went back to the lake to clean the pot and only left him when there wasn’t a smell of food anywhere in the area.

He stacked wood for the night fire and made his bed by restacking the mattress of pine boughs and unrolling the sleeping bag and foam pad, and here he got another warning that he ignored. When he slid into the bag and turned so that he felt the heat from the fire on his face coming through the opening it did not feel uncomfortable. He snuggled down into the bag and felt glad for its warmth, and the thought that this was the first time he’d felt glad for heat this season — that it was growing colder — somehow eluded him.

He closed his eyes and went to sleep like a baby.

Chapter TWO

For two weeks the weather grew warmer and each day was more glorious than the one before. Hunting seemed to get better as well. Brian took foolbirds or rabbits every day and on one single day he took three foolbirds.

He ate everything and felt fat and lazy and one afternoon he actually lay in the sun. It was perhaps wrong to say he was happy. He spent too much time in loneliness for true happiness. But he found himself smiling as he worked around the camp and actually looked forward to bringing in wood in the soft afternoons just because it kept him out rummaging around in the woods.

He had made many friends — or at least acquaintances. Birds had taken on a special significance for him. At night the owls made their soft sounds, calling each other in almost ghostly hooonnes that scared him until he finally saw one call on a night when the moon was full and so bright it was almost like a cloudy day. He slept with their calls and before long would awaken if they didn’t call.

Before dawn, just as gray light began to filter through the trees, the day birds began to sing. They started slowly but before the gray had become light enough to see ten yards all the birds started to sing and Brian was brought out of sleep by what seemed to be thousands of singing birds.

At first it all seemed to be noise but as he learned and listened, he found them all to be different. Robins had an evening song and one they sang right before a rainstorm and another when the rain was done. Blue jays spent all their time complaining and swearing but they also warned him when something — anything — was moving in the woods. Ravens and crows were the same — scrawking and cawing their way through the trees.

It was all, Brian found, about territory. Everybody wanted to own a place to live, a place to hunt. Birds didn’t sing for fun, they sang to warn other birds to keep away — sang to tell them to stay out of their territory.

He had learned about property from the wolves. Several times he had seen a solitary wolf — a large male that came near the camp and studied the boy. The wolf did not seem to be afraid and did nothing to frighten Brian, and Brian even thought of him as a kind of friend.

The wolf seemed to come on a regular schedule, hunting, and Brian guessed that he ran a kind of circuit. At night while gazing at the fire Brian figured that if the wolf made five miles an hour and hunted ten hours a day, he must be traveling close to a hundred-mile loop.

After a month or so the wolf brought a friend, a smaller, younger male, and the second time they both came they stopped near Brian’s camp and while Brian watched they peed on a rotten stump, both going twice on the same spot.

Brian had read about wolves and seen films about them and knew that they “left sign,” using urine to mark their territory. He had also read — he thought in a book by Farley Mowat — that the wolves respected others’ territories as well as their own. As soon as they were well away from the old stump Brian went up and peed where they had left sign.

Five days later when they came through again Brian saw them stop, smell where he had gone and then spot the ground next to Brian’s spot, accepting his boundary.

Good, he thought. I own something now. I belong. And he had gone on with his life believing that the wolves and he had settled everything.

But wolf rules and Brian rules only applied to wolves and Brian.

Then the bear came.

Brian had come to know bears as well as he knew wolves or birds. They were usually alone — unless it was a female with cubs — and they were absolutely, totally devoted to eating. He had seen them several times while picking berries, raking the bushes with their teeth to pull the fruit off — and a goodly number of leaves as well, which they spit out before swallowing the berries — and, as with the wolves, they seemed to get along with him.

That is to say Brian would see them eating and he would move away and let them pick where they wanted while he found another location. It worked for the bears, he thought, smiling, and it worked for him, and this thinking evolved into what Brian thought of as an understanding between him and the bears: Since he left them alone, they would leave him alone.

Unfortunately the bears did not know that it was an agreement, and Brian was suffering under the misunderstanding that, as in some imaginary politically correct society, everything was working out.

All of this made him totally unprepared for the reality of the woods. To wit: Bears and wolves did what they wanted to do, and Brian had to fit in.

He was literally awakened to the facts one morning during the two-week warm spell. Brian had been sleeping soundly and woke to the clunking sound of metal on rock. His mind and ears were tuned to all the natural sounds around him and there was no sound in nature of metal on stone. It snapped him awake in midbreath.

He was sleeping with his head in the opening of the shelter and he had his face out and when he opened his eyes he saw what appeared to be a wall of black-brown fur directly in front of him.

He thought he might be dreaming and shook his head but it didn’t go away and he realized in the same moment that he was looking at the rear end of a bear. No, he thought with a clinical logic that surprised him — I am looking at the very large rear end of a very large bear.

The bear had come to Brian’s camp — smelling the gutsmell of the dead rabbit, and the cooking odor from the pot. The bear did not see it as Brian’s camp or territory. There was a food smell, it was hungry, it was time to eat.

It had found the pot and knife by the fire where Brian had left them and scooped them outside. Brian had washed them both in the lake when he finished eating, but the smell of food was still in the air. Working around the side of the opening, the bear had bumped the pan against a rock at the same moment that it had settled its rump in the entrance of Brian’s shelter.

Brian pulled back a foot. “Hey — get out of there!” he yelled, and kicked the bear in the rear.

He was not certain what he expected. Perhaps that the bear would turn and realize its mistake and then sheepishly trundle away. Or that the bear would just run off.

With no hesitation, not even the smallest part of a second’s delay, the bear turned and ripped the entire log side off the shelter with one sweep of a front paw and a moist “whouuuff” out of its nostrils.

Brian found himself looking up at the bear, turned now to look down on the boy, and with another snort the bear swung its left paw again and scooped Brian out of the hollow of the rock and flung him end over end for twenty feet. Then the bear slipped forward and used both front paws to pack Brian in a kind of ball and whap him down to the edge of the water, where he lay, dazed, thinking in some way that he was still back in the shelter.

The bear stopped and studied Brian for a long minute, then turned back to ransacking the camp, looking for where that delicious smell had come from. It sat back on its haunches and felt the air with its nostrils, located another faint odor stream and followed it down to the edge of the water where the fish pool lay. It dug in the water — not more than ten feet from where Brian now lay, trying to figure out if his arms and legs were still all attached to where they had been before — and pulled up the rabbit skull, still with bits of meat on it, and swallowed it whole. It dug around in the water again and found the guts and ate them and went back to rummaging around in the pool, and when nothing more could be found the bear looked once more at Brian, at the camp, and then walked away without looking back.

Other than some minor scratches where the bear’s claws had slightly scraped him — it was more a boxing action than a clawing one — Brian was in one piece. He was still jolted and confused about just exactly which end was up, but most of all he was grateful.

He knew that the bear could have done much more damage than it had. He had seen a bear tear a stump out of the ground like a giant tooth when it was looking for grubworms and ants. This bear could just as easily have killed him, and had actually held back.

But as the day progressed Brian found himself stiffening, and by the time he was ready for bed his whole body ached and he knew he would be covered with bruises from the encounter.

He would have to find some way to protect himself, some weapon. The fire worked well when it was burning, but it had burned down. His hatchet and knife would have done nothing more than make the bear really angry — something he did not like to think about — and his bow was good only for smaller game. He had never tried to shoot anything bigger than a foolbird or rabbit with it and doubted that the bow would push the arrow deep enough to do anything but — again — make the bear really mad.

He bundled in his bag that night, the end of the two weeks of warm weather. He kept putting wood on the fire, half afraid the bear would come back. All the while he tried to think of a solution.

But in reality, the bear was not his primary adversary. Nor was the wolf, nor any animal. Brian had become his own worst enemy because in all the business of hunting, fishing and surviving he had forgotten the primary rule: Always, always pay attention to what was happening. Everything in nature means something and he had missed the warnings that summer was ending, had in many ways already ended, and what was coming would be the most dangerous thing he had faced since the plane crash.

Chapter THREE

He decided he needed a stronger weapon, a larger bow. He thought of it as a war bow. He would need arrows tipped with some kind of sharpened head. He had been hunting with wood arrows with fire-hardened tips but all they did was make a hole; they didn’t provide any cutting action, which he felt would work best with a stronger bow.

He used a hardwood tree he found by the lake. It had straight branches with a slickish gray bark and seemed to have a snap to it that other woods didn’t hold. He spent one whole day cutting a long, straight piece of wood and skinning and shaping it with the hunting knife and his hatchet into a bow shape slightly longer than he was tall. He did not hurry but kept at it with a steady pace and by dark the bow was ready to dry.

Arrow shafts took two days in the sun to dry once they were stripped of their bark, and he thought the bow might take four or five. He took time to cut another straight limb and shape another bow, working by firelight into the night. It wouldn’t hurt to have two bows and if one broke he had a backup.

He had not hunted for three days now but had eaten well of foolbird and rabbit on his last hunt and he took time to take two fish from the pool and cook them before going to sleep, boiling them into a fish soup, which he drank-spooned-fingerpicked until the bones were clean.

That night it was cold. Cold enough so that the sleeping bag felt almost delicious, and just as he closed his eyes it came to him — all the signs, all the little nudges. The cold would get worse. Summer was over. He would not get rescued — he had finally given up on it and no longer listened or looked for planes — and he was going to get hit with a northern winter.

All of that came to him just as he started to doze and it snapped him awake and kept him awake until exhaustion finally made him sleep.

In the morning he awakened with the same feeling of urgency and spent the day cutting arrow shafts from the willows for his war bow and trying to reason out what he needed to do to get ready for the coming winter.

He had no warm clothing or footgear. The sleeping bag was a good one, though not a true winter bag. It was effective to perhaps twenty above, if used in a good shelter. But that was all he had, the sleeping bag, and he couldn’t spend all his time just lying in the bag. He would starve and die. He would have to continue hunting, eating, living.

He looked at the shelter with new eyes. He had repaired the damage the bear had done. He studied his home while stripping the bark from the two dozen arrow shafts he’d cut for the war bow.

Three sides were of rock and they were snug. But the side he had filled in with logs and limbs and branches was far from airtight — he could see through it in several places — and would have to be winterized. He could pack it with dead leaves or even cut strips of sod with the hatchet to fill it in. And make an insulated door by stuffing two woven frames full of leaves. The problem — well, he thought, smiling, one of about a thousand problems — was that he didn’t honestly know how cold it would get or how much snow there would be or what he could do to live. What would be available to hunt in the winter? He knew some things migrated but he wasn’t sure which things or if even rabbits came out — maybe they stayed inside brushpiles or caves all winter and slept. Also, would he have to have a fire inside the shelter to stay warm?

He shook his head and paused in scraping the bark off one of the shafts to look across the lake. Too much to know for right now, too much to do. In the trees on the other side of the lake the leaves were changing.

They must have been doing it for a week or more, he thought — why didn’t I see it? And now that he noted it he saw that in many other areas the leaves were changing as well; mostly gold, some shades of pink and red, scattered bits of color. And the sky over the lake was different as well. The soft summer clouds were gone and where it was blue it was a flat coppery blue and where the clouds were coming they were a slate gray — and they grew as he watched. Not in thunderheads as in the summer, towering and full of drama, but an almost ugly gray that was all one shade and expanded from the north to cover the sky as if pushed by a large hand. Even as he watched, the patch of blue he had seen at first was gone and all the sky was gray and he could smell rain. Again, not the rain of summer but a cooler, almost cold rain was coming and it made him shiver though it had not started yet.

He went back to his shaving on the arrow shafts, concentrating on the task at hand. Something else he had learned: Do what you can as you can. Trouble, problems, will come no matter what you do, and you must respond as they come.

And indeed, he was having enough trouble with the idea of a war bow. It was all well and good to say he would have a more powerful bow — in the hope that a better weapon would give him more protection — but making one, and the arrows, was harder than he had thought it would be.

It all came down to poking a hole in something to kill it, he thought. That’s what weapons were all about, whether it was a gun or a spear or an arrow. Something had to die for him to live and the way to kill it was by poking a hole in it to make it die. He grimaced.

But it was so. The hole had to be poked, the animal killed, and therein lay the difficulty with a war bow. It was one thing to poke a hole in a rabbit or a foolbird. They were small and thin-skinned. It was something else to think of doing it to a large animal.

Once he had shot at a porcupine up in a tree with his light bow, thinking that if he could bring it down and skin it — very carefully — he would get more meat and fat than he did off rabbits and foolbirds. He was amazed to see his arrow bounce harmlessly off the side of the porcupine. If he could not shoot a relatively small animal what could be done to kill or even hurt a larger one?

It was in the strength of the bow, he thought, and the type of arrow. The bow had to be so stiff it would drive the arrow much harder into a larger animal, to get deeper into a vital area, and the arrow had to have some way to cut through and make a larger hole.

The stiffer bow he thought he had already made — though he would have to wait and string it to make certain — but the arrows were a problem. He had stiffer shafts, to take the extra load of a stronger bow, but the points were something else again. He thought on them long and hard all that night while working on the shafts by the fire. He considered the bits of aluminum scrap from the skin of the plane, but they were too thin and soft.

There had been something, a place, some place that could help him and he couldn’t make it come to his mind until after he’d gone to bed and was lying looking at the glowing coals of the fire.

Pintner’s Sporting Goods Store. It was an old store that he sometimes passed on his way to school, run by an older man named Pintner who had a sign over the door that said he was “Anti-mall.” And the store reflected it. There was none of the glitter or modernness of a mall, just some funky shelves and guns and bows and some hockey gear and an old oil stove where unshaven men sat and talked about the old days and spit tobacco juice into old coffee cans.

Brian had not been in the store that many times but on one occasion he’d stopped there to see if Pintner sharpened ice skates and next to the door there’d been a large glass case with a collection of arrowheads arranged in a circle. He had stopped to study them and he had thought then that it was a beautiful collection of intricately carved points, all laid out on red velvet, and he did not then or later think of what they really were: tools for hunting.

Only now, lying in his bag, looking at them in his mind, did it hit him just exactly what they were: arrowheads. Tips for arrows to make them punch holes. Some very small, some large and wide, and all of stone and all with sharp edges.

Those people were the pros, he thought — the Native Americans who had made the points centuries before. They lived all the time as Brian was trying to live now and they had experimented for thousands of years to come up with the designs of the heads. Brian closed his eyes and tried to remember how they had looked.

When he had an image he smoothed a place in the dirt next to the fire and drew five outlines that he thought he remembered correctly and tried to make them roughly the same size as the originals in the collection.

Three were small and he ignored them. Two were quite a bit larger and these he studied in his mind pictures as well as in the lines in the dirt.

There could be only one reason for a larger arrowhead — to kill a larger animal. They worked that out, he thought. They found after thousands of years that a larger head killed a larger animal. All my research has been done.

Now, he thought, all I have to do is find a way to make stone arrowheads.

He searched his memory, what he had learned in school, seen on television, read in books, and nowhere could he find a picture of anybody saying how stone arrowheads were made.

Well then, start with what you know.

The arrowheads were made of stone. So find a stone that will work, he thought, and went to sleep thinking of all the places around the lake where he had seen stones.

In the morning he awakened famished, as if he hadn’t eaten for a week. There were only four fish left in the fish pool and none on the line — which bothered him — and he ate two of the larger fish to take the edge off his hunger.

He would have to hunt today and get meat and set the arrowhead problem aside. In midmorning, after cleaning the camp and trying to hide the pot inside his shelter in case the bear came back, he set off to the north.

In the months that he’d lived on the L-shaped lake and hunted the area, he’d come to know the surrounding region like a large yard. Except for predators, which ranged constantly, looking for food, most animals seemed to stay pretty much in the same location, and because they started there they tended to grow there. North about half a mile it was best for hunting rabbits. There was a large patch — as big as a football field — where an ancient fire had burned the trees off and left brush. Rabbits had hidden there from predators because they could escape into the thick brambles easily. Because they had come there and been able to live there they had increased — as rabbits do — and now there seemed to be rabbits wherever Brian looked in the patch. It was unusual for him to go there without getting several good shots and though he still often missed he had worked out a ratio of five to one: He seemed to get one rabbit for about every five shots on rabbits. The ratio was seven to one on foolbirds.

Although he had hit the last rabbit he shot at, he felt lucky, and he approached the brushy area with an arrow already nocked on the string.

Things never happened as he planned, however, and because he was concentrating on looking for rabbits he very nearly stepped on a foolbird. It blew up under his foot in a flash of leaves and feathers like a grenade detonating and flew off at a quartering angle away and to Brian’s left front.

Without thinking he raised the bow, drew and released the arrow and was absolutely flabbergasted to see it fly in a clean line, intersect the flight line of the foolbird and take it neatly through the center of its body.

It cartwheeled to the ground and Brian ran over to it. Though it looked dead, he broke its neck with a quick snap to make certain it was gone.

Incredible, he thought. If I lived to be a hundred and tried it a thousand more times I would never be able to do it again. Just a clean reflexive shot.

But more — he pulled the arrow out of the dead foolbird and wiped the blood off it and turned to walk back to camp with the same arrow on the string. He took five steps and a rabbit jumped out from a bush on his right and in one smooth action he dropped the dead bird, raised the bow, drew the arrow and released it and saw it take the rabbit through the chest at a flat run. It died before he could get to it and he picked it up. That night he cleaned them both and made a stew, boiling them together, and ate the meat and drank the broth until he was packed, full, his stomach rounded and bulging.

Two, he thought — two with the same arrow and both moving and both hit almost perfectly. He took the arrow from the rest of them and propped it in the corner. That, he thought, is my lucky arrow. In the same instant the word medicine came into his thought—It is my medicine arrow. He had not planned it, not meant to think the phrase, but it came and he knew it was right. It was not a religous idea so much as a way to believe in what he had done, and how he had done it, and from that day on he did not use the arrow again but put it on a small rock ledge. When things were bad he would look to the arrow on the ledge and think of how right it had been: one arrow, two kills, and a full belly all on one day.

That night before he went to sleep, as he lay in his shelter with the light from the fire coming through the opening, he took a stick of charcoal from the fire and drew what he had done on the rock wall above his bed. A stick figure with a bow shooting an arrow at two stick animals, one bird and one rabbit, and lines showing how the same arrow had taken both of them. When he was done he shaded in the animals and the figure of the boy with the charcoal to give them body, working in the flickering light. He wished he had some color to work in as well, to show feathers and fur and blood.

It was not until later, as he lay back just before full-belly contented sleep, that he remembered having seen some pictures in a magazine of the cave paintings in France. Old, he thought, they were the oldest art ever found, according to the article. Painted by ancient, by early man.

Brian burrowed down into the bag and closed his eyes, and the last thing he thought was to wonder if the ancient men who drew in the caves in France ever took two animals with the same arrow…

Chapter FOUR

It was all much harder than he had thought it was going to be — which, of course, might be said for Brian’s whole life since the plane crash. But in this case he had somewhere to start. He had made the lighter bow and had tried to make slightly heavier bows, and he thought that making a really powerful weapon would be simply like doubling the smaller ones.

It was more than double. Because everything was stronger, there were difficulties that would not have occurred to him.

Rain came on the third day of drying the heavy bows. Luckily, Brian thought, they had dried enough, and set them inside the shelter until the rain stopped.

Except that it didn’t stop. In the summer when it rained it might last half a day or even a full day, but then it cleared off and dried out. Even violent storms, like the tornado that had caught him and brought the plane up, were short-lived.

But this was fall, and fall rains were a whole new dimension in weather. It started to rain from a low, gray sky and it didn’t rain hard and it didn’t rain soft. It just… kept… raining. Brian almost went crazy with it. By the end of the first whole day it was all he could do to find dry wood to keep the fire going. By the end of the second day of constant drizzle he found himself looking at the sky hoping to see a hole, anything with bright light.

But it rained steadily for five days and while it rained it turned colder, so that by the fifth day Brian felt as if he were freezing. The only way he could find dry wood was by looking for dead logs that had hung up off the ground, and then by breaking limbs off beneath them where they weren’t quite as soaked as they were on top. By the time he got enough wood to burn for a few hours and keep the fire going against the rain he was so soaked that it took all the time the wood burned just to get him warm and dry enough to go out again to search for more wood.

The inside of his sleeping bag was damp at first, then flat wet, and finally as soaked from his body and the humidity as if it had been out in the open rain.

But still worse, with the rain he did not think he could hunt and so had no food. On the fourth day he found a four-pound northern pike on his fishline and he ate it at one sitting, saving the guts and head for bait.

But he got no more fish and by the sixth day, when it was clear that it wasn’t going to stop raining — he believed now that it would never stop raining — by the end of the sixth day he decided that he would simply have to live in cold rain for the rest of his life, and the morning of the seventh day he sat in his bag, looked outside and said:

“To hell with it. I’m going hunting.”

And he did. He strung his bow and took his arrows — after touching his medicine arrow for luck — and in a tattered T-shirt with the hunting knife at his belt he set off into the rain.

Hunting took his mind off the cold and he found to his immense surprise that hunting was better during a rain than it was in clear weather. Game could hole up for a day or two of bad weather but animals were governed by the same physics as Brian, and rain or no rain, cold or no cold, they had to come out and eat.

He took a foolbird not forty feet from the camp and got four shots at two different rabbits within another twenty yards. He missed the rabbits but was satisfied with the foolbird and went back to build up the sputtering fire one more time and made a hot stew — including the heart and liver and a tough muscle he thought must be the gizzard, which he had come to like — and ate it all before falling sound asleep in his wet bag.

He slept hard, in spite of being cold and damp, but in the middle of the night he opened his eyes, instantly awake, and waited for his eyes and mind to tell him what had awakened him.

No noise, nothing, and then he realized that it had stopped. There was no rain falling and he peeked out of the shelter to see a night sky filled with stars and a sliver of a moon and he looked up at them and said softly, “Thank you,” and went back to sleep.

In the morning it was cold, truly cold. He saw his breath in the dawn sunlight coming through the opening and when he looked outside he saw a ring of ice four or five feet out from the edge of the lake all around the shore.

He stood up out of the bag, shivering, and got the fire going until it blazed merrily and then sat close to it, watching the sun come up while he warmed himself. When he had stopped shivering he brought his sleeping bag outside and spread it in the sunlight away from the fire so that no sparks would hit it and left it there to dry.

Within an hour the temperature was in the comfort range and Brian stretched and let the sun cook his bones for a few minutes. The ground was still damp but he sat on a dry rock and looked at the blue sky and felt the hot sun and it was as if the days and days of rain had never happened. A kind of lethargy came over him and he just wanted to sit in the sun and try to forget the last week. He closed his eyes and dozed for a few minutes but a new sound, high and almost cackling, cut into his doze and he opened his eyes to see a flock of geese high above heading south, migrating.

It was a reminder — it did not get things done, sitting — and in the back of his mind was the thought that what he had just had was a warning. A week of cold rain to show him how poor he was, how completely unready he was for what he knew now was coming. And today the geese to cap it.

He must work now, work hard or he would not make it. No matter how nice the weather might be he knew he had no time left.

First the shelter. He had to make the shelter coldproof and rainproof. That meant sealing the fire inside and closing the door in some way, but he thought the smoke would drive him out.

Still, he thought, they did it. The people who came before him had tents and tipis and caves and they did not have stoves. So how did they do it?

He took kindling into the shelter and made a small fire, and closed off the opening to see what would happen. As he had predicted, the smoke quickly filled the small enclosure and drove him coughing and spitting out into the air.

He had to let the smoke out. They must have known a way — what did they do? Tipis just let it come out the top through a hole. He’d seen that in movies, old Westerns on television.

Brian went to where his wall met the rock and made a hole about a foot across just above where he had made the fire, then tried it all again.

This time when he closed the door and put some sticks on the fire it started to smoke again but as the heat developed it rose and carried a small draft through the hole in the ceiling. There was a moment of smoke; then it all magically cleared and Brian was sitting in a snug little hut with a fire warming his face. Clearly it would take only a small blaze to keep the little shelter warm, which meant less wood would be required.

The side of the shelter was still far from airtight but about this Brian knew exactly what to do. He had spent one whole day watching a family of beaver mix mud and sticks to make a watertight dam. He spent three hours bringing up double armfuls of fresh mud from the lake to pack into the low wall with sticks and leaves. When he was done he covered it with another layer of brush to protect the mud and when it dried by nightfall he had a truly weathertight shelter. He still had to seal the door but that night he sat with a fire warming the inside of his home and knew that as long as he had wood — and he was living in the middle of a forest — he would stay warm no matter what kind of weather came. He slept so soundly that the bear could have come in again and torn the place apart and he would not have known it.

In the morning he mudded the door and set it aside to dry and used more mud to make a seal on the wall, smooth and tight. Then he set back to work on the arrowhead problem.

He went to the lakeshore and looked for stones that would make an arrowhead. There were rocks everywhere and he must have looked at a hundred, turning them this way and that, tapping them against each other. None of them worked or fit or seemed right and he stopped and thought again about the arrowhead collection.

They weren’t just stones in the shape of arrowheads. They had been worked, chiseled someway from larger stones to get the shape and edge. But what kind of stone and how? Wasn’t it some special type of rock, something that would flake off in sharp edges?

He had his hatchet on his belt and went back to the shore and started hitting rocks with the flat side of the hatchet. They just shattered and didn’t make any kind of sharp point. One rock chipped off a flake about three inches long and in the right shape but when he picked up the flake and tapped it with the back of the hatchet it fell into a dozen unusable pieces.

Flint. There, the word came to him. They weren’t just arrowheads, they were flint arrowheads — maybe they had to be flint to chip right.

So all he had to do was find some flint.

He went back to the lakeshore and looked at the rock supply again, smashing rocks with the back of the hatchet to see if any of them were made of flint. In truth, he didn’t really know what to look for, except that he remembered that flint and steel would spark when they hit.

He had smashed four or five more rocks looking for sparks when it came to him. There was a rock embedded in the wall of his shelter. He had thrown his hatchet at the porcupine the night he got stuck in the leg and the hatchet had showered sparks and led him to make fire.

It was there, in the fire rock. He had forgotten the rock because there had been matches and lighters in the survival pack he’d retrieved from the plane, and he hadn’t had to use the rock again.

He went and looked at it for the first time in more than a month, studied it. It was a dark rock; it had depth and seemed to have fracture lines or flaws in it. He struck it with the hatchet and smiled when he saw sparks, remembering the night the porcupine had come. But the rock didn’t shatter or flake. He looked at it from a different angle and saw a small ridge, little more than a line, and this time he aimed carefully and struck the line with the blunt corner of the hatchet, using a sharp tap with a little more muscle.

This time it cracked and a flake as wide as two fingers and three inches long fell to the ground beneath the rock.

He picked it up.

“Ouch!” He dropped it. The edge was as sharp as a razor and it cut his finger slightly. He sucked the blood away and picked the flake up more carefully, and turned it to the light. It had a slightly oval shape, pointed on one end and rounded on the other. Both sides leading down to the point were so sharp they would shave hair off the back of his arm.

All it needed to make it a true arrowhead was a pair of notches, one on either side of the rounded end. He put the flake on a flat rock and held it in place with his foot, vising it down tightly, while he chipped away at the notch positions with the tip of his hunting knife. He started with too big a piece and it broke the whole tip of the oval off and left the flake with a flat rear end. From then on he took tiny chips, each no bigger than the head of a pin, until he had an arrowhead that resembled those in the collection. It was not finished as well as the ancients had finished theirs, but it was sharp and tapered the right way and had a notch for tying it onto the shaft.

He took one of the shafts for the war bow arrows and split the grain on the end with the knife. He worked the point back into the split so that the notch was slightly recessed into the wood.

He had nothing with which to tie it into position and was casting around for a piece of string — nonexistent except for the original bowstring from his first bow or he would have used it long ago — when he saw the tree with the rabbit skins.

Whenever he took a rabbit he skinned it carefully and stretched the skin on the sides of an oak, holding it with wooden pegs driven into the bark until it was dry. He had not found a use for the skins yet but he hated to waste anything and thought something might come along. When they dried they were like thick paper with hair on one side, dry and crinkly and easy to tear. But the last hide he’d put up during the rain had not dried yet and he took it off the tree. Still damp, the hide had a strength to it and might make a kind of cord. He used the knife to cut strips from the rabbit skin and used one of the rawhide strips to tightly wrap and tie the point onto the split shaft.

When he was finished it seemed to be tight enough, and he had heard that rawhide shrinks when it dries, so that might make it even better. Of course the hair was still on the skin and stuck out all around and made the arrow look like a pom-pom, but a quick pass over the flames in the fire pit burned all the hair off, and when he was done he trimmed the ends of the lacing and it looked good.

“Almost professional.” He set the shaft aside and went back to the fire rock — he was already thinking of it as the arrow stone — and scrutinized it once more. Where he had broken the flake off it left two more edges, lines that looked the same as the first one, and he used the back of the hatchet to strike them the way he’d hit the first one.

Two more flakes came off, almost identical to the first one, and left two more lines. When he tapped those it happened again, and again until he had nine flake-points. He took them back to his work rock and clamped them with his foot and worked tie-notches into the shanks with the point of his knife and fitted them to the shafts with green rabbit hide and all of this, rock to points, in one day.

Just as bad things could snowball, Brian found that good things could come fast as well. While he was working with the rabbit skin in the cool evening he turned it to get a better angle and the hair brushed his hand and felt warm and he realized he’d found a way to stay warm.

He had fifteen dried skins and he brought them into the shelter at dark. He had not eaten again but the hunger was not as bad now because he was excited. Working in the firelight, he trimmed the hides to make them clean-edged and rectangular. He used one hide for lacing, cutting thin strips off the edge with his knife — the first-aid scissors were too small to help — and started lacing the others together to form a large rectangle. It took some time because he had no needle and used the point of the knife to punch a small hole through the sides of the hides and then a sharpened twig to push the lacing through. Also the laces weren’t long and he could only “sew” seven or eight inches before he had to tie it off and use a new lace and by the time he had four hides sewn together he could feel exhaustion taking him down. He crawled into his bag and slept hard and didn’t awaken until well after dawn.

Hunger awakened with him and he knew he had to hunt before he worked more on the hides so he took the light bow and arrows and went to the foolbird area. This time luck wasn’t with him and he missed three birds before he got a shot at a rabbit that hit. He cleaned it and used the green hide for lacing and started sewing again while his stew cooked and before he knew it he was back in the shelter again, working in the light from the fire, his stomach full and his fingers flying. But this time before he fell asleep he had finished sewing the rabbit skins into a rectangle roughly two feet wide by nearly six feet long.

“It would make a good rug,” he said, crawling into the bag to sleep at what he thought must be three or four in the morning.

Just before sleep came he heard the wolves. It sounded like two of them, high, keening howls as they sang to each other and then a crash in the brush as they chased something — maybe a deer. He had not heard from them in almost two weeks. There had been a time when the howls would have frightened him, given him an eerie feeling, but now he smiled. They must have gotten caught in the weather if it had taken them so long to run a circuit of their range, and he supposed they would mark the edge of their territory on the way through. He would have to go up and re-mark his own — the rains would have taken the smell away — the first thing in the morning.

Good hunting, he thought at the wolves — have a good hunt. A good hunt was everything.

Chapter FIVE

The morning dawned cold — more ice around the edge of the lake and the geese and ducks were flying almost constantly now — and after he rekindled the fire Brian went to work at once on the rabbit skins. He folded the rectangle over on itself with the fur on the inside and sewed up the sides, leaving two holes about six inches across at the top on each side, then cut a hole large enough for his head in the fold and pulled the whole thing down over his head, sticking his arms through the holes as he did so.

It made a perfect vest. Well, he thought, looking down at himself — maybe not perfect. It actually looked pretty tacky, with bits of dried flesh still stuck to the hides here and there and the crude lacing. But it was warm, very warm, and within moments he was sweating and realized that it was more than he needed and had to take it off.

He set it aside and was about to get back to work on the arrows — he still had to fletch them, put feathers on the shafts — when he remembered the wolves. He trotted up to mark his boundary stump and came around a corner near the stump and stopped dead.

Facing him was a wolf, a big male, his head covered with fresh blood. He was holding a large piece of meat with a bone in the center in his mouth and he didn’t growl or look at Brian with anything but mild curiosity. They stood that way, Brian with no weapon and nothing in his mind but peeing on a stump, and the wolf holding the meat, and then the wolf turned and trotted off to the left and was gone.

But he had come from the right, Brian thought — somewhere to the right — and as he watched, another wolf came by from the right with another piece of meat, though slightly smaller, and trotted easily off to the left, following the first one.

And Brian was alone. He stood, waiting, and when no more wolves came he relaxed his shoulders, which had been straining, and thought of what he had just seen.

They must have been the wolves that had sung the night before just as he went to sleep. They had hunted well and he smiled, thinking how they must feel — how he felt when it went well — and turned to go to his stump, when he thought again.

They had been carrying meat. Fresh meat. He did not know what kind it was but it must have been a large animal. Maybe a deer. And they seemed to be done with it.

Maybe there’s something left of the kill, he thought; if I can find it maybe there’s something left I can use. He started off the way the wolves had come but stopped again, thought a moment, then trotted back to camp and got his knife and hatchet and fire-hardened spear. Knowing the woods as he did, he knew there was a chance that he would not be the only thing looking at the wolves’ kill.

He started back up in the direction the wolves had come from, and hadn’t gone a hundred yards when he came to it.

It had been a deer, a young doe. There were dozens around and Brian had thought of hunting them, but his weapons were light and it was hard to get close to them. So he’d settled for rabbits and fish and foolbirds.

She had been the crash he had heard in the night when the wolves had howled, and he stopped before the kill to read sign. The doe was on the near side of a small clearing. She must have run out of the far side with the wolves nearly on her and they had caught her and held her while they tore at her to kill her.

She must have thrashed around a good deal because the grass was bloody across thirty or so feet and the ground was torn up. But they’d taken her down. Brian could see her tracks where they’d come into the clearing, and where the dirt was torn he could see the wolf tracks and he closed his eyes for a moment and imagined what it had been like — the deer running through the brush, the wolves gaining, then setting their teeth in her and dragging her back and down…

He shook his head and came back to reality. Most of her was gone. They had started at the rear, pulling and eating, and had taken both back legs off and up into the guts, as well as chewing at the neck. All that was really left was the head and neck and front shoulders and tattered bits of hide, the whole thing looking like a roadkill hit by a semi.

Brian smiled. It’s a treasure, he thought, and actually started to salivate and then smiled more widely as he had a fleeting image of back in the world and what they would think if they could see him now, salivating over what amounted to a roadkill.

He would have to work fast. Other predators — a bear, foxes, perhaps more wolves — could come along at any moment and until he got to the protection of the fire he wasn’t sure he could hold his new wealth.

The portion of the doe that was left weighed less than fifty pounds and he dragged it easily at first but then, seeing that it left a blood mark as it skidded along, and worried that it would be too easy to follow, he picked up the carcass and threw it over his shoulder and carried it.

At the shelter he put it down and put more wood on the fire and took out his knife. First it would have to be skinned. The skin toward the rear was torn and shredded where the wolves had ripped and fed but it was largely whole on her chest and neck and he worked carefully. First a cut down from the underside of her chin to the middle of her chest, and here was his first surprise. Rabbits were easy to skin — the hide almost fell off them. The doe’s skin was stuck tight to the meat and did not come off with simply pulling at it, the way a rabbit skin did. Brian had to use the tip of the knife to cut the skin away from the flesh, peeling it back a quarter of an inch at a time, and it took him the better part of an hour, working constantly, to get the hide loose, cutting it off the front legs and up the neck to the back of the head.

The doe’s eyes bothered him at first. They were large and brown and open and seemed to be watching him as he turned and cut and pulled, and he apologized for what had happened to her, what he was doing to her.

It did not ease his discomfort but he hoped the spirit of the deer knew what he was feeling and he promised that none of what was there would be wasted.

And what a lot of it there was — more than he’d seen since he crashed. The hide — much tougher and thicker than the rabbit skins — was big enough to nearly make another vest and he laid it near the side of his shelter to dry while he worked at the meat.

The wolves had fed until they were gorged and must have then taken what they could carry back to their den, but he was amazed at how much meat there was left. He started cutting it off in strips, lean red meat, which he laid on a flat rock. Just off one shoulder there was more meat than he’d ever seen together in one place outside a supermarket. A good six or seven pounds, with no bone in it, and then the other shoulder and then on top going up the neck and when he was finally done — just at dark — he figured he had twenty-five or thirty pounds of meat.

He made a huge stew, boiling close to six pounds of meat sitting by the fire in his rabbit-skin vest as the evening chill came down. Then he ate, and ate and ate, and when he was done there was still meat and broth left. He dozed, slept and awakened in the middle of the night and ate some more, drank some more of the broth, and there was still some left.

He awakened in the morning with a stomach still bulging full and grease on his lips and something close to joy in his heart.

He was not done with the body of the doe. The head bothered him — the way her eyes seemed to see things — and he separated it from the neck bones and took it up and set it in the fork of a tree well off the ground and looking out over the lake. He wasn’t sure why but it seemed the right thing to do and he thanked her again for her meat before turning back to work.

The freezes at night had done away with the flies so they didn’t bother the meat and he spread the pieces out to give them air and by the middle of the afternoon he could see they were drying into a kind of jerky in the sun. But before that he went to work on the bones. There was still a lot of meat on them and he chopped them up with the hatchet and kept a pot boiling all day to boil the meat and marrow from them. When it was finally done — again, in late afternoon — he was surprised to see the liquid in the pot become semihard, like Jell-O, and turn into a thick mass full of bits of cooked meat.

This he ate for the evening meal — or about half of it — spooning it in thick glops, and when he was at last back in his shelter, the meat stored safely in the rear and the pot set aside from the fire for the night (still half full) he felt like the richest man on the earth.

It was very hard to concentrate on working. Everything in him wanted to sleep now — he’d never been so full and the shelter was warm and snug and all he really wanted to do was close his eyes and sleep and end the day.

But he could not forget the bear attack, or the rain and cold, and he knew that the good weather and his luck wouldn’t last and he had really no time to waste.

He took the arrows out and rummaged around in the survival pack for his feather stash. He had found early on that foolbird feathers from the wing and tail worked the best for arrows and he had saved every wing and tail feather from every foolbird that he had shot and he took them out now.

These arrows were different. They were heavier and he worried that the width of the point would catch the air and counteract the feathers in some way. The solution, he felt, was to make the feathers longer.

He selected only two feathers for each arrow but left them a full six inches long and shaved a flat side with the knife the full length of each feather so that it would fit the arrow shaft.

He attached the arrows with pieces of thread from his old windbreaker, wrapping them at the front and the rear and then smearing them with bits of warmed pine sap — a trick he had learned when he had leaned against some sap on a tree and stuck to it — to protect the thread.

He did three arrows, working slowly and carefully before going at last to sleep. Once again he slept so hard that he awakened with his head jammed into the ground and his neck stiff from not moving all night.

Because of all the meat from the doe he did not have to hunt for days now, at least ten or twelve, maybe two weeks, and he worked all day on the arrows and bow, sitting next to the shelter in the warm sun, snacking on the jellied meat now and then.

By dark this day all nine arrows were finished. He had used the hunting knife as a scraper to shape the limbs of the bow more equally and to put in notches for the string to get it ready to string the next day for the first shooting trials. He was just leaning back, half cocky about how well things were going, when he smelled the skunk.

He had run into skunks before, of course, saw them all the time, but had only had the one really bad experience when he got sprayed directly. He knew they moved at night, hunting, and didn’t seem very afraid of anything. He looked out of the shelter opening carefully.

The skunk wasn’t four feet away, looking in at him at the shelter and the fire and as he watched, it whipped up its rear end and tipped its tail over and aimed directly at his face.

I’m dead, he thought, and froze. For a long time they stayed that way, Brian holding his breath waiting to be nailed, and the skunk aiming at him. But the skunk didn’t spray, just aimed and held it.

He’s hungry, Brian thought. That’s all. He’s hunting and he’s hungry. Slowly Brian reached to his right, where the meat was stored back in the corner, and took a piece of the venison. With a smooth, slow movement he tossed the meat out to the right of the skunk. For a split second he thought it was over. The skunk’s tail jerked when the meat hit the ground but then its nose twitched as it smelled it and it lowered its tail, turned and started eating the meat.

Brian carefully reached out to the side and pulled the door back over the opening and left the skunk outside eating.

Great, he thought, crawling back into his bag to sleep — I’ve got a pet skunk who’s a terrorist. If I quit feeding him he’ll spray me. Just great. His eyes closed and he sighed. Maybe he’ll be gone in the morning.

Chapter SIX

In the morning he pushed the door to the side gingerly, looking both ways. He didn’t see the skunk and he pushed the door all the way open and went outside. Still no skunk. Before heading back for the trench he had dug for a toilet he pulled the door back over the opening — no sense taking chances — and then trotted off into the woods.

When he came back he looked all around the area and still couldn’t see the skunk and he shrugged. It must have moved on.

He kindled an outside fire using coals from the shelter fire and soon had a small cooking fire going. The cold lasted longer now into the morning and the ice had moved farther out into the lake, almost forty feet from the shore all around. The rabbit-skin vest and the fire felt especially good.

He took the last of the jellied meat in the pot, added a piece of red venison, and put it on the side of the fire to cook while he took stock of his situation. The shelter was done, or as done as he could get it, and almost airtight and warm when he had a fire going inside. He had nine arrows finished, which seemed like a lot. How many times would he have to defend himself? Besides, even if he used all the arrows he could get more tips from the arrow stone, and the wood shafts would be there in the winter as well.

Winter.

The word stopped him. He knew nothing about it. At home in upstate New York, there was snow, sometimes a lot of it, and cold at times, cold enough to make his ears sting, but he could get inside, and he had good warm clothes. Here, he suspected, the winter would be a lot worse, but he didn’t know how much worse or how to prepare for it.

Just then the meat was done and at exactly that moment, as he pulled the pot off the fire, the skunk came waddling around the end of the rock, stopped four feet away and raised its tail.

“What…” Brian winced, waiting, but the skunk did not spray and Brian took a piece of meat from the pot and threw it on the ground next to it. The skunk lowered its tail, smelled the meat, and when it proved too hot to eat, it backed away and raised its tail again.

“Listen, you little robber — I’m sorry it’s too hot. You’ll just have to wait until it cools…”

The skunk kept its tail up, but lowered it a bit and seemed to understand, and in a moment when the meat cooled it picked up the chunk and disappeared with it around the corner of the large rock that was the back wall of Brian’s shelter.

“Where are you going?”

Brian stood up and followed at a distance, moving slowly, and when he came around the rock the skunk was gone, disappeared completely.

“But…”

Brian walked all around the end, back again, and was on his second loop when he saw some grass wiggling at the edge where the rock met the ground. The grass here was thick and about a foot tall and hid the dirt from view. Brian moved closer and saw some fresh earth and a hole beneath the rock and as he watched he saw black-and-white fur moving down inside the hole.

“You’re living here?” Brian shook his head. “You’ve moved in on me?”

The skunk stopped moving inside for a moment, then started again, and while Brian watched, little spurts of dirt came out of the entrance as the skunk dug back in under the rock.

Brian turned away. “Wonderful — I’ve got a roommate with a terminal hygiene problem…”

Inside of four days a routine was established. The skunk came to the entrance in the morning, flicked its tail in the air and waited to be fed. Brian fed it and it went back to its burrow until the next morning.

It wasn’t exactly friendship, but soon Brian smiled when he saw the skunk. He named it Betty after deciding that it was a female and that it looked like his aunt, who was low and round and waddled the same way. He looked forward to seeing it.

After developing the acquaintance with the skunk Brian had gone back to work on the heavy bow. The arrows were done but he had yet to string the bow and was stymied on where to get a string long enough until he saw the cord at the end of the sleeping bag. It was braided nylon, one eighth of an inch thick and close to six feet long — enough to go around the bag twice when it was rolled up.

The cord was sewn into the end of the bag but he sharpened the knife on his sharpening rock and used the point to open the stitching enough to free the cord.

It proved to be difficult to string the bow. In spite of his scraping and shaping, the limbs were still very stout and the bow bent only with heavy pressure. He tied the string to one end, then put the tied end in a depression in a rock on the ground and used his weight to pull down the top end while he tied the cord in place.

It hummed when he plucked it and the strength of the wood seemed to sing in the cord. He took four of the arrows and moved to a dirt hummock near the lakeshore.

He put an arrow in the bow and fitted it to the string, raised the bow and looked down the shaft at the target and drew the arrow back.

Or tried to. When it was halfway to his chin the bow seemed to double in strength and he was shaking with the exertion by the time he got the feathers all the way back and the cord seemed to be cutting through his fingers. He released quickly, before he had time to aim properly, and saw the arrow crease the top of the hummock, skip onto the lake ice, jump off the ice and fly across the open water in the middle and land skittering across the ice on the far side of the lake — a good two hundred yards.

At the same time the string slapped his arm so hard it seemed to tear the skin off and the rough front end of the feathers cut the top of his hand as they passed over it.

“Wow…”

He could not see the arrow but he knew where it had gone and would walk around the lake later and retrieve it. Now he had to practice. He changed the angle he was shooting at so that the arrows wouldn’t go across the lake if he missed—when he missed, he thought, smiling — and moved closer to the hummock.

It was hard to judge the strength of the pull of the bow. He guessed fifty, sixty pounds of pull were required to get the string back to his chin, and every shot hurt his arm and fingers and hand. But it was worth it. The arrows left the bow so fast that he couldn’t see them fly and they hit so hard that two of them drove on through the hummock and kept going for fifteen or twenty yards and broke the stone tips.

He made new tips that night and it was while he was making them that he knew he would be hunting bigger game. It was strange how the thought came, or how it just seemed to be there. He had made the bow for protection, had thought only in terms of protection all the while he was making arrows, but somewhere along the way the knowledge that he would use it to hunt was just there.

Maybe it was eating the meat from the doe that had done it. There was so much of it, and it tasted so good and was easier to deal with than the smaller animals. Whatever the reason, when he aimed at the hummock to practice he saw the chest of a deer.

He shot all that day, until his shoulders were sore and he had broken an arrow and two more tips by hitting small rocks along the ground. Then at dark he built a fire, cooked some meat, fed Betty, who arrived just as the meat was done, and retired to the shelter to fix arrows.

He would hunt big tomorrow, he thought. He would try to get a deer.

Chapter SEVEN

He didn’t know the time but somewhere in the middle of the night he awakened suddenly. He had come to rely on his senses and he knew something had changed to snap him awake that way and he lay with his eyes wide in the dark, listening, smelling, trying to see.

He did not have long to wait.

There was a soft rustle, then a whoofing sound and the whole wall of the shelter peeled away from the rock as if caught in an earthquake, away and down and Brian — still in his bag — was looking up in the dark at the enormous form of a bear leaning over him.

There was no time to react, to move, to do anything.

Meat, Brian had time to think — he’s smelled the venison and come for it. He’s come for the mea—

And it was true. The bear had come for the meat but the problem was that Brian lay between the bear and the meat, and the bear cuffed him to the side. As it was it wasn’t much of a cuff — nowhere near what the bear could have done, which would have broken Brian’s legs — but the bag was zipped and Brian became tangled in it and couldn’t move fast enough to stay out of the way so the bear hit him again.

This time hard. The blow took Brian in the upper thigh and even through the bag it was solid enough to nearly dislocate his hip.

He cried out. “Ahhhh…”

The bear stopped dead in the darkness. Brian could see the head turn to look back and down at him, a slow turning, huge and full of threat, and the bear’s breath washed over him and he thought I am going to die now. All this that I have done and I’m going to die because a bear wants to eat and I am in the way. He could see the bear’s teeth as it showed them and he couldn’t, simply couldn’t do anything; couldn’t move, couldn’t react. It was over.

The bear started to move down toward Brian and then hesitated, stopped and raised its head again and turned to look back over its shoulder to the left.

Half a beat and Brian lay still, staring up at the bear. But now a new smell, over the smell of the bear; a rank, foul, sulfurous and gagging smell as the bear turned and took a full shot of skunk spray directly in the eyes.

Betty had arrived. Whether she’d just been out hunting and had come back or had been awakened and surprised or simply didn’t like bears very much — whatever the reason she had dumped a full load in the bear’s face.

The effect was immediate and devastating.

“Rowwrrrmph!”

The bear seemed to turn inside itself, knocking Brian farther to the side, and rolled backward out of the shelter area, slamming its head back and forth on the ground, trying to clear its eyes, hacking and throwing up as it vanished in the night.

Brian looked to the source of all this. Betty stood near the end of the shelter, still with her tail raised, only now aimed at Brian. She twitched it once, then again, and Brian shook his head.

“I’m sorry. I just didn’t think you’d be thinking of food…” He took a piece of meat from the pile — a big one — and tossed it to her and she lowered her tail, picked up the meat and waddled off into the dark in the direction of her burrow.

Brian lay back in his bag. His shelter was a mess, the wall tipped over, and his hip hurt, but it wasn’t raining and the bag was warm. He could fix things up in the morning.

The stink of skunk was everywhere — much of what Betty had shot at the bear had gone around it and hit the wall — but Brian didn’t mind. In fact, he thought, I’ve grown kind of fond of it. I’ll have to make sure to give her extra food. It was like having a pet nuclear device.

He went to sleep smiling.

In the morning he found that the damage was not as extreme as he’d thought. The bear had tipped the wall away and down but the dried mud had held it together and Brian — after four heaving tries — tipped it back up and against the rock. He chopped a hole in the thin ice near the edge of the lake and brought up new mud to pack in around the seam and inside an hour it was as good as new.

Then he reviewed his thinking. The war bow wouldn’t help — at least not as a protective device. He’d shot it and made it work for him but in the dark, in the night in the shelter, there was no way he could have gotten the bow aligned or an arrow into the bear. And god knew what would have happened if he had hit the bear with an arrow — especially if he’d missed anything vital. The bear would have been really mad then — even Betty wouldn’t have been able to stop the thing.

Perhaps, he thought, a lance — a killing lance. If he used the same principle as with the arrows…

He went back to the stone he’d been chipping arrowheads from and studied it. He would need a wider, longer head, and the flakes came off too small for a spear. Near it there were other black stones, however, and he tapped at them with the back of the hatchet, knocking off flakes until he hit one that had a bigger pattern. Three times he hit, and took off flakes that were irregular or that broke in the middle. But on the fourth try he came away with a piece almost as wide as his palm and about seven inches long, tapering to a sharp point and with two edges like razors.

He worked tie-notches into the round end and mounted the point in one of his hardwood spears, carefully splitting the wood back and then tying the head in place with a thin strip of deer hide — which proved to be much tougher than the rabbit skin — and burning the hair off when he was done.

He hefted the lance and held it out, bracing with his arm. It wouldn’t do any good to throw, but for in close, like last night — if he had to use it — the head should cause some damage. Or at least discourage a bear. He nodded. Good. If nothing else, it gave him a feeling of security.

Later he would think on how strange things were. He would never see the bear again and inside the shelter he would never be threatened again.

Yet the lance would save his life.