Brian's Winter

Chapter EIGHT

He awakened when he had slept enough, and looked out of the shelter by cracking the door. It was cold and low and gray and raining, a dismal rain much like the one that had lasted so long earlier in the fall, and he kindled the fire with dry wood he’d set aside the night before when he’d seen the clouds moving in. Soon the inside of the shelter was cheery and warm, the smoke working its way out of the hole at the top, and he wished he’d thought to bring water in the night before and also wished he didn’t have to do what he had to do now.

But he couldn’t fight it and at last he pulled himself out of the bag, grabbed the hatchet and the largest aluminum pot and plunged out into the rain. As fast as possible, standing barefoot on the freezing, wet ground, he went to the bathroom and then ran to the lake and chopped his watering hole open — it had frozen thinly overnight — and filled the pan and ran back to the shelter.

He slid the door back in place and put the pot on the fire and dropped a piece of venison into it to make a breakfast stew.

The meat was getting low. He had stretched the wolf-killed doe as far as he could, trying to ration it and eat smaller amounts, but he’d have to hunt within four or five days.

He put a piece of meat outside the door for Betty, surprised that she wasn’t there already, and leaned back to think.

In the past few days it had become colder. The weather had a kind of steady feel to it, as if it was not going to get warmer but would stay cold, and he had to face some truths.

He simply wasn’t ready for cold weather. Oh, he thought, the shelter was all right. And the woods were full of fuel.

But his clothing was pitiful. His jeans were holding together — just — but his tennis shoes were about gone, his socks long since used to shreds, and on top all he had was a T-shirt (also nearly in pieces) and the rabbit-skin vest.

I am, he thought, a mess. He was tempted to smile except that it wasn’t really funny. He could sit in the shelter and stay warm but unless he could hunt he would die and he couldn’t hunt unless he had something to wear to keep from freezing.

To death, he thought, the truth sliding in like a snake. I could freeze to death. Not quite yet — it wasn’t that cold yet — but soon. He didn’t know northern winters but he knew it would get cold enough to kill him and freeze him solid.

He took stock again. No clothing, although he still had some rabbit hides, which he could sew into sleeves for his vest. There was also the hide from the doe. He looked at it and thought that he might get a pair of moccasins out of it. They would be crude but if he stitched them with the hair on the inside and made them big enough to wear over his tattered tennis shoes they would help.

He set to work on what he could do and spent all of that day sewing the rest of the rabbit skins into two tubes, which he attached as sleeves to the vest. When he tried it on everything crackled, as if he were wearing paper, but it seemed to hold together and he slept that night feeling slightly better about his future.

The next morning he checked the weather — still raining, and colder than it had been the previous morning — and then set to work making footgear.

It proved both easier and harder than he had thought it would be. The easy part was making a pattern. He just stood on the dry skin and marked around his foot with a piece of charcoal from the fire pit. When he’d cut out the two bottoms he cut two rectangles from the remaining hide and stitched — with some effort as the hide was thick and tough — the two pieces into rough cylinders. Then he sewed each of the tubes down to the sole, attaching it all around the edge, and when he was done he had two clunky boots that he could stick his tennis shoes down into; with the hair on the inside they felt warm the minute he stuck his feet into them. He used the last bits of hide to cut two strips to use for lacing to pull the tops of the cylinders tight to his legs — they hit about midcalf — and it was here he learned how to soften leather.

The deer hide was dried and working with it was about like working with thin wood. It had no give and was brittle and hard and very, very tough. It was all he could do to sew the cylinders to the bottom using thin-cut hide for lacing and punching holes with the tip of the knife. But the two straps that went around the top had to be soft enough to tie off. He thought of using the fishing line for thread but didn’t want to waste it. Then he found that by working the leather — first between his fingers and then by pulling it over a piece of wood that stuck out of the wall — he could soften it. It never got truly soft and supple like tanned deer hide, but it was workable and got the job done.

He gathered more wood just before dark and went to sleep that night dreaming of punching holes in leather with the tip of the knife — the image burned into his mind from sitting all day sewing.

Sometime that night, near the middle, it grew quiet and the change awakened him. He listened for a time and realized that the rain had stopped and he snuggled back in the bag thinking that with no rain the next day he would hunt.

In the morning he awakened and knew instantly that something had changed. Something about the sound. No. The lack of it. There was no sound. Normally he could hear birds in the morning, or the wind rustling.

Now there was nothing.

He crawled out of the bed and opened the door of the shelter. Or tried to. It seemed to be stuck, frozen in place. He pushed harder and finally half stood, crouched, and pushed out with his shoulder against the door.

At first it still didn’t move and only when he crouched back and slammed into it with his shoulder did the door fall away, letting him look outside.

It nearly blinded him.

The entire world was white, bright white with new morning sun glaring off and through it and so intense that it made his temples hurt.

Snow had fallen in the night. Soft, large flakes, nearly four inches deep everywhere. On limbs, logs, the ground, on the lake ice — all over, an even four inches.

And it was cold. Colder than it had been so far. His nostril hairs seemed to stick together when he breathed and the air caught in his throat. The world was so incredibly, wonderfully, stunningly beautiful that for a full minute all he could do was stare.

“Ohh…”

He had seen pictures of the woods with snow and had seen snow in the park and in the city but this was different. He was in it, inside the snowy scene, and the beauty of it became part of him.

He stepped outside the shelter and as he stepped into the snow realized that he was barefoot. He jumped back inside and put on his tennis shoes and fur boots and the rabbit-skin shirt and moved back outside.

He had never seen anything so clean. Because it was all new there wasn’t a mark, not a track in the surface of the snow, and he took four or five paces just to look back at his tracks.

“It’s like a bigfoot,” he said aloud. And indeed, the boots left a large, rounded hole for a footprint.

He moved around, did his toilet — drawing a picture in the snow when he did — and was amazed how well the boots worked, kept his feet warm and comfortable. As he came close to the shelter he saw a mouse appear almost magically out of the snow, run across the surface for three feet and then dive under again.

Brian moved to where the mouse had run and studied its tracks. Little dots in a parallel line with a small line in the middle where the tail dragged.

But clean, he thought, and neat and so easy to see and follow and everything, everything that moved in the woods would leave tracks.

Would be easy to see.

Would be easy to follow.

Would be much easier to hunt.

He still had some venison left but he decided to hunt. Because the snow was new and he’d never hunted in snow, because the sun was bright and fresh, because his clothing seemed to work, he decided to hunt, and it was in this way that he found the moose.

Chapter NINE

He prepared for hunting by putting his hatchet and knife on his belt and one of the butane lighters in his pocket. He started to take the light bow but thought that he might see something big and want to take a shot and so took the war bow under the theory that he could shoot something small with the big bow but he couldn’t shoot a deer with the small bow. So he took the large bow and the new lance and five arrows with stone points and went hunting.

At the start he almost couldn’t hunt. The woods were so beautiful, so changed — it was a whole different world — that he walked slowly along and feasted his eyes on first one scene and then another. It should all be framed, he thought — framed in some way to take back.

Take back. He hadn’t thought that in a long while either. Pictures of home were fading. But if he could show this to his mother, he thought, just for her to see this…

He shook his head and almost at the same instant saw a rabbit. It was sitting under an overhanging evergreen limb, back in the shadow, but still very easy to see because it was brown. On its back there were several white spots, each about as large as a silver dollar. Brian had seen several rabbits with similar white spots and had thought they were some kind of fluke or mutation but he guessed now that they actually changed color in the winter and became white so that they wouldn’t be so visible.

Without it, Brian thought, they were dead meat. A week or so earlier he had walked through and seen one rabbit in this area. He now took twenty steps and saw seven, all at varying ranges, none close enough to shoot, all standing out like sore thumbs because they were brown against the white snow.

He moved easily, slowly, waiting for a close shot. When it came — a rabbit not more than twenty feet away — he shot carefully and only missed by a hair, actually cutting the fur along the top of the rabbit’s shoulders. The rabbit dodged left, then right, and vanished in the underbrush and Brian went forward to get his arrow.

At first he couldn’t find it. He’d seen it fly, had seen exactly where it went into the snow — there was a hole marking the arrow’s entry — but it wasn’t there. He dug in the snow but still couldn’t find it and didn’t find it until he’d stepped back and lined up the flight of the arrow and worked along the snow scooping it out every foot. The arrow had gone more than thirty feet after entering the snow, skittering along beneath the surface before coming to rest. He’d have to be careful of his shots, he thought, pulling it out and blowing the snow off the feathers — he’d lose all his arrows on one hunt.

He moved on, still taken by the beauty, and had three more shots, all of which he missed because the targets were so small — rabbits — and he wasn’t used to shooting the heavier bow yet.

I’ll have to get closer, he thought — work right up on them, get into the thicker brush.

He slowed his pace even more and moved into a large stand of brambles and thick young evergreens, packed so closely he couldn’t see more than ten feet, and that only by crouching down and looking along the ground. It was hard going. Every limb pulled at the bow and he had to be careful not to wreck the feathers on the arrows as he moved.

There were rabbits everywhere. The snow was covered with their tracks and he had moved nearly fifty yards into the thick brush when the sound of a breaking limb stopped him cold. Rabbits and foolbirds did not break limbs when they moved. Deer broke limbs, bear broke limbs.

Almost simultaneously he saw different tracks in the snow in front of him. Big tracks. Huge tracks. The hair went up on his neck. They were big enough for bear and what he really didn’t want to do in his whole life was meet a bear in thick brush, especially if it was a bear that had a memory of a bad night with a skunk.

But when he leaned down to study the tracks he saw they had a cloven hoof, like those left by deer but larger. Much larger.

Moose. He knew instantly. He had seen moose several times since he had been attacked last summer. Once he had seen a bull with a rack so large that Brian could easily have fit between the antlers; the rest had been cows. They were all unbelievably big, and after he’d been attacked by the cow along the lake he’d given them a wide berth. When they got angry it was like having a Buick mad at you.

But, he thought — just that at first. But.

But what? But the moose are smaller now? But I’m tougher now? He shook his head, pushed the thoughts away, the sneaky thoughts, the ones that said he was hunting meat for food, moose were made out of meat, he had a larger bow, primitive people hunted moose with weapons like his, he was different now.

He heard the sound again. A breaking limb. Close, maybe thirty yards, and he crouched down and looked along the snow as he had for rabbits.

There. A brown leg moving, then another, like small trees they were, suddenly moving small trees.

He held his breath and crouched, watching. He could not see more of the moose, just the legs, and as he watched they moved off to the left a bit, hesitated, then turned left again and started moving slowly.

Directly at him.

Ahh, he thought. There it is — like it or not I am about to hunt moose. His stomach tightened and he stood and quickly glanced at his position. The brush was too thick for him to run even if he had wanted to and the truth was he didn’t want to. He was different, he did have better weapons — and there was a lot of meat on a moose.

No room, he thought, to maneuver or to shoot. He moved his head to the right and all he could see was thick brush, then to the left, and it was the same.

No. There, a small opening. Not four feet across and about four feet off the ground — almost a tunnel through the brush — but if it all worked right, all worked exactly right, he might be able to get a shot.

He moved to the left and stood facing the opening, leaned the killing lance against a nearby bush, held the bow up — with the top tipped slightly to the right to keep it out of the brush — and put his best arrow on the string ready to draw and waited.

And waited.

Time seemed to stop.

Somewhere to his left he heard the soft sound of a bird’s wings, then the scratchy sound of a chickadee.

Brush cracked directly in front of him but he could see nothing.

Another bird flew past.

He aged, waiting, and now he heard the moose stepping, its hooves shussh-shusshing in the snow, and another breaking branch and then a line, a curved line as the side of the moose’s front end came into view in the tunnel.

Brian tensed, his fingers tightening on the string. The edge of the shoulder moved slowly, ever so slowly to the left, bringing more and more of the moose’s chest into view.

A third there, then a half, then two thirds and then the whole chest.

Brian drew the shaft back.

A cow, his brain registered, a large cow moose. No antlers. A little spit dripping from the side of her mouth. Brown eyes looking at him but not seeing him, or at least he hoped not.

Twenty feet, no more. Six, seven paces at the most.

He released the bowstring.

He could see it all later in his mind’s eye so it all must have registered but when he did it everything happened so fast — and yet incredibly slowly — that it all seemed one event.

The arrow jumped from the string and he saw the feathers fly straight away from him and at the moose and slam into the moose’s neck just above the center of her chest and in that instant, in the same split second, the moose caught the movement of the bow and arrow and Brian’s head and charged, so fast she almost met the arrow.

If Brian had expected the brush to slow her down, or the arrow striking her to handicap her, he was sadly mistaken. She was at him like a cat, so fast that she seemed a blur, and yet his mind took it all in.

I hit her. The arrow hit her in the neck. She’s charging. She’s charging at me. Another arrow. No, no time. The lance. That’s it, the lance.

He threw the bow aside and reached for the lance, all in one motion and all too late. He felt his hand clamp on the shaft of the lance and at the same time she came out of the brush on top of him. He had one fleeting image of a wall of brown hair with the feathers of the arrow sticking out of the middle and he went down.

He would never know what saved him. She was gigantic and on him and he thought she would crush him, mash him into the ground. But either the arrow hampered her movement or her momentum carried her too far and she went on over Brian and had to turn and come back at him.

He was hurt. His leg, his shoulder, yet he could move, and he rolled, still holding the killing lance, and came up to a kneeling position. He raised the head of the lance just as she hit him again.

One image. She threw herself at him, her eyes red with rage, and he saw her run onto the lance, the point entering her chest just below the arrow. Then her head hit his forehead. Brian saw one flash of white light, as bright as all the snow, then nothing but pain and darkness.

Chapter TEN

A great weight. Something heavy on him. His mother was calling for him to come back. He was little again, a small boy and playing outside, and his mother was calling for him to come inside but he couldn’t move because there was a huge weight on him, holding him down, keeping him from coming home…

Brian opened his eyes slowly, closed them against the brightness and the pain in his forehead, then opened them again.

It was, he thought, the same world. Snow all around, bright sun, he was breathing, had a pounding pain in his forehead — it reminded him of the plane crash — and had what appeared to be an entire cow moose in his lap.

He twitched when he looked down at her. Her eyes still looked mad, and her head plowed against his chest. But he realized she was dead. He started to examine his own situation.

Nothing seemed to be broken. He could not at first believe this and moved his arms and legs several times to make certain, then squirmed his way out from beneath the moose. She was lying half on him, her head on his chest pushing him back, and when he stood it was the first time he got a long look at how big she was.

From nose to back end he guessed a good eight or nine feet, maybe more. He paced her off and came up with four paces in length, counting her legs, which were sticking out a bit.

Maybe ten feet. And she was taller at the shoulder than he stood.

He wondered for a moment if she was the same moose that had attacked him earlier in the summer and tried to feel that she was, tried to feel some animosity toward her. But the truth was that killing her made him sad — elated and sad all at once, as he had been with the wolf-killed doe.

She was ugly and beautiful at the same time, lying there in the snow, blood from her chest wounds smeared where she lay — an ugly beautiful animal, and she was ended now. He had killed her, ended her life so that he could live, and he felt as bad as he felt good.

He turned away for a moment, shook his head and then turned back. There was much work to do and for a moment he thought it would be impossible. It was perhaps half a mile back to camp and there was absolutely no way he would be able to drag her.

He tried lifting a back leg and it was all he could do to get it off the ground. Dragging her would be simply impossible. She must weigh six or seven hundred pounds.

He would have to cut her up here and take her back to camp in pieces and that nearly stopped him. How, he thought, do you cut a moose up? Never in all his life had he ever thought about cutting a moose to pieces. Where did he start? There were no dotted lines the way there were in the diagram at the meat market…

He thought on it a full five minutes, looking at her lying there, and finally realized he could do nothing until she was skinned.

He used the knife to slit the hide from the neck, down the chest and belly to the back end. He had to cut around the lance — which had broken off after driving into her — and the arrow shaft still sticking out because they wouldn’t pull free.

The skin came away harder than with the doe, was thicker and had to be cut loose as he skinned, peeling it back a half inch at a time all along her body. When he cut along the belly the knife slipped and cut the membrane holding the stomach in and her guts fell out on his feet, steaming, and he went ahead and pulled them the rest of the way out, amazed at how much there was inside her. The liver alone weighed more than two rabbits and he set it aside to cook later.

With the guts out of her she was easier to move — still very hard, but some easier — and he quickly developed a rhythm for skinning. Pull on the hide, slide the knife along, pull, slide, pull, slide. In half an hour he had lifted the hide completely off her right side, cutting it around the neck just under her head, and folded it over her back, completely exposing her right side.

He had never, even in a butcher shop, seen so much meat in one place. She was a house of meat. Again he lifted the back leg and couldn’t move her, even with the guts out. But as he lifted the leg he noted that there seemed to be a seam where the leg joined the body, a junction, and he put the knife there and cut and the leg lifted away from the body.

He kept lifting and cutting, all around the top of the back leg, pushing up as he did so until it was joined only at the hip socket, which rotated freely, and he cut around the socket with the knife, and it popped loose and the leg lifted completely away.

Just that, her back leg, was heavier than the doe, and he realized it would be hard to get the leg back to the shelter.

This would be a long job. He decided to pull the leg back and then return to finish up. An all-night job. And it would be cold.

He took off with the leg and used nearly twenty minutes just to pull it to the shelter and was almost exhausted when he got there. He stored it along the wall and went back to where the body of the cow lay.

It was now midday and he was starving. He took fifteen minutes to gather wood and start a fire near the carcass and when it was blazing well he cut a strip of meat from the rump near where he’d lifted the leg off and hung it over a stick so that it was nearly in the flames.

He went back to cutting and skinning while it cooked. He cut away the right front shoulder — it lifted off much the same as the rear leg, the shoulder blade cutting away, and then the leg, and he dragged it back to camp and when he returned, the meat on the stick was perfect: burned a little on the outside and cooked clear through.

He cut pieces off and ate it standing there, looking down at the rest of the cow, and he thought he’d never tasted meat so good. It was better than deer or rabbit or foolbirds, better than beef. And there was fat on it, more fat than the doe had, and he craved fat, ate one piece of fat alone that was hanging on the side of the meat and had cooked separately and still craved it. He cut two large pieces of fat off the carcass and hung them over the fire to cook while he went back to work.

With the right legs gone she was lighter and by lifting the legs on the ground he found he could just roll her over to get at the uncompleted side.

Once she was over he skinned the side as he’d done the first one, working up to the back after cutting around the legs until the hide was completely free of the carcass. Then he cut the legs loose, dragged them one at a time back to camp and returned to the body of the moose in darkness.

Finding his way was no problem because there was a half-moon and it lighted the snow into something close to daylight. But the cold came now and he had no gloves. His hands chilled as he worked on the damp meat and he had to warm them over the fire often, which slowed him, and by midnight everything in him screamed to stop.

But the cow was a treasure house of food and hide and he wasn’t about to leave her for the wolves, or the bear if it came along again. So he kept working.

With the legs and rump gone the remaining part of the carcass was not too hard to handle. He used the hatchet to chop through the spine in two places and separated the back, middle and front end and it amazed him how much all animals were alike. She was immense, but the cow was built almost like a rabbit, with the same basic layout.

The same design, he thought, grinning, and supposed if he were on all fours he would look the same.

He cut her head away with the hatchet and dragged the front section of her body, the rib cage and the hump meat on top of her shoulders with it, back to the camp and then the rear end and the center at the same time.

That left only the hide and head. The head he could come back for tomorrow and he set off with the hide at probably four in the morning.

It was the worst. It was staggeringly heavy — he couldn’t lift it — and dragging it back to camp, with his bow and arrows on top of it, exhausted him.

At camp he looked at the pile of meat and hide next to his shelter wall, smiled once, shucked out of his rabbit-skin shirt, crawled into his bag and was in a deep, dreamless sleep in seconds.

A good — no, he thought, his brain closing down, a great day. A meat day. A moose day. He would sketch it on the shelter wall tomorrow…

Chapter ELEVEN

The cow proved to be a godsend. The next day Brian awakened in midafternoon starving and not sure it had all happened — although his body felt as if he’d been sleeping in a cement mixer. Every bone and muscle seemed to ache. But the moose was all there, leaning against the side of the shelter.

He was starving and made a fire outside. He used the hatchet to chop out a section of ribs and cooked them on a stick over the flames and ate them when the fat was crackling.

“All I need is some barbecue sauce,” he said aloud, grease dripping down his chin. “And a Coke…”

When he had first come out of the shelter it had been partly cloudy with the sun shining through gray wisps of clouds, but while he ate, the clouds became thicker until there was no blue and he felt a few drops hit his cheek.

“Not again — not rain…”

But it was. It didn’t pour at first and he took the rest of the day to get in firewood — he had found a stand of dead poplar, all dry and easy to burn but still about a half mile away, and he dragged wood until it was dark and the rain was a steady, miserable, cold downpour.

He made a fire inside the shelter with coals from the outside fire and soon it was warm and toasty. He hung the rabbit-skin shirt up to dry and lay back to wait the rain out. Having worked all night the previous night and slept most of the day, he wasn’t sleepy and thought that the rain seemed light and would probably end by daylight and when he finally dozed off, warm and snug in the shelter, it seemed to be coming down more lightly all the time.

But at daylight it hadn’t stopped. He looked out at the drizzle — it had melted all the snow off and everything was a mess and now it had become cold and the rain was freezing into ice on the limbs and grass and he was glad that he had plenty of wood pulled up and a dry place to live.

It rained for a solid eight days, cold and wet, and if he hadn’t had the shelter and meat he would have gone crazy.

And in a strange way it never really did stop raining. Each day it got colder and colder and the rain kept coming down and Brian could hear limbs breaking off with the weight of the ice on them and just when he thought he could stand it no longer the rain turned to snow.

Only this time not a soft snow. A wind came out of the northwest that howled through the trees like something insane, actually awakened him in the middle of the night and made him sit bolt upright in fear.

The snow was small and hard at first, driven needles that seemed to cut his cheek when he looked outside, and then changing to blown finer snow that found ways to seep into the shelter and melt hissing on the fire.

He was not idle. He had dragged in enough wood to last if he was careful, but by the second and third day he was going stir-crazy and was looking for things to do.

Luckily there was much that needed doing. His clothing was far from adequate. The rabbit-skin shirt was like paper and ripped easily — indeed had been torn in several places during the moose attack and needed restitching — and Brian, with great effort, stretched the moose hide out in the rain and cut it in half and brought the rear half into the shelter.

The hide was still wet from being on the moose, hadn’t had time to dry, but the fire and heat in the shelter worked fast and within a few days it had dried sufficiently to work.

It was stiff and thick and while it was still damp he cut a rectangle for a moose shirt, stitching it down the sides with moose-hide laces, making it larger than the rabbit-skin shirt. He did the same kind of sleeves and then made a crude hood, which he stitched around the head opening.

He did all this with the hair side in and when he put the rabbit-skin shirt on underneath and then the moose-hide parka on the outside — even with the moose hide still uncured — he could feel his body warming up instantly.

He also nearly went down with the weight. He figured the coat weighed at least thirty pounds, maybe more, and decided he wouldn’t be doing much running in it.

The snowstorm lasted three days on top of the rain and Brian worked on his weak spot — his hands. He used moose hide and made a pair of crude mittens by using his hands for a pattern and a piece of charcoal to draw on the hide. The thumbs were so large he could almost stick his whole hand in the thumbhole. These he made with the hair side in and fashioned them large enough to allow a second set of rabbit-skin mitts to be worn inside. The mittens were so big they kept falling off his hands and he used moose hide to make a cord that went over his shoulders and held the mittens up if he relaxed his hands.

This was all hard work and kept him busy for days, but worse work was the hide. As it dried it started to harden and it turned into something very close to a board.

He worked it back and forth over a rounded piece of wood as he’d done with the lacing and this process, trying to soften the dried moose hide, took longer than sewing up the clothing. And in the end he had to settle for less than he wanted. He had the hide loose where it counted, in the armpits and elbows and the hood, but much of the rest of it was only half supple, stiff enough so that he felt as if he were wearing a coat of armor and still stiff though he worked on it for hours when at last the storm ended.

Brian expected to be snowed in but in fact it was only eight or nine inches deep. It had been a fine, driven snow and hadn’t accumulated to any depth but it was blasted into everything. Many of the trees had a full six inches sticking out to the side of the tree, where the snow had been driven by the wind.

It was still beautiful in the sunlight but had a different look from the last, fluffy snow, and it was cold, a deeper cold than before.

Brian couldn’t estimate temperature but he thought it must be near zero, but quiet — the wind had stopped completely — and his clothes kept him as warm as if he’d been in the shelter.

He started to brush the snow off the stacked moose meat and then thought better of it. The meat was frozen and protected under the snow and ice from the rain and safer there than in the open. He didn’t think the bear would come — it must be hibernating by now, and the same for Betty, whom he hadn’t seen since just after the bear attack — so the meat should be all right just beneath the snow.

He needed wood and he spent most of that day dragging in dead poplar, finally taking the parka off because it was so heavy and working in the rabbit-skin shirt alone. Everything had ice frozen on it but it chipped off easily with the hatchet. When he had a good stack — enough for another week (he was definitely gun-shy now about storms) — he chopped some meat off one of the back legs of the moose for stew and settled in for another night of rubbing the hide of his parka to soften it.

And he wondered that night — the night of day ninety-four — if this was it; was this all winter would be? Eating meat and rubbing hide and waiting for the next rain to turn to snow?

Chapter TWELVE

It did not rain again.

Nor did the snow go away. The temperature stayed down and in four days it snowed lightly, maybe an inch, and then in four more days another inch or two and then in four more days…

Regular as clockwork winter came. The snow never came deeply, never another wild blizzard, just an inch or two every four days. But the snow didn’t leave between times, didn’t melt, and before long there was a foot on the ground, a foot of dry powder.

At first it was all very settled and comfortable. Brian’s clothing seemed to work, he had plenty of meat and plenty of firewood — although he had to go some distance to get it. He knew how much wood it would take for a given time and brought in enough for a week — it took a full day — and then had nothing to do the rest of the week except work his moose-hide clothing against the wooden peg to soften it and eat moose-meat stew.

Summer had been so active and now he had suddenly come to a virtual stop. He couldn’t fish anymore because the ice was too thick to chop through with the hatchet, he didn’t need to hunt because he had — he figured roughly — four hundred pounds of moose left to eat. Lying by the fire one evening softening hide, he did some rough math, and if he ate four pounds of moose meat a day he would make at least a hundred days before needing more meat. More than three months. Let’s see, he thought, it was late November now, no, early December, no, wait…

He counted the days on his marks and decided it was the last week in November. Thanksgiving — he’d forgotten Thanksgiving.

He could do that. Have a Thanksgiving meal. The date was a little off, he would be late, but it felt good to think of it and he prepared for it as if he were home.

He would eat moose, of course, but he had found that the hump meat was the best and he chopped a three-pound piece off the frozen block by his door.

He would need more — some kind of sauce.

Then he remembered the berries. On one of his wood-gathering runs he’d gone past the north end of the lake and there had been a string of small, scraggly trees loaded with bright red berries. Because everything was under a foot of snow and he hadn’t seen a berry since summer these berries — looking fresh and bright even though they were frozen solid — struck him as very odd. They looked delicious and hung in small clumps and he smelled them, then took a handful and popped them into his mouth.

At first he couldn’t taste them because they were frozen but as soon as they thawed he got the flavor. They were tangy and had a mild bitter taste that made him want to pucker — also they had large pits. They were similar to the gut cherries he’d had trouble with during the summer except that they didn’t make him sick and the sour taste reminded him of something else he couldn’t at first place and later remembered as a vinegar or sour sauce flavor.

They would make a good sauce for a Thanksgiving meal and he went along the lakeshore and picked one of the smaller aluminum pans full and it was in this way that he learned about snowshoes.

It did not come that fast. There was about a foot of snow, powder but with a stiffness, and as he walked along the lake in his deer-hide boots he startled a rabbit from beneath an evergreen and it took off like a shot — all changed to white — across the snow.

Without sinking in. Brian watched it run away and had taken another four or five steps when it hit him that the rabbit was running on top of the snow while Brian was sinking in with each step.

He moved to the rabbit’s tracks and studied them. They were huge, fully twice the size of the feet he had seen on rabbits earlier, and when he examined the tracks more closely he saw that the rabbit had grown hair to increase the size of its feet and he thought how perfect they were: to be able to do that, change color in the winter and grow bigger feet to stay on top of the snow. How perfect. And he set the information back in his mind and went on about preparing for Thanksgiving.

He packed snow in with the berries and put them on the fire to melt and boil; then he put the hump meat in the large pan with snow and set that on to boil as well.

So much, he thought, for cooking Thanksgiving dinner.

What he wanted was a table and a chair and a tablecloth — no, he thought. What he wanted was a turkey and all the trimmings and then a table and chairs and tablecloth and his mother and father sitting with him and milk, oh yes, a glass of cold milk and bread and butter and potatoes and gravy and…

What he wanted more than anything was out, to be back in the world. To have all that stuff and be back in the world and then to go to a movie, no, to sit and watch television with your belly packed and watch a football game and belch and…

That was what he wanted.

What he did instead was clean his shelter.

He had been sleeping on the foam pad that had come with the survival pack and he straightened everything up and hung his bag out in the sun to air-dry and then used the hatchet to cut the ends of new evergreen boughs and laid them like a carpet in the shelter.

As soon as he brought the boughs inside and the heat from the fire warmed them they gave off the most wonderful smell, filled the whole shelter with the odor of spring, and he brought the bag back inside and spread the pad and bag and felt as if he were in a new home.

The berries boiled first and he added snow water to them and kept them boiling until he had a kind of mush in the pan. By that time the meat had cooked and he set it off to the side and tasted the berry mush.

Bitter, he thought, but tangy and not all that bad, and he cut a piece of the moose hump off, a thin slice, and dipped it in the sauce and ate it in two bites.

It was delicious, almost like having steak sauce or a kind of bitter catsup. He took another cut of meat, dipped it, ate it as well, the juice dripping down his chin, and was on his third one when he realized this was his Thanksgiving dinner.

And I’m eating like a wolf, he thought, before I give thanks.

It stopped him, the idea of giving thanks. At first his mind just stopped and he thought, for what? For the plane crash, for being here? I should thank somebody for that?

Then a small voice, almost a whisper, came into his mind and all it said was: It could have been worse; you could have been down in the plane with the pilot.

And he felt awful for his attitude, turned away from the food and forced himself to be grateful for all the good luck he’d had and to not think about the bad at all.

Just that, escaping from the plane alive — that was luck. And to be able to live and learn and know things, to be able to hunt, to be thankful for the animals’ lives that had been spent to keep him fed, to be thankful for the deer and the moose, lord, the moose like getting a whole food store and to be thankful for his shelter and knife and the hatchet…

The hatchet. The key to it all. Nothing without the hatchet. Just that would take all his thanks.

And every stick, every twig of wood that burned to keep him warm and his sleeping bag and Betty saving him from the bear and the chickadees that hung around the camp and the sun that brought each new day…

All that, he thought, all that and more to be thankful for and he ended the prayer — as it had seemed to become — with another thought about the pilot down in the lake, how he hoped the pilot had had a good life and was where it was good for him now.

Then he ate, quietly, thinking of his mother and father, and when he finished his Thanksgiving it was dark, pitch-dark, and he crawled into his bag to sleep and had just closed his eyes and started to get drowsy when he heard the gunshot.

Chapter THIRTEEN

It did not register at first.

The night had grown very cold and still and the shelter was warm and he was in that state just between waking and sleeping when he heard a sharp, blistering crack of sound.

He was half dreaming and thought it was part of the dream but it cracked again, a little more away and then a third time, very far away.

By the third shot he was on his feet and had pushed the door away and was standing in the opening.

“Hey! Over here, I’m over here!”

He listened and heard two other, much more muted shots and then nothing. Since he slept with no pants and his underwear had long since given up the ghost he was standing nude in the cold air. For a second or two his body heat held but then it started down fast and he felt the cold come into him.

Still he stood, listening, holding his breath, and he heard one more pop, so far away it could hardly be heard and after that no further sound.

“Hey!” he yelled one more time but there was no answer and the cold was getting to him so he closed the door and climbed back into the bag.

It was insane. All that shooting in the dark — who was doing it? And what were they shooting at? He would have to go out tomorrow and look for tracks, at least where the nearest shot seemed to come from — somewhere just across the lake.

And why didn’t they answer him? They must have heard him — what was the matter with them? Was it some maniac? And why hadn’t Brian seen him, or heard him before…

He meant to sleep, was tired enough to sleep, but he could not get the image out of his mind — some crazy man with a high-powered rifle was out there somewhere, shooting at things in the dark.

So Brian put a little more wood on the fire and blew on the coals to get it going and sat all night, dozing intermittently, waiting for daylight so that he could look for tracks.

At first light he got into his clothing and slid the door open and stepped outside.

Into a wall of cold.

He had read about cold — a teacher had read poems to him about Alaska when he was small — and heard stories and seen shows on the Discovery Channel on television but he had never felt anything like this.

His breath stopped in his throat. It felt as if the moisture on his eyes would freeze and he did feel the lining of his nose tighten and freeze. There was no wind, not even a dawn breeze — it was absolutely still — and when he took a step forward he felt the air moving against his eyes and he had to blink to keep them from freezing.

Thirty, forty, fifty below — he couldn’t even guess how cold it was — and he thought, This is how people die, in this cold. They stop and everything freezes and they die.

He pulled his hood up and was surprised, crude as it was, at how much it increased the warmth around his head. Then he pulled the mittens on and picked up his killing lance — long since repaired from the moose kill — and moved forward and as soon as he moved he felt warmer.

The snow was dry, like crystallized flour or sugar, and seemed to flow away from his legs as he walked.

He made a circle of the camp, walked out on the lake ice — which was covered with snow as well — and back around and saw no tracks other than rabbit and mouse.

Then he started to move toward where the sound had come from, working slowly, amazed that he was starting to warm up and even feel comfortable. Back in the hood the air was kept from moving and his face grew warmer and the fact that his head was warm seemed to warm his whole body and once he became accustomed to the cold he could look around and appreciate the world around him.

It was a world of beauty. It’s like being inside glass, he thought, a beautiful glass crystal. The air was so clear he could see tiny twigs, needles on pine trees fifty, seventy-five yards away, and so still that when a chickadee flew from a tree to the meat piled near the entrance — where they flocked and picked at the meat — he could actually hear the rush of air as the bird flapped its wings.

Tracks went everywhere. Once he was in the woods away from camp there were so many rabbit prints he felt there must be hundreds of them just living around the shelter. The tracks were so thick in some places that they had formed packed trails where the rabbits had run over the same place until it became a narrow highway. Some of the snow was packed so densely that it would hold Brian up and he walked single file on the tracks, where the brush permitted, to keep from sinking into the snow.

But he wasn’t looking for rabbit tracks. Somebody had been out there firing a gun and it hadn’t snowed during the night so there should be tracks, had to be tracks.

But there were none. He moved farther out from the camp, circled again, making wide arcs in the direction the sound had come from, and there were no tracks — or none other than mice, deer, something he thought was a fox, and about a million rabbits.

He stopped at midday and stood by a tree trying to find some other sign, something that would tell him how they did it…

Had he dreamed the whole thing? Could he have been dreaming of gunshots? Or maybe he’d been alone too much and was going insane. That could happen. It happened all the time. People went crazy under far less stress than Brian had been under. Maybe that was it — he’d dreamed it or had finally gone insane. Sure…

Craaack!

It was near his head and he dropped to his knees. They were shooting at him. And they were close, right next to him. No dream this time, no insanity — they were right on top of him.

He rolled to his left and came up in a crouch behind a large pine, waiting, watching. Nothing — he could see absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Just brush and trees and… there. He had been looking along the ground and he brought his eyes up a bit, so that they were scanning ten feet up, and he saw it.

A poplar tree was shattered; bits of wood and bark seemed to have been blown out of it as if it had been hit by an exploding shell. It was still standing but was severely damaged and he thought for a moment that somebody was playing pranks, shooting a tree ten feet off the ground.

But it hadn’t been shot. He moved closer to the tree and studied it and there was no evident bullet hole — just the shattering wound — and it is likely he would never have known except that he actually saw it happen and it was almost the last thing he saw happen on earth.

Directly in front of him, not fifteen feet away and just slightly higher than his head, a footlong section of tree exploded with a shattering, cracking sound that nearly deafened him and at the same time a sliver of wood from the tree came at him like an arrow. There was no time to dodge, move, even blink. The sliver — a foot long and slightly bigger in diameter than his thumb and sharp as a needle — came at his face, brushed violently past his ear and stuck halfway out the back of the leather hood.

He reached up to grab the sliver with his mittens on, couldn’t because they were too bulky and threw the right one off and grabbed the wood with his bare hand.

It was frozen solid, so cold that it stuck to the warm skin on his fingers and he had to shake it off. The tree was frozen all the way through. It was strange but he’d never thought of it, never considered what happened to trees when it got cold. He just figured they got through it somehow — they just got cold.

But there was moisture in them, sap, and when it got very cold the sap must freeze. He went up to the tree that had just exploded and saw that a whole section seemed to have been blown out of the side — maybe a foot and a half long and four or five inches wide. Just shattered and blown apart and the force seemed to have come from inside the tree and he stood back and stared at the wound and thought on it and finally came up with a theory.

The tree would freeze on the outside first, a ring of frozen wood all the way around. Then, when it got truly cold — as it had last night — the inside would freeze. When liquid freezes it expands — he had learned that in Ms. Clammon’s science class — or tries to expand. But with the wood frozen all around it there was no space for the center to expand. It simply stayed there, locked in the center while the outside held it in and the containment forced the center to build up pressure, and more pressure and still more, until it couldn’t be contained and blew out the side of the tree.

It wasn’t gunshots. It was trees exploding. There were no crazy people running around with guns and Brian hadn’t gone off the deep end.

It was just winter, that was all. Brian stared at the tree and then around the woods and knew one thing now for a certainty: Everything was different. The woods in summer were a certain way and now they were a different way, a completely different place.

And if he was to stay alive he would have to learn this new place, this winter woods. He would have to study it and know it. The next time he might not be so lucky…

Chapter FOURTEEN

It proved to be much harder than he had thought it would be. That night a front came in and the temperature rose — a welcome relief — to probably an even zero, and it snowed. This time it snowed close to six inches and while that would not have been so bad in itself it came on top of snow that was already there. All in all it added up to just under two feet of snow, dry powder, and when he tried to move in the woods it was too much. It came over the top of his cylinder boots and froze his legs and he had to go back to the shelter to get rid of the snow and dry his boots out.

“This,” he said, sitting by the fire, “is as bad as it gets…”

The truth was, it could be fatal. He needed to move in the woods to get firewood — not to mention hunting and studying to learn — and if he could not move without freezing his feet he could not get wood and without wood he would freeze to death.

It seemed to be a wall. He sat, burning the last two days’ worth of wood, and felt the cold waiting, waiting. Dark came suddenly at four in the afternoon and he sat in the dark for a while and thought on the problem and was leaning back gazing into the fire when he remembered the rabbits.

They grew larger feet.

He had to do the same. As soon as he thought it he smiled and thought of snowshoes. They had completely slipped his mind.

All he had to do was make a pair of snowshoes.

I’ll get right on it tomorrow morning, he thought, lying back to doze in his bag, and was nearly asleep, smiling in comfort and ease now that he had solved the problem, when he realized that he didn’t have the slightest idea how to make a pair of snowshoes.

It kept him awake for another hour, until he simply couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, and then he fell asleep without a solution.

Two bows.

It came in the half sleep just before he awakened. It was cold, the fire was burned down, and he felt snug and warm in the bag and didn’t want to get up, and lay with his eyes closed, his head tucked down inside the bag, and dozed, and was almost back asleep when the thought hit him.

Two bows.

If he made two bows of wood, then tied the ends together, used some kind of crosspieces to hold them apart and keep them in a rough oval, he would have the right shape for snowshoes.

And it proved to be almost that easy. He cut wood from the willows down by the lake and brought four five-foot-long pieces into the shelter where it was warm, along with some other shorter sections he’d cut from the lower and thicker branches on the same willow.

They were frozen solid but they thawed quickly by the fire and were as limber as they had been in the summer. He peeled the bark from them easily with the knife and then took two of them and tied the ends together with moose-hide lacing. After they were tied together he pulled the center sections apart until he could put the hatchet between them to hold them apart — about twelve inches — and then he used the knife to cut crosspieces and notch the ends of the shorter sections to fit around the wood of the long side and make cross-braces.

He put two cross-braces to hold the long sides apart and then tied the cross-braces in place with strips of moose-hide lacing and had the frame for a snowshoe.

He made a second one the same way — all of this didn’t take two hours — and moved on to the next step.

He would have to fill them with lacing and there was plenty of moose hide left but it was frozen outside. He brought it inside and let it thaw near the fire for the rest of the afternoon until he could unfold it and start to cut lacing to make the web of the snowshoe.

Here it was all mystery to him. He had seen pictures of snowshoes and had a vague idea that they seemed to be a web, kind of like a tennis racket — a very crude tennis racket — but that was it.

He had plenty of moose hide left and he started by cutting a lace half an inch wide. He did not know how much he would need but figured it should be long so he just kept cutting, running along the edge of a large piece of hide, cutting around and around the edge, stopping often to sharpen the knife on the stone until he had a pile of lacing lying on the ground by the fire.

By this time it was dark but he fed small bits of wood to the fire — the shelter was very tight and stayed surprisingly warm from just a small flame — and continued working.

He did not know how to make the rest of the snowshoe. He had seen pictures and knew it had to be a web of some sort but could not visualize how to start. In the end he just started in the middle and worked to the ends, tying the strips of moose hide crosswise, fastened to each side, making horizontal strips about two inches apart, each strap pulled tight and tied off in a double knot.

The hide was hard and he had to soften it by rubbing it over a stick to break it down, which slowed him, and it was late by the time he’d finished the crosspieces on one shoe but instead of going to bed he continued.

The strips that ran the long way he tried simply weaving into place but they were too loose and so he tied them off to each cross-strap as he went from one end of the shoe to the other, again with the straps about two inches apart.

It was moving toward morning when he finished the webbing on one shoe and he almost laughed at how it looked. He had not taken the fur off the hide strips and there was enough hair to fill all the holes with fuzz. He started to burn it off and then realized it would help keep him up in soft snow. He finally crawled into his bed to sleep about four in the morning, still smiling at how the shoe looked.

He slept hard until daylight — about nine o’clock — and then kindled the fire and restarted it with the coals that were still glowing. He had chopped some chunks of moose meat and he put a kettle on with slivers of meat and snow to make a breakfast stew and as soon as the shelter was warm went back to work.

The second shoe went much faster because of the practice he’d had on the first one and by midday he had finished webbing it. He ate the stew and drank the broth and then looked once more at his handiwork.

They looked odd, to say the least — downright ugly. The fur was so thick he could hardly see the lacing. But they also looked strong and now all he had to do was find a way to fix them to his feet.

He could think of no mind pictures, no memories that showed snowshoe bindings, and finally he simply tied straps across down the middle, as tightly as possible, to jam his feet beneath.

Then there was nothing to do but try them. He banked the fire so that the coals would hold for a time, got dressed and took the shoes outside.

They were very tight on his boots and felt snug and he set off trying to walk on them at once. Around the shelter the snow was packed down where he had walked and the shoes were easy — clumsy, but he could skid them along.

As soon as he moved away from the shelter in fresh snow everything changed. He took two steps and fell flat on his face in the snow. The tips kept digging in and tripping him and he tried holding his toes up, which didn’t help, and continued stumbling along, falling over frontward, until he thought of moving the foot strap forward a bit.

This just took a minute and then when he stepped off, his foot was farther forward and lifted the front of the shoe first, cleared the tip and pulled it across the top of the snow.

It made all the difference. He tripped twice more before he developed a pace that kept his legs far enough apart to prevent the shoes from hitting each other and then he moved into deeper snow.

It was amazing. The snow was powdery and the shoes didn’t keep him right on top as he’d thought they might. But he only went down three or four inches and stopped, instead of his foot going all the way down into two feet of snow, and as an added benefit the snowshoes kept the snow away from his feet and legs.

He didn’t get snow down his boots, his legs stayed warmer and dryer and that kept the rest of his body warmer and dryer but more, much more than that, he could move again.

He moved straight to a stand of dead poplar a quarter mile down the lakeshore. Poplars often died standing and for that reason stayed dry and out of the snow and were good firewood. He hadn’t been able to get at them because of the snow but the shoes made it easy.

He broke off limbs and knocked over small dead trees and, walking with a kind of forward churning motion, he spent the rest of the day bringing in wood until he had a huge pile next to the shelter — enough for a week.

It was incredible, he thought, how the snowshoes seemed to change everything, change his whole attitude. He’d been closing down, he realized — settling into the shelter, not paying attention to things, getting more and more into his own thinking, and the shoes changed all that. He felt like moving, hunting, seeing things, doing things again.

Thinking of hunting brought his food supply into his thoughts and he brushed the snow away from the moose meat and was stunned to see how much he’d eaten. He hadn’t gained weight, had lost a small amount as a matter of fact, and yet apparently without knowing it had been eating like a wolf.

He’d eaten both front shoulders, the back and hump area and one back leg — all the meat was chopped off the bones in those areas. All he really had left was the left rear leg and then chopping and boiling the bones to make the meat jelly-stew.

He would have to hunt again and that night he spent the hours until he slept making sure his war bow and big arrows were in shape, checking the lance and sharpening the hatchet and knife and retightening his snowshoes where they had become loose from gathering wood all day.

That night the temperature dropped like a stone, so that he heard trees exploding again, but he slept hard and down and tight in his shelter and dreamed of walking on white clouds…

Chapter FIFTEEN

Everything had changed.

Somehow he had thought that it would be like normal hunting except colder and whiter but it wasn’t — it all seemed a different world.

He made a breakfast stew and ate while it was still dark and didn’t open the shelter until close to ten, when the sun was well up.

Brian had never felt such cold, never thought he would see it, never thought that if he did see such cold he would live through it. He had his hood up and had to breathe slowly in through his nose to warm the air so that it would not stop halfway down his throat.

It was colder than before, how cold he couldn’t guess, but when he went to the bathroom some of his urine froze on the way to the ground and broke when it hit and he spit on a clear area of hard-packed snow and the spit bounced.

Still he did not feel cold. There was no wind, not a breath, and he soon warmed inside his parka as he walked and started to hunt.

He hadn’t shot in a while and wanted to try some practice shots but knew he would lose the arrows beneath the snow. He settled for pulling the bow back a few times and flexing his muscles and found that because the parka was so bulky he had to lean forward a bit to let the bowstring clear his sleeve. Also he couldn’t keep his mitten off for long or his hand would freeze, so he would have to have time to shake the mitten off before shooting.

Game was everywhere. They didn’t seem to mind the cold and he saw rabbits all over the place. He could have shot several but the moose had spoiled him. There was so much food in the large animal and only the one death — it still bothered him to kill — and it seemed more proper in some way. He would have to kill perhaps a hundred and fifty rabbits to equal one moose…

As it happened he did not get a moose. He didn’t even see a moose. He saw their tracks and they looked fresh but after following a moose track for more than a mile and seeing no moose and no change in the track he decided it was impossible to tell a fresh track from an old one in powdery snow. They all looked the same.

He was working back toward camp and had decided that he should start trying to hit rabbits when he saw the deer.

It was a buck with only one antler. Brian guessed the other one had gotten knocked off or had never grown. But the buck was good-sized for all that — nowhere near a moose, but large for a deer — and Brian studied the layout carefully.

Brian was on a small rise and the deer was slightly below, standing on the edge of a round frozen pond about fifty yards away — much too far for a shot. The deer was in snow up to its belly, biting the tops off small red willows, eating them slowly, but its ears swiveled constantly and Brian knew he could move no closer directly without being heard.

But down and to his left as he faced the deer there was a shallow depression that angled toward the buck — not quite a ditch yet deep enough to hide everything but his head as he moved and Brian, carefully raising and moving his snowshoes forward, slowly, a step at a time, only just clearing the snow, moved down the depression.

He watched the deer, only lifted his foot to move when the deer had its head down to bite a willow, a step, another step, slowly, so slowly, and in what seemed hours he’d moved sideways and fifteen yards closer.

Thirty-five yards. Still too far — twice too far.

Wait, another step while the deer ate, another wait, holding his breath, two steps, one, half a step…

Twenty yards.

Eighteen, sixteen, fifteen.

Fifteen long paces.

He had learned how to hunt, how to wait for the exact right moment and not waste his shot, and he eased his hand out of the mitten, let it hang on its cord, put his fingers to the string where the arrow lay and waited, frozen motionless.

The deer looked right at him, stared at him, then looked down, back up, stamped its right foot, looked at him again and, finally satisfied, turned to take another bite of willow.

It would not get better.

Brian raised the bow carefully, drew, looked to where the arrow would go, where he wanted it to be, and released.

There was a slight thrum of the string and the arrow leaped away from the bow. The deer heard the sound, had time to start to turn its head, and then the arrow disappeared into its side just to the rear of the shoulder.

Nothing happened.

Brian still stood, holding his breath, the bow still out in front of him.

The deer stood, staring at him, seeing him now, feeling the pain of the arrow that had gone into the top of its heart, but still staring and then settling, down on its front end slowly — as slowly as Brian had walked — then down with its back end and the head curving over to the back until the one antler rested on its shoulder and it died that way, looking back and up at the sky.

Forever, Brian thought. It took forever. With the moose there had been violence, the charge, his killing lance, but this…

This was a kind of murder.

I should have missed, he thought, still standing with the bow out in front of him. I should have raised my hand and the arrow would have gone up a bit and I would have missed, should have missed.

In hunting terms it was a perfect kill, and it made Brian feel perfectly awful. The deer had been eating, just eating, and hadn’t known he was there and the arrow had taken it…

He shook his head. He had done what he had to do and it was finished; he had taken meat and it would be wrong now to waste it.

He moved to the dead buck. It was a large deer — before the moose he would have considered it huge — but he had learned much from handling the moose, and he gutted the deer and peeled the skin back from the belly up to the back on one side, then rolled it and skinned the other side until the hide was free.

There were chunks of yellow-white fat on the carcass and hanging on the skin as well and he left them attached for the moment. He had a lot of daylight left but there was much work to do as well and he started in cutting the legs free as he had with the moose, then chopping the back into pieces. Again he left the head intact and cut it free from the hide and set it up in the crotch of a tree. He still could not bring himself to look at the eyes, though they were clouded and dull.

When the deer was cut up he laid the skin out flat and put the two back legs on it. It was in his mind to use the skin as a carrying pack but it had lain flat until it was frozen and was as hard and flat as a board.

Or a sled, he thought, looking at it from a different angle. He stacked all the meat, with the heart and liver, on the skin, then grabbed it where the head had been attached and pulled hard.

It slid forward easily, so easily he nearly fell over backward. The buck had thick hair but it was all slanted to the back and when he pulled forward the hairs lay back and let it slide like a flat-bottom sled.

“Slick,” he said aloud. “Really slick…”

He had planned on making several trips the mile and a half back to the camp but now it could all be done in one so he took his time, sliding the hide along behind the snowshoe tracks and getting back to the shelter well before dark.

“I am fat,” he said, looking at all he had: the rest of the moose, all the firewood he had gathered, the shelter and now the deer. “I’m set. Now all I have to do is…”

He couldn’t think of a word. He wanted to say “play,” but he didn’t think in terms of playing any longer. Or maybe it was that he considered it all play.

That night he splurged and didn’t boil meat. Instead he cut a steak off the deer and broiled it on sticks over the fire. It wasn’t perfect — the sticks burned and the meat fell into the fire twice and he lost all the juice in the flames and it smoked up the inside of the shelter so that he had to open the door to clear it out — but it was good. The fat had cooked and burned a little and he ate until he thought his stomach would burst.

During the night a change awakened him and he lay with his eyes open in the dark until he realized that a breeze had come up and that the temperature was rising and the hard-bite cold was gone and there would probably be some snow coming.

He didn’t care. He missed summer and the short fall that had followed but in some ways he liked winter better.

He hadn’t, he thought, smiling as he went to sleep, seen a mosquito in months…

Chapter SIXTEEN

The weather warmed and he started to run the next day.

Not literally — it was all he could do to walk fast in the snowshoes — but in the sense that wolves run.

He decided to see more, be more and not spend all his time in the shelter just living between kills and looking out the door now and then.

He wanted more, and the snowshoes and some new confidence made him free. He took his war bow and lance, a deerskin quiver of arrows over his back, a propane lighter and enough meat for the day wrapped in a hanging pouch of deer hide, and ran the way wolves ran, coursed just to see what he could see.

He moved out from the shelter in gradual circles, discovering the land. The first few days he did not go far, had a slight concern about becoming lost, and then decided it didn’t matter. He would always find his way back by the snowshoe tracks and even if they filled in and it took him some time to find his way home to the shelter in a very real sense he was always home now in the woods; with the bow and hatchet at his belt and the lighter to start a fire and snowshoes to keep him above the snow he had become a creature of winter. Home was where he stopped to have a fire and by the end of a week — the warm weather held, rising to thirty above during the day — he actually stayed out away from the shelter for a night and sat by a fire in his clothes, listening to wolves howling, seeing a thousand diamond eyes from the firelight glittering in the snow around the fire pit.

The next day it grew warmer still and he was working a ridge about four miles from camp hunting a moose. He had no intention of killing the moose but was hunting like a wolf — not always to kill, but to know, to see. He had seen the moose, a large bull with both antlers gone, earlier in the day and had locked onto his tracks and followed a quarter mile back, watching the moose through the trees as the moose nibbled on the same willow shoots Brian had seen the deer eating. They made it look so good he tried them but they tasted like wood to him and he spit them out.

The moose didn’t know Brian was there and Brian studied him carefully, watching him eat and move. The moose was huge, enormous, twice as big as the cow Brian had killed or maybe larger still, and Brian doubted that even with a full draw and very sharp arrow he could get a shaft deep enough to kill him. Perhaps with the lance and a good solid lunge or by having the bull run on the spear as the cow had done…

He was thinking this way, watching the bull from beneath an overhanging pine branch about a hundred yards away, imagining how it would be and what he would have to do to get the moose if he ever wanted to try it, when he saw the wolf kill.

At first he didn’t recognize what was coming. He saw the moose stiffen and turn his head, his huge ears alert and forward, and then in a shadow he saw a flash of gray, just a touch, moving across the rear of the moose.

Wolf. He just had time to think the word when he saw another gray shape swipe through the trees, again across the rear of the bull, and then two more as they came in to cut and dodge and it looked like seven or eight of them but he thought probably only four.

It was enough. The bull tried to fight. He slashed with his front hooves and kicked with his back, swinging and swiveling to meet the attackers, but they kept coming from the side in slashing attacks aimed at the bull’s back legs and rear end. They pulled at the hamstrings, cut at the back legs until the bull couldn’t stand and as he caved in and settled on his rear the wolves became frantic and started tearing at his rear end, opening the bull while he was still alive, ripping at the rear leg muscles and the anus, each bite opening the wound more until blood was all over the snow and the wolves were covered with it.

And they ate him that way. Pulling at his rear while he still lived, pulling his insides out while he tried to pull himself away with his front legs until he was at last too weak and fell forward. Still alive, still living while they ate him.

Brian wanted to not see it. He had thought killing with the arrows slow and bad but this — it was nothing like this. The wolves were crazy with it, with the smell of blood and from the hot intestines they pulled from the living moose, and the bull took forever to die, never died but just kept sinking down and down while the wolves ate him alive.

Brian shuddered. He had seen the wolves before and had never felt fear. He had not thought they would ever attack him but if they did — if they came in like that and pulled him down.

He looked away, shook his head. They would not attack. They hadn’t yet and they had had plenty of opportunities. They ate deer and moose and hopefully not boys.

But still, as Brian left them eating and moved quietly away, still he kept an arrow in the bow and his fingers on the string and kept looking over his shoulder back at them pulling at the bull and gorging on the warm meat and later that night in the shelter he sat by the fire and wondered how it could be so horrible — how nature could let an animal suffer the way the moose had suffered.

The wolves were just being natural and he understood the need to kill — he would himself die if he did not kill.

But so slowly…

He stared into the flames for a long time thinking of it and thought he would dream of it when he slept, but he didn’t. Instead he dreamed of home, of sitting watching television with his mother and father, and when he awakened it was well past daylight — the latest he had slept in some time.

He went outside to the bathroom and the weather was so soft and warm he didn’t need his parka — a warm day in December — and he turned back to build a fire and boil meat when he heard two trees explode, some distance off, one pop and after a short pause another one.

Pop… pop.

And he had the fire going and the pot on with snow and meat set to boil when he realized what he had heard, or what he hadn’t heard.

It was too warm for trees to explode.

Chapter SEVENTEEN

He had fooled himself before. He had thought he heard planes when none were there, had imagined he saw people, had thought guns were going off when trees were exploding — all wrong.

And so now he thought of what it could be. If it wasn’t trees exploding then what? He could think of nothing but a gun, unless somehow trees exploded when it got warm as well as when it was cold.

He had neglected camp and spent all the next day cleaning the shelter, bringing in more wood, retightening the snowshoes, checking the bowstring and sharpening the hatchet and knife. It was still warm so he put his sleeping bag out to air and somehow when he had done these things it was near dark and time to cook again and settle in for the night.

But he was not tired, and all the day, while he worked around camp, and then at dark when he made the fire and started to cook, all that time he kept listening for the sound again, knowing that it was warm and that it might not be trees, but not thinking past that, just listening, waiting. But he did not hear it again.

He lay awake looking at the coals, the warm glow lighting his face, and when his eyes closed he knew that the next day he would go and try to find the place where he had heard the popping sounds. He thought it must be a good distance — the sounds were faint — and he would probably find some plausible reason for the sound.

But he would look.

He had to look.

He awakened before dawn, made a small fire to cook stew and then prepared his gear. He had not forgotten the wolves and he saw to his lance and war bow and arrows, hung the hatchet and knife on a thong around his shoulder and left camp just after good light.

Brian knew it might be a wasted trip and he decided to swing past the wolf-killed moose. There had been four wolves but it was a large moose and there would probably be meat left over — if the wolves were gone.

He needn’t have worried. The wolves had eaten off the rear end and up the middle and were gone but the back and front shoulders were intact and Brian made a mental note to swing around and start carrying meat back to the camp when he finished the search.

The warm weather had softened the snow surface and then it had refrozen during the night, so the snowshoes didn’t sink in at all but rode along the top and Brian found it was almost like skating.

“If I had skis,” he murmured, “I could fly…” And he wondered how hard it would be to make a pair of skis — whittle them out of wood. Almost impossible, but his mind stayed on it, thinking on how he would cut a straight log and split it with the hatchet and carve it flat and somehow warp up the end, seeing it in his mind, visualizing each step, and he was so caught up in the idea of the skis that he almost missed it.

A line.

He had come three miles and a bit more, working along the tops of ridges where he could see farther. There were hundreds of ponds and lakes scattered through the woods and he wove between them, staying high. He saw three moose, more than a dozen deer and hundreds of rabbits and could have had many shots, but was trying to find some sign, something that would be out of the ordinary, and there it was:

A line.

In the middle of a lake more than a mile away and below the ridge he was walking on, out across the ice from the east to the west side of the lake, there was a line, a straight line.

He saw it and didn’t see it, looked away and kept walking, thinking of the skis, and then stopped, did a long double take and looked again and there it was — a straight line in the snow across the lake.

Brian had discovered that there are almost no straight lines in nature. The sides of trees up and down, the horizon far away, but very little else. Animal tracks almost always wandered, circled; seldom did they go straight for any distance.

But the lake was a mile away. The line could be anything. He walked closer, watching it as he came off the ridge until the trees blotted it out and then picking up the pace, sliding the snowshoes over the hard surface as fast as he could move until he saw it again — not on the lake, this time, but through the trees ahead before going out onto the ice.

The same line.

Closer, he could see that it was not just a line but a depression in the snow that went along straight and when he moved still closer he could see that the depression was about five inches deep, almost two feet wide, and the bottom of it was as smooth as packed ice; a flattened trail that went off the bank and out on the surface of the lake.

It was most definitely not a natural trail. Something had come along here. There were no tracks, just the smooth, flat, wide depression, and Brian squatted by the side of it and tried to visualize what had made this path.

Something came by here, he thought, and then no, not something but somebody came by here.

A person.

Ahh, he thought — another person in the world. He had come to think there were no other people and here was this strange track. Almost certainly a person made it but in what manner…

Then he saw the edge of a print. On the side of the flattened area, just to the edge, was one clear wolf print. It was as plain as if the wolf had stepped in plaster and made a cast; in the soft snow from the warm weather there was a wolf print. One. Heading out on the lake.

Somebody with a wolf?

No, that didn’t work. Somebody walking, pulling something, and then coming on an old wolf trail and covering the tracks, all but one.

Pulling what — a toboggan of some kind? Somebody coming along pulling a toboggan on an old wolf trail out here in the middle of the wilderness?

Out here?

It was insane. Brian wasn’t sure where he was, had no true idea how far the plane had come off course before he crashed, but he was certain nobody could have pulled a toboggan from civilization out here and for a second he doubted that he was seeing what he was actually seeing — a track left by a person. Perhaps he was hallucinating.

But he shook his head and it was still there, all of it, and if he was dreaming this or hallucinating it then he would have to have hallucinated all of it, the wolves, the moose kill, the popping sounds…

No. It was real.

So what did he do?

Follow the tracks, he thought — don’t be stupid.

But which way? There was no indication from the flat surface of the track of any direction. Just the wolf print, heading out onto the lake.

Well, why not? That way was as good as any and Brian set off, walking on the track itself, which was like a packed highway. If he was not particularly excited, it was because in truth some part of him did not believe what he was seeing, what he was doing.

He crossed the lake and went into the woods on the other side and there was no change, just the hard-packed trail out ahead of him, and he kept moving, seeing the wolf prints more often, especially where the trail curved around a tree — the prints would be on the outside — and in this way he passed the day.

Toward midafternoon he was hungry and stopped to eat from the meat in his pouch, eating snow to wash it down, and then he set off again and just before dark he caught a smell he knew well.

Smoke. Just a taint on the faint breeze that had come up. Some of the dry dead wood and a bit of pine, he thought, sniffing, and then it was gone, and he kept walking, thinking he must be close now, or the wind had carried it far and in the evening light he came around a corner past a large evergreen and was facing four wolves.

Except they weren’t. They looked like wolves at first, large, slab-sided gray beasts in the dim light, but then he saw they were tied, their chains leading back to trees. They were watching him come and wagging their tails, and he knew they were dogs.

Four huge malamutes.

The one on the left whined softly and wiggled, trying to get him to come and pet, and Brian stood there, stunned, when beyond the dogs he saw a crude log shelter covered with brush and a skin door. As he looked, a Native American man with a rifle stepped out of the door, saw Brian and nodded.

“It’s you — I wondered when you’d come by.”

Brian stood, his mouth open.

“We’ve got beaver cooking here, plenty for all of us.”

“I…

“But how… why… who?”

“Smelled your smoke three weeks ago. I didn’t want to bother you — there’s some in the bush want to be alone. Figured you’d be here before this but come on in…” He turned and said something back into the shelter and two small children came out and stood next to the man and a woman looked out over his shoulder.

“I… don’t know what to say.” And Brian knew he meant it. He hadn’t spoken to a person in… he had to stop and think. The days weren’t there anymore — always they had been there in the back of his mind, every day, the count, and now they were gone.

The man disappeared back inside the hut and Brian still stood, the dogs whining softly, wiggling to be petted, and in a minute the man’s head popped back out.

“Are you coming inside?”

“I…,” Brian started, then stopped and kicked out of his snowshoes and walked inside the hut.