Survive

by David Haynes

  He had a terrible feeling in his guts and it wasn’t hunger. It was dread…something they might have called foreboding in the old books he used to read.

  7

  The next three days were excruciating. The phrase ‘the silence was deafening’ had never been more true than during those long days and nights. The dog was forced to endure the silence too. The temperature dropped another ten degrees and Lad stayed out of the cabin when he could but even he was driven to the fireside occasionally. He sensed the atmosphere and spent most of the time in the shed or wandering around the clearing on the lookout for squirrels.

  When words were exchanged, they were formal and perfunctory. Jonesy slept on the ragged old couch downstairs. Or rather he lay there and stared at the wooden roof joists. Lisa hadn’t told him to sleep down there, she didn’t have to.

  He couldn’t care less if she wanted to climb into the cache and count the sacks of meat or rub her nose on the smoked salmon, it wasn’t about that anymore. It was about trust, it was about admitting she had gone up there in the middle of the night and then lied about it.

  Then of course there was the missing sack. However many times he ran through it in his mind, pictured the cache and its contents, he couldn’t find any possible way he had made a mistake. It wasn’t about being arrogant or stubborn. It was a reality. His methods were foolproof, for this very reason.

  There had been no stewed meat on the menu in the last three days; there had been no meat at all. Christ, he was confused. Confused and frightened. In twelve years of marriage he had not once questioned the trust he had in her, the loyalty that dragged her around the country. It was the same bond that brought her here to Alaska.

  He rolled off the couch and climbed the stairs. All of that should count for something.

  He sat on the side of the bed. In the dim light of the breaking dawn, she looked tiny in the bed. Her slender form was an undulating landscape of hip and shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  She stirred beneath the blankets.

  “I’m sorry for everything.” He could feel the sting of tears welling in his eyes. He wiped them away.

  “For bringing you here, for taking you away from your life, your job, for what happened last winter and most of all I’m sorry for not believing you.”

  She rolled onto her back and looked up at him.

  “Jonesy?” she said.

  “Yes?” he answered. Had she even heard his pathetic apology?

  She slapped him across the cheek. She didn’t have much leverage but what she had, she put into the blow. It snapped his head to the side. He felt his face redden.

  “And I’m sorry I didn’t do that three days ago. All that other shit you’ve just apologized for, I don’t care about that. You didn’t take me away from anything, I came because I wanted to. Because I love you. But the not-believing-me part, that hurts more than anything.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Good.” She reached up and touched his cheek. “No more, okay? We don’t need to talk about the last week at all. It didn’t happen. Got that?”

  He smiled. There was nothing he wanted more than to forget about it, pretend it had never happened.

  “And if I want to go and check on supplies, I’ll do it. I don’t need to go sneaking around in the middle of the night and hiding it from you. Do I?”

  “Course not,” he said. “I thought we weren’t talking about it?”

  “We’re not. Now how about you go up there and fetch some of that caribou bacon we salted? I’m starving.” She sat up and kissed him. “I didn’t mean to hit you so hard.” She turned his head to the side to examine the mark.

  “Yeah you did.” He stood up. “And you enjoyed it.”

  She winked. “Maybe. Just a little bit.”

  Jonesy took his flashlight and walked quickly up to the cache. It had to be minus ten, maybe more, and the top layer of snow was crystallized. With each step, his feet smashed through the icy crust.

  When he took the frozen bacon from the store, he deliberately ignored the empty hook where the stewing meat had been. He pretended it didn’t exist. Just like he was going to convince himself that Lisa’s footprints had never been there. That’s what she wanted, what they both wanted. It had never happened. Just like last winter. It was locked away in a box.

  *

  By the next morning, Jonesy had convinced himself that everything was back on an even keel. It didn’t happen the instant they were eating bacon and mushrooms on fried bread, but the meal helped steer them back to normality – whatever that was during winter in the middle of nowhere.

  During the night, the wind had blown so fiercely that he half-expected to wake up sleeping in the open air. It was a sleepless night, and the loud bone-splintering cracks they heard in the middle of the night were not the sounds of gunfire but of trees being wrenched out of the ground.

  There was more than enough wood to last them through the winter but a fallen tree was too good an opportunity to miss. There was an old chainsaw in the shed, but without fuel it was no better than an ornament. They had never used it. He would cut the first fallen tree he found by hand, as he always did. With the ax sharpened he fastened it to the sled, coiled several lengths of rope and set off with Lisa into the forest on the slope beneath the cabin. They seldom used the trail because it was much steeper than the one farther down the valley and it led almost directly into the Tanana.

  Carrying the rifle in her hands, Lisa walked in front of Lad as he pulled the sled, with Jonesy following at the rear. He felt good. Not just to be out in the open air again but with the knowledge they were working together, all three of them again. These were his favorite times.

  They maneuvered their way slowly down and along the slope. The wind was still strong but less than it had been overnight. There were signs of devastation everywhere and even some of the oldest and tallest trees had fallen victim to the weather. These were too large, too heavy to pull back to the cabin and too thick to even contemplate chopping up. They needed the smaller trees, ones that would be easier to handle.

  Over the last eighteen months, they had both learned to recognize the indicators of beetle infestation on the trees’ bark – the reddish-brown pitch tubes created by the beetles showing they had broken through a tree’s defenses. These were usually the trees they selected to chop down. They made the best firewood but with so many trees either completely uprooted or lying splintered in the snow, infestation was not something they needed to consider today.

  An hour after setting out, they found the tree they wanted. It had fallen against two others, its trunk splintered, revealing a pale creamy wood beneath the knotted bark. With three blows of the ax, Jonesy detached it from the remains of its trunk. He worked with Lisa to secure it to the sled with the ropes he’d brought. They didn’t talk much during the trek back to the cabin but that was nothing unusual. They both slipped into their own worlds where the other was not present.

  He sometimes missed the banal conversations of their other life. Who they’d seen at the mall, what they’d had for lunch, what they were going to watch on the box that night. They were easy conversations about unimportant mundane matters. They required no thought. Not like now. When they spoke it was usually about how they could survive better, how they could learn from their mistakes and make sure they were safe. None of it could ever be considered boring but it sometimes hurt his head to think about those things. To have to think about those things.

  Jonesy pulled the sled with Lad. The slope was a killer, though the dog seemed not to notice. When they reached the crest and the cabin appeared, he paused, took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Once the log was alongside the shed, he could take his time and chop it into firewood at his leisure. It would go to the far side of the pile to be seasoned over the spring and summer. They would probably be burning this particular tree at this time next year. It was a never-ending cycle.

  “What’s that?” Lisa was beside him, pointing
at the cabin.

  “Where?” he said, opening his eyes.

  “There, look.” She was already walking forward. Something was flapping on the outhouse side of the cabin. It looked to be stuck to the wood by the wind.

  Jonesy squinted, not wanting to remove the harness for fear that his shoulders wouldn’t allow him to put it back on. Whatever it was looked dirty and ragged. Like old, stained clothing.

  “Come on, Lad.” He took a few more steps forward, thankful they were now on the flat ground. Lisa was already there. She reached out and peeled it off the cabin.

  “What is it?” he shouted. It was obscured behind her body.

  A dozen more steps, that was all. Then he could wriggle out of the straps and stretch his back. Was this even going to be possible in another ten years?

  Lisa turned slowly. She held a meat sack in her hands. A bloodstained, cotton meat sack.

  “Where’s this from?” she asked.

  Jonesy reached her, released the clips on the harness and took it from her. He stared at it for a moment. The marks were a faded brown color, patchy like a kindergarten finger painting, but it was definitely blood. All of his sacks were stowed away in the shed. They were secured under a ton of other equipment because it was unlikely they would be needed again for some time. Besides, any that were in there were clean. Not spotlessly clean but they were scrubbed down in the river every spring, or after they were used. This one was dirty.

  “Is it ours?” Lisa asked.

  He turned it over. Unless it had blown all the way from Big Six, this sack belonged to them. His mind went back to the morning they both went up to the cache and found one sack missing. He knew without a doubt that this was the missing one.

  He looked at Lisa.

  “How’d it get out here?” She looked past him to the shed. “They’re all tied down, aren’t they?”

  He nodded and glanced up toward the cache.

  “From there?” There was a trace of panic in her voice. “Something got in there?” She turned and looked, lowering the rifle down from her shoulder and into her hands.

  It looked fine. There were no obvious signs that anything was amiss. They both knew from experience that bears didn’t just carefully select things they needed. They didn’t reach inside sacks and remove the meat. They shredded the sack, ate some of it, ate all of the meat, discarded it and then started on the next thing. If a bear had managed to get in their store, it would be on its side with the contents all over the clearing.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I know what this is.”

  She snapped her head around. “What?”

  “It’s the missing sack,” he said.

  She frowned at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. The wind whipped through the clearing and beside him, Lad grumbled.

  “We should go inside,” he said.

  “No,” she replied. “I want to know what you’re talking about. Missing sack?”

  He shuffled from one leg to the other. “The day we both went up there, the day I saw the footprints in the snow...” He needed more time to think about this.

  “Go on,” she pushed.

  “You left me up there and I...well, I think one of the stew sacks was missing.”

  Her expression was one of shocked disbelief. “You think? You think one was missing? Jesus, Jonesy.” She shook her head. “You know how many sacks there are. You know how many pieces of meat are in each of them. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We weren’t exactly talking then and we agreed not to mention it again. I just thought...”

  “Unless you thought it was me who took it?” she asked. “And you didn’t know what...Fuck, Mark. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  He winced. He could almost hear her brain working through the scenario. Even above the wind.

  “You think I’d do that? You think I’d sneak up there and steal meat? Our meat?” She lifted a hand and covered her mouth as if saying it was too ugly.

  He stepped toward her. “No, of course not. At least not when I thought about it properly.”

  She stepped back. “Thought about it? You should have to think about it!” She was yelling now.

  “Oh, come on!” he shouted back. “What was I supposed to think? You won’t admit that you came up here and you won’t admit you were over at the spring either.”

  “Because I didn’t do either of those things!”

  He was frustrated. He didn’t believe she had taken the meat, not deep down, but he couldn’t think of an explanation.

  “Maybe I thought you’d say I’d miscalculated. I don’t know...that I’d lost one or was careless, something like that. Maybe I thought I’d let you down again and you wouldn’t trust me to take care of us.” He banged his fists together. “I didn’t know what to think, Lisa. After all we went through and what we did, how can you ever trust me to look after you again?”

  The anger slid from her face. “You think I blame you, don’t you? You think it’s your fault that we had to go through that?” She shook her head. “Don’t you get it yet? We’re in this together and if we don’t trust each other then there’s nothing. We might as well pack up and go back to the city.”

  He nodded, unable to speak.

  “Wherever this sack came from,” she grabbed it from his hand, “I know you didn’t make a mistake, I don’t even have to think about that.”

  A fresh wave of guilt washed through him, nearly taking his breath.

  “And I sure as hell didn’t take it out of the cache,” she added.

  “So where does that leave us?” he asked. He felt foolish. Worse than that, he was disgusted with himself.

  “Where do you think?” She raised her eyebrows.

  He bit his lip. “There’s nobody out here but us,” he said. “Closest person is more than thirty miles away by river and another thirty on top of that by trail. I don’t see how...” He was putting words to the only solution left open.

  “Well if I didn’t make those tracks and you didn’t lose this sack, then what else is there? One of us is lying? Is that what it boils down to?”

  He shook his head. “I think we need to go inside, get out of the weather, and think.”

  She threw the sack at him. “Then you better think good and hard.” She edged past, leaving him clutching the sack. The terrible sinking feeling he’d had a few days ago was returning but this time it was taking him down deeper, down to a place where the sun never rose. He could do nothing but stand still and let the wind bite him.

  “Jonesy!” Lisa’s voice boomed in the silence of the clearing. “Mark!” she shouted again. He had never heard her voice sound so loud before. Lad was barking now, a compelling sound if ever there was one.

  He turned and lurched through the snow as fast as he could. He rounded the corner and saw Lisa standing on the porch, rifle pointing inside the cabin. Snow blew through the open door. Lad’s insistent bark was fast becoming a toothy snarl. Lisa reached down and grabbed his scruff.

  “What is it?” he called, dropping his own rifle from his shoulder.

  She glanced at him and then back inside. “Just come,” she said, her voice less urgent.

  He stumbled up onto the porch and looked inside. On the floor in front of the stove was a woman. She was curled into the fetal position. The padding of her red ski-suit couldn’t disguise the powerful shivers that punched through her body.

  8

  Jonesy’s mouth dropped open as he turned to his wife. She was slack-jawed too. He shook his head and stepped inside.

  “Just stay there,” he said to Lisa. “Keep Lad back.”

  The dog had never been good around strangers and because of how and where they lived, that meant almost every human was on his interloper list.

  Jonesy walked forward as if he were approaching a coiled rattler, the barrel of his Winchester pointing down at the floor but ready.

  The woman was
either asleep or unconscious, because she hadn’t moved an inch throughout Lad’s protest. It crossed his mind that it might be a trick.

  He coughed loudly. “Hello?” he said.

  He turned back to Lisa and shrugged. “Might as well come in, keep hold of him but see if he can’t give her a nudge.”

  Lisa kept hold of Lad’s neck and walked inside. The dog stopped barking as soon as he got in. He put his nose down and buried it forcefully in the woman’s face. Still, she didn’t move. Jonesy had first-hand experience of how Lad’s cold, wet nose could shock you out of even the deepest sleep.

  Jonesy pushed Lad back and crouched down. “She’s out cold,” he said.

  Lad sat on his haunches and licked his nose. Now he’d got a taste of her, he settled down to watch.

  Lisa dropped down beside Jonesy and grabbed the woman’s wrist. “Pulse is weak, slow. Probably hypothermia.” She looked at him. “We need to get her out of these clothes.”

  He nodded. Her ski-suit was ripped in several places and the lining looked ready to spill out like an old teddy bear.

  “Grab a cushion off the couch,” she said to him.

  He jumped up and grabbed the cushion. Lisa lifted her head so he could slide it under. Carefully, Lisa rolled her onto her back. They both winced when they saw the deep cut down the side of her cheek. There was no blood leaking from it but a scab hadn’t yet started to form. It was fresh.

  Lisa unzipped the front of the tattered ski-suit. It quickly became apparent she was naked underneath. Her flesh was so pale it seemed almost translucent.