by David Haynes
“Fetch me the fur,” Lisa said without looking up.
Jonesy jumped up again and ran upstairs to the bedroom. On their bed were three fur blankets. He grabbed the largest one and ran back downstairs. He could see the woman was now entirely naked. He turned his back, holding the blanket out at arm’s length. He felt it slide from his fingers as Lisa took it.
“Safe?” he asked.
“Safe,” she replied a moment later. He turned around. Lisa had put her in the recovery position, rolling her up in the fur. Jonesy pushed more wood into the fire and sat beside his wife.
“Where the hell did she come from?” he asked. It was a question as much to himself as it was to Lisa.
“God knows,” she replied, “but it looks like she ran through a wall to get here. Either that or she rolled up and down the valley a few times.”
“Huh?”
“She’s covered in bruises. I’ve never seen so many. Old ones, new ones, some that look like she’s been hit with a hammer.” She released her breath in a long steady stream. “Jesus Christ,” she added. “She needs to go to the hospital.”
Jonesy looked out of the window. The snow was falling heavier than ever and in the dying light of the day, the sky looked like it were filled with a thousand days of winter.
The nearest hospital was in Fairbanks, about a hundred and fifty miles away. The nearest radio was in Big Six, a good hike across sixty miles of mountain and forest in the snow.
“We’re not going anywhere,” he said. For the second time since they had lived in the cabin, he felt vulnerable. Not the type of vulnerability that kept them alert and safe, the day to day edge that had become part of their lives. This was a different species altogether, the very seeds of which sowed a nauseating fear through his body. They needed a satphone. Something they should have, something he’d been supposed to arrange.
He didn’t have to look at Lisa to know the same feeling was seeping out of her pores too. It smelled like shit.
Lisa put her hand on the girl’s forehead again. “She’s only young, mid-twenties maybe.”
Bundled up in the furs like that, Jonesy thought she looked like she was still in high school. He grabbed the discarded ski-suit, checking the pockets for some form of identification. They were empty, there was nothing to suggest who she was.
Lisa picked up her boots and held them in front of Jonesy. “Reckon she owns those footprints you saw? Same size as me.”
He winced and nodded. “Sorry,” he said. But sorry would never be enough.
“And the sack?” Lisa asked. “Her again?”
Jonesy nodded. “Makes sense.” He turned his head and looked at her. “I just never considered someone else might be out here. Never even crossed my mind.”
“Nor mine,” she said. “When did anyone ever come up here?”
He shook his head. They both knew the answer to that question. Never. “Best we can do is keep her warm and hope she comes out of it.”
Lisa nodded.
“I’ll go get some more firewood,” Jonesy said, standing up.
He walked outside. Normally Lad would have gone with him but he was transfixed by the stranger lying by the fire. The question neither of them had asked was, what then? What would happen if she did recover? They couldn’t exactly turn her out into the cold a minute after she had woken up. She would need to rest, recover properly, maybe even stay with them for several weeks – all winter.
He gathered up an armful of logs. There was enough food for two, for him and Lisa to last out the winter in relative comfort. Was there enough for three people? Probably, but they wouldn’t be eating tenderloin every week. They might even have to ration things out toward spring. He didn’t like that thought and he knew exactly what Lisa would say. She must have been thinking it already.
He turned back toward the cabin. They were already a sack of stewing meat down too. She must have eaten it raw.
There was one last question. At least for now. Was she alone? It seemed unlikely that anyone would be out in the bush, in the middle of winter, on their own. The suit she had been wearing was not the kind of thing someone who lived out here would wear. It was tourist attire. A lost hiker maybe? She didn’t even have a pack with her. No rifle, no water. Nothing.
Something was very wrong with this picture and the more he thought about it, the worse it got.
*
They both stayed downstairs for most of the night. Jonesy went to bed for a while but when the girl started groaning and calling out, he came back to the fireside. The girl was stuck in some feverish netherworld that squeezed child-like whimpers and groans from between her dried lips. Lisa soaked a towel and dripped water into her mouth, but it seemed to sizzle and evaporate before it had the chance to trickle down her throat.
In the orange glow of the fire, they looked at each other with the same knowing expression. The girl wasn’t going to make it. Not unless they got her to a hospital.
Before the sun showed any signs of rising, Jonesy stood up and stretched.
“You go up and grab a couple of hours, I’ll be fine here for a while longer. If she wakes up, I’ll call you,” Lisa said.
He shook his head. “She can’t be on her own. There must be others out there somewhere. I need to go and look for them.”
“Are you kidding me?” she answered. “You can’t go out there on your own, it’s minus twenty.”
“I’ll take Lad,” he answered, sitting at the table, pulling on his boots.
“Jonesy,” Lisa said. He knew the tone. It meant look at me.
He finished with his boots and looked up.
“If there is anyone out there and they’re dressed like she is, without shelter, they will be dead. You know that.”
He nodded. “You think she ate that sack of meat on her own? Raw and frozen?”
Lisa shrugged. “I don’t know. No telling what people will...” She stopped. He was glad. There was no reason to go any further.
“I’ll just go down through the forest, follow the river for a couple of miles, come back up onto the plateau as far the southern fork. Four hours.” He stood up. “At most.”
“I don’t like it,” she said, looking out of the window.
Jonesy looked too. The snow looked like a cloud of rabid mosquitoes. It wasn’t a day he would ordinarily choose to go out hiking.
“We can’t leave people out there, Lisa. Not if there’s a chance.”
Lisa looked back at him and then down at the girl. “If we wait for her to...”
“We don’t know when or if that’s going to happen, and by then it’ll be too late for anyone out there.”
She lifted her head again. “I could come with you?”
“You need to stay with her. Four hours and then we know we’ve done everything we can.”
Lisa squeezed a few drops of water into the girl’s lips. “Okay. But you’re not going anywhere until it gets light. Enough time for a bowl of oatmeal and some coffee.”
He smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”
*
As the sun came up over Denali and the rest of the Alaskan Range, Jonesy had already threaded his way through the forest down to the banks of the Tanana. He passed many more fallen Sitka, birch and spruce on his way. There would be no shortage of firewood this year.
Lad was pulling the sled just in case they did find anybody, but Jonesy knew anyone they found would be frozen if they were out here in the open. The girl had been underprepared for the conditions, and it was a safe bet whoever she was with would be too.
The river was not flowing, at least not visibly. Ice had formed in a solid sheet across the surface and would be that way for several more months before running water was visible again. He skirted the bank where the snow was shallowest. Not once did he dare step on the ice.
Across the river, the valley stretched into the distance. He raised his binoculars and scanned the vast, unending frozen desert. It was barren and even if there had been signs of life – or death – over there, he was unable to
venture across. Great clouds of snow whirled and swirled across the expanse looking for something to tear apart. It wasn’t going to be him.
He walked along the riverbank until they arrived at the forest where they had witnessed the lone grizzly bear destroy and eat an injured caribou a few months ago. It was a devastating display of strength and it made them both feel very small. Jonesy knew he could walk through the trees, keep going to the other side and then on again until they reached the great curving sweep of the river, but he had to draw a line somewhere. There was only so far he could travel.
He followed the treeline over to the side of the valley and looked up. A few days ago, Lad had pulled him along the ridge, over to the lookout point. The day had been crisp and clear and both of them had enjoyed being out in the open again. Today up on the ridge the snow blew sideways off the plateau, creating an icy maelstrom. He didn’t relish the idea of the climb but that was the perimeter of the search area he had drawn in his mind.
By the time Jonesy reached the top, he was exhausted and they paused to take a drink of water from his canteen. It was hard to see much farther than the forest even with the binoculars, but he scanned across the valley nevertheless. Nothing. No sign of anything moving out there.
As they made their way back toward the cabin, he knew whatever slim hope there had been of finding anyone was getting thinner by the second. Someone out in the open would be dead and their body completely covered by the snow inside half a day. They might be found when the thaw started but even then, out here in the wilderness they could remain lost for years. By then one of the numerous predators that lived here would have made a meal of them. If they hadn’t already.
He crossed the frozen spring and paused at the trail that led down to the cabin. He could be inside, drinking coffee, eating jerky and warming his frigid hands in twenty minutes. He looked along the ridge. Or he could continue for another hour and then turn back on himself, working his way back through the woods toward home.
He closed his eyes. “Come on!” he shouted. Lad responded immediately. There was still enough light to complete a search.
It was nearly a year since he had walked this part of the trail. It would be exactly a year in another four weeks. It was an anniversary neither he nor Lisa would be celebrating.
As much as he wanted to pick that memory out of his head and stamp it into the dirt, he couldn’t. It was scorched into his brain like a brand. When he died, everything about that time, everything he had done would remain. The trees, the earth, the air, the river, even the cabin, it was etched into all of them just as it was him. And if all that was left of him was that memory, then it would be black and stink like a million festering piles of shit.
He turned off the trail, slipping and falling head-first into a gnarly tree trunk. The pain was instant and sharp. It was jarring and it shook him out of the terrible darkness of that memory. Being distracted out here and alone was dangerous.
He pushed Lad through a meandering path among the trees, fighting to stay upright and to keep the sled from pulling them both all the way down to the river. There was nobody out here. It had been foolish to think there could be.
He steered the sled toward home. At least he knew that now. He had done all he could.
9
“She opened her eyes,” Lisa said without looking over her shoulder. “Only for a second but she looked at me.”
Jonesy closed the door behind him and stepped inside the cabin. Lad was already beside Lisa, looking down at the girl.
“She did?” He was shocked. He had half-expected to come home and find the girl dead. He knelt beside Lisa. “Did she speak?”
“No, but she opened her mouth long enough for me to get some water in there.”
“That’s fantastic,” he said.
She turned to him. “Anything?”
Jonesy held his hands up to the stove. “Nothing. No sign of anyone or anything.”
She nodded and rubbed his hands. “You tried.”
“Think she’ll make it?”
Lisa shrugged. “An hour ago I’d have said no chance, but now, I don’t know. Maybe.” She grabbed the girl’s hand, holding it up for Jonesy to look. “Look at this.”
The girl wore a wedding band on her finger.
“Shit,” Jonesy said. It meant there was probably someone else out there. Her husband. They should have seen that earlier. It was the only item of jewelry she wore. “I should go back out there and look for him.”
“No. You’re not going,” Lisa said.
“But...”
“No,” she repeated.
He was about to argue but the girl moved, shifting her body against them both. Her eyes opened. She looked terrified, blinked three times in rapid succession as if she were trying to clear her vision and then closed them again. She let out a long pained moan and then was still.
“Better than she was yesterday,” he said.
He didn’t know if what she had just done was better but it had to be a positive sign. Either that or that little display was her death throes.
Lisa felt her pulse. “Stronger. Much stronger.”
By the time they ate supper, her eyes were open more or less constantly. She didn’t try to unroll herself from the fur but the shivers stopped and the awful streaming sweat, as sour as it was copious, slowed. It coated her forehead with a silvery, greasy sheen. She didn’t speak and any attempts to engage with her were met with an expression of confused fear. She had no idea where she was or who she was with, that much was obvious.
Lisa tried to feed her, as a mother would a toddler, by spooning food toward her mouth. She kept her mouth closed, pursing her lips together as if she thought Lisa might try and ram the spoon past her teeth.
She did drink though. She took great gulps of water, retching and coughing as she tried to replace what she had lost. It occurred to Jonesy that she looked far worse awake than she had when she was unconscious. She reminded him of his first caribou kill. He had only wounded it, smashing the front shoulder joint with the bullet and felling the animal. Standing over it, looking into those dark and uncomprehending eyes, feeling the fear emanate from it, had been a terrible thing. Her eyes were like the animal’s. She was literally full to the brim with terror.
Lisa sat with her overnight again and in the darkness Jonesy could hear her voice, soothing, gently trying to coax her into a conversation. It didn’t work, it was a monologue. In the morning, after breakfast, Lisa finally agreed to go upstairs and get some sleep. She looked almost as wretched as the girl did by then.
Jonesy busied himself fetching wood from the shed, preparing food and, when he was sure the girl had fallen asleep, he took Lad to the spring to fetch more water. Although she didn’t drink much, it was astonishing to see how much faster the water supply diminished when there were three mouths. As far as he knew, she hadn’t eaten anything since her arrival. That was forty-eight hours ago. As soon as she started eating, their food supplies would go down just as fast as the water was right now. He tried not to think about it.
When he returned with the water the girl was sitting up, the fur draped around her body, dwarfing her. In her hand she held a mug which she was drinking from. It was the first time he had seen her doing anything for herself. Everything else, Lisa had taken care of. Everything.
Her eyes widened when she saw him and she dropped the mug into her lap. The last drops of water splashed against the stove and sizzled.
“Hey,” he said.
She just stared back at him, watching him every step of the way from the door to the stairs.
“Just fetched some water,” he said to her. “Got to be ten inches of ice on it now.” He didn’t know why he was telling her that but it made him feel better. “Good job we’ve got the auger, huh? Hard work breaking through with just the ax.” He scratched his beard and then the back of his head. This didn’t feel in any way awkward.
“Think we’ve got enough wood?” he asked her. There was a huge pile by the do
or, enough for the next three days at least.
She licked her lips.
“Maybe I should fetch some more. Wouldn’t want to run out.” He looked up the stairs, thought about going to wake Lisa and then stopped. She had been awake most of the night. Just because he felt awkward, it wasn’t fair to wake her yet.
Lad clearly didn’t feel the same. He sat beside the girl, staring into the flames and panting.
“Maybe I’ll just make some coffee, then. You up to coffee yet?”
He walked toward the stove, toward her. It was a mundane act, something he did every day, and yet the look on her face suggested he had three heads, was armed with a machete and was coming to cleave her head in two. She slid away from him, banging into the small cupboard where they kept plates and dishes. The impact sent the skillet off the top of the cupboard, clattering across the floor. It was iron, a good weight, and sounded like someone had fired a cannon inside the cabin.
“Jonesy!” Lisa shouted down. “You okay?”
“Fine,” he replied. “Just dropped something. Go back to sleep.”
“What time is it?” she asked.
“About two.” Even when the skillet landed, the girl didn’t take her eyes off him; not even when Lisa shouted down did she look away. Why was she scared of him?
“How is she?” Lisa shouted down again.
“Okay. I think.” He shrugged. “Are you?” He bent his head toward her. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
“Hey.” Lisa was looking down from the mezzanine.
The girl finally took her eyes away from Jonesy and looked up at Lisa.
“I could do with some coffee,” Lisa said.
“Maybe you ought to make it,” he replied.
*
She ate a small amount of bread and three mugs of water for breakfast. When she finished she tried to stand up, but was too weak and collapsed right back down again.
“You need to use the bathroom?” Lisa asked her.
She nodded back. It was the closest thing they had to a conversation since she had been there.