by Tim O'Brien
Perry did not notice the clouds coming in. When the clouds covered the sun, he did not notice. He followed Harvey’s orange rucksack.
Twice Harvey stopped to consult his compass. On the second stop, they took off their packs and skis and stood together and urinated under a pine. Harvey unwrapped a bar of chocolate. “Nice country, isn’t it? I told you. We can rest awhile if you’re tired.”
Perry waved him off and they continued up the creek. Eventually it emptied on to a large lake and on the far side they had to carry their skis through a tangle of brush and pines. The country got rocky. The slope of land began turning up. Skiing was impossible. They climbed a pine bluff, then another, and the country kept angling up and up. Perry noticed then that the sun was gone. When finally they stopped climbing, the sky was a sickly gray color. Harvey grunted and unzipped his trousers.
His urine made a yellow patch in the snow.
“What time is it?” Perry asked.
“About three thirty, judging by the sun.”
Perry laughed. “Okay, woodsman. There isn’t any sun. How about judging by your watch?”
“Ha. Okay. Judging by my watch it’s four. Not bad?”
“Nice trick. Where to now?”
They sat on their rucksacks and Harvey took out the map. “An hour and a half of good light left. All right.” He placed his compass on the map. “Parent Lake is dead west of here, half an hour.” He pointed to a place on the map.
Perry studied it. A thousand lakes looked back at him. “Where are we now?”
“Here. Right about here. I can tell better when we get out of this thick stuff. But right about here.”
“All right,” Perry nodded. “And this river? Have we passed this river yet? I didn’t notice it if we did.”
Harvey folded the map up and shrugged. “Who knows? The way everything’s frozen over. Snowed under. Could have crossed a hundred rivers. Damn river doesn’t even have a name. See?”
“Yeah, Harv. Rugged country, right?”
“Absolutely. Let’s go. We’ll have a fire blazing in half an hour.”
They strapped on their skis. The bluffs fell to a natural valley that burrowed southwest and then opened on to a meadow surrounded by more trees. The trees were very old, mostly pine but some birch. The birch were slim and tall, and the white bark stretched in large sheets around the trunks, crinkling at the black seams. There was nothing moving. Perry looked once at the closing sky then decided to ignore it and followed Harvey’s orange rucksack. A palpable, bitter air kept him going.
For a time it was easy skiing again, but then again the forest thickened and they were forced to walk. Harvey followed a chain of moraines that gradually flattened and gave way on the rim of an ancient gully. It was getting dark. They didn’t talk. Harvey took out the map and compass, spending a long time over them, and finally he grinned and said they should make camp. He pointed into the gully: “Down there, I guess. It’ll keep the wind out.”
“You know what’s what,” said Perry, and he threw his skis into the depression.
Without being told, Perry began the search for wood.
“Made fifteen miles today,” Harvey was saying. “Not at all bad considering all the walking. From here on it’ll get a lot easier, once we get to the string of lakes.”
“Right.”
“Nothing to it.”
“A nice crackling fire,” Harvey was saying, confident and cheerful, dumping an armload of wood into the gully. “What we need now are some logs. About a dozen good-sized logs.”
“You sure that’s enough?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
The forest light was gone. Calcified, frozen, the forest was quiet except for the light wind.
“That’ll do it,” Harvey said.
They dropped their wood into the gully, then Harvey held Perry’s wrist and lowered him down. For a moment he was free of the earth, dangling. It sucked his breath away. He gasped, and felt the strain on his shoulder, and he was suddenly afraid, not of falling but of falling nowhere. Harvey released the grip. Perry fell to his knees, his hands sinking into the snow.
“That’ll do it, that’ll do it,” Harvey said. “You all right?”
Perry nodded in the dark.
They gathered the wood into a pile and Harvey separated the twigs from the branches from the big stuff. It was dark. Perry could see only his brother’s form squatting in the snow. The wind seemed wet.
Crouched down, Harvey dug out a hollow in the snow. “Easy does it,” he purred. He took a sheet of newspaper from his pack, crinkled it and laid it in the hollow, then he added the twigs, then branches. He braced the pile with two logs. “Easy does it,” he purred. The wind was picking up. “Here she goes, here she goes,” said Harvey, striking a match, touching the newspaper.
The fire burned away the newspaper, then the twigs, then took hold of the pine branches.
Slowly at first, then quickly, the fire’s light spread across the snow and climbed the banks of the gully, and Perry saw it was snowing.
It was snowing, and the wind was coming down the gully from the north in a low whine. It was snowing, and the fire climbed the banks of the gully and the snow crackled in the heat. Harvey’s face was bright red, his eyes were red, his brown beard sparkled, he was grinning, and the fire leapt up into the coming snow.
“There she is,” he purred.
“Harvey?”
“Look at that nice baby, will you?”
“Harvey, it’s snowing for Christ sake.”
Beyond the ring of light there was nothing. The wind and snow seemed captured in the fire. There was not a sound, just the fire and the settling gravity of the snowfall.
The fire sputtered and shifted from the branches to the logs.
“For Christ sake, Harvey, can’t you see it’s snowing?”
Perry moved close to the fire. Harvey was crouched low, building the flames up.
“Harvey.”
“Shhhh,” said Harvey. He hovered over the fire and continued to feed the wood.
“Harvey, it’s a goddamn snowstorm.”
Perry was cold. He unzipped his parka and thrust his hands into his armpits and let them thaw. He stood still and watched Harvey and watched the snow slant across the flames. He was tired. He wanted to sit down but there was nothing but the snow.
“There she is,” Harvey purred. “Some fire, isn’t she? She’ll keep us well all night.” At last he stood up.
“Harvey. For Christ sake, can’t you see it’s snowing?”
“Hmmm. Yes, I see it, I see.” His eye was fast on the fire. “Isn’t that some beaut of a fire? Proud of it. Sure, a little snow. Winter, isn’t it? What do you expect in winter. Come on, let’s get the tarp up and have some coffee and supper. Nothing we can’t handle, brother, let’s get a move on.”
Harvey slung the rucksacks over his shoulder and took them to the fire and dumped their gear close in, then he climbed the gully and in a few minutes came back with pine boughs. “You see? No problem. The old man taught me all about this stuff. Dig around and find a couple big branches to hold the tarp. Let’s get a move on, brother.” Glazed and angry, Perry wandered up the gully looking for branches. When he got back, Harvey had the sleeping bags unrolled on the boughs and water was boiling and the snow had stopped, leaving just a light bitter wind. “See?” Harvey said.
Perry watched while Harvey pushed the branches down and erected a taut lean-to over the bags. “Nothing to it if you know how,” Harvey said. “You paying attention?”
“This is crazy, Harv.”
“It’s not crazy. Not at all. This is just how it’s done. Let’s have some supper now.”
He watched while Harvey heated cans of beans and Spam, prepared coffee and tended the fire and cut squares of chocolate on to plastic plates. Perry watched with the sensation of great blocks of time passing by, a long cold suspension in which he was outside looking in, seeing his brother in some distorted and disjointed trick of history, going backwa
rd too fast to care. Perry watched with his hands folded under his armpits.
The snowfall had ended.
He was embarrassed. He sat on a rucksack and accepted a cup of coffee and drank it down and held it out for Harvey to refill. Fear and longing had combined during the dusk, but it was over, and he was left with a kind of intellectual wonder, watching Harvey perform his woodsman’s tricks.
“Not so bad, is it?”
“I guess not. That snow.”
“Nothing to worry about, believe me. Eat up now.”
Afterward, Harvey cleaned the plates and cups and stashed them in the packs, then he took off his parka and got into his sleeping bag and tinkered with the fire. The wind died. Harvey curled into the bag.
“You going to sleep?” asked Perry.
Harvey mumbled something.
“You aren’t going to sleep, are you?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.” Perry thought about it. “We’ve got enough wood, I suppose?”
“Plenty.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe one of us ought to stay up while the other sleeps. What do you think? To keep the fire going and all.”
“Shit,” Harvey laughed.
Perry pulled his pack closer to the fire and sat still. Harvey was buried in his bag. He’d been afraid. Outside the fire’s light, the night was there. The fire was nice. It made his face and chest and belly warm, and it left his back cold. He closed his eyes. Later he had a cigarette then crawled into his bag and watched the fire. With Harvey’s lean-to and the sleeping bag and the pine boughs, he felt comfortable and warm. A few tiny snowflakes still drifted across the fire. He put out his hand and caught a few and licked at them.
His mind wandered. Then for a while he was asleep.
When he awakened the fire was still going, Harvey was snoring, it was all peaceful and a winter night.
He removed his glasses and pushed them to the bottom of the bag. He lay still and listened to the fire and Harvey’s snoring. Sound asleep. A bull, all right. He knew what he was doing. The Bull of Karelia. No question about it. They were different. Scratch everything else, no matter, they were different. Harvey knew what he was doing. Calm, building that fire, unafraid, a full-fledged undaunted hero, absolutely no question. A little snow. A flutter of snow, a minuscule flurry. He watched the fire draw down. There was a different sense of time, all right. By civilization’s time, it was probably still early. Eight o’clock, nine o’clock. Scrabble time.
The fire drew into a ball and Perry watched it.
A billion, a billion billion separate details, piled and lumped together, a billion sparkling facets, angles, faces, lightings, memories, distances, square and round and jagged and triangular and pointed and sharp and full and flat and dull, rugged and even, a thicket. He felt grafted to the forest floor. A vast cold froze it all together. The black forest was fused to the black sky, the black sky to the clouds, the clouds to the snow, the snow to the fire, all to one.
He pushed his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. He rubbed his eyes and blinked. The forest was colorless. In the morning it would have color. In the morning Harvey would rebuild the fire, he would make coffee, he would roll up the sleeping bags and take the lead and they would go on, Harvey was a woodsman, no question about it. The way be could sleep and snore. The way he could build a fire, make coffee, make supper, curl into his sleeping bag and sleep and sleep, the snoring sounds mingling with the forest’s sobbing sounds. Old Harvey. And the times.…
“Paul?”
“You scared me. I thought you were asleep.”
“I woke up. Can you reach out and put one of those logs on the fire? It’s ready to die.”
“Yeah. There.”
“How you sleeping?”
“Not at all. Not yet. It’s all right, I’m warm enough.”
“Try counting out loud.”
“What?”
“It’s a trick … it’s one of those things I learned from the old man. Just give it a try, can’t hurt.”
Harvey turned softly. Fire shadows played on the lean-to ceiling and the flames caught hold of the new log. Harvey’s voice was slow with sleep, smooth and calming in the woods. In a while he turned again. “Nice, isn’t it?”
“Fine.”
“Did you try counting?”
“Yes.”
“You have to do it out loud. Like this: one, two, three, four, five. Until you’re asleep.”
“How do you know when to stop?”
“You just stop. That’s the good part. Hey. You want a beer? I’ve got four of them hidden away in my pack. Special occasions and all. You want one?”
In the dark Harvey hooked his rucksack and dragged it under the lean-to and Perry listened to the tops pop off the cans. “Good,” said Harvey with a satisfied smacking. “Try that, isn’t that something special?”
Chunks of ice floated in the beer. It was sweet and good.
“You see? There are some pleasures, real pleasures out here. All it takes is to try it.” Harvey was quiet for a while and Perry heard him sipping at the beer. “The only problem is taking a pee after drinking beer,” Harvey said. “Getting out of the sleeping bag and everything. No fun at all. I heard a story once about Admiral Perry running across a guy who had to pee in the Antarctic and the guy was frozen right into the ice like a snowman. Poor Admiral Perry kicked at the guy and got all the snow off him. What do you think he found? Well, he found the frozen bugger had peed himself right to death, that’s what. A three-foot arc of golden ice going from the poor guy’s weenie to the snow, frozen stiff. Some rainbow, don’t you think? Story goes that Admiral Perry accidentally kicked away the frozen arc of pee and the frozen bugger toppled and shattered. A true saga of adventure, don’t you think? A slice of life, as they say. I don’t know. Personally I don’t believe it for a minute.”
“That’s an epic story.”
“Yes. Don’t you think so? I’m thinking of writing it up.” He giggled. He looked happy. “We ought to do this more often. Don’t you think? All that Addie nonsense. Don’t know what gets into me. She’s something, isn’t she? Keeps calling me her bloody pirate. Don’t know where she gets that pirate business, it’s absolutely crazy. She thinks my Admiral Perry story is true. She didn’t believe me when I told her it was a lie. I don’t know. You have to be with her all the time, I guess, because when you’re with her she’s terrific, she really is terrific, but when you’re not with her and she’s off somewhere, well, then she doesn’t even know you. Isn’t she something? And that Daniel. I don’t want to talk about it … She keeps asking strange questions. She wanted to know what it felt like when I lost my eye. What it felt like! Jesus. Can you believe that? Then she gets all teasing and makes you feel like a crazy for not wanting to talk about it, as if … I don’t know what. Jesus. She wouldn’t believe me when I told her I didn’t even remember what happened. Now isn’t that something, not even believing me? The way she’s always grinning and teasing. Really, she’s just a kid … I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t think she’s part Indian at all; I think it’s one of her teasing stories. Think about it, sometimes she doesn’t even look Indian, does she? I mean, I guess it’s true. Sometimes she does look Indian.”
“Yeah.”
“Shall we have the other two beers? No. We’ll save them.”
“Save them,” Perry said. “That’s a good idea.”
“I’m glad you came out here with me. You didn’t have to. I’m glad you came though. You should have come before. I don’t know, but I think Dad would have been happy. Never said anything, of course. I don’t know. Sorry. Maybe we should have those other beers now.”
“Maybe so.”
“What do you think?”
“Yeah. Let’s have them right now.”
“Good man! Good man. That’s what I think.”
The pop-tops cracked open. The can was cold in his hand, and there was nothing to think about. The bag was warm and the beer was cold and
the night was dark and the fire was different colors. There was nothing to think about. “Anyhow,” Harvey was saying beside him, talking on, “anyhow, I’ve pretty much decided to get a job and get on with it. I don’t know what yet. That’s something I’ll have to think about. I know I’m dreaming but I’d give a million bucks for a job out here. I don’t know doing what, something. Too bad they don’t need lumberjacks anymore. That’s what I’d be good for. Anyhow, pretty soon I’ll be getting a job. I was thinking maybe we could start some kind of business together, you know? What do you think of that? I’m not sure doing what. We could start an army or something. They always need armies. Anyhow. Anyhow. I had it all planned out. It was all planned.”
“It’s a crime.”
“She’s all right though.”
“Forget it.”
“I’m going to sleep.”
“Good night, Harv.”
“Night. We’re always saying good night.”
Deceptively, the morning snowfall fluttered down. It wasn’t much. Flakes and swirls. The snow came and went, a bit at a time, very quiet.
They cooked breakfast in cans. Harvey was happy and eager. He took charge, rounding up firewood and striking the fire, opening cans, hustling.
The snowfall was light and loose and constant. At first, Perry did not hear it. Then the sound was clear, the sobbing sound. It was that light hum, a respiration that was all around, and the snow fell like a gauze curtain. On either side of the gully, the evergreens sagged with the snow and the sky was gray. For breakfast they had soup and Spam and coffee. They opened a sack of cookies and ate them all, drank more coffee, then Harvey unfolded the map and laid it on his rucksack.
“We’re here,” he said.
“Where?”
“Here. See? The gully must have been a river or creek or something when they made this map. That means we’re right here. If we follow the gully it should take us straight into Parent Lake. Half an hour maybe. Then turn south.”
Perry nodded. The map was reassuring. It was very green. Blue lines and lake splotches were drawn in certain detail. He looked at the names of the familiar towns. They seemed close, inches away. Silver Bay, Lutsen, Finland, Two Harbors, Sawmill Landing. He felt much better looking at the map. He clapped Harvey’s shoulder.