Cataract City

by Craig Davidson

  I unscrewed the mounts and tore out the twelve-volt battery, along with a few connecting wires. I slit the nylon straps mooring the shotgun to the frame and pulled it free.

  Drinkwater’s tracks were gone. He must have edged his way down west of here, where the incline descended more gently. He’d be miles away by now. Back over the river, maybe, in his truck driving towards some sleepy border crossing.

  We weren’t far from the river—fifteen miles, tops. But the incline was too steep to retrace our path. Possibly our best bet was to stay put. If a search helicopter swept past, it might spot our fire—providing we’d retained enough of our Boy Scouts fire-craft skills to build one.

  Standing shoulder to shoulder, we peered into the forest. My eyes had become accustomed somewhat, but human eyes were not built for this kind of dark. Here and there I caught—sensed?—sly shiftings and shadings, movement tracing over the rocks and trees. I squinted at the luminescent hands on my watch. It was past 2 a.m. On a typical Friday night I’d be … drunk, probably. Passed out in bed. My warm, soft bed.

  I gestured into the heart of the woods. “Got to be something. A road, a logging route, an old trapper’s shack.”

  “Something. Sure.”

  Duncan hitched the satchel up on his back. I slung the shotgun over my shoulder. We entered the blackness of the woods.

  A winter forest is pure whiteness rolled flat. Austere endless white that dissolves every landmark. Imagine trying to find your bearings on the moon.

  It’s tough going, especially without snowshoes. Each footstep breaks through the snow crust, miring your boots in the soft powder. Before long the eyelets and uppers are iced over and heavy. Envy of chipmunks and dormice sets in: weightless creatures who skitter across the crust.

  Cold radiates from that whiteness, borne on slinking winds that curl under pant-legs and down collars. Coldness wraps around your skull, encasing the brainstem in ice. You get foggy-headed with it, and it dawns on you that all you want to do is sit. Your boots are so heavy it’s like hauling anvils. The snow is soft and inviting. People who freeze to death are often found with faint smiles on their faces: during those last moments they occupy a different geography in their minds. You have to fight the urge to just … sit … down.

  We trod lightly, bodies tilted against the wind, carving a path between the poplars. The naked branches knit together, a latticework of angles shielding the winter sky. We were tired and achy but the adrenaline hadn’t yet burned off. A snowy owl watched from a low branch, eyes shining in the ruffled oval of its face. It hooted—a trilling, melancholy note—and took flight, white wing-tips trailing into the darkness.

  We’d barely covered a mile before we came across Drinkwater’s skidoo. Its hood had crumpled against a lightning-felled oak, and one ski had snapped off and stuck in the bark. The right tread had sheared off its runner.

  I set a gloved hand on the muffler. “Still warm.”

  Fifteen feet past the fallen tree we could make out the spot where Drinkwater’s body had hit. There was a dark stain on the snow the size of a dinner plate. I inspected the skidoo’s empty webbing and untied straps, figuring Drinkwater must have scavenged it. Dark coins dotted the snow around the machine. From there, Drinkwater’s footsteps advanced into the woods in a determined line.

  I pulled Duncan down behind the skidoo. “He could be out there. He’s got a gun.”

  I imagined Drinkwater hunched a hundred yards off, eyeing us down a rifle’s sights. Worse, I pictured Drinkwater bleeding out somewhere in the dark, stubbornly refusing to call for help.

  “Lemmy!” Dunk shouted, as if channelling my thoughts. “You all right?”

  “Shut it,” I hissed. “What’s the sense of that?”

  Duncan didn’t answer. The effort it took to shout doubled him over. “He’s running,” he managed to say through gritted teeth.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “He’s hurt and he’s running, Owe. He could die out here.”

  “We could, too.”

  We sat with the possibility until I said, “Twenty years later … Finnegan, begin again.”

  Duncan smiled. “Same shit, different day.”

  We shared a gravedigger’s laugh. The cold locked around our joints, crimping our nostrils shut with each inhale.

  “We should make a fire,” Dunk said.

  “He could see us.”

  “If he doesn’t make one himself he’ll freeze to death, anyway.”

  We cleared a spot next to the skidoo, scraping with our boots until we hit the frozen earth. We snapped twigs off the fallen oak. Duncan doused the heap with gasoline and pulled a flare from the satchel.

  “Not that,” I said. “We may need it later.”

  I sat the twelve-volt battery on my lap, stripped the plastic coating off two wires and twisted one around the negative coil and the other around the positive coil. When I touched the wire-tips, they glowed. I rubbed them over the kindling pile until a spark caught the gasoline.

  We sat on the skidoo seat, hands held to the licking flames. The twigs crackled and glowed, sending up a grey coil of smoke. I thought about how making this fire didn’t have the same life-or-death quality it had when we were kids down to one paper match with the darkness chewing at our backs. But it still felt like a distinctly human act that set us apart from the surrounding wilderness.

  I peered across the flames, following Drinkwater’s footsteps into the gloom. Was there a faint flicker out there? A wavering orange dot? It could have been a few hundred yards off, a mile, or a trick of my fatigued mind.

  “You think he’s out there?” Dunk asked.

  “He’s a survivor. I heard Native boys used to get sent out into the woods for a week, no food, no nothing—a quest, to find their spirit animal. A raven, a wolf, a bear. Once they’d found it, they returned to the tribe and were accepted as warriors. I’m not saying that happens anymore. It’s a survivor culture is all I’m thinking. Hey, what if you found out your spirit animal was a weasel?” I laughed. “What if a worm came to you in your dreams?” Laughing even harder. “I’d lie my ass off. Tell the chief, Oh, yeah, I saw a moose. Big mean bastard.”

  Dunk found a shard of clear ice and bit into it as if it was peanut brittle. We both ate a protein bar. We had three guns between us, but no rifle. I wondered if Dunk would try to shoot something with Bruiser Mahoney’s old pistol, just like Mahoney had shot that poor raccoon.

  Warmth prickled my skin, bringing the pain roaring back down my arm. It was sharper now, an edge of glass raked across raw bone.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “This arm … something must be in it.”

  “If something’s in there, Owe, we ought to get it out.”

  Gingerly, I unzipped my parka. The right side of my shirt was dark and heavy red. Duncan helped me peel it off. My right sleeve was stuck to my wrist with a gummy collar of blood. Duncan used the Leatherman to cut the sleeve near my shoulder. He slit it down my biceps and wrist, and the material fell off my arm like a shed snakeskin.

  “It’s deep,” Duncan said, “but clean. Not wide … but yeah, deep.”

  “See anything inside?”

  “Just a sec … uh.”

  “What?”

  “Just a glint. I can get it.”

  “How?”

  Duncan unfolded the Leatherman, brought the prongs of the needlenose pliers together: snick-snick. “Meatball medicine.” He cut a length of canvas rigging off the skidoo and tied it around my arm. With the tourniquet in place he held the pliers over the flame.

  “Not too long,” I said. “I don’t want to be cauterized.”

  Duncan plunged the pliers into the snow. The hot metal hissed. “Just sterilizing them, man.” He angled the wound into the firelight, debating. “How about I get hold of it and just, uh, wiggle a little?”

  “Sounds magical.”

  He worked the tip of the pliers into the slit. My arm jerked involuntarily, but Duncan gripped my wrist to keep
me steady, nosing the pliers deeper. The coagulated blood at the edges of the cut gave way; fresh blood dripped into the snow. Then the pliers brushed against something hard, too shallow to be bone.

  Dunk closed the pliers’ jaws around whatever it was and squeezed them together—then came a sharp click as the pliers slipped off a metallic edge and snapped shut.

  “Fffffffffffffffffff—!”

  “Sorry,” Dunk said. “Got to get a good grip.” He handed me a thumb-width piece of kindling. “Bite.”

  I jammed the stick between my teeth and bit down so hard that my jaw trembled. Duncan wiped away the blood and probed again. The pliers gritted against whatever was embedded in my flesh, a metal-on-metal rasp. The pain was monstrous. My entire skeletal system lit up like a Christmas tree. The stick went snap between my jaws. I spat out the splinters and said, “Just go. Just keep … keep oh oh god keep going.”

  Steadying his free hand on my wrist, Dunk pulled carefully. “Got it.”

  He held it up to the firelight: a shard of metal in the shape of a diamond—one of the interlocking diamonds that made up a skidoo tread. He dropped it into the fire. The stink of fried blood rose off the coals.

  The bleeding slowed to a trickle. Duncan found the med kit, slathered some gauze with Polysporin and told me to poke it as far into the wound as I could bear. He stuck a Band-Aid over the gauze, then wrapped surgical tape around my elbow to keep everything in place.

  “Good enough?”

  I said, “Yeah, good. Thanks.”

  He settled back against the skidoo. His exhales were syrupy and bubbly, as if he was forcing each breath through an inch of pancake batter. I hoped it was just the busted nose, which would make breathing hard. He’d probably swallowed a lot of blood, too. I stared skywards, flakes of snow scrolling above the flames.

  I drifted into a half sleep, snapping awake to spot mouselike shapes racing round the edge of the fire’s light, too fast to track. A thicker dark fell around us, airless and isolating. We fed the flames and pulled our collars tight and got used to the phantom movements beyond the fire. I told myself they were nothing but the play of starlight on wind-sculpted snow.

  Before dawn those movements coalesced into permanence—a group of shapes all roughly the same size and moving with the same low-slung lope. Thirty yards from the fire, circling clockwise.

  “Dunk … hey, Dunk.”

  Duncan cracked one eye, followed my pointing finger. Sight wasn’t needed—you could smell them: like wet dogs, only more primal.

  I said, “Coyotes.”

  One of them let loose a high mocking gibber. This was answered by a series of excited yips.

  I rooted a flare out of the satchel and tore the igniting strip. An umbrella of red light draped us both, flecks of molten phosphorus spitting in elegant arcs. We saw them clearly: a pack of coyotes ringing the fire, hackles raised, fur running down their spines on a band-saw edge.

  I tossed the flare to scatter the pack. It sailed end over end to land on a patch of black ice behind them.

  “Jesus,” Duncan said.

  Three timberwolves stood illuminated in the fan of flare-light. Bone-white, almost indistinguishable from the snow. Only their black snouts gave them away. They stood in a casual threesome—the largest wolf standing, the other two hunched on either side. Their legs were shockingly long, strangely thin: a herbivore’s legs, almost, carrying their torsos high off the ground. The biggest wolf opened its mouth—its jaws enormous—and licked its chops.

  The coyotes scattered, baying plaintively. I picked up the shotgun. Duncan laid Bruiser’s pistol across his lap. Was there enough wood to last through to daylight? The flare guttered, guttered. The wolves stayed in place, watching.

  Dawn took forever to come.

  A light snow had fallen overnight. The temperature rose slightly as the sun crawled above the horizon. It remained sub-zero, though, and neither of us was properly outfitted. I wore uninsulated police-issue brogans, the leather cracked along the soles. Amazingly, my knee didn’t hurt that much. Sure, I could feel the pins and screws—fine needles like icy worms knitted with the flesh and bone—but the physical sensation wasn’t that painful. It felt good, almost: a dull throb that drew attention away from sharper pain in other parts of my body.

  I’d chosen wool pants—a stroke of luck—but my shirt was now missing its sleeve and there was a rip in my parka where the metal diamond had pierced. Duncan had on warm boots, jeans with a rip in the knee, a heavy sweater and coat. He’d also found a flimsy pair of Magic Gloves in his coat pocket—I pictured his mom stuffing them in there, one of those protective things mothers do.

  We set off at daybreak. Blood from Duncan’s broken nose was crusted like rust in the seams of his face. I’d patched my parka with a strip of tape from the medical kit. Duncan hacked the upholstery off the skidoo’s seat with the Leatherman, rolled up the padded material and stuffed it into the satchel.

  Drinkwater’s bootprints were faint traces in the snow.

  “Follow them?” said Duncan.

  “What makes you think he knows where he’s going?”

  Duncan shrugged.

  “Maybe he’s got a phone.” I said. “He could call someone. A bunch of guys. What if he’s looking for us?”

  “Doubt it.”

  I held my arms out. “What better place? We’re miles from anywhere. Put us down, one shot in the back of the head. Boom. Easy. The coyotes will eat most of us, the birds will take what’s left. By spring thaw there’ll be nothing to know us by.”

  “So what’s your idea?”

  I puffed breath into my cupped palms. “Follow his tracks, not him. We’re not after Drinkwater anymore, okay? Let’s just get out of this.”

  Before setting off I cut four sheets out of the silver Mylar emergency blanket. I flipped a hot ember out of the fire into each sheet and crimped them into balls, placing two in my coat pockets and giving two to Duncan.

  We followed Drinkwater’s bootprints, our hands sunk into our warm pockets, walking directly into the sun as it bathed the snow in a reddish glare. I took the lead, feet sinking deeper into where Drinkwater’s had been. Duncan followed, breathing heavily.

  We found Drinkwater’s fire, its embers still flaring with the wind. He’d fashioned a lean-to, the ends of which he’d whittled and slotted flush. He must have draped it with an emergency blanket and hunkered inside—he may have even gotten an hour or two of sleep. It was the campsite of a seasoned outdoorsman, assembled with ease, abandoned quickly.

  A frozen pool of blood lay next to the fire. The blood had a matte look, platelets frozen to a dull gloss. I chipped at it with my thumbnail. It wasn’t frozen solid, the way water freezes; it was softer, the consistency of a Fudgsicle. I tweezed a needle out of the blood, attached to a hank of black thread. Had Drinkwater stitched himself up?

  “He knows we’re following him,” Dunk said.

  “How do you figure?”

  He pointed ten yards past the fire. Drinkwater had unzipped and relieved his bladder, scrawling a message in the snow.

  F.U.

  “He even got the periods in there between the letters,” Duncan marvelled.

  The sun climbed a cloudless sky, lacking the wavering edge it held on summer days: looking at it was like staring into a blast furnace through a hole cut in blue Bristol board. Still, it was better to look into the sky or straight ahead. Staring down brought on the oddest vertigo, the snow sizzling like a lake of fire.

  Duncan began to cough. He pressed a fist to his chest as it built to a rumbling thunder rolling through his lungs. I could tell he was in serious pain, his face wrenched into a tortured expression—he looked as if a thousand fish hooks were tugging inside his chest. He doubled over, palms braced on his knees. He coughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. When the coughing finally tapered he tried to stand up, but his boots skidded in the snow and he fell to his knees, then forward onto his hands. He spat. A red splotch hit the snow. He tried to cover it up so
I wouldn’t see but the blood just churned into the snow, making it pink.

  After a while I said, “Need a hand up?”

  “If I can’t get up on my own, we’ve got trouble.” He rose unsteadily, and we carried on.

  Drinkwater’s tracks cut through the snow on a determined line—looking at them, you’d think they’d been made by a man who knew exactly where he was going, or at least had no fear of what lay ahead. In my mind I imagined an animal travelling on four legs rather than two. Drinkwater’s nose was the black of a dog’s nose. One of his eyes was milky, the result of some past scrap. We were following a cunning old lion—and he knew he was being followed.

  The land unfurled in terrifying swathes of arctic whiteness to every point on the compass. My toes had gone numb without my realizing. Idly, I wondered how long it would take for frostbite to set in. I’d seen a TV show about mountain climbers trapped on a cliff during a snowstorm. One of them, a smiling blond Swede, lost eight toes and seven fingers to frostbite. He kept them in a mason jar. The amputated digits were black, as if they’d been spray-painted. The sunny Swede said they’d just snapped off, especially the toes. He’d taken his boot off to find them rolling around in the heel like black licorice jujubes. He was incredibly well adjusted to his loss.

  As we walked, I sang old camp songs. It wasn’t wise to announce our whereabouts, but the tunes kept the oppressive silence at bay.

  “Land of the silver birch,

  home of the weasel,

  Where still the mighty moose

  wanders at will.

  Blue lake and rocky shore,

  I will return once more.

  Boom diddy-yaa daa, boom diddy-yaa daa,

  Boo-hoo-ooo-hooo-oom.”

  Duncan said: “Pretty sure it’s ‘Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver.’”

  “Really? I like weasel better.”

  Drinkwater’s tracks stopped, went forward again, seemed to hesitate (judging from the depth of the imprint), then backtracked fifty yards to veer into a dense thicket. The shrubs were bare where Drinkwater had picked his way through; snow sifted off their limbs. I wondered what had caused him to change course.