Out of the Wilderness

by Deb Vanasse

  Only when he looked back at the pile of guts and the head did the image of the living, breathing bear come back to him. It was a grisly picture, made more ugly by his brother’s strong reaction. Nathan would really be upset if he saw the bear reduced to this, Josh thought.

  The pull of the pack strained at the muscles of Josh’s back, and he had to focus intently on the trail to keep from slipping. The mile and a half back to the cabin seemed twice the distance with the heavy burden of the meat.

  Josh urged himself on with thoughts of what the meat would mean to them: rich soups and thick stews, along with dried jerky to chew as they followed their winter traplines. If Nathan let go of his anger and stayed, he would at least eat none of the meat. More for us, Josh thought, with just a twinge of guilt.

  Maybe—maybe they wouldn’t need to stretch the bear meat through the winter. Maybe Nathan would be gone, vanished from their lives, as suddenly as they had found him. And his father would realize this wilderness thing was just a crazy dream that was slowly turning to a nightmare in which they struggled at every turn for water, for food, for warmth in the winter. With Nathan gone, maybe they could go back to hamburgers and hot dogs, movies and malls, paved roads and telephones, TV and school. Funny, Josh thought. He even missed school.

  Maybe they could go back to Anchorage. Anchorage had been good, the best place they’d lived since they’d wandered west from Chicago. They’d spent two years there, longer than they’d spent anywhere else. His father had found work, not great work, but steady. There Josh had friends—and he had hockey.

  Josh stopped himself. If there was one thing he’d learned, it was not to hope for a change before it happened. And his little dream today hinged on his brother’s foolish threat to strike out on his own in the wilderness. Josh let the twinge of guilt take root and grow to its proper size. No one should try to make it on his own in the wilderness, least of all Nathan.

  3

  Josh’s father reached the cabin first, with Josh right behind him. He gave the timbered door a shove with his shoulder, and it swung into the familiar room. The pale light of late afternoon filtered through the doorway and two small windows, illuminating the tattered sofa and lumpy armchair they had hauled from Goodwill, the table and three chairs they’d hewn from logs and branches. There was no sign of Nathan.

  “Nathan?” his father called out, his eyes on the loft above.

  No answer. Josh let the pack drop from his aching shoulders. “He’ll be back,” Josh said. He tried to sound hopeful, expectant.

  Josh’s father let go of his pack and stood still, watching, as if Nathan were an animal they were trying to lure from its den.

  “I’ll put on the coffee, Dad. Then we’ll get that meat in the cellar.”

  “You don’t think he’s . . . ?”

  “I think he’s fine,” Josh interrupted. “He’s a big boy, Dad. He can take care of himself. And he’ll be back before dark. You’ll see.”

  But when darkness came, Nathan still hadn’t shown up. Josh had fried the bear meat, serving it with gravy over rice, and they had cached the rest of the meat in their makeshift cellar. Now they sat fighting the sluggishness that sets in after a hearty meal.

  Josh held a match to the mantle of the hissing lantern, and with a pop of white light, it lit. He adjusted the valve and stared into the glow. His father sat in the easy chair, his own eyes fixed on the window and the darkness beyond.

  “He’s probably just trying to, well, punish us or something, Dad. For shooting the bear, I mean. It’s not like he could really go anywhere. There’s no place to go.”

  Josh’s father sighed. “Mighty cold to be sleeping outdoors.”

  Josh pictured his brother, shivering beside a campfire, determined not to join them in the warmth of the cabin.

  “Look, I’ll bet all of his stuff is still here. You want me to look?” Josh forced the words to sound casual. They should have done it when they first got home—looked to see what was missing, to see if Nathan had packed up with the intent of leaving for good.

  His father shrugged his reply. The lantern light made shadows of the lines across his forehead, and his cheeks, so ruddy when he chopped ice or hauled wood, were ashen. Gray streaked the black of his beard.

  Living at Willow Creek and dealing with Nathan were taking their toll. Here they sat, wondering if Nathan would come through the door at any moment, stomping his boots and warming his hands over the woodstove, giving no explanation for the time he had been missing, and no explanation demanded. That would be the way with Nathan.

  But despite all Nathan’s prior disagreements and disappointments with things his father and Josh said or did, he had never before threatened to go off on his own. Josh climbed the ladder to the loft. He knelt on the rough planks warmed by the rising heat and, in the dim light, surveyed the few belongings he and Nathan kept there.

  In one corner sat his own wooden crate, filled with reminders of happier days. Some nights he would lie on the camp mattress beside the crate and pull out its contents one item at a time, turning each over and over in his hands, remembering back to when he’d lived much like his friends, surrounded by the lights and action of the city. He’d felt part of something then, something bigger than himself, his dad, and his brother.

  There was the puck he’d shot to score the winning goal for his team in the playoffs; the note from Jenny Hodges that he’d found stuffed inside his seventh-grade math book, the one that said how she loved looking into his deep green eyes. And, shoved down at the bottom of the crate, there was the framed photo of Josh on his mother’s lap, his father’s arm swung casually, happily over her shoulder. They were memories, it seemed, from another lifetime.

  Josh let his eyes move to Nathan’s corner of the loft, to find what he both dreaded and hoped. There was Nathan’s mattress, their father’s wool blanket tucked tight around the corners, in contrast to the jumble of blanket and sheets on Josh’s bed. But the full-sized pack he kept propped in the corner was missing, as was the tidy stack of jeans and T-shirts that had graced the floor beside the mattress.

  Josh made his way down the ladder, reaching with one foot and then the other. At the bottom, he turned and faced his father, who looked at him expectantly.

  “Your blanket is still on the bed,” Josh began. “But his pack and clothes are gone.”

  His father shook his head. “Just like Nathan. Too proud to take a blanket, even if it means he’d freeze to death.”

  He stood and went to the window, his face nearly pressing against the pane. “Where could he have gone?”

  Josh stood next to his father. “Not far. And he could come back at any time.”

  “If only he’d told us sooner how he felt about that bear. He’s normally so good about saying what he feels.”

  Josh didn’t figure this was the time to disagree, but his father seemed stuck on Nathan the way he’d been when they first met up with him, when he was full of enthusiasm about moving to the woods and building a cabin so he could live in harmony with nature, so he could prove himself. But the leaner, tougher Nathan they lived with now was more withdrawn. Josh suspected there was much he kept from him and his father, both of whom failed to meet his high standards for wilderness living.

  “He could survive a night or two outdoors,” Josh said. “It’s October, after all, not the dead of winter.”

  “You think he might just be making a point? Think he’ll come home before long?”

  “Most likely, Dad. And if he doesn’t . . .”

  “If he doesn’t, we’ll have to go looking for him. Talk him back to his senses. We need to stick together through the winter.”

  Josh took a deep breath.

  “Dad, do you think, when we find him, when he comes home, we could talk about doing something different for the winter? Going back to Anchorage, maybe?” He tried to sound casual, not too hopeful.

  “Why would we want to do that? Got a cache full of bear meat and a snug little cabin.” Josh’s father s
hook his head. “You know how Nathan hated Anchorage. Too many people. Just the idea of it would get him all riled up again.”

  Josh felt his hopes sink like lead. It was always what Nathan wanted. Couldn’t get him all riled up. I should try getting all riled up myself, he thought. Don’t I deserve a life, too? But the protests stayed locked inside Josh’s head.

  Suddenly his father turned from the window, his face brightening. “I’ll bet he’s not sleeping in the cold. I’ll bet he made it over to Harry’s place.”

  “Maybe so, Dad.” Josh looked away, hiding his disappointment at the thought. He hadn’t let himself think of the possibility until his father spoke the words. Nathan could hole up at Harry’s indefinitely. Harry had helped them from the start, sharing all he had learned from years on a remote mining claim. Putting up a cabin at Willow Creek, near the end of the road, had been Harry’s way of moving closer to civilization.

  But now Harry was in Anchorage, too crippled by arthritis to care if someone moved into his place. Nathan could probably live permanently in the half-finished cabin.

  Permanently. If Nathan had moved himself to Harry’s cabin, they might not have to deal with him every day, but his father still would be hard-pressed to leave his older son alone in the woods. He’d want to hang around, keep an eye on him, try to smooth things over.

  “We’ll go there in the morning,” his father said, his voice upbeat and cheerful. “Not to bother him, of course. Just to make sure that he’s there. But I’m sure he is. I’d put money on it.”

  As if they had money to put anywhere, Josh thought. It was amazing how quickly his father’s mood changed once he figured that Nathan probably wasn’t far away after all.

  “Let’s get after those dishes before we turn in for the night,” his father suggested. He set the kettle, brimming with water, atop the woodstove. Josh knelt beside the stove and stoked the fire with an armful of wood, then poked at the embers until the flickers grew to hot flames.

  Closing the stove door, he leaned back and ran his hands over his shoulders and biceps, rubbing at the soreness, feeling the bulging muscles through his flannel shirt. Every fifteen-year-old boy’s dream, these muscles were. Girls would have loved them, were there any girls around. His hockey coach, always harping on the boys to train in the off-season, would have been pleased. But on the frozen ponds and creeks this winter, there would be no rinks, no lights, no coach, no team.

  Josh stood and stretched his legs. They had grown so long and he so tall. Those legs could probably skate faster than ever now. He closed his eyes and remembered the wind on his face, the blur of the puck at the end of his stick, the power and speed of his stride, the joy of a high shot swooshed past the goalie’s outstretched glove into the corner of the net.

  Opening his eyes, Josh brought himself back to reality. His skates probably didn’t fit anymore. And if by some miracle he made it back to the city, he’d be so far behind the guys who’d been playing the last two seasons that he wouldn’t make even a B team. Not to mention the problem of money for ice time.

  While they waited for the water to boil, Josh sat at the table and pulled out an algebra lesson from the correspondence school materials stacked there. The letters, numbers, and signs of the equations looked even more confusing than they had when he’d struggled over them that morning. That morning seemed a distant memory, given all that had happened with Nathan and the bear.

  Josh sighed. Taking his eighth-grade requirements by correspondence had been almost fun, as school went. He could study when and where he wanted, with no teacher harping about paying attention and getting the homework done on time.

  But the high school courses seemed much more difficult, especially algebra. His father had looked over the work but couldn’t remember much about these equations, and Nathan had an aversion to math. A teacher standing over his shoulder would be welcome, much as he hated to admit it.

  “I’ll wash,” he said, shoving the lesson back in the pile. His father, intent on a book, nodded. The tension in his face had relaxed.

  “They can drip dry,” Josh added. “You stay put. I wasn’t getting anywhere with that algebra anyhow.”

  The steaming water, mixed with a splash of cold water dipped from the bucket in the corner, felt good on Josh’s hands. Washing dishes without running water was one of the easier tasks they faced in their daily struggle to get by at Willow Creek. Washing jeans by hand was ten times harder.

  As he scrubbed at the frying pan, Josh looked up and out the window at a star that hung far above in the lonely night. A hundred miles away in Anchorage, his friends could look up from the rink and see that star. Thousands of miles away, not far from Chicago, where his mother lived with her new husband, she could look up and see that star. Did she ever look up into the night sky and think of him?

  Tonight, like most nights, Josh felt as lonely as that distant star. He wiped the last plate and set it aside to dry. The weariness of the long day settled in, and he wanted only to crawl under his covers and fade into a dreamless sleep.

  4

  It all came to pass as Josh had suspected. Nathan settled into Harry’s cabin. He received his father and brother as occasional visitors, seeming pleased with his newfound solitude. He even consented to keeping the rice and berries that their father insisted were part of his share of the food.

  None of them ever mentioned the bear. Their father would carefully steer their conversations to subjects where Nathan was most comfortable—the beauty of last night’s aurora, the chickadee perched on the porch railing, the tattered volume of Thoreau’s Walden that Nathan was rereading.

  Nathan could talk for a long time about Thoreau. Josh heard a lot about the naturalist, about his experiment of living alone for nearly two years at Walden Pond in a cabin he built himself.

  Even though Nathan now lived in a ready-made, unfinished cabin that belonged to Harry Donaldson, he still treated it with the kind of respect that he said Thoreau extended to even the simplest aspects of life. Josh had to admit that Harry probably wouldn’t object to the tidy corner of the cabin Nathan kept with the kind of reverence you might find around the altar of a country church. The dishes were always clean and the bunk always made.

  Perhaps Nathan felt some ownership in the place since he had lent Harry a hand with scribing and fitting the logs during their first summer at Willow Creek. In fact, he had charmed the old man much as he had their father. Harry used to slap Nathan on the back and call him Son.

  Seeing Nathan so at ease in Harry’s cabin seemed to renew their father’s commitment to sticking it out at Willow Creek. The state’s Permanent Fund Dividend Program, which distributed a percentage of the interest earned on oil revenues to Alaskan residents, bolstered their dwindling supply of money. When the dividend checks showed up in their post office box at the end of October, Josh and his father drove into town to cash them and stock up on supplies for the winter. They would buy what they could, setting aside a bit for gasoline and emergencies, and rely on what they could hunt, trap, and gather to supply the rest of their needs.

  Before heading back to the cabin, they stopped at a fast food place on the edge of Wasilla. In between handfuls of warm, salty French fries, Josh tried once more to broach the subject of moving out of the wilderness.

  “You know, Dad, Wasilla wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “So bad for what?” his father asked, wiping the grease from his fingers.

  “For living in. Couldn’t be more than a few thousand people here, and you could get a job.”

  Josh paused, glancing at a table near the door where a group of high school students, book bags flung to the floor, sat laughing and talking. Two guys sported red-and-white school jackets, with pins lined up along the letters. Three girls flashed jewelry, wearing makeup like cover girls from a supermarket magazine. Josh looked down at his own dirty jeans and turned back to his father.

  His father dipped the last two fries in ketchup. “Wasilla’s all right, as towns go. But who could w
ant more than what we’ve got at the cabin? It’s our own, free and clear, with fresh air and clean water. And we have each other.”

  “I know, Dad. But back when you were my age, didn’t you want to be around other kids?” Josh glanced back at the booth by the door. “Just go out, hang around with your friends?”

  His father pushed the tray with its rumpled napkins toward the edge of the table. “Tell you the truth, Josh, I wanted to be in the woods more than anything else. Couldn’t wait for school to get out so I could check my rabbit snares or cast for pike in the lake.”

  “But the thing is, you could be with friends if you wanted. You had a choice.”

  “Saw a lot of kids get into trouble with their so-called friends. Had a few myself that tried to drag me into some things.” His father nodded at the teenagers across the room.

  “Take a look over there,” he continued. “Looks like one girl’s got a ring through the side of her nose. Lord knows what else she’s got pierced. And the boys—they’ll be thinking they’re hot stuff, drinking on the weekends, getting girls in trouble.”

  He rose to his feet, wiping his hands once more on the sides of his jeans. “I don’t have to worry about you doing any of that at Willow Creek. You and Nathan are getting a good solid portion of what life’s all about, and you’ll both be better men for it. Nathan knows that, and you’ll realize it, too, as you get older.”

  A fleeting thought came to Josh. What if he just told his father he was fed up with living a hundred miles from nowhere? What if he told him to go on ahead, back to the land, but that he was staying right here?

  “Coming?” Josh’s father asked.

  “Yeah,” Josh said quietly. In the end, his objections would just be idle threats. He couldn’t stay here by himself, with no friends, no family, no job. He stood and shoved the greasy remnants of his meal into the trash.

  But if Nathan got fed up with the wilderness, Josh knew, his father would give in. His father had no influence over Nathan. It seemed no one did.