by Abi Andrews
I had to stop myself from using up too much of the antibacterial hand rub to get rid of the death smell on my hands. I am going out to get some firewood and then I will cook and after some reading I will be very ready for bed, I am exhausted after not sleeping last night. I feel very resourceful. Like a bird must feel when it settles into its nest that it built with its own beak and claws. Birds must be capable of feelings of sorts. When a little bird settles down into its self-built nest and fluffs up its feathers and burrows into its own neck, it is the very image of immense satisfaction.
MORE SPACE WHERE NOBODY IS THAN WHERE ANYBODY IS
My plan is to make my map over four days. I already have my rough diagram but need to walk to each place to hone it and add finer details, like where is good for a lookout, or somewhere to maybe practise trapping. I want it to cover the area I am likely to use on a regular day so I will walk for half a day then turn back on myself. On day one I will head north, on day two east, and so on. I think I can walk about twenty miles in a very long day, so the map should cover approximately ten miles in radius from the hut at the centre.
Stan criticised Chris McCandless for the fact that he did not have an official map. If he had had an official map he would have seen that just downriver from where he could not make his crossing back to civilisation because of floodwater and subsequently ate the potato that killed him, there was a pulley system for transporting things and people across safely. But if Chris McCandless had had an official map, it would not have been his wilderness and he might as well have died anyway.
I am not in danger of that because I know exactly how to get back to the road to get the bus back to the visitors’ centre, and I also have radio contact if I want to turn the thing back on. It would not take them long to find the cabin if they needed to, because they know I was headed out without camping gear. I am conceptually isolated and alone, but in trouble I could radio Stan for help. Although I had thought about going further in and leaving the radio behind, finding somewhere else to sleep. With each day I feel a little more certain that Stan will try to rescue me. Actually I am thinking about it a lot.
South of the hut the forest becomes dense and backs all the way to where the mountains start, in the south and arcing west. In the lower foothills the trees stop growing from the altitude, then just behind the mountains rise higher and are sooty black with stripes of white where the meagre snow is. Further behind still somewhere is Denali, the highest point in North America.
Mount Denali was until very recently named Mount McKinley, and is still called that by some bitter Ohioans. It was called Denali from the Koyukon-Athabaskan Deenaalee, which means ‘the high one’. The Russians, when they owned Alaska, called it Bolshaya Gora, which means ‘big mountain’. Then an American gold prospector came along and called it McKinley, which means ‘President William McKinley’, bequeathed in a curious naming ritual used by colonising white men whereby the conquered entity is named after the conqueror or an adulated public figure.
The gold prospector called the mountain McKinley because William McKinley was a proponent of the gold standard and the prospector wanted to get one over on the silver miners, who wanted the president to be William Jennings Bryan, the proponent of the silver standard.
Then President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist called Leon Czolgosz because he was the ‘president of the money kings’ willing to exploit the poor to benefit the rich. So the name got officially etched into all of the maps in President William McKinley’s memory by the American government in 1917.
Years and years and they will not stop arguing about it because for America Alaska is still very much in the process of construction. Alaskans want the name to be Denali from Deenaalee, maybe mostly because they do not want to be out-Alaskaned by the Ohioans, who keep blocking the change because McKinley came from Ohio and they want their namesake on the biggest mountain in North America. In real life in Alaska people mostly just call it Denali. The Athabaskans never stopped calling it Deenaalee and maybe do not know what all the fuss is about, because they did not draw maps.
In 2015 President Barack Obama officially finally changed the name to Denali to show honour, respect and gratitude to the Athabaskan-speaking people (as if naming is owning and he was giving it back). Donald Trump declared this ‘an insult to Ohio’ and vowed to change it back, so let’s see how long that lasts. Does an orca care if it gets shunted from one entire species to a separate species dependent on how it hunts (which is what Larus said may be the case)? Probably the Athabaskans just shrug and say you do what you want, we are going to just carry on calling it Deenaalee under your shouting chins. The orcas say yeah, whatever, we are just going to carry on swimming and flipping seals or not flipping seals.
The tundra is always in soliloquy. Mostly it whistles and sings, but now and then the wind will die down suddenly and in the utter silence and still it feels like you are on stage. As though you did not know there were curtains until they just suddenly opened. Then the cacophony of noise again like applause.
From where the tundra and taiga meet you see right across to the east, but you do not see the road because it is too far. The sky was very blue and clouds dragged shadows over the tundra, dimming the glare of the lake.
In the forest I worried about getting lost, but heading due south-west by the compass, towards the steeper foothills, I stayed on track fine. In this area the trees were dense. This route leads to a perfect fishing spot, where the stream is shallow enough to cross and brimming with fish. I headed further on past this in order to get to the foothills because I wanted to climb past the timberline to get a better look. The ground started to slope and the trees thinned so that I had a slight vantage, and I could see what I took to be a radio mast just a mile or so away in the east. I headed there instead for no reason other than that it intrigued me.
The radio mast is really a fire tower. The foliage around it is thick overhead, and after going back into the thicker trees I could not really get a view of it until I was almost directly underneath. There was a little clearing, and when I came into it the sudden view of the tower shocked me. A radio mast was benign in my mind but a watchtower reeked too much of people. It isn’t that I am hermitised already, just that I do not want to lose this game I am playing with myself so soon.
I hid back in the trees, where I was sure I could not be seen from above, and hunkered down to watch for movement in the lookout at the top. In real-life terms, I was also concerned that a park warden might ask to see my permit. Stan gave a resident permit from lost property to me, which he advised me to leave in my hut on the days I went out; that way if anyone dropped by they would leave me be thinking I was ‘P. S. Aldridge’. He did not actually explain what I should do if I met a warden while I was out, he just told me that where I was going was so far away and off-trail I would not meet one at all.
I stayed still, hunkered and watching for a good ten minutes. The tower was rusted and wind-battered. As I watched it, it gradually changed its appearance, began to seem hollower as its potential to expose me withered. But then the fire-watcher could just be sat where I could not see them, reading or sleeping or watching for fires. I decided the only way to know was to yell up. I would yell like some kind of animal from inside the trees and see if anything changed.
I yelled stupidly. Only crows noticed, lifting off from the tops of the trees and cawing at me because they were annoyed at themselves for startling so easily. Then I felt less stupid. Nobody came to the window.
At the base of the tower, with my foot on the ladder, I shouted up again just to make sure. This time, in a human voice, I asked hello? Nothing. The steps were made of sheet metal, like the steps to a lifeguard’s chair, and were rickety. They wound around the four legs of the tower in an angular spiral.
Towards the top the tower groaned against the slow wind. I came into the lookout through a trapdoor. The floor was coated with a coarse gristly dust, prints left where it came away on my hands. Apart from my mar
ks it was print-less. Nobody had been up there for a very long time. I clambered inside and crawled to sit with my back to a wall.
There was nothing inside and the glass in the windows was grimy. I looked around for a sign for when there was last a person in there. The dust was felt-like on the floor. Light came up through the boards, rendering all my movements gold-dusty and ethereal.
I had the thought to maybe check the walls for some kind of graffiti. I imagine they turn up all over the place in spaces like this. There were two; they read:
Johnston Wills, 1952
P Harris, 1999
If I had not found them I could have been the first person to set foot in there since whenever I wanted to imagine. Maybe not objectively, but that would not have mattered. Like how a scientific discovery is a discovery until a new discovery is made that refutes the original one, like how Denali stays Deenaalee to the isolated Athabaskans, who choose not to read maps. Really in this way no one ever discovers anything, they only invent things (we invented nuclear bombs but we say we discovered them because that sounds less evil). I could have invented this place as an unpeopled wilderness for myself. I sat down cross-legged and looked at them and wondered if maybe P Harris had thought the same. Maybe he wrote his name in defiance: you can’t have this place all to yourself, Johnston Wills.
Then I remembered the rock in the Greenlandic tundra that stood to hold me and Urla and Naaja until enough rain, time and rock plants had eroded our names. I wondered what they were both doing right then. If Urla had really thought Larus and I were close in the wrong way, if he let her think that, if she hated me.
If I came back with supplies I could camp out in the tower for a few days. I did not want to cook any food and use the portable propane so soon, so I would have to bring it already cooked and cold. I only have one kind of container for bringing it so I could do maybe two nights if I filled the tub, before I got hungry again. I was brain tired, and my legs ached, and it felt safe to be so high up off the ground, rocking gently, a bird in a tree. I thought of all the canopy creatures; bees in hives, pine martens in tree hollows, porcupine sat in branches, everyone safely elevated from the prowlers, a hovering biome. I felt a comfort like fellowship, and decided to stay put until the morning.
HEROES FOR A GIRL SCOUT
In my dream I am sat at the bottom of the mighty Mekong river talking to a giant catfish, who tells me he is one hundred years old. His eyes and scales are the same dirt-brown as the river, like over time the dirt that settled on him crawled underneath his skin and became his skin. His voice sounds like bubbling custard. All the dead men that fell in the water in the Vietnam War had sheened themselves with DDT to keep mosquitoes away. Agent Orange collected in the waters and the soil and the bodies of the living things.
The bodies got eaten by the little fish, bigger fish ate the little fish, the catfish ate the bigger fish, all the DDT and Agent Orange from all their livers built up and up in the liver of the catfish. Now the catfish is poison. A hook and line plop and sink into the brown river to where I sit with the catfish. He takes the hook in his crêpe-like fin and pops it through his blubbery lip. Above, a little Vietnamese boy reels in his dinner.
I was sleeping deeply and was jerked quite suddenly awake by a strange, long noise. A bell. I shook all over and my teeth clanked from panic. I imagined looking over the spruces like a crow sees them, stretching on and on, an unbroken sea of green and dark shadows. And then the tower.
A bell needed somebody to ring it. From a vantage of anywhere over the forest, from the ridge or the semicircle of higher ground from the north, you need not be a crow. Had I lit the tower up like a beacon when I used the torch? Somebody had rung a bell.
I sat up when it came again, peeling away on the wind. It sounded distorted this time. Then right away, it came again. Only this time it sounded nothing like I thought it at all. It was unmistakable: a mournful warble as timeless and familiar as the pentatonic scale.
I grabbed the camera and scrambled to open up the window and look down into the dimly visible clearing. It was empty but the wolves were near. The howl had come so clear, and besides I could feel them. The forest was heavy with anticipation, the spires of the evergreens whispering like a crowd as the lights dim.
The howl came again, and it went right through me, could have been in the tower. It made my whole body shudder in a way that made me grin; a tingle of pseudo-fear like looking down from an airplane. My hackles raised of their own accord. Into the clearing came a dark shape, one, two, three, and then a white one, then one more black. They fanned around the base of the tower with their noses to the ground. I could hear an excited kind of whimpering.
Wolves are an animal I can trust. Their packs are hierarchical, but they are spearheaded by a male and female breeding pair, who rule together in equality. Wolf Wives are absent from The Call of the Wild. Two she-dogs are friendly so get killed, and the only strong female sled dog – Dolly – goes mad and has her head smashed in. Mercedes, the sole female human character in the book, spends her cameo crying and complaining. This has left a lasting impression on men-who-think-like-dogs like Stan.
For a moment of delicious fear I toyed with the vision of the wolves staying put and waiting for me. Sitting on their haunches and looking up at the tower with hungry eyes.
But they did not look up. One of them cocked his leg to the tower then yelped, and they filed away quickly into the trees with such a purpose I knew I would not see them again that night.
THE TIMESCALES OF HUMMINGBIRDS
When I returned to the cabin I was glad to find everything as I left it. My permit was in the exact same place on the desk, so I am pretty sure nobody came by. I will go back to camp in the tower at some other point but I need some proper food and my mosquito net. Stan was smug when he added it to my list and I had thought it an arbitrary appendage to make him feel like he had had one on me. I have to give him credit now as actually I would have been fucked without it. In the tower so high up they were not so bad, but in the cabin and outside on evenings they come in swarms. I can slap my arm and kill four at one time. I feel a little bad doing this because I know that only female mosquitoes bite and they have to do it to get enough iron and protein to make their eggs. They are only trying to feed their babies, just like everything is trying to feed its babies.
I decided to try fishing as I figured it would affect me a lot less than shooting a thing dead. I had bought some fishing line and hooks in Fairbanks, and for the rest I found a sturdy stick as my rod and tied the line to the end, where it splayed, so I could attach it around the adjoining part to make it more secure. I made the line long enough so that I could yank it out the water fast, but with no reel I can only use it in relatively shallow water.
I was stumped for a float until I remembered a redundant tampon at the bottom of my bag that I’d brought just in case I lost my Mooncup. It was still sealed with all the air in so it worked a dream. I attached this to the middle of the line before tying the hook to the end with a little ribbon of foil from a noodle packet just above it to act as the little fish-attracter thing. Then I upturned a log and collected myself some grubs and worms for bait in a rusty tin can.
I found salmonberries (they look a little like raspberries, more seedy and juicy) and harvested as many as I could carry inside a clean sock. Along the way I managed to find lots of dandelion leaves that I washed in a stream and nibbled. There was also a plant I came across that looked like the plant the pamphlet called goosetongue, but it warned that it also looks like arrowgrass, which is poisonous. I have learned enough from Chris McCandless to know that eating anything I was not sure of would be a no-no, but it felt wholesome to be learning the things by their names just to look at and touch, their tactile truth.
Although to be fair to McCandless it does not seem he confused a lethal plant for another, it was just his own fauna and flora book did not tell him that this certain potato he was always eating actually contained lethal toxins. It was a taxonomic
al failing and not ignorance that killed him, as I said to Stan.
The course of the stream widens out where another joins it. The water runs clear and shallow; underneath it you can see the shadows of the fish holding themselves against the current. They hold then dart away suddenly for reasons kept from you by the mirage-making surface. I watched one fish that seemed to enjoy holding itself against the exact point where the two waters met and did not move from this meditative state for a whole fifteen minutes. Do fish feel meditative? Without awareness, just some primitive state of tranquillity?
I set up the rod to dip into the water where shadow from the trees hung over. The forest was awake to me and gave its alarm call. I made sure the rod was wedged into the ground firmly and rested my leg against it so I could feel any movement. It is like all my senses are intensified, sounds are so loud they make me jumpy and my body reacts nervously to the slightest movement. I feel like an acrobat, every body part accountable for something.
After not too much time the birds took up their usual quarrels with each other and ignored me, and the sound came thick from the trees. For some time I lay on my side with my ear to the cool, damp ground. I could feel how far down the layers of earth went below me like vertigo, with soil and crust and mantle, lithosphere and asthenosphere, all the way down to the fiery nut of the earth. I could almost hear it, a mellow, churning grumble.
You can’t feel that in a built-up place. In a built-up place the ground is thick with artificiality. In a place that has been built and rebuilt many times over, old towns fallen, redeveloped, retarmacked, returfed, that turf in ready cylinders like grass-and-soil Swiss rolls rolled out, plastered new again and again; it feels too structured to feel dizzying. This is a part of the reason I like my lime quarry so much. All its layers. At the lime quarry the earth is bare and cut open like a quiche and inside the quarry you can feel closer to the heart of the earth, like touching the pit of someone else’s scar.