by David Vann
But he continued on anyway, until the sky lightened finally and then it was dawn and he had found the shore by going consistently downhill. It wasn’t the shore in front of the cabin, and he didn’t know in which direction to follow it, but it was a shore, and he went the way that seemed right, hiking along it and waiting for the cabin.
It was a sunny day, cold and bright, the first clear day they’d had in a long time. He was very hungry and tired and sore but grateful for the sun. He didn’t find the cabin after several hours, so he turned and walked back the other way, but even this seemed all right. At what must have been about noon, the sun overhead, he passed the point where he’d started and continued on for another hour or so before he arrived at the beach in front of the cabin. He stopped and stood there and just looked at it for a while, then he went in.
Everything was where he had left it, and Roy still in the back room. Jim ate a can of soup straight out of the can, without heating it, and then he lay down on the floor wrapped in the blanket and slept.
When he woke, he was very cold and it was night. He found the lamp and then got a fire going in the stove. I’m going to be more careful now, he told himself as he was pushing more wood in. And I’m going to take care of things. I’m going to find someone on this island and let Roy’s mother know and give Roy a decent burial. I’ll go today.
He ate another can of soup and then some instant mashed potatoes and went back to sleep for a few hours and woke in the morning. Okay, he said as soon as he’d opened his eyes, I’m going.
He restoked the stove and fixed some breakfast. As he was eating, he realized he’d have to leave a note. If anyone came here and found this, found the broken cabin and Roy in the back room and saw he’d been living in here, they’d think the wrong things. And he’d have to close up the kitchen window, too, so nothing got in to eat his food or get at Roy.
Jim looked in drawers until he found a pen and an envelope that he could write on. I’ve gone for help, he wrote. My son killed himself and is in the back room. I didn’t have any way of contacting anyone. I couldn’t go farther in the boat. I’m hiking around the island now trying to find some help and I will be back. He reread it several times and couldn’t think of anything better, so he signed it and then got some food together and packed the blanket in a garbage bag in case he had to sleep out there.
The window was a problem. He didn’t have a hammer or nails or even good boards. So he carried the busted outboard to the shed and used it to bash in the shed door, the same as he’d done to the kitchen window. When he had broken through, he rested until his breath calmed and then he pulled away the pieces of splintered wood and went back for the lamp to search the shed.
All the tools were here: ax, shovel, saws, hammer, nails, even a sander and chain saw and chains and a ratchet and screwdrivers, wrenches, all just sitting in here rusting away. Jim chopped off a big piece of the door with the ax and then brought it over to the kitchen window to hammer it up. Before he did this, though, he went in to say good-bye to Roy and let him know what he was doing. I’m taking care of things now, he said, standing in the bedroom doorway. I’m sorry things have gone so badly so far, but I’m getting it together now. Then he brought out his bag of food and the blanket and the note and nailed up the board and nailed the note to it and started hiking.
It was already very late morning. He should have had an earlier start. But at least I’m going, he told himself. He hiked up the shoreline past where he had been the day before. He kept going, moving at a fast pace, keeping an eye out for boats or cabins or any sign of a trail that people might be using. The visibility was good enough he might be able to signal a boat. The air wasn’t too cold, either, and the only clouds were thin and high up.
This coastline of banded rock and deadfall and dark sand seemed ancient to Jim, prehistoric. As he hiked along it quietly for hours, hearing only the sound of his boots and an occasional bird and the wind and small waves coming in, it seemed as if he might be the only man, come out to see what was in the world. He mused on this and walked more cat-like, hopping from stone to stone, and he longed for this simplicity, this innocence. He wanted not to have been who he was and not to find anyone. If he found someone, he would have to tell his story, which, he admitted to himself now, could only sound terrible.
He hiked on around point after point and so imagined he must be curving around the island, though he could not know for sure until the sun set slightly behind where it had before. It was a long island, apparently, and there was no way to know beforehand whether or where anyone might be living. It could be that his was the only cabin.
The late sunset was still red in the sky as the rocks at his feet became difficult to distinguish. The sky above the red was green and then faded into blue. He continued until it was no longer safe, until he nearly ran face first into a dark snag without having seen it at all, and then he stopped. He went up into the woods, wrapped himself in his blanket, and cut open a pack of smoked salmon for dinner. The salmon was tangy and good, a recipe with spices other than just salt and brown sugar. He sat chewing and looking at the pale light on the water and listened to the forest around him, which seemed more quiet than usual, no sound except light wind and an occasional settling, no movement of a living thing that he could detect.
Roy had not wanted to come here. Jim saw that now. Roy had come to save him; he had come because he was afraid his father might kill himself. But Roy had not been interested in this place, or in homesteading. Jim had imagined that any boy would want to homestead in Alaska with his father—though technically they were not quite homesteading, of course, since he had bought the land and it already had a cabin—but he hadn’t really thought of Roy or of what Roy might have wanted for even an instant. And that had still been true after they’d landed. Jim had taken his son for granted at every moment, and now his son was gone. That was the odd thing.
If Roy were still alive, and Jim could take him somewhere now, he would take him sailing around the world. That was something Roy had actually wanted to do. He had said so himself. And it was something Jim could have arranged just as easily as homesteading. He had the money for a boat, he knew how to sail, he had the time. But for that to have been possible, he would have had to listen to Roy. He would have had to notice him while he was still alive. And that was what simply could not have happened. Jim had been thinking of Rhoda, and of other women.
Jim tried to sleep then, lay back on the moss in his blanket and kept his food close to his belly. He didn’t care if a bear did come; he wasn’t giving up his food.
But he couldn’t sleep. He looked for stars, kept looking even though there were none, kept his eyes open though there was no light and nothing to see. He imagined what sailing through the South Pacific might have been like. He had seen pictures of Bora-Bora. Dark-green jungle and black rock, light-blue water and white sand. It would have been warm always, and comfortable, and they could have snorkeled. They could even have learned to scuba. Why spend any part of a life in a cold place? It didn’t make sense to him.
Jim didn’t feel tired, couldn’t imagine sleeping, so he rose again, put his blanket in his bag with the food, and hiked carefully back down to the shore.
The night was dark, without stars or moon. He couldn’t see anything, though his eyes had had hours now to adjust. He put out one foot at a time and felt around with it before putting weight on. He moved slowly step by step this way along the shore until he came too close to the water’s edge and slipped on seaweed and went down hard onto wet rock. He got back up fast and fell again, then groaned from the pain in his elbow and hip and found his bag and crawled up onto the dry rocks on hands and knees until he could stand safely. He continued on into the woods, his hurt leg trembling, and lay down with the blanket over him and rested and woke in the morning to find he had fallen asleep.
This second day he made good progress, though he was sore from the falls. His elbow ached as if he had bruised the bone and his leg felt badly attached, but
this didn’t matter to him much. He kept alert for boats and cabins and reassured himself as he walked that he would find someone. But then he wondered whether this might be Prince of Wales Island, the big one. It wasn’t so far from where he had come from, it looked just like everything else around it, and it was almost more remote than Sukkwan just because it was so big. Long stretches of its shoreline were uninhabited. And he supposed there could be more problems with bears on the big island, too. There would be no way of knowing for sure whether this was a smaller island until he had circumnavigated it, but he was still going along this shore, with the sunset to his left.
At midday he rested and ate. He sat in the shade, though the sun shone only weakly through haze. He saw no boats. He had seen no boats at all at any point. It was remarkable to him how remote this place was. He had come into nowhere and had thought somehow that that would be a good thing; when he had originally looked on a chart, he had thought his cabin too close to Prince of Wales Island and the few towns along its southwestern coast, but now he wished he could remember those towns and the other small enclaves scattered on neighboring islands. Colonies, really, just two or three houses, with almost no roads. The kinds of places he had always romanticized. He had known a few families who lived in them, had visited their one-room cabins built by hand with homemade dressers and blankets hung to make a bedroom. Bear rugs on the floor and walls. What was the magic in those places? What was it about the frontier that made him feel nothing else was really living? It made no sense, because he didn’t like to be uncomfortable and couldn’t stand to be alone. Every moment of every day now he wanted to see someone. He wanted a woman, any woman. Landscape meant nothing to him if he had to see it alone.
He packed up and continued on. Within the next hour, the coastline fell back sharply to the right and he felt certain now that this was not the big island. When the sunset came, he could see pink in the clouds above to the east but the west was blocked by forest.
Still no one, he said. I might be spending the entire winter here.
It was getting colder again each night. He had been lucky to have this warm spell over the past week, but now the snow and rain would set in again, he knew. He had only his warm clothes and the one blanket with him. This had been enough so far, but he knew he needed to find someone soon or else get back to the cabin where he had left Roy before it became too cold.
That night he woke shivering several times and was never warm enough. He dreamed of hiking around and around in circles with something after him. In the morning, a dusting of snow on the trees, which the drizzle melted away by noon. He had a waterproof jacket but still felt soaked and cold. He ate his lunch sitting on a log at the water’s edge and thinking. If no one else were on this island, he would have to stay here and wait. There would be almost no boat traffic now until the late spring, until May probably or even June, and the people whose cabin he was in would not come back until July or August. And he had wrecked the outboard and radios. So he could be here a long time. He wondered whether his food would hold out. It didn’t seem that it would, and he had not brought his rifle or fishing gear with him. There was no way of going back, either, to all that food he and Roy had stored up.
It was crazy how much food they had stored up. Enough to feed a small colony through the winter. But that was what the trip had become for him. Instead of relaxing and getting to know his son, he had worried only about survival. And when it had finally been time to stop putting food away, that was when he had become terrified; he’d had no idea how to pass the time, how to get through the winter. So he had started calling Rhoda on the radio. Within a month, he would have left, he was sure. He wouldn’t have been able to stay. But Roy had believed they were staying.
Jim was crying again. Roy had wanted to go, and he hadn’t let him. He had trapped him. But Jim made himself stop crying and got up. He continued on until dusk and by then realized he hadn’t been looking for hours, had only been hiking along non-stop and not looking at all for boats or cabins. He didn’t believe anyone else was here.
This night was so cold he couldn’t sleep and instead tried to make some kind of shelter. It was black again, no light, so he could only feel around in the darkness for enough branches and ferns and such to make a pile that he could sleep in. He mounded it all up the length of his body and slid in carefully, trying not to disturb it. This was much warmer but he fell asleep thinking of all the bugs and things in his pile that must be working their way through his clothing right now.
The days continued like this and became indistinguishable. It was a monstrously long island. If he had been certain he could find his cabin, he would simply have hiked across the island and returned, because by now he knew no one else lived here, but he didn’t know how wide the island was and he wasn’t sure he’d recognize coastline on the other side even if it was coastline he had seen before. So he continued on, hiking the full length of the short days and then waiting through each night, waking more than sleeping.
He was thinking of Roy these nights, remembering him as a child, riding the toy green tractor in Ketchikan, wearing a chef’s hat at three and standing up on a stool to reach the mixing bowl. He remembered Roy picking blueberries in his red jacket and knocking down icicles and finding the antlers Jim had thrown behind the fence. Jim had thrown them there because they were small, but Roy discovered them and treasured them as if they were artifacts of another people. They seemed mysterious and wonderful to him. Jim didn’t know how these times became the last years with Roy, didn’t understand any of the transformations, and remembering, Jim realized he was gone for years of Roy’s life, even in Ketchikan when they all still lived together, because Jim was thinking then of women, scheming, beginning to cheat. He had fallen into his secret life with other women and not known anyone or anything else. After the divorce, he still didn’t wake up, but continued after women. And so he could not say who Roy was in the end. He was missing too many of the years leading up to him.
Jim reflected on all of this more calmly now, as if he couldn’t afford the expenditure of crying when he was trying just to stay warm and survive each of these nights. It was not a time for extravagance. He would have to conserve if he was to survive until spring.
During the day, he tried to cover ground but his hiking became slower and slower. He had run out of food nearly a week before and was surviving now on seaweed and mushrooms and small crabs he caught at low tide. He drank from the occasional streams he crossed but was thirsty sometimes for days on end.
The crabs were very good, actually, and he looked forward to them. They were only three or four inches wide, but he cleaned them as he would have a larger crab, grabbing all their flexing legs from behind, underneath the shell, and then smashing the face onto a sharp rock until the top of the shell flew off. Then he broke the crab in half and shook once to get rid of the guts. He rinsed in seawater and sucked out the tender clear meat. He did this throughout the day, eating four or five crabs at a time. The only hard part, really, was when he couldn’t find enough fresh water for a few days and his lips became swollen and his throat sore. But sucking on the needles of the spruce trees in the mornings gave him some relief, and there was often rain. No snow, luckily. He was getting very lucky with the weather.
He daydreamed about the South Pacific, drinking water from large strange leaves, eating fruit that grew everywhere. Mangoes, guavas, coconuts, and wild fruits he had never seen. These new fruits he imagined to be purplish and very sweet. The sun would be out constantly, and he would bathe under waterfalls.
And then one evening he saw the edge of the sunset to the west and knew he had come around the southern tip of the island. He was on his way home now. He continued on to the point and sat in the trees watching the thin line of sunset devoured in watery gray clouds. Then he scraped up enough small stuff to make a mound, pushed his way in, and slept.
It was five more days before he reached the cabin. He arrived fairly early in the morning, had slept the night before
less than a mile from it. Shit, he said. It’s right here. He stood on the beach and looked at it for a while, through the trees.
As he walked up to it, up onto the porch, he could tell that no one had come. Everything was just as he had left it. The note had streaked and faded from the rain, but that was the only change. He went around back for the hammer. The deflated boat was still there, the broken door on the shed, no changes.
Jim pulled the nails from the boards he had placed over the kitchen window, starting to smell Roy even before the first board was fully removed. When he stepped inside, the stench was a thing with weight and heft. He threw up right there on the kitchen floor, threw up his few precious crabs and mushrooms and the fresh water he had sucked yesterday from dew. It seemed a terrible waste, even though he knew he would have better food and water now.
He cleaned himself up at the sink, rinsed out his mouth. The smell was overpowering. He could see well enough in the kitchen, but the back rooms would be dark, so he lit the paraffin lamp and walked back as if against a strong wind into the smell.
Roy was not as stiff as before. The sleeping bag was on the floor now and wet and had white fuzz growing even on the outside. Jim tried to grab the end of the bag but couldn’t and stepped back again. I’m sorry, Roy, he said, weeping now for the first time in a while. And he knew he would have to bury him now. He had tried to find someone, had tried to find a way to show Roy to his mother and sister and give him a funeral, but now he would have to settle for burial on this island. There was no other choice. He couldn’t live with this smell, couldn’t let his son just rot here.
He had to go back outside first to breathe. He waited until he had stopped crying, too, then he went back inside quickly, grabbed the wet bag, and dragged it out to the window. When he hefted it through the window, the contents inside mushed together and some of Roy leaked out through the tears in the bag. Jim was making sounds, disgusted. He couldn’t believe he was having to do this.