Nowhere Wild

by Joe Beernink

  “Don’t call me that—call me Izzy. My name is Izzy.”

  Her mother had only called her Isabelle when she was in trouble. Angie had called her Iz-Kid when she was younger. Her father had called her Izzy from the start. That was who she was, and who she always would be.

  Rick softened his voice. “Izzy’s a little girl’s name. Isabelle is a much better name for a young woman.”

  “Oh.” Despite the cold, an ember of warmth flared in her chest. A short smile formed on her lips. If Rick saw her as more of an adult, maybe he would listen to her ideas. She let her eyes drift away from his face.

  “You okay, darlin’?” His voice cracked as if he were too tired to even finish his sentence.

  “Just tired.” In every direction, bright white snow covered everything.

  “Once we get to the cabin, we can rest. And maybe I’ll teach you the right way to handle the guns. I suppose you’re gettin’ old enough to learn.” He tipped his head northward. “We gotta keep moving.” He adjusted the straps on his pack and started forward again.

  Izzy shifted her backpack. Despite being completely empty of food, it still weighed a ton. She waited for him to get farther ahead of her so she wouldn’t get slapped by branches as he moved, then resumed her march. She focused on her feet, simply following Rick’s trail. It saved her the effort of looking where she was going.

  She seemed to have been following Rick like this for years. It had only been months, though, she corrected herself. She and Angie had fled Thompson with Rick in July when the food ran out in the city. Along with a few dozen other survivors, they followed the road south in a convoy of vehicles, hoping that Winnipeg still had food in the stores. They met the first trickle of survivors from the south less than halfway to the city. They told horror stories of how bad things were down there. At first, no one wanted to believe those tales. But as they came upon more survivors—every one of them emaciated and running for their lives—the reality began to sink in.

  Then they encountered the first of the large gangs. Rick dumped their car and took Angie and Izzy off the main road and into the bush, where they watched in terror as a gang from the city descended onto the rest of their unprepared group from Thompson like a pack of wolves. Rick didn’t let them hang around to see what happened next. He led them deeper and deeper into the bush, along a peaceful river filled with fish. There they remained for the rest of the summer. Rick kept them alive through what they had thought was the worst of it.

  But their luck peaked with Izzy’s killing of the deer. The river ran low and the fish moved to deeper water. The geese and the ducks winged their way south. Angie and Rick began to bicker about the littlest things, like camp duty and fishing techniques. One morning in mid-September, they awoke to a thin layer of ice on the water. A flurry of snow drifted through the air to confirm their fears.

  When the deer meat ran out shortly thereafter, and their sleeping bags were no longer warm enough to keep them comfortable in their thin tents, they headed back to Thompson, where they had hoped to keep a low profile while surviving the winter. It should have been easy in an empty town where the few who remained were too scared of strangers to make contact. Somehow, though, after only three weeks, they had been noticed, and the consequences had been beyond terrible.

  Now, as Izzy marched northward with Rick, she was sure that wherever they were going, there would be no more gangs and no more attacks. With each step, however, she grew more despondent, certain their stomachs would never be full again, and that, when all was said and done, they would still be dead, just for different reasons.

  The tips of her skis grabbed a low-hanging branch like a grappling hook and stopped her dead in her tracks. She fell to her knees to break its grasp.

  Rick heard her cry out and turned. He waited for her to regain her feet, an exhausted look on his own face.

  “Fine. We’ll stop here. Set up the tent.” He pointed to a shallow depression to the left of a cedar tree.

  Izzy didn’t wait for him to change his mind. She set her pack down and, by shuffling with her snowshoes in small circles that gradually got larger, tamped down the snow to build a better platform. This routine she now knew by heart. She set up the tent and gathered firewood. He set the traps and lit the fire. If they were lucky they’d have rabbit or squirrel or something for breakfast.

  They ate nothing for dinner, settling their stomachs with more hot water. The small fire did little to keep Izzy warm. As the cold of the subarctic night set in, they climbed into the tent and sank into their sleeping bags. Rick lay motionless, zipped deep into his mummy bag, asleep within seconds.

  Izzy’s body ached from her head to her toes. She had been tired before, but never this tired. After long training runs with her mother, she had routinely slept twelve hours straight. Those sleeps had been in her bed, where she didn’t have to worry about the cold or where her next meal was coming from. She had never gone to bed hungry. She had taken her safety for granted. Out here, so far from anywhere, she took nothing for granted: not the next meal, not a fire to warm herself by, not even whether she would see the sun rise the next day. The snoring figure next to her was all that kept the fire burning and food in her stomach. Today, there had been no food, and the fire had barely warmed her hands. And whether she would be alive to see the sun rise in the morning remained to be seen.

  The nylon walls of the tent, pitched beneath sullen skies, rattled in the breeze like bones in a tomb. She sensed Rick more by smell and sound than by sight. Before her mind drifted to tumultuous, hunger-fed dreams, she rolled away from him and pulled her sleeping bag tight around her head. She covered her mouth with her hands and forced herself not to cry.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jake

  (Spring)

  Jake set an aggressive pace southward, his brown eyes shaded by a sweat-stained camouflage cap. His grandfather had cautioned him a dozen times about overexertion, but he needed to put some distance between himself and the cabin with its graves. He focused on his paddling and on his breathing, pushing the memory of the previous night’s heartrending chores out of his thoughts. But forgetting his grandfather altogether was not possible.

  “Jake, you’ll need to be smart about this,” his grandfather had warned one night. Notches cut into boards on the western wall of the cabin told them February had arrived. The only light came from a small candle of bear fat, its wick made of cloth from a tattered old shirt. Their potbellied stove provided enough heat to keep one corner of the shack comfortable. Ice and snow glazed the window overlooking the frozen lake. The darkness of the middle of winter swallowed up the rest of the North. The brief daily episode of daylight had already come and gone. A desperate chill had taken hold of the land back in late October and never released its grip.

  “If you go out too fast, you’ll burn up like a firecracker. Set a comfortable pace and stick to it. You’ll last longer.” Amos made a paddling motion with his arms. The words had made sense back then. Despite the warning, Jake reached the first portage before lunch, cutting a full hour off his best solo time. The distance didn’t help with how he felt, though—his heart still ached with every beat.

  The portage trail zigzagged between impassable bogs, bypassing the rocky riverbed in favor of more even footing. In most years the trailhead would have been obvious to untrained eyes, but now, two seasons’ worth of weeds hid the entrance.

  “It’s the portages, Jake,” Amos had said that night. “Those are the tough parts. A lot of the lakes here, they don’t feed rivers, not big enough to paddle, anyways. They’re potholes. Some are no bigger than this cabin. Some are the size of Winnipeg.”

  He waggled a thin finger at the map spread on the table and traced the route they had marked in pencil a month before. They had just two maps: a local topographic map that covered about forty square kilometers around the cabin, and a Manitoba road map bought at a gas station in Thompson years ago. They had been over this route nearly every day since the ice had set in on the lake and t
he darkness had fallen. Jake had grown weary of hearing the same warnings day after day.

  “All the rivers around here flow north or northeast. See?” Amos traced his finger along a series of thin, unnamed blue lines that joined one small lake to another, eventually emptying into Hudson Bay. He didn’t wait for Jake to look.

  “You get out into the Land of Little Sticks without food—without someone to watch your back—and it’s trouble. That’s polar bear country, Jake. Not like the little blacks we got here. Big ones, the size of your mama’s Toyota. You’d be about the size of a snack for them. And a pitifully small one at that.” He flashed a grin short two more teeth since the end of the summer. Soon he would have no teeth left at all.

  “And north isn’t the way you want to go anyway. Once the rivers start turning that way, you need to hump it overland and connect up here,” he continued after giving Jake a moment to worry about polar bears. He tapped his finger next to a small lake near Sand Lakes Provincial Park. The lakes north of this lake drained into the Seal River. The lakes to the south followed a line down to the Churchill River.

  “You’ll have to take your time on those portages. Short hauls. Scout the line. Always keep your pack with you. You leave it alone for half an hour, and you’ll have company. Blackie can smell you ten miles away, but he’ll stay away as long as you’re making noise.”

  Jake had nodded as if this were new information to him, but he knew the black bear. The cover on his bed was the skin from a black that had harassed their cabin in the fall. They had, for a while, eaten relatively well.

  Before setting out down the trail, he took a moment to chew a mouthful of dried venison, then washed it down with a swig from his canteen. The water had been boiled the night before. He would have to boil more each night to be safe. His father had drilled that lesson into him years before, but it only took one round of giardiasis as a child to reinforce it. The water here, even as clear as it was to the naked eye, could be as deadly as the polar bears his grandfather had warned him about.

  He tightened the straps on his pack, slid his paddle between the thwarts of the canoe, and tipped the canoe onto its side. With a single, practiced motion, starting from his knees, he flipped the canoe up over his head and heaved himself to a standing position. After a deep, bracing breath, he marched into the woods.

  In the shade of the jack pines, the cool, pine-scented air wrapped around him like an old blanket. Jake’s long-sleeve shirt kept the ever-present bugs off his skin. The light fabric prevented overheating in the early-summer temperatures. Summer was short but could be pleasant here, two hundred and sixty kilometers north of Thompson and nine hundred kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. Bad weather always lurked close on the horizon though—never more than a couple of days away at best. Once, Jake had seen it snow here in July. Today, however, the skies were blue and the temperatures comfortable.

  Nettles ripped at his hiking pants as he walked. He knew better than to wear shorts or jeans on a trip like this. When jeans got wet, they stayed wet. Here, everything got wet, eventually. His father didn’t even let him bring anything denim into the woods. “Urban trash. Great for cowboys, but useless in the bush.” Jake grinned as he did his best imitation of his father’s deep voice.

  His father had surely hiked this same portage nine months before, but as Jake made his way down the crude path, he found no sign of his passage. The weeds and bushes obscured any hint of recent travelers. The weather had washed away the footprints.

  “You head south, Jake,” his grandfather had told him. “Always south. Take your time. You need to get into the Churchill watershed. Laroque is small, but you’ll find it. Once you hit the big lakes, get your bearings, figure out exactly where you are, and head for town as quick as you can. If the river starts turning north, you’re too far east. And don’t even think about trying to run the Churchill. It’ll ruin you. Even if you somehow made it down there, you’d have to paddle on the bay, and no canoe we got is going to handle those waves. They’ll swamp you before you get far enough out to not see bottom. You’ll be hypothermic in seconds.” He snapped his fingers.

  “If you end up west of the lakes, you’ll eventually run into roads, but you’d have to be off course by hundreds of kilometers to reach them. But if you’re that far off course, you’ve got other issues. The Churchill drains half the damn province. Hard to miss. And I know you’re a better navigator than that, anyways. You won’t get that lost.”

  Jake had smiled at the compliment until Amos coughed. The cabin’s cold air came back out in clouds of vapor and spittle. Amos wiped his mouth with his sleeve again, then looked at the cuff. Jake pretended not to see the worried glance, just like he had pretended not to see the blood on the fabric when he was scrubbing their clothes during the last laundry cycle. He knew it couldn’t have been from their last kill; Jake had dressed and butchered that buck himself.

  Amos had scratched the back of his hand. Dark liver spots covered it as reminders of a different life, a long time ago. He looked at his hand in the pale light of the fat candle, and then covered the arm back up. He cleared his throat and licked his lips. Jake watched him for a moment, waiting for his grandfather to continue. Amos said no more. He simply folded up the map, placed it back onto its spot on the shelf, then curled up into his bed for another nap.

  Jake had been relieved that day that the lecture had been cut short. Now, with his grandfather gone, he wished he could have heard it a hundred times more.

  After only a few minutes of walking, the reality of portaging alone began to set in. Sweat poured down Jake’s face, chest, and back. The mosquitoes hounded him, buzzing around his face and flying into his mouth whenever he inhaled. His shoulders burned with the weight of the pack and the yoke of the canoe. His legs ached with the combination of it all. He focused on taking each step, picking a tree he could see ten meters in front of him, reaching that point, then picking the next goal.

  Just keep walking, he reminded himself.

  His grandfather had done a lot of marching in the army. Forty miles in two days while peacekeeping in the Sudan, he’d told Jake many times, and a hell of a lot more than that while doing cold-weather training around Cold Lake, Alberta. “Wasn’t much of a challenge for the Eskimo, they’d say,” Amos recounted. “I kept telling them I wasn’t no Eskimo—that I was Cree—but those guys, those guys don’t know the difference. Don’t care neither.”

  Jake covered nearly a kilometer and a half before a raspberry vine seized his ankle. The canoe tipped to the right as he went down, jolting to a stop with a dull thud. The yoke drove Jake’s face into the brambles. He yelped in pain and muttered things he would never have said in front of his mother.

  Jake lay still for a moment while he inventoried his aches and pains. The weight of his pack glued him to the ground. Forcing back a groan of self-pity, he rolled onto his side before pushing himself into a sitting position.

  A flip of a clasp loosened his pack straps and released the plastic hip buckle. He sucked in a lungful of air, then took a long drink of water from his canteen.

  He stood slowly and stretched his aching muscles. Ahead, the trail sloped downward to the next lake, passing through a thick line of pines. He checked his pack. Everything remained secure. A survey of damage to the canoe showed only a small, fresh scratch on the bow. He ran his finger over the new scar and tested the hull with his knuckle. It held.

  With the detailed map from the pocket on his pack, he verified his position and direction. He’d been reading maps since before he could read books. He’d been so good at it that his father had started letting him lead trips at each one of the outfitter’s camps. He had picked his way through dense forest, paddled hundreds of kilometers of backwaters on private tours, and navigated thick swamp while hunting moose—all with just a compass and a topographic map. They called it orienteering in school. His father called it survival.

  It would be weeks before the raspberries would be in season, but there were other berries, oth
er plants around at this time of year he could eat. Amos had shown him the leaves of the pigweed and the shoots from the cattail and the leaves of the dandelion. Even the roots of stinging nettles could be eaten if he boiled them first. Those plants, however, did not compare to the taste of the fresh berries these bushes would hold late in the summer. His mother used to come out to the camps while his father guided a hunting trip and pick them by the bucketful. She filled their deep freezer to the top by October. Jake, Leland, and Amos emptied it, without fail, by the next season. Jake smiled as he thought about his mother without breaking down. That, a few months ago, would have been impossible.

  The trip down the hill left him next to a trickling, spring-fed stream. The roots of willows and more raspberry bushes fought for the extra water the spring provided. It took Jake two hours to go half a kilometer through the thick brush, forcing him to set the canoe down to hack his way through the growth with his machete.

  The ground softened and the stream widened into a small delta as he approached the lake. Centuries’ worth of dead vegetation stacked up to form a thick, stinking bog. The trail disappeared completely. Glimpses of open water appeared a few hundred meters ahead, tantalizingly close.

  He towed the canoe to the water with a short rope tied to the bow, grunting and straining with each step. Swarms of giant mosquitoes and tiny gnats lined up to take their turns harassing him. The muck pulled at his boots, making every step a gargantuan effort. Jake pushed on through the knee-deep bog, stirring up rank odors of decaying plants and rotting fish, burning energy and time he didn’t have.

  The water deepened until he was finally able to pull the canoe beside him and hoist himself in. A gentle breeze rippled the open water ahead. When he cleared the reeds, the mosquitoes returned home, leaving him puffy and caked with dried blood. He removed his boots and socks, gave them a rinse in the lake, and set them forward in the canoe to dry.