by Joe Beernink
Rick had been right a hundred times. He knew what it would take for them to survive out here. If he said bunking together was their best chance to make it through the worst of the winter, when temperatures in this area were known to drop to eighty below, then that was probably the case. She and Angie had shared a queen-sized bed in Thompson, and half the time she had had no idea whether or not Angie was there. Still, the idea of being that close to Rick caused shivers that the cold could never match.
When she returned, the frame was nearly complete. Rick greeted her with a proud smile. Izzy stared at what he had built.
“It ain’t much to look at right now, darling, but I think we’ll be pretty comfy. Should do us for a long time.” He tapped the frame with his hand and shook the bed to show how sturdy it was.
Izzy clasped her hand over her mouth. This was no queen-sized mattress. The bed, as it now stood, would be barely wide enough for the two of them lying side by side. Her cramps returned, and she bolted for the outhouse once again.
CHAPTER 10
Jake
(Summer)
With each ridge and each valley, the isolation of the wild pressed more heavily onto Jake’s shoulders. Here, in the thick of it, Jake felt more alone than he had ever been in his whole life.
A single airplane was all they had needed. A single plane could have saved them all.
His mother had died just three days after Jake’s father left. She had been convulsing one moment and screaming in delirium and pain the next. Jake held her down as Amos forced water between her lips, past a swollen tongue that dangled from her mouth like a dead snake. Her pulse beat like a snare drum—fast and weak. Her abdomen had bloated, becoming rigid and discolored.
Amos whispered as he mopped her brow with a cloth, “Shhh, child. It’ll be okay.”
By that point, they all knew that was a lie.
Her face matched the color of the thick layer of fog draped over the lake. She shook continuously, despite being perched on a cot next to a stove pumping out enough heat to melt the arctic ice pack. Her eyes jolted wide open for a brief, terrifying moment. She looked at Jake and gave Amos a look of fear and worry. A final, gut-wrenching scream, and she was gone. The shaking stopped; her agony ended as if a switch had been thrown.
It took Jake days to get out of bed, to make his own food again. His dreams—when he did sleep—were nightmares. During the day, he sat by the radio, dead as it was, waiting for it to miraculously chirp to life. He watched the lake from their single window, praying for a plane to land. Not even the formerly omnipresent contrails of intercontinental jets appeared in the stratosphere.
Three weeks after Jake’s mother died, Amos sat down on the bed next to Jake. “Jake . . .” Amos started. Jake lay on his cot, his back to Amos. He pretended not to hear.
“Jake . . . I need you to listen to me for a bit.” Amos put his weathered hand on the covers hiding Jake’s shoulder. “We need to talk.
“I know . . . I know you think we’ve talked enough, and you’re probably tired of me telling you to get off your ass, but that’s not what we need to discuss. Not right now.” His voice lowered and steadied. Jake stared at a line of browned insulation stuffed into a gap in the plywood wall of the cabin and gritted his teeth.
Talk. Talk was not what he wanted. He wanted to yell—to scream. Anger, bitter and raw, snuck up his throat like bile. It coated everything and burned. My mother is dead. He had stayed for no reason. His father was out there, doing something. Jake squeezed a fold of the blanket in his fist. He closed his eyes and willed Amos away. He didn’t want his grandfather so near. He didn’t want the old man to become a target for his rage. He needed time. Couldn’t Amos understand that?
“Your grandmother Beth was the love of my life, Jake. She was the kindest, most gentle creature that ever graced my eyes. She was everything to me. But I was always second in her life after your father was born. She loved your father—doted on him. She would have walked through fire for him. Much like your mother would have for you.” The bed moved as Amos changed position and sniffled.
“My Beth died way too young. Like your mom. Way too damn young. Both senseless deaths, Jake. God-awful and senseless. We haven’t talked much about your grandmother, Jake. Not in a long time. It’s always been too hard. God knows we’re no good at talking about that kind of stuff. There’s too much history in this family, and too much tragedy. We keep it covered up like some disease, like we’ll all catch it if we talk about it. But you need to know. You need to understand . . .” Jake adjusted his position. The old man’s hand lay heavy on his shoulder, and it shook just a little.
“When your father was a few years older than you are now, he left the rez—went out on his own. The house got awfully empty once he left. It wasn’t a big place, but Beth and I seemed to rattle around in it. Empty nest, they say. There was so much we hadn’t done in our lives. So I lived it up, sometimes too hard. I never worried about it. I knew that Beth was always ready to pick me up and drive me home when I did.
“She was on her way to pick me up when she got hit. She never had a chance. That Chev pushed the driver’s-side door on her little Dodge nearly out the passenger side.”
Jake pulled his knees up to his chest. Pain radiated from Amos’s words and cut into Jake’s heart like a hunting knife.
“My world got a lot smaller that night, Jake. My Beth. Gone. Quick as that.
“I thought up a thousand other ways to end it all—to take the easy way out—but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to take the chance that the preacher was right, and that there is no heaven for those who kill themselves. I was scared I’d end up looking through those gates at her, but never able to be with her. She was everything to me, Jake. Everything.”
He paused, and took a sip of water from a cup before continuing his story.
“I’ve never told anyone all of this. Not even your father. But you need to know . . . you need to understand.” He coughed again. “I couldn’t stay on the rez after that, so I ran. From one crappy town to another, looking for jobs that weren’t there. Not for me. I had the wrong color skin. Didn’t matter though. I wasn’t in any kind of mind to settle down. I ran from the spirits of my ancestors, and from my family. But you can’t outrun your memories, Jake. They follow you. Wherever you go.
“Then your father got this idea into his head to start up this outfitting company, and whether it was foolish or not, he decided he wanted me part of it. We fought like alley cats, but he made it work. I never understood how your father could forgive me for what I did. I wanted to run a dozen times, but he held on tight. He wouldn’t let me go. Your father is a strong one. Stronger than me, that’s for sure. And then he met your mother, and she took me in, too. I didn’t know why. But when you were born, and I saw you for the first time and saw those eyes, I knew . . . I knew why we had to make it work. Why I had to stay . . . You have your grandmother’s eyes, Jake. When I saw those eyes, I knew . . .”
Amos took a long pause to catch his breath.
“I’m not going to be able to hang on much longer. Not without your help, and even then, I’m not sure how much longer I’ve got. My body just isn’t what it used to be.”
Jake turned over in the bed, his hair falling about his eyes. It had been days since it had seen a comb or been washed. Tangles covered half his face and forced him to push the mess aside.
“Grandpa, you can’t . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“It’s not going to happen today, or this week. But it is going to happen, and probably before we get out of here. The doc said spring if I was lucky.”
“Spring?” Jake tried to calculate the impact. He’d lost track of the days. He had no idea how far off Christmas was, let alone spring.
“It don’t matter about me, but there’s a lot of things I have to teach you, things you’re going to have to learn, so that at least one of us gets out of here. We’re going to make sure that once the ice breaks next spring, you can get your ass hom
e.”
“I’m not leaving you, Grandpa. Not a chance.”
Jake sat up in bed and grabbed his grandfather’s hand. Amos looked at the boy and smiled.
“You have your father’s hands, Jake. Your grandmother’s eyes, your father’s hands, and your mother’s heart. I’ve never known a boy to have been dealt those kinds of cards.”
“You’re coming with me, Grandpa.”
“Maybe so, Jake. Maybe so.”
But that wasn’t to be. The doctor had been right, and by spring, Amos was dead.
Now, Jake attempted to trace the same route as his father had taken. Tracks would be hard to find unless his dad had left telltales such as stone cairns, or perhaps markers tied high in trees. He wouldn’t have done that though, Jake reasoned. His father had expected to be back from Laroque within three weeks with a rescue party in tow. Jake could think of no good reason why his father hadn’t returned within a month. There were only bad ones—nightmare scenarios that curled him up in his sleeping bag, night after night, imagining the worst.
Amos had, however, made good on his promise. He taught Jake everything he knew about living in the wild. Now it was Jake’s turn to find a way out, to find his father, and then to pick up the pieces of his life and live. The memories of generations gone before had been stuffed into his head during the long winter. That had been his grandfather’s gift to him.
Jake would honor those memories by doing the one thing they had all trained him to do: survive.
CHAPTER 11
Izzy
(Winter)
The thin buffer of trees and scrub barely held back the roaring wind. As the temperature dropped, Izzy and Rick had filled the cabin with firewood. The snow-covered wood left puddles on the floor as meltwater dripped in the relative warmth of the cabin—puddles that formed ice under the pile every night. They foraged for more firewood any time the snow let up for even a few minutes. The cold drove them back inside before frostbite set in.
“Seems like this storm’s never going to end.” Izzy pulled her coat tighter and gazed out the frosted window. It should have been daylight out, but heavy flurries had turned the sky dark. The tinkle of snow pellets hitting the roof nearly covered up her words.
“It’ll pass,” Rick said. “Go back to sleep. There’s a reason bears hibernate in the winter up here.” The bed frame creaked as he rolled over.
Izzy checked the meat on the drying rack. Two days before the storm blew in, Rick had killed another buck. Blood-soaked drapes of drying meat hung over the stove. A nine-point set of antlers crowned the door. That had been Rick’s project the previous day. Izzy thought the antlers were slightly gruesome, but wasn’t bothered by the meat.
She wiggled her toes in her new rabbit-fur slippers. Next to the bed, a set of mittens made with deerskin and lined with more fur awaited final stitching. A half dozen failed attempts at creating leg warmers lay in a discard pile next to bed. Even her latest creations weren’t elegant, but they were getting better, and definitely warmer than the thin gloves she had brought with her from town. Her original gloves, layered with high-tech materials and warm to minus forty, remained on the counter in the house where Angie had been killed. She flexed her fingers and closed her eyes, trying to shake off a memory dulled little by the passage of time.
Time. How long had they been here? Izzy stepped back to the window. A gust of wind shook the cabin. She caught her reflection in the glass and pushed her hair back from her face. She would have to cut it soon. Angie had cut it for her last. Months ago, it seemed. September? She swallowed and counted the days. She’d lost track after they left Thompson. She could only guess that it was late November. Her birthday was November 11. Fourteen. She had turned fourteen without even noticing. She ran her hand over her cheeks, wiping them dry. Dates meant little out here. Survival was the only thing that mattered.
“You’re gonna freeze if you keep standing around,” Rick said with a deep grumble. “Throw a stick into the stove and put out the light. We ain’t got enough fuel to let it burn all day.”
Izzy nodded, pulled two short, thick pieces of wood from the pile, and dropped them into the stove. On her route from the stove to the bed, she passed a draft that roared across the floor like a frozen locomotive. She set the lamp down beside the wall and pushed more moss into the offending gap between the logs. The brief exposure to the colder air made her teeth chatter. She hesitated only slightly before pulling off her coat and slippers and crawling back under the covers. The bed was now toasty warm, with its thick layer of pine boughs covered in deerskin, two sleeping bags, and blankets over the top of them. She shivered as it sucked the cold from her bones.
“Slide over here, hon. You’re freezing.” Rick lifted the covers slightly. Warm air trapped between the layers looped around her. She slid slightly closer to the center of the bed. She had worn a groove along the outermost edge of the mattress, as far away from Rick as possible, but the cot was barely wide enough for two to begin with. With her tiny shift, the heat from his body extended warming tentacles around her.
Rick moved, his arm pushing up against her side. It seemed innocent enough, but Izzy knew better. A half dozen times he had done that since she had moved from the floor to the bed. The last time he had done it, his hand had worked its way onto her stomach. A few times during the night, she had awoken from a deep sleep with a start, as if something had been crawling on her. Rick had quickly turned over and away from her, feigning sleep.
Izzy hesitated before slowly rolling onto her side, facing away from him. The pine boughs under the deerskin dug into her, especially on her thin shoulders and hips. She could deal with the discomfort. It gave her an extra bit of space.
“You know, back when Lois and I and Brian used to come up here, we all crammed into this little shack. It was so peaceful and we had so much fun,” he said wistfully. “Brian used to fish from dawn to dusk. That lake is just chock-full of fish, Isabelle. By the second day, we’d always have our limit and be dumping them back. Wasn’t no better place than here.”
“Must have been crowded with the three of you in here,” Izzy said. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dim room. The ghosted outlines of the stove and woodpile formed monsters in the dark.
“Didn’t seem that way, not when Brian was young. By the time he got older, he’d put up a tent by the shore and Lois and I would snuggle up in here.”
“You weren’t here in the winter then,” Izzy said.
“Naw, we never made it up here in the winter. Lois wasn’t much on really roughing it. She’d do it, but if the weather turned, she’d be tellin’ me to get on the radio to have the plane come back and pick us up,” Rick said with a chuckle.
“Smart woman,” Izzy said.
“She always thought so. Said a vacation shouldn’t be something you have to come back and recover from. She always wanted to go to Mexico or Jamaica or somewhere. That was her idea of a good vacation.” Rick moved and the distance between them shrank a bit more.
“Did you ever do it?” Izzy asked. She coughed as cold air bubbled up from another draft. Her hand moved forward to see how much room she had to the edge of the bed.
“Nope. Never went. Never had the money. Should have done it though. Should have figured it out.” He moved again. His leg touched her curled-up feet. She pushed it back with her heel. Sliding any farther forward would pitch her onto the floor.
“Angie always wanted to go to Europe,” Izzy said, trying to ignore the movement behind her. Sometimes, when she talked like this, Rick would grow bored and go to sleep. Brian had said she could talk the ears off a stalk of corn when she wanted to. “Paris and Barcelona,” she continued. “She used to talk about touring the museums and eating bread and cheese under the Eiffel Tower. Wanted to see the fashion shows, the museums, the stores.” Izzy thought back to the stack of magazines by Angie’s bed in their old house. She read anything that had anything to do with life in the big cities. Angie wasn’t going to stay in Thompson a moment longer than
she had to.
“Angie always did have expensive tastes.” Rick took her brief silence as an opportunity to voice his opinion.
“She just knew what she liked. Sounded good to me. We talked about going when she was done with college. I wanted to see London. And Italy. Rome. Maybe Budapest. Don’t know why. Think I saw it in some movie a long time ago, or maybe read about it in a book.”
“I always thought that her and Brian might . . . might go out sometime. They would have made a cute couple.” Rick said, changing the subject.
“They didn’t have much in common,” Izzy said. “They would have been miserable together.”
“I think they would have done all right. Lois and me, we didn’t have so much in common when we started dating. But we got along good, and things just worked out. Sometimes time makes the heart grow fonder.”
Rick moved again. Now he was directly behind her on his side. His hand settled onto her, slowly caressing her arm and sliding down to her hip. Izzy’s skin crawled as he pulled her closer to him.
“I think it’s ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder.’” She grabbed his hand to push it off her. He resisted and squeezed her tighter. She clenched her fist and wondered what he would do if she drove her elbow back into him. Something told her it wouldn’t have helped, and would have only made things worse.
“Time will do it too, Isabelle.” He said it low and soft. He nuzzled into her hair. She squirmed away.
“Rick. No.” She teetered on the edge of the bed. He seized her leg as she swung it out from under the covers.
“It’s too cold out there, darling. Stay.” His rough hands pulled her back into the bed.
“Rick, let me go!” Panic surged through her. He had never touched her like this before. “What are you doing?” she cried.