Nowhere Wild

by Joe Beernink

  She ate her meager portion for lunch as she ogled the rest of the drying meat on the rack. They were still rationing the deer as if it alone would have to last them through the winter. Rick knew exactly how much remained. His orders were strict, and Izzy still remembered what a truly empty stomach felt like. She made do with her ration.

  She wandered farther inland after her lunch, her trail marked with the small hatchet strapped to her wrist. Even with the snowshoe tracks, it was far too easy to become disoriented and end up walking in a circle. In the first two weeks at the cabin, when the snow wasn’t quite so deep, they had gathered wood from close by. Now she had to go farther each day. When Rick was around, he’d chop down an entire dead tree. She didn’t have the energy or the power to do that.

  The ground rose as she trudged north. At first, the shallow grade offered little resistance, but after ten minutes the rise grew steeper until she reached a gravel ridge as high as a six-story building. The trees stopped just short of the slope. She climbed the incline, struggling to maintain a foothold on the ice-covered dirt. The hatchet swung freely from its rawhide strap, banging into her ribs as she ascended. Only a thin layer of snow covered the top, as if the bulk of the ridge had frightened the wind into going up and over and holding its white cargo to dump on their cabin instead.

  An impressive view greeted her from the top of the esker. To the north, the ridge sloped steeply downward. Trees fought back against the force of the predominant winds. To the east and west, the ridge ran to the horizon. To the south, toward the cabin, she could just see over the tops of the snow-covered trees below. The lake extended as an expanse of white beyond the limit of visibility. The slightest wisp of gray-blue smoke drifted out of the cabin’s metal chimney, reminding her of the need to feed another stick into the fire. Rick wouldn’t be happy if it was out when he returned from hunting.

  She stood on the ridge as the sky grew. For the first time in months, she could see beyond her immediate surroundings. Last summer, being caught in the open had been something to fear. Here, from the top of this ridge, the size of the earth frightened her. The northern sky dwarfed the tiny, isolated cabin. There was nothing left beyond this desolate view—nothing to go back to. The flu had only been the start of the destruction. People had done the rest.

  After the flu, Izzy had followed Angie wherever she went, stumbling through day after day of grief, oblivious to anything but her loss. Her mother. Her father. Her friends.

  All dead or gone.

  Neither of them had even had the energy to go to the store to get groceries. Rick saved them then. He found them food and gathered supplies. When the remaining survivors began to hoard what they could, the stores had emptied so fast. The flu had killed so many—yet it took only a few weeks for the survivors to eat what was left. Thompson, dependent on trucked-in food and fuel, had been forgotten.

  The trucks would come back, the weakened flu survivors all said. The trucks never did.

  No one rationed what they had. The food had always come. Everyone ate three meals a day until one day there was barely enough for one. A discovered can of tuna, long hidden in someone’s pantry, seemed like a banquet fit for a king. Those had been the good days.

  Then the starvation began. The true starvation, where the energy it took to find food exceeded the return from eating it. Every house had been ransacked. The people who could leave, left, and never came back. No one ever came back. Those who stayed, changed. Good people—people who would have given the shirt off their back in the good times—protected what they had until it, too, was gone. Hunger changed them all.

  But Rick again had saved them. He took them out of town when there were no other options. Angie had been there, pulling Izzy along, telling her it would be okay. Telling her that they would make it, one way or another.

  Izzy glanced back to where the thin curl of smoke betrayed the location of the cabin, and the bed inside.

  Angie, why didn’t you stop this?

  Her sister remained silent.

  More memories. Memories of conversations—whispered conversations between Angie and Rick that Izzy had been too stricken to hear to when they happened. The whispers grew louder now. Now, she heard them clearly.

  “Don’t you ever—”

  “Never! You understand me?”

  “Never!”

  And then she realized Angie had done her best to stop it. Izzy knew, in a moment of clarity, what had happened to Angie.

  That day.

  That day Izzy had killed the deer. Rick and Angie had been gone. Angie had left Izzy alone for the first time in forever. And Angie had been so upset, so different, after she came back. Izzy had always thought it was about the deer. Angie became distant—angry. Not with Izzy. With Rick.

  Rick had . . . had done the same to her.

  Oh, Angie! Poor, Angie!

  And yet Angie had stayed. She had stayed; had gone through that for weeks after that day and said nothing. Why would she have done that? In the instant that followed, Izzy knew why. Survival. Angie had done that, with him, to survive. To allow both of them to survive. The realization came in gigantic, body-shaking sobs. Her sister had done the unthinkable. And then she knew she would have to do the same, because Angie had done it for her. For Izzy not to survive would be to dishonor Angie’s memory, to waste her sacrifice. Izzy’s duty was to survive, and then to escape—or everything Angie had suffered through would be for nothing. Izzy couldn’t do that. Not now that she knew it all.

  She stumbled over to a cluster of gnarled trees that had shied away from the predominantly northerly gusts. Instead of giving up altogether, the trees had done what they could to survive. Living in the depths of the ravines, away from the wind, would have been easier. But that was not their lot; that was not where their seeds had fallen and taken root. And though their life was hard, their roots grasped at the shallow soil, held tight to it, and the trees survived. Where others with thinner roots would have fallen in the slightest gust, these trees had fought the cruelty of the extended winters and lived.

  Izzy put her hand on one of the branches. The branch barely moved. It resisted her pressure. It had adapted. It had grown strong where it could.

  From this ridge, she could see the curvature of the earth. No one was out there. No one was looking for her. No one would save her.

  Escape would be completely up to her.

  She stood on that ridge for a half hour, watching the clouds move, until the chill of the day settled through her clothes. Rick would be back soon, and she had work to do. She would have to do that work, and more. She would have to recover her strength. She would have to learn how to hunt for her own food. She would have to learn how to navigate the wilderness. She would have to find a way to make her own supplies and tools. But worst of all, she would have to bide her time. She would need to survive in that cabin until she could survive out here by herself. In the snow, she would be too easy for him to find. In the summer, however, when the days were long, the weather warmer, and food easier to come by—she could go then. Back to Thompson, and whatever—whoever—was there. And if there was no one there, she would go south and keep going, until she found . . . a new life . . . away from him.

  She worked her way back down the esker, grabbing an armful of branches from a hung-up deadfall as she returned to the cabin.

  Rick was waiting by the door when she arrived. A long, silver canoe lay on the snow next to the cabin.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asked.

  “Getting firewood.” She held up the collection of branches as if he couldn’t see them. “Where’d you get that?” She tipped her head toward the canoe. She dumped the sticks unceremoniously on the pile inside the cabin. Clumps of snow dropped onto the floor.

  “Did you have to go all the way to Winnipeg for it?” Rick ignored the question about the canoe. Blood covered his hands. A freshly skinned and gutted rabbit lay on the kitchen table. A dead ptarmigan lay next to it, its head at an odd angle to its body, it
s feathers flayed with spots of red.

  “No . . . just had to find wood not covered up by the snow.”

  “How long were you gone?”

  “Not long . . . ,” she said with a bit of hesitation. Rick simmered.

  “What did I tell you before I left?”

  “You told me to get wood and find some moss.”

  “And what else?”

  “And . . .” And she remembered. The stove. She glanced at it.

  “You let the fire go out.” He grabbed her by the collar of her coat and dragged her over to the stove. The coals were gray and cold. He pushed her face against the cold metal.

  “You feel that? You feel how cold that is?” The cast iron sucked the heat from her exposed skin. He pulled her up and glared at her.

  “I’m sorry, Rick. I didn’t mean to . . . I thought about it while I was out there. Really I did. I just wanted to get as much wood in here as I could, in case it storms again.” Izzy’s stomach churned. Fire, out here, was everything. Without it, they wouldn’t last a night. Not in this cold.

  Rick paused. “We can’t let it happen again. You understand?” His anger slowly subsided.

  “I know, Rick. I know. It won’t happen again.”

  Rick’s grip on her collar relaxed. “There’s another half hour of daylight left. Get out there and get some more wood. I’ll get this bloody thing relit.” He picked up the flint and striker from the mantel, growling and cussing as he did so.

  Izzy pulled her coat tight and rushed out the door, back into the cold, deep snow, barely giving a passing thought to the canoe by the door.

  Summer couldn’t possibly come soon enough.

  CHAPTER 14

  Jake

  (Summer)

  Jake rose before dawn, cleaned up his camp, and ate breakfast while the sun climbed to warm the valley. A thick fog settled between the trees, drowning out any noise he made. The incessant buzz of mosquitoes patrolling the lowlands droned in the background. Jake’s vision extended just a few meters beyond his camp. His traps had been empty again. He didn’t bother to fish.

  Away from the river, the air lightened and the fog lifted. The heavy woolen layer that had covered the area the previous day gave way to a pleasant sky dotted with puffy clouds. Drops of dew from the tangled brush soaked his pants and chilled his legs.

  His body hurt from the battle with the logs. A bruise on his knee nearly matched the color of the camouflage cap pulled low over his brow. Red scabs—on scratches delivered by the tree that had saved him—covered his hands and face, providing landing strips for the attacks of the morning’s gnats.

  It was easier walking in the bush without the canoe, but as he caught a glimpse of the river below, he knew that with its speed on flat water, he would already have paddled the length of that river and been on the next lake. He tried not to dwell on it.

  He spent more time foraging for edible plants as he worked his way south. A few, like dandelion leaves and lamb’s-quarter, could be eaten right off the stem without cooking. Twice he found large clusters of tiny, wild strawberries. Bear scat piled around every berry patch. Plants crushed by sleeping animals sprang up like traps as he passed by. Most bushes had been picked clean. Jake salvaged what he could and kept going. His gun, so long strapped to his pack while he portaged, had been pulled from its case. He held it in his hands, loaded and ready.

  His rifle was too powerful for most of the small animals of the area. His grandfather’s Colt, still wrapped in a towel and stuffed deep in his pack, was no better. For birds, squirrels, or rabbits, the rifle would likely not just kill them, but would blow them to bits, leaving nothing to eat. Jake had considered other long-barreled guns; they had had three options at the cabin: a .22 rifle, a 12-gauge pump shotgun and the .308 rifle. But he could never have left the .308 behind.

  His father had put an air rifle in Jake’s hands at the age of six and started him target shooting. When Jake was eight, Leland let him try a single-shot .22-caliber rifle. The noise was louder and the kick more substantial, especially for a skinny boy barely taller than the gun was long. He had balanced the gun by bracing it with his elbows on a downed tree. He learned how to maintain that rifle. He learned how to shoot, how to adjust for wind and gravity, and how to lead a moving target. By the time he was ten, he could hit cans swinging on a rope from forty meters away. This winter at the cabin he’d hit a running snowshoe hare from eighty meters in knee-deep snow—a shot Amos had recounted with pride for weeks.

  He was ten when he took his first deer: a small five-point buck. Jake field dressed it himself and helped butcher it. The hunt, the kill, and the butchering had not fazed him. The death didn’t revolt him. It had been clean and quick. It wasn’t a kill for sport—his dad would never have allowed that. Amos had shown him how to honor the memory of the deer by sprinkling loose tobacco on the ground by the carcass. “The forest,” Amos said, “has a memory that will outlive man.”

  Jake’s father gave him the Remington 700 for his twelfth birthday—a gun of superb quality and craftsmanship, and one he took great care to maintain. The kickback from the heavy rounds hurt Jake’s shoulder after each shot. Still, he practiced religiously. By fourteen, he was the best shot in the family, so good that his father often wondered aloud if that gun was actually part of him.

  As late afternoon approached, Jake changed his style of hiking to reduce his noise. He kept to his planned path as his eyes scanned for a substantial meal. He placed his feet carefully to sidestep breaking twigs. He adjusted his stride to avoid brushing up against branches. He moved across cluttered ground, barely making a sound. He bypassed shots at a couple of small birds. He had to choose his shot: once he fired his gun, the sound and its echo would disperse anything else worth shooting, and hunting would be unproductive for hours.

  He crested a small, false peak on a ridge and silently brought the gun to his shoulder. Thirty meters ahead and upwind, a raccoon dug in the remnants of an old tree stump, searching for grubs. Jake leveled the rifle and aimed. He pressed the safety off with a barely audible click and took a pulse-slowing breath. As he exhaled, he squeezed the trigger.

  The retort shook the valley. The force of the bullet’s impact flung the body end for end, sending a spurt of blood across the ground like a flick of red paint from a dipped brush.

  Jake clicked the safety back on and cleared the spent casing from the gun while covering the distance to his kill. The body lay curled in a ball. He prodded it once with the blade of his knife and rolled it onto its back. The field-dressing process was quick. He sliced through the skin along the breast, drained the blood, and removed the entrails. The heart and liver he set on a piece of plastic for safekeeping. He skinned the animal with a practiced hand, trimming the meat off the carcass and wrapping it in the plastic. Raccoon meat would be a welcome change from the deer jerky and fish he had been eating almost continuously on this trip. With no place or time to dry the skin properly, he left it on the ground, neatly rolled up as a sign of respect. The forest, he reminded himself, has a memory that will outlive man.

  He moved on as soon as his gear was repacked. The smell of blood would be strong in the area of the kill, and would draw larger predators. This spot was too exposed to stay in long. A half kilometer later, in the shelter of two boulders, he cooked the meat over a small fire. He didn’t stop long. A few minutes after the food was cooked and either rewrapped or eaten, he set back off into the trees. Daylight was not to be wasted.

  His compass steered him ever southward. With a full stomach, his pace quickened. The pain in his joints and muscles faded into background noise, like the hum of a fan. The surroundings alternated between dense forest, thick brush, and swampy lowlands. He took his bearings often from any high, exposed place he could find. The area showed no signs of human habitation. There were no abandoned campsites, no trash, and no old trails that weren’t made by animals. The skies remained vacant.

  He settled in to a rhythmic walking pace much like the paddling pace
he had found while canoeing. Walking through the brush was like paddling into a bow-on crosswind that fought progress with every stroke. Roots grabbed at the toes of his boots. Vines grabbed at his shins. Mosquitoes and blackflies hovered around his head and launched attacks onto whatever exposed skin he had left, whether it was previously bitten or not. Jake covered up what he could. He stuffed scraps of cloth from an old shirt under his cap to protect his neck and ears and walked with his mouth closed. Still, he constantly swatted the pests away from his nose and eyes. On the water, the breeze would have blown them back. In the thickets surrounding the lake, the air barely moved and the bugs never ceased their assaults.

  It was the distraction of the bugs that allowed him to approach the bear so closely without noticing. The wind, what there was of it deep in the woods, was blowing in the wrong direction for them to smell each other, and Jake missed the telltale snuffs from the bear as it blew the marauding mosquitoes from its own nose while it ambled through the bush.

  They were ten meters apart when they finally detected one another. Jake froze, as did the bear. In deep shadow, its black fur had rendered it nearly invisible. A small patch of tan tipped its nose. Jake guessed its weight at a hundred kilos easily, perhaps a hundred and fifty. A slick of dew clung to its fur. Blackflies buzzed around its head. The bear flipped its ears in an instinctual rhythm. It uttered a rumbling growl and sniffed the air. Jake’s lungs locked tight. He stole glances to the sides to see if there were cubs about.

  “Whoa, big fella.” His finger moved slightly toward the safety on the gun. A round sat ready in the chamber, but this was a single-shot gun. If he fired and missed, or if he only wounded the bear and then it attacked, he would have no time to crank the bolt for the next round. The .308 was a deer killer. It could kill a bear with a good shot. He had done just that the previous winter. Back then, he had the safety of a backup shooter in Amos, the distance to allow time to reload, and the time to aim a shot at a bear completely unaware of their presence. At that moment, he wanted the Colt handgun. A bigger caliber. A bigger punch. An automatic reload. But it was zipped deep inside his bag.