After a while, the cold began to get to Charles, and he decided to stop to make a fire. He cleared a small circle in the snow at the base of a large rock, then went off in search of branches and birchbark. Ten minutes later he was back with an armload of fuel, after a foray that had proved more arduous than he’d expected. Crouched beside the rock, Boff was shivering pitifully, raising one paw then another off the ground. Looking at him, Charles was suddenly filled with a vague feeling of misgiving.
“Are you freezing, old boy? We’ll soon have you warmed up. Watch this.”
He bent over and set the branches on the snow, then made a small pyramid of some of them, poking bits of birchbark and dry pine needles into the spaces between the sticks. Boff watched him with interest, as though he had guessed that this little pile of twigs would soon put an end to his shivering.
The wind blew out the first three matches. The fourth, however, sheltered from the wind by a strip of birchbark, finally passed its flame on to a spray of pine needles. An angry crackling ensued. Charles quickly fed more birch-bark to it, then gave a cry of satisfaction: the fire was catching. After a few minutes it was leaping joyously up the rock, melting the bits of snow that had clung to its flanks and causing them to slide down to the ground.
Boff’s eyes half closed in contentment. He snuggled so close to the flames that he risked scorching his coat. Charles kneeled beside him, rubbing his hands together above the fire and whistling happily. From time to time he added more wood, and soon his supply dwindled and he went off to fetch a second armful. The fire leapt merrily, and was now surrounded by a circle of damp earth from which rose thin wisps of steam. It became so hot that Boff was obliged to back away from it.
Snowflakes began to fill the air, as though summoned to take part in the celebration. They swarmed in a delicate, capricious sort of dance: “Aha,” Charles thought, “the snow they were calling for tomorrow has come early.”
Looking up, he could just glimpse of the sky through the trees. It had turned from its former deep blue to a uniform grey. It was closing in on four o’clock. The sun was about to set. Even though they were only a kilometre or two from the cottage, they had better be getting back. But Boff seemed to be taking so much pleasure in roasting his flanks that Charles went off for another armload of wood.
When he came back fifteen minutes later, drawn by his dog’s barking, the fire was nearly out, and Charles sensed something akin to menace in the air, thickened as it was by the falling blanket of snow. It was time to leave. It would soon be dark.
“Wouldn’t you know it,” Charles sighed. “There was a flashlight in the drawer beside the kitchen sink. What an idiot I am — I should have brought it.”
So as not to have wasted his effort, he tossed his fresh supply of wood onto the dying fire, thinking it would snuff it out completely. Instead, the branches exploded into flame and light and, for a second, gave the impression that the weather had cleared and daylight had returned to the woods. Boff, heartened, wagged his tail. With darkness increasing and the cold becoming more and more biting, they were reluctant to leave the fire. If only they could keep it going all night! Wouldn’t that make a good story to tell when they got home, the winter night they spent in the impenetrable forest!
“Okay, Boff, let’s make tracks. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting hungry.”
Despite the cover provided by the trees, the snow was falling more thickly than ever. Charles had to give his entire attention to retracing their footprints.
From time to time he turned around to keep an eye on Boff. Chilled to the bone, the dog was picking his way painfully through the snow, and was slowing him down. Charles called encouragement in his most enthusiastic voice, but he was beginning to be fearful now, and his voice faltered. It was stupid to feel afraid, irrational, but fear was making his temples pound and his body sweat, despite the cold.
He plowed on for twenty minutes, bent over, snapping off branches as he went, stopping frequently to give his dog a chance to catch up, then was surprised to find that he had still not made it back to the clear-cut. Standing still, his eyes wide and straining in the near pitch darkness, he looked around and realized with alarm that his old footprints had disappeared. The new snowfall hadn’t had time to fill them in. It was he who had taken a wrong turning somewhere, no doubt had turned around in the darkness, mistaking humps in the snow for his own tracks and heading off in the wrong direction.
He was lost.
In the middle of the forest. In the middle of winter.
He stood stock still, frozen by awareness of his predicament. He slid his hands into his coat pockets and sighed deeply, his eyes half closed against the onslaught of falling snow.
A brush against his leg brought him back to reality. He leaned down over his dog, hoisted him up on his lap, and began to rub him. It was pitiful to see the poor animal shivering so much.
The blind confidence and endless patience Boff had had in him throughout this ill-fated excursion calmed Charles’s fears somewhat. After all, he only had to trace his footprints back to the place where he had deviated from his earlier tracks, and all would be well again. It couldn’t be very far. Before they knew it they would be back on the logging road, and twenty minutes after that they’d be in the cottage, this whole episode relegated to an unpleasant memory.
He set the dog down and began to walk, his gaze fixed on the ground at his feet. He was trudging through a stand of deciduous trees, their naked branches providing little relief from the wind and snow, which was now accumulating in huge drifts. He thought again of the flashlight he had neglected to bring, and self-recrimination tightened his jaw muscles.
Twenty minutes went by. He had to admit to himself what was clearly the truth of the situation: he couldn’t see a thing. He peered into the darkness, looking for a rock in whose shelter he could light another fire. That was the only way they would survive until daylight. He suddenly became aware of the fact that Boff, squatting in front of him, was making a strange noise as he breathed, a sound he had never heard coming from his dog before.
He leaned down, took off his glove, and pressed his hand against Boff’s side. It felt as cold as ice, and yet the dog was shivering wildly.
Boff was close to dying of exposure.
“Stay,” he said, his voice firm, almost cruel. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move, do you understand?”
Almost immediately he found himself in a kind of enclosure formed by two huge rocks; by some miracle, it was filled with piles of old branches that, when the snow was shaken off them, were dry enough to be perfect for lighting a fire.
He ran back to his dog, who was waiting for him without moving. Charles picked him up and carried him to the shelter. He was working frantically now, heedless of the branches scratching at his face and guided solely by the snow’s faint lustre, which was greatly reduced by the storm. In a few minutes he had cleared a space in the enclosure, shaken off the branches, broken some into short lengths, and made a second teepee of them close to where Boff was lying, immobile and silent.
The wind blew out the first match. Despite Charles’s care, it also extinguished the second one. He had only one match left.
It, too, went out in his fingers before he could get it to the strip of birchbark.
Devastated, he sat on the ground, his back against the rock, his dog pressed against his side, fear’s icy fingers once again clutching at his heart. He hugged his dog to him as much to protect himself from an invisible foe as to keep his companion from the cold.
He remembered a short story by Jack London, about a trapper in the Yukon who froze to death because he’d been unable to light a fire. Admittedly, there was a huge difference between the implacable cold of the Yukon and the kind of winters they had in Quebec. Here the storm was bound to end before long. Still, he knew that even in the forests of Quebec people died of hunger or exhaustion. Without a fire, without shelter, they could get hypothermia, their clothing too light to protect them from the el
ements.
But for the moment, despite his frozen buttocks and the shivers running up his spine, he didn’t think his life was in danger. He couldn’t say the same for old Boff, though, who was breathing and shivering in his arms but was otherwise still, as though he no longer had enough strength to move a muscle.
If he did nothing, this rocky enclosure would be his dog’s final resting place.
He took the compass out of his backpack, lifted the cover, and, squinting in the darkness, observed the needle dance until it settled pointing north, as it eventually always did. Good, so now what? A compass was no doubt a very handy instrument to have in the bush, but unless you knew how to use it, it was about as useful as an electric frying pan.
He spent a few moments entertaining such dark thoughts. Then he remembered something he’d heard a long time before, when there had been talk about a hunter who had died in the forest a few dozen metres from a road. How he got lost was from getting turned around, which is what always happens to these poor lost souls. If he’d walked in a straight line, he’d have been saved.
With the compass he could at least figure out how to walk in a straight line.
There was, however, one major problem. His dog was completely exhausted. Poor Boff would sink down into the snow after a couple of hundred metres, never to get up again, ever.
Then he had an idea. Taking his backpack, he put Boff in it so that only the top half of his body was sticking out. Then he slipped the straps over his shoulders and took a few exploratory steps.
The dog was heavy and the walking difficult, but he managed to make some headway. He set out farther, guided by his compass, stopping every so often to check his bearings. The storm had begun to let up a little, and he had the impression that his visibility had improved slightly, as though the snow were giving off a soft luminescence.
He once again found himself on a long incline where the scattered trees made the walking somewhat easier. The straps of his pack were digging cruelly into his shoulders and sweat began to run down into his eyes. Boff gave out an occasional whimper, since his cramped position was causing him pain, but he remained immobile, as though he knew that the heroic efforts of his master were meant to save his life.
At the top of the incline, Charles stopped and leaned against a tree to catch his breath. The whole of the steep downhill slope ahead of him appeared to be nothing but shadow and confusion, an interlacing of branches and tree trunks and low brush laden with a white mantle of snow. He could no longer feel the toes on his right foot. And a terrifying, unthinkable idea began to torture him: what if, by heading due north, he was disappearing forever into these frozen wastes?
The snow had stopped falling, and in the suddenly clear sky he could see the moon, a pale crescent that only slightly alleviated the darkness. Suddenly, Charles gave a start: somewhere ahead of and below him he had heard the feeble buzz of a snowmobile. He listened for a moment, his head turned sideways towards the sound, which seemed to be coming closer. It was the sweetest music he had ever heard in his life.
He began to shout at the top of his lungs, and dashed down the slope at full speed, caution thrown to the wind, dropping his compass, swerving at the last second to avoid crashing into a tree, and finally falling over onto his side with a cry of pain, his foot jammed into a crevice in the earth. Boff rolled a few yards and lay inert in the snow while Charles writhed and groaned. After a moment, the dog slowly rose and dragged himself over to his master. With a valiant effort, Charles managed to stand up and then tried to free his boot from the earth’s hold, but without success. He sat back down with his knees pulled up and wiped the snow from his foot with his gloved hand; his heel was caught in the vice-like grip of an exposed root that had risen up out of the ground like the jaws of a trap. The more his heel swelled, the tighter he was held. He pulled again on his foot. Pain shot up his leg and encircled his heart. He would have to cut the damned root or die where he was. But he had neither axe nor knife.
He began to cry, overwhelmed by his predicament. Fate seemed to have decided that this excursion of his would be fatal, and that both he and his dog would die out here in the woods — where help seemed so close at hand!
He heard a moaning sound and turned his head. Boff was staring at him, standing on trembling legs, his breath coming in greater and greater gasps, and Charles could discern such distress in the dog’s eyes, such helpless compassion, that it made him cry all the harder. From time to time he would hold his breath and listen, but he could no longer hear the snowmobile. They were well and truly done for. There was nothing he could do now but lean back against a tree, with his dog on his lap, and wait for death as calmly as possible, like the heroes in Jack London’s novels. The cold would slowly numb his pain, making it bearable.
He thought of Céline, of Lucie and Fernand, the three beings who were dearest to him, and he tried to imagine their reaction to the news of his death. Then he wondered how Steve and Blonblon would take it. Would Steve cry at his funeral? Blonblon was so sensitive, he had no doubt about him. And what about Céline? After a long period of mourning, whom would she find eventually? Would she gradually forget him? Probably. Forgetfulness consumes everything, despite all our fancy phrases, all our photo albums and our granite monuments.
All at once he was seized by a renewed bout of fear, a horrible blade that sliced through his entrails and made him squirm and strain like a condemned man in an electric chair. He strained with all his might on his left leg, trying to free his right foot, and kept at it until he collapsed with exhaustion. There was nothing he could do. He was caught like a rat.
Boff gave a short bark. Charles looked at him wild-eyed, in such a state of confusion that he felt he’d been plunged into a nightmare, then he leaned back again against the tree.
And then suddenly everything became clear in his mind.
“That’s it, Boff!” he shouted, grabbing the dog. “Chew on the root! Chew it! Chew it up into a thousand pieces! Try not to get my foot, though! That’s it, boy!”
The dog threw himself into the task in a fit of rage. Where had he found the strength? Bits of wood flew everywhere. Charles laughed nervously, patted Boff’s back, and started crying again.
Within minutes his foot was free of its trap and he was able to stand up, albeit painfully He had to stop Boff from continuing his destructive attack, so invaded was the dog by his incredibly youthful ardour. Charles thought that if he could find a broken branch to use as a crutch, he might be able to walk, but there would be no question of his being able to carry the dog. He saw a suitable branch a few feet away, half-buried in snow, and he crawled towards it on his knees. The violent effort of breaking it from its tree made him turn his head slightly to the left, and he let out a cry.
A ray of moonlight was falling on some kind of metallic surface, somewhat downhill from him. He could see it glimmering between the trunks of the trees. The metallic surface was a roof! There was a house immediately below, perhaps people as well! He was saved.
“Come on, Boff! Let’s go, let’s go get warm! Hell’s bells, hell’s bells, but do I feel good! Oh, boy!”
Ten minutes later they were standing before a small cabin with an aluminum roof and walls of large, round logs, greyed by time. But there was no sign of anyone, either within the cabin or anywhere outside it.
“Anyone there?” Charles shouted, stumbling up onto the small, snow-covered porch that apparently hadn’t been cleared since the beginning of the season.
He turned around. “Come on, Boff! Get up here. Our ordeal is over!”
The dog moved so slowly that Charles went down to pick him up, worried. Saving his master seemed to have used up his final reserves of strength.
“Listen, boy. Don’t give up now, just when we’re out of danger. Ten more minutes and we’ll be as warm as toast! Let’s go inside, boy!”
He painfully climbed the steps onto the porch, shook the door, then, with his fist, broke through a square of glass and unlocked it from the inside
. Boff waited at the bottom of the stairs. Charles had to drag him by the collar to get him into the cabin.
Once inside he felt surrounded by a delicious warmth, but realized it was only from the absence of wind. After a few minutes the contrast with the outside disappeared, and the sense of well-being was replaced by one of damp cold.
“Damn, they’ve shut off the electricity,” he muttered after trying a few switches.
He was standing in a small, modestly equipped kitchen. The sight of a wood-burning cookstove, decorated by ceramic squares in the ancient style, was comforting. He limped through each of the three rooms that constituted the cabin, and found some candles in one cupboard and a box of matches in a breadbox, and a pile of split cordwood in a shed attached to the back wall. Fifteen minutes later he had a fire raging in the stove, two candles were burning on the kitchen table, stuck in beer bottles, and he had repaired the broken window with a square of cardboard. The refrigerator was as empty as a moneylender’s heart, but Charles discovered a large bag of peanuts in the shell at the back of a closet, already partly eaten by mice, which nonetheless made a delicious meal. He still had some dogfood in his backpack, and he gave that to Boff, who refused to eat it. Boff was still shivering violently, curled up in a corner and lying still and miserable, his breath coming in sharp whistles. Charles became more and more concerned, and wrapped him in a woollen blanket, lifted him onto the table, and dragged the table closer to the stove.
But the poor dog continued to shiver.
When the cabin was completely warmed up and three flies had awakened from their dormancy by this inexplicable summer and were flying from room to room in the grip of a strange confusion, Charles took off his clothes and crawled into a sleeping bag with his dog. Despite the pain shooting from his ankle, he fell asleep holding Boff in his arms, as he had once held Simon the Polar Bear when he was a small boy.
When he awoke early the next morning, the cabin was cold again. Boff, pressed against his chest, was looking at him with an attentive and, one would think, benevolent eye. But he was no longer breathing.
A Very Bold Leap Page 24