Resurrection Pass

by Kurt Anderson

  “Then what?” Warren asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I lose my scout,” Warren said, “how do we get out of these woods?”

  “Once you reach the campsite, you’ll have the satellite phone, right? Call in for help. Jaimie might still be out there, and there’s two bodies we need to extract. You have plenty of people you could call. An entire government.” He paused, catching Warren’s eye. “Two governments you could call, maybe.”

  Warren shook his head, not taking the bait. “What if we have to move faster than that? Maybe it follows us up there, and we have to run. We could wander around for forty years in these godforsaken woods.”

  Jake glanced up at the sun, arcing over the trees. “This time of year, the sun rises in the southeast, not the east. It sets in the southwest, not due west. You understand?”

  Warren nodded and pointed at the sun, still low in the sky, partially obscured by a bank of gold-colored cirrus clouds. “Southeast.”

  “Head south by southwest.” Jake held his hand out on an imaginary straight line, then moved it forty-five degrees to the right. “You might not come out at the same place we went in. You almost certainly won’t, actually. But if you keep on a southwest line, you’ll hit the Little Glutton River, somewhere near the Braids. It’s where the river splits up into a dozen channels, and the floodplain is covered with willows. Don’t cross it—it’s all sand and silt, and the river is going to be high with all of this rain. Turn left, follow the river down until you reach a gravel road. Take another left, and you’ll find your van at the Gissammee trailhead. You’ll be on the road for ten miles. Someone may come along and give you a ride.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Follow the setting sun. Once you reach the river you’ll be fine.”

  “Quit it,” Rachel said. “We’re not going to leave you to die out there.”

  Jake eyed the route up the side of the valley. He could see the path he would take, more or less. It was mostly rocks for the first fifty yards, then the long flat stretch he would need to sprint across. Then, where the slope curved upward into the ancient cut of the river bottom, the going would be slower; he would have to pick his way through the saplings, and hope that he had left the underground presence behind him, or that it was too slow to follow him. He flexed his legs. His hips and knees ached with pain gnawing at his joints, sending shoots of pain down the lengths of his femurs, his tibias, all the way into the metatarsals. But he could still move, goddammit. Better than most.

  “Jake?” Rachel said again.

  “What?”

  “We aren’t going to leave you out there.”

  “I’ll be okay. If, if, I get stuck, it’ll probably be too late to do anything about it. Find a way out, find a way through. Don’t . . .” he paused, unsure what to say, unsure what words had almost come out of his mouth. An image arose in his mind of those long green walls, the fluorescent lighting, the nurses and doctors and interns and sometimes visitors—not many visitors. He remembered the sound of his footsteps on the linoleum, everything restricted to a narrow band on the color spectrum. Even the light through the windows in the room was bland, bland on the brightest summer day, the beep of the machine, the damn machine, the tubes and sensors and . . . no. Stop there. Stop before you let your eyes travel down the tubes and the sensors, down to Deserae.

  He touched Rachel’s arm with the tips of his fingers. “Don’t waste your life on me.”

  He jumped down onto the spray of loose rocks at the base of the pad, his hand pressed against his knife, and started running toward the top.

  Chapter 9

  They moved like a pack of wolves, the pace somewhere just south of a trot, spread out in a rough line in the aspen forest. Henry was by far the oldest man, sixty-three that past spring, still fit and light on his feet but definitely the anchor, the one who held the rest of them back from an even quicker pace. He was in the center of the line, and the wings moved forward ahead of him, Henry at the point of the inverted V. It was late afternoon, and they had been moving at this pace for most of the day. Henry knew that they were pushing him, as he would have pushed them fifteen years ago, and felt the bright, hard edge of hatred and envy of their youth, their pushiness, fueling his legs.

  He hated Garney the least, because he was the heaviest and the slowest of the younger men. Although they might leave Henry to pick his way through the woods and catch up with them at nightfall, Darius would not leave two men behind. Two men could form a temporary bond when left behind, forming a group within the group. And two men could, if they were so inclined, find a kindred soul, swell their ranks to include a third: a majority. Those were the kinds of situations Darius would avoid in his own team, exploit in others.

  Don’t give him too much credit, Henry thought, arming sweat off his brow as he plodded onward. He’s tired, too.

  He could see Darius out on the far-left wing, wending his way through the big white trunks of the aspens. He seemed tired but not exhausted, which was how Henry was starting to assess his own condition. Garney was positioned between them, his shirt completely soaked with sweat. To Henry’s right, Weasel slipped through the woods, a thin and ugly little man who Henry distrusted more than anyone besides Darius, and maybe more than Darius. On the right edge was Billy, effortless as he moved through the aspen and hazel brush. Billy was a relation, a nephew once removed, the son of Woolsy Martineau. Woolsy had died in a snowbank outside his cabin in his thirty-second year, when Billy was just a pup. He had stashed a bottle of whiskey outside, to hide it from Tammy, Billy’s mother, and after an argument he had slammed the door shut behind him, gone outside, and drank half the bottle in one long, furious pull. It had been twenty-five degrees below zero that night, and the whiskey the same temperature. His esophagus had frozen instantly and he went into cardiac arrest, clutching the bottle as he died, ten feet from his angry wife and the two-year-old son who slept in his homemade bed.

  They were all armed, and Henry was no exception. He carried his Winchester Model 94 30-30 caliber in a leather sling on his back, and in the bottom of his waxed canvas backpack he had a small Walther .38 caliber semiautomatic, the bullets in the factory box wrapped inside an old cotton shirt. The shirt was in turn sealed inside two plastic baggies. He had a knife and a hatchet and his mess kit and a bedroll, and nothing in his pack or on his person made any noise at all. Except for his breath, which was turning into a pant.

  Garney, despite Darius’s objections, was armed only with his Mathews compound bow, the six carbon arrows with expandable broadheads secured in the hunting quiver attached to the bow’s frame. Weasel and Billy were armed with moose hunting rifles, and Henry knew what that could do to a man, had seen it once on a hunt near the Burned Lakes, a strange country where wildfire had scorched the thin earth atop the bedrock decades ago. The fire had moved through the region hot and fast, and many of the pines still stood, baked into statues, the branches burned to stubs, the trunks sooty and hard. The soil had been burned so thoroughly that nothing could grow, not trees nor shrubs nor even the ubiquitous purple fireweed. The moose loved it because there was a certain type of grass that flourished along the water’s edge, where the fire had not touched. Henry’s group had gone in after the tracks of a young bull, lost it on the burned and flinty ground, and split up. Late that evening, one of Henry’s hunting partners had mistaken his other friend for a moose and shot him as he moved through the black trees. The hole was the size of a dime going in, and on the far side there was no hole, just the absent half of a rib cage, the shattered ribs curving around the pink mass of jellied lungs. They left the man there, cooling among the blackened pines, and reported him lost in the great wilderness, and there was no search party and they never hunted there again.

  Now Henry wished they were headed to the haunted landscape of the Burned Lakes, or to the great unnamed morass of swamp downstream, anywhere but their current destination. Its name came through his mind and he was tempted to mouth it, to feel
it on his lips. He had been there before, and Darius had used the previous trip as the basis for his request for Henry to accompany them. Henry had agreed because there was something in Darius’s dark brown eyes, a hint of fear. The fear had intrigued Henry. Darius’s men were the Okitchawa, yesterday’s warriors, and they fancied themselves sacred protectors of the wilderness. Or some damn thing. They did have a tendency to make visitors feel unwelcome, that much was true. Perhaps the other things they had claimed (or that other people had claimed of them) were true as well. They were hard men, and Henry counted himself amongst that classification and yet he disliked them and distanced himself from them, not only because of their youth but because of their inability to reason, to see the larger picture. They were still caught in the youthful daydream that they knew enough, within a day or two, about every situation to be able to take immediate and just action. They saw Henry and the others around Highbanks as listless observers, timid and powerless to stop the trespasses, whether it was the constant intrusions of the loggers from the Crown or hunters from the States. More recently it had been an increased focus on what was below the ground, with more planes overhead and more surveyors in the woods every year.

  The Okitchawa, and Darius in particular, were adamant that their ancestors would never have allowed these encroachments, that they would have protected the resources of the land for their people at all costs. So they took the role of protectors upon themselves, and if they got scent of an outsider, they followed the trail to its bloody end. Must have got lost in the woods was the explanation most people gave for the missing outsiders, and they remained truly lost. No bodies had been recovered, even after several massive manhunts.

  “This place gives us life,” Darius had said, speaking at the First Dance ceremony the year before, right after several surveyors had disappeared into the green, yawning maw of the wilderness. “If we don’t keep it clean, if we don’t remember the sacrifices of the old ones, we pollute our own souls.” He said nothing else, and he didn’t have to.

  The Okitchawa were right, in a way, Henry supposed. But life was different now, and just because there had been old ways of doing things didn’t mean they were the right ways.

  So why come here? he asked himself. He did not like the encroachments either, but he felt no desire to spill blood.

  And the answer came to him, in a single word:

  Asiskiwiw. A fearful place, to be sure. But also a place where someone like himself might find the connection he had sought for so long, something that had nothing to do with resources, or intruders. It was, he supposed, a pilgrimage.

  He came to a stop, readjusting his rifle strap. On either side of him the other men were paused, sucking in the midmorning breeze on the top of a rise. Garney had his head back, hands on his wide hips, little rolls bunched up at the base of his neck. Weasel hacked and coughed and lit a cigarette, pausing first to rip the filter from the end. Darius, on the left, breathed more easily, as did Billy on the right. Henry felt his calf muscles bunching and tightening, the electrical quiver of muscles used far beyond their normal range. He pulled the leather bota from his pack and drank deeply of the lukewarm water, squirting it down the back of his throat.

  “Better save your water, old man,” Garney said.

  Henry pulled the bota back, letting the water wash over his face. He shook himself to clear his eyes and then turned to Garney. “Braids are at the bottom of the hill. You can refill there.”

  Garney peered downward, where the more open aspen forest gave way to a tangled mass of alder brush, purple-skinned branches with dark green leaves. “I don’t see anything.”

  “There are none so blind,” Henry said, “as those who will not listen.”

  “Huh?”

  “Ears,” Henry said, tapping the side of his head. “Quit panting so much and listen.”

  Below them came the burbling sound of running water. They began picking their way through the alders. The mosquitoes were thick, but did not form the constant swarms of June or July; they were beginning to die off. Everywhere around him Henry saw the signs of autumn, the yellowing patches of big leaf aster on the forest floor, the fading of the alder leaves. He could even smell it in the air, the slow funk of a season’s decay bubbling up around his boots. It was his least favorite time of the year, the transition between the richness of the summer and the cool, clear days of autumn.

  They converged, funneling into a single line along the lone game trail, and emerged from the thicket. The river in front of them was big and fast and complex. Swollen by the summer rains, it had carved a dozen paths through the silty river bottom, some of them little more than rivulets, others faster and deeper. Willows had sprouted on the numerous islands, thickly clumped, none taller than a man. Henry looked upstream, then downstream. The braided river channels twined and connected and diverged as far as the eye could see, the brown water carving into the edges of the silt. There would be other places to cross, Henry knew, but it would mean traversing an immense swamp on both sides of the river.

  Weasel hawked a glob of phlegm into the running water at their feet and watched it speed downstream. “How we getting through this shit?”

  “One step at a time,” Darius said. He was scanning the horizon on the far side of the river, the skyline featureless except for trees and a few lower clouds. “Check your backpacks, fill your skins. We’ll wipe the guns down when we get across.”

  “How deep is it?” Billy asked. He was looking at the turbid water, which gave no indication of what lay beneath the surface.

  “Dunno.” Henry pulled a coil of rope from his pack and spread the loops out with his fingers, looking for kinks. “The Braids change every year.”

  “I don’t swim too good.” Billy was still studying the river, chewing on his lower lip, sweat running down the sides of his face.

  Henry grunted. He had known the Martineaus for decades and he had known Billy for all his life, had seen his name appear on the honor rolls, disappearing from those thinly-populated ranks between his sophomore and junior year of high school, only to return on the A honor roll his senior year. Henry had been in the audience when Billy had delivered a halting but powerful salutatorian address, had been there to wish him farewell when he drove off to Regina to play football and study economics, or perhaps engineering. That Billy had been bright and committed and often unsure of himself, and Henry had liked him quite a lot. This new Billy, the one who had fallen in with the Okitchawa, the one who smiled all the time and seemed to have no cares in the world, the slick one, the cool Billy, Billy-Dawg, disgusted Henry. It was as though Billy had decided if he couldn’t be a college boy he was going to be a thug, no middle ground. Leave all those good and justifiable worries behind him, be confident in what he had and where he was going. Like all the damned rest of them.

  “What are you thinking about?” Billy asked.

  “People,” Henry replied, tying the end of the rope into a loop and passing the length back through it to form a noose. “People who worry about the wrong things.”

  “People?” Garney said. “You should be thinking about how we get across this river, old man.”

  Let me guess, Henry thought. You don’t swim too good, neither.

  “Here’s the deal,” Henry said, noticing that he had their full attention, even Weasel’s. “Everybody needs a wading stick. Try to get one with a fork on the bottom. It’ll keep it from slipping on any rocks below the surface. Then I’m going to give one end of the rope to Garney, tie the other end onto my waist, and go to that island.” He pointed to a long crescent-shaped pile of silt on the far side of one of the main channels, covered with willows. “We’ll avoid the smaller islands, the ones without bushes. They’re liable to break apart if we climb on them, turn into quicksand. Understand?”

  Four impassive sets of brown eyes looked back at him. Henry went on. “Once I make it across, the next guy—Weasel, he’s the smallest—follows, holding on to the rope. He helps me hold the rope while the next guy goe
s across. We work smallest to largest in case somebody gets swept away. If you slip, or start going under, just hold on to the rope. We’ll pull you in.”

  “That the plan?” Garney asked. “What about the next guy, the one after the idiot that just got swept downstream? He goes across without a rope?”

  “Yes,” Darius replied. “Just like Henry is planning to do, except he doesn’t whine about it.” He fixed Garney with his gaze. “Go cut your stick.”

  Garney mumbled something and turned away. Darius called out to him and Garney turned around, his knife in his hand.

  “Cut one for me and Henry while you’re at it.” He held Garney with his gaze. “You have a problem with that?”

  Garney turned away without comment, and a moment later the air was filled with dull thuds as they hacked at the small birch trees that lined the river. Darius watched them for a bit, then turned back to Henry, looking at him through those low-hanging eyelids, the look of a boxer who had been hit too much.

  “Elsie said you should come with us. Your old girlfriend. Did you know that?”

  Henry shrugged. Elsie had been almost fifty years old, quite a bit older than Henry, when they had dated. Still, she was accommodating to almost any favor he requested, as long as he repaid her in turn. It was not long after they went their different ways that she had shacked up with some trapper for a couple winters and, if rumor was true, suffered a series of miscarriages that had turned her from a middle-aged woman into her current state in a few short years. Yet she had not changed much since then; it was as though she had taken her next thirty years of aging in one big swallow.

  “Elsie told me,” Darius said, “you went into this forest once, looking for a vision.”