by Will Hobbs
“The Royal Canadian Air Force and the bush pilots.”
“How much do they search?”
“A lot. Tomorrow we can get a real smoky signal fire going.”
“Do we have any food?”
“I didn’t have time to look. Let’s go find out.”
“Man, it’s getting cold,” I said. “This must be the arctic air that Clint was talking about.” I stumbled on a root and went down hard. I picked myself back up. “I can’t believe this happened,” I mumbled, catching up. “We’re in a world of trouble, Raymond.”
“You got that right.”
8
THE OLD MAN ALREADY had a fire going. It brought us in like a beacon. We huddled close, absorbing the heat. I kept picturing the airplane breaking up, Clint disappearing in the whitewater. Then I was back on the float, paddling as hard as I could but never getting any closer to the shore. My mind wouldn’t let go of the pictures.
The old man was sawing firewood with a folding bow saw. It seemed odd how unhurriedly he was working, just as if he was on a camp-out. Back from the fire, ten feet or so, he’d already built a lean-to of spruce boughs floored with a deep layer of boughs and tips.
“Don’t get the front of your boots too close to the fire,” Raymond warned.
I took a step back.
“It’s a good thing he’s with us,” Raymond said.
“Who?” I asked, still in a daze.
“Him,” Raymond said, pointing with his face toward the old man. “Those old guys like him…”
“What’s his name?”
“Johnny Raven.”
Hearing his name, the old man looked up. He’d set the bow saw aside and was digging through one of the waterproof army boxes. He fished out some tea bags and handed Raymond a big aluminum pot that had a second one nested inside, motioning with the pots toward the river. “He wants me to get some water,” Raymond told me.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
The thunder from the falls grew louder as we came over a little rise. I said, “I still can’t believe this really happened.”
“Me either. It’s bad.”
We were approaching the river. The whitewater sounded close. Suddenly Raymond’s flashlight beam fell on the freshly broken roots of the spruce tree Clint had tied to. Raymond said, “He should never have flown us way back up here. He’d still be alive if he’d done what he was supposed to do—just taken us home.”
“I know,” I agreed. “He was like a little kid, all excited about flying. I think he was a good pilot; he just had bad luck. It wasn’t really his fault about the engine quitting.”
“Could’ve been it was his fault, the way it conked out. Who knows? And what about the radio? He shouldn’t have kept going. People always say about the bush pilots, Bad luck can happen to anyone, but you can’t afford to make stupid mistakes.”
Raymond took the aluminum pots apart to get the water. “Here,” I said, “Let me hold the light.” I flashed it along the shore. The ice had grown considerably in the last few hours. “Man, it’s cold,” I said.
“Tell me about it.”
“Let me give you a hand so you don’t slip. Careful…”
My mind kept racing. “If the Mayday didn’t get through,” I said, thinking aloud, “and the emergency transmitter got wrecked…What I’m trying to figure out is, where are they going to be searching for us?”
“Along the Liard River, where we were supposed to be.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“I know.”
Raymond was way ahead of me, I realized. “How much food could there be in those metal boxes?”
“Not much, I guess.”
We brought the water back to the old man, and he brewed tea. It felt good to get something hot inside our bodies. The old man had fished out the sleeping bags for us and wrapped himself in the red wool blanket. He looked calm in the light of the fire. I felt anything but calm.
Raymond was looking into one of the metal boxes with the flashlight. “Any food in there?” I asked.
“Some,” he said. “A sack of flour, a can of baking powder, a box of salt—we can make bannock. Big bag of beans, about five macaroni-and-cheese dinners, some boxes of dried fruit.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Now Raymond was going through his duffel bag and pulling out clothes, laying them on a blue vinyl tarp he’d pulled out of the second army box. His three pairs of gym shoes looked as out of place as his electric guitar and the hockey stick propped up against the tree behind him. “Lucky I have all these clothes with me,” he said, as he unlaced his boots and stepped onto the tarp, quickly stripping down to bare flesh and reaching for his thermal underwear. “What do you have in your daypack?”
“A couple of changes of underwear, some heavy winter socks, a wool scarf, my big mittens. I’m wearing my thermals, a heavy wool shirt, and I’ve got these heavy wool trousers.”
“Not enough,” he said, and handed me a sweater, then another one to the old man. “I got two more pairs of trousers, one for you and one for me.”
“You mean wear two pairs at the same time?”
“That’s what he’s doing already,” Raymond said, nodding toward his great-uncle.
“What about his feet in those moccasins?”
“Those big moosehide moccasins work as long as they’re dry. Those old guys like him are tough.”
“What about your boots? They don’t look as good as mine.”
“Good enough,” Raymond said. “They’re new, too. My dad got ’em for me when he took me to Yellowknife.” Raymond took a turquoise ski headband out of the pocket of his parka and handed it to the old man, who didn’t seem to have a cap. The old man said something in his language and pulled the headband over his ears. He didn’t look tough to me. He looked frail.
Raymond and I crawled into the shelter with our sleeping bags and started arranging them on the spruce boughs. The old man was still sitting by the fire, wrapped in the blanket. Raymond said, “Sleep in everything you got on; you’re going to need it.”
“In Scouts,” I said, “when I was a kid…they told us it was warmer to sleep nude inside your sleeping bag.”
“Ha! I wish I could tell that to Johnny! He’d think that was pretty funny. Want to try it tonight?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I think I’ll take your advice. All I’m taking off is my boots.”
Within two minutes there was a little whistle in Raymond’s breath. He was already asleep. I bent double against the cold and watched the full moon rise over the mountains through a break in the clouds. I was shivering, more from fear, I think, than from the cold. The adrenaline was still pumping panic through my veins. Try to be brave, I told myself. This is when it really counts. I could hear my mother telling me how strong I was, how tough. She always said that. I didn’t feel strong at all. I felt more like crying.
A branch was sticking me in the side. I tossed and turned, realizing how hungry I was. Tomorrow we’d eat something. Not much, that’s for sure. I wasn’t going to mention food again. And no more complaining about the cold, I told myself. That’s not going to make it any warmer. No matter what happens now, at least I’m not alone. I have Raymond and that old man Johnny Raven. I drifted off thinking about my father. By now he knows we’re missing. He’ll make sure they keep searching until they find us.
I woke in the dim twilight of morning to a crackling sound. I didn’t know where I was. All I could see was Raymond’s black hair sticking out of the zippered top of his sleeping bag. I smelled the pitchy scent of spruce trees. Then it all came back, what had happened and where we were. The crackling sound was the sound of the campfire. And now I saw that three inches of snow as fine as salt had fallen during the night. It was bitter cold. I heard the background roar of the falls and remembered Clint and all that talk about the hammer. Well, I thought, the hammer’s down now, no question about it. I looked at my watch. It was just before 8:00 A.M.
, and the date said it was the first day of November.
Raymond kept sleeping. I joined the old man at the campfire. He acknowledged me with a nod of his head and a gentle smile. The old Dene was still wrapped in the wool blanket. The years had worn his face with so many creases it looked like a map of all the rivers and streams in the North. With a twist of his lips, he pointed to a bannock he’d evidently just taken out of the frying pan. He’d set it aside to cool on his woodpile, and it was still giving off heat. The old man got up and tore off a big piece for me, taking a very small one for himself. I took off one mitten and accepted it from his hand. It was warm and delicious, the first food I’d eaten since our breakfast at Fort Simpson. “Good,” he said in English.
“Good is right,” I agreed. “The bread of the North. We had bannock at the boarding school. At first I thought it was a pan pizza without anything on it.”
I could see he liked it that I was talking to him even though he couldn’t understand much.
I slipped my mitten back on and walked over to the river. I stood there staring at the hole in the ground, looking again at the broken roots where the spruce had stood. From the hanging shelves of ice along the shore, I could tell that the river had dropped two or three feet overnight. The Nahanni looked so different from the day before that I was stunned. Today it was filled with hissing cakes of mush ice, and the sky was filled with gray clouds and snow. The snow was falling on the rocky slopes of Sunblood Mountain, which rose from its immense base along the opposite shore. I remembered the little thermometer attached to the parka’s zipper pull at my neck. I zipped it down far enough to read what it said. Twenty-two degrees below zero. The coldest I’d ever seen in my life was twenty-four above. They’d better find us soon, I thought.
When I returned to the fire, Raymond was there eating his bannock. I could see he wasn’t going to have much to say, and I didn’t blame him. The old man handed me a cup of hot tea. A half-dozen gray jays showed up out of nowhere and snatched the crumbs from around Raymond’s feet. “We call that bird ‘camprobber,’” he said.
“You should see the river this morning,” I said. “It’s full of ice.”
“Gonna freeze up now. November is winter. But I thought of something else about our chances for getting rescued.”
“What is it?”
“There’s a few hunting cabins along the Liard River. They call that part the Long Reach. People are still hunting moose down there now. Somebody could have seen our plane go away from the river, toward the mountains.”
“Now you’re talking,” I said.
“Then they wouldn’t spend all their time looking up and down the river. They’ll come looking in the mountains.”
“And maybe they’ll figure out we wanted to go see the falls! We’ll get a smoky fire going today, like you said. We’ll be out of here!”
The old man was making an inventory of all the emergency gear from the plane, laying everything out on the blue tarp for us to see. He was pleased with each and every item: a few pots and pans, a few utensils, two plastic water bottles, a sheath knife, a slim bone-handled knife Raymond said was a skinning knife, a folding camp shovel, a whetstone and file, the bow saw and two spare blades, the ax, and the useless rifle. Old Johnny Raven checked the rifle’s tubular magazine for shells and found it empty, pulled the bolt back and exposed the chamber, and was disappointed to find the chamber empty too.
Raymond was arranging a number of smaller items. He set out three packs of parachute cord a hundred feet long each, a first-aid kit, a compass, a sewing kit, a small fishing tackle box, a pencil and notepad, four candles, and a cigar box with two butane lighters and a box of kitchen matches inside.
There was one other item that Raymond had picked up and was turning over in his hands, trying to figure out what it was—a fluorescent-orange plastic case about four inches long. Raymond pulled it apart, and a white cube fell out onto the ground. A round metal dowel stuck out of the handgrip of the device, and a short flat bar stuck out of the cap piece. I glanced at the old man; he was keenly interested.
“I think it’s a fire starter,” Raymond said, scraping the flat striker against the metal dowel and producing a heavy shower of sparks, which greatly impressed the old man and both of us as well. Raymond showered the white cube with sparks. Nothing happened. Nine, ten times he tried, but nothing happened. “I guess it doesn’t work,” I said.
Old Johnny Raven took out his pocket knife and scraped the top of the cube a little. It had the consistency of soap. He made a few little shavings on the top surface of the cube, then set the cube back on the ground carefully so the shavings would stay in place.
This time Raymond’s first shower of sparks set the cube aflame. Johnny Raven’s eyes went wide and so did ours. The flame rose to a height of about five inches. The old man snatched up a handful of snow and smothered the flame, retrieved the cube, and set it on his palm admiringly. I borrowed the cube and took a sniff of it. “Some kind of petroleum product,” I reported to Raymond. The old man inserted the cube back into the case, which he snapped shut. Then he cut a length of parachute cord and hung the fire starter around Raymond’s neck. Raymond stuffed it inside his parka. “We’ll only use it if we have to,” he said.
As soon as our inventory was done, the old man had us pack everything up. Evidently he wanted us to leave this spot. It took quite a bit of doing for him to explain himself, since he had so few English words and Raymond had so few Slavey. Johnny Raven wanted us to move upriver. The day was gray, windy, and bitter cold, and we had a good fire going, so we didn’t get too excited about the idea. Finally, by acting out an elaborate pantomime, the old man made us understand that there was plenty of dead wood upstream for firewood and very little here. “I should’ve known that,” Raymond said. “I just didn’t think. Green spruce like we have here is hard to get to burn. You need a lot of dead wood to get it to burn at all. And we need to make a big fire, for the search planes.”
We lugged everything up to the new camp, on a rise above a small creek a couple hundred feet back from the Nahanni. The creek was almost completely frozen over. At the edge of a stand of dead timber Raymond and I started our signal fire. We built it up big and threw on a couple of rotten logs to make plenty of smoke.
We stood back and watched the smoke rise high in the sky. Raymond said, “We have to keep this fire burning good every day in case they’re looking anywhere near here.”
I said, “I keep thinking about what you said this morning…how somebody might have seen our plane turn away from the river, toward the mountains. I keep thinking, what if nobody saw that? Then what? They’ll just keep searching up and down the Liard, right? What’s it like along there? All forest, isn’t it?”
“That’s right—like you saw. Cottonwood trees along the river, spruce everywhere else.”
“Hard to see a plane in a thick forest like that, right? So they’ll keep searching over and over, thinking they’ll eventually find the plane hidden down in the trees somewhere.”
“I guess so.”
“Or they could think the plane must have gone down in the river, and that’s why they can’t find it. It could’ve sunk.”
Raymond shrugged.
“I’m just trying to think,” I said. “If they don’t show up soon, I guess we just have to hang on here until they widen the search and start looking way up in the mountains. I hope the weather back here doesn’t get too bad for flying.”
When we returned to the new campsite, the old man took the ax from us and quickly fashioned three long poles from skinny spruce trees, then lashed them together near their tops with a piece of parachute cord. Now he stood them up, making a tripod. Taking the folding camp shovel from one of the army boxes, he peeled a big piece of frozen moss from the ground and gestured that he’d like Raymond to produce a whole lot more of the same. Assembling the bow saw into its triangle shape, he showed me he wanted green spruce boughs and plenty of them. A few seconds later he was back to cutting more po
les.
“What are we making here?” I asked Raymond.
“I’ve never seen one before, but I’ve seen pictures. I think he’s building a brush teepee, like they used to live in during the winter in the old days when people lived out in the bush.”
“What do you usually sleep in when you’re out camping in the winter?”
He laughed. “I’ve slept outside in the winter two nights in my whole life, and one of ’em was last night. On my dad’s trapline he has tiny cabins all along the way. Once we got caught by a storm, and my dad had to build one of those lean-tos like Johnny made last night. But this brush teepee’s going to be a lot warmer. They lived in these. They built fires in them and everything.”
The day was already dimming. The actual daylight had come and gone so fast. This far north, I realized, winter days are going to be mostly twilight. We were all moving quickly, without a word being spoken. It wasn’t long before we were patching the brush teepee together over the bare spot Raymond had cleared. Into the forks of the tripod we placed all the poles the old man had cut, then laid on layers of moss and boughs. Johnny Raven wanted us to leave the very top open where the poles crossed. “That’s for the smoke to get out,” Raymond explained.
We chinked the shelter with moss as tight as we could, leaving an opening between two poles for a small entrance. Except for the fire ring in the middle of the shelter, we lined the floor with boughs and tips, three or four inches thick. It was already apparent that this night would be colder than the last. We used the rest of the twilight to make a small pile of split firewood and bring it inside.
The old man, in constant motion, went to the creek and chopped a hole in the ice for water. Gone was the sad expression I’d seen on his face at the floatdock at Yellowknife Bay. He seemed perfectly content.
We cooked up one of the macaroni-and-cheese dinners. I could’ve eaten ten times that much and a bucket of fried chicken besides. It was smoky in there; the smoke found its way directly up and out of the shelter only some of the time. Mostly we had to keep low, where the air was good. I ate lying down, propped on one elbow.