Far North

by Will Hobbs

  “A trapper?” Raymond muttered to his great-uncle, and the old man nodded his agreement.

  “You knew him?” Raymond asked. He pointed at the name, and then looked back to the old man. “You knew him?”

  Johnny was nodding vigorously.

  We returned to our campfire for the night. Raymond and I stayed up close to the fire as Johnny wrapped himself in his blanket, lay down, and slept. “At least we have a cabin to stay in now,” I said. “A cabin with a stove—we can stay warm. Do you think that plane will come back, take a look around here?”

  “We should get a signal fire going in case it does,” Raymond said. “Maybe build it here and use driftwood, so we can save the wood near the cabin for the stove.”

  “I just wish I hadn’t lost that meat. You’re pretty lucky to have me along, you know. You wouldn’t want this to be too easy.”

  With a grin, Raymond said, “If I ever do another raft trip, I think I’d want to have you with me. You’re pretty good on those oars.” He placed a big chunk of wood on the fire. “Johnny’ll get another moose,” he said confidently.

  “Do you think Johnny wants us to stay here for the rest of the winter—if no one spots us, I mean?”

  “Maybe we’ll be able to hike out down the river later, on the ice, once there’s no more Chinooks. I just don’t know. I think we better just take our cues from Johnny from here on out.”

  “You won’t get any back talk from me on that.”

  In the gray morning twilight we built up our signal fire by the river, then began moving our stuff. The squat cabin with its thick roof of moss and clay looked as miraculous as before. We broomed the dirt floor clean with spruce branches, brought our gear inside, and moved in. The stove looked to be in one piece. We fitted the stovepipe back together and ran it up through the roof jack. The big roof poles looked sound. The one window had been broken out, but a sheet of hard clear plastic had been fastened across the entire window frame. The window allowed quite a bit of light. “Home,” Raymond announced. It was the twenty-first of November.

  We tried a fire in the rusty little stove. It worked, and cheered us up as we warmed our hands.

  I looked around the cabin, ending up with my eyes on the rough little table. “This must be the kitchen,” I said.

  “Needs a microwave,” Raymond added. “No TV in here either. Next time we should bring a VCR—watch movies all winter.”

  “There you go,” I said, with a small laugh that made my side hurt. But in the back of my mind, I was remembering Clint’s story about the two brothers who tried to winter in Deadmen Valley, starved to death, and lost their heads to the bears.

  The old man pegged the moose hide to the wall with the old nails we found around the place and began scraping the hair from the hide with the sheath knife. He was going to make it into rawhide—babiche, as Raymond called it. Raymond and I sawed three big rounds of spruce to serve as stools. We allowed our spirits to lift for the time being. All that remained of our food was a little flour, baking powder, some beans, a handful of dried fruit, and the box of meat.

  Raymond and I fashioned a ladder so we’d be able to reach the food cache behind the cabin, trusting that meat would come to fill it. Like a cabin in miniature on stilts, the old cache was supported by four trees that had been sawed off about twelve feet above the ground. Just under the cache, the stilts were wrapped with stovepipe—to prevent a black bear or wolverine from reaching the cache, Raymond said.

  “What about a grizzly?” I asked.

  “Grizzlies can’t climb,” he explained. “And it’s out of a grizzly’s reach.”

  As Raymond had predicted, the old man took us out right away on a hunt for just the right birch tree. He had us cut a ten-foot log from it and carry it back to the cabin, where he planed it flat on two sides with the ax and began to strip it into lengths. “The old guys like Johnny always use birch for snowshoe frames,” Raymond said. “It’s tough, it’ll bend without breaking, and it splits easily when it’s cold.”

  Around noon the next day it cleared up enough for us to notice the sun making a brief appearance over the bald mountain to the southwest. The temperature was ten below, practically a heat wave. When I returned from building up the signal fire, I found Raymond watching intently as Johnny fashioned a snowshoe frame, bending the green birch strips patiently over his knee, bracing and lashing them temporarily into shape with whittled pegs and fine spruce roots. I watched for a while, until Johnny picked up his rifle, said something to us in Slavey, and slipped into the trees. He returned in the dark—no luck.

  On the twenty-fifth of November the warm Chinook returned. By day it would blow through the valley almost at gale force, and by night we could hear it high above, raging on the ridges. The Nahanni opened up in spots, smoking in the cold mornings. The Chinook would alternate with the arctic winds in pitched battles that seesawed back and forth above Deadmen Valley, sending the temperature from forty above to thirty below.

  Still no snow. It was not the weather that Raymond had hoped for as Johnny hunted our side of the river for the moose that should be browsing in the willow thickets. Raymond and I were picking frozen cranberries. Any we could find helped a little. We’d gone through the last of the fruit and the flour, and the ration of meat we were allowing ourselves could barely keep us going. We still had beans. For our only meal of the day, we’d been allowing ourselves no more than one pound total of the moose meat, cooked in with some beans.

  When the old man wasn’t hunting, he was weaving the intricate babiche lacing to complete the first pair of snowshoes. Raymond and I were making snares, braiding the thin strips of babiche as Johnny had shown us. We set a dozen snares up and down the river for snowshoe hares. Raymond knew exactly how to do it, having snared the rabbits with picture wire when he was a kid. He’d bend a young tree down over a rabbit run and rig the snare below it so it made a circle about four inches across, about three inches above the trail. Then he’d arrange slender sticks like a fence on both sides of the snare and tiny ones underneath, so the rabbit was forced to pass through the circle.

  Once we interrupted a chase in the trees above us. A dark-furred animal the size of an overgrown house cat hunched its back and growled at us as we passed below. “Marten,” Raymond said. In the next tree a red squirrel chattered as the marten glowered at us, growling all the while, trying at the same time to keep its eye on the squirrel. I tried to knock the marten from the tree with a stick but succeeded only in chasing it away.

  Raymond was always on the lookout for fresh moose sign, but he wasn’t finding any. “All these willow thickets,” he kept saying. “All these moose paths. Old droppings everywhere, but none fresh. I don’t understand it.”

  The old man showed Raymond that the airplane cable we had salvaged could make a snare too, just like a rabbit snare, only on a bigger scale. “It’s illegal,” Raymond said. “But in Deadmen Valley,” he added with a smile, “we might get away with it.” We rigged the snare on one of the more prominent moose paths through the thickets. As Raymond secured the free end to a cottonwood tree, he said, “Man, would I like to get a moose for Johnny. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. The young men are supposed to bring the first and the best meat to the elders.”

  Wherever we went we took the ax with us, for protection. “Nobody walks around in the bush without a rifle,” Raymond said.

  I told him, “That looks more like an ax you’ve got in your hand.”

  “Better than a kick in the knee.”

  “Where did you come up with that expression? My mother always used to say that.”

  “Old Dene saying,” he replied with a smirk.

  “The ax…it’s protection from what?”

  “Bull moose, cow moose with a calf, or ‘keep out of its way.’”

  “I thought grizzlies were supposed to be hibernating by now.”

  “Supposed to be,” he replied.

  With the ax and the bow saw we made so much firewood for our little st
ove it looked like we had a woodlot going. We sought out the dead trees and hauled them back in lengths to the cabin and sawed and split firewood endlessly, mixing in green spruce, which split easily in the cold. With the Chinook in retreat, perhaps for good, there was plenty of cold available. We each broke a saw blade sawing too fast. When the second one broke a few days after the first, it scared us. We’d have to baby the bow saw now that we were down to the last blade.

  The mercury stayed down around twenty and thirty below at midday. It amazed me that life could go on. Yet as long as we dried our clothes out overnight, and dried our gloves and mitts and the felt liners from our boots, we were okay. Bundled up in as many layers as we were, we’d become accustomed to it.

  The old man made a simple hand-held drum from a small piece of moose hide that he stretched over a birch frame. It looked something like a big tambourine. He’d tap out a simple rhythm with a small padded stick, sometimes chanting on into the night. The drum had a hypnotic effect and helped take our minds from our hunger. Just as we never spoke about the search plane that didn’t come back, we never talked about our hunger. It clawed at us from the inside, a private torment.

  At least it was warm in the cabin. That small a space was easy to heat if we just kept stoking the fire. After we would regretfully snuff out the candle for the evening, we’d lie on the spruce boughs in our bags and watch the bit of firelight from the stove door playing on the drumskin and the ancient face of the drummer. Each evening old Johnny started with a Slavey formula that Raymond knew and translated as “In the Distant Time it is said…” Raymond explained that Johnny was telling the stories “of when the world was young.”

  “What are they about?” I asked.

  “Oh, like about Raven, how he made the world and then unmade it so it wasn’t perfect anymore, how he made mosquitoes and made water to run downhill, how he’d play tricks on everybody. There’s even a story about the flood like the one in the Bible. There’s stories about animals back when they were human, stories about giants and supernatural beings, about heroes, about medicine men who could communicate with ravens and even take the shape of ravens…The elders have all sorts of stories.”

  All the time Johnny kept building the snowshoes. My eyes kept going back to the finished pair standing in the corner. They were truly works of art with their graceful curves and intricate rawhide webbing.

  On the fifth of December it snowed six inches of dry snow, then cleared off. The sun appeared over the bald mountain only ten minutes before it set again. Raymond and I kept felling trees in the twilight, hauling logs to the cabin, splitting wood, and checking our snares. Over the next week we caught three hares, white as snow and always frozen solid by the time we discovered them. We had to bring the rabbits inside the cabin to warm them up enough to gut and skin them. Some years, Raymond said, the rabbits were everywhere you looked. There was even a legend about hares falling out of the sky like snow.

  “Looks like we might have to live on rabbits,” I said to Raymond. “The moose meat and beans aren’t going to last much longer.”

  “There’s no fat on rabbits,” he replied. “We’re going to need to find something with some fat on it. They always say your body needs to burn fat when it gets real cold.”

  I could see his face growing thinner, and I knew mine must be, too. I guessed I’d already lost fifteen pounds. The last of our moose meat was soon gone.

  I was lucky enough to get a grouse with a well-thrown stick. It was a tasty little morsel, but it didn’t take the edge off our hunger. Still no fresh sign of moose, and we hadn’t heard wolves since we first arrived. Raymond was worried about not hearing the wolves anymore, and I asked him why. “No wolves means no moose,” he said. “The wolves follow the moose in the winter, hoping they can get one in deep snow.”

  On the morning of the sixteenth of December we opened the cabin door and found Deadmen Valley transformed. Two feet of snow had fallen in the night. All the forest was draped with snow and the high mountains all around had taken on the unreality of a painting. It was all so beautiful and so clean, the pure whiteness of it all.

  Johnny walked over to the snowshoes in the corner. To my surprise, he was motioning to me. He wanted me to try them out. “Good deal!” I said to Raymond, and we all pulled on some clothes. Outside, Johnny helped me step into them and lace up the bindings, and then I took off like a horse out of the starting gate, I guess. I hadn’t gone fifteen feet before I tripped and did a faceplant in the snow. I thrashed around, spitting snow out of my mouth and trying to get back up. But I was getting all entangled, making a spectacle of myself with my arms and legs and those five-foot snowshoes all windmilling around. Raymond and Johnny were laughing their heads off. “Hey, I thought this would be easy!” I called.

  As soon as he could quit laughing, Raymond said, “Got to keep your tips up, Gabe, or they get caught in the snow. I think you better let Johnny use those now. It’s a good day for him to track moose.”

  Johnny was still chuckling ten minutes later when he stepped into the snowshoes and laced them on. Raymond handed him the rifle and said, “Good luck, Johnny.” Just then we heard wings thrashing the cold air and looked up to see a raven directly above, calling, “Ggaagga…ggaagga.”

  Raymond whispered, “It’s saying, ‘Animal…animal.’” It struck me that Raymond said this as a matter of fact. He went on to whisper that ravens were known to lead hunters to game, knowing that they would get their share from what the hunter couldn’t use.

  The old hunter was watching as the raven tucked its wing and rolled over in the sky before flying on. Johnny winked at Raymond and nodded with a smile. “My father says it’s a good-luck sign when a raven does that,” Raymond explained. “It means the hunter will have good luck that day.”

  An hour later we heard the rifle shot loud and clear, upriver, in the cold dry air. “Moose in the cooking pot,” I said, certain as if I’d seen it fall. We waited as the hours passed, and then, when Johnny hadn’t returned by two we had misgivings and started after him, post-holing our way through the new snow without snowshoes.

  We found where the trail of the man first intersected the trail of the moose, fresh with droppings and urine, and then we followed the trail of the man, which looped away from the moose’s trail and then came back to it every quarter mile or so. “Johnny was staying downwind,” Raymond explained.

  We found the rifle cartridge in the snow showing where the old man had stood when he’d fired the shot. As the twilight deepened, we found the place where the moose had bolted and run. No blood in the snow, not a fleck. “I guess Johnny missed,” Raymond said. His words hung in the cold air like death.

  A raven in a nearby tree caught our attention as it walked back and forth on a dead branch, squawking and squawking. “His belly’s empty,” Raymond said. “He was counting on a moose dinner tonight. Gabe, I think I better get back to the cabin. My boots got a little wet.”

  “So did mine,” I told him. “We better get back fast.”

  Johnny was sitting by the stove in his bare feet. He glanced up at us coming in. We were throwing off our boots and our socks. I massaged my toes with my fingers. “They’re okay,” I told Raymond, and he said, “Mine too.”

  We could see in the old man’s mournful eyes that he’d never caught up with the moose. He looked at Raymond and said something in Slavey.

  “No medicine,” Raymond told me.

  I wondered if they were talking about some medicine that had been prescribed back in the hospital. “Let’s look in the first-aid kit,” I said.

  “Dene medicine,” Raymond explained. “It’s like power and good luck. Different people have medicine for all sorts of things. Hunters have good medicine for different animals. Johnny thinks his medicine for moose is all gone. It’s because of how he left the moose above the falls. When you don’t treat an animal respectfully, its spirit is offended, and then you won’t have any more medicine with that animal. That’s what happened.”

&nb
sp; “Do you think that could be true? Do you believe it yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” Raymond said. “I’ve heard that kind of stuff all my life. It’s not very scientific, I know. I guess I don’t know what I think about it.”

  “But at least we know there’s still moose in Deadmen Valley. And he has two shells left.”

  “That could’ve been the last moose,” Raymond said. To me, it sounded like he was just as convinced as the old man that we’d destroyed our luck.

  13

  A HALF-CHINOOK SWEPT briefly into the valley, raising the temperature above freezing and melting the snowpack down to six inches. Just as quickly the Chinook was gone, and the cold returned. This time the mercury plunged to forty below. The Nahanni had frozen solid except for one spot upstream that stayed open for some reason, forming an icy fog that hugged the valley floor along the river. The sun wasn’t clearing the bald mountain at noon, so twilight was all we had now, even in the middle of the day.

  For a couple of days Raymond and I tried to fish the open spot in the river, jigging the lures from crude poles. It was my idea—Raymond had said that the Nahanni had a reputation as a poor fishing river, something to do with all the silt in it from glaciers at its headwaters. “I think there’s some little graylings in here,” Raymond said, but if there were, we couldn’t catch them. We never even had a bite.

  Working long into the nights, Johnny completed Raymond’s snowshoes and mine. They’d be ready when the next big snowfall came. I started wondering if it might be possible for us to hike out down the canyon of the Nahanni. I talked it over with Raymond, and we decided to ask Johnny what he thought. Johnny didn’t even have to think about it. He pointed upriver to that smoking patch of open water, and then pointed downstream emphatically. “More,” he said in English.