by Will Hobbs
With only the ax for protection, we went to get the ladder, upright in a tight cluster of spruces where I’d left it. Then we scouted all around the cabin in widening circles, searching for the right tree. Finally we found one barely back from the bank of the Nahanni, across from the stretch of water that even now remained open. It was a giant spruce standing all by itself several hundred yards from the protection of the cabin. Our ladder reached its lowest limbs at about the thirteen-foot level. At that point two substantial branches spoked out from the trunk about five feet apart—just what we needed to support the toboggan.
Back at the cabin Raymond said we should pack both army boxes with meat before we sledded the rest to our new cache. “Just in case,” he said.
“You’ve got a head on your shoulders,” I told him. “Mine froze off a couple of days ago.”
“So let’s get going while mine’s still attached!”
I couldn’t help laughing at our insanely desperate situation. “Welcome back to the valley of headless men, eh?”
With the ax we hacked the meat into shapes we could cram into the army boxes, then fastened the lids down and left the boxes outside the cabin door. After that we sledded the toboggan to the tree, looking all around for the bear in the twilight. It was impossible to shake the sensation that we were being watched. “Whatever you do,” Raymond whispered, “don’t turn your back on one of those bears. Don’t run, or it’ll chase you. Talk to it.”
“Talk to it?”
“Talk to it nice. Let it know what you are. Don’t look it in the eye, don’t get it mad. Is the ax handy? It’s all we’ve got.”
Suddenly I felt sick through and through. “I left it at the cabin,” I confessed. “Should I go get it?”
“Let’s just get the meat up in the tree.”
The canopy of the spruce’s branches had shed the snow so effectively that the ground was bare below it, making for a good staging area. Raymond went up the ladder first and stood on the branch. I started working the empty toboggan up as he pulled from above. We muscled the toboggan into the tree, and Raymond worked it across the two big branches. I went halfway up and handed him the tarp. Then I went back down for the first piece of meat.
“Too late,” Raymond whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“Look out on the river.”
I couldn’t see anything. “Quit joking,” I said.
“It’s coming toward us.”
I still couldn’t see anything.
“Get up here!”
Now I could see the bear, huge and silver, soundlessly crossing the river ice, more like a ghost bear than a flesh-and-blood creature. I recognized the big hump over the shoulders, yet this apparition looked nothing like my conception of a grizzly. This bear looked as if it had been carved from crystal. Then I realized that its fur was entirely armored in ice, giving it this ghostlike appearance. The bear had gotten into open water and now its fur was draped with hundreds of daggers of ice. My heart was in my throat as it paused, lifting its nose, taking the scent of the frozen moose meat and maybe of me.
“Get up here!”
I grabbed a piece of moose meat and climbed up the ladder. I handed the meat to Raymond, then joined him on the branch. When I turned around to look, the bear rose over the top of the riverbank, paused to sniff the air again, and kept coming. “Holy cow,” I muttered.
Halfway to the tree the bear stood on two legs and woofed several times, looking all around. I had serious doubts, trying to gauge the standing height of the bear, about our safety on this limb. I looked up into the tree; we could scramble to higher branches if we had to. For a moment the bear went down on all fours, then back on hind legs again, roaring a challenge that could have knocked trees down. “He smells us,” Raymond whispered.
Now the bear came on cautiously to the meat and hung its head low, growling like a dog over a bone. We could see every icicle clinging to its fur. I thought the bear might not be aware of us after all, but suddenly it swung away from the meat, stood on two hind legs again, and looked right up at us, roaring horribly.
We tried to pull up the ladder, but we couldn’t budge it from where we were crouching. “Should I knock it over?” I asked.
“We need it to get down. He can’t come up it anyway. He’s too heavy.”
We looked back down only to see the bear, all glistening with ice, moving closer yet. Then the bear stood to its full height against the ladder, just below us, and began to climb it. I rose, reaching for the next limb above me. When a couple of rungs broke beneath its weight, the bear stood up and began to throw its weight against the ladder with a rocking motion, roaring with frustration. Its breath made fog that blasted over us, warm and smelling of the inside of its gut.
With a loud crack, the ladder broke completely in half.
The bear turned back to our precious moose meat, gnawing on it while keeping up a continuous growl.
“Don’t worry about us,” I called to the bear. “We aren’t going anywhere.”
The winter bear growled louder. “Don’t get him mad,” Raymond whispered.
“We’re going to freeze up if we can’t move around,” I said.
“I know.”
There was nothing to be done. All we could do was rearrange ourselves a little so we could sit on the toboggan, and then it was a matter of waiting the bear out. Early on we thought the bear might be leaving, when it took a huge hunk of meat in its mouth and ghosted away, but we could still hear it growling somewhere out there. It was back again within five minutes.
When the bear had carried away the last of the meat, we were still pinned in the tree with the cold seeping through every layer and into our bones. It got dark, and the moon appeared over the mountains, just past full. The growling went on and on, wherever the bear was, not that far away. “How are your feet?” I asked.
“Like concrete,” Raymond answered.
“Same here. Man, we’re going to freeze solid. When they find us, they’re going to wonder what we were doing up here.”
No reply from Raymond. I thought I better keep talking at least. I said, “Think about being too hot.”
“Impossible,” he said.
“When my dad and I were at Big Bend out in west Texas, it got to 118 degrees.”
“How hot is that?”
“Even lizards burn their feet on it.”
“I’ve never seen a lizard, except in a book.”
“Most of them can’t tolerate the sand during the daytime in the middle of the summer. They stay hidden underground, or in shady cracks in the rocks. But there’s this one kind of lizard I saw tearing across a sand dune—whenever it stopped moving, it lifted its front left leg and its back right leg at the same time, and balanced on the other two. After a few seconds the feet on the sand got too hot, so it traded off with the other two, back and forth, back and forth. It looked goofy, but I guess it works.”
“They got turtles in Texas? I never saw one of those either.”
“All kinds of turtles, including snapping turtles. They sit on the bottom of the river, open their jaws, and wag their tongue back and forth for a fishing lure. Ever heard of an armadillo?”
“Is it a kind of turtle?”
“Not a turtle. I don’t know what they are, really. Maybe a kind of anteater with armor.”
“For real?”
“Sure they’re real. They look like a little armored car, but they’ve got feet instead.”
He started chuckling, then giggling. Then he shifted his position. “Man, I’m cold.”
“I can still hear ‘keep out of its way.’ I don’t trust him any farther than I can throw him.”
Raymond laughed. “I never heard that expression. Or ‘Holy cow’ either.”
“You don’t watch enough TV.”
“I thought you said I watch too much. You really don’t watch TV? Or just fooling?”
“Not much.”
“How come?”
“Oh, because of my moth
er, I guess. She liked to read, I really remember that. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I know what you mean. I keep thinking about Johnny, stuff I learned from him.”
“Well, now you have that bush education that he said you should get.”
“That’s for sure…. But it doesn’t look like I’m going to graduate.”
There was nothing I could say, nothing honest. Instead I said, “I don’t hear the bear anymore.”
“He could still be close by.”
“I know.”
“Should we take a chance?”
“We have to, or we’ll freeze to death.”
The trunk of the tree was much too big around for us to try shinnying down it. We were going to have to hang from a limb and then drop to the ground.
I got up. I was stiff as stone. If I dropped to the ground and the bear rushed me, then what?
I shucked my mitts, crouched, and got ready to lower myself, using the limb. My gloved hands weren’t going to be much use: they were too cold to really grip with. I encircled the branch with my forearms, then lowered my weight over the side as slowly as I could. I was so frozen up, I couldn’t really hang on and then time my drop. I broke loose before I was ready and fell heavily to the frozen ground, tumbling quick as I could to take the weight from my feet. I knew right away I’d hurt my knee.
“You okay?” Raymond whispered.
“I hurt my knee—sprained it maybe. I don’t know if you should try…the ground’s hard as steel.”
“I can’t stay up here. I gotta try it.”
“See if you can tuck and roll as you hit the ground.”
Raymond lost his grip before he was ready to drop, just sort of fell off the branch. He tried to right himself in midair but came down hard on his right foot, which buckled. Even through his red mask I could see him react to the pain.
“I hurt it,” he whispered apologetically. “I think I hurt it bad.”
I waited a minute, looking for the bear, expecting to see its dim shape in the starlight. “Can you walk?”
“Don’t think so,” he managed to say.
“I’m going to lift you up now. Put all your weight on your good leg. Use my shoulder.”
I had him standing up on one leg. He said, “What about your knee?”
“Don’t worry about it. Ready?”
“Ready,” he said. “Let’s go.”
20
AT LAST THE FIRE in the stove was backing off the deep cold that had settled inside the cabin. With the stove door cracked, I could see to unlace Raymond’s boots. His face in the flickering light of the fire was contorted with pain. “Sprains can hurt really bad,” I said. “Let’s hope it’s only a sprain.” He flinched and sucked in his breath as I eased the boot around his heel.
In the first-aid kit we had two kinds of pain medicine: a bottle of aspirin we’d almost used up and another smaller prescription bottle we hadn’t touched yet. The smaller one read: Take one to two tablets by mouth every three hours as needed for pain. In handwriting underneath was written: For major pain. Do not use with head injuries. When I read that part to Raymond he managed a grin and said, “I guess I was lucky I hurt my foot.”
Both our water bottles were dry. He stuck one pill at a time way down his throat and swallowed them. I said I’d go get some water after I wrapped his foot.
He grimaced, shook his head.
“Don’t wrap your foot?”
“Don’t get water,” he said between his teeth.
“Why not?”
He put both his hands up in the air, spreading his fingers like huge claws, then raked me on the arm.
“Oh, I forgot,” I said. “Probably we shouldn’t bring the boxes of meat inside the cabin, either.”
He nodded vigorously.
“But I’ll string them up in a tree first thing in the morning.”
“Good. But what if he breaks the rope or chews it? Bears are smart.”
“Let me think…. That cable from the airplane isn’t very far away, the one Johnny used for the snare. I’ll use that for the part he can reach.”
As I pulled off Raymond’s socks, I said, “You might be out of next week’s game, but we’ll have you back in the lineup the week after.”
The foot looked bad—bruised and swelling fast. I said, “In my professional opinion…a bad sprain.”
“Hope so.”
“You’ll see,” I said, even though I wasn’t at all sure. “Tell me where it hurts the most.”
“My whole ankle.”
I began to wrap his ankle in a figure eight with an elastic bandage. I made it secure enough for support but not tight enough to cut off circulation. “Now we should ice it,” I said.
“No way. It still feels freezing cold.”
“Just don’t get it anywhere near the fire then.” Gently as I could, I worked two pairs of wool socks back over his foot. Then I helped him into his sleeping bag and stuffed some clothes under his leg to elevate it a little. “I’ll get some fresh spruce bedding in here tomorrow,” I said. “Lot of tips—this stuff is awful rough.”
“What about your knee?” he asked. “You’re limping around yourself. Take some of those pills.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “We’re both messed up, but you’re more messed up than I am.”
Lucky for Raymond, he slept after a while. I sat up stoking the fire, ax within reach and listening for the bear, which I kept thinking I was hearing moving around outside. I was keenly aware of my thirst and hunger, and our deadly situation. The winter bear willing, I could reach our boxes of meat, I could fetch water, I could keep us warm, but I couldn’t supply what we needed most: hope. No hope now of making it until May.
At first light I laced up the snowshoes and went looking for the wire cable from the airplane. It was farther away than I remembered, and I took a couple of hours finding it, limping around in the trees and imagining at every moment the approach of the bear. I was even more scared than I’d been in the actual presence of the bear. Raymond had been with me then, and that had made all the difference.
Back at the cabin, Raymond was no better but awfully glad to see me. I crept to the creek for water. Every nerve in my body was screaming false alarms. After that I strung the army boxes in the trees, always with an eye over my shoulder. I had to cook out in front of the cabin on an open fire—that way we wouldn’t be inviting the bear inside with the smell of meat. And if the bear came around, it might be deterred by the fire. I helped Raymond get around so he wouldn’t fall and make his injury worse.
Raymond sat at the table to eat. We put away two huge moose steaks with thick trimmings of fat. All the same, we agreed that with only the two boxes of moose meat, we had to go back to eating only once a day. We didn’t talk about how there wasn’t enough to pull us through, even if we cut back to starvation rations. We both knew that.
I could tell Raymond’s foot felt just as bad or worse. He kept taking his pills. We were going to go by my watch so he wouldn’t run out of them any sooner than he had to. My knee was going to come around if I just didn’t work it too hard. I was pretty sure by now it wasn’t anything really bad.
The sky was extraordinarily orange all above the bald mountain in advance of the sunrise. Raymond said we’d probably have snow coming. I had to go out on the snowshoes and find firewood. There weren’t any more dead trees within ten minutes of the cabin. The bear was everywhere and nowhere. I kept imagining its silver shape and soundless approach between the trees.
The sun rose at ten forty-five in the morning. At least I could count on the February daylight helping out a little bit more each day. I spent the rest of the day felling dead trees, hauling logs back to the cabin, hoping Raymond’s foot would improve soon. I was thinking furiously about escape. I saw no way out but trying our luck down the Nahanni once again. In the evening I told Raymond I thought we were going to have to try it, and he thought so too. “Think how long we’ve had this
vicious cold spell,” I said. “In another week, the open spots in the river are even more likely to have frozen up. And you’ll be ready to go.”
Raymond just nodded his head. He didn’t seem too convinced. We both knew that the patch of water just up the river from the cabin remained as open as ever.
The next day I hauled logs to the cabin again, and in the afternoon I began to saw and split more firewood. My palm kept cracking open along the creases, but that couldn’t be helped. Then I broke the last saw blade.
For a second I just stared at the broken blade. Then I threw the useless saw down on the ground, kicked it, and felt a bolt of pain course through my knee. I looked up to see Raymond at the cabin door, standing on one foot and watching me. “It’s okay, Gabe,” he said. “That last blade was bound to go sometime. We can get by with the ax. Hey, look at the clouds. It’s warming up—might snow.”
Raymond went back inside. I thought of covering the firewood with the tarp, then remembered that the tarp was still with the toboggan up in the spruce where the bear had treed us. I needed to fetch the toboggan, too; we were going to need it for our gear when we made our break. And there was a hunk of moose meat rolled up in the tarp.
I cut a couple of slender birches and dragged them over to our busted ladder beneath the big spruce, the ax under my arm and my head swiveling around, looking for the bear. I splinted the ladder poles with the birches, the quickest makeshift repair I could manage, and I climbed into the tree. Carefully I lowered the toboggan to the ground and then came down with the piece of meat.
I wasn’t really on guard as I made my beeline to the cabin. I thought I was home safe; my eye was on the door and I was thinking about Raymond. I was only fifty feet from the cabin when I heard that ominous, unmistakable woof, once, twice. There was the winter bear, right there, standing under the suspended metal boxes no farther from me than I was from the cabin. The ghostlike bear, all too real, came down to all fours with a roar in its throat, laying its ears back and fixing its small dark eyes on me. Its jaws were making an awful snapping and clicking sound.
I wanted to turn and bolt for the cabin. “Don’t run,” I remembered Raymond saying. “Don’t turn your back on him.” I shucked my mitts and held tight to the ax with both hands. I remembered I had the piece of meat on the toboggan right behind me. “Talk nice,” I remembered. But I never had a chance to talk. Fast as a train, the bear charged. I got set to try to do him some damage.