“Amazing,” he said in the truck on their way to the base. “You think, ‘How could we have missed this?’ But that’s not the case. Far from it. Dene have been hunting there for thousands of years, living off it. It’s just . . . it’s the endlessness. The flatness. It looks like nothing special until you see the exploding oranges and yellows and reds of the low brush, the sand eskers that look like moonscape. You think, ‘How can anything live out here?’ And then you see the caribou grazing and lifting their heads to the sound of the plane. Incredible. I never thought I could feel so at home somewhere so far away from anything familiar.”
Now, between the music and Muddy singing along and the noise of the plane they can’t speak unless they shout, so most of their communication consists of Mac tapping her shoulder, pointing below to a fox skirting the perimeter of a small stand of stunted trees. There, he shouts, and she sees a caribou and her calf resting on the lichen. There, he shouts again, and she sees an abandoned trapper cabin rotting into the rock it was built on.
They land, and Muddy cuts the engine as they drift toward shore. He pulls off his headphones and turns to them, his wide grin gaping from the missing front tooth. “Gentlemen, welcome back to paradise. And you too, of course, milady.” He tips his fingers in a royal salute to Delilah, then reaches down by his feet and extracts a bottle of Jack Daniels. “Care for some champagne before we begin?” He reaches the bottle toward Will, who is organizing his notes into a canvas bag that holds glass jars and a strange wooden box Mac had told Delilah was for mineral samples.
Will shakes his head, but Mac takes the bottle and has a swig before handing it back. Muddy opens the door, and a glacial chill carries in off the lake. Delilah shivers. It smells strange, like clean laundry flapping on a line and ancient layers of silt and grit.
“Why do you fly with bare feet?” Delilah asks as Muddy takes a long slug from the black-labelled bottle.
Muddy laughs and twists the cap back on. “Sure you don’t want some?” he calls over to Will, who is beside Delilah, still going through papers.
“Nah,” Will says without looking up. “One of us better stay sober to protect your sorry drunk ass from the grizzly bears.”
Grizzly bears? Delilah looks over at her dad, but he just smiles, shaking his head. Don’t worry.
Muddy is peering out the door at the calm lake. “Like to feel the metal vibrating beneath my feet,” he says. “Helps remind me how fragile it all is—those two inches of steel that mean the difference between soaring through the sky on wings and a fiery death.” He fixes his strange blue eyes on her. “I know,” he says. “Lost countless buddies.” He glances over at the other men. “As many men get hurt or die in the mines, ten times more lose their lives in bush planes.”
She isn’t sure what she thinks about what Muddy said. But to Delilah, the bare feet seem like a rebellion, like he’s saying screw off to the danger. Despite her mild distaste for Muddy, she was never once afraid they would crash while they were in the air. Somehow, he seems both reckless and capable.
Muddy hops out and stands on the left float, a wooden oar in one hand and the end of a rope in the other. His cotton shirt is only buttoned at the bottom, leaving it rippling around him as he balances there in his bare feet. His long stringy brown hair plays in the wind, and to Delilah, he looks a little like Jesus, only a dirtier version.
He sits on the float and rows with the oar, then jumps ashore onto a tiny sandy beach with the rope in his hand and indicates for Mac to do the same off the opposite float. Rope in hand, Mac aims himself toward the brush-covered shore and makes it by an inch, his right foot slipping into the frigid water before he can pull it out. He trails the rope to the right until he finds a boulder about twenty feet along and ties the rope around it. Muddy has done the same in the opposite direction. Still sitting in the plane, Delilah feels like a spider in a web, anchored on both sides.
Will manoeuvres the gear from the floats to shore, tossing the tents and duffel bag of food toward land. The sun is high in the blue sky, and Delilah knows it will not be going anywhere for a long time. The night before, she got up to get a drink of water just before midnight and the kitchen was as bright as morning.
Delilah shoulders her backpack filled with books and extra shorts, a sweater and her bathing suit—although her dad has warned her the lake is cold. After a short hike over lichen and wildflowers, they set up camp in a small valley between two high esker ridges. Nobody has been saying much, Will whistling to himself, and Muddy taking swigs from the bottle. They set up the testing and gear tent and then a large sleeping tent. Delilah had been worried about sharing the tent, but when she sees the size of it, she doesn’t mind.
Muddy takes the far side, and Mac motions for Delilah to take the other side. He sets up his bedroll beside hers, and Will drops his sleeping bag next to him. Even with all their beds and gear, there is still at least three feet between each of them. Delilah takes out her books and stacks them neatly, leaving her extra clothes protected in the backpack from rogue insects. “See you’re roughing it,” her dad says as he pulls a small pillow out of a stuff sack.
“Yes,” she says. “I only brought three.”
“I was teasing. You won’t get bored out here, don’t worry.”
“Are you going to make me work?”
“You know it. Camp life isn’t for the faint of heart.”
Outside, Will starts a fire from some dry willow twigs he found near the shore. They heat cans of Libby’s beans on the coals and eat them straight out of the can with tin forks.
“Nectar of the gods,” Muddy says, mopping the sides of his can with a slice of Will’s Wonder Bread. Delilah is ravenous. She has never tasted anything so delicious in her life.
“Slow down there, kid,” Will says, laughing at her. He hands her another slice of bread. “You’re gonna choke.”
She takes the bread, embarrassed.
“It’s the air,” he says, setting aside his tin can and wiping his hands on his jeans. “Don’t get much fresher than this.”
“Beats Annie’s seed bread, eh?” Mac says.
Delilah nods, her mouth full of the delicious paste that is Wonder Bread.
Will tosses his empty can into the ashes of the fire.
“You ready?” Mac asks him.
“Yup,” he says, getting to his feet.
Delilah has one more bite of beans and tosses her can at the fire but misses. It rolls near Muddy’s grimy foot. He grins and kicks it toward the fire. “Nice shot,” he says. “You folks go on ahead, I’ll catch up.” He licks sauce from his thumb. “I’ll put out the fire.”
Mac heads toward the side of the tent, and Delilah trails him, shaking dried lichen out of her sneakers.
“First things first,” he says. He picks up a stack of wooden stakes he had laid against the tent earlier and hands them to her. “Can you handle these? It’s quite a walk.”
She nods and accepts the load. Will emerges from the gear tent with the small wooden boxes and a canvas bag. “All set,” he says.
For a second nobody moves. Mac is just standing there, looking over at Will in his frayed jeans and his fringed suede jacket. They look at each other for what seems like a long time and Delilah knows they are having a conversation she can’t hear. Finally, Will nods once, and then Mac starts walking. She follows them through the low brush, the smell of the fire and the charred remnants of beans behind them.
They dip into a little valley spread out in a brilliant carpet of red brush, just like her dad had talked about. She stops to take it in.
“Not bad, eh?” Will says, taking a swig of water from a skin bag. He has set his box and bag beside him. Mac is still walking ahead of them.
“Did you . . .” Delilah says. “Dad says you used to live out here sometimes.”
“That’s right,” Will says. “Hey, Speedy Gonzales!” he shouts at her father. “You worried we’re gonna run out of light, or what?”
Mac stops and turns, squinting a
t them in the relentless sun. He pulls his own water out and takes a sip.
“Spent the autumns out here with the family when I was a kid,” Will says, replacing his water in the bag. “We picked wild cranberries for my grandmother. Pity the kid who didn’t pick his share. My grandma wasn’t one for excuses.” He laughs. “Hunted wolf and fox with my uncle and Jethro. Scraped caribou hides and left them in the sun to dry.” There is a nostalgia in his voice. She hears it sometimes when her dad talks about fishing on the St. Lawrence with his dad or the oak trees in front of the brick house he grew up in scattering its leaves so they settled on the cars. She doesn’t feel wistful about any of the places she’s lived. At least not yet.
“Did you come here every fall?” she asks.
“Pretty much.”
They start walking again, and Delilah pictures a little Will running through this strange vastness, hunting with his brother, sliding down those rocky hills. She imagines herself there too, a small child running wild and happy.
“You always live in cities, kid?” he asks.
She nods. “Yeah. I think because . . . like, my mom always likes to be around artists.”
“Ah.” Will slows his pace a bit so Delilah can keep up. “Artists. I see. So what do you like to be around?”
She thinks about his question. Nobody has ever asked her that before. She steps carefully to avoid treading on the delicate, lace-like brush beneath her and looks around at the rippling land peppered with sprinkles of tiny flowers, the blue sky cloudless and enormous above them.
“This,” she says.
LATER THAT NIGHT, DELILAH lies in the tent in the faded glow of nighttime sun listening to the men talk by the fire. They have all had their fair share of the Jack Daniels, possibly even started on a new bottle by now. Delilah can hardly keep her eyes open, exhausted from pounding stakes and hiking for what seemed like miles. They returned with some rock scrapings in the sample bottles and she helped Will catch trout for their dinner from the shore of the lake. Muddy fried them in a cast iron pan over the stove, adding a dash from the whiskey bottle to the sizzling pan every once in a while.
She can hear every word they’re saying out by the fire. The canvas does nothing to dull the noise. They are talking about what they found that day, speculating on the mineral samples. But as she starts to drift, she is startled awake by her father saying, “What if it all goes wrong? What if we’re blowing our money and taking these risks for nothing?”
Another voice, Muddy’s, says, “Jesus, have another fucking drink. Whose fucking idea was this? It’s a no-brainer. We’re being good fucking businessmen.”
There is a crash that makes Delilah jump, but she soon realizes it’s probably an empty liquor bottle hitting the fire.
“What the hell,” Mac says after a while. “What the hell. You gotta go forward sometimes or else there’s nothing to do but go back.” To that, the only response is the crackling of the fire. Will hasn’t said a word.
Delilah drifts off again as Muddy starts singing “Sweet Home Alabama,” and wakes up only when the men crawl into the big tent, their boots banging on the hard earth beneath the tarp. Her eyes flutter open and through the tent doorway she sees that the sun has finally disappeared as her dad and Will sprawl on their sleeping bags still wearing all their clothes. The sky is a faded, hazy blue. The thick canvas tent makes it so she can’t see much but the rough outlines of their bodies.
Within minutes Muddy is snoring in a reeking cloud of booze.
“Need one of them pine tree air fresheners in here,” Will says quietly.
Delilah smiles.
“No doubt,” Mac mumbles. “That guy can knock it back.”
There’s silence for a few minutes and Mac whispers, “He okay, you figure? Muddy?”
Delilah’s ears perk. They don’t know she’s awake.
Will doesn’t answer right away, but then he says quietly, “Don’t know. Ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”
“You trust him?”
“Much as I trust anyone.”
“How much is that?”
“Not much.”
Delilah feels a strange pounding in her chest, a worry she can’t put her finger on. What are they up to? It all seemed clear before today when her dad explained it: they discovered a promising patch that could mean gold, they’re staking and taking samples. So why all the whispering? Why does it matter so much that Muddy is trustworthy?
Mac starts to say something but there is a sudden, loud howling outside and he stops short. It sounds like a man wailing, an intimate, grieving sound.
Delilah sits up. “Dad?”
“It’s okay,” Mac says, but he sounds tense.
It’s not far off, maybe even just above them on top of the esker. Delilah squints toward the door of the tent and makes sure she can see the sharp outline of the rifles. They’re there, resting against someone’s pack.
“Wolf,” Will says. “Lie down, kid. It won’t hurt you.”
“We have the guns if we need them, Lila,” Mac says.
Delilah can’t lie down. Her skin feels alive, every hair an antenna.
The wolf howls again and again, long and low, each time ending in a wavering shudder. She thinks of the ravens, how they call to the wolves to come rip open the dead animals. Has this one been summoned, tricked here by the birds?
“Why do they howl like that?” she whispers. She doesn’t know why she says it. She knows, she read about it in National Geographic at the doctor’s office. They do it to communicate, to rally the troops. But why that sound, is what she means. Why that long, heartsick song when it could be just a bark or a yip?
“He’s calling for the ones he lost,” Will says through the dark. “Telling them to come on home.”
THEY AREN’T SURE WHEN Annie left, only that she is gone when they come home from the Barrens. They return to the shack from the float plane base, sunburned and punch-drunk on three days of fresh air and glacial lake swims. They see that Bessie isn’t parked by the woodpile but think nothing of it, figuring Annie has a shift at the Wildcat.
But they figure it out pretty soon. The first thing Delilah sees when they walk in are the wilting flowers. She and Mac sit on the couch staring at them, Mac still in his work pants, his dusty steel-toed boots, Annie’s note in his hands, both of them struck dumb. Annie left the note on the steamer trunk, a small vase of wild daisies placed beside it, a plate of homemade oatmeal cookies with a red dishcloth covering it. Mac reaches out to touch a cookie, as though to see if it’s still warm, if they somehow just missed her, if there is time to run after her and change her mind, but Delilah had already done the same. They’re cold. Baked hours ago, or worse, days ago.
“She’ll come back,” Mac says shakily. “She’ll be back.”
Did Annie leave the minute their plane took off? Delilah wonders. Watch it from the bridge, even, until she knew it was safe to go? Delilah gets up from the couch and walks to her parents’ bedroom. Annie’s clothes are gone from the shelves, her jackets and sweaters missing from the hooks on the walls. Mac’s jackets have been moved over to cover the spaces as though they had never been there at all. Delilah sinks to the bed. Annie is gone. Gone gone gone. There is no air left in Delilah’s body. She needs her inhaler, but her legs suddenly feel too thin and useless to carry her out to the living room.
That night, her dad drinks eleven of the twelve beer he bought at Weaver’s on their way home from the float plane base. He doesn’t touch the toasted cheese and lettuce sandwich she gives him for supper. When she goes to bed, she hears him through the knotholed walls, crying as he wanders through the house like he’s looking for something.
She’s gone! Delilah wants to scream. She left us and went to California! But she lies there silent and still until he finally settles on the couch.
Delilah knows Annie will be back. She said in the note that she’d be back. But it isn’t the being gone that bothers her. Her dad was gone for months when he moved up here, and she m
issed him, but she could still sleep at night. So it isn’t that.
It’s the leaving. The leaving is a cut, a sudden unexpected gash, violent and quick, and it leaks out, bleeds a little. She will have to wait for it to scab over like a scraped knee or a blackfly bite.
SINCE ANNIE LEFT, MAC spends his days either at the mines working or silently absorbed by small, trivial jobs around the house. Nailing up shelves in Delilah’s room, moving the couch to a different position. He prepares small, simple meals for them in silence, macaroni noodles with shredded cheese, Lipton soup, fried hamburger patties. She hasn’t eaten a vegetable since her mother left. They leave the dishes piled in the sink. Before, this would have made her happy. Just her and her dad, eating whatever they want, doing whatever they want. A break from Annie’s moods, her intensity, her searing criticism. But everything Mac does now scrapes against Delilah, needles at her. It bothers her how silent he is, how sad, how lost inside himself he has become. He doesn’t know the things Annie does. He doesn’t know how outrageous it is for her to cause him this pain on top of the other betrayals. Delilah keeps quiet, quiet as a mouse, because if she opens her mouth, it will all come spilling out—Marcel. The others.
She spends her evenings reading while he sits at the table and flips through mineral reference books, rubs his hands through his hair, stares out the kitchen window at the bright night sky.
She watches him like a hawk, waiting for the day he says they have to follow Annie to California.
SIX DAYS LATER DELILAH is washing dishes when Mac comes home from Red’s with his hair wet at the tips, his face scrubbed and pink. He has finally had a shower. This is a good sign. He smells like the lavender soap Annie left behind, the kind with the tiny seeds Delilah hates because they scratch her skin.
Mac sits her down and pours her a glass of Tang from the plastic pitcher. She had never in her life tried Tang until he bought it that week, though she asked Santa for it the Christmas she was seven. On Christmas morning Annie told her Santa must have loved her too much to bring her Tang, which was full of chemicals and processed sugar.
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