by Susan Wiggs
Dear God, it was months until spring. She would not let herself dwell on that, would not let herself dwell on the fact that she had no fire and no food. She used one of the remaining matches to light the lamp. Just the sight of the glow within the glass warmed her. She stared at the flame, mesmerized, thinking what an exhausting day it had been. She was hungry and cold and thirsty, but above all, she was tired. She could just crawl under the covers, fully dressed, and sleep forever. Hibernate like a winter creature, and when she awakened, it would be spring. The notion tantalized her. It would be so incredibly easy just to slip off to bed.
“No,” she said through gritted teeth. “If you sleep now, you’ll never wake up. Get that fire started.”
The lamp oil sloshed a little as she brought her light back to the stove, and the flame spat and flared momentarily. At first she thought nothing of it, but then she carefully set the lamp down and fetched the rectangular can of oil.
If this fuel could keep the lamp wick burning, then it logically followed that it could keep the logs burning in the grate. She tipped the can and sprinkled the logs. This time when she touched a match to the wood, the fire took with a loud whoosh that made her stagger backward, away from the leaping tongues of flame. Those flames shrank with disappointing quickness. Deborah fed a few smaller sticks to the fire and breathed a sigh of relief when they caught and burned steadily.
Making fires was a dangerous business, Deborah thought, touching her eyebrows to see if she had singed them. Yet she felt such a thrill of triumph upon seeing the big logs burn that she laughed aloud…and nearly choked on the smoke.
For some reason, the smoke wasn’t going up the pipe, but was pouring into the cabin. Deborah knew she would choke to death within minutes if she didn’t do something. The flue, she remembered suddenly. Open the flue, close the flue. She had heard servants mention this. What on earth was a flue? It might be the iron lever protruding from the side of the stovepipe, she decided. She lifted it and waited.
The billows of smoke changed direction as if the big stove suddenly decided to inhale. Success. The pipe started to work immediately, drawing the smoke and the flames upward.
Deborah sat on the bare floor, her knees pulled up to her chin and stared at the rising flames. “I am warm,” she said to the flickering fire. “Finally, I am warm. Who would have thought getting warm was such an ordeal?”
She was tempted to simply make a nest of her cloak, lie down and sleep in front of the stove. But she was fast learning that survival was a matter of planning, not indulging the momentary urge. First she needed to lay in enough fuel for the night and find something—anything—to eat, or she’d be too weak to get up in the morning.
She forced herself to go outside for more wood. The lash of the wind and cold took her breath away. The storm was made of thin steel blades, all of them slashing at her with a cold so intense it hurt her very bones. As quickly as she could, she brought a stack of logs from the wood bin at the side of the house. She had no idea if the logs would last the night, but it looked like enough. The howling wind chased her inside, and she imagined that it was a great monster, pursuing her, bellowing at her door, shrieking through the chinks in the walls and roaring up through the floorboards.
Enough of being fanciful, she told herself sternly. She had work to do.
She stacked the wood in the bin beside the stove. Surprisingly, after all that activity, she felt slightly flushed and more hungry than ever. The pantry offered virtually nothing. Tom Silver had either taken the excess supplies to the mainland or sealed them away in barrels in the cellar under the trading post. Leaving food out, he had explained, only invited marauding bears or the occasional squatter or trapper.
She found a small jar of salt and a tin of cornmeal. Supper consisted of three spoons of cornmeal cooked in melted snow. The bland and thick-textured meal stuck in her throat, but she forced herself to swallow. Tomorrow she would get into the trading post and find something a little more appetizing.
With something akin to relief, she set about making a bed for the night. Since there was no need for privacy, she dragged the mattress over near the stove and piled it with rough wool blankets. Her damp skirt, stockings and shoes steamed when she hung them on the back of a chair to dry. How remarkable to think only a day had passed since she had fallen into the stream.
Deborah Beaton Sinclair used to have one, sometimes two skilled maids to help her with her nightly toilette. They used to remove her clothes with reverence, exclaiming over the perfection of the French fashions. They would put her in a gown of white cotton lawn so finely woven that it felt like soft water against her skin. They brushed out her hair until it glowed, gave her a cup of chamomile tea sweetened with honey and asked if she had any other needs before she retired for the night.
She laughed when she thought of the Deborah who had so thoughtlessly accepted such treatment as her due. That shallow, uncomplicated girl existed no more. Now her “needs” had narrowed to the need to fill her belly and keep from freezing to death. And astoundingly, there was only one person present who was capable of fulfilling that requirement. Even more astoundingly, she had managed to do it and not die.
As she made a crude pallet and snuggled under the mound of covers in front of the fire, it struck her again how truly alone she was. Truly alone, for the first time in her life.
She stared at the louvered iron door of the stove, watched the flames dancing and prayed she would awaken in time to add fuel to the fire. And then, as the roar of the blizzard outside crescendoed, she squeezed her eyes shut and felt herself hurtling into restless sleep.
She dreamed of a bear, a great brown one like the one Nels had shown her at Gull Lake. The huge creature had tiny black eyes and a red, hungry mouth. Rearing up on two legs, it came at her and opened its mouth to roar. But instead of an animal bellow, a horrible tenor voice came out, singing Mozart.
The beast drew close, and she could feel the rank heat of its body, red pulsations surrounding her, thawing her, forcing her to feel again, licking at her.
Gunshot.
Deborah sat straight up, her heart pounding wildly, her body drenched in sweat.
Disoriented, the sound of the exploding gun ringing in her head, she clutched the blankets to her chest and cowered on the bed. Only it wasn’t a bed, but the pallet she had made for herself. And it wasn’t a gunshot, but a log popping in the fire.
Slowly, inexorably, reality broke over her. She was in the middle of nowhere. She was frozen in some eerie realm separate from the rest of the world, a floating icebound kingdom where nothing and no one could come near her. Sitting in front of the only fire she had ever made, Deborah pulled her knees up to her chest and stared into the blue heart of the flames. It was a dream. And now she was awake, and it was over.
Over.
She gave a short, sharp laugh that was filled with irony. She must be the only woman in the world who would awaken to the white nothingness of a blizzard and feel relief rather than alarm. Odd. She didn’t even remember falling asleep. She must have been more tired than she’d thought.
Just as a precaution, she took down the old buckshot gun from its pegs in the loft. Her hands shook a little as she loaded in the shot, remembering the shooting lessons at her father’s lakeside estate. Leaning the gun in a corner, she pushed a heavy trunk against the door and stared out the window. The nightmare gradually dissolved in a blaze of winter white, and she forced her attention to the matters at hand. First, the fire. Her intuition about it had improved, for she now knew how to lay the smaller sticks loosely on the coals, under the logs. She fiddled with the bellows until she figured out how to use them. She generated puffs of air to fan the flames, and saw with inordinate pride that the technique worked quickly and well. Once she had a nice blaze going, she heated water in the only pot she could find. She suspected that the well would freeze, and then she would have to melt snow for water. Yesterday the notion would have panicked her. Today she felt rather matter-of-fact about it
.
But first she should eat. The cornmeal did not tempt her and the thought of trying to make it into a pasty mush turned her stomach. She decided to go to the trading post and raid the stores. Tom and Lightning Jack had left very little behind, but surely she would find something edible.
When she opened the door, the wind practically snatched it out of her hand and smacked it against the side of the house. The cold bit at her with teeth of steel. She hauled the door shut again and pressed herself against it, breathing hard as if she had escaped the talons of a monster.
“All right, Deborah,” she said to herself. It was strange to hear her voice for the first time this morning. “For once in your life, think things through. Be prepared.”
She went about the room, shaking out the clothing she had hung to dry by the fire. For some reason, the nightmare still clung in her mind, hanging about like cobwebs in the corners of her thoughts.
As her mind wandered, she dressed in every article of clothing she could find, including an old soft flannel shirt she found hanging on a peg behind the door. When she put the shirt on, something unexpected happened. She was hit by a wave of scent that she recognized. The smell of the lake winds and the north woods and…Tom Silver.
She gasped, her heart knocking in her chest, and clawed at the garment, intent on getting it off. But as images of Tom penetrated her panic, she slowed down. She saw him in all his guises—the wild man bursting into her father’s house, the big protector saving a little girl from the flames, the mariner, the businessman, the trader. The man grieving for a boy he had loved as his own son. She had seen many facets of Tom Silver, but never once had she seen a man to be feared. And it was so odd that she had never feared him, for hadn’t he come blazing into her life for the purpose of shooting her father?
Yet even then, some subtle instinct had whispered in her ear that this man was not a killer.
Slowly, letting out her breath, she buttoned the shirt down the front. She put on her gray wool hat, pulled on her gloves…and was struck by the memory of Tom’s big, blunt fingers struggling with her glove buttons. He was everywhere, haunting every corner of this house, haunting every corner of her heart and mind. She couldn’t seem to escape thoughts of him, though she wished she could. She needn’t worry about him now, at any rate. He had gone to the mainland without her. She was all alone.
The coarse woolen blanket made a serviceable outer cloak. She was only going across the yard to the trading post, but the trouble was, when she looked out the window, she could not even see the end of the porch. The snow was coming down that thick.
Lowering her head into the wind, she went outside. The storm swept her footprints away as soon as she lifted her foot, and within a few moments, she realized she could not see the house. Blind with cold and panic, she groped her way back, praying she had not lost her bearings. When her shin bumped the stoop, she nearly wept with relief.
But instead of weeping, she fought her way back inside and paced up and down, trying to think of a way to go out without getting lost. She found a ball of twine and tied one end to the door handle. By keeping hold of the twine, she wouldn’t get lost even if the snow blinded her.
She took a deep breath, like a diver about to plunge in, and opened the door again. The icy wind sliced into her like razor blades, cutting her breath. The slinging snow threatened to drive her back inside. It was tempting to retreat, to simply curl into a ball by the fire and pray the storm would pass before she starved, but something extraordinary happened to Deborah Beaton Sinclair in those frozen moments. She became determined to survive.
She pulled in a deep, painful breath of the arctic air and then fought the storm, lowering her head and leaning into the howling wind. By the time she had gone ten steps, she could no longer feel her feet. Ten more steps and her fingers, chin and nose seemed to be gone. Frustrated, frightened sobs gusted from her and the cold seared her lungs.
Her shin bumped against something and she realized she had reached the steps to the back of the trading post. Stumbling with haste, she found the door.
It was locked with an iron hasp.
“No,” she screamed, pounding her fists against the stout wooden planks. “For the love of heaven, no!”
Hysteria would serve nothing, she told herself.
The ax. Get the ax. Back across the yard to the woodshed adjacent to the house, paying out the twine as she went. She found the long-handled ax suspended on the wall and took it down. It felt heavier than it looked. She had no idea how to use it, but was learning to turn terror into grim determination. Wading through the snow—it was waist deep now—she nearly lost her way, but found the door again and hit it with the ax.
The blow reverberated down her arms, but otherwise had no effect on the weathered wood of the door. With the next blow, the blade stuck into the wood, though not deeply enough to do any damage.
Deborah gritted her teeth and struck again. This time the blade sank into the wood, but when she wrenched it out, only a splinter of wood came with it.
“I’ll die if I stay out here much longer,” she said through her chattering teeth. The thought made her more angry than frightened. She pulled back and swung with all her might—at the lock, not the door itself. The frozen, brittle iron broke away, and the lock hung askew.
Tears of relief flooded Deborah’s eyes. She pushed her way into the dim, ice-cold shop and scavenged all the food she could find, filling a burlap sack with jars of maple syrup and applesauce, bottled berries, tinned meats, coffee beans. Then she slung the sack over her shoulder and started toward the cabin.
The day had gone white. Pure, stinging white. She couldn’t see a blessed thing. If she took one wrong step, she could get lost and freeze to death just a few feet from the house. She gave a tentative tug on the twine in her apron pocket. The end still seemed to be tied to the doorknob. She staggered across the yard, hand over hand, stumbling and awkward with the sack of supplies on her back.
At long last she made it back to the warm cabin and nearly wept with relief. No time for tears, she admonished herself and peeled off the outer layers of clothing. Her face, hands and feet prickled and burned as they thawed, but she welcomed the sensation as proof that she had survived the ordeal. She built up the fire, then broke open a jar of applesauce and wolfed it all down right out of the jar, with a shocking lack of table manners. When she finished, she stared into the fire until she felt herself relax, her eyelids grow heavy and her breathing finally catch up with itself. Sleep beckoned, and she began sinking into a well-deserved nap.
Survival—it was an exhausting business.
TWENTY-ONE
The horse gave out at sunset the second day, keeling over like a felled oak. Tom leaped out of the saddle as the big-boned shire gelding collapsed, narrowly escaping being pinned beneath the huge carcass.
A steady stream of obscenities erupted from him as he fought to extract the saddlebags from the saddle. Fifteen hundred pounds of dead horse made for a considerable struggle, and Tom had to retrieve his belongings by cutting a perfectly good saddle to pieces.
While he worked, Deborah’s dog huddled against his chest, pressed between his layered woolen shirts. Tom hadn’t wanted to bring the critter along, but a mile from the settlement, he’d heard a muffled yapping sound and turned to see the dog leaping through the snow after him. The fool thing had followed him. He’d sworn, scooped the thing up and thrust it inside his coat.
He cursed again as he looked down at the shire. The liveryman at the lakeshore settlement had declared the big workhorse a “sound” animal and had sworn he’d make it to Thunder Bay even in the midst of the storm. Thunder Bay was the closest spot on the mainland to Isle Royale. Assuming the lake had frozen hard enough, Tom could cross the ice to the island, a distance of just ten miles. It was the fastest way he knew to get there.
But he hadn’t counted on losing the hired horse.
Hell, he hadn’t counted on anything that had happened since the great Chicago fire, no
w that he thought about it. Each event seemed to lean on others, and when one situation changed, everything else did too.
His first impulse, after realizing he had to return to Isle Royale for Deborah, had been to go by boat. By that evening, the first blizzard of the year walloped the lake, and it was impossible even to launch, much less navigate. Even so, Lightning Jack practically had to tie Tom up to keep him from going out on the lake after her. “Tiens, you will do the girl no good if you die,” the old voyageur had railed at him. Lightning Jack and the others had begged him to wait for the storm to pass before he set out to find her. He had waited for as long as he could stand—perhaps a whole hour before worry gnawed a huge hole in his patience. Lightning Jack had forced him to wait for first light and provision himself properly.
Jack had even tried to come along, but Tom had argued him out of it. There was no sense in both of them going. In the end, he had gone off without saying a word, because he was sick of hearing about the dangers of traveling through a storm along the lakeshore, with the jagged tops of the Sawtooth Mountains hemming him in from the west.
Tom had scoured the area for a team of dogs, but there was none to be had. He’d settled for the draft horse and left at dawn. The horse had been balky and slow through the day and had coughed the night through in the shelter Tom made inside a snow-draped cedar tree the first night. Now the damned thing was dead and stiffening fast in the arctic weather.
After struggling for about an hour, Tom managed to collect the most necessary items—a thick blanket, matches, dried fish, a knife and a pistol. He tied everything together and fashioned a knapsack out of the blanket, fitting it on his back the best he could.
He had to get to Deborah.
Since the first, gut-squeezing moment when he had realized she’d been left behind, that one thought had pounded in his head, his chest, and telegraphed itself along every limb. She’d been left behind in a blizzard. He could not—would not—rest until he went back for her.