by Peter Geye
Maybe he could get home without it. For all the time he’d spent facing south and east, maybe he could tell those directions by sniffing them out and get home by instinct, with help from the sun and the stars. Maybe. But what about those wide-open spaces? The ten-mile lakes and deep rivers and streams winding through the cold and relentless woods? All of those places came back to him as a terrifying memory, and he knew that without the compass he was little better than a blind man.
Gus sat down on the bunk again and looked over at his father. “We only have one compass. I’m going to take it when I leave.” Harry still did not look up. “I’m going to finish getting my things together and go this morning. I don’t see any reason to wait around here.”
Finally, his father’s face fixed on him. “Okay,” he said, “we can go. But I think we ought to wait till tomorrow. We need to put ourselves right. Make sure we take only what we need.”
“I’ve already figured that out. One light pack. Skis and snowshoes. I’m leaving today.”
“Listen, Charlie won’t come back so soon. The reason he burned all our meat is because he wants us to suffer. To panic. He’s taunting us.”
Gus just stared at him for a moment. “I don’t really care when Charlie’s coming back or what he’s doing. I just want to leave. Today.”
“We’ve gone long enough without a plan. That’s my fault, I know it. And I’m sorry. But let’s put the right packs together and think carefully about what we’re doing. About how we’re going to get home. We can leave tomorrow morning, the minute the sun comes up.”
When Gus didn’t respond, Harry stood up, took the pot from the table, and added water for more coffee, then said, “Let’s have a look at those maps you’ve been drawing.”
—
There was little to plan or do. They studied Gus’s maps and compared them with the ones Harry had drawn months and years earlier, the books opened like two songs being sung, each over the other. For different reasons both of them worried Gus, but neither as much as the days that surely lay before them.
Harry cleaned and oiled the Remington and the pistol before gathering his own kit. They were both packed and ready before lunch without so much as a word between them. After they ate—rice and dried fruit, a chocolate bar for Gus—Harry brought the maul in from outside. He lined up the moose antlers on the floor, then stood there and looked at them for a long time. What he was pondering was something Gus never even guessed about, but he himself could not imagine those beasts’ anguish as their antlers locked. The horrible dance they must have enacted before tripping over each other and falling onto the shore, their eyes just a foot apart. What was one seeing in the other? How hotly did their breath mix in the small space between them? Gus scrutinized the antlers, and what a miracle it was how perfectly they were interwoven, how strong the fibers were that held together the symmetry of their entanglement. More than anything he wondered at their fear when the wolves finally came. For surely they would have come.
Harry swung the maul almost in concert with Gus’s final thought. Three swings it took to splinter the antlers apart. Their skulls cracked and rotten teeth scattered across the wood floor. The bone plates at their base split like logs. His father picked the pieces up and laid them into the stove, where the marrow hissed deliciously.
Harry set the maul beside the door and readied a fishing line, then put on his coat and grabbed the wooden bucket and went outside. Gus watched him go to the hole he’d cut in the lake ice, pull off the covering, sit down on the upturned bucket, and drop his line in the water, as if this were just another day of fishing. He stood at the window and watched for an hour, maybe two, until his father came in without anything to show for his effort but two gallons of frigid water.
Gus could not have imagined the depths of his father’s thoughts as he sat out there fishing in the cold. Nor the expanse of his memory, nor the horrible things held within it. It was no fault of Gus’s that this was true. No fault at all.
Instead, Gus reckoned how impossible it seemed that his father could have spent all these hours and days and weeks up here without giving a single thought to how they would get out. To have left as they did, Gus could see that. Harry had been betrayed and cuckolded, so his anger was explanation enough. But to have had all the time in the world to parse things out and come up with nothing, to have failed to see how he’d endangered them in so many different ways, that seemed—and always would, even with the benefit of thirty-odd years—the most intractable, unforgivable fact of their misbegotten adventure. And then there were all the years afterward, with hardly ever a word between them about their time up on the borderlands. What had those decades of silence actually meant?
They ate an early dinner of rice and Gus filled the stove with wood he’d cut. Before it was dark, they turned in for the last time in the shack. Gus did not dream, at least not that he remembered. But every night after, for years and even sometimes still, he dreamt of fire.
THE WINDOW SHATTERED and the floor beneath the stove and his father’s bunk erupted in flames, the suddenness of all that light and heat meteoric. Gus fell from his bunk as Harry jumped through the fire with the bearskin over his shoulder. “Put your pants on!” he shouted. The flames already governed the shack. “Grab your coat and boots and get the hell out of here!”
Harry had his arm up shielding his face. “My Lord!” He ran over to Gus. “You’ve got five seconds!” he cried above the pealing flames. “Take the sleeping sack, the pack, and get moving.”
Gus didn’t need any encouragement. In the time it took his father to bark his orders he’d put his pants and boots on and pulled his sleeping sack free. He had one hand on the door and the other on the Duluth pack, but the door wouldn’t budge. He put his shoulder into it three times in rapid succession, then stood back and kicked it with the heel of his right boot, but it didn’t give an inch.
Harry was standing beside him, still in his long johns but already wearing his boots and his red hat. “Stand aside,” he hollered, his face glimmering with sweat. Even before Gus stepped back his father was swinging the maul at the door. Only because he’d used it on the moose antlers was it in the shack at all.
He swung wildly as the shelf above the stove collapsed in flames. Harry’s bunk was engulfed and his sleeping sack blazing. After three or four heavy swings the door flew off its hinges. A piece of split oak had been wedged between the handle outside and the doorframe. The cold air that came rushing in whipped the flames up to the ceiling, and the trusses lit like tinder.
Both Eides fell out the door, Harry pushing his son forward. Under the weight of his pack Gus tripped in the snow, fell on his back, and stared up at the shack. The glare of the fire bright in the doorway. Smoke seething from chinks in the rough-sawn walls. His father started back inside and Gus hurried to his feet and raced to the door himself, lifted his arm over his mouth, and stepped inside.
For all the smoke, he couldn’t tell where his father was. The heat was hellacious and he jerked his coat and his mittens from the peg by the door, straddled the threshold, and screamed “Dad!” but couldn’t hear his own voice above the howling flames and the pops and cracks of the old wood.
One of the joists crashed down and sprayed fire in every direction, blasting Gus out of the doorway and onto his back in the snow again. When he looked up his father was beside him, the bearskin in one hand, the Remington in the other.
“Is the pistol in your pack?” Harry asked.
Gus nodded yes.
“Loaded?”
Gus nodded again.
“And the maps?” Harry said.
“Yes.”
They had to shout in order to be heard over the roar.
“What else you got in there?”
“Tent. Change of clothes.” Gus unbuckled the Duluth pack quickly and dug through it. “Rope. Field glasses. Canteen. Compass. Saw and hatchet. Some chow.”
“Here.” Harry magically produced one handful of dried fruit and another of chocol
ate bars and stuffed them into the pack. When another ceiling truss crashed to the floor, Harry flinched and looked around blindly, then turned to face the darkness. “Goddamnit,” he said. “Goddamnit.” He checked the Remington and realized the cartridge was empty. He dropped the gun, stepped toward the burning shack, paused for a heartbeat, then made a second dash inside.
Gus followed, shouting for him to stop. But in the inferno his father either couldn’t hear or wouldn’t listen and Gus could only stand there, the heat from the fire masking the bitter chill of the air. He could feel the first on his face, the other at his back.
It was only a few short seconds before Harry dove from the doorway and landed on his coat, which he’d covered his head with. Standing up, he tossed Gus the ammo and pulled his coat on. Then he grabbed the snowshoes from the snowbank where they’d been lodged, handed Gus a pair, stepped right next to him, and spoke softly into his ear, as if to keep these instructions secret from the flames.
“Put those on. Make sure everything’s in the pack and get over to the oaks as fast as you can.” He reached into the pack and pulled out the Ruger, checked that it was loaded, flipped on the safety, and handed it to him. He leaned again to Gus’s ear. “Wait for me in that blind you were using. Don’t make a sound. Keep alert. Be ready.”
Gus did exactly as his father said. He stuffed the bearskin and sleeping sack in the pack, cinched it up and buckled the straps, pulled it on his shoulders. He slipped the tumpline over his forehead and looked around to make sure he had everything while he strapped the holster around his waist.
And then his father was gone. Gus had no idea if he’d disappeared back into the shack or out into the woods or simply turned to smoke himself. Panic welled up but he quelled it as fast as he’d felt it and ran through the weakening glow of the fire until he was halfway across the lake, where there was no light at all. He ran hard, his lungs burning, the snowshoes landing softly and soundlessly on the snow, the Duluth pack clumping against his back. He glanced over his shoulder twice but saw only darkness and the distant fire blooming beyond it.
When he reached the shore he stood behind the nearest tree. Slumped over with his hands on his knees, he finally caught his breath and looked back across the bay. He felt the wind on his face and soon could smell the fire, faint and almost pleasant from a quarter mile away, and growing even as he watched. He heard the boom of the roof collapsing, and in that same exhalation the cache and the closest trees were set ablaze. The glare of the flames was now even brighter and he thought by some miracle he could feel their heat from where he stood. Was such a thing possible? Through all of that cold, could the heat abide?
He peeled the tumpline from his forehead and let the pack slide from his shoulders. He checked the pistol himself, then sat on the pack with his back against the tree. Could he really have been sound asleep in his bunk ten minutes ago?
—
It might’ve been an hour later and the fire still burned. The shack was rubble except for the fieldstone chimney. The cache was gone and two trees next to it stood naked of boughs, totems to that unholy night.
Shocked, sitting there against the tree, he felt a strange relief. For the first time since they left home in October, there was only one thing to do. It might be impossible, and they might get killed or die along the way, but there was no uncertainty anymore. Go south and east until they got home or died. Go fast and don’t ever look back.
Gus had hardly moved. He sat shivering against the tree, staring as the firelight across the bay faded in gradations until there was none left at all. He looked up at the sky and saw only the black dome of the cloud-covered night. He reached for the holster and gripped the Ruger. There was nothing left to think about. There was only the waiting, so he closed his eyes and did.
What came next was a voice not his father’s calling out of the night, from the frozen bay. There was a loud, wolflike howl and then Charlie Aas shouted, “Now for the fun part, you lousy sons of bitches.”
Gus pressed his face against the bark of the tree and felt his pulse from his temples to the soles of his feet. He peeked over his shoulder and saw him silhouetted against the firelight perhaps fifty yards offshore. Gus could see him switch a rifle from one shoulder to the other.
“All these years you fool Eides have bird-dogged with the Riverfish clan,” he shouted, his voice seeming nearer than his body, “and still you don’t know any better than making a trail like a circus leaving town? Old Freddy could track a trout up a stream, that one. But a blind man could follow these tracks. A blind man in the pitch dark.” Charlie played a flashlight over Gus’s tracks, shining the beam left and right, then lifting it into the woods, where Gus pulled his face behind the tree with the rest of him. The light couldn’t reach him but he was glad when Charlie turned it off.
“Of course,” Charlie called, then moved forward. “It’s only one of you pucker-assed pansies.” He switched the light back on and circled the beam all around; then it went out again. “I ain’t been shot yet. That must mean it’s young Eide on the yonder shore.” He cupped his ear and took several more steps toward the shore. “That right? You hiding in those trees, Gus?” Now he straightened up. “You’re every bit the candy ass your old man is, ain’t you, now? The world hates a gutless man.”
He lowered the gun to his waist and pointed it into the woods. “You got the dark on your side. I’ll grant that much. But soon the day will break. If you haven’t learned a goddamn thing playing woodsmen, I bet you figured that out.” He kept moving. “Tell me something, Gussie, you spend much time up here thinking about my daughter with your hand in your pants? You little fuck, you. You poisoned that girl. Yes, you did.” He took another step, and now Gus could make out the brim of his hat and the tufted fur of his open coat. “I’m gonna turn you into a damn eunuch. I got a bowie knife here could cut the balls off a dinosaur.”
Gus took a gulping breath and thought surely Charlie could hear the drumming of his heart and see the terrified whites of his eyes. Without moving his head, he looked to see the clouds breaking up and the starlight showering down. He slowly lowered his hand onto the pistol grip.
“You’ve been given every disadvantage,” Charlie barked. “I understand that. But the world makes no exceptions and neither do I. You should know it ain’t your fault you got found out there. Not one little bit. I want you to die knowing that much. But you should know it was your old man letting you down again. See, it was the smoke from his fire that put us onto you. We been hunting you boys for three weeks now. Might not’ve found you, either, if you’d saved your fires for the dark, like we did.”
Gus snapped the holster, slipped the Ruger out, and held it against his leg. After a long, slow breath he flipped the safety off, then slid down the tree trunk and lay prone on the snow behind the Duluth pack. He elbowed up onto it and raised the pistol. With his left eye closed he sighted Charlie Aas out on the ice.
“Who killed that bear, Gus? I brought a couple chunks home and had your mama cook it up for me. We had a real romantic time of it, she and I. We drank wine and supped and then spent the night tangled in your daddy’s sheets. Of course, it wasn’t the first time I bent her over that particular bedspring. Won’t be the last, neither.” He was silent for a moment. “Your sister made us breakfast in the morning. I thought about giving her a go, too.”
Gus blinked and took a deep breath before resting his finger on the trigger, thinking of his mother and of Signe and of this man being in their home. He squinted tightly and peered down the pistol barrel.
“That you moving around, youngster? Hiding behind a rock there?”
Gus aimed the pistol a third time and tensed his finger on the trigger. In the starlight he had him dead to rights.
“There’s not enough darkness to swallow your ass up. No rock big enough to shield it. Didn’t your daddy tell you the only thing you really needed to know?” Now he yelled, “I am the czar and master of these fucking woods! Everybody knows what you don’t, Eide! Ev
en your fool dad! And for that you will suffer greatly!” He howled again as he had out on the ice. “But I will wait until morning, so you can see the glint of my blade and the shine of my eyes as I smile down upon you.” Charlie shined his flashlight into the trees once more, then turned slowly.
Gus shivered and bristled and took another deep breath as he steadied his gun hand with the other. He sighted Charlie again and closed his eyes, then heard five rapid shots and opened them to see Charlie drop to his knees. Then Gus closed his eyes again, dropped the pistol, and curled up behind the tree.
—
He thought of those hours often. Too often, he was sure. There remained times, Gus told me, when he felt he was still brooking that darkness, times when a decade of his life seemed a trifle compared with the passing of that single night on the shore of the bay. But it must have ended, that night, because he remembered all the whiteness—the drifting snow, the pressing clouds hiding the rising sun, the frost on the pistol’s barrel—and how none of it, not even taken altogether, could bleach the blackness from that daybreak.
And he remembered his father crawling on hands and knees, from the direction of the blind that Gus hadn’t even managed to get to. In the hoary first light Harry put a finger to his lips and came up next to him and pulled the bearskin from the Duluth pack and wrapped himself in it, then laid his head back against the tree trunk and took a deep breath. “You all right?”
Gus squeezed his eyes shut.
“Hey!” his father said, the sound of his voice barely audible above the breeze. “Look at me.”
Gus opened his eyes. His father’s face was only inches from his own.
“Are you all right?”
Gus opened his eyes wider.
Harry grasped the back of Gus’s neck. “Did you see Charlie? Did he find you?”
My father let me kill him, Gus thought. He felt dizzy and closed his eyes against the whirl and didn’t open them until he was steady again. His father still had him by the neck, so he shook himself free.