In the kitchen, our two retired dogs, Homer and Canyon, lay by the woodstove. Each day, we give one racing dog a turn to be the house dog, today it was Old Susitna. She was the dog who led Dad to both his Iditarod wins, but she was coming up on retirement soon. She got up to greet me, nosed my hand to see if I had treats. I give each dog a good scratch.
Dad stood at the sink, sipping his coffee. He had let me sleep through breakfast, and he’d already took Scott to school and come back again. The eggs and slices of bologna he had fried up that morning was still on the stove, cold. I folded the bologna in half and ate it in two bites.
Dad drained his mug.
Sleep all right?
I shrugged.
Hope so, he said. Going to need plenty of energy to get through that list of chores.
I skimmed the scrap of paper he’d left on the table and seen that he had found plenty to keep me busy and not just away from the dogs but inside the house most of the day. Vacuuming, dusting, mopping the kitchen floor, the only thing on the list that got me out of the house was number one, Clean out the Shed.
It wasn’t the chores I minded. I knew it was a trade, that you have to work for what you get. That seemed fair to me. What wasn’t fair was the nature of that list. It was another punishment, except it was one he snuck up on me. It would be dinnertime before I finished every chore on that list, and then he would tell me to do my schoolwork, and when I finished that, he would remind me I wasn’t to go into the woods, not as long as I was grounded. He thought taking the outdoors from me was the same as taking Scott’s comic books or his old camera from him, but it wasn’t. My stomach clenched and I breathed deep, tried to push a lid down on the panic rising inside me.
Better get started, Dad said.
I followed him outside, meaning to get the shed done first. The sky was low, full of solid clouds, white and heavy. Everything still. Days like that usually smell flat, clean. There is electricity in the air, your skin tingles with it and you know soon snow will blanket everything. Underneath, you can still catch the fuzzy scent of fall, like wet leaves and rotted wood, things decaying and going back to the dirt. It’s an outdoors smell, a seasons-changing smell. A scent that don’t have nothing to do with people.
The day smelled wrong.
I seen him before Dad did. Before the dogs even got wind of him. Just where the trailhead spills into the yard, the stranger come stumbling out of the trees.
Then the dogs was barking, and Dad looked up to see the man stagger, fall. Dad dropped the axe he was holding. I watched him run to the heap of person. I was rooted where I stood. Thinking of the memory I’d woke with that morning. Mom asking, Have you ever come across anyone when you’ve been hunting?
Instead of what happened the day before, I remembered the time I come across a moose calf. The steel cable snare had been set too high, it caught the calf instead of the smaller critter it was meant for. I do not use snares unless I am waiting and watching, but there used to be a man who set traps so close to our property you could call it trespassing. The calf must of felt the cable round its neck and panicked, pulled at the cable, which only made it tighter, till the young moose was strangled. That’s when I come across it.
Tracy!
Dad’s voice jolted me.
Tracy, bring me a towel!
The stranger, motionless on the ground.
Move!
I tore myself from where I stood, run into the house. Then sprinted across the yard, it seemed to grow wider the longer I run, my legs wouldn’t move fast enough, till suddenly I was there, kneeling beside the stranger. The ground under him already red. The wound a puncture, a hole in the gut that opened and let the blood out.
Help me get him up, Dad said, and he pressed the towel against the wound. We need to get him to the clinic.
I leaned over the stranger. He had a set of old scars running across his face from eye to cheek, like claw marks, pink and puckered. I tried to recall the face that come at me in the woods the day before, whether I remembered scars, or the size of the hands that had grabbed at me. Were they the same size as this man’s hands, now gloved in his own blood? But when I searched my memory, I only seen a blur of green and brown, then the stars that had filled my vision. Then nothing.
I put my arm round him and made ready to help lift him when his eyes fluttered open. They locked on me, then got wide. He tried to speak, but all that come out was a wheeze.
It’s okay, Dad said. Stay calm. We’re going to get you some help.
The man clutched at Dad’s shirt. I staggered under his weight. He was taller than Dad and solid. We drug him like a felled tree across the yard and into the truck.
I’ll call you when I get to the clinic, Dad said.
Dad—
Shut the door.
He whipped the truck round, the tires spitting gravel. A cloud of dust left in his wake.
Quiet as a vacuum after so much commotion. The dust settling. My breath ragged, like I had just run a mile fast as I was able. The sky so white it hurt to look at it. Over in the dog yard, Marcey circled then settled in front of her house. Flash give a whine.
I tried to think, and tried not to think.
When I come upon that calf, I’d wondered how long it had been there, hanging by its neck. Not long enough to go cold or grow stiff, there was new snow all round but none on its body. I held my breath and waited. Watched for its flank to rise. A moose calf is big, they have real sharp hooves, and if it was alive I didn’t want to get too close, it might spook and clomp me.
I waited till I was certain. Then I used my knife.
But when I drew back from the slit I had made and the blood was spilling out, I heard the calf bleat. A sound so small I might of imagined it. Its eyes rolled, landed right on me.
And then it was dead, and it was dark outside, so much time had passed and I couldn’t account for any of it, except that I was still in the woods, running. I never give a second thought to that calf till I stood in the driveway with a layer of dust on my skin, thinking about my own knife, sheathed in the blood I’d cleaned off later on my pantleg, and about the stranger who’d stumbled into our yard, bleeding from a wound not deep enough to kill him.
When Scott was still inside Mom’s belly she would tell me, Put your hand here, and I would feel him kick. I pictured him like a sleek river otter, swimming with the current of her blood. Dad told me one time she wasn’t supposed to have another baby after it went so rough with me. The health aide warned her she would be sick and have to stay in bed till he was born, but Mom was fine. In fact, it was the only time I remember her skin looking warm and brown from the sun, she was fat and healthy all that summer, happier than I’d ever seen her. Planting her vegetables and weeding the raised garden beds right up till Scott come along. He was born in the clinic like regular babies, a skinny, long-legged thing. He smelled funny and looked like a hairless opossum. When he was small, I watched her bite his fingernails, one by one, and spit them out.
She said, Come away from there, Trace.
She didn’t like me standing over his bed.
Sit down, she told me. She lifted Scott from the crib then lowered him into my arms. Support the head, she said.
He was heavier than he looked. I was always pestering her to let me hold him. Now he was so close I could see the blue veins at his temples, just under the surface of his skin. He stuck his fist in his mouth and sucked on it.
Good, Mom said. You need to be gentle with him. Understood?
It was an accident, I told her.
You bit his finger till it bled.
He had screamed when I done that.
Be Gentle with the Baby wasn’t the only rule Mom give me when I was little. Rule Number One for being outdoors was Never Lose Sight of the House. After Scott was born, I could play in the yard and even go into the woods but not so far that I couldn’t still see some part of the house or the kennel or the dog yard. If I call you, Mom said, and you don’t come running, I’ll know you’r
e too far from home.
I was almost five, too small to trap or hunt, but I could run all day and never get tired. I wanted to be outside from sunup to sundown, even when winter come along and the days got short, the dark didn’t scare me and the cold never bothered me much. From far enough away, the windows of the house was just squares of light, when you slipped behind a tree the glare from the squares went away, the woods grew darker and you could see better. What was once just shapes and shadows sharpened to become a rock or a snarl of roots at the base of a tree.
Before I learned to read books, I learned to read the woods. I crouched against a tree trunk and learned why squirrels come down to the ground even though they could travel limb to limb. I learned that a chipmunk will make the entrance hole to its tunnel under a rock or a fallen tree so there is no mound of dirt to attract its natural predators.
At first I was content to sit and watch, it was like television. Except the chipmunk show and the squirrel show was better than anything on TV. You watch critters like them long enough, you learn their habits and, one day, when you are six or seven and you have found a large stone, you pick a tree near the entrance hole and do not move even when you hear your mom hollering your name. You sit, barely breathing, pretty soon all the sound drains away, except the sound of claws scratching against dirt, and then it pokes its head out but still you do not move, you wait till it darts across the ground right in front of you, and then you bring the heavy stone down.
That first time, I missed, I did not brain the chipmunk the way I intended but crushed its leg and when I picked it up to finish the job, it wriggled and bit me. I howled and dropped it, then stomped it with my foot. The blood come then, trickled from its mouth and nose.
After that, I wasn’t content to learn just by watching.
Rule Number Two was Be Home for Dinner. I heard Mom hollering then, she must of been shouting and calling a long while. When I come running into the yard, I could see through the kitchen window dinner was on the table.
Sorry, I said to Mom.
What have you got all over you?
I showed her my hands.
Is that blood?
I brought my hand to my mouth, the blood was dry on my skin but I could still taste it.
Tracy.
She grabbed my hand away.
Go inside and wash up.
I done what she said. That night, she give me Rule Number Three, which was Never Come Home with Dirty Hands.
Dad’s list of chores was waiting but the woods grasped at me, till finally I give in and started to run. But I did not let it become the kind of running that give my mind a place to hide. Instead, I moved through the trees and every stride was a memory of the day before. I sprinted up the trail and thought of the tree with its soft, raw spot where I’d put my hand. I leaped over a fallen log. The squirrel in its funnel. Left the trail, weaved between bushes, splashed through the shallow creek. I turned round, and the stranger grabbed me. Then I’d took my knife out—
But after that, all I found was a wall, the one that had fell on me when my head struck the root. Next thing I could recall was coming off the trail yesterday, my belly warm. Then I was in the kennel, cleaning blood from the blade of my knife.
I reached the small clearing in the woods where I’d hunted the squirrel. Even if you wasn’t good at tracking you would of noticed the matted grass where two people had stood. The prints left by my own bare feet was easy to spot, they was small and you could make out all five toes. Beyond the clearing, the other set of tracks had to be the stranger’s, the feet that had made them was bigger than mine and had worn a pair of boots with fairly new tread. The blades of grass red where he’d stood, where he must of fallen. Little spots of blood leading back to the trail like the kind a moose will leave if you shoot and wound it and have to follow it through the trees till it collapses. I do not like guns, they are too loud and there is no art to them, but I have been hunting with my dad and am a decent shot.
I could see how the man must of staggered away from me, his path back to the trail marked by broken branches, a trampled patch of devil’s club. A bit of blue thread, snagged from his shirt by a prickly stalk. He’d stopped and put his hand out to steady himself against a tree, there was the brownish shape of a handprint, blood long dried, on the trunk of a paper birch. I touched the outline of the hand on the tree, but my fingers come away clean.
The snow started then, the hesitant small flakes of the first snow of the season. They fell fast and thick, and soon the green and brown of the woods was blotted out by white. I begun to shiver. Not from cold, but from how my mind contracted, the thoughts in my head tighter as one possibility after another fell away and I got closer and closer to what every clue told me.
I had run into folks in the woods before, hikers and hunters, people just passing through. No matter who I come upon, though, they was always louder than me. I would hear their voices, brush rustling, sticks snapping underfoot, and I would shimmy up a tree or lay in a patch of tall weeds and wait till they passed. Always thinking of what Mom had told me, that if I come upon someone lost or hurt, I should run home. But the hikers wasn’t lost and the wanderers didn’t seem hurt, and no one I ever crossed paths with seemed specially dangerous. I didn’t see the point in running home for no reason when I could hide long enough to be alone again, then carry on with my hunt.
Tiny flakes landed on my skin and melted, stuck to my clothes. I left the clearing, pushed through brush on my way back to the trail. The snow drifted down heavier, everything clean and white. Except for a scream of red as I reached the trail—a backpack half-hid by a leafless bush. Hid, or dropped by someone who didn’t have the strength to keep carrying it?
I kneeled and opened it, then pulled my hand away quick, as if it had snapped at me. The money inside was loose. I dug out a handful of bills, ones, tens, twenties. There was maybe a little over three thousand dollars, all told.
Holy shit.
Other stuff inside, too. Matches, a rolled-up tarp tied with a thin rope. A plastic bottle half full of water. A thin, worn-out sleeping bag that wouldn’t be much warmth once the weather got colder. Some socks, a pair of gloves.
At the bottom of the pack there was a dog-eared paperback I recognized. I could of recited parts of it by heart, including the first lines: Like most of my bad ideas, it started with desire. I desired a different life, a chance to know who I could be. I desired the solitude required to hear one’s inner voice. And so I came to Alaska.
The stranger must of loved the Kleinhaus book as much as I done if he bothered to bear the unnecessary weight of it as he walked through the woods. I should of felt even worse, knowing me and him had something in common, we might of got along if we had met under different circumstances. But a hardness rose up in me.
I dropped the book back inside the pack. Went to shove it back under the bush where I’d found it, then hesitated. If the stranger didn’t bleed to death in Dad’s truck or at the clinic, odds was he would come back. The book, the money—you don’t leave what belongs to you behind, specially something so valuable.
Then again, he’d come into the yard bleeding an awful lot. And even though a few thousand dollars seemed like a fortune to me, I had seen how little time it took for Dad to blow through that much money, and he wasn’t a frivolous person. He’d won the Copper Basin 300 right before Mom died, and come home with about that much in his pocket, but once there was a funeral to pay for and no more money from sponsors or from Mom training other people’s dogs, a few thousand bucks dried up fast. For a grown-up, specially one that had nearly got killed in these woods, was the money in the pack a sum worth coming back for?
It was true, what Dad said about the entry fees for the races I wanted to run. I wanted to trick myself into believing that somehow we could afford to pay almost twelve hundred dollars for the Iditarod alone. But I wasn’t about to give up my chance to run the Junior, at least. Problem was, I didn’t have no money of my own to enter.
Till now.
I shouldered the pack and started running again. I couldn’t say how long I’d been gone and I needed to beat Dad home if I didn’t want him to see what I’d found.
When I got back, his truck was still gone. I shoved the pack under my bed, then come down to the kitchen and stoked the fire in the woodstove. Let the retired dogs out to do their business. Looked at my list of chores. There wasn’t time to properly start number one, Clean out the Shed, so I moved on to numbers two and three, Sweep the Kitchen and Wipe Down the countertops. My ears straining for the sound of the truck in the drive as I worked.
I was on number four, Do the Dishes, when he got back. His truck rolled up the driveway alone, no VSO following behind, and no passenger riding along with Dad. I let go of the breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding. Dad climbed out, his face grim. My legs went watery. I gripped the edge of the countertop, and hated myself for the hope that welled up in me.
Dad stomped his boots clean of snow in the mudroom, then went over to the coffeepot, it was cold but he poured himself a cup anyway and sipped it, black. He didn’t say nothing, just leaned against the counter, drinking. Watching me rinse a handful of forks and butter knives. My throat so dry it clicked when I swallowed.
He’s all right, he said finally.
I put the silverware down so he couldn’t see how my hands begun to tremble.
You talked to him? I managed to ask.
Dad shook his head.
I talked at him plenty. To keep him awake on the drive. But it was the nurse who told me he ought to be okay. I stuck around and filled out his paperwork best I could. Had to go through the man’s wallet just to find out his name. Tom Hatch. He ain’t from around here.
So he ain’t dead? My voice cracked.
He lost a lot of blood, Dad said then laughed, it sounded like a bark. He said, You should see the truck, blood everywhere. Trace, you always keep your knife on you, don’t you?
The Wild Inside Page 3