We sat and watched the snow tumble down. A raven dropped out of the sky and onto the roof outside her window. It was unusual to see a bird out in a snowstorm, usually they sense bad weather coming and fly away from it, or else hole up. Find a dense tree and nest under the branches till the weather passes. The raven stood right next to the glass, so still you couldn’t even tell if it was breathing, its little black eye on us.
What if I got you something? I asked.
She opened her eyes. Got me something?
Like a squirrel. Or even a vole. Something small. Would that help?
All the tiredness in her face replaced by a hardness. I told you, I stopped that. A long time ago.
I know, I said. But I thought—
I don’t need it, she said.
No sound but the ruffle of feathers as the raven took flight. Nothing left but the print of his feet in the snow, soon those would vanish, too.
All I need is a little rest, she said and closed her eyes again.
I stayed next to her till she fell asleep. Whatever she was sick with, it seemed so much like how I got when I hadn’t drunk in days. But it mustn’t of been the same because a few days later she was out of bed, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, no trace of tiredness in her. No sign that she’d ever been sick at all. That winter, she was full of energy. She didn’t go back into the woods with me again but she spent more time than ever outside, working with our dogs, playing in the snow, riding the back of a sled round and round the yard with our youngest racers. She didn’t catch so much as a cold the rest of that season, she was the healthiest I’d ever seen her. Till the night she took a walk along the road and the next we heard of her, it was from a VSO knocking on the door in the early morning, telling Dad he would need to go into town, they had already took her body to the clinic.
The first night after Dad give Flash away, I run for hours, no real thought in my head but to keep moving. Your three priorities when you are in the wilderness are shelter, water, fire, in that order. There are lots of places in the woods to find shelter if you know where to look, hollowed-out trees or boulders where you can make a lean-to, or you can even dig a snow cave. When I finally wanted a rest in the earliest hours of the morning, I spent an hour or so on a lean-to, then made a fire and melted snow for water. The northern lights flashed across the black sky, pulsing green and white. I stopped for a minute and watched. Thought of the words Tom Hatch had wrote in the pages of the Kleinhaus book. If I do nothing else before I die, I will see the northern lights. He hadn’t managed to stay in Alaska long enough to see the lights, they was most active in the winter during nights that stretch out so long they eat up a good chunk of the day, too. It was my doing that he hadn’t reached the one goal he’d set himself before dying. Maybe he would come back to Alaska someday, not to fetch his pack but to make good on this small dream he’d wrote down. Or maybe I had ruined that for him, too.
I got up then, kicked snow over the remnants of my fire, then ventured away from my temporary camp to see what I could rustle up for breakfast. But the woods was quiet that morning. I set a snare to check after I got a few hours’ sleep, but when I come back there was no catch. So I kept moving.
I didn’t let myself think that first day. Not about Scott’s blood, fresh on my hand, and what it give me when I licked it away. No regret about how I couldn’t resist it. No anger at losing Flash, or at the way Dad had looked, stupid and mean and small with a spray of snow across his coat. No worry about Jesse, who I trusted about as far as I could toss him. Running freed me from all of that. Emptied me out. I filled the space that was left with the sky and the trees and the anticipation of whatever I’d find that day to warm my insides. I destroyed my camp and made a new one, deeper in the woods. Climbed a tree and watched the split stick trap I’d built. Waited for movement in the snow. When there wasn’t none, I moved again, deeper into the wild. Farther away from home.
The second night, warm in the sleeping bag I brung along and with the coals of a fire at the mouth of my shelter, there wasn’t anything to do but think. I watched the smoldering coals and remembered spotting Dad and Jesse making their way down the rows of doghouses with their shovels and spades. I had come out to help with the work, but Dad’s voice stopped me before I crossed the yard. He was talking nonstop, I couldn’t make out the words, just the tone of his voice and the way it rose and fell, the music of it. I remembered that enthusiasm, the way it would spark off of him and ignite something in me, a kind of electricity between us as we argued good-natured about which dog run best with which.
Dad and Jesse moved like a man and his shadow. Dad fell quiet, and Jesse spoke up. His voice wasn’t very loud, even when he hollered his voice didn’t carry.
Then Dad laughed. The sound of it rolled over the snow, brightened every dull metal surface and shrunk the early evening shadows. A rare sound after Mom died, a sound I didn’t hear often enough.
Even I had to admit, whatever Jesse’s aim was, he had made things better. In the few weeks he’d lived with us, the yard, the house, the dogs, all of it seemed more like Before than After.
I pushed Jesse from my mind as the last of my fire died, turned over to chase sleep down its narrow rabbit’s hole. My belly complained. I laid open-eyed, watching stars wink at me between the branches of my shelter. I could still taste the last thing I’d drunk, Scott’s worry and irritation still clinging to me. I knew it was only my imagination, but I felt his blood on my lips, coursing through me, pulsing inside my head. Tomorrow, I told myself. I would catch a critter and drink my fill, and it would bury Scott deeper inside my head, replace him with the wildness of a hare or a marten, something that would let me run unburdened with thought deeper into the woods.
But there was no critter the next day. Nothing warm inside me. I pressed on, thinking of Peter Kleinhaus. Of how, nearly starving, he come across the carcass of some animal, so long dead he couldn’t tell what it had been. The bits of meat and skin left on the bones was frozen. I found a part I recognized, is what he wrote, some animal’s rib. There was no moment of decision, no thought at all. Only action. Only my hand to my mouth, the bone between my teeth. The animal, gnawing.
No catch, but I dug the knife from my pocket just the same. Opened the blade.
You expect someone vanishing out of your life to change things forever, and in some ways, it does. But not as much as you’d guess. Someone dies, and the dogs still need to get fed. Shit still needs to be shoveled. You go on eating, sleeping, waking up. Snow melts, trees and grass green up, the days grow longer then shorter again. The snow comes back, nearly a year has passed, and you surprise yourself by carrying on living, despite the worst.
The first winter after Mom died was like ripping the dressing off a wound that only begun to scab over. I spent most of my time in the woods. Tried to quiet my thoughts by hunting but I passed by the place where I’d caught and bled a marten the first time Mom come into the woods with me, and I walked through the clearing where she once showed me how to dig through a pile of scat to find out which nearby plants was good to eat. Every tree I seen, every rock and fallen log, everything was like a hole in the ground you forget is there. You step in it every time, twist your ankle and think, I have got to remember about that hole, but soon as your ankle stops hurting, you forget again, and the forgetting is what makes you step in that exact same hole the next time.
Mornings, I would wake confused by the silent house. I squeezed my eyes closed and listened for her in the kitchen, the gurgle of the coffeemaker, the sizzle of bacon as she cooked breakfast. But there was only a quiet so complete I could hear every part of my own body, all the sounds you can normally ignore. The thud of your heart. The wet rush of your breath. The sound of your eyelids the moment they open for the first time after sleeping, the gentlest pop followed by the rustle of your eyelashes parting. My stomach cramped, and a warmth spread under me.
I got up, cringing at the thought that I had wet the bed. Pushed back my covers and seen the blood, a l
ittle puddle of it soaking the sheet. Smears of it staining my thighs. I put my hand between my legs and my fingers come away slick and hot, coated in red.
I didn’t yet know what a period was, that it was natural and not so different from when one of our dogs went into heat. I wouldn’t find out till later that most girls get it earlier than I done, sixteen is awful late. Since that day, I have wondered why Mom never told me what to expect.
I run to her room, called out, Mom! but the word fell to the floor without her there to catch it. Blood trickling down my leg. My own blood. Coursing out of me the way it had drained from all the animals I’d ever killed.
Voices outside, Dad and Scott in the dog yard. I couldn’t let them see.
I barely remembered to put on clothes before I run out the back door, barefoot, into the snow. Sprinting across the yard and into the trees before anyone could see. When I was too out of breath to keep running, I walked, stumbled away from the trail, no direction in my mind but away. My head filled with a howling wind. Finally, legs wobbly and lungs aching, I come to a big tree with a hollow in it. I sat inside and wrapped my arms round myself. I never was one to get cold easy but that day I shivered so hard my teeth rattled.
My pants was stiff and red. I could smell myself, bright and metallic, and I wondered how long it would take to bleed to death. I could drain a smallish animal in just a few minutes. The woods was full of them, not just living animals I hadn’t yet caught but the ghosts of all the ones I had killed, hundreds, maybe thousands. Then there was the blood I had took from other people. I remembered sinking my teeth into Scott’s hand, remembered playing blood brothers with him when he was older. The taste of the boy from kindergarten who had got too close. The look on Aaron’s face when he seen what I done to our old cat, the burnt, electric flavor fear give his blood. Even as I regretted each one, I felt a craving in me.
I knew then I couldn’t go back home. I thought of our old dog, Denali, who died when I was about eight, he crawled under the back stoop and we found him a day later. Dad had said critters do that sometimes. Feel death coming and hide themselves away to greet it.
I climbed out from the hollow of the tree, still shivering, and started to walk.
I stumbled through the night, checked the traps I come across but every one was empty. I dug into my pocket, but my knife wasn’t there. I pushed snow aside, burrowed down to the cold ground like Mom had showed me, places where I knew good things grew, and I ate wilted greens and shriveled berries, as much as I could find. Still my belly ached and rumbled.
Come the next evening, I sat near a slender branch of the river and considered the stains on me. All the red. All the ways it come to me. The first critter I ever caught, I hadn’t wondered what to do with it. Drinking was natural to me and it didn’t occur to me till later that it might not be the same for other people. By the time I understood that Mom was the same as me, I come to think of drinking the way I thought of how you touch yourself in private. You know you must not be the only one to do it, but you understand it’s not something to talk about. It’s the nature of the thing to be hidden.
Mom had give me plenty of advice. She’d give me her rules. But she wasn’t here no more. I had to go back to figuring things out for myself. To taking what I could get, whatever way it come to me.
My fingers was numb. They fumbled with the button on my jeans.
After that, I wasn’t hungry no more.
It’s different when you take your own blood. Less satisfying. And you don’t learn from yourself the way you learn from an animal or another person. Instead, you see and feel and hear your own life as a sort of echo, images and sounds double up on you, like placing one transparent picture over another.
I laid down, my mind fuzzy and filled with muddy memories that reshaped themselves into dreams as I drifted off. I dreamed my dogs beside me, keeping me warm. Dreamed bears and wolves and moose all running through the woods. I dreamed Mom. She was a little girl, barefoot, leaves in her hair. Running past me, sleek and swift as the caribou and foxes she run alongside. She turned her head and seen me, put her fingers to her lips, like a kiss. Or a secret. Smiled at me and waved. Come on, come on! I wanted to get up and follow her. I couldn’t feel my feet. It took all my strength just to lift my head and watch her sprint away.
When Dad come round, I thought I dreamed him, too. Then I was flying, bundled in something warm that smelled of old campfires. Dad’s voice behind me, he kept saying, Stay with me, kiddo, stay awake. So I did. I watched the dogs in front of me, Marcey and Hazel, Boomer and Grizz. Old Su on the lead. My dogs, running me home.
When we got home Dad pulled me out of the sled, carried me inside. My feet was white, hard like stones to the touch, and numb. He run water in the tub, then held me as I sat on the edge, wincing as the lukewarm water washed over my feet, full of needles. Slowly, slowly, he let the water warm. I bit my lip, my feet numb and on fire at the same time. I gripped the tub. I know it hurts, it’ll be over soon, Dad said. We stayed there forever, me exhausted and clinging to him while he poured more water into the tub, more, his voice the same as the water, pouring over me, telling me he knew, it wouldn’t be much longer, it will be okay, I’m here, I’m here.
Seemed like hours before he finally emptied the tub and dried my feet, then he found me some thick, warm socks and said it was all right now, he didn’t think we needed to go to the clinic.
He wet a towel and drew the blanket away. I flinched.
Tracy, let me see, he said. You’re covered in blood. Where are you hurt?
The stains on my pants had crusted and browned, they looked more like old mud than blood. But I was still bleeding, I could feel it coursing out of me. My feet throbbed but I stood anyway, unbuttoned my jeans.
Oh—no, no. Stop. He stood, too. I didn’t realize.
He handed me the towel. I’ll let you clean yourself up, he muttered.
Then he left me on my own. Closed the door behind him. I done as he said, scrubbed myself clean. The blood kept on coming, though, it would for two days more. Eventually I learned what it was, and that it would come back. Gradually, specially when the woods was quiet and I found my traps empty, I come to see it as a gift instead of a curse.
Another night. Still no catch, the woods seemed empty of critters. My fire dead, my eyes dry with wakefulness. I watched the sky grow mottled with clouds that blotted out the stars, then finally give up trying to sleep. I dug through my pack and found the Kleinhaus book. I seen I had got the two copies mixed up, had left mine at home and brought Tom Hatch’s copy with me by accident.
Still, it was a comfort to read the familiar voice. Them first lines, setting the scene for adventure. Like most of my bad ideas, it started with desire. I flipped the pages, skipped the boring part before Kleinhaus come to Alaska, like I usually done. Come to the part where Kleinhaus falls through thin ice and panics, only to realize he can put his feet on the ground, the water’s only up to his chest. The time he gets attacked by a bear in early spring, so afraid to stop playing dead even after the bear has moseyed away, he ends up falling asleep. I thumbed back and forth through the book, reading snippets here and there, growing involved enough in the story again that I went back to the beginning to read the bits I usually skipped. I even forgot about the rumbling in my belly.
Till I come upon words that was familiar, but not because Kleinhaus had wrote them.
At age eight, I was taken in by my grandparents, longtime residents of rural Maine, retired teachers who had adopted mushing not as a sport but as a way of life. The dogs were transportation. They were farmhands. Employees, guards, companions. Occasionally, audience: my grandfather had taught English literature, and was the only musher, I reckon, who would recite Shakespeare while riding the back of his sled.
Jesse, laughing shyly as he brushed snow from his knees. The two of us handling the dogs together, me close enough I could make out the spray of freckles on his cheeks.
I turned the pages of the Kleinhaus book, bare
ly reading, only needing to remember now. After Kleinhaus’s grandparents died, he set out across the country. Spent some time in Montana, he’d worked on a cattle ranch before heading farther west. Later, he’d got a job on a commercial fishing boat in Ketchikan.
Everything Jesse had told us about his life, I could find in them pages. Every breath in him a lie.
I thought when I found the pack with the Kleinhaus book buried under bundles of cash that it belonged to the man I’d stabbed, a stranger who had stumbled into our yard spilling blood and desperate for help. A man who would come back, I had been certain, because if he’d bothered carrying that much money into the woods, odds was he needed it. Tom Hatch never did pay us a visit, but the owner of the pack had come back after all.
I got up, rolled my sleeping bag, patted my pocket and found my knife where it always was. I had left the pack I’d thought belonged to Tom Hatch under my bed. I’d used most of the money for race fees. If Jesse found his bag in my absence, what would he do when he seen most of his money was missing? And that was assuming money was all he wanted. Before he showed up asking to trade his labor for a home in our shed, he’d watched us. From the kennel, from the edge of the trees, from the brush near the traps he’d stole from, he’d observed and waited, biding his time—for what? You don’t spy on a family for weeks if all you really need to do is knock on a door and ask if anyone’s seen a red backpack you lost in the woods.
My limbs grew warmer the faster I went. I pushed through brush and bare-limbed trees, waded through places where the snow had built up in drifts. Before, I’d pushed every thought of Jesse out of my head, but now he was all I could think of. Dad trusted him, but he didn’t have all the information. I seen Jesse stealing up the stairs at night, so familiar with the house by now that he knew to avoid the step that always groaned underfoot. Understanding from the nights he’d seen me sneak out that Dad would sleep through anything. Maybe he would only search silently, then disappear and leave Dad to wonder where he’d got off to. Or maybe he wouldn’t risk leaving anyone behind who could report him missing or describe him to the VSO.
The Wild Inside Page 12