As the sun gradually dipped on the horizon, N’ka began looking for a suitable campsite somewhere, but saw nothing promising to the north or the west, which stretched out flat and white forever. The south looked more promising, with a group of low hills huddled together at a distance of two or three miles, a smattering of vegetation along their lower fringes.
Beyond the hills there were real mountains, craggy and sudden, though not so high, and not so abrupt as the ones they left behind. They would camp in the green at the base of the hills, N’ka decided. He should have begun veering south an hour ago instead of daydreaming. The instant he shifted their course southerly, his mother slipped on the ice, landing flat on her back with a sharp exclamation.
N’ka swung around so fast that he nearly lost his own footing shuffling to her aid.
“Are you okay?”
She groaned.
Kneeling down, it was obvious from her dull and uncomprehending gaze that she was not okay.
“Mama,” he said. “Talk to me.”
She only groaned again.
He sat her up.
“Where are you hurt?” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Help me up.”
He helped her to her feet.
“That’s one way to get rid of a headache,” she said.
He held her under the arm for a step, as though aiding her in her forward progress.
“I can walk myself,” she said impatiently, pushing him off.
In spite of her insistence, the incident slowed her pace markedly. The farther they walked, the more her tempo slackened, the more evident it became that she was injured in some way.
Halting his progress, he turned back to her.
“Where are you hurt?” he said. “Is it your back, your leg?”
“Bah,” she said. “I’m fine. Just stiff.”
“You’re limping,” he said.
“I’m cold,” she said. “I’m tired, I want a fire. Now, keep walking.”
Though their progress remained excruciatingly slow, and his mother continued to refuse assistance, they managed to reach the wooded fringe along the base of the hills and located a small clearing before the sun had sunk completely below the horizon.
N’ka began hastily setting up camp, first scavenging sticks from amongst the scrubby trees that lined the perimeter of the clearing and heaping them in a pile. Next, he laid the ragged hides out, his mother watching, grimacing through her pain and exhaustion.
As N’ka tended to the fire, a sudden movement on the periphery caught his attention. When he turned to look, he saw a brown blur dart behind the measly cluster of trees to his left. He fixed on the trees momentarily, looking for further movement.
Rising slowly to his feet, he began to creep in the direction of the trees.
“What is it? Where are you going?” said his mother.
“Shhh,” he said.
Stealthily he moved out past the perimeter of the clearing into the brush, which dropped down into a swale ten or twelve feet deep. There he discovered a figure crouching in the brush at the bottom of the gulley.
She was just a child, maybe ten or eleven years old. The hide she wore was unlike any hide N’ka had ever seen, fitted and cinched about the waist with a strap of leather, unlike his own baggy, crudely cut garment.
“Hello,” said N’ka.
Though the child hardly stirred, N’ka saw her green eyes darting about for a possible escape route.
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “I do not wish to harm you.”
But the girl only looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“Where do you come from?” he said. “Are there others near?”
Still she could not apprehend his meaning.
As soon as N’ka reached out to take hold of her wrist, the child clambered up the far side of the gulch and darted off into the brush.
N’ka gave chase, twice losing his footing up the incline. When he reached the top, heart pounding, he furiously scanned the vicinity for the girl, but found no sign of her, or any indication as to which direction she might have proceeded.
“Come back!” he called out.
Though she left no discernible tracks through the underbrush, N’ka proceeded west for a quarter mile, presuming the girl belonged to the same band of westbound travelers who had been leaving signs in their wake all along.
He hurried along, dodging trees and boulders, eyes frisking everything he passed. Why did she run? Was it because she, too, had a mother somewhere teaching her to be wary of outsiders? Or was she alone and frightened? Lost on the ice? Every possibility only exacerbated N’ka’s sense of urgency. He must find her. But where? Where did she go, this girl, this other person, the only other person beside his mother that N’ka had ever been within arm’s reach of?
Before he could locate the girl, the light began to fade, and N’ka was forced to abandon his pursuit, hurrying back to camp in the gathering darkness.
He found his ailing mother huddled over the weak fire.
“And?” she said
“A little girl,” he said.
“Eh?”
“Her clan must be nearby,” he said.
“No doubt they’ve seen us coming for miles,” his mother said. “You’ll see, they’re trying to lure you away from me, and then—snap,” she said, with a whacking gesture.
“That must be it,” he said. “They must be afraid of you, the fierce old pessimist, so their plan is to lure me away from you. That makes sense. Surely, whoever they are, they can see they’re no match for a bitter old woman the likes of you. Now that I think about it, I’m sure that’s what’s been keeping the wolves away, too.”
“Bah,” she said, rubbing her feet. “Laugh at me if you want. But you will see.”
As she looked back into the fire, her eyes were smiling.
Travers Cartwright
“I kept telling myself to stay out of it, just let them be. Kris and I, we already tried to help, and it didn’t seem to do any good. Bella just ended up back where she started anyway. If anything, it turned her against us. It’s gonna sound like I’m making excuses, and that’s fair, but if there was one thing you should know about my brother, he was a capable guy, a lot more capable than me. He could hunt, he could fish, he could build, and he was just generally resourceful as hell. He could make a little go a long way. Look what he was able to do on the football field at five-nine and a buck-fifty. And on top of that, he survived three tours in Iraq, and the death of his wife. More than I ever survived by a mile. So if anybody could do just fine up there in the dead of winter, it was Dave.
“That’s what I kept telling myself.
“The thing that worried me more than the weather conditions was the talk of the sheriff’s office getting involved, which was probably my fault without getting too far into it. Anyway, the thought of cops up there made me nervous. Because I knew how proud Dave was, and I also knew that slow as he was to anger, if you pushed him too far, hell, he was likely to blow his top.
“In some ways, winter may have been a blessing.”
Almost Perfect
Finally, the heavy snow came falling in languid sheets, big, fluffy flakes like cotton fiber, ghostly in their descent. They settled on the little plateau above the canyon, gathering in drifts, muffling sound and reshaping the world. Confined by the plunging valleys, buttressed by the hulking palisade of the front ranges, the serrated edge of the Pickets seemed to pierce the living sky. The North Cascades truly were a wondrous place.
Bella was giddy with the arrival of the snow. Dave saw her crunching through it, saw her sliding upon it, saw her digging and burrowing, piling and flattening, and rolling in its white wonder. He watched her form it into bricks to stack into misshapen igloos, saw her rolling it into balls half the size of herself.
“Oh, Daddy, it’s the best snow!” she cried. “You can do absolutely anything with it! I made a throne for Boris, and he actually sat on it. You should have seen it! I tried to make a crown,
but it wouldn’t stick together.”
Her joy awakened Dave. After weeks of simmering apathy, he finally knew vitality once more, a heat in his blood, a hopeful beating in his chest. And for the first time since fall, he was motivated. He shoveled a clear passage in and out of the cave, and carved a path to the pit toilet, fifty yards downwind. No sooner did he set his shovel aside than he was drilled in the chest with a snowball.
“C’mon, Daddy!” she said. “Try and get me.”
And just like that, Dave was ducking and diving, crunching and rolling, and firing off snowballs.
“Time out,” he said, winded, holding up a hand to catch his breath, the grin on his face irrepressible.
To be alive again, God, but it was glorious! The rush of adrenaline, the crisp air filling his lungs, the glowing face of his daughter.
“C’mon, hurry up and rest,” she said, already leveling her aim.
Soon they agreed to an armistice, but only long enough to build opposing walls, and stockpile their arsenals. When the tips of their gloved fingers were numb, they charged at each other again and again, hurling and dodging, until finally they collapsed on their backs next to each other in the middle of the snowy meadow, where, panting and heaving, they looked up at the slate gray sky.
“Can we make a sled?” she said.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
And together they fashioned a sled made of cedar slats left over from the smokehouse, with a deck big enough to hold two bodies, and runners of bowed green hemlock, Bella holding the last runner fast, with numb fingers, as Dave fastened it. They hauled it out past the pit toilet, and through the woods past the smoke house, to a bald incline.
“You go first,” said Dave.
“Can we go together?” she said.
And so, with a running start, Dave launched them down the hill, and jumped on deck behind Bella, the sled holding up much better than Dave had imagined, the runners not bogging down as they swished down the side of the mountain toward the tree line, Bella squealing with delight. The runners started to mire at the foot of the hill, but not before they rode halfway up the berm and tumbled off into each other’s arms, laughing.
“Let’s do it again,” she said. “Oh, please, please, please.”
Dave would have stopped at nothing to preserve her joy. They launched themselves down the hillside again, and again, and again, Bella, red-nosed and panting, as Dave, light headed and short of breath himself, towed the sled back up the incline each time, until finally the runners were too wobbly to attempt another run.
“We can fix it tomorrow,” he said.
“Promise?” she said, just as the snow started to fall again.
“Promise.”
“Or we can build a faster one,” she said.
God, it thrilled Dave to see the sparkle back in Bella’s eyes, to hear the old singsong in her voice again! He looked at her smiling, cheeks red and chafed, lips ravaged from the frigid air. She was so exhausted on the hike back that Dave was forced to abandon the rickety sled and carry her the rest of the way, her warm, satisfied breath against his neck, her little arms clutching him securely. This day was as good as any he’d ever envisioned for the two of them: happy, healthy, connected. And all it took was a foot of snow.
Back on the bluff, back aching, heart full, Dave set Bella down by the pit and promptly started a fire, as Bella watched on.
“Don’t fall asleep. Just hang on a few more minutes, baby,” he said. “I wanna get some food in your belly.”
Dinner was a broth of squirrel, seasoned with a smattering of salt and rosemary, along with a tough hunk of jerked salmon. Dessert was a palm full of frozen blackberries. Afterward, Dave set the kettle on the glowing coals.
At dusk they ducked into the cave, Dave clutching the sighing kettle as Bella lit the lantern. Reinvigorated for the moment, she wrapped herself in a blanket and awaited the licorice tea that Dave had been saving for months, unbeknownst to Bella.
Dave poured the hot water out into their enamel cups, and Bella blew impatiently at her steeping tea.
“Let’s read,” she said.
“Whatever you want, baby.”
And so they took turns reading aloud in the pulsing lamplight. They read about Nepalese holidays, and orangutans in Borneo, and about Jupiter’s great red spot, ten thousand miles across, Bella plying Dave with questions at every turn. Then they read about mandala sand paintings, and elephants of the African savanna, until Bella grew so sleepy she could hardly keep her head up. However, the moment Dave dimmed the lantern and they lay down side by side in the darkness, Bella immediately caught a second wind.
“Today was a perfect day, Daddy,” she said.
“I’m so glad,” he said.
“Except for maybe dinner,” she said.
“We can do better tomorrow,” he said. “There’s still a little venison in the smokehouse.”
“I love venison.”
“I know you do,” he said.
“Can we have licorice tea again?”
“It might be a little weak.”
“That’s okay,” she said.
With that they fell silent for a few minutes, until Dave was certain that Bella had fallen to sleep. But soon, to his dismay, he heard her muffled sobs.
“Baby, what is it?”
“I don’t want to die,” she said, her throat catching.
Dave’s heart ran like wax into the hollow of his stomach.
“Baby, you’re not gonna die,” he said, propping himself up on an elbow. “Not for a long, long time. Are you worried about something?”
She sniffed and swallowed.
“No,” she said.
“What made you think that, baby?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Because today was so much fun, I guess.”
“Baby, you’re just a little girl. You’re gonna live a long time.”
“But it seems like just two minutes ago I was five,” she said, fighting back a sob. “And now I’m eight already.”
Dave rolled over and clutched Bella.
“It goes faster when you’re younger, baby, I promise,” he said softly. “I hardly even remember anything before I was your age. Think about that. I’ve got like ten memories before I was eight. It’s like my life hardly started until then. And now I’m forty, and eight seems like three lifetimes ago.”
“But Daddy, I don’t ever want to die,” she said. “I love life.”
S’tka
For the second day in a row, S’tka’s movement over the ice was measured and excruciatingly slow. Her fall the previous afternoon had taken a toll. With each step, she winced, as the pain of her injured hip ran down her leg to the back of her knee, and up her spine to the base of her skull.
N’ka had grown irritable and impatient with her limitations. He worried, though never aloud, that they would not be able to keep pace with the elusive others as they moved west.
As always, she could guess at his thoughts.
“Leave me behind,” she insisted. “Go on up ahead, I will catch up to you eventually.”
“And leave you to die?”
“Go,” she said.
But N’ka refused to abandon her.
Time, however, was running out, and they both knew it. They hadn’t eaten in three days, and there was no sign whatsoever of game. Looking west, through the haze, over the frozen wasteland, there was still no discernible end to the ice, no hint of anything different, nor the tiniest whiff of N’ka’s paradise. Meanwhile, the cruel conditions of this perpetual winter showed no signs of abating.
Finding the elusive others seemed their only hope for survival.
With each mile, S’tka’s condition worsened. Each step seemed to require more effort than the last. Still she trudged on mechanically, too tired to think or reflect, her only impetus the dim promise that the cover of darkness would force them to stop eventually. The trail had long gone cold where the mysterious others were concerned. The best they could hope for now was
sleep.
For hours, they found no sign of life, nor any sign of recent habituation, neither footprint, nor distant voices on the wind, nor the cooling embers of a cooking fire. Finally, as afternoon waned, they made camp amidst a lonely stand of spruce at the base of the hills, with the craggy, ice-strewn mountains rising abruptly to the south, promising nothing in the way of comfort. Sometimes it was hard not to wonder at the Great Provider’s design. Why not give the people fur, like the beasts, if she intended for them to live in such an inhospitable place?
S’tka watched dully, massaging her aching joints, as N’ka built a fire for warmth. Only now did her thoughts resume with any lucidity, and the first among them was the thought of starvation. How much longer could they go before the ravages of hunger weakened them beyond the point of further progress? And what would they do then, just lay down on the ice to die? Hunker in a gulley to freeze to death?
N’ka, meanwhile, somehow managed to remain upbeat, as he busied himself making camp.
“Have you noticed it’s getting greener?” he said. “A little bit, anyway.”
“Yes,” she said, though in fact, she had noticed no such thing. At this point, they could have been walking in circles and she wouldn’t have known better. Her only meaningful guidepost the whole journey long had been the mountains they left behind days ago. All the rest had been sameness to her eyes, until the appearance of these new mountains to the south.
“We’re getting close, I can feel it,” he said.
“Mm,” she said, huddling closer to the flames.
She could no longer afford to doubt him. Either he was right or they would both perish on the ice.
Please, oh, Great Provider, let him be right. Let there be something better. For his sake, if not mine.
Legends of the North Cascades Page 24