Brian's Return (7 page)

He passed not twenty feet from her but all she did was keep chewing on the root, water dripping in golden drops from her muzzle, breaking the surface like jewels. It was as though she hadn’t seen him— and perhaps she hadn’t. Moose, he had read, had terrible eyesight and she may have thought he was merely a log drifting by. Before he had passed by, she had put her head beneath the surface again, looking for more roots. Brian went back to studying beauty.

All that day he felt as if he were in a painting, a beautiful private diorama. He worked through a sheltered narrow lagoon and then out into the open to cross a small lake, then back under the canopy through the still water.

He had never had a day pass so quickly nor so beautifully and he nearly forgot that he had to find a camp and get some food before dark. He wasn’t sick of boiled fish and rice yet, so in the late afternoon he took time to move back along the lily pads and drop the hook over. He caught a large sunfish immediately—again, on a bare hook—and took three more small ones, dropping them all over the side using a short piece of nylon rope as a stringer, running the nylon through their gills and out their mouths.

He took his time looking for a campsite and picked one on a flat area five or six feet above the surface of the lake. It was a clearing about twenty yards across. There were many such clearings, probably all made by beaver cutting down the small trees years before, allowing the grass to take over. Brian pulled the canoe well up onto the grass and for no real reason tied a piece of line from the boat’s bow to a tree.

Later he would wonder at this bit of foresight. He had not done it the night before, and since this site was much higher from the water he wouldn’t have thought he’d need to secure the canoe here.

The storm hit in the middle of the night.

Dear Caleb: Nothing much to report today, unless you count shooting yourself in the leg with an arrow.

It was not that there was so much wind—certainly not as much as he’d been through before with the tornado—when he was first marooned in the wilderness and not that there was so much rain, although there was a goodly amount of it.

It was the combination of the two.

He had cooked dinner and eaten, boiled water for the next day’s canteen, pulled his packs up in a tree, set up the tent and arranged his sleeping bag and weapons. Then he’d sat by the fire and written to Caleb about the day in one of the books, using tiny writing so he wouldn’t waste the pages.

When he was done he put the book back in a plastic bag and crawled inside the tent to go to bed.

Two things he noted but didn’t pay attention to: One, the mosquitos and flies were not as bad as they’d been. Two, with darkness a heavy cloud layer had come up, causing a closeness in the air.

He had studied the map. It looked as if he’d gone more than twenty miles, which explained why he was tired. About eighty miles remained to reach Williams Lake, maybe four more days at his current rate. He fell asleep almost as soon as he lay down.

He was awakened by a new sound, a loud sound. Not thunder—it never did thunder or lighten—and not the trainlike roar of a tornado. This just started low, the hissing of rain driven against the tent. He listened for a moment, then snuggled back in his bag. He was in a good shelter, waterproof—let it rain.

Except that it kept coming and
kept
coming. It went from a moderate rain to a downpour and finally to an outright deluge. And with the rain came wind. Not violent, but enough to break off branches and push the rain still harder, and soon Brian found his bag wet as the rain came in under the tent. He lifted the flap to look out but it was far too dark to see anything.

And it rained harder. And harder. The wind pushed stronger and still stronger and at last the tent seemed to sigh. It collapsed around him and he started rolling across the grass toward the edge of the clearing.

Everything was upside down, crazy. He couldn’t find the entrance and about the time he thought he had it the tent dropped off the five-foot embankment and he rolled down to the lakeshore.

He landed in a heap and felt an intense, hot pain in his right leg at the upper thigh and reached down to feel an arrow shaft protruding from his leg.

Great, he thought. I’ve shot myself in the leg. He hadn’t, of course, but had rolled onto an arrow that had fallen out of the quiver just as the tent rolled off the embankment.

He couldn’t get his bearings but he knew where his thigh was and he grabbed the arrow and jerked the shaft out of his leg. There was an immediate surge of pain and he felt like passing out. He didn’t, but then he heard a strange
whump-thump
and something crashed down on his head. This time he did pass out.

He came to a few seconds later with a sore head, a sore leg and absolutely no idea in the world what was happening to him. He was still wrapped in the tent and his bag was in his face and his bow and arrows lay all around him and he seemed to be in water, almost swimming.

All right, he thought, take one thing at a time. Just one thing.

I poked my leg with an arrow.

There. Good. I pulled the arrow out. My leg still works. It must not have been a broadhead because it didn’t go in very deep. Good.

My tent collapsed. There. Another thing. I’m in the tent and it collapsed. I just have to find the front zipper and get out and climb up the bank. Easy now, easy.

Something hit me on the head. What? Something big that thunked. The canoe. The wind picked up the canoe and it hit me.

There. I’ve poked my leg, rolled down a bank and been hit in the head with the canoe.

All simple things. All fixable things.

He fumbled around and at last found the zipper at the front of the tent, opened it and slithered out into the mud on the lakeshore.

The rain was still coming down in sheets, the wind still hissing and slashing him with the water, but he had his bearings and it was not impossible to deal with things. He dragged the tent back up the embankment onto the grass, limping as the pain in his leg hit him. It was too dark to see much but he could make out the shape of the canoe lying upside down. It had moved a good ten feet from where he had left it and had he not tied it down loosely with the line it would have blown away across the lake.

He had forgotten the most important thing about living in the wilderness, the one thing he’d thought he would never forget—expect the unexpected. What you didn’t think would get you, would get you. Plan on the worst and be happy when it didn’t come.

But he had done one thing right: He had tied the canoe to a tree. He dragged the tent to the canoe, crawled underneath and lay on the tent the rest of the night, listening to the wind and rain, wincing now and then with the pain in his leg and feeling stupid.

It was a long night.

Dear Caleb: I read some Shakespeare today. I think it changed my life.

It was a repair day, both for equipment and for himself.

Dawn was wet and dreary and it took him a full hour to find some dry wood and leaves and get a decent fire going—all the time castigating himself. Had he forgotten
everything?
He hadn’t made a secure camp, hadn’t dug a rain gutter around the tent, hadn’t brought in wood so he’d have dry fire starter in the morning.

He limped through the woods around the campsite until he found a dead birch log with the bark still intact. Birchbark was nearly waterproof—it was what Native Americans used for canoes—and beneath the bark he broke off slivers of dry wood. He took a double armful of bark and slivers back to the campsite and after three attempts—he should have needed only one match, he told himself—he at last got a sputtering flame going.

Once the bark caught it went like paper dipped in kerosene and the wood caught and when the flames were going well he put on smaller pieces of the wet firewood. The flames dried the wood and started it burning and in another half hour he had a good blaze going.

He took a moment then to examine his leg. There was a clean puncture wound not more than half an inch deep and he took some disinfectant from the first-aid kit and dabbed it on the hole, put a Band-Aid on it and then went back to work.

The wind had dropped and the rain had eased to a few sprinkles now and then. He saw clear holes in the clouds. He spread the gear to dry, tying it to limbs with nylon cord. His sleeping bag was soaked through and the tent was a sloppy mess. He had to stay put so he set the tent back up, this time pegging it down and using the small shovel to dig a drainage ditch around the sides with a runoff ditch leading down to the lake.

The wind had tangled the packs in the tree limbs but they were still intact, and after some effort Brian untangled them and lowered them to the ground.

Again he dried arrows and the quiver and checked his bow. Then he launched the canoe and took about fifteen minutes to catch six good-size bluegills. He cleaned the fish, put them on to boil with a teaspoon or so of salt, put rice in the other pan and then suddenly found that all the work was done.

The sun was out—he could actually see steam coming up from his sleeping bag as it dried—and he lay back on the ground by the fire and went over what had happened. His leg throbbed in time with his thoughts as he learned yet again: Never assume anything, expect the unexpected, be ready for everything all the time.

And finally, no matter what he
thought
would happen, nature would do what it wanted to do. He had to be part of it, part of what it was really like, not what he or some other person thought it should be like.

He gathered wood for the night and spread it in the sun to dry, took the meat off the fish and mixed it with the rice and set it aside to cool—he sometimes liked to eat the rice cold—and lay in the sun nude (his shorts drying on a limb) and let the smoke from the fire keep the mosquitos off while he dozed, catching up on sleep he’d lost in the rain the night before.

He slept solidly for more than four hours. The fire was nearly out when he awakened and he put more wood on the coals and got them going again.

It was midafternoon and he ate the rice and fish, then made tea and had a cup with a sugar cube for dessert.

By evening his bag was dry. He put it in the tent, put on a T-shirt because he was feeling a bit sunburned, and his hand bumped one of the Shakespeare volumes.

“So I’ll try reading it . . .”

He had been exposed to Shakespeare in school, briefly, and had not paid much attention. The play they had read was
Romeo and Juliet
and he knew it was about young people so he tried it again now.

He stood on the shore and read aloud, and felt silly at first. But because he liked Caleb and trusted him he kept going, staggering on until he came to the verse in act 2 where Juliet says:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

Deny thy father and refuse thy name,

Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,

And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

Here a strange thing happened to Brian. Whenever he’d heard this part before—on television, in school—he’d thought she was looking for Romeo, wondering where he was, calling for him. But something brought the words, the meaning, to him as he stood there in the afternoon sun, reading it aloud out onto the lake, and he knew that was wrong, knew that she was instead calling on Romeo, asking him why he was a member of the wrong family, the Montagues, and if only he weren’t . . .

And a few lines later he read Juliet saying:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other word would smell as sweet.

And Brian knew. It was as if his whole world had suddenly opened. He
knew
what Shakespeare was trying to tell him. Of Juliet’s love for Romeo, of her torment and despair over the agony of the fight between the two families.

This man had written of these things hundreds of years before Brian was born, in a world so different from Brian’s it might be on another planet, and Brian _knew _. . .

It shook him, standing there on the side of a lake in the northern wilderness reading a love story written more than three hundred years earlier, to
know
how they felt, how they hurt.

He closed the book and sat down on the grass, his legs crossed, the sun heading into evening, and thought of all the time he had wasted not knowing Shakespeare, and a tear slid down his cheek, a tear for Juliet and Romeo, a tear for Shakespeare, who he wished were still alive, a tear for his own loss and a tear for the beauty of knowing sadness . . .

Dear Caleb: It gets more and more beautiful. I think most of the city is leaving me.

He was not sure what, if anything, awakened him. Probably the fact that he had slept so hard during the day. Whatever the reason, in the dead middle of the night his eyes suddenly snapped open and he sat up, listening with his mouth open, breathing in shallow pulls to not make noise.

Nothing.

He leaned forward and unzipped the tent and looked out. Still nothing, at least nothing to hear. But the sight that met his eyes made him hold his breath.

The sky was clear, filled with stars, and the moon was half full and laid a silver streak across the lake—a white road that came across the water and called to him with such intensity that he closed the tent and moved to the canoe, turned it over and slid it out onto the water.

The night was cool enough that the mosquitos stayed down. He stroked once with the paddle and the canoe slid out and away from the bank into the silver reflection of the moon out on the water.

Another pull, another slide across the still water, moving through liquid silver. A loon called. It seemed to come from somewhere to the left but the sound moved around until it filled the lake, mixed somehow with the moonlight and became almost visible. It hung there, the sound he could see in the moonlight, for half a minute; then the loon called again, or another answered it, and suddenly—close, on the far edge of the lake, only a hundred yards away—a wolf howled.