Brian's Winter (6 page)

The cord was sewn into the end of the bag but he sharpened the knife on his sharpening rock and used the point to open the stitching enough to free the cord.

It proved to be difficult to string the bow. In spite of his scraping and shaping, the limbs were still very stout and the bow bent only with heavy pressure. He tied the string to one end, then put the tied end in a depression in a rock on the ground and used his weight to pull down the top end while he tied the cord in place.

It hummed when he plucked it and the strength of the wood seemed to sing in the cord. He took four of the arrows and moved to a dirt hummock near the lakeshore.

He put an arrow in the bow and fitted it to the string, raised the bow and looked down the shaft at the target and drew the arrow back.

Or tried to. When it was halfway to his chin the bow seemed to double in strength and he was shaking with the exertion by the time he got the feathers all the way back and the cord seemed to be cutting through his fingers. He released quickly, before he had time to aim properly, and saw the arrow crease the top of the hummock, skip onto the lake ice, jump off the ice and fly across the open water in the middle and land skittering across the ice on the far side of the lake—a good two hundred yards.

At the same time the string slapped his arm so hard it seemed to tear the skin off and the rough front end of the feathers cut the top of his hand as they passed over it.

“Wow…”

He could not see the arrow but he knew where it had gone and would walk around the lake later and retrieve it. Now he had to practice. He changed the angle he was shooting at so that the arrows wouldn’t go across the lake if he missed—
when
he missed, he thought, smiling—and moved closer to the hummock.

It was hard to judge the strength of the pull of the bow. He guessed fifty, sixty pounds of pull were required to get the string back to his chin, and every shot hurt his arm and fingers and hand. But it was worth it. The arrows left the bow so fast that he couldn’t see them fly and they hit so hard that two of them drove on through the hummock and kept going for fifteen or twenty yards and broke the stone tips.

He made new tips that night and it was while he was making them that he knew he would be hunting bigger game. It was strange how the thought came, or how it just seemed to be there. He had made the bow for protection, had thought only in terms of protection all the while he was making arrows, but somewhere along the way the knowledge that he would use it to hunt was just there.

Maybe it was eating the meat from the doe that had done it. There was so much of it, and it tasted so good and was easier to deal with than the smaller animals. Whatever the reason, when he aimed at the hummock to practice he saw the chest of a deer.

He shot all that day, until his shoulders were sore and he had broken an arrow and two more tips by hitting small rocks along the ground. Then at dark he built a fire, cooked some meat, fed Betty, who arrived just as the meat was done, and retired to the shelter to fix arrows.

He would hunt big tomorrow, he thought. He would try to get a deer.

He didn’t know the time but somewhere in the middle of the night he awakened suddenly. He had come to rely on his senses and he knew something had changed to snap him awake that way and he lay with his eyes wide in the dark, listening, smelling, trying to see.

He did not have long to wait.

There was a soft rustle, then a whoofing sound and the whole wall of the shelter peeled away from the rock as if caught in an earthquake, away and down and Brian—still in his bag—was looking up in the dark at the enormous form of a bear leaning over him.

There was no time to react, to move, to do anything.

Meat, Brian had time to think—he’s smelled the venison and come for it. He’s come for the mea—

And it was true. The bear had come for the meat but the problem was that Brian lay between the bear and the meat, and the bear cuffed him to the side. As it was it wasn’t much of a cuff—nowhere near what the bear could have done, which would have broken Brian’s legs—but the bag was zipped and Brian became tangled in it and couldn’t move fast enough to stay out of the way so the bear hit him again.

This time hard. The blow took Brian in the upper thigh and even through the bag it was solid enough to nearly dislocate his hip.

He cried out. “Ahhhh…”

The bear stopped dead in the darkness. Brian could see the head turn to look back and down at him, a slow turning, huge and full of threat, and the bear’s breath washed over him and he thought I am going to die now. All this that I have done and I’m going to die because a bear wants to eat and I am in the way. He could see the bear’s teeth as it showed them and he couldn’t, simply couldn’t do anything; couldn’t move, couldn’t react. It was over.

The bear started to move down toward Brian and then hesitated, stopped and raised its head again and turned to look back over its shoulder to the left.

Half a beat and Brian lay still, staring up at the bear. But now a new smell, over the smell of the bear; a rank, foul, sulfurous and gagging smell as the bear turned and took a full shot of skunk spray directly in the eyes.

Betty had arrived. Whether she’d just been out hunting and had come back or had been awakened and surprised or simply didn’t like bears very much—whatever the reason she had dumped a full load in the bear’s face.

The effect was immediate and devastating.

“Rowwrrrmph!”

The bear seemed to turn inside itself, knocking Brian farther to the side, and rolled backward out of the shelter area, slamming its head back and forth on the ground, trying to clear its eyes, hacking and throwing up as it vanished in the night.

Brian looked to the source of all this. Betty stood near the end of the shelter, still with her tail raised, only now aimed at Brian. She twitched it once, then again, and Brian shook his head.

“I’m sorry. I just didn’t think you’d be thinking of food…” He took a piece of meat from the pile—a big one—and tossed it to her and she lowered her tail, picked up the meat and waddled off into the dark in the direction of her burrow.

Brian lay back in his bag. His shelter was a mess, the wall tipped over, and his hip hurt, but it wasn’t raining and the bag was warm. He could fix things up in the morning.

The stink of skunk was everywhere—much of what Betty had shot at the bear had gone around it and hit the wall—but Brian didn’t mind. In fact, he thought, I’ve grown kind of fond of it. I’ll have to make sure to give her extra food. It was like having a pet nuclear device.

He went to sleep smiling.

In the morning he found that the damage was not as extreme as he’d thought. The bear had tipped the wall away and down but the dried mud had held it together and Brian—after four heaving tries—tipped it back up and against the rock. He chopped a hole in the thin ice near the edge of the lake and brought up new mud to pack in around the seam and inside an hour it was as good as new.

Then he reviewed his thinking. The war bow wouldn’t help—at least not as a protective device. He’d shot it and made it work for him but in the dark, in the night in the shelter, there was no way he could have gotten the bow aligned or an arrow into the bear. And god knew what would have happened if he
had
hit the bear with an arrow—especially if he’d missed anything vital. The bear would have been really mad then—even Betty wouldn’t have been able to stop the thing.

Perhaps, he thought, a lance—a killing lance. If he used the same principle as with the arrows…

He went back to the stone he’d been chipping arrowheads from and studied it. He would need a wider, longer head, and the flakes came off too small for a spear. Near it there were other black stones, however, and he tapped at them with the back of the hatchet, knocking off flakes until he hit one that had a bigger pattern. Three times he hit, and took off flakes that were irregular or that broke in the middle. But on the fourth try he came away with a piece almost as wide as his palm and about seven inches long, tapering to a sharp point and with two edges like razors.

He worked tie-notches into the round end and mounted the point in one of his hardwood spears, carefully splitting the wood back and then tying the head in place with a thin strip of deer hide—which proved to be much tougher than the rabbit skin—and burning the hair off when he was done.

He hefted the lance and held it out, bracing with his arm. It wouldn’t do any good to throw, but for in close, like last night—if he had to use it—the head should cause some damage. Or at least discourage a bear. He nodded. Good. If nothing else, it gave him a feeling of security.

Later he would think on how strange things were. He would never see the bear again and inside the shelter he would never be threatened again.

Yet the lance would save his life.

He awakened when he had slept enough, and looked out of the shelter by cracking the door. It was cold and low and gray and raining, a dismal rain much like the one that had lasted so long earlier in the fall, and he kindled the fire with dry wood he’d set aside the night before when he’d seen the clouds moving in. Soon the inside of the shelter was cheery and warm, the smoke working its way out of the hole at the top, and he wished he’d thought to bring water in the night before and also wished he didn’t have to do what he had to do now.

But he couldn’t fight it and at last he pulled himself out of the bag, grabbed the hatchet and the largest aluminum pot and plunged out into the rain. As fast as possible, standing barefoot on the freezing, wet ground, he went to the bathroom and then ran to the lake and chopped his watering hole open—it had frozen thinly overnight—and filled the pan and ran back to the shelter.

He slid the door back in place and put the pot on the fire and dropped a piece of venison into it to make a breakfast stew.

The meat was getting low. He had stretched the wolf-killed doe as far as he could, trying to ration it and eat smaller amounts, but he’d have to hunt within four or five days.

He put a piece of meat outside the door for Betty, surprised that she wasn’t there already, and leaned back to think.

In the past few days it had become colder. The weather had a kind of steady feel to it, as if it was not going to get warmer but would stay cold, and he had to face some truths.

He simply wasn’t ready for cold weather. Oh, he thought, the shelter was all right. And the woods were full of fuel.

But his clothing was pitiful. His jeans were holding together—just—but his tennis shoes were about gone, his socks long since used to shreds, and on top all he had was a T-shirt (also nearly in pieces) and the rabbit-skin vest.

I am, he thought, a mess. He was tempted to smile except that it wasn’t really funny. He could sit in the shelter and stay warm but unless he could hunt he would die and he couldn’t hunt unless he had something to wear to keep from freezing.

To death, he thought, the truth sliding in like a snake. I could freeze to death. Not quite yet—it wasn’t that cold yet—but soon. He didn’t know northern winters but he knew it would get cold enough to kill him and freeze him solid.

He took stock again. No clothing, although he still had some rabbit hides, which he could sew into sleeves for his vest. There was also the hide from the doe. He looked at it and thought that he might get a pair of moccasins out of it. They would be crude but if he stitched them with the hair on the inside and made them big enough to wear over his tattered tennis shoes they would help.

He set to work on what he could do and spent all of that day sewing the rest of the rabbit skins into two tubes, which he attached as sleeves to the vest. When he tried it on everything crackled, as if he were wearing paper, but it seemed to hold together and he slept that night feeling slightly better about his future.

The next morning he checked the weather—still raining, and colder than it had been the previous morning—and then set to work making footgear.

It proved both easier and harder than he had thought it would be. The easy part was making a pattern. He just stood on the dry skin and marked around his foot with a piece of charcoal from the fire pit. When he’d cut out the two bottoms he cut two rectangles from the remaining hide and stitched—with some effort as the hide was thick and tough—the two pieces into rough cylinders. Then he sewed each of the tubes down to the sole, attaching it all around the edge, and when he was done he had two clunky boots that he could stick his tennis shoes down into; with the hair on the inside they felt warm the minute he stuck his feet into them. He used the last bits of hide to cut two strips to use for lacing to pull the tops of the cylinders tight to his legs—they hit about midcalf—and it was here he learned how to soften leather.

The deer hide was dried and working with it was about like working with thin wood. It had no give and was brittle and hard and very, very tough. It was all he could do to sew the cylinders to the bottom using thin-cut hide for lacing and punching holes with the tip of the knife. But the two straps that went around the top had to be soft enough to tie off. He thought of using the fishing line for thread but didn’t want to waste it. Then he found that by working the leather—first between his fingers and then by pulling it over a piece of wood that stuck out of the wall—he could soften it. It never got truly soft and supple like tanned deer hide, but it was workable and got the job done.

He gathered more wood just before dark and went to sleep that night dreaming of punching holes in leather with the tip of the knife—the image burned into his mind from sitting all day sewing.

Sometime that night, near the middle, it grew quiet and the change awakened him. He listened for a time and realized that the rain had stopped and he snuggled back in the bag thinking that with no rain the next day he would hunt.

In the morning he awakened and knew instantly that something had changed. Something about the sound. No. The lack of it. There was no sound. Normally he could hear birds in the morning, or the wind rustling.