Brian's Winter (9 page)

He would need more—some kind of sauce.

Then he remembered the berries. On one of his wood-gathering runs he’d gone past the north end of the lake and there had been a string of small, scraggly trees loaded with bright red berries. Because everything was under a foot of snow and he hadn’t seen a berry since summer these berries—looking fresh and bright even though they were frozen solid—struck him as very odd. They looked delicious and hung in small clumps and he smelled them, then took a handful and popped them into his mouth.

At first he couldn’t taste them because they were frozen but as soon as they thawed he got the flavor. They were tangy and had a mild bitter taste that made him want to pucker—also they had large pits. They were similar to the gut cherries he’d had trouble with during the summer except that they didn’t make him sick and the sour taste reminded him of something else he couldn’t at first place and later remembered as a vinegar or sour sauce flavor.

They would make a good sauce for a Thanksgiving meal and he went along the lakeshore and picked one of the smaller aluminum pans full and it was in this way that he learned about snowshoes.

It did not come that fast. There was about a foot of snow, powder but with a stiffness, and as he walked along the lake in his deer-hide boots he startled a rabbit from beneath an evergreen and it took off like a shot—all changed to white—across the snow.

Without sinking in. Brian watched it run away and had taken another four or five steps when it hit him that the rabbit was running on
top
of the snow while Brian was sinking in with each step.

He moved to the rabbit’s tracks and studied them. They were huge, fully twice the size of the feet he had seen on rabbits earlier, and when he examined the tracks more closely he saw that the rabbit had grown hair to increase the size of its feet and he thought how perfect they were: to be able to do that, change color in the winter and grow bigger feet to stay on top of the snow. How perfect. And he set the information back in his mind and went on about preparing for Thanksgiving.

He packed snow in with the berries and put them on the fire to melt and boil; then he put the hump meat in the large pan with snow and set that on to boil as well.

So much, he thought, for cooking Thanksgiving dinner.

What he wanted was a table and a chair and a tablecloth—no, he thought. What he wanted was a turkey and all the trimmings and then a table and chairs and tablecloth and his mother and father sitting with him and milk, oh yes, a glass of cold milk and bread and butter and potatoes and gravy and…

What he wanted more than anything was out, to be back in the world. To have all that stuff and be back in the world and then to go to a movie, no, to sit and watch television with your belly packed and watch a football game and belch and…

That was what he wanted.

What he did instead was clean his shelter.

He had been sleeping on the foam pad that had come with the survival pack and he straightened everything up and hung his bag out in the sun to air-dry and then used the hatchet to cut the ends of new evergreen boughs and laid them like a carpet in the shelter.

As soon as he brought the boughs inside and the heat from the fire warmed them they gave off the most wonderful smell, filled the whole shelter with the odor of spring, and he brought the bag back inside and spread the pad and bag and felt as if he were in a new home.

The berries boiled first and he added snow water to them and kept them boiling until he had a kind of mush in the pan. By that time the meat had cooked and he set it off to the side and tasted the berry mush.

Bitter, he thought, but tangy and not all that bad, and he cut a piece of the moose hump off, a thin slice, and dipped it in the sauce and ate it in two bites.

It was delicious, almost like having steak sauce or a kind of bitter catsup. He took another cut of meat, dipped it, ate it as well, the juice dripping down his chin, and was on his third one when he realized this was his Thanksgiving dinner.

And I’m eating like a wolf, he thought, before I give thanks.

It stopped him, the idea of giving thanks. At first his mind just stopped and he thought, for what? For the plane crash, for being here? I should thank somebody for that?

Then a small voice, almost a whisper, came into his mind and all it said was: It could have been worse; you could have been down in the plane with the pilot.

And he felt awful for his attitude, turned away from the food and forced himself to be grateful for all the good luck he’d had and to not think about the bad at all.

Just that, escaping from the plane alive—that was luck. And to be able to live and learn and know things, to be able to hunt, to be thankful for the animals’ lives that had been spent to keep him fed, to be thankful for the deer and the moose, lord, the moose like getting a whole food store and to be thankful for his shelter and knife and the hatchet…

The hatchet. The key to it all. Nothing without the hatchet. Just that would take all his thanks.

And every stick, every twig of wood that burned to keep him warm and his sleeping bag and Betty saving him from the bear and the chickadees that hung around the camp and the sun that brought each new day…

All that, he thought, all that and more to be thankful for and he ended the prayer—as it had seemed to become—with another thought about the pilot down in the lake, how he hoped the pilot had had a good life and was where it was good for him now.

Then he ate, quietly, thinking of his mother and father, and when he finished his Thanksgiving it was dark, pitch-dark, and he crawled into his bag to sleep and had just closed his eyes and started to get drowsy when he heard the gunshot.

It did not register at first.

The night had grown very cold and still and the shelter was warm and he was in that state just between waking and sleeping when he heard a sharp, blistering crack of sound.

He was half dreaming and thought it was part of the dream but it cracked again, a little more away and then a third time, very far away.

By the third shot he was on his feet and had pushed the door away and was standing in the opening.

“Hey! Over here, I’m over here!”

He listened and heard two other, much more muted shots and then nothing. Since he slept with no pants and his underwear had long since given up the ghost he was standing nude in the cold air. For a second or two his body heat held but then it started down fast and he felt the cold come into him.

Still he stood, listening, holding his breath, and he heard one more pop, so far away it could hardly be heard and after that no further sound.

“Hey!” he yelled one more time but there was no answer and the cold was getting to him so he closed the door and climbed back into the bag.

It was insane. All that shooting in the dark—who was doing it? And what were they shooting at? He would have to go out tomorrow and look for tracks, at least where the nearest shot seemed to come from—somewhere just across the lake.

And why didn’t they answer him? They must have heard him—what was the matter with them? Was it some maniac? And why hadn’t Brian seen him, or heard him before…

He meant to sleep, was tired enough to sleep, but he could not get the image out of his mind—some crazy man with a high-powered rifle was out there somewhere, shooting at things in the dark.

So Brian put a little more wood on the fire and blew on the coals to get it going and sat all night, dozing intermittently, waiting for daylight so that he could look for tracks.

At first light he got into his clothing and slid the door open and stepped outside.

Into a wall of cold.

He had read about cold—a teacher had read poems to him about Alaska when he was small—and heard stories and seen shows on the Discovery Channel on television but he had never felt anything like this.

His breath stopped in his throat. It felt as if the moisture on his eyes would freeze and he did feel the lining of his nose tighten and freeze. There was no wind, not even a dawn breeze—it was absolutely still—and when he took a step forward he felt the air moving against his eyes and he had to blink to keep them from freezing.

Thirty, forty, fifty below—he couldn’t even guess how cold it was—and he thought, This is how people die, in this cold. They stop and everything freezes and they die.

He pulled his hood up and was surprised, crude as it was, at how much it increased the warmth around his head. Then he pulled the mittens on and picked up his killing lance—long since repaired from the moose kill—and moved forward and as soon as he moved he felt warmer.

The snow was dry, like crystallized flour or sugar, and seemed to flow away from his legs as he walked.

He made a circle of the camp, walked out on the lake ice—which was covered with snow as well—and back around and saw no tracks other than rabbit and mouse.

Then he started to move toward where the sound had come from, working slowly, amazed that he was starting to warm up and even feel comfortable. Back in the hood the air was kept from moving and his face grew warmer and the fact that his head was warm seemed to warm his whole body and once he became accustomed to the cold he could look around and appreciate the world around him.

It was a world of beauty. It’s like being inside glass, he thought, a beautiful glass crystal. The air was so clear he could see tiny twigs, needles on pine trees fifty, seventy-five yards away, and so still that when a chickadee flew from a tree to the meat piled near the entrance—where they flocked and picked at the meat—he could actually hear the rush of air as the bird flapped its wings.

Tracks went everywhere. Once he was in the woods away from camp there were so many rabbit prints he felt there must be hundreds of them just living around the shelter. The tracks were so thick in some places that they had formed packed trails where the rabbits had run over the same place until it became a narrow highway. Some of the snow was packed so densely that it would hold Brian up and he walked single file on the tracks, where the brush permitted, to keep from sinking into the snow.

But he wasn’t looking for rabbit tracks. Somebody had been out there firing a gun and it hadn’t snowed during the night so there should be tracks, had to be tracks.

But there were none. He moved farther out from the camp, circled again, making wide arcs in the direction the sound had come from, and there were no tracks—or none other than mice, deer, something he thought was a fox, and about a million rabbits.

He stopped at midday and stood by a tree trying to find some other sign, something that would tell him how they did it…

Had he dreamed the whole thing? Could he have been dreaming of gunshots? Or maybe he’d been alone too much and was going insane. That could happen. It happened all the time. People went crazy under far less stress than Brian had been under. Maybe that was it—he’d dreamed it or had finally gone insane. Sure…

Craaack!

It was near his head and he dropped to his knees. They were shooting at him. And they were close, right next to him. No dream this time, no insanity—they were right on top of him.

He rolled to his left and came up in a crouch behind a large pine, waiting, watching. Nothing—he could see absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Just brush and trees and…there. He had been looking along the ground and he brought his eyes up a bit, so that they were scanning ten feet up, and he saw it.

A poplar tree was shattered; bits of wood and bark seemed to have been blown out of it as if it had been hit by an exploding shell. It was still standing but was severely damaged and he thought for a moment that somebody was playing pranks, shooting a tree ten feet off the ground.

But it hadn’t been shot. He moved closer to the tree and studied it and there was no evident bullet hole—just the shattering wound—and it is likely he would never have known except that he actually saw it happen and it was almost the last thing he saw happen on earth.

Directly in front of him, not fifteen feet away and just slightly higher than his head, a footlong section of tree exploded with a shattering, cracking sound that nearly deafened him and at the same time a sliver of wood from the tree came at him like an arrow. There was no time to dodge, move, even blink. The sliver—a foot long and slightly bigger in diameter than his thumb and sharp as a needle—came at his face, brushed violently past his ear and stuck halfway out the back of the leather hood.

He reached up to grab the sliver with his mittens on, couldn’t because they were too bulky and threw the right one off and grabbed the wood with his bare hand.

It was frozen solid, so cold that it stuck to the warm skin on his fingers and he had to shake it off. The tree was frozen all the way through. It was strange but he’d never thought of it, never considered what happened to trees when it got cold. He just figured they got through it somehow—they just got cold.

But there was moisture in them, sap, and when it got very cold the sap must freeze. He went up to the tree that had just exploded and saw that a whole section seemed to have been blown out of the side—maybe a foot and a half long and four or five inches wide. Just shattered and blown apart and the force seemed to have come from inside the tree and he stood back and stared at the wound and thought on it and finally came up with a theory.

The tree would freeze on the outside first, a ring of frozen wood all the way around. Then, when it got truly cold—as it had last night—the inside would freeze. When liquid freezes it expands—he had learned that in Ms. Clammon’s science class—or tries to expand. But with the wood frozen all around it there was no space for the center to expand. It simply stayed there, locked in the center while the outside held it in and the containment forced the center to build up pressure, and more pressure and still more, until it couldn’t be contained and blew out the side of the tree.

It wasn’t gunshots. It was trees exploding. There were no crazy people running around with guns and Brian hadn’t gone off the deep end.

It was just winter, that was all. Brian stared at the tree and then around the woods and knew one thing now for a certainty: Everything was different. The woods in summer were a certain way and now they were a different way, a completely different place.