Cataract City (42 page)

“It’s deep,” Duncan said, “but clean. Not wide … but yeah,
deep
.”

“See anything inside?”

“Just a sec … uh.”

“What?”

“Just a glint. I can get it.”

“How?”

Duncan unfolded the Leatherman, brought the prongs of the needlenose pliers together:
snick-snick
. “Meatball medicine.” He cut a length of canvas rigging off the skidoo and tied it around my arm. With the tourniquet in place he held the pliers over the flame.

“Not too long,” I said. “I don’t want to be cauterized.”

Duncan plunged the pliers into the snow. The hot metal hissed. “Just sterilizing them, man.” He angled the wound into the firelight, debating. “How about I get hold of it and just, uh, wiggle a little?”

“Sounds magical.”

He worked the tip of the pliers into the slit. My arm jerked involuntarily, but Duncan gripped my wrist to keep me steady, nosing the pliers deeper. The coagulated blood at the edges of the cut gave way; fresh blood dripped into the snow. Then the pliers brushed against something hard, too shallow to be bone.

Dunk closed the pliers’ jaws around whatever it was and squeezed them together—then came a sharp
click
as the pliers slipped off a metallic edge and snapped shut.

“Fffffffffffffffffff—!”

“Sorry,” Dunk said. “Got to get a good grip.” He handed me a thumb-width piece of kindling. “Bite.”

I jammed the stick between my teeth and bit down so hard that
my jaw trembled. Duncan wiped away the blood and probed again. The pliers gritted against whatever was embedded in my flesh, a metal-on-metal rasp. The pain was monstrous. My entire skeletal system lit up like a Christmas tree. The stick went
snap
between my jaws. I spat out the splinters and said, “Just go. Just keep … keep oh oh god keep going.”

Steadying his free hand on my wrist, Dunk pulled carefully. “Got it.”

He held it up to the firelight: a shard of metal in the shape of a diamond—one of the interlocking diamonds that made up a skidoo tread. He dropped it into the fire. The stink of fried blood rose off the coals.

The bleeding slowed to a trickle. Duncan found the med kit, slathered some gauze with Polysporin and told me to poke it as far into the wound as I could bear. He stuck a Band-Aid over the gauze, then wrapped surgical tape around my elbow to keep everything in place.

“Good enough?”

I said, “Yeah, good. Thanks.”

He settled back against the skidoo. His exhales were syrupy and bubbly, as if he was forcing each breath through an inch of pancake batter. I hoped it was just the busted nose, which would make breathing hard. He’d probably swallowed a lot of blood, too. I stared skywards, flakes of snow scrolling above the flames.

I drifted into a half sleep, snapping awake to spot mouselike shapes racing round the edge of the fire’s light, too fast to track. A thicker dark fell around us, airless and isolating. We fed the flames and pulled our collars tight and got used to the phantom movements beyond the fire. I told myself they were nothing but the play of starlight on wind-sculpted snow.

Before dawn those movements coalesced into permanence—a group of shapes all roughly the same size and moving with the same low-slung lope. Thirty yards from the fire, circling clockwise.

“Dunk … hey, Dunk.”

Duncan cracked one eye, followed my pointing finger. Sight wasn’t needed—you could smell them: like wet dogs, only more primal.

I said, “Coyotes.”

One of them let loose a high mocking gibber. This was answered by a series of excited yips.

I rooted a flare out of the satchel and tore the igniting strip. An umbrella of red light draped us both, flecks of molten phosphorus spitting in elegant arcs. We saw them clearly: a pack of coyotes ringing the fire, hackles raised, fur running down their spines on a band-saw edge.

I tossed the flare to scatter the pack. It sailed end over end to land on a patch of black ice behind them.

“Jesus,” Duncan said.

Three timberwolves stood illuminated in the fan of flare-light. Bone-white, almost indistinguishable from the snow. Only their black snouts gave them away. They stood in a casual threesome—the largest wolf standing, the other two hunched on either side. Their legs were shockingly long, strangely thin: a herbivore’s legs, almost, carrying their torsos high off the ground. The biggest wolf opened its mouth—its jaws enormous—and licked its chops.

The coyotes scattered, baying plaintively. I picked up the shotgun. Duncan laid Bruiser’s pistol across his lap. Was there enough wood to last through to daylight? The flare guttered, guttered. The wolves stayed in place, watching.

Dawn took forever to come.

A light snow had fallen overnight. The temperature rose slightly as the sun crawled above the horizon. It remained sub-zero, though, and
neither of us was properly outfitted. I wore uninsulated police-issue brogans, the leather cracked along the soles. Amazingly, my knee didn’t hurt that much. Sure, I could feel the pins and screws—fine needles like icy worms knitted with the flesh and bone—but the physical sensation wasn’t that painful. It felt
good
, almost: a dull throb that drew attention away from sharper pain in other parts of my body.

I’d chosen wool pants—a stroke of luck—but my shirt was now missing its sleeve and there was a rip in my parka where the metal diamond had pierced. Duncan had on warm boots, jeans with a rip in the knee, a heavy sweater and coat. He’d also found a flimsy pair of Magic Gloves in his coat pocket—I pictured his mom stuffing them in there, one of those protective things mothers do.

We set off at daybreak. Blood from Duncan’s broken nose was crusted like rust in the seams of his face. I’d patched my parka with a strip of tape from the medical kit. Duncan hacked the upholstery off the skidoo’s seat with the Leatherman, rolled up the padded material and stuffed it into the satchel.

Drinkwater’s bootprints were faint traces in the snow.

“Follow them?” said Duncan.

“What makes you think he knows where he’s going?”

Duncan shrugged.

“Maybe he’s got a phone.” I said. “He could call someone. A bunch of guys. What if he’s looking for us?”

“Doubt it.”

I held my arms out. “What better place? We’re miles from anywhere. Put us down, one shot in the back of the head. Boom. Easy. The coyotes will eat most of us, the birds will take what’s left. By spring thaw there’ll be nothing to know us by.”

“So what’s your idea?”

I puffed breath into my cupped palms. “Follow his tracks, not him. We’re not after Drinkwater anymore, okay? Let’s just get out of this.”

Before setting off I cut four sheets out of the silver Mylar emergency blanket. I flipped a hot ember out of the fire into each sheet and crimped them into balls, placing two in my coat pockets and giving two to Duncan.

We followed Drinkwater’s bootprints, our hands sunk into our warm pockets, walking directly into the sun as it bathed the snow in a reddish glare. I took the lead, feet sinking deeper into where Drinkwater’s had been. Duncan followed, breathing heavily.

We found Drinkwater’s fire, its embers still flaring with the wind. He’d fashioned a lean-to, the ends of which he’d whittled and slotted flush. He must have draped it with an emergency blanket and hunkered inside—he may have even gotten an hour or two of sleep. It was the campsite of a seasoned outdoorsman, assembled with ease, abandoned quickly.

A frozen pool of blood lay next to the fire. The blood had a matte look, platelets frozen to a dull gloss. I chipped at it with my thumbnail. It wasn’t frozen solid, the way water freezes; it was softer, the consistency of a Fudgsicle. I tweezed a needle out of the blood, attached to a hank of black thread. Had Drinkwater stitched himself up?

“He knows we’re following him,” Dunk said.

“How do you figure?”

He pointed ten yards past the fire. Drinkwater had unzipped and relieved his bladder, scrawling a message in the snow.

F.U.

“He even got the periods in there between the letters,” Duncan marvelled.

The sun climbed a cloudless sky, lacking the wavering edge it held on summer days: looking at it was like staring into a blast furnace through a hole cut in blue Bristol board. Still, it was better to look into the sky or straight ahead. Staring down brought on the oddest vertigo, the snow sizzling like a lake of fire.

Duncan began to cough. He pressed a fist to his chest as it built to a rumbling thunder rolling through his lungs. I could tell he was in serious pain, his face wrenched into a tortured expression—he looked as if a thousand fish hooks were tugging inside his chest. He doubled over, palms braced on his knees. He coughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. When the coughing finally tapered he tried to stand up, but his boots skidded in the snow and he fell to his knees, then forward onto his hands. He spat. A red splotch hit the snow. He tried to cover it up so I wouldn’t see but the blood just churned into the snow, making it pink.

After a while I said, “Need a hand up?”

“If I can’t get up on my own, we’ve got trouble.” He rose unsteadily, and we carried on.

Drinkwater’s tracks cut through the snow on a determined line—looking at them, you’d think they’d been made by a man who knew exactly where he was going, or at least had no fear of what lay ahead. In my mind I imagined an animal travelling on four legs rather than two. Drinkwater’s nose was the black of a dog’s nose. One of his eyes was milky, the result of some past scrap. We were following a cunning old lion—and he
knew
he was being followed.

The land unfurled in terrifying swathes of arctic whiteness to every point on the compass. My toes had gone numb without my realizing. Idly, I wondered how long it would take for frostbite to set in. I’d seen a TV show about mountain climbers trapped on a cliff during a snowstorm. One of them, a smiling blond Swede, lost eight toes and seven fingers to frostbite. He kept them in a mason jar. The amputated digits were black, as if they’d been spray-painted. The sunny Swede said they’d just snapped off, especially the toes. He’d taken his boot off to find them rolling around in the heel like black licorice jujubes. He was incredibly well adjusted to his loss.

As we walked, I sang old camp songs. It wasn’t wise to announce our whereabouts, but the tunes kept the oppressive silence at bay.

“
Land of the silver birch
,

home of the weasel
,

Where still the mighty moose

wanders at will
.

Blue lake and rocky shore
,

I will return once more
.

Boom diddy-yaa daa, boom diddy-yaa daa
,

Boo-hoo-ooo-hooo-oom
.”

Duncan said: “Pretty sure it’s ‘Land of the silver birch, home of the
beaver
.’”

“Really? I like weasel better.”

Drinkwater’s tracks stopped, went forward again, seemed to hesitate (judging from the depth of the imprint), then backtracked fifty yards to veer into a dense thicket. The shrubs were bare where Drinkwater had picked his way through; snow sifted off their limbs. I wondered what had caused him to change course.

The snow ran deep between the shrubs, almost knee high. We hit a natural laneway between the foliage, about two yards wide. There were animal tracks in the snow, roughly the size of a dog’s paw prints. Drinkwater’s bootprints were not as deeply impressed here: for a few steps they were barely visible at all before re-establishing themselves on the far side of the laneway. I stepped forward and—

“Stop!”

Duncan’s hand was hooked in my collar.

“It’s a fox run,” he said. “Silver foxes, probably.”

“So?”

“Don’t move.”

He dug in the satchel for the battery and lobbed it at the faintest
of Drinkwater’s bootprints. The trap sprang out of the snow, teeth colliding with a metallic
schnik
.

Duncan pointed at a ring of dull yellow spray-painted around the trunk of a poplar tree. “A trapper’s marker. Drinkwater must have seen that, found the baited trap, sprung it, reset it, covered it with snow. Then he stepped past the fox run, walked back down his own bootprints—he probably walked backwards, looking over his shoulder to make sure his boots came down exactly where they’d been—then took off one of his boots and made a print in the snow right over the trap.”

I could picture it perfectly: Drinkwater balanced on one leg with his socked foot outstretched.

Duncan said, “Christ, he’s crafty.”

“It didn’t work, you prick!” My voice rose into the icy altar of sky, going out and out. The sound settled into silence—at which point another voice may have come back, a soft, wavering note.

It will — ill — ill — ill …

It was that point in winter where afternoons were non-existent. First there was morning, sun twinkling off the snow. Next came a terminal grey interregnum, after which twilight swiftly fell.

The sun began to set, very red and cold. The twilight was growing teeth by the time we came upon a steep ridge. Our shadows stretched across the snow, outlines liquefying into the dusk. Wind scrawled the ridge’s whitened edge, helixes of snow spiralling. Darkness locked the cold into our bones; the Mylar-wrapped coals in our pockets were long dead. Drinkwater’s footprints picked a cautious path down the ridge. At a depth of twenty yards they, too, softened into the encroaching dusk.

Duncan’s breaths were ragged and phlegmy; he’d been stopping often to hack up blood. Twice in the last hour he’d collapsed, coughing
helplessly. Not one familiar signpost had carved itself out of the terrain. I found it remarkable that two men could live nearly their whole lives in one place and still be completely disoriented by the wilderness that surrounded it. A band of fear tightened round my heart.

Clouds scudded the horizon. A snowflake touched the nape of my neck. We didn’t want to be stuck atop this bluff when night came down.

“Lower ground’s better, Dunk. Even if we manage to make a fire up here, it could blow out.”

“Long way down,” Duncan said, his body angled against the wind as it howled up the ridge.