Nowhere Wild (8 page)

Jake rose before dawn, cleaned up his camp, and ate breakfast while the sun climbed to warm the valley. A thick fog settled between the trees, drowning out any noise he made. The incessant buzz of mosquitoes patrolling the lowlands droned in the background. Jake's vision extended just a few meters beyond his camp. His traps had been empty again. He didn't bother to fish.

Away from the river, the air lightened and the fog lifted. The heavy woolen layer that had covered the area the previous day gave way to a pleasant sky dotted with puffy clouds. Drops of dew from the tangled brush soaked his pants and chilled his legs.

His body hurt from the battle with the logs. A bruise on his knee nearly matched the color of the camouflage cap pulled low over his brow. Red scabs—on scratches delivered by the tree that had saved him—covered his hands and face, providing landing strips for the attacks of the morning's gnats.

It was easier walking in the bush without the canoe, but as he caught a glimpse of the river below, he knew that with its speed on flat water, he would already have paddled the length of that river and been on the next lake. He tried not to dwell on it.

He spent more time foraging for edible plants as he worked his way south. A few, like dandelion leaves and lamb's-quarter, could be eaten right off the stem without cooking. Twice he found large clusters
of tiny, wild strawberries. Bear scat piled around every berry patch. Plants crushed by sleeping animals sprang up like traps as he passed by. Most bushes had been picked clean. Jake salvaged what he could and kept going. His gun, so long strapped to his pack while he portaged, had been pulled from its case. He held it in his hands, loaded and ready.

His rifle was too powerful for most of the small animals of the area. His grandfather's Colt, still wrapped in a towel and stuffed deep in his pack, was no better. For birds, squirrels, or rabbits, the rifle would likely not just kill them, but would blow them to bits, leaving nothing to eat. Jake had considered other long-barreled guns; they had had three options at the cabin: a .22 rifle, a 12-gauge pump shotgun and the .308 rifle. But he could never have left the .308 behind.

His father had put an air rifle in Jake's hands at the age of six and started him target shooting. When Jake was eight, Leland let him try a single-shot .22-caliber rifle. The noise was louder and the kick more substantial, especially for a skinny boy barely taller than the gun was long. He had balanced the gun by bracing it with his elbows on a downed tree. He learned how to maintain that rifle. He learned how to shoot, how to adjust for wind and gravity, and how to lead a moving target. By the time he was ten, he could hit cans swinging on a rope from forty meters away. This winter at the cabin he'd hit a running snowshoe hare from eighty meters in knee-deep snow—a shot Amos had recounted with pride for weeks.

He was ten when he took his first deer: a small five-point buck. Jake field dressed it himself and helped butcher it. The hunt, the kill, and the butchering had not fazed him. The death didn't revolt him. It had been clean and quick. It wasn't a kill for sport—his dad would never have allowed that. Amos had shown him how to honor the memory of the deer by sprinkling loose tobacco on the ground by the carcass. “The forest,” Amos said, “has a memory that will outlive man.”

Jake's father gave him the Remington 700 for his twelfth birthday—a gun of superb quality and craftsmanship, and one he took great care to maintain. The kickback from the heavy rounds hurt Jake's shoulder after each shot. Still, he practiced religiously. By fourteen, he was the best shot in the family, so good that his father often wondered aloud if that gun was actually part of him.

As late afternoon approached, Jake changed his style of hiking to reduce his noise. He kept to his planned path as his eyes scanned for a substantial meal. He placed his feet carefully to sidestep breaking twigs. He adjusted his stride to avoid brushing up against branches. He moved across cluttered ground, barely making a sound. He bypassed shots at a couple of small birds. He had to choose his shot: once he fired his gun, the sound and its echo would disperse anything else worth shooting, and hunting would be unproductive for hours.

He crested a small, false peak on a ridge and silently brought the gun to his shoulder. Thirty meters ahead and upwind, a raccoon dug in the remnants of an old tree stump, searching for grubs. Jake leveled the rifle and aimed. He pressed the safety off with a barely audible click and took a pulse-slowing breath. As he exhaled, he squeezed the trigger.

The retort shook the valley. The force of the bullet's impact flung the body end for end, sending a spurt of blood across the ground like a flick of red paint from a dipped brush.

Jake clicked the safety back on and cleared the spent casing from the gun while covering the distance to his kill. The body lay curled in a ball. He prodded it once with the blade of his knife and rolled it onto its back. The field-dressing process was quick. He sliced through the skin along the breast, drained the blood, and removed the entrails. The heart and liver he set on a piece of plastic for safekeeping. He skinned the animal with a practiced hand, trimming the
meat off the carcass and wrapping it in the plastic. Raccoon meat would be a welcome change from the deer jerky and fish he had been eating almost continuously on this trip. With no place or time to dry the skin properly, he left it on the ground, neatly rolled up as a sign of respect.
The forest
, he reminded himself,
has a memory that will outlive man.

He moved on as soon as his gear was repacked. The smell of blood would be strong in the area of the kill, and would draw larger predators. This spot was too exposed to stay in long. A half kilometer later, in the shelter of two boulders, he cooked the meat over a small fire. He didn't stop long. A few minutes after the food was cooked and either rewrapped or eaten, he set back off into the trees. Daylight was not to be wasted.

His compass steered him ever southward. With a full stomach, his pace quickened. The pain in his joints and muscles faded into background noise, like the hum of a fan. The surroundings alternated between dense forest, thick brush, and swampy lowlands. He took his bearings often from any high, exposed place he could find. The area showed no signs of human habitation. There were no abandoned campsites, no trash, and no old trails that weren't made by animals. The skies remained vacant.

He settled in to a rhythmic walking pace much like the paddling pace he had found while canoeing. Walking through the brush was like paddling into a bow-on crosswind that fought progress with every stroke. Roots grabbed at the toes of his boots. Vines grabbed at his shins. Mosquitoes and blackflies hovered around his head and launched attacks onto whatever exposed skin he had left, whether it was previously bitten or not. Jake covered up what he could. He stuffed scraps of cloth from an old shirt under his cap to protect his neck and ears and walked with his mouth closed. Still, he constantly swatted the pests away from his nose and eyes. On the water, the
breeze would have blown them back. In the thickets surrounding the lake, the air barely moved and the bugs never ceased their assaults.

It was the distraction of the bugs that allowed him to approach the bear so closely without noticing. The wind, what there was of it deep in the woods, was blowing in the wrong direction for them to smell each other, and Jake missed the telltale snuffs from the bear as it blew the marauding mosquitoes from its own nose while it ambled through the bush.

They were ten meters apart when they finally detected one another. Jake froze, as did the bear. In deep shadow, its black fur had rendered it nearly invisible. A small patch of tan tipped its nose. Jake guessed its weight at a hundred kilos easily, perhaps a hundred and fifty. A slick of dew clung to its fur. Blackflies buzzed around its head. The bear flipped its ears in an instinctual rhythm. It uttered a rumbling growl and sniffed the air. Jake's lungs locked tight. He stole glances to the sides to see if there were cubs about.

“Whoa, big fella.” His finger moved slightly toward the safety on the gun. A round sat ready in the chamber, but this was a single-shot gun. If he fired and missed, or if he only wounded the bear and then it attacked, he would have no time to crank the bolt for the next round. The .308 was a deer killer. It could kill a bear with a good shot. He had done just that the previous winter. Back then, he had the safety of a backup shooter in Amos, the distance to allow time to reload, and the time to aim a shot at a bear completely unaware of their presence. At that moment, he wanted the Colt handgun. A bigger caliber. A bigger punch. An automatic reload. But it was zipped deep inside his bag.

The bear dropped its head as Jake adjusted his grip. It fixed its eyes on Jake.

Another snuff. A short surge forward.

Jake yelled at it. “Whoa bear! Whoa bear!”

Another surge. It glared at him. Jake yelled again.

The bear rocked back on its legs, sniffing the air once more. Jake released the safety. The bear jerked at the sound. Jake held his ground and the standoff continued.

Don't do it. Don't charge, bear.

“Whoa bear!”

Jake knew not to run. Prey ran. Competition charged. Respect held ground.

Jake held his ground, but slid his right foot slightly backward to a better shooting position. The bear responded by lifting up onto its hind feet. The bear was bigger than Jake had first thought—easily his height, with paws the size of salad plates. Its curled claws were dirty, but razor sharp. Deadly.

Jake considered the bear spray canister clipped to his shoulder strap. That was an option, though not a great one. The bear was in range, but perhaps too close to deploy the canister quickly enough. And Jake would have to let go of the gun to use it.

He could fire a warning shot, but his father had told him to always shoot to kill in a situation like this.
When you have no second shot, make the first one a damn good one. If you leave a bear wounded, it only comes back angry. And an angry bear does a lot more damage than a dead one.

The bear dropped down to its front feet, waddled backward, and growled. Jake took a slow step in reverse, adjusting his grip on the stock of the gun just slightly. The bear took another step backward. Jake did likewise. The bear grunted, swung its head away from Jake, and ran up the hill into the brush, crashing through like a bulldozer. Leaves and broken branches flew in all directions. The bear checked behind itself two or three times before it disappeared from the trail.

Jake shivered, then reengaged the safety on the gun and wondered when his heart would resume beating.

Izzy held the pine branch at arm's length and inspected the tip. It looked like it might be able to pierce something besides snow. Looks, she knew, could be deceiving. She practiced throwing it at a stump a few times. From ten meters away, she hit the stump once in ten tries. That shot barely nicked her objective. It would be a miracle to hit a moving target, and only the luckiest of strikes would kill something. She left the spear behind a rock along the base of the esker. Depression chased her as she wandered back to the cabin. Without a gun, killing any animals for food would be damn near impossible. She would have to steal what food she needed from Rick's stock. It would be heavy, and it would be all she would ever have. When it ran out, she would be hungry. Even if she made it to Thompson before her supply ran out, the town might still be empty—or worse. And she would go hungry.

She stopped by a tree and picked a handful of pine needles for tea. A squawk from above led her eyes to a complaining crow, angry that she had dared to steal from his domain. As it flapped its wings, a pinecone picked clean of seeds dropped from its grasp. It missed her head by an inch.

“You little bugger,” she said as she picked the cone up. She hurled it into the branches. The coal-black bird barely moved as her aim went wide. It squawked again, almost teasing her, daring her, to
try again. She picked up another cone and threw it as hard as she could. The cone bounced off a branch just below the crow's feet. It stepped sideways and fluffed its feathers, now slightly perturbed by her presence and gall.

“If I had a gun, you'd be dinner tonight, bird.” Izzy bent down and picked up another cone. Even a BB gun would have worked. She kicked herself for not having looked for one when they were in town. Before the flu, every boy in Thompson had at least one. Brian had three or four. When they were on the run, Rick had looked to grab real guns with a high caliber, but those that hadn't been taken by other people were locked in thick-walled safes. She had never considered finding anything for herself.

The crow squawked again, hopped off its branch, dropped a few feet, flapped its wings, and disappeared into the trees. Izzy turned and moved on. Her thoughts drifted back to Brian. He had taught her to shoot the BB gun in the backyard and had taken the blame when she broke a window on the house next door. The guns had been taken away for a month. Brian hadn't really been fazed by it, though. There were plenty of ways, he said, to cause trouble if you really wanted to.

She stopped walking and looked back to the tree where the bird had been. Brian had lost the gun, but he had still had his slingshot. And he was damn good with that. He could take the top off a flower from ten meters away with a piece of pea gravel. During the month the guns were locked up, he left a perfect circle of dents in the wooden fence in the backyard, showing her just how good his aim could be.

She didn't have his slingshot, and she didn't think she had anything elastic enough to work as a slingshot. Rubber didn't last long in this kind of cold. A slingshot, though, wasn't the only way to make rocks travel far and fast. She had once seen Brian fashion a sling from a pair of old shoelaces and a piece of cardboard. She
could make something similar: a couple of thin strips of rawhide and another doubled-up piece of hide. She could make that easily. She could practice every time she was out foraging. Slings had been around since the beginning of time. If some Neanderthal could use one, she certainly could.

She gathered another armful of sticks and ran back to the cabin. She had a few hours before Rick returned, and she had a new weapon to make.

It took far longer to learn how to use the sling than it did to make it. For such a simple tool, a thousand things could go wrong to cause the rock to miss its target. Twice, she nearly shot herself in the head by releasing at the wrong instant, and once, the rock careened off a nearby tree only to bounce back and strike her shin, leaving her with a softball-sized purple welt and a trickle of blood. She limped for three days from that one. Rick never asked why.

She practiced for two weeks before she gained the slightest bit of control over the trajectory the rock took when it left the sling. It took another week after that to work out distance.

A month after she had first started, Izzy looped the rawhide strip around her ring finger and clutched it against the palm of her right hand. She pinched the other end of the strap with her thumb and index finger. She removed a twist from the line, then dropped a frosted pebble into the cradle. The sling was ready to fire.

Finding stones under the snow and ice was hard enough, but finding the right size, shape, and weight for her new weapon had been even harder. The best stones were from the esker—ones that had been ground into smooth, rounded pebbles by centuries of glacial pressure. Flat stones tended to curve unpredictably when thrown hard. The perfect stone was round and about the size of a golf ball. In the summer, they would be easy to find. In the winter, they were not.

She leaned back on her right heel while at the same time rotating her arm back as if she were about to throw a baseball. Too much bend in the elbow, and the rock didn't hold a flat trajectory. If her arm was too straight, her accuracy dropped, and the odds that the two strands of rawhide would twist increased dramatically.

Her arm shot forward in the direction she wanted the rock to go. She gave one last snap of the wrist, while simultaneously releasing the trailing line from between her thumb and index finger.

This rock cracked into the wooden target she had placed on the stump, sending broken pieces off in three different directions. She smiled. A collection of mulched wood decorated the snow like chocolate sprinkles on a sponge cake.

She stepped back five steps, picked a different spot on the splintered stump, dropped another rock into the pouch, aimed, and fired. It missed her chosen spot by half a meter. She reloaded and let go again. A hair to the left.

She flexed her fingers and rubbed her hands together. Flecks of snow drifted through the skeletal canopy overhead. Somewhere to her left, a crow cawed. She pulled her last rock from her pocket and dropped it into the pouch, ready to aim. She flexed her shoulder. The joint ached with every move—not a painful ache though: a productive one. On the second day of practice, she'd thought she would never be able to lift her arm again. That ache had faded as she worked, and when she was sure Rick was deep in the woods working his trapline, she returned to practice, hurling twenty or thirty rocks each time.

The crow sounded its cry again, and she turned toward it. It was time to try the sling on something that moved. She crept as quietly as she could on her snowshoes. Her eyes alternated between scanning the branches for the bird and watching her footing. The sling she held loose by her side. It bounced against her leg like a gunslinger's holster.

A movement on the ground ahead stopped her in place. She expected the black wings of a bird, but there was only white. Her eyes scanned the tree. Had the breeze knocked a clump of snow from a branch? She paused. The wind was calm, the tree devoid of everything including leaves. Her eyes drifted back to the ground. A hint of shadow—something slightly darker than the white of the snow—shifted just slightly. The thin outline of a camouflaged hare pulsed against the field of white and faded.

Izzy pulled her arm back. The rock felt light now in the sling, like it would rather soar away into the sky than fly straight and true. She pinched hard onto the lead strand, shifted her feet ever so slightly, rocked back, and launched the stone forward.

The rock smacked into the hare's back, bounced off at an odd angle, then embedded itself into the powder an arm's length away. Izzy rushed forward, struggling to pull her knife from the handmade sheath on her belt. She didn't need it. The hare was already dead. Izzy stood over it, not yet daring to touch it. It was dinner, certainly—but it was far more than that. It was a sign of self-sufficiency. With this sling, she could survive on her own. She could escape from the cabin and make it back to civilization. She would never run out of ammunition. She could make three or four slings and be set for months. Years, even.

She picked up the hare by the scruff of the neck. Tonight, regardless of what Rick brought in, they would eat a full meal. More food was a good thing. She pocketed her sling and headed back to the cabin almost at a run, slowing only to make sure she didn't drop her precious cargo.

By the time Rick returned, she had skinned and gutted the hare. Thin slices of meat were already cooking for the evening meal. The stove was stoked and warm, the water pails full, and the kettle hot. The woodpile inside was enough for three days, even if
the temperature dropped. The pile behind the cabin was enough for another week. There would be nothing he could criticize or punish her for today.

Rick entered with only a single bird, another ptarmigan, on his catch line.

He glanced at the stove first, then at the wood pile. “Light day today, Isabelle. Damn wolverine raided my traps again. Son of a bitch took two of them. White fur everywhere. Got a bird though.” He held it up.

“That's okay,” Izzy said proudly. “I got dinner tonight.” She pulled back the cover on the frying pan, showing the prepared meat from the hare, ready to eat.

“Where the hell did that come from?” Rick asked. He looked at the meat-drying racks. It took him only a second to realize she hadn't used any of that.

“I killed it,” she said proudly.

“With what?” He stepped closer to the pan.

“This.” She pulled the sling out of her pocket proudly. He glared at her and snatched it from her hand. Ice sluiced into her stomach. He held it up by the window.

“You made this?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I thought it would be good for both of us to be out hunting. You know. Just in case.” She looked at the single, now pitiful-looking bird in his hand, then back at the meat in the pan.

“You don't need to be worrying about that. I'll do the hunting.” He balled up the sling in his hand. The shock on his face faded, and for the briefest of seconds, it turned to something she had never seen before. That look disappeared in a flash, replaced with something she
had
seen before: anger. She saw it blossom and bloom, and that
spurred a rise in her temperature as well. How could he be angry at her for bringing in food? He never minded when she found nuts or brought in water.

“It's not like we're living a luxurious life out here, Rick. You should be glad I brought something home tonight. If you don't want it, fine. Don't eat it. More for me.” She slammed the pan down on the top of the stove. The lid bounced and fell to the floor. She muttered a curse word under her breath and bent to pick it up.

The back of his knuckles smashed into her left cheek as she stood up. Her head snapped back. The lid again flew from her grasp. Her already aching shoulder crashed into the cabin wall, sending jolts of pain flaring through her entire body. Her head missed the edge of the stone mantel by a hair's whisper. Blood filled her mouth as she slid to the floor. She choked on it, spraying a thin red mist across the room.

Rick watched her regain her wits, waiting until he was sure she could see what he was doing. He opened the lid on the barrel-shaped stove and dropped her sling into the fire.

“You don't need that,” he said as he turned back to her. “Whatever we need, I'll get. Your job is here, in the house. You don't need to be out there. You have no idea how dangerous it is out there.” He looked at the pan filled with the ready-to-cook hare, picked it up, and calmly dumped the contents into the fire. Izzy watched in horror. A line of blood and saliva spilled from her lips. The smell of burning leather wafted through the cabin. Rick closed the lid, glowering at her.

She touched the inside of her cheek with her tongue. Her teeth had dug deep gashes into the flesh. She winced.

“I'm sorry darlin'. Didn't mean to do that.” He reached down and caressed her cheek. “You'll be fine. No damage done, right?”

Izzy shook her head ever so slightly, more out of disbelief than agreement, but Rick took it as assent.

“Good. Get yourself cleaned up. And then pluck that bird,” he said as he turned away. “It'll do for dinner.” He left the cabin with barely a pause, not even bothering to help her back to her feet.

Izzy leaned back against the hearth and swallowed another mouthful of blood-laced spittle.

There had been no warning, nothing but the look on his face . . . and that strange look that had briefly crossed his face before the anger. She closed her eyes and memorized that expression. The shock. The anger. And the look in between.

Her pulse quickened. She knew what that expression was. Fear.
True fear
. The fear of realizing that she could get the one thing she would always need, the one thing he had always provided: food. With that ability, she could go anywhere, do anything,
without him.

She looked at the stove. The sling was gone, but she could make another. The next one she would hide, and the meat she caught she would keep for herself.

He could have his anger. He could make her life hellish. But she would always remember that look of fear on his face, and someday, when the winter was over, she would make his worst fears come true.

She would leave, and
he
would be completely alone.