It must have been around midnight, the sun hovering on the horizon, when they swung into the mouth of the Thirtymile River and the cabin came into view. Already the five dogs were up and yammering, dust rising round their feet in a distant cloud, the proto-barks drifting off into wolfish howls of greeting. “Hear that?” Sess said, digging into the paddle. “That's your welcoming committee.”
She turned to look over her shoulder. “Oh, really? And what are they saying?”
“ 'Pam-e-la, we looooooove youuuu!' ”
And she laughed, even as a pair of loons went racketing up off the water. “You sure they're not saying, 'Here we are, now feeeeeeeeed us'?”
“Well, Pamela,” he said, and he winked at her because he was feeling so light in his bones and his organs he might have been a bird that could sail right up out of the canoe and across the flux of the water in a single wild rush of feathers, “to be truthful with you-and I'm going to be truthful with you, always, whether this lasts the weekend or till you're a hunched-over old lady and I'm an old man-I think you do have a point there.” He let the paddle trail an instant and cupped a hand to his ear. “Yep. Now that I concentrate, I think I _can__ detect maybe just a trace of hunger in that chorus-but that's Bobo, that sharp contralto in there, and he's always hungry. So don't blame him for spoiling the surprise.”
Then it was dusk and the canoe was up on the gravel bar, the dogs straining at their chains, and he and Pamela were walking hand in hand up the path that beat through the weeds to the cabin. He wished he could show her something grander-the rambling spread of outbuildings, the smokehouse, sauna and enclosed dog runs he planned to put up once he found the time and the money, not to mention a more spacious cabin-but he was proud of what he'd already accomplished, and he could feel the pride beating at his rib cage as he took down the bear-proof shutters and unlatched the door for her. The door faced south, of course, as did the two double-paned windows set on either side of it, but before they were in the cabin proper they had to go through the five-by-five dogtrot-or mud room, as somebody who lived in town might call it. “This,” he said, breathing hard in the dimness and taking in the familiar smells of oil, gasoline, ancient bait and bloodied traps and mold and whatever else had awakened out of the dirt, “this is the mud room.”
She was right there, a good eight or ten inches shorter than him, her pale hair and white arms ghostly in the half-light, and she wasn't saying anything, just staring wide-eyed, like a girl on a school trip. He guided her through the inner door and into the cabin itself, dodging round her to put a match to the lantern he kept on a hook just inside the door. “And this,” he said, his voice almost strangled in his throat with the sheer tension of the moment, “this is what I call home.”
She stood in the middle of the room and she didn't say a word. Her hair was luminous, her shoulders squared. He wanted to say something, wanted to ask her if she liked it, but he couldn't find his voice. After a moment she drifted toward the shelves on the near wall and idly fingered the things there, his few grease-slick books _(Tanning: From A to Z; How to Stay Alive in the Woods; Arctic Wilderness; The Home Brewer),__ a bottle of Pepto Bismol set beside a string of dried habanero chiles, Three-In-One oil in a rusted can, a candle six inches around he'd made from the wax of the bees he'd mail-ordered last summer, the odd tool. Still, she didn't say anything.
How long she stood there, picking up one thing after another and gently setting it down again, he couldn't say-no more than a minute or two, certainly, but it was the longest minute or two of his life. Was she in shock, was that it? For all her talk, she was a city woman, and maybe she had a whole different idea of what a cabin in the woods really was, a whole unspooling romantic fantasy of a big Ponderosa TV cabin with forest green shutters and a wide veranda and a kitchen with a tile floor and a hand pump for water. His heart was hammering. He couldn't seem to swallow. Outside, the dogs howled. And never had the place seemed so close, so dingy and confining, so much like a cell, like a bum's palace, like the meanest, crackbrained idea of a tumbledown shack in the world. The floor was caked with dirt. It was cold as a grave. He wanted to get down on his knees and sob. What had he been thinking? What in God's name had he been thinking?
“I'm going to put a coat of varnish on the floor,” he said. “That's the next thing. The very next thing.”
And then she turned to him, and the tears were in _her__ eyes. “Oh, Sess,” she said, “it's so, so _beautiful.__”
Together they fed the dogs-pots of cornmeal mush with dried chum salmon and the odd greenish scrap of last fall's moose stirred in-and then he got the stove going and made her coffee with evaporated milk and so much sugar the spoon stood upright in it. Down came the table and the bed, both of which folded up against the wall when they weren't in use and rested on dowels of white spruce when they were-“Space management,” he told her, “nothing to get in your way and trip over.” She perched on the bed, on the thin single mattress he'd hauled upriver in the canoe two years ago, and on the sleeping bag he'd sewn from the hides of a hundred ground squirrels. Within minutes the stove had driven the chill from the place and conquered the lingering odor of dampness and mold.
He sat on the far edge of the bed from her, cradling his cup in his hands. “It's a tight cabin,” he said, selling its virtues. “Even at sixty below. You'd be surprised. I mean, you would.”
She'd taken off her jacket now, and she stretched and leaned back into the pile of furs-lynx, fox, wolf-he'd heaped up around her. Her eyes were feasting. “That's nice to know,” she said. “But with all these furs, and this beautiful sleeping bag-very neat stitchwork, Sess, by the way; I'm impressed-with all of this you'd be warm without the stove.”
He was thinking he'd be even warmer if he had somebody inside it with him, and before he could stop himself, he'd said as much. He said it, and then he looked away.
Her first response was a laugh, musical and ringing, a laugh that made the place swell till it was like a concert hall. He brought the coffee mug to his lips so he could steal a look at her. Her face grew serious. She shifted herself closer to him and reached out her hand for his. “That'd be nice,” she said, her voice gone raw in her throat. “But I don't want you to get the wrong idea here, because it would be easy to, I suppose, you know, with me advertising for a man and all-”
He held her hand across the expanse of the bed, flesh to flesh, his every cell on fire. He didn't know what to say.
“Because I'm not that kind of girl, not the kind you hear about-or read about in the magazines. I'm old-fashioned, Sess, and I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. I've waited twenty-seven years for the right man and I guess I can wait a few weeks longer. Till I'm married. Can you understand that? Can you?”
He was thinking about Jill, her hair cut short with a pair of shears till it stood out from her head like a clown's, her legs hard-muscled and short, the heavy gravitational pull of her breasts as she swung into the sleeping bag naked, always naked, even on the coldest nights. Jill. He was thinking about Jill. “Yes,” he said. “Sure.”
And finally, when they thought of sleep with the sun propped back up in the sky and the night as still as a dead man's dream, he was the one who gave up the bed and went out into the pale drizzle of light to pitch his tent amongst the dogs.