The first thing was a fire, but he was afraid of a fire because Bosky might see it and come back for them, so he concentrated on hauling the canoe up out of the water, unloading the wet groceries and the wet clothes and the tools and equipment and all the rest of the things they just couldn't live without, and then propping the hull up as a windbreak. Pamela worked beside him, and they didn't have to talk, didn't have to say a word, working in consonance to unload everything and cut spruce boughs to lay down under the canoe and collect driftwood to mound up for the fire if there was going to be a fire, and they would have to wait and see about that. In the meanwhile, the snow stiffened, rattling off their hoods and sleeves in pellets and granules, sifting to the ground with the soft shush of rice spilled from a sack, and soon the dark vacancy of the riverbank began to fill in with the pale glowing substance of it. “He's not coming back, is he, Sess?” Pamela said out of the void.
He looked to her, the ghostly stoop and movement of her as she mounded wood and let the phrases escape her mouth in quick snatched drifts of windblown vapor. “No,” he said, “not in this, and I hope to god the son of a bitch crashes and burns till there's nothing recognizable left of him. Can you believe it? Can you believe he actually shot at us? I told you, Pamela. I told you from the beginning, and you wouldn't listen.”
They waited half an hour, shivering, and then he held a match to a twist of birch bark and the fire took. They dried their shoes, their socks, their feet. Pamela dug a damp box of crackers out of a shredded grocery bag and they shared them with slices of Cracker Barrel cheddar and let their internal engines wind down a bit. What this looked like was the first big storm of the year-it had all the earmarks, what with the wind and the snow formed into pellets and temperatures in the twenties, and he had no doubt it would settle in colder and the snow turn to powder-and they had a very narrow window of opportunity here if they were going to get the canoe and all their precious stuff back to the Thirtymile before next spring. After a while, he got up and fished around through the baggage till he found a pair of his new guaranteed-to-keep-your-toes-warm-at-forty-below Outdoorsman-brand thermal socks and worked one of them through the bullethole in the bottom of the canoe till he had a plug he thought would hold. Then they loaded up again and went out on the river in the full blow of the storm, their forearms and shoulders fighting the resistance, their hands molded to the paddles as if they'd been sculpted of ice.
It must have been past midnight when they skirted Woodchopper Creek, veering far out from shore on the off chance Joe Bosky was out there somewhere laying for them, and neither of them dared even to think of what might have happened upriver, at the cabin, when Joe Bosky knew they were away from home and had the means and the motive to do them real and irreparable harm. The snow flew in their faces. A thin crust of ice formed over the baggage where the leavings of Pamela's paddle flew back on the wind and settled, and a layer of snow formed atop that. The night was a dense and private thing, working through the motions of its own unknowable rhythms, and they had no right to be out in it. Sess Harder didn't care. He was glad to be here, now, equal to the challenge, glad to be alive, glad for every furious driven bite the wooden paddle took out of the refrigerated river. And when they rounded the Thirtymile and the dogs sang out with the apprehension of their coming, he was the gladdest man in the world.
PART SIX. OLD NIGHT
This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night.
27
It was Halloween, October thirty-first, Pan's favorite day of the year, and what did he have to show for it? Nothing-no black cats, no skeletons, not even a jack-o'-lantern. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, black dark, and the river, the big roiling silver playground chock-full of fish and game he'd cavorted on all summer, was locked up tight in a tomb of ice. Freeze-up, that's what they called it, and Pan had shuffled off down the frozen highway of Woodchopper Creek in the declining light of day to see that the last open channel had sealed up overnight. It was twenty below zero. There was a wind. He'd stood there shivering on the rock-hard bank and listening to the silence-it was mind-blowing, all that noise of buckling ice and angry water, all that _life,__ smoothed out to nothing, not a whimper, not so much as a pop or burble-and then he'd hiked back up the creek to the cabin and stooped outside the door to fill his arms with firewood.
Nobody blinked. He came in through the dogtrot, slammed the outer door to, then squeezed through the heavy cabin door like a contortionist and slammed that behind him, his nose dripping, fingers numb, the sawed-off lengths of pine tucked under his arm like a stack of unreadable books. A garment of cold-thinned air came with him, and the _smell__ of the cold, almost a chemical smell, and what was it going to be like when the temperature dropped another twenty degrees? Another forty? He crossed the room, poked the coals and laid on the wood, and nobody said _Hey, man, what's it like out there?__ or _Did it lock up?__ or _We thought maybe you were frozen to a stump or something.__ They said, “Raise and call.” They said, “Two pairs.” They said, “Three jacks, pair of nines.”
Joe was cramped in at the table with Sky Dog and Dale, shuffling cards. They'd been playing poker for the past twelve hours at least-since they got back from the Three Pup on the snow machines, anyway-and they showed no sign of letting up. They kept a joint circulating. They were drinking beer out of the quart bottle and they threw back reds and Dexamils according to need, and he'd sat in himself for a while and made sure to look after his own pharmaceutical well-being, but he'd got to the end of that and what he wanted now was some action, some fun, some _Halloween,__ for shitsake.
Joe had the generator going because money meant nothing to him and he could fly in gasoline anytime he wanted, and so the lights were on, and that was a pure and beneficial thing in one way-at least you could _read__ to fight back the boredom that was already closing in like a smotherer's hand-but it was a curse too. It was curse and a royal pain in the ass to the degree that Pan, pacifist and flower child though he might have been, was considering triple homicide and maybe suicide into the bargain, because electricity meant music and for Joe Bosky music meant show tunes and country-“Oklahoma,”
“The Sound of Music,” Kitty Wells, Roy Acuff, Flatt and Scruggs, Eddy Arnold, Gene Autry. _Gene Autry,__ for Christ's sake. Ronnie couldn't let himself think about it, and he stuffed his ears with toilet paper to try to blot it out, but the corny booming voices and twanging strings and country yodeling seeped through nonetheless, polluted his consciousness till he actually found himself _humming__ the shit. _The hills are alive__-if he heard the hills are alive one more time he wouldn't be responsible for his actions, he wouldn't.
Of course, the irony, sad and piss-poor as it was, was that the hills were dead and so was everything else. Joe kept talking about trapping, about the excitement of running a line and seeing what was there for you _gifted up from nature,__ but he never did anything but talk. He was through with trapping, that was the reality. He was making his money flying booze in to the Eskimos in the dry villages along the Kobuk River, selling cases of Fleischmann's gin and Three Feathers whiskey and Everclear for ten times what he paid for them in Fairbanks. Ronnie had gone with him, twice, just to see what it was like, and it was the end of the world, that was what it was. Windowless shacks, chained-up dogs, dirt streets and garbage blowing in the wind, no roads in and no roads out-Boynton was midtown Manhattan in comparison. He'd made a buck or two himself, selling the odd lid of pot out of the stash he'd taken with him from Drop City-and he'd tried to _give__ the shit away to Norm and Marco and Verbie and he didn't know who else and still everybody treated him like a leper, and that wasn't right, even though when he looked at it in the light of day he could see where he'd fucked up, fucked up big time, and he re-gretted that, he did. But the Eskimos-little half-sized scaled-down comical cats with hair like walking grease who wouldn't look you in the eye if you set their shirts on fire-the Eskimos wanted it, oh yes indeed.