In the gloaming there was a caribou. It looked at him, he looked at it. Too far away for him to shoot, too fast for him to chase. Those things could skim over the top of the muskeg as if on skis.
The next day was bright and almost hot; things in the distance were wobbly at the edges, like a mirage. Was he hungry any more? Hard to tell. He could sense words rising from him, burning away in the sun. Soon he’d be wordless, and then would he still be able to think? No and yes, yes and no. He’d be up against it, up against everything that filled the space he was moving through, with no glass pane of language coming between him and not-him. Not-him was seeping into him through his defences, through his edges, eating away at form, sending its rootlets into his head like reverse hairs. Soon he’d be overgrown, one with the moss. He needed to keep moving, preserve his outlines, define himself by his own shockwaves, the wake he left in the air. To keep alert, to stay attuned to the, to the what? To whatever might come at him and stop him dead.
At the next washed-out bridge a bear congealed from the low shrubs flanking the river. It was not there and then it was there, and it reared up, startled, offering itself. Was there growling, a roar, a stench? No doubt, but Zeb can’t remember. He must have sprayed its eyes with the bear spray and shot it point-blank, but there’s no photo record.
Next thing he knew he was butchering it, hacking away at it with his inadequate knife. Blood up to the wrists, then bonanza: the meat, the fur. The two ravens stood at a distance, making R noises, waiting their turn: gobbets for him, followed by pickings for them.
“Not too much,” he told himself, chewing, recalling the dangers of stuffing yourself on an empty stomach, especially on something so rich and supersaturated. “Little at a time.” His voice came to him muffled, as if he was telephoning himself from underground. What did this taste like? Who cared? Having eaten the heart, could he now speak the language of bears?
Picture him the next day or the next or sometime, halfway there, wherever there is, though he retains the belief that it is in fact somewhere. He’s got new footgear — wraps of hide, fur side in, tied with crisscross strips like a fashion item in a cave-man comic. He’s got a fur cape, he’s got a fur hat, and all of it doubles as sleeping gear, heavy and stinky. He’s porting a meat cargo and a big wad of fat. If he had the time he’d render the fat into grease and smear it on himself, but as it is he injects it into his mouth like bite-sized fuel. And it is fuel, he’s burning it; he can feel the heat of it travelling through his veins.
“Goodbye to care,” he sings. The ravens are sticking with him, shadowing him. Now there are four of them: he’s the Pied Piper of ravens. “There’s a bluebird on my windowsill,” he sings to them. His mother went in for cheerful, upbeat retro crap. That, and perky hymns.
And now, coming towards him along the relatively smooth stretch of road ahead, far in the distance, there’s a cyclist. Some rugged mountain bike adventurer out of his mind on endorphins. They pass through Whitehorse from time to time, augment their kits at the outfitter stores, head for the hills to test their endurance mettle on the Old Canol Trail. They pedal as far as the bunkie — that’s their usual trajectory. Then they pedal back, thinner, stringier, madder. Some bring tales of alien abductions, some of talking foxes, some of human voices on the tundra at night. Or semi-human voices. Trying to lure them.
No, two cyclists. One quite a bit ahead. Lovers’ tiff, he speculates. The normal thing would be to stick together.
Useful things, mountain bikes. Also pannier packs and whatever might be in them.
Zeb hides in the creekside shrubbery, waits for the first one to go past. A woman, blond, sporting the thighs of a stainless-steel nutcracker goddess in her shiny skintight cyclewear. Under her streamlined helmet she’s squinting into the wind, frowning fit to kill with her skimpy eyebrows over her trendy little wind/sun goggles. Away she goes, bumpity-bump, ass taut as an implanted tit, and now here comes the guy, keeping his distance, morose, mouth down at the corners. He’s pissed her off, he’s feeling the whip. He’s burdened with a misery Zeb can alleviate.
“Arrgh,” Zeb yells, or words to that effect.
“Arrgh?” says Toby, laughing.
“You know what I mean,” says Zeb.
Short form: he leaps out of the bushes and onto the guy, making a growly noise, in his bear-fur coverings. There’s a strangled yelp from the target, then a metallic toppling. No need to bash the poor sucker, he’s out cold anyway. Just take the cycle with its twin saddle packs and make off.
When he looks behind, the girl has stopped. He can picture her recently clamped mouth an open O, the O of woe. Now she’ll be sorry she tongue-lashed the sad bugger. She’ll thunder-thigh back, kneel and minister, rock and cradle, dab at scrapes, shed tears. The lad will come to and gaze into her ungoggled eyes, the simp, and all will be forgiven, whatever it was. Then they will use her cellphone to call for aid.
What will they say? He can imagine.
When he’s out of sight, down a hill, and around a corner, he goes through the saddlebags. What a trove: a poker hand of Joltbars, some sort of quasi-cheese product, an extra windcheater, a mini-stove with fuel cylinder, a pair of dry socks, spare boots with thick soles — too small, but he’ll cut out the toes. A cellphone. Best of all, an identity: he can use some of that. He mashes the cellphone and hides it under a rock, then makes his way sideways over the tundra, squish squish, bike and all.
Luckily there’s a palsa that’s been ripped open, no doubt by an enraged grolar in search of evasive ground squirrels. Zeb digs himself and the bike into the moist black earth, leaving a vantage point between clods. After a long damp wait, here comes the ’thopter. It hovers over where the two young cyclists must be hugging and shivering and thanking their lucky stars, and down goes the ladder, and, after a time, up go the lovers, and then they’re carried away in the slow, low ’thopter, flippity-flop, blimpity-blimp. What a story they will have to tell.
And they tell it. Once in Whitehorse, having shed his bearskin wrappings some time back and sunk them in a pond, having changed into the fresh gear provided by Fortune, having grabbed a hitchhike, having freshened up considerably and altered his hairstyle, having hacked certain features of the cyclist’s identity and run some cash through a backdoor known to him by memory, and having swiftly topped up his own cash flow thereby, he reads all about it.
Sasquatches are real after all, and they’ve migrated to the Mackenzie Mountain Barrens. No, it couldn’t have been a bear because bears can’t ride mountain bikes. Anyway, this thing was seven feet tall with eyes almost like a man’s, and it smelled terrible, and it showed signs of almost-human intelligence. There’s even a picture, taken on the girl’s cellphone: a brown blob, with a red circle around it to signal which of the many brown blobs in the picture is the significant one.
Within a week, Bigfoot-believers from around the world have formed a posse and mounted an expedition to the site of the discovery, and are combing the area for footprints and tufts of hair and piles of dung. Soon, says their leader, they will have a batch of definitive DNA, and then the scoffers will be shown up for the corrupt, fossilized, obsolete truth-deniers that they are.
Very soon.
The Story of Zeb and Thank You and Good Night
Thank you for bringing me this fish.
Thank you means … Thank you means you did something good for me. Or something you thought was good. And that good thing was giving me a fish. So that made me happy, but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That’s what Thank you means.