The calendar swore it was spring. Rob Ferguson was more inclined to swear at the calendar, or else to burst into hysterical laughter. The only double-digit temperatures Guilford had seen since the beginning of the year were the ones in negative numbers. When your lows were below zero, that was one thing. When your highs couldn’t jump the hurdle, you were talking about a whole ’nother ballgame.
He moved on snowshoes as easily as he would have in socks across a bare floor. He remembered how, when he first came to Guilford, the splay-legged, shuffling gait had left his thigh muscles sore, and how he’d had to think about every step before he took it. No more. As with Shakespeare’s grave diggers, familiarity lent a quality of easiness.
He tramped through a barer, more open landscape than the one he’d known just after he got here. The pines and broad-leaved trees that had grown this close to Guilford were long gone now—literally gone up in smoke. You could chop and burn or you could freeze. Not a pretty choice, but a real one.
He didn’t expect to see a moose around these parts. To put it another way, he would have been astonished to see a moose around these parts. They’d been hunted out for a while now. But the Piscataquis River ran into Manhanock Pond east and a little south of Guilford. Most of the big pond was frozen hard enough for hockey. Hell, most of it was probably frozen hard enough for tank battles. But there’d be, or there might be, a little stretch of open water where the river came in.
Where there was open water, there’d be, or there might be, waterfowl. Mallards, maybe, or geese: Canada geese or the snow geese that grew more common in these parts as snow did, too. Rob’s mouth filled with spit at the thought of roast goose. All dark meat—and all that lovely goose grease, too. If you were going to live in a climate like this, you needed fat. Vegans in Guilford—there were some—had a rough time because so little olive oil or even corn or soybean cooking oil came in. Corn and soybeans grew in the Midwest, or they had. Not much of anything grew there now.
Rob carried a shotgun in the crook of his left elbow. He wore an electric orange vest over his L.L. Bean heavy-duty anorak and backpack. His fur cap with earflaps had an electric orange nylon cover. He looked around and behind him every so often just the same. He’d used all the Day-Glo crap when he got shot, too. Just fool luck he hadn’t lost a leg or got killed instead of only picking up that scar. If somebody was gaining on him now, he wanted to know about it as soon as he could.
Trust but verify. That had been a disarmament-negotiation mantra back about the time Rob was born. He wanted to verify, all right. Trust? After you’d got shot once, trusting wasn’t so easy. He was glad when he didn’t see anybody else.
He also peered ahead. Guilford wasn’t the only small town that could send hunters to Manhanock Pond. Sangerville and Dover-Foxcroft might try it, too. Sangerville was so tiny, it had almost frozen up and blown away. Dover-Foxcroft lay farther off but, bigger even than Guilford, remained very much a going concern. It had a real hospital, for instance, not just an urgent-care clinic.
He didn’t see anybody coming from the east, either. Not even the Three Wise Guys, he thought. Maybe over there they figured the whole pond would be frozen up. And maybe they were right, and he was just wasting his time hiking out here. As with any hunting, that was the chance you took.
His chuckle sent gusts of vapor spurting from his mouth and nose. What would I be doing if I’d stayed back in Guilford? The most likely answer was Sitting around twiddling my thumbs. He might be playing music with the other guys in the band, assuming they had nothing else shaking this morning. Or he might be over at the Mansion Inn, shooting the shit with Dick Barber.
But twiddling his thumbs was the best bet. He wouldn’t be jumping on his wife’s bones—he knew that only too well. Lindsey had a genuine, honest to God job: she taught chemistry at the high school east of the Inn. How useful that was in subarctic Maine might be a different question, but getting kids out of their folks’ hair several hours a day several days a week had to prevent all kinds of child abuse.
There was some open water where the Piscataquis flowed into the lake. Rob clapped his mittened hands together. They made a Zennish almost-noise. (One of the mittens had a slit so he could stick out his index finger and fire the shotgun.) The only trouble was, no waterfowl swam in the water or waddled around by the edge of the lake.
Even more than trying to make a living in the music biz, hunting taught you patience. Either that or it drove you crazy, one. In his pack, Rob carried a little white pop-up tent. He took it out and popped it up now. Voilà! Instant nylon igloo. He turned it so one of the mesh squares that did duty for windows pointed toward the water. The mesh had been cut at the bottom and sides. He could push out the shotgun when he needed to. If he needed to.
He crawled inside. His six-one frame was crowded in there, but not terribly crowded. He settled down to wait. Maybe he would trudge back to Guilford empty-handed when evening came around. Or maybe he would be the primeval huntsman, bringing fat geese back to his mate. (The primeval huntsman probably wouldn’t have toted his kill home in dark green Hefty trash bags, though.)
This whole business of killing your own food felt weird to a guy who’d spent most of his life grazing at roadside diners, and who’d always figured venturing into a supermarket and coming out with something raw was getting back to nature. Just as strange was having to think hard to remember the last time he’d actually spent money.
No, when you got right down to it, that was even stranger. He’d scuffled for cash ever since he went out on the road with Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. Almost any band that toured all the time scuffled for cash. Yeah, there were exceptions, but SF and the ETs hadn’t seemed likely to turn into one even before the supervolcano went kablooie.
Since then… With some wonder, Rob reminded himself that he hadn’t filed a tax return since the eruption. The IRS and the FBI hadn’t indicted him and dragged his evading ass to Leavenworth on account of it, either. Partly, that was because the Feds had written off this part of Maine as not being worth the bother. They kept trying to rehab the huge swath of the Midwest the blast had trashed: it would be worth something if they did. This piece of the country? Who cared? Washington sure didn’t. Rob knew exactly nobody who had paid taxes the past few years.
Another reason for not paying was that precious little cash money had passed through his hands lately. He did spend some in the brief, chilly time alleged to be summer, when the roads thawed out and luxury goods from the south could come up. And he got a little sometimes when the band gigged in far-off places like Dover-Foxcroft and Greenville.
Mostly, though, the money economy in this cut-off part of the country had collapsed. Barter was the new king. You needed something done, you paid off in moose meat or paperback books or guitar lessons or whatever else you had that whoever was doing something for you wanted. A couple of women in Guilford had lost their reputations—or got new ones—by paying for things they needed in the oldest coin of all. So had one guy, a variation that might not have been seen so openly back in the old days.
Rob peered out through the mesh screen. Snow. Ice. Green water. No ducks. No geese. Not even any coots, though you had to be hungry even to think about shooting a coot. Rob had been hungry enough to do it a couple of times. He’d had coot roasted and boiled. Both took a long time and used up a lot of fuel. Neither was a success.
And coot soup made turkey soup smell good by comparison. Turkeys were such nice, tasty birds. Why their boiled carcasses smelled so nasty, Rob had no idea. But they did. Coot soup was worse yet. Boiled skunk might outdo it, but Rob wasn’t even sure of that.