“What is it, lad?”
Danny still had his snowshoes on and he sat on the floor to take them off as he panted, “Odd, he’s outside. He’s hurt bad.”
Hosea ran outside, down the steps, and found the boy lying there. One of the town dogs had sniffed Odd out and was poking his cold nose into the wound on his face. Hosea kicked the dog away.
“Daniel!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Daniel! Get out here.”
But Danny was already hurrying back to the toboggan.
“What in Christ’s name happened?”
Danny’s breath was coming back to him. “It was a bear.”
“A bear?”
“Odd went into a den. It’s my fault.”
Hosea stood quickly and removed his apron and balled it and put it firmly over Odd’s eye. He turned to Daniel. “Listen to me carefully. Go inside. Tell Rebekah to put water on to boil. Lots of it. She’s upstairs. Tell her to put fresh linens on the table in the surgery. Go.”
Daniel was back inside the apothecary before Hosea lifted Odd off the toboggan. By the time he’d carried him up to the second floor, Rebekah and Daniel were already preparing the table. Hosea laid Odd down. Though the boy was still unconscious, Hosea was relieved to find his pulse steady, his temperature, to the touch, normal.
“Rebekah, listen.”
Rebekah could not take her eyes off Odd.
“Rebekah! Listen to me.”
She finally looked up.
“Do you have water boiling?”
She nodded.
“Go upstairs. As soon as it’s ready, as soon as it’s hot, bring it down. Put more on to boil. Do this as quickly as possible. Do you understand?”
Rebekah answered by walking backward from the room, her eyes not leaving Odd until she’d stepped out.
“Now, Daniel, I need you to tell me slowly and precisely what happened.”
So, while Hosea sedated Odd, while he stanched the blood and cleaned the eye, while he clipped away Odd’s shaggy hair and shaved his eyebrow, Daniel told him the story of Odd climbing into the bears’ den. Danny spoke slowly, as he’d been instructed, and tried to remember every detail. Hosea listened intently while he worked.
“I tried to stop him but I was too late,” Danny concluded. “He was half in the den when I realized what he was doing. It’s my fault.” Danny started to weep.
Hosea stood up and checked Odd’s pulse again and then looked at Daniel. “I don’t understand how it’s your fault,” he said.
“I told him he was a chickenshit,” Danny said. “Odd said he was going to be brave.” Danny wiped the tears from his cheeks, wiped the snot from his nose. “I didn’t know he was going to climb into a bear den.”
Hosea put his hand on Danny shoulder. “Daniel, any fool who climbs into a bear den deserves what awaits him. This is not your fault.”
These words only sent the boy into another fit of tears.
Hosea tousled the boy’s hair and said, “Go help Rebekah with the water, Daniel. We’ll fix your pal up good as new.”
But Hosea had no confidence this was true. Since his arrival in Gunflint he’d set countless broken bones. Cleaned the bullet wounds of many men clipped accidentally in the shoulder or back during pheasant or turkey hunts. Delivered all the babies born here over the past ten years and stood over more than a few slow deaths. Never mind his effort at curing Thea, the poor lad’s poor mother. But Odd’s injury was different. It was out of his purview, for one. This skull injury, he wondered if he was actually seeing the outer recesses of Odd’s brain when he looked into the wound. And then, it was Odd.
Hosea walked to Odd’s bedside and carefully removed the bandage covering the boy’s eye. Blood pulsed slowly from the wound with each beat of Odd’s heart. Hosea put two fingers on his neck and opened his pocket watch. After a minute he wrote the boy’s heart rate on a chart on the bedside table. From his pocket he removed the ophthalmoscope and trained it on the empty eye socket. He had identified the essential components. The extraocular muscles had been severed. The ophthalmic artery was intact. The bundle of optic and sclerotic nerves was horribly frayed. Hosea could not imagine the pain. It made his skin crawl to think of it. He wet a clean cloth in the bowl of warm water and washed the wound for the tenth time. Odd stirred but did not wake, the drugs staying consciousness.
He replaced the ophthalmoscope and walked to the window. The sun was near to rising over the lake. He had to catch his breath looking on the horizon, thinking about the boy and how from now on he’d only ever see half of what he ought.
After lunch, after Hosea had been up the Lighthouse Road to the telegraph machine in the lighthouse keeper’s office, after he’d exchanged telegraphs with a physician friend in Chicago, after two more hours spent with Howe’s Manual and another hour studying Gray’s Anatomy, after he’d administered another dose of ether, after all this, Hosea performed the surgery. With a speculum holding Odd’s eyelids wide open, Hosea trimmed the frayed nerves and cut back the extraocular muscles. The bear’s claw had entered at the corner of the boy’s eye and broken the bridge of his nose in the process. Hosea removed several tiny fragments of bone that he’d not seen until then. For an hour he labored over the boy’s injury and when he was satisfied he stitched the gash extending down from the outer corner of Odd’s eye, bandaged it, and wrapped his head with gauze. Finally he gave him a last dose of morphine and left the boy to sleep.
Danny had been sitting outside the surgery since early morning, and when Hosea stepped out of the room Danny stood with a questioning look on his face.
Hosea took a deep breath, he cracked his knuckles. “Hello, Daniel.”
“How is he, Mister Grimm?”
“I think he’ll be fine. He’s lost his eye. It will take him some long time to recover. He’ll need visitors. I hope you’ll come see him.”
“I will. Every day.”
“I believe you will.”
“Can I go in and sit next to him?”
“Don’t touch or otherwise disturb him. Do you understand?”
Danny nodded.
“And if he wakes, or if anything seems strange, come up and fetch me.”
“I will.”
Hosea turned to leave as Danny stepped into the room, but Hosea paused and turned. “Daniel.”
Danny paused in turn. “Yes?”
“Where were you boys when this happened?”
“Up on the Burnt Wood. We spent the day on my trapline.”
“Why did you call Odd a chickenshit?”
Danny blushed.
“I already told you it’s not your fault, son.”
“He told me about learning to fish with Arne and I couldn’t help it. I just don’t see him out on the big water all by himself.”
Hosea considered this for a moment. “So he went bear hunting.”
“Mister Grimm, I wish I wouldn’t have said it.”
“I’m sure. Go on in there, sit next to your friend.”
Danny did.
Twice each day Hosea cleaned the wound and changed the bandages. He administered smaller and smaller doses of morphine until finally none was needed. Danny came every day and sat on the bedside chair. Rebekah brought Odd his meals and watched over him when Danny wasn’t there.
After a week Odd was well enough to convalesce up in the flat, so Hosea moved a chair to the front window and piled books around the boy and in this way Odd ushered in spring. Danny still came often and the two boys spent the first days of April playing chess or card games rather than romping through the woods.
On one such day, as the boys sat in the flat putting new backing and line on their fly reels, Hosea joined them.