Her hand on me so cold. What’s wrong? I asked her.
I’m sick, she told me. But I’m fine. I’ll be fine.
Then how come Helen is here?
For your dad’s peace of mind.
We sat and watched the snow tumble down. A raven dropped out of the sky and onto the roof outside her window. It was unusual to see a bird out in a snowstorm, usually they sense bad weather coming and fly away from it, or else hole up. Find a dense tree and nest under the branches till the weather passes. The raven stood right next to the glass, so still you couldn’t even tell if it was breathing, its little black eye on us.
What if I got you something? I asked.
She opened her eyes. Got me something?
Like a squirrel. Or even a vole. Something small. Would that help?
All the tiredness in her face replaced by a hardness. I told you, I stopped that. A long time ago.
I know, I said. But I thought—
I don’t need it, she said.
No sound but the ruffle of feathers as the raven took flight. Nothing left but the print of his feet in the snow, soon those would vanish, too.
All I need is a little rest, she said and closed her eyes again.
I stayed next to her till she fell asleep. Whatever she was sick with, it seemed so much like how I got when I hadn’t drunk in days. But it mustn’t of been the same because a few days later she was out of bed, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, no trace of tiredness in her. No sign that she’d ever been sick at all. That winter, she was full of energy. She didn’t go back into the woods with me again but she spent more time than ever outside, working with our dogs, playing in the snow, riding the back of a sled round and round the yard with our youngest racers. She didn’t catch so much as a cold the rest of that season, she was the healthiest I’d ever seen her. Till the night she took a walk along the road and the next we heard of her, it was from a VSO knocking on the door in the early morning, telling Dad he would need to go into town, they had already took her body to the clinic.
The first night after Dad give Flash away, I run for hours, no real thought in my head but to keep moving. Your three priorities when you are in the wilderness are shelter, water, fire, in that order. There are lots of places in the woods to find shelter if you know where to look, hollowed-out trees or boulders where you can make a lean-to, or you can even dig a snow cave. When I finally wanted a rest in the earliest hours of the morning, I spent an hour or so on a lean-to, then made a fire and melted snow for water. The northern lights flashed across the black sky, pulsing green and white. I stopped for a minute and watched. Thought of the words Tom Hatch had wrote in the pages of the Kleinhaus book. If I do nothing else before I die, I will see the northern lights. He hadn’t managed to stay in Alaska long enough to see the lights, they was most active in the winter during nights that stretch out so long they eat up a good chunk of the day, too. It was my doing that he hadn’t reached the one goal he’d set himself before dying. Maybe he would come back to Alaska someday, not to fetch his pack but to make good on this small dream he’d wrote down. Or maybe I had ruined that for him, too.
I got up then, kicked snow over the remnants of my fire, then ventured away from my temporary camp to see what I could rustle up for breakfast. But the woods was quiet that morning. I set a snare to check after I got a few hours’ sleep, but when I come back there was no catch. So I kept moving.
I didn’t let myself think that first day. Not about Scott’s blood, fresh on my hand, and what it give me when I licked it away. No regret about how I couldn’t resist it. No anger at losing Flash, or at the way Dad had looked, stupid and mean and small with a spray of snow across his coat. No worry about Jesse, who I trusted about as far as I could toss him. Running freed me from all of that. Emptied me out. I filled the space that was left with the sky and the trees and the anticipation of whatever I’d find that day to warm my insides. I destroyed my camp and made a new one, deeper in the woods. Climbed a tree and watched the split stick trap I’d built. Waited for movement in the snow. When there wasn’t none, I moved again, deeper into the wild. Farther away from home.
The second night, warm in the sleeping bag I brung along and with the coals of a fire at the mouth of my shelter, there wasn’t anything to do but think. I watched the smoldering coals and remembered spotting Dad and Jesse making their way down the rows of doghouses with their shovels and spades. I had come out to help with the work, but Dad’s voice stopped me before I crossed the yard. He was talking nonstop, I couldn’t make out the words, just the tone of his voice and the way it rose and fell, the music of it. I remembered that enthusiasm, the way it would spark off of him and ignite something in me, a kind of electricity between us as we argued good-natured about which dog run best with which.
Dad and Jesse moved like a man and his shadow. Dad fell quiet, and Jesse spoke up. His voice wasn’t very loud, even when he hollered his voice didn’t carry.
Then Dad laughed. The sound of it rolled over the snow, brightened every dull metal surface and shrunk the early evening shadows. A rare sound after Mom died, a sound I didn’t hear often enough.
Even I had to admit, whatever Jesse’s aim was, he had made things better. In the few weeks he’d lived with us, the yard, the house, the dogs, all of it seemed more like Before than After.
I pushed Jesse from my mind as the last of my fire died, turned over to chase sleep down its narrow rabbit’s hole. My belly complained. I laid open-eyed, watching stars wink at me between the branches of my shelter. I could still taste the last thing I’d drunk, Scott’s worry and irritation still clinging to me. I knew it was only my imagination, but I felt his blood on my lips, coursing through me, pulsing inside my head. Tomorrow, I told myself. I would catch a critter and drink my fill, and it would bury Scott deeper inside my head, replace him with the wildness of a hare or a marten, something that would let me run unburdened with thought deeper into the woods.
But there was no critter the next day. Nothing warm inside me. I pressed on, thinking of Peter Kleinhaus. Of how, nearly starving, he come across the carcass of some animal, so long dead he couldn’t tell what it had been. The bits of meat and skin left on the bones was frozen. I found a part I recognized, is what he wrote, some animal’s rib. There was no moment of decision, no thought at all. Only action. Only my hand to my mouth, the bone between my teeth. The animal, gnawing.
No catch, but I dug the knife from my pocket just the same. Opened the blade.
You expect someone vanishing out of your life to change things forever, and in some ways, it does. But not as much as you’d guess. Someone dies, and the dogs still need to get fed. Shit still needs to be shoveled. You go on eating, sleeping, waking up. Snow melts, trees and grass green up, the days grow longer then shorter again. The snow comes back, nearly a year has passed, and you surprise yourself by carrying on living, despite the worst.
The first winter after Mom died was like ripping the dressing off a wound that only begun to scab over. I spent most of my time in the woods. Tried to quiet my thoughts by hunting but I passed by the place where I’d caught and bled a marten the first time Mom come into the woods with me, and I walked through the clearing where she once showed me how to dig through a pile of scat to find out which nearby plants was good to eat. Every tree I seen, every rock and fallen log, everything was like a hole in the ground you forget is there. You step in it every time, twist your ankle and think, I have got to remember about that hole, but soon as your ankle stops hurting, you forget again, and the forgetting is what makes you step in that exact same hole the next time.