But I knew him. He was a runner.
When we come to the lake, I took the trail round the frozen surface, though it slowed us down. I couldn’t bear to ride over the frozen water again. There was a cold front coming in, according to what the radio had said that morning, it would bring a few days of hard freeze and then they was predicting precipitation, just a few inches but enough to blanket the woods in a layer of snow. Plenty more snowfalls before May, before breakup come and everything started to melt. The ice on the lake would shrink day by day till all that was left was small floes that finally vanished, and then one day, when the sun was warm overhead and the water almost bearable enough to swim in, Helen would find the surface. Dad’s life would change again, then. More loss, another ending. I wished I could tell him I was sorry.
I took the sled as far as Fox Creek, where Dad and I had camped together only hours ago. Took all five dogs off the gangline, then undone their harnesses, too. It wasn’t likely they’d get hung up on a felled tree or in some bushes, but I didn’t want to take the chance. I stowed the harnesses in the basket, then covered the sled with some branches to protect it from the coming snow.
I knelt in front of the dogs and rubbed and petted and stroked each one in turn. Stella licked my face. When she wasn’t focused on the trail she was a real lover, and awfully loyal. When I finally stood up and said, Go on, and shooed them away with a wave, Stella was the only one who paused, waiting for me to follow.
Go on, now, I told her.
Watched her run after the other dogs. It didn’t take long for them to be swallowed up by the night.
They would find their way back easy, show up by late morning or maybe that afternoon. Dad would look up from the kitchen sink and see them coming, or else maybe he’d sleep in, exhausted from the night before. Either way, he’d find his dogs back, five of them loose and running round the yard, tired from their journey and ready for something to eat. I hoped he would feed them before he come looking for me. Scott would help with the feeding, maybe, finish it while Dad prepped another sled and got a fresh team on the line then come blazing down the trail. He’d find my sled that first day, of course. I hoped he would understand then. When he didn’t find me right away, he would keep looking, I knew. Searching, the way he done before, shouting my name only to have the sound of it absorbed by the new snow and the acres of forest and the miles between us.
When Helen’s body was found, someone would come asking about her. Maybe the VSO would remember how reluctantly I had answered his questions, and that thought would rekindle the spark of suspicion he’d felt when he laid eyes on me. Maybe he would come back, ask after me, and find I had gone missing.
Or maybe no one would come. Once the VSO heard I’d vanished, maybe he would understand my dad had been through enough, he oughtn’t be bothered with a mystery that didn’t have no good answers. It was possible he would even land on a version of the truth and decide it was me who’d killed Helen, but by then it would be too late. Either way, I hoped he would leave my dad and brother alone. That he would learn to live without ever knowing the truth. If I could talk to the VSO one last time, that’s what I would tell him: that more often than not, knowing ain’t worth it.
The first year, I grew wiry and tough, whatever extra meat I had on my bones I shed. I ate well enough, drunk my fill, but I was relying only on what I could forage and hunt and trap, and sometimes the woods are abundant, and sometimes they are not.
My hair grew long and tangled till I hacked it off with my knife, and then it seemed to stop growing altogether. My nails like claws till they broke off. My skin toughened. My shoes fell apart, so I tied the bottoms to my feet with twine, then finally stopped bothering and went barefoot all that winter and the next, and after a time I couldn’t even recall what it felt like to have a sole between the ground and my foot.
The wild was quiet. No chatter from other people’s lives inside my head. Every great once in a while, I would discover a memory inside me that wasn’t my own, glance up, and see a hiker on the trail, a hunter hiding himself in the brush. I would climb a tree till the hiker passed, reroute myself round the hunter, feeling for a time her wonder at this wilderness, his patience and focus, till the distance I put between myself and other people diminished their strange lives.
I built shelters and melted snow and climbed trees to gain my bearings. I holed up in caves during bad weather, slept like a hibernating bear. From time to time, I was lucky and stumbled upon a park service cabin. In the winter these places are often unoccupied. I opened the door and dropped my pack and looked round, bewildered by the sight of bunks and tables and benches where people like I used to be sat down to meals they’d eat with forks, out of bowls or off of plates. Once I found a pack of playing cards someone left behind, and I spread them out and spent the better part of a night by the fire just staring at the faces on the cards. Another time it was a glossy magazine that someone left. I turned the pages for hours, taking in the pictures and paragraphs, till finally I tried a sentence. Read aloud words that felt strange on my tongue. Startled myself with the scratchy, unused sound of my own voice.
At the end of the Kleinhaus book, he goes back home. Like a lot of books you read, that’s how it ends, with someone coming back to where he started from, but changed. I suppose there’s no point in reading a story where the main character don’t end up different than how they started.
But just before breakup, when the snow softens and the whole world seems made of water, on the last real day of winter, Kleinhaus scales a tree. His hands and feet scrambling up the branches as a moose charges the place he was standing just a few seconds before. The moose is skinny, he can see its ribs, and its hide hangs off its bones like a too big coat. All the trees nearby stripped of their bark, every plant chewed to nubs. Food is scarce. The moose is surly, in no mood to be startled, which is why it lowers its head and charges him.
So Kleinhaus is up in his tree with an angry moose circling the trunk, and he perches on a branch to wait it out. After a time, he looks up from the moose and out at the land around him. It goes on and on, mountains and rivers and valleys, only a handful of them he’s explored. And he thinks, you could roam that land your whole life and never know it the same way this moose knows it. Or the way the bear that nearly killed him early the previous fall knows it. There’s a wall between him and the land, and there always will be, because he’s a man and not a bear or a moose, or any other kind of animal that lives its whole life in the wild, getting its food from the ground and finding shelter in the trees and drinking from streams and rivers. And right then, he thinks he’ll never go back home. He’ll stay beyond winter, into the spring, into the next year, and the one after that, he’ll learn the land well enough to survive, and if he don’t, he’ll die out there and decompose and then he’ll finally be part of that land.
But of course eventually the moose loses interest in chewing the bark off the trunk of Kleinhaus’s tree and wanders away. Eventually Kleinhaus takes his gaze away from the miles of unknowable land and lowers himself from his branch. He pushes his way through brush and the vanishing snow to find the trail that will lead him back home, and he follows it.
I think of them as they must be now. Scott away at college, the way Dad described. Home for the holidays and summers, his camera slung round his neck. Back to help with the dogs. There’s fewer of them now, Dad give up racing, he only runs them now when he finds himself missing the back of a sled. Spends his days working in the yard, splitting wood. Alone with his thoughts, no sound but the sighs and chuffs of the few dogs left, dozing in their houses, longing after the trail.