Sorry, I said to Mom.
What have you got all over you?
I showed her my hands.
Is that blood?
I brought my hand to my mouth, the blood was dry on my skin but I could still taste it.
Tracy.
She grabbed my hand away.
Go inside and wash up.
I done what she said. That night, she give me Rule Number Three, which was Never Come Home with Dirty Hands.
Dad’s list of chores was waiting but the woods grasped at me, till finally I give in and started to run. But I did not let it become the kind of running that give my mind a place to hide. Instead, I moved through the trees and every stride was a memory of the day before. I sprinted up the trail and thought of the tree with its soft, raw spot where I’d put my hand. I leaped over a fallen log. The squirrel in its funnel. Left the trail, weaved between bushes, splashed through the shallow creek. I turned round, and the stranger grabbed me. Then I’d took my knife out—
But after that, all I found was a wall, the one that had fell on me when my head struck the root. Next thing I could recall was coming off the trail yesterday, my belly warm. Then I was in the kennel, cleaning blood from the blade of my knife.
I reached the small clearing in the woods where I’d hunted the squirrel. Even if you wasn’t good at tracking you would of noticed the matted grass where two people had stood. The prints left by my own bare feet was easy to spot, they was small and you could make out all five toes. Beyond the clearing, the other set of tracks had to be the stranger’s, the feet that had made them was bigger than mine and had worn a pair of boots with fairly new tread. The blades of grass red where he’d stood, where he must of fallen. Little spots of blood leading back to the trail like the kind a moose will leave if you shoot and wound it and have to follow it through the trees till it collapses. I do not like guns, they are too loud and there is no art to them, but I have been hunting with my dad and am a decent shot.
I could see how the man must of staggered away from me, his path back to the trail marked by broken branches, a trampled patch of devil’s club. A bit of blue thread, snagged from his shirt by a prickly stalk. He’d stopped and put his hand out to steady himself against a tree, there was the brownish shape of a handprint, blood long dried, on the trunk of a paper birch. I touched the outline of the hand on the tree, but my fingers come away clean.
The snow started then, the hesitant small flakes of the first snow of the season. They fell fast and thick, and soon the green and brown of the woods was blotted out by white. I begun to shiver. Not from cold, but from how my mind contracted, the thoughts in my head tighter as one possibility after another fell away and I got closer and closer to what every clue told me.
I had run into folks in the woods before, hikers and hunters, people just passing through. No matter who I come upon, though, they was always louder than me. I would hear their voices, brush rustling, sticks snapping underfoot, and I would shimmy up a tree or lay in a patch of tall weeds and wait till they passed. Always thinking of what Mom had told me, that if I come upon someone lost or hurt, I should run home. But the hikers wasn’t lost and the wanderers didn’t seem hurt, and no one I ever crossed paths with seemed specially dangerous. I didn’t see the point in running home for no reason when I could hide long enough to be alone again, then carry on with my hunt.
Tiny flakes landed on my skin and melted, stuck to my clothes. I left the clearing, pushed through brush on my way back to the trail. The snow drifted down heavier, everything clean and white. Except for a scream of red as I reached the trail—a backpack half-hid by a leafless bush. Hid, or dropped by someone who didn’t have the strength to keep carrying it?
I kneeled and opened it, then pulled my hand away quick, as if it had snapped at me. The money inside was loose. I dug out a handful of bills, ones, tens, twenties. There was maybe a little over three thousand dollars, all told.
Holy shit.
Other stuff inside, too. Matches, a rolled-up tarp tied with a thin rope. A plastic bottle half full of water. A thin, worn-out sleeping bag that wouldn’t be much warmth once the weather got colder. Some socks, a pair of gloves.
At the bottom of the pack there was a dog-eared paperback I recognized. I could of recited parts of it by heart, including the first lines: Like most of my bad ideas, it started with desire. I desired a different life, a chance to know who I could be. I desired the solitude required to hear one’s inner voice. And so I came to Alaska.
The stranger must of loved the Kleinhaus book as much as I done if he bothered to bear the unnecessary weight of it as he walked through the woods. I should of felt even worse, knowing me and him had something in common, we might of got along if we had met under different circumstances. But a hardness rose up in me.
I dropped the book back inside the pack. Went to shove it back under the bush where I’d found it, then hesitated. If the stranger didn’t bleed to death in Dad’s truck or at the clinic, odds was he would come back. The book, the money—you don’t leave what belongs to you behind, specially something so valuable.
Then again, he’d come into the yard bleeding an awful lot. And even though a few thousand dollars seemed like a fortune to me, I had seen how little time it took for Dad to blow through that much money, and he wasn’t a frivolous person. He’d won the Copper Basin 300 right before Mom died, and come home with about that much in his pocket, but once there was a funeral to pay for and no more money from sponsors or from Mom training other people’s dogs, a few thousand bucks dried up fast. For a grown-up, specially one that had nearly got killed in these woods, was the money in the pack a sum worth coming back for?
It was true, what Dad said about the entry fees for the races I wanted to run. I wanted to trick myself into believing that somehow we could afford to pay almost twelve hundred dollars for the Iditarod alone. But I wasn’t about to give up my chance to run the Junior, at least. Problem was, I didn’t have no money of my own to enter.
Till now.
I shouldered the pack and started running again. I couldn’t say how long I’d been gone and I needed to beat Dad home if I didn’t want him to see what I’d found.
When I got back, his truck was still gone. I shoved the pack under my bed, then come down to the kitchen and stoked the fire in the woodstove. Let the retired dogs out to do their business. Looked at my list of chores. There wasn’t time to properly start number one, Clean out the Shed, so I moved on to numbers two and three, Sweep the Kitchen and Wipe Down the countertops. My ears straining for the sound of the truck in the drive as I worked.
I was on number four, Do the Dishes, when he got back. His truck rolled up the driveway alone, no VSO following behind, and no passenger riding along with Dad. I let go of the breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding. Dad climbed out, his face grim. My legs went watery. I gripped the edge of the countertop, and hated myself for the hope that welled up in me.
Dad stomped his boots clean of snow in the mudroom, then went over to the coffeepot, it was cold but he poured himself a cup anyway and sipped it, black. He didn’t say nothing, just leaned against the counter, drinking. Watching me rinse a handful of forks and butter knives. My throat so dry it clicked when I swallowed.
He’s all right, he said finally.
I put the silverware down so he couldn’t see how my hands begun to tremble.
You talked to him? I managed to ask.
Dad shook his head.