As the train rocked dead at Livingston, I saw my boy. His hand sprang up and his face broke into a smile. I smiled back gravely and nodded. I did not otherwise move. He turned from the window and I watched the bustle of people at the station. I waited on the platform. First sight of my boy had reminded me of the last time I had seen him and how much he had grown since then.
We drove in the old open Willys toward the cabin beyond town. The windshield of the Willys was up, but the fine cold sharp rain came into our faces and my boy kept his eyes down. He wore the rain parka I had handed him at the station, while I, protected by only my khaki, held my lips strung in a firm, silent line that was more grin than wince.
"We have a moose tag," I shouted.
My boy said nothing. I wondered what that meant, if anything.
"I've got one picked out. A bull. I've stalked him for two weeks. Up in the Crazies. When we get to the cabin we'll build a good, roaring fire." With only the charade of a pause, I added, "Your mother." It was said like a question. My boy was silent. "How is she?"
"All right, I guess." Over the Jeep's howl, with the wind stealing his voice, my boy too had to shout.
"Are you friends with her?"
"I guess so."
"Is she still a beautiful lady?"
"I don't know. I guess so. I don't know that."
"You must know that. Is she starting to get wrinkled like me? Does she seem worried and sad? Or is she just still a fine, beautiful lady? You must know that."
"She's still a beautiful lady, I guess."
"Did she tell you any messages for me?"
"She said... She said I should give you her love," my boy said, impulsively and clumsily. I at once knew that was a lie.
"Oh," I said, "Thank you, David."
We reached the cabin on a mile of dirt road winding through meadow to a spruce grove. Inside, we were enwrapped in the strong, syncretic smell of all seasonal mountain cabins: pine resin and insect repellent and a mustiness suggesting damp bathing trunks stored in a drawer. There were yellow pine floors and rope-work throw rugs and a bead curtain to the bedroom and a cast-iron cook stove with none of the lids or handles missing and a pump in the kitchen sink and old issues of Field and Stream, and on the mantel above where a fire now finally burned was a picture of my father, my boy's grandfather, the railroad telegrapher who had once owned the cabin. I cooked a dinner of fried ham and I could tell my boy wasn't fond of it, but he said nothing. I asked him about school and he talked while I listened with interest.
Then I said, "We'll leave tomorrow around ten."
Last year on my boy's visit, we had hunted birds. We had lived in the cabin for six nights, and each day we had hunted pheasant in the wheat stubble, or blue grouse in the woods, or ducks along the irrigation slews. We had been wet and cold and miserable at times, but each evening, we had returned to the cabin and to our dry clothes. We had eaten hot food cooked on a stove, and had smelled the cabin smell, and had slept together in a bed. In six days of hunting, my boy had not managed to kill a single bird. Yet last year he had known that, at least once a day, he would be comfortable, if not happy. This year, I had planned something different in hopes that he would come around. I had said in my last letter to Evergreen Park that I would take my boy camping in the mountains, after big game. I had believed he would be glad.
The Willys was loaded and moving by ten minutes to ten. For three hours, we drove, through Big Timber, and then North on the highway, and then back West again on a logging road that took us winding and bouncing higher into the mountains. Thick cottony streaks of white cloud hung in among the mountaintop trees, light and dense dollops against the bulking sharp dark olive, as though in a black-and-white photograph. We followed the gravel road for an hour. Finally we crossed a creek and I plunged the Willys off into a bed of weeds.
I said, "Here."
My boy said, "Where?"
"Up that little drainage. At the head of the creek."
"How far is it?"
"Two or three miles."
"Is that where you saw the moose?"
"No. That's where I saw the sheepman's hut. The moose is farther. On top."
"Are we going to sleep in a hut? I thought we were going to sleep in a tent."
"No. Why should we carry a tent up there when we have a perfectly good hut?"
My boy couldn't answer that question. I thought now that this might be the time when he would cry. I had known it was coming.
"I don't much want to sleep in a hut," he said, and his voice broke with the simple honesty of it, and his eyes glazed. He held his mouth tight against the trembling.
As though something had broken in me too, I laid my forehead down on the steering wheel, against my knuckles. For a moment I remained bowed, breathing exhaustedly. But I looked up again before speaking.
"Well, we don't have to, David."
My boy said nothing.
"It's an old sheepman's hut made of logs, and it's near where we're going to hunt and we can fix it dry and good. I thought you might like that. I thought it might be more fun than a tent. But we don't have to do it. We can drive back to Big Timber and buy a tent, or we can drive back to the cabin and hunt birds, like last year. Whatever you want to do. You have to forgive me the kind of ideas I get. I hope you will. We don't have to do anything that you don't want to do."
"No," my boy said, "I want to."
"Are you sure?"
"No," my boy said, "But I just want to."
We bushwhacked along the creek, treading a thick soft mixture of moss and humus and needles, climbing upward through brush. Then the brush thinned and we were ascending an open creek bottom, thirty yards wide, darkened by fir and cedar. Farther, and we struck a trail, which led us upward along the creek. Farther still, and the trail received a branch, then another, then forked.
"Who made this trail? Did the sheepman?"
"No," I said. "Deer and elk."
Gradually the creek's little canyon narrowed, steep wooded shoulders funneling closer on each side. For a while the game trails forked and converged like a maze, but soon again there were only two branches, and finally one, heavily worn. It dodged through alder and willow, skirting tangles of browned raspberry, so that my boy and I could never see more than twenty feet ahead. When we stopped to rest, I unstrapped the .270 from my pack and loaded it.
"We have to be careful now," I explained. "We may surprise a bear."
Under the cedars, the creek bottom held a cool dampness that seemed to be stored from one winter to the next. I at once began to feel chilled. My boy put on his jacket, and we continued climbing. Soon we were sweating again in the cold.
On a small flat where the alder drew back from the creek, the hut was built into one bank of the canyon, with the sod of the hillside lapping out over its roof. The door was a low dark opening. Forty or fifty years ago, I explained, this hut had been built and used by a Basque shepherd. At that time there had been many Basques in Montana, and they had run sheep all across this ridge of the Crazies. My boy hardly paid attention, it seemed.
We built a fire. I had brought sirloin steaks and an onion for dinner, and my boy was happy with me about that. As we ate, it grew dark, but we had stocked a large comforting pile of naked deadfall. In the darkness, by firelight, I made chocolate pudding. The pudding had been my own surprise. My boy sat on a piece of canvas and added logs to the fire while I drank coffee. Sparks rose on the heat and I watched them climb toward the cedar limbs and the black pools of sky. The pudding did not set.
"Do you remember your grandfather, David?"
"Yes," my boy said and I wished it were true. He remembered a funeral when he was three.
"Your grandfather brought me up on this mountain when I was seventeen. That was the last year he hunted." Those were the sort of thoughts I was having. But I knew also that his home was in Evergreen Park, and that he was another man's boy now, with another man's name, though I indeed was his father. "Your grandfather was fifty years older than me."
My boy said nothing.
"And I'm thirty-four years older than you."
"And I'm only eleven," my boy cautioned me.
"Yes," I said. "And someday you'll have a son and you'll be forty years older than him, and you'll want so badly for him to know who you are that you could cry."
My boy looked away.
"And that's called the cycle of life's infinite wisdom," I said, and laughed at myself unpleasantly.
"What did he die of?" my boy asked, desperate to escape the focus of my rumination.
"He was eighty-seven then. Christ. He was tired." I went silent. Then I shook my head, and poured myself the remaining coffee.
Through that night, we were never quite warm. I slept on my side with my knees drawn up, and this was uncomfortable, but my body seemed to demand it for warmth. The hard cold mountain earth pressed upward through the mat of fir boughs I had laid, and drew heat from our bodies like a pallet of leeches. I clutched the bedroll around my neck and folded the empty part at the bottom back under my legs. Once I woke to a noise. I was sleeping between my boy and the door of the hut; for a while I lay awake, listening, and then woke again on my back to realize time had passed. I heard droplets begin to hit the canvas I had spread over the sod roof of the hut. But we remained dry.
I arose and made a fire. The tarp was rigid with sleet and frost. The firewood and the knapsacks were frosted. It was that grey time of dawn before any blue and, through the branches above, I was unable to tell whether the sky was murky or clear. Delicate sheet ice hung on everything, but there was no wetness. The rain seemed to have been hushed by the cold.
"What time is it?"
"Early yet."
"How early?"
"Early. I don't have a watch. What difference does it make, David?"
"Not any."
After breakfast we began walking up the valley. I had the .270 and my boy carried an old Winchester .30-30, with open sights. The walking was not hard, and with this gentle exercise in the cold morning we soon felt fresh and fine. Now I'm hunting for moose with my son, I told myself. That's just what I'm doing. Few boys in Evergreen Park had ever been moose hunting with their fathers in Montana, I knew that. I'm doing it now, I told myself.
Reaching the lip of a high meadow, a mile above the shepherd's hut, we had not seen so much as a magpie.
Before us, across hundreds of yards, opened a smooth lake of tall lifeless grass, browned by September drought and killed by the frosts and beginning to rot with November's rain. The creek was here a deep quiet channel of smooth curves overhung by the grass, with a dark surface like heavy oil. When we had come fifty yards into the meadow, I turned and pointed out to my boy a large ponderosa pine with a forked crown that marked the head of our creek valley. I showed my boy a small aspen grove Midway across the meadow, toward which we were aligning ourselves.
"Near the far woods is a beaver pond. The moose waters there. We can wait in the aspens and watch the whole meadow without being seen. If he doesn't come, we'll go up another canyon, and check again on the way back."
For an hour, and another, we waited. My boy sat with his hands in his jacket pockets, bunching the jacket tighter around him. I squatted on my heels like a country man, rising periodically to inspect the meadow in all directions. Finally I stood up; I fixed my stare on the distant fringe of woods and, like a retriever, did not move. I said, "David."
My boy stood beside me. I placed a hand on his shoulder. He saw the large dark form rolling toward us like a great slug in the grass.
"Is it the moose?"
"No," I said. "That is a grizzly bear, David. An old male grizzly."
My boy looked impressed. He sensed the aura of power and terror and authority about the husky shape, even at two hundred yards.
"Are we going to shoot it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"We don't have a permit," I whispered. "And because we don't want to."
The bear plowed on toward the beaver pond for a while, then stopped. It froze in the grass and seemed to be listening. I added, "That's not hunting for the meat. That's hunting for the fear. I don't need the fear. I've got enough in my life already."
The bear turned and moiled off quickly through the grass. It disappeared back into the far woods.
"He heard us."
"Maybe," I said. "Let's go have a look at that beaver pond."
A sleek furred carcass lay low in the water, swollen grotesquely with putrescence and coated with glistening blowflies. Four days, I guessed. The moose had been shot at least eighteen times with a .22 pistol. One of its eyes had been shot out; it had been shot twice in the jaw; and both quarters on the side that lay upward were ruined with shots. Standing up to my knees in the sump, I took the trouble of counting the holes, and probing one of the slugs out with my knife. That only made me angrier. I flung the lead away.
For the next three hours, I had withdrawn into a solitary and characteristic bitterness. I was angry a moose would be slaughtered with a light pistol and left to rot. I did not bother to explain to my boy; like the bear, he understood it as well as he needed to. We walked on, but we did not really hunt.
We left the meadow for more pine, and now tamarack, naked tamarack, the yellow needles nearly all down and going ginger where they coated the trail. My boy and I hiked along a level path into another canyon, this one vast at the mouth and narrowing between high ridges of bare rock. We crossed and recrossed the shepherd's creek, which in this canyon was a tumbling free-stone brook. Following five yards behind me, watching the cold, unapproachable rage that shaped the line of my shoulders, my boy was miserably uneasy because I had grown so distant and quiet. We climbed over deadfalls blocking the trail, skirted one boulder large as a cabin, and blundered into a garden of nettles that stung us fiercely through our trousers. We saw fresh elk scat, and we saw bear, diarrhetic with late berries. I eventually grew bored with brooding, and showed my boy how to stalk. Before dusk that day we had shot an elk.
An open and gently sloped hillside, almost a meadow, ran for a quarter mile in quaking aspen, none over fifteen feet tall. The elk was above. I had my boy brace his gun in the notch of an aspen and take the first shot. He missed. The elk reeled and bolted down and I killed it before it made cover. It was a five-point bull. We dressed the elk out and dragged it down to the cover of large pines, near the stream, where we would quarter it tomorrow, and then we returned under twilight to the hut.
That night even the fetal position could not keep us warm. My boy shivered wakefully for hours. I was saddened that the following day, though full of walking and butchery and oppressive burdens, would be our last in the woods. I heard nothing. When I woke, through the door of the hut I saw whiteness like bone.
Six inches had fallen, and it was still snowing. My boy stood about in the campsite, amazed. There had been no warning. It was not much colder than it had been yesterday, and the transformation of the woods seemed mysterious and benign and somehow comic. I thought of Christmas. Then I barked at him.
My mood had also changed, but in a different way; serious and hurried. As I wiped the breakfast pots clean with snow, I gave my boy orders for other chores. We left camp with two empty pack frames, both rifles, and a handsaw and rope. My boy seemed not to understand why I felt the pressure of time. It took us an hour to climb the mile to the meadow. The snow continued. We did not rest until we reached the aspens.
"I had half a mind at breakfast to let the bull lie and pack us straight down out of here," I admitted. "Probably smarter and less trouble in the long run. I could have come back on snowshoes next week. But by then it might be three feet deep and starting to drift. We can get two quarters out today. That will make it easier for me later." My boy didn't understand why I would be so wary in the face of a gentle snowfall. The air of the meadow teemed with white.
"If it stops soon, we're fine," I said.
It continued.
The path up the far canyon was hard climbing in eight inches of snow. My boy fell once, filling his collar and sleeves, and the gun-sight put a small gouge in his chin. But he was not discouraged. That night we would be warm and dry at the cabin. A half mile on and he came up beside me. I had stopped to stare down at dark splashes of blood.
Heavy tracks and a dragging belly mark led up to the scramble of deepening red, and away. The tracks were nine inches long and showed claws. I knelt. As I watched, one shining maroon splotch the size of a saucer sank slowly beyond sight into the snow. The blood was warm.
Inspecting the tracks carefully, I said, "She's got a cub with her."
"What happened?"
"Just a kill. Seems to have been a bird. That's too much blood for a grouse, but I don't see any signs of any four-footed creature. Maybe a turkey." I frowned thoughtfully. "A turkey without feathers. I don't know. What I dislike is coming up on her with a cub." I drove a round into the chamber of the .270.
Trailing red smears, the tracks preceded us. Within fifty feet we found the body. It was half-buried. The top of its head had been shorn away, and the cub's brains had been licked out.
I said, "Christ," and plunged off the trail. I snapped at my boy to follow closely.
We made a wide crescent through the brush and struck back about a quarter mile. I slogged ahead in the snow, stopping often to stand holding my gun ready and glancing around while my boy caught up and passed me. He was confused. He knew I was worried, but did not seem to feel any danger himself. We met the trail again, and went on to the aspen hillside before I allowed us to rest. My boy spat on the snow. Our lungs ached badly.
"Why did she do that?"
"She didn't. Another bear got her cub. A male. Maybe the one we saw yesterday. Then she fought him for the body, and she won. We didn't miss them by much. She may even have been watching. Nothing could put her in a worse frame of mind."
I added: "If we so much as see her, I want you to pick the nearest big tree and start climbing. Don't stop till you're twenty feet off the ground. I'll stay down and decide whether or not we have to shoot her. Is your rifle cocked?"
"No."
"Cock it and put on the safety. She may be a black bear and black bears can climb. If she comes up after you, lean down and stick your gun in her mouth and fire. You can't miss."
He cocked the Winchester, as I had said.
We angled downhill to the stream, and on to the mound of our dead elk. Snow filtered down steadily in purposeful silence. It could not be much below freezing, I was aware, because with the exercise, my bare hands were comfortable, even sweating between the fingers.
"Can I get a drink?"
"Yes. Be careful you don't get your feet wet. And don't wander anywhere. We're going to get this done quickly."
He walked the few yards, ducked through the brush at streamside, and knelt in the snow to drink. As he stood again, I noticed an animal body ahead of him near the stream bank. For a moment, I felt sure it was another dead cub. During that moment I called:
"David! Get up here right now!"
My boy stepped closer to turn the cub with his foot. The touch brought it alive. It rose suddenly with a high squealing growl and whirled its head like a snake and snapped. My boy shrieked. The cub had his right hand in its jaws. It would not release.
It thrashed senselessly, working its teeth deeper and tearing flesh with each movement. I knew his hand was being damaged and that realization terrified me and I was desperate to get the hand back before it was ruined. My boy was helpless. He screamed at the cub almost reasoningly to let him go. His screams scared the cub more. Its head snatched back and forth. My boy did not think to shout for me.
I moved at full stride in a slowed laboring run through the snow, saying nothing and holding the rifle I did not use, crossed the last six feet still gathering speed, and brought my right boot up into the cub's belly. That kick seemed to lift the cub clear of the snow. It opened its jaws to another shrill piggish squeal, and my boy's hand was relieved, as though I had pressed open the blades of a spring trap with my foot. The cub tumbled once and disappeared over the stream bank, then surfaced downstream, squalling and paddling. My boy looked at his hand and was horrified. It was unrecognizable. His fingers had been peeled down through the palm like flaps on a banana. He might have stood stupidly watching the hand bleed if I had not grabbed him.
I snatched my boy by the arm and dragged him towards a tree. He jerked back in angry resistance as though he had been struck. He screamed at me. He screamed that his hand had been cut, believing I did not know, and as he screamed he began to cry. I could imagine his blood melting red holes in the snow behind him. At that instant I knew he hated me. But I was stronger. I all but carried my boy to a tree.
I lifted him. In a voice that was quiet and hurried and very unlike the harsh grip with which I had taken my boy's arm, I said:
"Grab hold and climb up a few branches as best you can. Sit on a limb and hold tight and clamp the hand under your other armpit, if you can do that. I'll be right back to you. Hold tight because you're going to get dizzy." My boy groped desperately for a branch. I supported him from beneath, and waited. My boy clambered. His feet scraped at the trunk. Then he was in the tree. Bark flakes and resin were stuck to the raw naked meat of his fight hand. I said:
"Now here, take this. Hurry."
I didn't know whether I myself had been frightened enough to forget for that moment about my boy's hand, or whether I was still thinking quite clearly. I may have expected that much. By the merciless clarity of my own standards, I may have expected that my boy should be able to hold onto a tree, and a wound, and a rifle, all with one hand. I extended the stock of the Winchester toward him.
His tears and his fright would not let him gather a breath. He shuddered, and could not speak. "David," I urged. My boy reached for the stock and faltered and clutched at the trunk with his good arm. He was crying and gasping, and he wanted to speak. He was afraid. He released his grip once again, and started to tip. I extended the gun higher, holding the barrel. My boy swung out his injured hand, spraying my face with blood. He reached and he tried to close torn dangling fingers around the stock and he pulled the trigger.
The bullet entered low on my thigh and shattered the knee and traveled down the shin bone and into the ground through my heel.
I fell, and the rifle fell with me. I lay in the snow without moving. Then I groped for the rifle. I found it and rolled onto my stomach, taking aim at the sow grizzly. Forty feet up the hill, towering on hind legs, she canted her head to one side, indecisive. When the cub pulled itself up a snowbank from the stream, she coughed at it sternly. The cub trotted straight to her with its head low. She knocked it off its feet with a huge paw, and it yelped. Then she turned quickly. The cub followed.
The woods were silent. The gunshot still echoed awesomely back to me but it was an echo of memory, not sound. I felt nothing. My body stretched on the snow and I did not really believe I was where I was. I did not want to move; I wanted to wake. My boy sat in the tree and waited. The snow fell as gracefully as before.
I rolled onto my back. I raised myself to a sitting position and looked down at the leg and betrayed no expression, then slumped back. I blinked slowly and lifted my eyes to meet my boy's eyes. He waited. He expected me to speak. He expected me to say 'Shinny down using your elbows and knees and get the first-aid kit and boil water and phone the doctor. The number is taped to the dial.' I stared. There was the flicker of thoughts behind my eyes. I said nothing. I raised my arms slowly and crossed them over my face, as though to nap in the sun.
My boy jumped. He landed hard on his feet and fell onto his back. He stood over me. His hand dripped quietly onto the snow. He may have thought that I was deciding to die. He didn't beg me to reconsider. My boy had never before seen me hopeless. He was afraid.
But he didn't have to be afraid of me.
Then I uncovered my face and said, "Let me see it."
We bandaged my boy's hand with a sleeve cut from the other arm of his shirt. I wrapped the hand firmly and split the sleeve end with my deer knife and tied in neatly in two places. At least he did not have to look at it. Quickly the plaid flannel bandage began to soak through maroon. We cut a sleeve from my shirt to tie over the wound in my thigh. We raised the trouser leg to see the long swelling bruise down the calf where I was hemorrhaging into the bullet's tunnel. Only then did I realize that I was bleeding also from the heel. My boy took off my boot and placed a half-clean handkerchief on the insole where the bullet had exited, as I instructed him. Then I laced the boot on again tightly. My boy helped me to stand. I tried a step, then collapsed in the snow with a blasphemous howl of pain.
My chest heaved with the forced sighs of suffocating frustration, and the air wheezed through my nostrils. I relaxed myself with the breathing, and started thinking. I said,
"You can find you way back to the hut."
My boy held his own breath and did not move.
"You can, can't you?"
"But I'm not. I'm not going alone. I'm only going with you."
"All right, David, listen carefully," I said. "We don't have to worry about freezing. I'm not worried about either of us freezing to death. No one is going to freeze in the woods in November, if he looks after himself. Not even in Montana. It just isn't that cold. I have matches and I have a fresh elk. And I don't think this weather is going to get any worse. It may be raining again by morning. What I'm concerned about is the bleeding. If I spend too much time and effort trying to walk out of here, I could bleed to death.
"I think your hand is going to be all right. It's a bad wound, but the doctors will be able to fix it as good as new. I can see that. I promise you that. You'll be bleeding some too, but if you take care of that hand it won't bleed any more walking than if you were standing still. Then you'll be at the doctor's tonight. But if I try to walk out on this leg it's going to bleed and keep bleeding and I'll lose too much blood. So I'm staying here and bundling up warm and you're walking out to get help. I'm sorry about this. It's what we have got to do.
"You can't possibly get lost. You'll just follow this trail straight down the canyon the way we came up, and then you'll come to the meadow. Point yourself toward the big pine tree with the forked crown. When you get to that tree you'll find the creek again. You may not be able to see it, but make yourself quiet and listen for it. You'll hear it. Follow that down off the mountain and past the little hut till you get to the Jeep."
I struggled a hand into my pocket. "You've never driven a car, have you?"
My boy's lips were pinched. Muscles in his cheeks clenched his jaw. He shook his head.
"You can do it. It isn't difficult." I held up a single key and began telling my boy how to start the Jeep, how to work the clutch, how to find reverse and then first and then second. As I described the positions on the floor shift my boy raised his swaddled right hand. I stopped. I rubbed at my eye sockets, like a man waking.
"Of course," I said. "All right. You'll have to help me."
Using the saw with his left hand, my boy cut a small forked aspen. I showed him where to trim it so that the tork would reach just to my armpit. Then we lifted me to my feet. But the crutch was useless on a steep hillside of deep grass and snow. I leaned over my boy's shoulders and we fought the slope for an hour.
When my boy stepped in a hole and we fell, I made no exclamation of pain. He said nothing about his hand, though several times in our climb it was twisted or crushed. We reached the trail. The snow had not stopped, and our tracks were veiled. I said:
"We need one of the guns. I forgot. It's my fault. But you'll have to go back down and get it."
My boy could not find the tree against which I said I had leaned the .270, so he went toward the stream. Nearby he found the Winchester.
"The lucky one," I said. "That's all right. Here." I snapped open the breach and a shell flew and I caught it in the air. I glanced dourly at the casing, then cast it aside in the snow. I held the gun out for my boy to see, and with my thumb let the hammer down one notch.
"Remember?" I said. "The safety."
My boy did not seem to feel great shame. He was coming to understand me. I could not help myself. I did not want my boy to feel contemptible, but I needed him to, because of the loneliness and the bitterness and the boy's mother, and I could not help myself.
After another hour we had barely traversed the aspen hillside. Pushing the crutch away in angry frustration, I sat in the snow. The light had wilted to something more like moonlight than afternoon. The sweep of snow had gone gray, depthless, flat, and the sky warned sullenly of night. My boy grew restless. Then it was decided. I hung myself piggyback over his shoulders, holding the rifle. He supported me with elbows crooked under my knees. My boy was tall for eleven years old, and heavy. I weighed 164 pounds.
My boy walked.
He moved as slowly as drifting snow: a step, then time, then another step. I did not think he would be able to carry me far.
He took the first few paces and I expected him to fall. He did not fall, so he kept walking. For a surprisingly long time my burden seemed to not grow any worse. He found balance. He found rhythm. He was moving.
Dark blurred the woods, but the snow was luminous. We could see the trail well. He walked.
"How are you, David? How are you holding up?"
"All right."
"We'll stop for a while and let you rest. You can set me down here." My boy kept walking. He moved so ponderously, it seemed after each step that he had stopped. But he kept walking.
"You can set me down. Don't you want to rest?"
My boy did not answer. I wished that he would. At the start he had gulped for air. Now he was breathing low and regularly. He was watching his thighs slice through the snow. He did not want to be disturbed. After a moment, he said, "No."
He walked. He came to the cub, shrouded beneath new snow, and he did not see it, and fell over it. His face was smashed deep into the snow by my weight. He could not move. But he could breathe. He rested. My thigh rolled across his right hand and I remembered his wound. He was lucky his arms had been pinned to his sides, or the hand might have taken the force of our fall. He waited for me to roll myself clear. I noticed the change in temperature. My sweat chilled me quickly. I began shivering.
I again fell in silence. We both knew I would not call out or even mention the pain in my leg. My boy did not mention his hand. The blood soaking the outside of his flannel bandage had grown sticky.
"We'll rest now."
"I'm not tired," my boy said. "I'm just getting cold."
"We'll rest," I said. "I'm tired."
Under my knee, I noticed, was a cavity in the snow, already melted away by fresh blood. The dark flannel around my thigh did not appear sticky. It gleamed.
I instructed my boy how to open the cub with the deer knife. I stood on one leg against a deadfall, holding the Winchester ready, and glanced around on all sides as I spoke. The boy used his left hand and both his knees. He punctured the cub low in the belly, to a soft squirting sound, and sliced upward easily. He did not gut the cub. He merely cut out a large square of belly meat. He handed it to me, in exchange for the rifle.
I peeled off the hide and left the fat. I sawed the meat in half. One piece I rolled up and put in my jacket pocket. The other I divided again. I gave the boy a square thick with glistening raw fat.
"Eat it. The fat too. Especially the fat. We'll cook the rest farther on. I don't want to build a fire here and taunt momma."
The meat was chewy. We did not find it disgusting. We were hungry.
I sat back on the ground and unlaced the boot from my good foot. Before my boy understood what I was doing, I replaced the boot. I was holding a damp wool sock.
"Give me your left hand." My boy held out his good hand, and I pulled the sock down over it. "It's getting a lot colder. And we need that hand."
"What about yours? We need your hands too. I'll give you my—"
"No, you won't. We need your feet more than anything. It's all right. I'll put mine inside your shirt."
He lifted me, and we went on. My boy walked.
He moved steadily through cold darkness. Soon I was sweating again, down my ribs and inside my boots. Only my hands and ears felt as though crushed in a cold metal vice. But I was shuddering. My boy stopped.
I did not put down my legs. My boy stood on the trail and waited. Slowly he released his wrist holds. My thighs slumped. He was careful about my wounded leg. My grip over his neck did not loosen. My fingers were cold against his bare skin.
"Are we at the hut?"
"No. We're not even to the meadow."
"Why did you stop?" I asked.
"It's so cold. You're shivering. Can we build a fire?"
"Yes," I said hazily. "We'll rest. What time is it?"
"We don't know," my boy said, "We don't have a watch."
He gathered small deadwood. I used the Winchester stock to scoop snow away from a boulder, and we placed the fire at the boulder's base. I broke up pine twigs and fumbled dry toilet paper from my breast pocket and arranged the wood, but by then my fingers were shaking too badly to strike a match. My boy lit the fire. He stamped down the snow, as I instructed, to make a small oven-like recess before the fire boulder. He cut fir boughs to floor the recess. He added more deadwood. Beyond the invisible clouds there seemed to be part of a moon.
"It stopped snowing," my boy said.
"Why?"
My boy did not speak. My voice had sounded unnatural. After a moment I said:
"Yes, indeed. It stopped."
We roasted pieces of cub meat skewered on a green stick. Dripping fat made the fire spatter and flare. The meat was scorched on the outside and raw within. It tasted as good as any meat we had ever eaten. We burned our palates on hot fat. The second stick smoldered through before we had noticed, and that batch of meat fell in the fire. I cursed once and reached into the flame for it and dropped it and clawed it out, and then put my hand in the snow. I did not look at the blistered fingers. We ate. Both my hands had gone clumsy and almost useless.
My boy went for more wood. He found a bleached deadfall not far off the trail, but with one arm he could only break up and carry small loads. We lay down in the recess together like spoons, my boy nearer the fire. We pulled fir boughs into place above us, resting across the snow. We pressed close together. I was shivering spastically now, and I clenched my boy in a fierce hug. He put my hands back inside his own shirt. My boy slept. I woke when the fire faded and he added more wood and slept. I woke again and he tended the fire and changed places with me and slept. I slept more soundly closer to the fire. I woke again when I began to vomit.
I wrenched with sudden spasms that brought up cub meat and yellow liquid and blood and sprayed them across the snow by the grayish-red glow of the fire and emptied my stomach dry and then would not release my boy. I heaved on pathetically. My boy pleaded to be told what was wrong. I could not answer. The spasms seized me again at the stomach and twisted the rest of my body taut in ugly jerks. Between the attacks I breathed with a wet rumbling sound deep in my chest, and did not speak. When the vomiting subsided, my breathing stretched itself out into long bubbling sighs, then shallow gasps, then more liquidy sighs. My breath caught and froth rose in my throat and into my mouth and I gagged on it and began vomiting again. I thought I would choke. My boy knelt beside me and held me and cried.
When I was quiet, he went for more wood. He broke limbs from the deadfall with fanatic persistence and brought them back in bundles and built the fire up bigger. He nestled me close to it and held me from behind. We did not sleep. We waited. Finally I opened my eyes on the beginnings of dawn. I sat up and began to spit.
"One more load of wood and you keep me warm from behind and then we'll go."
My boy obeyed. I was surprised that I could speak.
He lifted me, and walked.
Sometime while dawn was completing itself, the snow had resumed. It did not filter down soundlessly. It came on a slight wind at our backs, blowing down the canyon. I felt as though we were tumbling forward with the snow into a long vertical shaft. We tumbled slowly. My body protected my boy's back from being chilled by the wind. We were both soaked through our clothes. I was soon shuddering again.
My boy walked. He bent his head forward against the weight and the pain, and his legs surged through the snow.
Twice he fell. He walked. I drifted. There was nothing but the wind and my tremulous breathing.
"Where is the creek?"
I did not respond. My boy bounced gently up and down, hoping to jar me alert.
"Where is the creek? I can't find it."
"What?"
"We crossed the meadow and I found the tree but I can't find the creek. I need you to help."
"The compass is in my pocket," I said.
He lowered me into the snow. I noticed with a flinch that his right thigh was smeared with fresh blood. For an instant I thought he had a new wound. Then I realized that the blood was mine.
"What do I do?"
I did not respond. My boy asked again. I said nothing. I sat in the snow and shivered.
He left me for a time. Then he returned and we continued on.
That afternoon he killed a grouse. He cleaned it as he had seen me clean grouse and built a fire and seared the bird on a stick. He fed me. I could not chew. My boy chewed mouthfuls of grouse, and took the chewed gobbets in his hand, and put them into my mouth. I could swallow. I could no longer speak.
My boy walked. My boy cried.
I could not cry.
I drifted again into something colder, quieter.
My boy walked.
I left my boy there in the wilderness.