I am on a trail that winds in a gentle curve through a meadow of Alaska cotton, white tufts moving in the wind. A soft light in the long grasses, Yukon summer evening. With my fingertips, I touch seedpods, green blades. Just beyond the meadow, the mudflats bend toward the vast braided Slims River.
When I study the mud, I know I might find the overlapping footprints she and I left here in 2005. Overlapping because we often paused to kiss each other on the trail. Maybe I’ll see the grizzly who ambled toward us when we stopped for lunch there on those boulders. His muscle memory contains a small human with black curly hair who stood up and shouted, “Hey, bear!” while her taller companion laughed happily. Here in this air our laughter and our words exist, still. Here are the descendants of the same plants—lupine, penstemon, fireweed—we flattened with our steps, touched with our fingertips, picked for each other’s hair. Here is the same grove of aspens, grown a little taller, and the same spruce forest. Far down the valley, the Kaskawulsh Glacier still pours down from the mountains toward the headwaters of the Slims River. For the glacier, eight years has been barely a blink. Above me, the blue sky. Blue, blue sky, and sun. My skin feels warm. When I pull the photographs of the two of us from my backpack, I see I stand in the same place we took turns posing that June day. She wears a long-sleeved blue hiking shirt, khaki shorts. I wear my long-sleeved silver hiking shirt, pants. She always got warm more quickly than I did.
It is so pleasant here. I know I’ll find her, so I hike more quickly. Making noise to deter the bears seems unnecessary in this broad open meadow, and besides, harm seems impossible here.
The rush and tumble of Bullion Creek startles me when I round a bend in the trail. Memory: we talked about the semantics of the word “creek,” how ill-named are these glacial, perilous water veins. When we crossed Bullion together, I gave her instructions in my most confident backpack guide voice, reminding her to unbuckle her pack in case she slipped on a rock in the thigh-deep water. We wore our sandals, tied our hiking boots to our packs, prepared. But she crossed boldly while I trembled in the creek’s center. She had to pull me across with her voice.
Today, I have to cross alone.
The trail curves away from the mudflats up toward the scree slopes and bluffs, and it is in the side of a scree slope that I find the door. It is not a large door, but it must have served the miners’ purpose of keeping secure their holdings in their absence. It is merely several boards of wood hammered together, a loop of metal for a handle. Cold air billows toward me through the cracks in the door. I know I must, so I pull the handle toward me, half-expecting it to break off in my hands.
The tunnel behind the door glows faintly, as if with candlelight, so I follow it, stooped. I smell only the faint scent of coffee. Finally, the tunnel opens into a room, and there on a folding cot is her body. In the dim light, I can see her eyes are closed, and someone has changed the jeans and heavy purple fleece in which she died to the khaki shorts and the light blue hiking shirt. Her black hair curls around her face. And now I know the coroner left her silver ring, the one that matches mine, the one with the parallel braided rivers, on her left hand.
I know what to do. I kneel beside her body, and I pick her up in my arms. She weighs nearly nothing, less than our youngest child. In fact, she seems to grow smaller in my arms, she is a child in my arms. I cradle her close to my chest (she is warm), and I walk out of the room, out of the tunnel, through the door onto the sunlit trail.
It is still sunny as I return the way I came, cradling her small body against mine, walking carefully so I do not wake her. My body feels none of the signs of sadness. My chest does not feel tight, my arms and legs do not feel numb, I do not have an uncomfortable lump in my throat. None of the yawning emptiness that assails me most days assails me now. She is in my arms, I carry her, we are in the Yukon together again.
We reach Bullion Creek. I hesitate. When I crossed it earlier, the frigid water reached my hipbones, and I had to fight to gain the opposite shore. It took several minutes for the sensation to return to my feet and my legs.
I cannot carry her across without great risk. I’ve heard of hikers who drowned in glacial creeks, pulled under by the great speed of the water, yanked hard against boulders that crushed their skulls.
Something urges me on. I panic. Holding her in my arms, I consider the creek and decide to try. I refuse to leave her again.
It is difficult to maintain my balance in the deep cold water with my arms close to my body, holding her. I should have strapped her into my backpack. The water rushes and roils, pushes, tugs. Boulder rolls over boulder, a thick tree branch crashes past me. And then suddenly—the water takes her. I did not let her go. The water just lifted her, took her, see, she floats away from me downstream toward the river.
My body doesn’t remember what to do now.
Cold. Cold. Cold. The trail is a mark, the trees are marks, the trail leads to a parking lot which is a mark in the parking lot beneath the stones could still be our footprints overlapping (maybe) to prove we were here.
We. Were. Here.