WE STAYED INSIDE the cabin the next day. I was stoking the fire and Raymond was in a trance, holding Johnny’s little hand drum and focusing on nothing at all. Outside, the wind down from the arctic was blowing a gale as it almost always did in Deadmen Valley, bending the tall spruces as if they were saplings. The gusts blasted down the frozen river, driving the stinging snow and compressing it into drifts.
In the afternoon Raymond took the letter out and read it over to himself, then folded it back up and stuck it in his pocket. The letter didn’t seem to give him any peace. I took the file and sharpened the ax just to have something to do. Raymond never noticed me.
I went down to the creek with the ax to break open the spot where we always collected our water. The entire area was covered with a slowly moving sheet of overflow water that had the consistency of oozing gelatin. The overflow was coming from just upstream, where a strong head of water was bubbling up through the ice like an artesian well. As Raymond had explained to me, when the creeks freeze deep, the water moving under the ice has to find somewhere to go, so it splits the ice at a weak point and forces its way to the surface, where it fans out in a slushy mass before freezing solid.
Above the source of the overflow I found a new collection spot and accidentally splashed water all over myself trying to chop the new hole. The water froze instantly to my clothes; I barely noticed. I was in a sort of trance myself. I hauled the water back to the cabin. I made what we were calling beaver stew, with no other ingredients but shredded beaver meat and water. All the while my mind was racing. I had only one thought: escape down the frozen Nahanni while we still had food and strength. There had never been another airplane. We’d quietly given up on the signal fire at least ten days ago. We had to do something. The two brothers this valley was named after—the prospectors back in 1908—didn’t get out in time.
I handed Raymond a plate of beaver stew. He looked at me as if he’d never been away, and he said, “We have to get out of here.”
“Amen to that,” I agreed. “And before it snows again—a lot of snow would make it a whole lot harder. Hike out down the river, is that what you’re thinking, too?”
With a nod, he said, “There’s no other way. We only have two bullets left. We don’t have any reason to think the moose are still around, and even if they were, I can’t hunt like Johnny. Let’s go while we still have the beaver meat.”
“If we come to open water, we’ll just walk around it. How far is it down to Nahanni Butte, do you think?”
“Too far to carry the meat and everything on our backs. It could be a hundred miles, and who knows how long it would take us. We need to make a toboggan.”
“Is it canyon all the way?”
“The last forty miles or so is all different. It’s called the Splits—that’s where I got my moose. The river winds all over the place. It’s got lots of islands, lots of different channels. All open country, real flat.”
We found two perfectly straight young birches on a ridge three or four hundred feet above the floor of the valley. We prepared the logs just as Johnny had, stripping long slats for the toboggan the same way he’d stripped material for the snowshoe frames. Then we went to work with my pocketknife and Raymond’s sheath knife, whittling our narrow boards down to roughly uniform thickness.
Raymond slowly worked the bend into the slats at one end, shaping them over his knee. We lashed them together with babiche and tied the curved front end back to the toboggan to keep the proper bend in place while the wood was drying out. The toboggan took us three days to build. As we were finishing it, I scooped up a handful of shavings and was about to toss them in the stove. Raymond said, “Maybe we shouldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“The elders always take the scraps outside and spread them out in the woods. They say otherwise you won’t find a good birch when you need one.”
I thought about it and said, “There might be something to that.”
“I guess it’s showing respect for a tree. They always say even the trees have spirits. Sounds crazy, I guess.”
I said, “If I’d never been to the North, maybe it would sound crazy to me. But I’m getting the idea. It’s like ‘Make more beaver.’”
When I said that he added, “They say that living things don’t die right away when they’re killed or cut down. The spirit can stay around for days or months or even longer.”
“Same as our old friend,” I pointed out.
We used the bowline I’d salvaged from the raft as the pull-rope for the toboggan. It was all we had left of the parachute cord. We attached it at both ends on the front. One of us would pull the toboggan by walking inside the rope.
On the last day of the year we precooked all the beaver meat for our hike out. It was Raymond’s idea. The easy part was the quick-freezing: set your plates of stew outside the door, wait ten minutes, then chuck the rations into the army box. The meat filled one box and half of the second one.
Sometime during our last night in the cabin, a bird started croaking, not very far away. “Did you hear that?” Raymond whispered.
“Raven?”
“Ravens aren’t supposed to talk at night…. That’s not a good sign.”
In the morning twilight we decided on what was absolutely essential. Everything else we’d leave behind. We’d take along Johnny’s moccasins and his blanket. We’d leave most of the pots and pans, Raymond’s gym shoes, the camp shovel, Johnny’s parka, the beautiful beaver pelts he had tanned. Raymond looked a long time at Johnny’s hand drum, then said, “I’ll come back for this next summer.”
We lashed everything down on the toboggan, including all three pairs of snowshoes. We rigged the ax where we could get at it. Raymond shouldered the packsack, latched the door, and picked up the rifle. I started out pulling the toboggan and had the daypack on my back. It was New Year’s Day and forty degrees below zero. That’s seventy-two degrees below freezing, I thought. I took a glance back at the cabin and saw the blue smoke drifting out of the chimney and spreading out along the ground. I remembered the night Johnny had led us to this cabin, under the northern lights, and I thought about all that had happened there. Raymond, I realized, was also looking back.
The surface of the Nahanni was mostly glare ice. The toboggan was sliding along behind me of its own accord. The walking was so easy we soon rounded an island, passed a second, and found ourselves about where our log raft had piled against the ice a month before. Not far ahead loomed the tall gate of the lower canyon. A short while later we entered the gate and passed inside.
A couple of miles and around a bend, we encountered an icy fog hugging the bottom of the canyon. It had to be coming from open water. Raymond and I looked at each other and said nothing. Forty below zero, yet open water, just as we had feared.
When we got down to the riffles, our fears eased. It was only a narrow strip of running water, with a cliff on the left but plenty of room to get around on the right.
Every mile or two we encountered another stretch of open water. I couldn’t understand it. Right beside the exposed water, the ice would be a full two feet thick. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why isn’t the ice two feet thick all across the river? What causes these open spots? It’s January!”
“It beats me,” Raymond said. “Maybe tricky currents can rile up the water and keep it from freezing.”
“That might explain it.”
“Maybe there’s even hot springs right under the bed of the river. I know about some farther down—I’ve been there, right where the canyon ends and the Splits begins.”
We pushed on between the blue-gray walls of the canyon. The rim of the canyon thousands of feet above glowed pink, signaling day’s end coming soon, and we thought better of continuing. On an island we cut down a pair of dead spruces and tried to start a fire with the butane lighter, but it wouldn’t function at these temperatures. We were out of kitchen matches, so it was going to be Raymond’s fire starter from now on. It worked like a charm. By the light of the fire we slashed dead limbs from live trees and dragged in driftwood until we knew we had enough to take us through the night.
A quick supper, two plates apiece; then we got into our sleeping bags and began the torturous wait for those five hours of daylight to return. We sat up into the night stoking the fire, trying to stay as warm as possible. Raymond said, “I wish we could’ve been at Nahanni Butte for Christmas—you wouldn’t believe the food.”
“Try me.”
Raymond’s face glowed. “After church, there’s a great big potlatch—a feast. Everybody comes. It’s in the community hall.”
“How many people is that?”
“Oh, about eighty-five, I guess.”
“You’re kidding! I was picturing it more like three or four hundred.”
He tossed a big branch on the fire. “That’s the good thing about Nahanni—everybody knows you. Everybody looks out for everybody else.”
“Tell me about the feast,” I said. “That’s the part I want to know about.”
“Well, there’s everything you could think of—modern food and traditional. People always save bear meat for potlatches—black bear—with great big straps of fat. That’s my favorite.”
“When will the next potlatch come along?”
“There’ll be one for Johnny, a real big one. People will come from all over. They’ll tell about the things he did in his life, and they’ll feed his spirit by putting some food in the fire.”
“I can picture you doing that in person,” I said. “You’ll be there. We’re going to make it.”
“I could tell about what he did in the very last part of his life.”
We slept as best we could, on the blue tarp spread over four inches of branches. Every few hours we’d start shaking, and one of us would get up and heap another round of fuel on the glowing mass of coals.
The next day the wind quit blowing down the canyon, the sky turned a dark gray, and the temperature rose to ten below. The walls of the canyon climbed sheer from the river in some places; in others they rose from slopes of shattered rock. The walls were composed of horizontal bands of limestone from river to sky, like the bluffs along the Guadalupe River back in the Texas hill country but on a grand scale, with dwarf evergreens clinging to impossible locations and frozen waterfalls attached to sheer rock faces and glowing pale blue.
Every time we encountered open water we found a way around one side or the other. Our hopes were soaring. “We’ll be taking a bath in those hot springs soon,” Raymond said.
“Instead of a sponge bath without a sponge.”
Late in the day we passed an island with the typical massive driftpile on its upstream end. We talked about camping there, but islands and driftpiles were plentiful and an hour of twilight remained. We decided to press on. Raymond was pulling the toboggan, and I had the packsack on my back.
Just below the island, where the canyon narrowed, open water rushed out from under the ice and sped toward a cliff on the left side, leaving no ice to walk on over there. From the cliff, the strip of open water angled gradually back across the entire width of the river, passing briefly under a big ice bridge before splashing against another sheer cliff a short distance down on the right side of the canyon. “Bad luck,” I said. “Open water from cliff to cliff.”
We were stopped. Unless we wanted to try crossing on the ice bridge.
I looked downriver. If we got past this place, it was good walking as far as I could see. We approached the ice bridge and took a closer look. It was about fifty feet across and about ten to twenty feet wide, with ice shelves extending to the shores on either side.
“What do you think?” I asked Raymond. “It looks to me like it should hold us….”
Raymond kept studying the bridge. “Could we build a raft and get across here? There’s that driftpile we just passed.”
“We don’t have any parachute cord, except for the pull-rope on the toboggan, and that sure wouldn’t do it. I don’t know, maybe we could tear some of our stuff into strips to tie the logs together.”
“I don’t know either,” Raymond said slowly. “The water’s so fast…. Even if we could patch together some kind of raft tomorrow, we’d have to launch it just past the ice bridge, and from there it’s such a short distance on the water—fifty meters maybe? Then the raft would crash against the cliff at the bottom, and we’d be scrambling to get out on the ice. What if the ice down there wouldn’t hold us?”
“It’ll all be happening real fast,” I said. “That’s for sure.”
“It’s getting so late,” Raymond said, looking around. “I think fooling with a raft would be riskier than the ice bridge. We sure could waste a lot of time and wreck our stuff trying it.”
Dropping the packsack to the ground, I took off my parka and cap, my outer mitts, and then my gloves, and tucked them under the lashing on the toboggan. I started for the ice bridge. “I’ll test it first without all this stuff on.”
“Careful, Gabe.”
I took a few steps onto the ice bridge. “So far, so good,” I said. “I think it’s okay.”
“Are you sure?” I heard from behind me.
“Slow and easy,” I said, taking a few more steps. I glanced back and saw Raymond there watching intently.
Halfway across, with no warning, the ice broke with a sudden crack. I spun around, trying to get back to safety, but the big middle piece of the bridge under me slumped and broke free into the river. As I struggled for balance, the mass of ice started floating downriver with me on it. I looked over and saw Raymond on the shore, saw the shock on his face. Then I looked downstream and realized exactly what was going to happen. If I floated past that cliff on the right, Raymond couldn’t possibly reach me. Just as I realized I was going to have to swim for it, the ice underneath me rolled and I was pitched into the water.
Now you’ve done it, I thought. The shock of the cold water squeezed all the breath out of my lungs. I caught a glimpse of Raymond running along the bank. All encumbered by my heavy clothes and boots, I swam as best I could for the shore. I had to get to the shore before the cliff or I was dead.
I concentrated on Raymond’s face inside that circle of fur on his parka ruff. The wall was coming up fast. I swam with all the strength I had left, fighting the clothes and the boots. I thought I’d lost, but his arm reached out and yanked me out of the water and onto the ice.
“Get up!” he was yelling.
Get up…? I couldn’t even breathe. He stood me up, and my clothes stiffened just that fast. He hustled me along the shore, stopping only to pull on my parka, mitts, and cap. “We need fire!” he shouted, and started yanking the toboggan upriver. “We got to get back to that driftpile!”
I ran alongside thinking, Now you’ve done it! Now you’ve done it! I kept stumbling forward encased in my ice-hardened clothes, losing the feeling in my arms and legs. I could see the driftpile now in the dimming twilight. All pumped up with adrenaline, I ran ahead of Raymond.
When we got to the driftpile I kept running back and forth, just trying to keep moving. I was aware of Raymond gathering kindling; I saw him take shredded birchbark out of his pocket. I saw the shower of sparks from his fire starter. I watched his kindling catch, I rushed over, he pushed me back. He was adding more sticks, babying his fire. I was standing there frozen as a post, brain frozen, too. Raymond turned to the toboggan, freed the tarp, threw the spare clothes on it, including Johnny Raven’s moccasins.
The wind was fanning the fire into the heart of the driftpile. It was dry wood, and it went up fast. I stood close, too close—Raymond yelled at me to get back, and he helped me strip off my wet clothes.
The driftpile was becoming an inferno of heat. Within another five minutes I was flash-cooked. I changed into dry clothes, pulled on Johnny’s moccasins. The flames soared twenty, thirty feet high, pushing us farther and farther back and lighting up the canyon walls hundreds of feet above.
The danger was over, no damage done. Raymond nodded toward the bonfire. “It’s not a hot spring, but same idea.”
“You saved my life,” I said.
Raymond waved me off. “Oh, I just didn’t want to go back to Deadmen Valley by myself.”
In the morning we started back to the cabin. We were beaten, quiet as the canyon itself and filled with dread. It warmed up and began to snow about midday. By the next morning, three feet of snow had fallen. We took turns breaking trail and muscling the toboggan. My ribs started aching again. My mind drifted away from the effort and the tedium of lifting one snowshoe high, then the next, while pulling the toboggan. I figured out that the brothers who ended up headless back in 1908 probably had tried to escape down the river, just like we had, and they’d been turned back to Deadmen Valley, just like we had.
The return trip took us four days, slogging through the deep snow. At last the cabin came into sight and we trudged the last hundred yards, completely spent. I took off my snowshoes, unlatched the cabin door, and was nearly inside when I detected a quick movement in the back of the cabin. I caught a glimpse of wreckage and became aware of a strong, repulsive smell as my eyes found my danger: in a back corner behind sections of stovepipe and the upended table crouched a dark, heavily furred animal I’d never seen before in my life, about the size of a small bear. Its beady eyes were locked on mine. Then it bared its teeth.
Suddenly the cabin erupted with a vicious, snarling, utterly ferocious growl. Just then Raymond grabbed my parka and yanked me back, yelling, “Wolverine!”
Raymond pulled me back outside through the open door, shouting, “He’ll tear your face off!”
Barely behind us, the wolverine shot out the door. It ran halfway across the clearing, then stopped and looked back at us, still growling. I got a good look at the long front claws and powerful jaws. “They’re not that big,” Raymond said, “but even grizzlies leave ’em alone.”
In another moment the nasty-tempered, low-slung little beast loped off into the forest with a strange, bounding gait.
“How’d he get in?” I wondered aloud.
We stepped back inside the cabin. The place smelled rank, worse than musky. My question was answered as I looked up to see a hole in the roof where the wolverine had torn out the roof jack and knocked the stovepipe apart.
Just about everything we’d left behind was in tatters. Raymond reached for Johnny’s drum, which had been slashed into shreds.