AT LAST THE FIRE in the stove was backing off the deep cold that had settled inside the cabin. With the stove door cracked, I could see to unlace Raymond’s boots. His face in the flickering light of the fire was contorted with pain. “Sprains can hurt really bad,” I said. “Let’s hope it’s only a sprain.” He flinched and sucked in his breath as I eased the boot around his heel.
In the first-aid kit we had two kinds of pain medicine: a bottle of aspirin we’d almost used up and another smaller prescription bottle we hadn’t touched yet. The smaller one read: Take one to two tablets by mouth every three hours as needed for pain. In handwriting underneath was written: For major pain. Do not use with head injuries. When I read that part to Raymond he managed a grin and said, “I guess I was lucky I hurt my foot.”
Both our water bottles were dry. He stuck one pill at a time way down his throat and swallowed them. I said I’d go get some water after I wrapped his foot.
He grimaced, shook his head.
“Don’t wrap your foot?”
“Don’t get water,” he said between his teeth.
“Why not?”
He put both his hands up in the air, spreading his fingers like huge claws, then raked me on the arm.
“Oh, I forgot,” I said. “Probably we shouldn’t bring the boxes of meat inside the cabin, either.”
He nodded vigorously.
“But I’ll string them up in a tree first thing in the morning.”
“Good. But what if he breaks the rope or chews it? Bears are smart.”
“Let me think…. That cable from the airplane isn’t very far away, the one Johnny used for the snare. I’ll use that for the part he can reach.”
As I pulled off Raymond’s socks, I said, “You might be out of next week’s game, but we’ll have you back in the lineup the week after.”
The foot looked bad—bruised and swelling fast. I said, “In my professional opinion…a bad sprain.”
“Hope so.”
“You’ll see,” I said, even though I wasn’t at all sure. “Tell me where it hurts the most.”
“My whole ankle.”
I began to wrap his ankle in a figure eight with an elastic bandage. I made it secure enough for support but not tight enough to cut off circulation. “Now we should ice it,” I said.
“No way. It still feels freezing cold.”
“Just don’t get it anywhere near the fire then.” Gently as I could, I worked two pairs of wool socks back over his foot. Then I helped him into his sleeping bag and stuffed some clothes under his leg to elevate it a little. “I’ll get some fresh spruce bedding in here tomorrow,” I said. “Lot of tips—this stuff is awful rough.”
“What about your knee?” he asked. “You’re limping around yourself. Take some of those pills.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “We’re both messed up, but you’re more messed up than I am.”
Lucky for Raymond, he slept after a while. I sat up stoking the fire, ax within reach and listening for the bear, which I kept thinking I was hearing moving around outside. I was keenly aware of my thirst and hunger, and our deadly situation. The winter bear willing, I could reach our boxes of meat, I could fetch water, I could keep us warm, but I couldn’t supply what we needed most: hope. No hope now of making it until May.
At first light I laced up the snowshoes and went looking for the wire cable from the airplane. It was farther away than I remembered, and I took a couple of hours finding it, limping around in the trees and imagining at every moment the approach of the bear. I was even more scared than I’d been in the actual presence of the bear. Raymond had been with me then, and that had made all the difference.
Back at the cabin, Raymond was no better but awfully glad to see me. I crept to the creek for water. Every nerve in my body was screaming false alarms. After that I strung the army boxes in the trees, always with an eye over my shoulder. I had to cook out in front of the cabin on an open fire—that way we wouldn’t be inviting the bear inside with the smell of meat. And if the bear came around, it might be deterred by the fire. I helped Raymond get around so he wouldn’t fall and make his injury worse.
Raymond sat at the table to eat. We put away two huge moose steaks with thick trimmings of fat. All the same, we agreed that with only the two boxes of moose meat, we had to go back to eating only once a day. We didn’t talk about how there wasn’t enough to pull us through, even if we cut back to starvation rations. We both knew that.
I could tell Raymond’s foot felt just as bad or worse. He kept taking his pills. We were going to go by my watch so he wouldn’t run out of them any sooner than he had to. My knee was going to come around if I just didn’t work it too hard. I was pretty sure by now it wasn’t anything really bad.
The sky was extraordinarily orange all above the bald mountain in advance of the sunrise. Raymond said we’d probably have snow coming. I had to go out on the snowshoes and find firewood. There weren’t any more dead trees within ten minutes of the cabin. The bear was everywhere and nowhere. I kept imagining its silver shape and soundless approach between the trees.
The sun rose at ten forty-five in the morning. At least I could count on the February daylight helping out a little bit more each day. I spent the rest of the day felling dead trees, hauling logs back to the cabin, hoping Raymond’s foot would improve soon. I was thinking furiously about escape. I saw no way out but trying our luck down the Nahanni once again. In the evening I told Raymond I thought we were going to have to try it, and he thought so too. “Think how long we’ve had this vicious cold spell,” I said. “In another week, the open spots in the river are even more likely to have frozen up. And you’ll be ready to go.”
Raymond just nodded his head. He didn’t seem too convinced. We both knew that the patch of water just up the river from the cabin remained as open as ever.
The next day I hauled logs to the cabin again, and in the afternoon I began to saw and split more firewood. My palm kept cracking open along the creases, but that couldn’t be helped. Then I broke the last saw blade.
For a second I just stared at the broken blade. Then I threw the useless saw down on the ground, kicked it, and felt a bolt of pain course through my knee. I looked up to see Raymond at the cabin door, standing on one foot and watching me. “It’s okay, Gabe,” he said. “That last blade was bound to go sometime. We can get by with the ax. Hey, look at the clouds. It’s warming up—might snow.”
Raymond went back inside. I thought of covering the firewood with the tarp, then remembered that the tarp was still with the toboggan up in the spruce where the bear had treed us. I needed to fetch the toboggan, too; we were going to need it for our gear when we made our break. And there was a hunk of moose meat rolled up in the tarp.
I cut a couple of slender birches and dragged them over to our busted ladder beneath the big spruce, the ax under my arm and my head swiveling around, looking for the bear. I splinted the ladder poles with the birches, the quickest makeshift repair I could manage, and I climbed into the tree. Carefully I lowered the toboggan to the ground and then came down with the piece of meat.
I wasn’t really on guard as I made my beeline to the cabin. I thought I was home safe; my eye was on the door and I was thinking about Raymond. I was only fifty feet from the cabin when I heard that ominous, unmistakable woof, once, twice. There was the winter bear, right there, standing under the suspended metal boxes no farther from me than I was from the cabin. The ghostlike bear, all too real, came down to all fours with a roar in its throat, laying its ears back and fixing its small dark eyes on me. Its jaws were making an awful snapping and clicking sound.
I wanted to turn and bolt for the cabin. “Don’t run,” I remembered Raymond saying. “Don’t turn your back on him.” I shucked my mitts and held tight to the ax with both hands. I remembered I had the piece of meat on the toboggan right behind me. “Talk nice,” I remembered. But I never had a chance to talk. Fast as a train, the bear charged. I got set to try to do him some damage.
No more than fifteen feet from me, the bear came to an abrupt halt and stood up roaring, a mountain of ice and claws and teeth. I held out the ax toward the bear, without quite looking him in the eye, and spoke as calmly as I could manage: “We keep this ax real sharp, winter bear. If you try to hurt me, I’m going to floss your teeth.”
The bear glanced toward the cabin. I heard Raymond’s voice over there say something in Slavey and then add “Go away” in English.
The bear went down on all fours, eyeing me, then Raymond. Its nose was twitching; I realized he smelled the meat. I backed up a couple of steps, bent down slowly, then tossed the meat in its direction. The grizzly took the meat, then retreated twenty feet or so. It stood once more, with the meat in its mouth, then loped into the trees with a shuffling gait, its head held close to the ground.
My knees were so weak I could barely make it to the cabin. “Floss his teeth?” Raymond said as I reached the door.
“I didn’t know what to say!”
“You sounded like you meant it.” Raymond hopped back inside, taking a seat at the table. “You did everything right.”
“I was all jelly! What did you say? If you hadn’t distracted him…Did you say something in Slavey?”
“I called him ‘friend.’”
“How come you said it in Slavey?”
“I didn’t think about it…. I guess because I figured he would understand Slavey.”
I busted out laughing. “That sort of makes sense. Sorry I had to feed him.”
“I think that was a pretty good idea.”
“Will he come back?”
“I don’t know. Keep watching out for him. A bear in that condition might stalk a human being.”
My heart was still hammering like thunder. “What if he comes through the door?”
“There’s nothing we could really block the door with if that bear wanted to come in.”
An hour later, just as it was getting dark, I got up enough courage to peek outside. It was starting to snow in stinging, miniature crystals. I covered my stack of wood outside with the tarp and leaned the toboggan up against the back of the stack. Then I brought in as much wood as we could keep inside the cabin. I stacked quite a bit of it against the door. “I’ll have to rearrange it to go back outside,” I said to Raymond, “but as my dad always says, ‘What’s time to a hog?’”
“I don’t get what that means,” Raymond said.
“It makes more sense than a lot of his jokes. Try this one: ‘What’s the difference between a duck?’”
“‘Between a duck’?” Raymond repeated. “I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I. Are you ready for the answer?”
“I’m ready.”
I smiled, just like my father always did when he told this, and said, “The other leg is the same.”
Raymond still looked confused. I said, “Don’t bust a gut trying to figure it out. I’ve been working on it for about ten years. How’s your foot?”
“Maybe a little better.” I couldn’t tell if he believed it or not. Maybe the pain medicine was helping him to believe it, but he was going to run out of the pills soon.
“Your hair’s getting long and shaggy,” I told him.
“So is yours. You got a beard now, too.”
I stroked what was left of my face after all the wind and cold and that woolen mask. “Feels like a poor excuse for a beard. Glad we don’t have a mirror along—we’d scare ourselves to death.”
“I got a scar here on my forehead?”
“It looks great—gives you even more character. We won’t cut our hair—we’ll be rock-and-roll stars.”
He was amused, but he said to me thoughtfully, “I want to get another guitar. Maybe learn fiddle, too. Some of those old guys could teach me fiddle.”
Raymond asked me to bring down one of the remaining beaver pelts that Johnny had stretched with willow frames and hung up on the wall. Then he took the sheath knife off his belt and started carefully scraping the fur from the hide. “I want to try to fix up Johnny’s drum,” he explained. “Make a new drumskin for it.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” I said. “That wolverine really made a mess of it.”
I kept watching the weather. It warmed all the way up to zero and just kept snowing. Now the snow had some moisture in it; it was quite a bit heavier. I fretted about the new snow making it harder to pull the toboggan when we were ready to leave, but there was nothing to be done. We just had to wait for Raymond’s foot to heal. I wished I had a book to read. It would take my mind off the waiting and also off thinking about what was going to happen to us. Then I got an idea. Actually, watching Raymond work on that drum made me think of it. I could try to make a model of a log house, just like the one my father and I were going to build down in the hill country. I got really excited just thinking about it.
Over the next four days, every time I went out with the ax to go chop ice at the creek and haul water, I also brought back alder branches. Smooth and straight and strong, with thin dark bark, they made perfect model logs. I laid out the base of the log house just a few inches in from the edges of the table. This was going to be a sizable model. Knowing my dad, he wouldn’t settle for a simple rectangle. And he’d want it to be huge, two stories high where you walked in the front door. He’d mentioned a special room for a pool table—I wasn’t going to leave that out.
I enjoyed notching all the little logs, making the door and window openings, thinking about how I was going to do the roof. I let my mind drift, and it shortly drifted from sentimental to morbid. I was thinking that if I did end up dead, at least my dad would get to find this log house I made for him. He’d come here after somebody found us, they’d figure out we’d been staying at this cabin, he’d know I’d been thinking about him….
After studying the construction of Johnny’s hand drum, Raymond had removed the torn drumskin and fitted his new one over Johnny’s birch frame. He reworked the fine spruce roots in a perfect imitation of Johnny’s lashing where it ran through the birch frame and crisscrossed on the underside of the drum.
We would work silently for a long while, and then we’d get to talking. Our conversations went on far into the night. Raymond had much more curiosity than I’d ever realized about what life was like down in the States, or “the South,” as he called it. At first I thought he was talking about Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and so on, but then I realized that everything south of the Northwest Territories was “the South” to him. He was trying to picture how big San Antonio was, and I told him it had more than a million people. He kept trying to picture all those houses, all those people, all those cars and freeways. “I don’t think I’d want to live there,” he said. “Too many people. What we got up in the North is lots of land.”
I told him about the piece of land close to my grandparents’ place, how it used to be covered with hundreds of live oak trees, and how I would always climb into this one certain tree and hang out there. I told him that when they built a big shopping mall on that land, they didn’t even save one tree when they made the parking lot.
“How come?” he said.
“Because it was too much trouble, I guess, and would’ve added cost. To find open land, you have to go farther and farther away.”
He was trying to picture it. Then he asked, “Is it true that people are always shooting each other? Like it looks like on TV?”
“It’s in the news every night,” I admitted.
“What about suicide?”
It seemed like a strange question. “I guess it’s a big problem,” I said. “I don’t know much about it, really.”
Then he talked about growing up in Nahanni Butte, about fixing snowmobiles, about the winter road, about the boat they would use to get back and forth to Fort Simpson in the summer when it was light all night. “What about mosquitoes?” I asked.
“They get real bad in June,” he said. “But the gnats and the blackflies later are worse.”
He went on to tell me all about his family: his mother and his father, his big sister, Monique, who was nineteen and lived with his grandmother, his younger brother, Alfred, who was nine, and his younger sister, Dora, who was seven. In the midst of this, to my surprise, he told me that he wanted to go back to the boarding school at Yellowknife. “I want to graduate from there,” he said. “Not many kids from Nahanni ever did. I thought I could do it. I knew I was smart enough…. I just didn’t have my mind made up strong enough.”
“I’m sure you can,” I said. “I know you can.”
“Johnny thought it was important. Even if it’s going to be hard.”
I could tell there was something else he was wanting to say. “What is it?” I asked.
Raymond looked away, then said, “I had an older brother…he got angry a lot. He went to that school in Yellowknife. My parents say he got lost there. They told me to come back if I felt like I was going to get lost.”
“Your brother doesn’t come home anymore?” I wondered, all confused.
“He killed himself.”
I felt like all the breath had been knocked out of me. I didn’t know how to react. I tried to say something, but I couldn’t find any words except “I’m sorry.”
Raymond was looking down at the drum in his hands. “Don’t feel sorry about it—that’s what my mother says to me. She’d say, ‘Don’t feel sorry for him or yourself. You can’t change the past. You can only change the future.’ She’d say, ‘Just remember, Raymond, life is the greatest gift.’ I always thought that was just something she heard at church. Now I know it’s the truth. It’s the truest thing there is.”
Then Raymond looked up from the drum and caught my eye. “I’m not going to make it, Gabe.”
He’d said it with such certainty, it scared me bad. “What are you talking about?” I shot back.
“My foot. I’ll wait here for you to send somebody back. Maybe they can get a helicopter in here or something.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, racing to think of objections. But I could see he wasn’t kidding.
“It’s been a week. I can’t put any weight on it. It’s busted up bad. You have to go by yourself.”
“I’ll pull you out on the toboggan.”
He was shaking his head. “It’s too far. It’s too much to pull, with all the camp gear and everything.”
“I pulled half a moose.”
“Not nearly as far. What about your knee?”
“It’s okay,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. “How would you get firewood and water back here by yourself? I’d have to take the fire starter. What happens when your fire goes out?”
His dark eyes were back down on the drum. “You’d have ten times better chance if you went by yourself. We’ll split up the food. You can make some more firewood before you go, and I’ll make sure the fire doesn’t go out. You’ll make it out much faster without me. Then you can send back help.”
“What about open water?” I asked him. “What about that? If I fall into the river, what happens to you?”
He shrugged. “That’s the way it goes, I guess.”
“I won’t even think about it,” I said. “You’d be waiting and nobody would ever come. Everything that’s happened, we’ve been through it together, right? Except for that once when I was on my own, and I nearly got myself killed.”
“You won’t let that happen again.”
“Listen,” I pleaded. “You’re the best friend I’m ever going to have. That’s what I’m talking about. I’ve just been hearing about what your mother said, how life is the greatest gift. She’s right. That’s why we’ve been trying so hard to stay alive. But friendship, that’s as close to the top of the list as you can get.”
Raymond seemed surprised by the strength of my outburst, but gratified. “Okay,” he agreed. “We’ll see if you can pull the toboggan with me on it and everything else, too. But if you can’t, I stay here.”
“I can pull you out of here, I know I can.”
“Musk-ox!” he said with a smile.