“Of course we could live on oats and flour and rice until Mom gets here,” I say. Brooks sits, licking his lips as he waits for me to hand over my breakfast. Saliva trails from the corner of his mouth. I’m ravenous. Maybe I’ll give him the bowl to lick. “But I’d love to get some fresh meat.”
Later I walk, with Brooks at heel, down the only trail we can use until the rivers freeze solid. Every hundred feet, we stop and scan the horizon and the mountainsides, and then I peer through the low, wild, gray forest. I watch particularly for movement, not just of animals themselves but also of branches they may have brushed. Then I scan once again for anything sticking out, too much regularity or an unusual shade. Before moving again, Brooks breathes in a great symphony of smells, a tapestry of wild scents. I sniff beside him, pulling air through my nostrils until my lungs feel full. Brooks moves, head down, sniffing tracks. Once, I lie on my stomach and close my eyes, breathing hard next to a rabbit track.
Nothing. Maybe humans had hunter noses at one time, but we haven’t needed them for centuries.
Do blind people develop a more acute sense of smell as well as hearing?
I walk on, noting where the river still flows some places in an open channel and some places over top of ice that is surging beneath the surface. Details are sharper in the cold air today; spruce needles on boughs and leftover birds’ nests in the crotch of willow branches stand out as if seen through my monocle. Back home, both stoves are full and the cache ladder is leaning against a nearby spruce tree so I can lift it easily back into place, but no passing creatures can climb into the cache. A kettle of water is hissing at the far edge of the cookstove so it will stay hot but not boil. A box of wooden matches, decorated with an eagle in flight, lies on the table where I can grope for it even after dark.
Loose matches are in my coat pocket too. At the point where we decide to return, I pull one out and strike the sulfur tip against a rock on a gravel bar where we once camped. I break off old-man’s beard and crumple it into a heap, hold the match to the pile and blow. Flames catch the lichen and then twigs and branches.
I pick the roundest rocks and juggle. In gloves, the rocks feel different. I need to concentrate more. I keep up a regular cascade until the fire is burning smoothly with driftwood. I try the “snatching from above” trick and the “behind the back.” Not enough flexibility with a coat so I shrug it off, stoking the fire even higher.
Before leaving, I push three straight sticks into the flames so only the ends catch fire. I pull them out, fire licking down the wood, and throw the torches toward the sky. I hear the whoosh of flame each time a stick flies. There’s a second when the fire is directly above my face. I force myself not to blink, and then their fire goes out.
I keep juggling with the charred sticks—obviously there must be a better way to keep them lit. Brooks curls by the fire and sleeps. I juggle until my feet, stuck in home position, begin to stab from cold. Then I chuck my torches on the bonfire. No need to douse the flames on a gravel bar with the snow falling.
Snow is falling in fat soft flakes that fill the sky, dancing like dust motes through a window.
On the way home I notice them.
Over my tracks, over Brooks’s tracks is another set of bear prints. The bear followed us downriver. He must have been standing in the shadows while I juggled. He was watching from the snow and Brooks didn’t even catch his scent. I cup my hands around my mouth and yodel loudly in the direction the tracks have taken. “Leave us alone, bear,” I say. “That’s enough.”
I’m starving when I get back to the cabin. I devour a spoonful of brown sugar, grain by grain, while I wait for porridge to boil: dry flakes turning to mush and spluttering to the surface only to be dragged down again into the bowels of the pot. I share with Brooks, even though I’d rather not. Hunger tears at my stomach. I drink cup after cup of black tea and read “The Snow Queen” out loud to make it last.
I’ve been forgetting about fairy tales. I read a page and lick my finger to turn it over, holding the book close to my face. I smell faint traces of must from the years the book lay in the cache while the winds from the passes blew through the open spaces between its log walls.
“The Snow Queen” is about a young girl, Greta, whose dearest friend, a boy named Kay, wanders off with the Snow Queen because he has a magic sliver of ice in his heart that makes him hard and cruel. None of this is his fault, Greta is sure. It’s the Snow Queen’s way of casting a spell.
Greta, of course, goes taking off in pursuit of Kay.
An old woman in a wooden cottage built into a hillside writes directions for Greta on a fish skin.
Back in the cabin I smell the paper
again, and this time it smells like dry fish in a cold underground
house. Of course, it could be just the general smell in the air
from all the fish I’ve boiled here. I grab a stack of moldy paper
and a pencil from a shelf. I know what this story says already.
This time I’m going to write my own.
“For whom do you wander?” asks the bent old crone. “For whom do you search?”
And then Greta, who’s taken leave of her senses in the warmth of the buried home, remembers her sweet friend and the ice that had lodged in his heart. It is time to be gone, to be searching once again. She knows that’s what she came for, though she no longer understands why. Maybe, since her friend left, she should accept his decision and believe that’s what it is. After all, she has no proof otherwise.
But in the end, she begs forgiveness from the old woman for being unable to tarry. That very morning, before the moon sinks below the horizon, Greta will journey, she’s decided, to the Castle of the Snow Queen, far away toward the gray line of horizon.
As she shuts the old woman’s door, the wind grabs it and rips the handle from her hands. Smoke from the chimney blows flat, in a sheet, along the ground. Snowflakes, however, are not falling but jump about like popcorn on a hot stove. Greta laughs and catches several with her tongue before moving away from the safety of the now invisible shelter onto the white trackless plain.
But as Greta ventures out from the mound containing the old woman’s home, she finds caribou tracks, a sign that other creatures have wandered this way. At first she sees only a few, then troughs through the snow where great wild herds have trotted. Greta can stay on these trails by the feel of hard-packed snow under her feet. And as she wends her way down the invisible route, her thoughts fly to her friend and his frozen heart and the wickedness of the Queen who led him so far astray. As the night passes, creatures of the taiga stare out from the storm so Greta sees only the shining of their eyes for a moment through the swirling flakes of snow; then darkness breaks about them.
Greta is cold
but she is also content. There’s nowhere on this Earth she’d rather be. Something in her heart
answers the wildness of the storm. How
unfortunate, she thinks, that I am seeking
a friend who perhaps doesn’t even care to be sought. How
lacking in good fortune that this fierce beauty
cannot penetrate my own heart, that the
fate of the old crone in need of a helper cannot move me as does the fate of my long-departed
friend.
Because that’s the question, I think: at what point should you just give up?
That night I dream I’m in a blizzard. On the horizon is a yellow light. Sky and earth are invisible. Without my boots planted in the snow, I couldn’t tell earth and sky apart. The air in between is crowded with falling snowflakes. I brush them from my shoulders, take off my hat and bang it against my legs. Dad is on the trail beside me, laughing as always. “Cold enough for you?” he says.
I wake knowing I have to look for tracks around the cabin, check if the bear has come back. I’ve never heard of a bear stalking a person this way. I’ve had enough, I think, enough of being scared.
All this time I’ve been frightened not so much of the bear, but of the panic, the horrible surge of terror I felt when he was near. Panic is instant; it can’t be controlled. But the bear’s not a monster; he’s a living creature. I can look at him and see him as just a bear.
If I look at him long enough and hard enough, I might still be afraid. But maybe he’ll feel like what he really is, a fellow sojourner on this Earth with a perspective all his own.
Before leaving the cabin, I fry up a huge breakfast of rice and jerky that I’ve marinated for days in water, brown sugar and spices. I’m starving all the time these days.
Really, I don’t want to shoot him, even after he hurt Brooks. I want that golden bear to dig out his den and hunker down to sleep while the snow drifts around his bed. I want him to grow thin and his heartbeat to slow. Of course, he has to fatten first, though not on me and not on my dog.
I’m going caribou hunting downriver again tomorrow. And the bear will simply have to stay out of my way.