Part Two: Winter
Chapter
EIGHT
He awakened when he had slept enough, and looked out of the shelter by cracking the door. It was cold and low and gray and raining, a dismal rain much like the one that had lasted so long earlier in the fall, and he kindled the fire with dry wood he’d set aside the night before when he’d seen the clouds moving in. Soon the inside of the shelter was cheery and warm, the smoke working its way out of the hole at the top, and he wished he’d thought to bring water in the night before and also wished he didn’t have to do what he had to do now.
But he couldn’t fight it and at last he pulled himself out of the bag, grabbed the hatchet and the largest aluminum pot and plunged out into the rain. As fast as possible, standing barefoot on the freezing, wet ground, he went to the bathroom and then ran to the lake and chopped his watering hole open—it had frozen thinly overnight—and filled the pan and ran back to the shelter.
He slid the door back in place and put the pot on the fire and dropped a piece of venison into it to make a breakfast stew.
The meat was getting low. He had stretched the wolf-killed doe as far as he could, trying to ration it and eat smaller amounts, but he’d have to hunt within four or five days.
He put a piece of meat outside the door for Betty, surprised that she wasn’t there already, and leaned back to think.
In the past few days it had become colder. The weather had a kind of steady feel to it, as if it was not going to get warmer but would stay cold, and he had to face some truths.
He simply wasn’t ready for cold weather. Oh, he thought, the shelter was all right. And the woods were full of fuel.
But his clothing was pitiful. His jeans were holding together—just—but his tennis shoes were about gone, his socks long since used to shreds, and on top all he had was a T-shirt (also nearly in pieces) and the rabbit-skin vest.
I am, he thought, a mess. He was tempted to smile except that it wasn’t really funny. He could sit in the shelter and stay warm but unless he could hunt he would die and he couldn’t hunt unless he had something to wear to keep from freezing.
To death, he thought, the truth sliding in like a snake. I could freeze to death. Not quite yet—it wasn’t that cold yet—but soon. He didn’t know northern winters but he knew it would get cold enough to kill him and freeze him solid.
He took stock again. No clothing, although he still had some rabbit hides, which he could sew into sleeves for his vest. There was also the hide from the doe. He looked at it and thought that he might get a pair of moccasins out of it. They would be crude but if he stitched them with the hair on the inside and made them big enough to wear over his tattered tennis shoes they would help.
He set to work on what he could do and spent all of that day sewing the rest of the rabbit skins into two tubes, which he attached as sleeves to the vest. When he tried it on everything crackled, as if he were wearing paper, but it seemed to hold together and he slept that night feeling slightly better about his future.
The next morning he checked the weather—still raining, and colder than it had been the previous morning—and then set to work making footgear.
It proved both easier and harder than he had thought it would be. The easy part was making a pattern. He just stood on the dry skin and marked around his foot with a piece of charcoal from the fire pit. When he’d cut out the two bottoms he cut two rectangles from the remaining hide and stitched—with some effort as the hide was thick and tough—the two pieces into rough cylinders. Then he sewed each of the tubes down to the sole, attaching it all around the edge, and when he was done he had two clunky boots that he could stick his tennis shoes down into; with the hair on the inside they felt warm the minute he stuck his feet into them. He used the last bits of hide to cut two strips to use for lacing to pull the tops of the cylinders tight to his legs—they hit about midcalf—and it was here he learned how to soften leather.
The deer hide was dried and working with it was about like working with thin wood. It had no give and was brittle and hard and very, very tough. It was all he could do to sew the cylinders to the bottom using thin-cut hide for lacing and punching holes with the tip of the knife. But the two straps that went around the top had to be soft enough to tie off. He thought of using the fishing line for thread but didn’t want to waste it. Then he found that by working the leather—first between his fingers and then by pulling it over a piece of wood that stuck out of the wall—he could soften it. It never got truly soft and supple like tanned deer hide, but it was workable and got the job done.
He gathered more wood just before dark and went to sleep that night dreaming of punching holes in leather with the tip of the knife—the image burned into his mind from sitting all day sewing.
Sometime that night, near the middle, it grew quiet and the change awakened him. He listened for a time and realized that the rain had stopped and he snuggled back in the bag thinking that with no rain the next day he would hunt.
In the morning he awakened and knew instantly that something had changed. Something about the sound. No. The lack of it. There was no sound. Normally he could hear birds in the morning, or the wind rustling.
Now there was nothing.
He crawled out of the bed and opened the door of the shelter. Or tried to. It seemed to be stuck, frozen in place. He pushed harder and finally half stood, crouched, and pushed out with his shoulder against the door.
At first it still didn’t move and only when he crouched back and slammed into it with his shoulder did the door fall away, letting him look outside.
It nearly blinded him.
The entire world was white, bright white with new morning sun glaring off and through it and so intense that it made his temples hurt.
Snow had fallen in the night. Soft, large flakes, nearly four inches deep everywhere. On limbs, logs, the ground, on the lake ice—all over, an even four inches.
And it was cold. Colder than it had been so far. His nostril hairs seemed to stick together when he breathed and the air caught in his throat. The world was so incredibly, wonderfully, stunningly beautiful that for a full minute all he could do was stare.
“Ohh . . .”
He had seen pictures of the woods with snow and had seen snow in the park and in the city but this was different. He was in it, inside the snowy scene, and the beauty of it became part of him.
He stepped outside the shelter and as he stepped into the snow realized that he was barefoot. He jumped back inside and put on his tennis shoes and fur boots and the rabbit-skin shirt and moved back outside.
He had never seen anything so clean. Because it was all new there wasn’t a mark, not a track in the surface of the snow, and he took four or five paces just to look back at his tracks.
“It’s like a bigfoot,” he said aloud. And indeed, the boots left a large, rounded hole for a footprint.
He moved around, did his toilet—drawing a picture in the snow when he did—and was amazed how well the boots worked, kept his feet warm and comfortable. As he came close to the shelter he saw a mouse appear almost magically out of the snow, run across the surface for three feet and then dive under again.
Brian moved to where the mouse had run and studied its tracks. Little dots in a parallel line with a small line in the middle where the tail dragged.
But clean, he thought, and neat and so easy to see and follow and everything, everything that moved in the woods would leave tracks.
Would be easy to see.
Would be easy to follow.
Would be much easier to hunt.
He still had some venison left but he decided to hunt. Because the snow was new and he’d never hunted in snow, because the sun was bright and fresh, because his clothing seemed to work, he decided to hunt, and it was in this way that he found the moose.