Chapter
ELEVEN
The cow proved to be a godsend. The next day Brian awakened in midafternoon starving and not sure it had all happened—although his body felt as if he’d been sleeping in a cement mixer. Every bone and muscle seemed to ache. But the moose was all there, leaning against the side of the shelter.
He was starving and made a fire outside. He used the hatchet to chop out a section of ribs and cooked them on a stick over the flames and ate them when the fat was crackling.
“All I need is some barbecue sauce,” he said aloud, grease dripping down his chin. “And a Coke . . .”
When he had first come out of the shelter it had been partly cloudy with the sun shining through gray wisps of clouds, but while he ate, the clouds became thicker until there was no blue and he felt a few drops hit his cheek.
“Not again—not rain . . .”
But it was. It didn’t pour at first and he took the rest of the day to get in firewood—he had found a stand of dead poplar, all dry and easy to burn but still about a half mile away, and he dragged wood until it was dark and the rain was a steady, miserable, cold downpour.
He made a fire inside the shelter with coals from the outside fire and soon it was warm and toasty. He hung the rabbit-skin shirt up to dry and lay back to wait the rain out. Having worked all night the previous night and slept most of the day, he wasn’t sleepy and thought that the rain seemed light and would probably end by daylight and when he finally dozed off, warm and snug in the shelter, it seemed to be coming down more lightly all the time.
But at daylight it hadn’t stopped. He looked out at the drizzle—it had melted all the snow off and everything was a mess and now it had become cold and the rain was freezing into ice on the limbs and grass and he was glad that he had plenty of wood pulled up and a dry place to live.
It rained for a solid eight days, cold and wet, and if he hadn’t had the shelter and meat he would have gone crazy.
And in a strange way it never really did stop raining. Each day it got colder and colder and the rain kept coming down and Brian could hear limbs breaking off with the weight of the ice on them and just when he thought he could stand it no longer the rain turned to snow.
Only this time not a soft snow. A wind came out of the northwest that howled through the trees like something insane, actually awakened him in the middle of the night and made him sit bolt upright in fear.
The snow was small and hard at first, driven needles that seemed to cut his cheek when he looked outside, and then changing to blown finer snow that found ways to seep into the shelter and melt hissing on the fire.
He was not idle. He had dragged in enough wood to last if he was careful, but by the second and third day he was going stir-crazy and was looking for things to do.
Luckily there was much that needed doing. His clothing was far from adequate. The rabbit-skin shirt was like paper and ripped easily—indeed had been torn in several places during the moose attack and needed restitching—and Brian, with great effort, stretched the moose hide out in the rain and cut it in half and brought the rear half into the shelter.
The hide was still wet from being on the moose, hadn’t had time to dry, but the fire and heat in the shelter worked fast and within a few days it had dried sufficiently to work.
It was stiff and thick and while it was still damp he cut a rectangle for a moose shirt, stitching it down the sides with moose-hide laces, making it larger than the rabbit-skin shirt. He did the same kind of sleeves and then made a crude hood, which he stitched around the head opening.
He did all this with the hair side in and when he put the rabbit-skin shirt on underneath and then the moose-hide parka on the outside—even with the moose hide still uncured—he could feel his body warming up instantly.
He also nearly went down with the weight. He figured the coat weighed at least thirty pounds, maybe more, and decided he wouldn’t be doing much running in it.
The snowstorm lasted three days on top of the rain and Brian worked on his weak spot—his hands. He used moose hide and made a pair of crude mittens by using his hands for a pattern and a piece of charcoal to draw on the hide. The thumbs were so large he could almost stick his whole hand in the thumbhole. These he made with the hair side in and fashioned them large enough to allow a second set of rabbit-skin mitts to be worn inside. The mittens were so big they kept falling off his hands and he used moose hide to make a cord that went over his shoulders and held the mittens up if he relaxed his hands.
This was all hard work and kept him busy for days, but worse work was the hide. As it dried it started to harden and it turned into something very close to a board.
He worked it back and forth over a rounded piece of wood as he’d done with the lacing and this process, trying to soften the dried moose hide, took longer than sewing up the clothing. And in the end he had to settle for less than he wanted. He had the hide loose where it counted, in the armpits and elbows and the hood, but much of the rest of it was only half supple, stiff enough so that he felt as if he were wearing a coat of armor and still stiff though he worked on it for hours when at last the storm ended.
Brian expected to be snowed in but in fact it was only eight or nine inches deep. It had been a fine, driven snow and hadn’t accumulated to any depth but it was blasted into everything. Many of the trees had a full six inches sticking out to the side of the tree, where the snow had been driven by the wind.
It was still beautiful in the sunlight but had a different look from the last, fluffy snow, and it was cold, a deeper cold than before.
Brian couldn’t estimate temperature but he thought it must be near zero, but quiet—the wind had stopped completely—and his clothes kept him as warm as if he’d been in the shelter.
He started to brush the snow off the stacked moose meat and then thought better of it. The meat was frozen and protected under the snow and ice from the rain and safer there than in the open. He didn’t think the bear would come—it must be hibernating by now, and the same for Betty, whom he hadn’t seen since just after the bear attack—so the meat should be all right just beneath the snow.
He needed wood and he spent most of that day dragging in dead poplar, finally taking the parka off because it was so heavy and working in the rabbit-skin shirt alone. Everything had ice frozen on it but it chipped off easily with the hatchet. When he had a good stack—enough for another week (he was definitely gun-shy now about storms)—he chopped some meat off one of the back legs of the moose for stew and settled in for another night of rubbing the hide of his parka to soften it.
And he wondered that night—the night of day ninety-four—if this was it; was this all winter would be? Eating meat and rubbing hide and waiting for the next rain to turn to snow?