Chapter
TWELVE
It did not rain again.
Nor did the snow go away. The temperature stayed down and in four days it snowed lightly, maybe an inch, and then in four more days another inch or two and then in four more days . . .
Regular as clockwork winter came. The snow never came deeply, never another wild blizzard, just an inch or two every four days. But the snow didn’t leave between times, didn’t melt, and before long there was a foot on the ground, a foot of dry powder.
At first it was all very settled and comfortable. Brian’s clothing seemed to work, he had plenty of meat and plenty of firewood—although he had to go some distance to get it. He knew how much wood it would take for a given time and brought in enough for a week—it took a full day—and then had nothing to do the rest of the week except work his moose-hide clothing against the wooden peg to soften it and eat moose-meat stew.
Summer had been so active and now he had suddenly come to a virtual stop. He couldn’t fish anymore because the ice was too thick to chop through with the hatchet, he didn’t need to hunt because he had—he figured roughly—four hundred pounds of moose left to eat. Lying by the fire one evening softening hide, he did some rough math, and if he ate four pounds of moose meat a day he would make at least a hundred days before needing more meat. More than three months. Let’s see, he thought, it was late November now, no, early December, no, wait . . .
He counted the days on his marks and decided it was the last week in November. Thanksgiving—he’d forgotten Thanksgiving.
He could do that. Have a Thanksgiving meal. The date was a little off, he would be late, but it felt good to think of it and he prepared for it as if he were home.
He would eat moose, of course, but he had found that the hump meat was the best and he chopped a three-pound piece off the frozen block by his door.
He would need more—some kind of sauce.
Then he remembered the berries. On one of his wood-gathering runs he’d gone past the north end of the lake and there had been a string of small, scraggly trees loaded with bright red berries. Because everything was under a foot of snow and he hadn’t seen a berry since summer these berries—looking fresh and bright even though they were frozen solid—struck him as very odd. They looked delicious and hung in small clumps and he smelled them, then took a handful and popped them into his mouth.
At first he couldn’t taste them because they were frozen but as soon as they thawed he got the flavor. They were tangy and had a mild bitter taste that made him want to pucker—also they had large pits. They were similar to the gut cherries he’d had trouble with during the summer except that they didn’t make him sick and the sour taste reminded him of something else he couldn’t at first place and later remembered as a vinegar or sour sauce flavor.
They would make a good sauce for a Thanksgiving meal and he went along the lakeshore and picked one of the smaller aluminum pans full and it was in this way that he learned about snowshoes.
It did not come that fast. There was about a foot of snow, powder but with a stiffness, and as he walked along the lake in his deer-hide boots he startled a rabbit from beneath an evergreen and it took off like a shot—all changed to white—across the snow.
Without sinking in. Brian watched it run away and had taken another four or five steps when it hit him that the rabbit was running on top of the snow while Brian was sinking in with each step.
He moved to the rabbit’s tracks and studied them. They were huge, fully twice the size of the feet he had seen on rabbits earlier, and when he examined the tracks more closely he saw that the rabbit had grown hair to increase the size of its feet and he thought how perfect they were: to be able to do that, change color in the winter and grow bigger feet to stay on top of the snow. How perfect. And he set the information back in his mind and went on about preparing for Thanksgiving.
He packed snow in with the berries and put them on the fire to melt and boil; then he put the hump meat in the large pan with snow and set that on to boil as well.
So much, he thought, for cooking Thanksgiving dinner.
What he wanted was a table and a chair and a tablecloth—no, he thought. What he wanted was a turkey and all the trimmings and then a table and chairs and tablecloth and his mother and father sitting with him and milk, oh yes, a glass of cold milk and bread and butter and potatoes and gravy and . . .
What he wanted more than anything was out, to be back in the world. To have all that stuff and be back in the world and then to go to a movie, no, to sit and watch television with your belly packed and watch a football game and belch and . . .
That was what he wanted.
What he did instead was clean his shelter.
He had been sleeping on the foam pad that had come with the survival pack and he straightened everything up and hung his bag out in the sun to air-dry and then used the hatchet to cut the ends of new evergreen boughs and laid them like a carpet in the shelter.
As soon as he brought the boughs inside and the heat from the fire warmed them they gave off the most wonderful smell, filled the whole shelter with the odor of spring, and he brought the bag back inside and spread the pad and bag and felt as if he were in a new home.
The berries boiled first and he added snow water to them and kept them boiling until he had a kind of mush in the pan. By that time the meat had cooked and he set it off to the side and tasted the berry mush.
Bitter, he thought, but tangy and not all that bad, and he cut a piece of the moose hump off, a thin slice, and dipped it in the sauce and ate it in two bites.
It was delicious, almost like having steak sauce or a kind of bitter catsup. He took another cut of meat, dipped it, ate it as well, the juice dripping down his chin, and was on his third one when he realized this was his Thanksgiving dinner.
And I’m eating like a wolf, he thought, before I give thanks.
It stopped him, the idea of giving thanks. At first his mind just stopped and he thought, for what? For the plane crash, for being here? I should thank somebody for that?
Then a small voice, almost a whisper, came into his mind and all it said was: It could have been worse; you could have been down in the plane with the pilot.
And he felt awful for his attitude, turned away from the food and forced himself to be grateful for all the good luck he’d had and to not think about the bad at all.
Just that, escaping from the plane alive—that was luck. And to be able to live and learn and know things, to be able to hunt, to be thankful for the animals’ lives that had been spent to keep him fed, to be thankful for the deer and the moose, lord, the moose like getting a whole food store and to be thankful for his shelter and knife and the hatchet . . .
The hatchet. The key to it all. Nothing without the hatchet. Just that would take all his thanks.
And every stick, every twig of wood that burned to keep him warm and his sleeping bag and Betty saving him from the bear and the chickadees that hung around the camp and the sun that brought each new day . . .
All that, he thought, all that and more to be thankful for and he ended the prayer—as it had seemed to become—with another thought about the pilot down in the lake, how he hoped the pilot had had a good life and was where it was good for him now.
Then he ate, quietly, thinking of his mother and father, and when he finished his Thanksgiving it was dark, pitch-dark, and he crawled into his bag to sleep and had just closed his eyes and started to get drowsy when he heard the gunshot.