Northern Lights (19 page)

“Suppose Daniel’s gone,” said Perry.

“I suppose.”

It was a slow anesthetic lunch. Perry found himself happy in Addie’s new pensiveness. And Grace was quiet, and the hotel seemed to cry with tinny echoes, and Perry for once felt they were all in it together, the same mood as on a dying January day.

It seemed to Perry that they rushed too blindly to the forest. Too quickly and without proper preparation and forewarning.

Harvey was in a hurry.

They dressed in high wool socks, cotton anoraks and parkas.

Harvey was all business, taking charge. He packed the new-bought rations into the rucksacks, rolled the sleeping bags and tied them and stashed them inside the packs.

The momentum of departure was taking hold, an inertia that seemed to have started years before, slowly growing until it was a locomotive that wailed down an incline uncontrolled, and Perry held on, following Harvey’s lead.

They helped Grace and Addie carry the baggage to the car. No one talked much. Grace seemed far away. As if viewing her through a badly remembered dream, physically out of joint. He gave her a short kiss and she held his arm a moment, then she whispered something he couldn’t hear and got into the car.
Without looking at anyone, Addie grinned and waved and got behind the wheel. Perry wanted to say something. Instead he waved at Grace and stepped back. Addie drove the car over the icy parking lot, honked and turned on to the road leading south. “That’s that,” Harvey said. Perry shook his head as though trying to clear it of apprehension. “That’s that,” Harvey said again. He smiled ghoulishly, letting his dead eye float upward. The iris disappeared behind the bone of his forehead.

In the lobby they gave their skis a last coat of wax. Everything was still. Harvey studied the map again, jotting notes in the margin, then he gave the map to Perry and went into the kitchen to fill his Thermos with coffee. Perry sat with the map. The lobby fireplace was sputtering and all was warm and quiet and still. When Harvey returned, they had a cigarette, threw their butts into the fireplace and helped each other into their packs, breathed in the warm hotel air, then went outside.

Perry was lost.

He stepped into his skis, pulled up the woollen leggings.

Down the road, hanging from evergreens, were batches of half-deflated balloons and scraps of crepe paper. A man in earmuffs was dismantling the loudspeaker platform, using a hammer to knock the wooden struts out of place, and the man’s breath hung in the air.

“Saddle up,” Harvey said.

“Which way?”

“After me, after me.” He stooped and tied his safety straps. “We’ll take it nice and easy. Ready now?”

Harvey skied down the slope leading to the lake. Without pausing, he swept across the road and on to the lake, the orange rucksack bobbing on his back. Perry hurried to catch up.

Two

S
obbing sounds: coffee into a cup, leaves into a bushel basket, feathers into a pillow, air into a vacuum. He listened. No certain sounds, vague and muffled and indistinct. No rustles or movements. A sobbing sound, many sobbing sounds. Inanimate and elemental, into him and out of him, some distant time, very distant. Perry snuggled deep in the bag. He was warm enough. Goose down—the best insulation, Harvey said. He was warm enough but he could not sleep. He disliked the slick feel of the bag’s nylon lining. And the bag seemed to anchor him, pinning him down, and he tossed about and fought for some accommodation with it. He poked his nose free. The night air was cold and almost sweet, and he pulled it into his lungs and warmed it and released it as steam into the forest. He listened: the sobbing sounds. He tried to place them. He listened carefully, holding his breath to let the sounds come through pure. There was no wind, no motion. The night was solid and still. The sobbing sounds continued. He peered ahead,
looking for the source, but he was blind. Harvey had promised his eyes would adjust to the winter dark, but he was blind. The fire was dead. Not even an ember left. There was no colour or form or motion. Inside the bag it was warm. But it was artificial and tenuous warmth, absolutely dependent on the sustained well-being of his own body. He thought about it. The sobbing sounds: indefinite, gradually compressing air, the sound of frost going deep. He couldn’t tell. It was all too demanding. Too wild and too lonely. Harvey began to snore. The snoring seemed far away, as though overheard in another room, or in a hospital ward where the patients lie separated by curtains, each suffering alone. He couldn’t tell. Eventually the snoring merged with the other sounds. Turning on to his side, he faced the black brunt of the west forest. There was nothing to see. He moved deeper into the bag and lay still and tried not to think and he began thinking. He thought about having to find another job, about Grace, then about Addie and Harvey, then about himself. He thought for a time about his father, nothing specific, letting the colored memories flop like television advertisements, the bomb shelter, the pond, growing up, growing down, getting married, wandering, letting go, thinking forward and backward with futile aimlessness. He decided to pray. He thought about Damascus Lutheran. Desperation mixed with guilt, and he prayed for Grace and for finding a new job and for Harvey and for himself. He prayed the Lord’s Prayer, then he prayed for another vacation soon. He stopped praying and listened to the sobbing sounds, then he remembered Jud Harmor. He prayed that Jud Harmor didn’t have cancer, then he prayed that, if it were cancer, the old man could be saved, then he prayed that, if he couldn’t be saved, the old man would die fast and not feel pain, then he lay wide awake and listened to the forest’s sobbing sounds. He was surprised at how warm the bag was. Harvey knew how to do it right. Goose
down. Dig a trench in the snow, lay the bag in, cover it with a foot of snow. Insulation, Harvey explained. A snow nest. A snow den. Like the bears, Harvey explained. He concentrated on the sounds of the forest: like rainfall, all around, high and low, pouring everywhere. He turned on to his back. For a while he was able to lie still, thinking about nothing but the sounds. A good woodsman would identify them. Harvey could name them, give their source and place and exact distance. Harvey was sleeping. The fire was dead. A hard day. Leaving, the anticipation, Grace. All told, they hadn’t gone very far, barely ten miles. But it was nothing easy. When Harvey left the trail, plunging dead west into the woods, they’d gone slow, picking the way, Harvey’s orange rucksack bobbing ahead, weaving and flanking the impenetrable thickets of pine. No more paths, nothing but the lay of the forest the way it had always been. Nothing easy. Harvey’s orange rucksack always moving. Perry turned and thought out the day and listened to the sobbing sounds and tried to sleep. He heard Harvey move. He thought he heard it. He wasn’t sure.

“You awake, Harv?”

He listened but it was nothing.

In the morning a natural alarm punctured his sleep, a slight change of temperature and the sun’s light. Harvey was standing at the fire.

“Fine day,” he said, without turning. He was wearing a sweater and blue jeans. His parka hung on a birch branch.

“Damn cold day.”

“That’s no way to talk. Get out and help me with breakfast. We’ll eat a nice big breakfast, you’ll be surprised. Come on.”

“Get the fire hotter. I’m staying here till it’s hotter.”

Harvey laughed and pushed a new log into the fire. Perry watched him boil water and make coffee and put two cans of
chili on the fire. It was a sunny morning. Harvey brought him coffee in a tin cup and Perry lay in his bag to drink it. The sun bathed a jungle of green pine. The shadows stretched across the camp clearing and into another, deeper growth of trees.

“Not so bad, is it?” Harvey said.

“Cold.”

“Cold,” Harvey laughed. He looked much better. He smiled and his teeth were white through the beard. He looked recovered. “Get out and move around and you’ll see how cold it is.”

Perry hooked his glasses with his toes, brought them to the head of the bag and slipped them on. Things looked better. Reluctantly he pulled his clothes on and left the bag. He did not need his parka.

“Not so bad, is it?” Harvey said.

They ate the chili and had more coffee, then began packing the rucksacks. By the time the sun cleared the pines, everything seemed fine. Perry kicked snow into the fire.

“A good skiing day,” said Harvey. “Just look at it. We’ll make twenty miles.”

And it was a fine day.

Harvey’s orange rucksack flashed ahead of him and Perry followed, feeling strong and comfortable, stabbing the snow with his poles, rushing on. The motion was swift and unconnected to anything solid. He gained confidence. The morning skiing was easy as the forest descended and the trees grew far enough apart not to worry about quick stops. They crossed two medium-sized lakes, neither of which were on the map, something new and undiscovered, and the land continued its descent in a gentle downward flow. When they crossed the second lake, Harvey found a small frozen creek and they followed it deep in. On both banks evergreens grew tall, their branches intertwined to form a wall. The sky became a narrow slit.

Perry did not notice the clouds coming in. When the clouds
covered the sun, he did not notice. He followed Harvey’s orange rucksack.

Twice Harvey stopped to consult his compass. On the second stop, they took off their packs and skis and stood together and urinated under a pine. Harvey unwrapped a bar of chocolate. “Nice country, isn’t it? I told you. We can rest awhile if you’re tired.”

Perry waved him off and they continued up the creek. Eventually it emptied on to a large lake and on the far side they had to carry their skis through a tangle of brush and pines. The country got rocky. The slope of land began turning up. Skiing was impossible. They climbed a pine bluff, then another, and the country kept angling up and up. Perry noticed then that the sun was gone. When finally they stopped climbing, the sky was a sickly gray color. Harvey grunted and unzipped his trousers.

His urine made a yellow patch in the snow.

“What time is it?” Perry asked.

“About three thirty, judging by the sun.”

Perry laughed. “Okay, woodsman. There isn’t any sun. How about judging by your watch?”

“Ha. Okay. Judging by my watch it’s four. Not bad?”

“Nice trick. Where to now?”

They sat on their rucksacks and Harvey took out the map. “An hour and a half of good light left. All right.” He placed his compass on the map. “Parent Lake is dead west of here, half an hour.” He pointed to a place on the map.

Perry studied it. A thousand lakes looked back at him. “Where are we now?”

“Here. Right about here. I can tell better when we get out of this thick stuff. But right about here.”

“All right,” Perry nodded. “And this river? Have we passed this river yet? I didn’t notice it if we did.”

Harvey folded the map up and shrugged. “Who knows? The
way everything’s frozen over. Snowed under. Could have crossed a hundred rivers. Damn river doesn’t even have a name. See?”

“Yeah, Harv. Rugged country, right?”

“Absolutely. Let’s go. We’ll have a fire blazing in half an hour.”

They strapped on their skis. The bluffs fell to a natural valley that burrowed southwest and then opened on to a meadow surrounded by more trees. The trees were very old, mostly pine but some birch. The birch were slim and tall, and the white bark stretched in large sheets around the trunks, crinkling at the black seams. There was nothing moving. Perry looked once at the closing sky then decided to ignore it and followed Harvey’s orange rucksack. A palpable, bitter air kept him going.

For a time it was easy skiing again, but then again the forest thickened and they were forced to walk. Harvey followed a chain of moraines that gradually flattened and gave way on the rim of an ancient gully. It was getting dark. They didn’t talk. Harvey took out the map and compass, spending a long time over them, and finally he grinned and said they should make camp. He pointed into the gully: “Down there, I guess. It’ll keep the wind out.”

“You know what’s what,” said Perry, and he threw his skis into the depression.

Without being told, Perry began the search for wood.

“Made fifteen miles today,” Harvey was saying. “Not at all bad considering all the walking. From here on it’ll get a lot easier, once we get to the string of lakes.”

“Right.”

“Nothing to it.”

“A nice crackling fire,” Harvey was saying, confident and cheerful, dumping an armload of wood into the gully. “What we need now are some logs. About a dozen good-sized logs.”

“You sure that’s enough?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

The forest light was gone. Calcified, frozen, the forest was quiet except for the light wind.

“That’ll do it,” Harvey said.

They dropped their wood into the gully, then Harvey held Perry’s wrist and lowered him down. For a moment he was free of the earth, dangling. It sucked his breath away. He gasped, and felt the strain on his shoulder, and he was suddenly afraid, not of falling but of falling nowhere. Harvey released the grip. Perry fell to his knees, his hands sinking into the snow.