Wintering (16 page)

“I've been skiing south of here. Climbed a cliff yesterday and saw some territory that I want to get to, but I'll need to camp overnight to get there. Just the night. Maybe two.”

“What territory?”

“There's a big cut of the woods that burned. I want to see it up close.”

Harry smiled. “You remember that night you got our bear?”

“Yeah, and it won't happen again.”

“You know that how?”

“I'll be careful.”

“You'll be careful.”

Gus lifted the Duluth pack, testing its weight. “You can come with,” he said.

“I'm partial to our digs here.”

“Suit yourself, then.”

Harry looked at him for a long moment, reconciling himself to the fact that in dragging Gus up here he'd forfeited the right to tell him what to do or not to do. Still, he was his father. “I'm not sure it's a good idea, camping overnight. The weather could turn. What if you got lost?”

“I've gotten pretty familiar with that stretch of woods.”

Harry studied him again. “What is it you're really looking for, bud?”

Gus might have answered that he merely wanted the adventure. But that wasn't true. He might have said he wanted to face his fear, or make discoveries, or simply see as much of the borderlands as he could. But all of that was also untrue. He couldn't have said any of it and believed himself, much less expected his father to. Decades later, he knew he was simply obeying his instincts by going off into the forest alone. As though he were merely another beast roaming those woods. “I'm not really looking for anything. I just want to go see,” he finally said.

Which was both true and an answer that satisfied his father. Enough that when Gus left with the Duluth pack in the morning Harry only patted him on the shoulder and said, “Be careful, eh? I'll see you tomorrow.”

By the time he made camp nine hours later—all the daylight spent and a new and bitter cold bearing down—Gus was afraid again. Not of the wilderness or the cold, but because his father had let him go.

He'd stopped twice to sketch the shape of the lakes and mark the entrances into the clearings. He'd climbed the same ridgeline that he had the day before, and blocked out the landscape on a separate sheet of paper. He used the field glasses to scan the distant hills and the compass to assure himself that he was looking either south or east.

Once he got nestled in the tent, the flap pulled back and a fire at its mouth, his belly full and his coffee warm, he had figured out what he was doing out here. He redrew his earlier sketches in the back of the composition book, guessing at distances traveled and seen, detailing any dramatic rises, and any other features of the terrain that warranted attention.

“The next morning I skied what must have been another fifteen miles. Always, always south or east. If I came on some impediment—an impassable stretch of woods, a hill too daunting, whatever—I'd backtrack until I found a route that kept me on course. South or east. No exceptions.”

I had flipped through most of the composition book and could well imagine him sitting alone as a boy in the middle of the wilderness, charting his path home. Of all the things I knew about that season and about Gus, this was the most impressive. Even more so than what was to come.

“Anyone who's ever been lost understands the first rule of the cartographer,” he said, motioning to the waitress to refill his coffee mug. “I understood it instinctively, and since I gave no credence to my father's maps—which, I might add, I carried with me and consulted often—I was free to follow that first rule without any hesitation. It was a simple undertaking. I had to figure out how to get home when the time came. With no tools at my disposal other than the binoculars and the compass, the task was as simple as could be. Get from here to there, from A to B. From the shack to the Burnt Wood River.”

The waitress topped off his coffee and he continued. “I thought often those days of how uninterested I'd been in our route. How trusting I'd been of my father and his plan and his book of maps. I can't say I felt foolish, though maybe I should have, but I was definitely aware that if we were ever going to get out of there, it would be because I'd figured out how to do it.

“Three nights I was gone that first time. Three nights and maybe twenty-five or thirty miles. It occurred to me more than once that we'd only just settled in and here I was looking to get out. At the time I wasn't proud of this. I saw it as a deficiency in my character. But it was merely my nature. I came by it through no choice of my own, just as my father had no choice in his. To get rid of it you'd have to go back a thousand years and across all the miles of the Atlantic Ocean, through all our ancestors and all the qualities of the Northern European people in general.” He smiled. “You know something about this particular quality of our people, Berit Lovig. You know it just as well as I do.”

“You're talking about more than getting to church on time.”

He smiled again, more broadly, and nodded. “I haven't been to church twelve times in my life. What I'm talking about is who I am, and how not even those borderlands could rid me of that.”

“Did those borderlands take your father's true nature away from him?”

He thought for a moment. “I suppose my father thought he might feel better up there. Better as in happier, or more capable, or at least more himself.” He thought a bit more. “Or maybe he thought he could escape his nature. Just forget who he was. And maybe he did. But any thoughts like this he might've had were afterthoughts. Whatever he thought he'd find there he knew would come with Charlie and all that he'd bring with him.”

He gazed for a long spell out the window at the winter waves coming over the breakwater. “The truth is, after everything that happened, he still came back the same man that went up. Even if he spent some time being someone else. But you don't need me to tell you that.” He smiled. “You knew him better than I did. Lately, I mean.”

“I spent more time with him, but I could never have known him better.”

He smiled again. “It was twilight when I got back to the shack after those three nights away. It had been cold. Probably below zero the whole day. And when I walked in and closed the door behind me, I caught my reflection in the window glass. It had been snowing all afternoon, and I was white as a ghost. My whiskers were covered with icicles. My hat was well frosted and covered with snow. My coat, too.

“My father was standing at the stove. There was this delicious smell in the air”—he waved his hand in front of his face as though to summon the remembered smell—“and he had a shit-eating grin on his face. He said he was glad I made it back, as he didn't want to have to eat both grouse himself.

“I peeled off my coat and hat. Emptied out the Duluth pack. Put everything back in its place. Secreted his book of maps and my own new drawings under my sleeping sack after I spread it on the bunk. Finally, I walked over to the stove. ‘Grouse?' I said. ‘We couldn't have bear for Thanksgiving dinner, now, could we?' he said, turning to me. ‘Did you find our old trail out there?' He nodded toward the door. I shrugged and told him, ‘I couldn't say. I was just wandering around the woods.' ”

Gus finished his coffee there in the Blue Sky Café. He set the empty cup on the table and pointed the handle so it faced south. I noticed that. Then he shifted it east.

“We ate that grouse sprinkled with salt and pepper. Just grouse and coffee. He told me how he'd been passing by a clearing up in the woods when one jumped from under a bush. He shot its head off. Two hours later, he's coming back and another comes out of the same damn bush. He shot its head off, too. And so there we were, eating Thanksgiving dinner at the shack. He didn't ask me about the days I'd been gone except to wonder if I'd seen anything exceptional. That was his word.

“ ‘Just the cold and snow. I guess it's winter now,' I said.”

Gus picked the coffee cup up off the table and looked into its emptiness. “He had an answer for everything, my old man. He might have just agreed. Said, Sure, it's winter now. But instead he reached for his little birch calendar.” Gus paused and shook his head. “ ‘Winter?' he said. ‘Not yet, bud. We've got three weeks before winter.' ”

G
US MADE
surveying his occupation between Thanksgiving and Christmas, weeks of hush and white and a kind of coldness he'd never known before. Sometimes he was gone for a day, sometimes two or three. Once, he was gone for four nights and crossed the Laurentian Divide. He knew because he came to a river whose south-rushing saults he couldn't cross. His trails in the woods and across the frozen lakes gained permanence. He camped at the same spots and set fires on the heaps of old ashes. The snap of those fires was often the only accompaniment to the silence, and in that faint rasping he heard music unlike any he'd ever known before and to which he composed lyrics he'd never sing. He never once saw another breathing creature that wasn't black-winged and aloft.

Going by an island on a large lake one morning, he saw a dead-looking tangle of blueberry bushes alongshore. The mere thought of a handful of berries caused him such despair that while his mouth watered he nearly wept out of want and felt like a child. If he'd learned anything it was to not want, so he pushed ahead on his skis or snowshoes and found the next vantage.

Sometimes that was a ridgeline, or a bald knoll, or the notch of a remnant white pine he climbed. Thirty or forty feet off the ground, he compared his father's maps with the land and lakes that spread before him. Sometimes there seemed a likeness, but mostly he resorted to his composition book and kept drawing what he saw. On the coldest and brightest days, in the early or late hours, he was blinded by sun dogs that he could only think of as the sort of light he'd likely see at the end of his life. He'd stare into those halos like they had something to tell him, about not only where he was going but also right where he was.

He often thought of the voyageurs his father so admired. And considered how their maps told stories of where they'd been or wanted to go, of who they aspired to be and what they wanted from the world. He thought of their courage and their brute strength—things of legend—and also of their limits, which must have been considerable as well. He wondered if they left wives and children behind, living their lives only looking forward, and he wondered what secrets they kept. He thought their stories were better told on a map than in a song.

One day he discovered pictographs along the umber cliffs above a long lake: a moose chased by three wolves, the sun shining down like God. An hour later he came across a windblown shoreline and in its dark granite he could feel what passed for midday warmth. He sat down for a bite to eat, and when he looked at the rock between his knees he saw the vertebrae of some extinct creature, doubtless brought here by a receding glacier. From how far north, and how long did it take that glacier to get here, what force moved it? Instead of feeling less substantial than ever, he felt powered by a force akin to the glacier and knew this somehow was thanks to his own patience. Buoyed by this thought, he looked out before him and drew what he could see of it. The composition book was more than half filled now. Each lake numbered instead of named. Each creek and stream and river noted as frozen or free-flowing, each rise in the land marked as passable or not.

That night he counted the rings on the birch log he stoked his fire with before adjourning to his dreams, which came to him lit by more northern lights. When he woke in the morning he made his coffee and thought of home. He was pleased by his efforts to chart a course to get back, but knew full well that, given the vast number of steps required to get there, it would no longer be the same place he'd left, that the home he'd known was gone forever, and that his next home would be one he'd make himself. Whether that was in this life or the next seemed not so consequential. This thought carried him back toward the shack.

Before he reached their lake he took a detour, changing his skis for his snowshoes and taking an unexplored course along the western shore. For four hours he pushed through the drifted snow, passing islands and rocky shoreline and the headwaters of three streams. At the last of these he took the field glasses from his neck and scanned the wide, frozen world. He spotted the entrance to their bay and the smoke from their chimney rising weakly through the trees, one last mile between him and the shack. Looking north, he could see clear to the end of the lake, some three miles away. He took a last look back at the tracks coming up the shore and meeting him where he stood. With the field glasses back around his neck, he scouted where steps in the same direction would take him, past a gentle shore clear of trees thirty yards up off the water.

And right there he saw the moose antlers, their tips sticking out of the snow only thirty paces from where he'd just surveyed the world. He dug them free of the snow and ice and discovered there were two sets, their skulls locked together eye to eye. On his knees, he peered into the hollow sockets and studied the long teeth and the patterns on the antlers themselves and worried very much about the last breaths of these beasts. He looked around the ground on which he stood—all covered in snow, any trace of the carnage that must have accompanied their death lost to time and water and wind. Still, he could hear the snarling wolves and feel the final desperate kicks of these two bulls writhing on the ground.

And no sooner did he imagine the screaming of the ravens than he heard exactly this—eight or ten or twenty, a whole unkindness, coming over the trees. He watched those living things sharp against the sky, riding gyres up and tucking their wings to veer back down. He might have thought them a warning if he'd had sense to think anything. Instead, he took rope from his pack, laced the heavy antlers to his back, then crossed the lake to the shack.