Brian's Winter Read online

  Brian had read about wolves and seen films about them and knew that they “left sign,” using urine to mark their territory. He had also read—he thought in a book by Farley Mowat—that the wolves respected others’ territories as well as their own. As soon as they were well away from the old stump Brian went up and peed where they had left sign.

  Five days later when they came through again Brian saw them stop, smell where he had gone and then spot the ground next to Brian’s spot, accepting his boundary.

  Good, he thought. I own something now. I belong. And he had gone on with his life believing that the wolves and he had settled everything.

  But wolf rules and Brian rules only applied to wolves and Brian.

  Then the bear came.

  Brian had come to know bears as well as he knew wolves or birds. They were usually alone—unless it was a female with cubs—and they were absolutely, totally devoted to eating. He had seen them several times while picking berries, raking the bushes with their teeth to pull the fruit off—and a goodly number of leaves as well, which they spit out before swallowing the berries—and, as with the wolves, they seemed to get along with him.

  That is to say Brian would see them eating and he would move away and let them pick where they wanted while he found another location. It worked for the bears, he thought, smiling, and it worked for him, and this thinking evolved into what Brian thought of as an understanding between him and the bears: Since he left them alone, they would leave him alone.

  Unfortunately the bears did not know that it was an agreement, and Brian was suffering under the misunderstanding that, as in some imaginary politically correct society, everything was working out.

  All of this made him totally unprepared for the reality of the woods. To wit: Bears and wolves did what they wanted to do, and Brian had to fit in.

  He was literally awakened to the facts one morning during the two-week warm spell. Brian had been sleeping soundly and woke to the clunking sound of metal on rock. His mind and ears were tuned to all the natural sounds around him and there was no sound in nature of metal on stone. It snapped him awake in midbreath.

  He was sleeping with his head in the opening of the shelter and he had his face out and when he opened his eyes he saw what appeared to be a wall of black-brown fur directly in front of him.

  He thought he might be dreaming and shook his head but it didn’t go away and he realized in the same moment that he was looking at the rear end of a bear. No, he thought with a clinical logic that surprised him—I am looking at the very large rear end of a very large bear.

  The bear had come to Brian’s camp—smelling the gutsmell of the dead rabbit, and the cooking odor from the pot. The bear did not see it as Brian’s camp or territory. There was a food smell, it was hungry, it was time to eat.

  It had found the pot and knife by the fire where Brian had left them and scooped them outside. Brian had washed them both in the lake when he finished eating, but the smell of food was still in the air. Working around the side of the opening, the bear had bumped the pan against a rock at the same moment that it had settled its rump in the entrance of Brian’s shelter.

  Brian pulled back a foot. “Hey—get out of there!” he yelled, and kicked the bear in the rear.

  He was not certain what he expected. Perhaps that the bear would turn and realize its mistake and then sheepishly trundle away. Or that the bear would just run off.

  With no hesitation, not even the smallest part of a second’s delay, the bear turned and ripped the entire log side off the shelter with one sweep of a front paw and a moist “whouuuff” out of its nostrils.

  Brian found himself looking up at the bear, turned now to look down on the boy, and with another snort the bear swung its left paw again and scooped Brian out of the hollow of the rock and flung him end over end for twenty feet. Then the bear slipped forward and used both front paws to pack Brian in a kind of ball and whap him down to the edge of the water, where he lay, dazed, thinking in some way that he was still back in the shelter.

  The bear stopped and studied Brian for a long minute, then turned back to ransacking the camp, looking for where that delicious smell had come from. It sat back on its haunches and felt the air with its nostrils, located another faint odor stream and followed it down to the edge of the water where the fish pool lay. It dug in the water—not more than ten feet from where Brian now lay, trying to figure out if his arms and legs were still all attached to where they had been before—and pulled up the rabbit skull, still with bits of meat on it, and swallowed it whole. It dug around in the water again and found the guts and ate them and went back to rummaging around in the pool, and when nothing more could be found the bear looked once more at Brian, at the camp, and then walked away without looking back.

  Other than some minor scratches where the bear’s claws had slightly scraped him—it was more a boxing action than a clawing one—Brian was in one piece. He was still jolted and confused about just exactly which end was up, but most of all he was grateful.

  He knew that the bear could have done much more damage than it had. He had seen a bear tear a stump out of the ground like a giant tooth when it was looking for grubworms and ants. This bear could just as easily have killed him, and had actually held back.

  But as the day progressed Brian found himself stiffening, and by the time he was ready for bed his whole body ached and he knew he would be covered with bruises from the encounter.

  He would have to find some way to protect himself, some weapon. The fire worked well when it was burning, but it had burned down. His hatchet and knife would have done nothing more than make the bear really angry—something he did not like to think about—and his bow was good only for smaller game. He had never tried to shoot anything bigger than a foolbird or rabbit with it and doubted that the bow would push the arrow deep enough to do anything but—again—make the bear really mad.

  He bundled in his bag that night, the end of the two weeks of warm weather. He kept putting wood on the fire, half afraid the bear would come back. All the while he tried to think of a solution.

  But in reality, the bear was not his primary adversary. Nor was the wolf, nor any animal. Brian had become his own worst enemy because in all the business of hunting, fishing and surviving he had forgotten the primary rule: Always, always pay attention to what was happening. Everything in nature means something and he had missed the warnings that summer was ending, had in many ways already ended, and what was coming would be the most dangerous thing he had faced since the plane crash.

  Chapter

  THREE

  He decided he needed a stronger weapon, a larger bow. He thought of it as a war bow. He would need arrows tipped with some kind of sharpened head. He had been hunting with wood arrows with fire-hardened tips but all they did was make a hole; they didn’t provide any cutting action, which he felt would work best with a stronger bow.

  He used a hardwood tree he found by the lake. It had straight branches with a slickish gray bark and seemed to have a snap to it that other woods didn’t hold. He spent one whole day cutting a long, straight piece of wood and skinning and shaping it with the hunting knife and his hatchet into a bow shape slightly longer than he was tall. He did not hurry but kept at it with a steady pace and by dark the bow was ready to dry.

  Arrow shafts took two days in the sun to dry once they were stripped of their bark, and he thought the bow might take four or five. He took time to cut another straight limb and shape another bow, working by firelight into the night. It wouldn’t hurt to have two bows and if one broke he had a backup.

  He had not hunted for three days now but had eaten well of foolbird and rabbit on his last hunt and he took time to take two fish from the pool and cook them before going to sleep, boiling them into a fish soup, which he drank-spooned-fingerpicked until the bones were clean.

  That night it was cold. Cold enough so that the sleeping bag felt almost delicious, and just as he closed his eyes it came to him—all the signs, al
l the little nudges. The cold would get worse. Summer was over. He would not get rescued—he had finally given up on it and no longer listened or looked for planes—and he was going to get hit with a northern winter.

  All of that came to him just as he started to doze and it snapped him awake and kept him awake until exhaustion finally made him sleep.

  In the morning he awakened with the same feeling of urgency and spent the day cutting arrow shafts from the willows for his war bow and trying to reason out what he needed to do to get ready for the coming winter.

  He had no warm clothing or footgear. The sleeping bag was a good one, though not a true winter bag. It was effective to perhaps twenty above, if used in a good shelter. But that was all he had, the sleeping bag, and he couldn’t spend all his time just lying in the bag. He would starve and die. He would have to continue hunting, eating, living.

  He looked at the shelter with new eyes. He had repaired the damage the bear had done. He studied his home while stripping the bark from the two dozen arrow shafts he’d cut for the war bow.

  Three sides were of rock and they were snug. But the side he had filled in with logs and limbs and branches was far from airtight—he could see through it in several places—and would have to be winterized. He could pack it with dead leaves or even cut strips of sod with the hatchet to fill it in. And make an insulated door by stuffing two woven frames full of leaves. The problem—well, he thought, smiling, one of about a thousand problems—was that he didn’t honestly know how cold it would get or how much snow there would be or what he could do to live. What would be available to hunt in the winter? He knew some things migrated but he wasn’t sure which things or if even rabbits came out—maybe they stayed inside brushpiles or caves all winter and slept. Also, would he have to have a fire inside the shelter to stay warm?

  He shook his head and paused in scraping the bark off one of the shafts to look across the lake. Too much to know for right now, too much to do. In the trees on the other side of the lake the leaves were changing.

  They must have been doing it for a week or more, he thought—why didn’t I see it? And now that he noted it he saw that in many other areas the leaves were changing as well; mostly gold, some shades of pink and red, scattered bits of color. And the sky over the lake was different as well. The soft summer clouds were gone and where it was blue it was a flat coppery blue and where the clouds were coming they were a slate gray—and they grew as he watched. Not in thunderheads as in the summer, towering and full of drama, but an almost ugly gray that was all one shade and expanded from the north to cover the sky as if pushed by a large hand. Even as he watched, the patch of blue he had seen at first was gone and all the sky was gray and he could smell rain. Again, not the rain of summer but a cooler, almost cold rain was coming and it made him shiver though it had not started yet.

  He went back to his shaving on the arrow shafts, concentrating on the task at hand. Something else he had learned: Do what you can as you can. Trouble, problems, will come no matter what you do, and you must respond as they come.

  And indeed, he was having enough trouble with the idea of a war bow. It was all well and good to say he would have a more powerful bow—in the hope that a better weapon would give him more protection—but making one, and the arrows, was harder than he had thought it would be.

  It all came down to poking a hole in something to kill it, he thought. That’s what weapons were all about, whether it was a gun or a spear or an arrow. Something had to die for him to live and the way to kill it was by poking a hole in it to make it die. He grimaced.

  But it was so. The hole had to be poked, the animal killed, and therein lay the difficulty with a war bow. It was one thing to poke a hole in a rabbit or a foolbird. They were small and thin-skinned. It was something else to think of doing it to a large animal.

  Once he had shot at a porcupine up in a tree with his light bow, thinking that if he could bring it down and skin it—very carefully—he would get more meat and fat than he did off rabbits and foolbirds. He was amazed to see his arrow bounce harmlessly off the side of the porcupine. If he could not shoot a relatively small animal what could be done to kill or even hurt a larger one?

  It was in the strength of the bow, he thought, and the type of arrow. The bow had to be so stiff it would drive the arrow much harder into a larger animal, to get deeper into a vital area, and the arrow had to have some way to cut through and make a larger hole.

  The stiffer bow he thought he had already made—though he would have to wait and string it to make certain—but the arrows were a problem. He had stiffer shafts, to take the extra load of a stronger bow, but the points were something else again. He thought on them long and hard all that night while working on the shafts by the fire. He considered the bits of aluminum scrap from the skin of the plane, but they were too thin and soft.

  There had been something, a place, some place that could help him and he couldn’t make it come to his mind until after he’d gone to bed and was lying looking at the glowing coals of the fire.

  Pintner’s Sporting Goods Store. It was an old store that he sometimes passed on his way to school, run by an older man named Pintner who had a sign over the door that said he was “Anti-mall.” And the store reflected it. There was none of the glitter or modernness of a mall, just some funky shelves and guns and bows and some hockey gear and an old oil stove where unshaven men sat and talked about the old days and spit tobacco juice into old coffee cans.

  Brian had not been in the store that many times but on one occasion he’d stopped there to see if Pintner sharpened ice skates and next to the door there’d been a large glass case with a collection of arrowheads arranged in a circle. He had stopped to study them and he had thought then that it was a beautiful collection of intricately carved points, all laid out on red velvet, and he did not then or later think of what they really were: tools for hunting.

  Only now, lying in his bag, looking at them in his mind, did it hit him just exactly what they were: arrowheads. Tips for arrows to make them punch holes. Some very small, some large and wide, and all of stone and all with sharp edges.

  Those people were the pros, he thought—the Native Americans who had made the points centuries before. They lived all the time as Brian was trying to live now and they had experimented for thousands of years to come up with the designs of the heads. Brian closed his eyes and tried to remember how they had looked.

  When he had an image he smoothed a place in the dirt next to the fire and drew five outlines that he thought he remembered correctly and tried to make them roughly the same size as the originals in the collection.

  Three were small and he ignored them. Two were quite a bit larger and these he studied in his mind pictures as well as in the lines in the dirt.

  There could be only one reason for a larger arrowhead—to kill a larger animal. They worked that out, he thought. They found after thousands of years that a larger head killed a larger animal. All my research has been done.

  Now, he thought, all I have to do is find a way to make stone arrowheads.

  He searched his memory, what he had learned in school, seen on television, read in books, and nowhere could he find a picture of anybody saying how stone arrowheads were made.

  Well then, start with what you know.

  The arrowheads were made of stone. So find a stone that will work, he thought, and went to sleep thinking of all the places around the lake where he had seen stones.

  In the morning he awakened famished, as if he hadn’t eaten for a week. There were only four fish left in the fish pool and none on the line—which bothered him—and he ate two of the larger fish to take the edge off his hunger.

  He would have to hunt today and get meat and set the arrowhead problem aside. In midmorning, after cleaning the camp and trying to hide the pot inside his shelter in case the bear came back, he set off to the north.

  In the months that he’d lived on the L-shaped lake and hunted the area, he’d come to know the surr
ounding region like a large yard. Except for predators, which ranged constantly, looking for food, most animals seemed to stay pretty much in the same location, and because they started there they tended to grow there. North about half a mile it was best for hunting rabbits. There was a large patch—as big as a football field—where an ancient fire had burned the trees off and left brush. Rabbits had hidden there from predators because they could escape into the thick brambles easily. Because they had come there and been able to live there they had increased—as rabbits do—and now there seemed to be rabbits wherever Brian looked in the patch. It was unusual for him to go there without getting several good shots and though he still often missed he had worked out a ratio of five to one: He seemed to get one rabbit for about every five shots on rabbits. The ratio was seven to one on foolbirds.

  Although he had hit the last rabbit he shot at, he felt lucky, and he approached the brushy area with an arrow already nocked on the string.

  Things never happened as he planned, however, and because he was concentrating on looking for rabbits he very nearly stepped on a foolbird. It blew up under his foot in a flash of leaves and feathers like a grenade detonating and flew off at a quartering angle away and to Brian’s left front.

  Without thinking he raised the bow, drew and released the arrow and was absolutely flabbergasted to see it fly in a clean line, intersect the flight line of the foolbird and take it neatly through the center of its body.

  It cartwheeled to the ground and Brian ran over to it. Though it looked dead, he broke its neck with a quick snap to make certain it was gone.

  Incredible, he thought. If I lived to be a hundred and tried it a thousand more times I would never be able to do it again. Just a clean reflexive shot.

  But more—he pulled the arrow out of the dead foolbird and wiped the blood off it and turned to walk back to camp with the same arrow on the string. He took five steps and a rabbit jumped out from a bush on his right and in one smooth action he dropped the dead bird, raised the bow, drew the arrow and released it and saw it take the rabbit through the chest at a flat run. It died before he could get to it and he picked it up. That night he cleaned them both and made a stew, boiling them together, and ate the meat and drank the broth until he was packed, full, his stomach rounded and bulging.