Brian's Return Read online

  The first thing to come was a bow. He did not want to get too complicated and stayed away from the compound bows with wheels and pulleys. They were more accurate, maybe, and far easier to pull, but he sensed they would break with rough use. Instead he wrote to Blakely, a man who made longbows and shorter recurved bows and ordered what Blakely called a short longbow. True longbows were fine but very long, as the name implied, and Brian knew that in brush they would hang up on branches and be hard to use. He ordered a shorter version with forty-five-pound pull at twenty-six inches. He hadn’t been sure of the pull weight, but he told Blakely his size and what he wanted to use it for— general hunting—and Blakely told him to keep it low. Blakely made bows with up to 120 pounds pull, but they were brutal and, he wrote, ‘‘If the arrowhead is sharp it will penetrate from a softer bow as well as a hard one.’’

  The bow was beautiful, a mix of ironwood and rosewood laminated in thin strips with fiberglass on the front and back. Blakely included four extra strings. He also sold arrows so Brian bought a hundred Port Orford cedar shafts and all the tools and precut feathers and nocks he would need to make his own arrows. Blakely also sent along fifty of the MA-3 broadheads and field points for the arrows so he could practice without using the MA-3s. Brian had never made arrows before but there were full instructions with the equipment and Brian found it easy to do. He went to a garden store and brought home three hay bales. He put them up in the backyard and put a cardboard target in front. When he had six arrows finished he started shooting each day.

  It was incredible. He was used to weapons he’d made with crude arrows and fire-hardened points, and he was amazed at the difference. The bow was smooth and clean and quiet and the arrows flew with a tight accuracy that at first he couldn’t believe. On the first day he had several shots where he actually hit one arrow with another in the center of the cardboard target.

  To protect his fingers he used a simple leather tab that Blakely had thrown in and he must have shot two hundred times the first day. He didn’t use sights but shot by instinct—let his mind and eye ‘‘feel’’ where the arrow would go as he’d done with his war bow in the woods—and within a week he could consistently hit a six-inch circle in the cardboard from twenty yards.

  Just this one part of the List, the bow and arrows, took two and a half weeks, not counting the time for shipping. The work gave him something to do, kept him active.

  Along with the List and practice, he had Caleb. Five days a week he went to Caleb’s house after school. His mother thought it was for counseling, though she wondered that no bills came. In a way, it was true. Counseling was a matter of telling somebody something and getting help with a problem, and that was what he was doing with Caleb.

  He told Caleb about his life in the woods, and though Caleb seldom said much this talking helped Brian to understand himself and what was happening—and what was going to happen to him.

  Caleb would make a pot of tea—nothing fancy, just hot water and a tea bag with some cream and sugar—and have a cup waiting when Brian got there. Brian had never thought much of tea but the first time he put sugar in it and sipped it while he spoke it somehow seemed to always have been a part of him. It was so natural that after only a small bit of thought he added tea to his list for the woods. Tea—and sugar in cubes.

  He would take the tea, sit down in the iron chair, look at Caleb and say. ‘‘What do you want to hear about today?’’

  ‘‘I wouldn’t even know what to ask. You pick it.’’

  And Brian would think a moment and then tell a story of moose or fishing or the sun on the water or the way beaver build a house or the lonely cry of a loon in the night or the stomach-tightening wail of a wolf singing to the moon and Caleb would listen quietly, his eyes staring off, sometimes crying or laughing, sometimes surprised, sometimes sad.

  Then there came a day when school was nearly done, when Brian had received nearly all the things on the List, and Caleb sighed and said, ‘‘It’s time for you to go back, to find what you’re looking for.’’

  Brian agreed. They’d spoken about his going back and how he had to know what it was that pulled him and made him feel empty. ‘‘But I don’t know exactly how to do it,’’ Brian said.

  ‘‘I’ll help you.’’

  ‘‘You will?’’

  Caleb shrugged. ‘‘I’m supposed to be helping you ‘recover your mental health,’ aren’t I? Well, it’s clear that for you to be mentally healthy you have to go back to the woods and find what you left there.’’

  ‘‘That’s true.’’

  ‘‘What about that Cree family who rescued you? The trappers?’’

  ‘‘The Smallhorns.’’ Brian thought of them often. ‘‘What about them?’’

  ‘‘Didn’t they want you to come back and visit them?’’

  Brian stared. ‘‘Of course. It’s perfect. Why didn’t I think of that?’’

  Chapter SEVEN

  It wasn’t easy at first. He had expected difficulties with his parents and he wasn’t mistaken. His mother had a terrible fear of the bush—which had developed in the weeks when he had disappeared and she had had to believe he was dead. They talked many nights before she relented. He was older now, more seasoned, and she knew that. He had done well the past summer, when he had returned with Derek. With Caleb’s help, his mother came around.

  ‘‘How will you find the Smallhorns?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘The pilot, the man who flew me out, will know where they are.’’

  Brian had kept the pilot’s name. The man had a one-plane operation working out of International Falls, on the Minnesota-Canada border, and Brian called.

  ‘‘The Smallhorns? Yeah—they’re up in the Williams Lake area in a fish camp but I’m not due to go up there until fall. I’m booked solid all summer with fishing charters. I can’t take the time to run you up there.’’

  ‘‘How about getting me close? I can make my own way in a canoe.’’

  ‘‘Just a minute.’’ Brian heard papers shuffling as the pilot went through his records. ‘‘Yeah, here. I’m due to take a couple of guys fishing in ten days. We’re going to the Granite Lake area and with my fuel I can take you maybe another hundred miles. That’s still a hundred miles short of the Smallhorns’ camp but it’s all chain lakes up there and you can do it without any really bad portages. I’ll give you a good map. How heavy is your gear?’’

  ‘‘Maybe two hundred pounds, plus me and a canoe. Can you haul a canoe?’’

  ‘‘Sure. On the floats. We’re taking one canoe and I can fit yours on the other float. When are you figuring on coming out?’’

  ‘‘I’m not . . . sure.’’

  ‘‘I’m due to make a supply run to them in the fall before trapping season and bad weather sets in. You could come out then.’’

  ‘‘Sure.’’

  ‘‘All right—you just fly up to International Falls and I’ll meet you there.’’

  He didn’t exactly lie to his mother, he just didn’t tell her the whole truth. She thought the plane was taking him all the way and he didn’t correct her. When he called to tell his father about his ‘‘visit,’’ he left the same impression, although he didn’t think it would have mattered to his father that he planned to do the last hundred miles by canoe. His relationship with his father had also changed in the last year— they had grown somehow farther apart and closer at the same time. His father no longer seemed to think of him as a boy and didn’t talk down to him. Now he spoke to Brian more as an equal.

  ‘‘It sounds great,’’ he said. ‘‘A long visit will do you good. You’ll have a wonderful time.’’

  The canoe was the problem. He had to pay extra for shipping it and from Minneapolis north he had to send it by truck. The airlines took care of all the arrangements. He had to send it early for the canoe to be there when he arrived and he worried that something would happen to it—hated to let it out of his sight. But the airline called to say when it arrived safely in International Fal
ls—a full four days before he flew up himself.

  The rest of his gear he put in two backpacks, except for the bow and arrows. He checked the bow on the plane in a thick paper tube and the arrows went in boxes with his packs.

  He did not take winter or cold-weather gear except for a windbreaker-anorak and two Polar Fleece pullovers. He wasn’t sure why. When he walked around the house or through town or was at school there was not a thought in his mind of coming back. Perhaps he would, but . . . As television had soured for him he had started to read more, studied history more and knew that in the past many young men his age, nearly sixteen—were away and into their lives. In the Civil War sixteen-year-olds had been fighting, dying. With his parents’ permission, Brian could enlist in the army at seventeen. For better or worse, he was set on his own path and he didn’t think of coming back and yet he didn’t take winter gear.

  It was the lack of room, he told himself—he could get it later. He just didn’t have enough room.

  The last two weeks were filled with calling the travel agent, assuring everybody he would be all right, making certain everything on the List was packed, and visiting Caleb.

  Then finally the last day came and he visited Caleb to say goodbye.

  ‘‘You’ll write,’’ Caleb said, and it was not a question but a statement. ‘‘I’ll want to know how you’re doing.’’

  Brian nodded. ‘‘Except that I won’t be able to get any mail out.’’

  ‘‘In the fall. There will be the supply run you told me about. You could send letters then.’’

  ‘‘I will. I promise.’’

  ‘‘Well, then . . .’’

  Brian stood and they started to shake hands. Then Caleb moved around the desk and grabbed him up in a bear hug. Brian’s feet actually left the ground.

  ‘‘I’ll write,’’ he promised when he was loose.

  ‘‘Tell me everything,’’ Caleb said. ‘‘Tell me about light and colors. All of it . . .’’

  ‘‘I will.’’ He paused. ‘‘I don’t know how to thank you.’’

  Caleb smiled. ‘‘You already have. Just write.’’

  His mother drove him to the airport and helped him with all his gear. At the check-in she put her hand on one of the packs and he looked at her and she was crying.

  ‘‘I’ll be fine, Mom.’’

  ‘‘I know. I just remembered how it all started. The small plane, and the hatchet I gave you. It all seems so long ago and it was just two years.’’

  No, Brian thought, hugging her. It was more than that. It was a lifetime ago.

  ‘‘You’re grown now. Your father and I were talking about it last week. But when I see you like this, getting ready to leave, I think of you back then when you really were a little boy.’’ She took a deep breath. ‘‘I don’t want you to go.’’

  He didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say. She was his mother and he loved her. He loved his father too but he had to do this thing or he would . . . he didn’t know what he would do. Go crazy. Never be right. Somehow inside he would die.

  ‘‘I’ll write and send it out by bushplane.’’

  ‘‘You’d better.’’

  She stayed with him at the gate, talking of small things and touching him now and again until it was time to board, and then she waved as he walked down the tunnel to the plane.

  Chapter EIGHT

  Brian flew to Minneapolis and changed to a shuttle flight to International Falls. He got in at three in the afternoon and found his canoe and paddles waiting at the airport. He called the bush pilot, who answered on the first ring and told him to get his gear down to the dock by a store in Ranier, a little town on Rainy Lake near International Falls.

  Brian took a cab to the dock with all his gear. The driver had rope to tie the canoe to the rack on top of the car, said he did it all the time what with all the people coming to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. He waited on the end of the dock and in an hour a bushplane with twin floats circled once, landed and idled up to the dock.

  ‘‘Hi, Brian!’’ The pilot jumped out and tied the plane to the dock. ‘‘Good to see you again. Just put your gear in the backseat and we’ll tie your canoe on the float. Won’t take a minute.’’

  In five minutes they were taxiing away from the dock. The pilot throttled back and moved down the lake a quarter mile to a small building beside another dock.

  ‘‘My shack.’’ The pilot pointed with his chin. ‘‘I could have had you take the cab there but the cabbies don’t like the road. It’s two miles through the woods and mostly mud. You got food?’’

  Brian had been looking at the building. ‘‘Pardon?’’

  ‘‘Do you have food with you? Thing is, the two fishermen are coming in early in the morning. I thought you’d stay here in the shack for the night while I go home but there’s no food here. I’ve got my Jeep there and we can run and get you something if you need it.’’

  ‘‘I ate on the plane,’’ Brian said. ‘‘And I have some stuff in the packs. I’ll be fine.’’

  ‘‘Good enough.’’ He pulled the plane delicately to the dock, climbed out on the float and tied up the plane. ‘‘We’ll be back early in the morning—I plan on leaving here at daylight-thirty. About four-thirty. See you.’’ And he was gone.

  Brian stood alone on the dock and looked at the shore. It was not woods. Not yet. Here and there were cabins, and docks with boats next to them. But there were thick trees and bird sounds and green— lord, he’d forgotten how thickly green the northern forest is in the summer—and he let the sounds, and the lack of noise, settle over him like a blanket. He stood there for perhaps five minutes, relaxing.

  It was coming into evening. He purposely had not brought a watch or clock. They did not fit where he would be. And he had been only partially honest with the pilot. He had eaten on the plane—a tiny sandwich and some peanuts and a Coke—but he didn’t have food with him. Instead he had the ability to get food.

  He took his pack with the sleeping bag out of the plane and moved up to the small building. It was unlocked and inside it was full of old engine parts and fishing gear. There was a couch in one corner and he thought of sleeping on it. But the sky didn’t look like rain and the stink from paint cans in the corner convinced him. He would sleep away from the shack.

  In one pocket of the pack he had rolls of fishing line, small sinkers and a plastic container of hooks. He had seen many small panfish—bluegills and sunfish—by the dock when he stepped off the plane float and he rigged a line with a hook and sinker. Then he went into the trees, turned over a rotting log and grabbed half a dozen earthworms.

  The fish seemed starved and in ten minutes he’d caught five of them. He pulled the line, rolled it on a stick and put it back in his pack. Then he cleaned the fish, leaving the heads on, scaled them with the back of his knife and threw them in his smaller pot. The shore was covered with driftwood and in moments he had a small cooking fire going near the water’s edge on the small strip of sand beach. He added lake water to the pot, slapped the lid on and put it directly into the flames.

  The evening crop of mosquitos found him but he threw some green grass and leaves on the fire. The smoke drove them away. He sat and watched the evening sun disappear over the lake to his left, and thought how truly and honestly right it felt.

  Once, when he didn’t think he could stand being at home any longer, in the middle of the night he had taken the blanket off his bed and gone into the backyard and lain on the ground. It was almost more than he could bear to be in a room without an open window. He had to feel the air on his skin, to feel a part of the outside. That night he had lain trying to see up to the sky, to the stars. There was too much city light to see much but he tried, just as he tried to pretend the air in the yard was the same as the air in the woods.

  Now he spread his bag in the grass on the bank and lay on it. It was not dark yet but close, and he could make out an evening star and he thought of how people wished on them. He had never do
ne it but now he wished he could see it again the next night and the next and the next and always be able to see it.

  He smelled his fish soup. It was nearly done and he added a couple of pinches of salt from a plastic bag he had brought and set the pot off the fire to cool a little.

  After ten minutes he took the lid off and used the tip of his knife and a spoon to peel the skin away, then ate the tender pink meat along the backbones.

  He ate quickly, carefully avoiding the bones, and then drank the broth. He cleaned his pan in the lake and decided to put up his tent to avoid the night bugs. He’d brought a small two-man tent. He’d thought of going without one at first but the tent was very light and had screened openings and the insects—whether he loved the woods or not—were awful. It took him five minutes to set it up and put his bag inside but instead of going to bed at once he put more driftwood on the fire and sat for a while in the dark.

  He was close now. Not quite there but very close. Tomorrow the plane would take him northeast. He smiled.

  He unzipped the tent and crawled inside and lay on top of the bag. For the first time in months he was sound asleep within five minutes.

  Chapter NINE

  Brian awakened and for a second did not remember where he was. There was a scuffling outside and he thought of bear and how stupid he’d been to leave his pack on the ground next to the tent. When he looked out he saw not a bear but a skunk and it wasn’t near his pack but smelling around the dead embers of the fire.

  The fish leftovers. When he’d finished the soup he’d put the skins and heads and bones on the fire and burned them. The smell must have traveled up and down the lakeshore. There was half a moon and enough light to make out what was happening. He sat up to watch and the movement startled the skunk, which immediately raised its tail and aimed at him—from six feet away—but held fire.