Brian's Winter (10 page)

And if he was to stay alive he would have to learn this new place, this winter woods. He would have to study it and know it. The next time he might not be so lucky…

It proved to be much harder than he had thought it would be. That night a front came in and the temperature rose—a welcome relief—to probably an even zero, and it snowed. This time it snowed close to six inches and while that would not have been so bad in itself it came on top of snow that was already there. All in all it added up to just under two feet of snow, dry powder, and when he tried to move in the woods it was too much. It came over the top of his cylinder boots and froze his legs and he had to go back to the shelter to get rid of the snow and dry his boots out.

“This,” he said, sitting by the fire, “is as bad as it gets…”

The truth was, it could be fatal. He needed to move in the woods to get firewood—not to mention hunting and studying to learn—and if he could not move without freezing his feet he could not get wood and without wood he would freeze to death.

It seemed to be a wall. He sat, burning the last two days’ worth of wood, and felt the cold waiting, waiting. Dark came suddenly at four in the afternoon and he sat in the dark for a while and thought on the problem and was leaning back gazing into the fire when he remembered the rabbits.

They grew larger feet.

He had to do the same. As soon as he thought it he smiled and thought of snowshoes. They had completely slipped his mind.

All he had to do was make a pair of snowshoes.

I’ll get right on it tomorrow morning, he thought, lying back to doze in his bag, and was nearly asleep, smiling in comfort and ease now that he had solved the problem, when he realized that he didn’t have the slightest idea how to make a pair of snowshoes.

It kept him awake for another hour, until he simply couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, and then he fell asleep without a solution.

Two bows.

It came in the half sleep just before he awakened. It was cold, the fire was burned down, and he felt snug and warm in the bag and didn’t want to get up, and lay with his eyes closed, his head tucked down inside the bag, and dozed, and was almost back asleep when the thought hit him.

Two bows.

If he made two bows of wood, then tied the ends together, used some kind of crosspieces to hold them apart and keep them in a rough oval, he would have the right shape for snowshoes.

And it proved to be almost that easy. He cut wood from the willows down by the lake and brought four five-foot-long pieces into the shelter where it was warm, along with some other shorter sections he’d cut from the lower and thicker branches on the same willow.

They were frozen solid but they thawed quickly by the fire and were as limber as they had been in the summer. He peeled the bark from them easily with the knife and then took two of them and tied the ends together with moose-hide lacing. After they were tied together he pulled the center sections apart until he could put the hatchet between them to hold them apart—about twelve inches—and then he used the knife to cut crosspieces and notch the ends of the shorter sections to fit around the wood of the long side and make cross-braces.

He put two cross-braces to hold the long sides apart and then tied the cross-braces in place with strips of moose-hide lacing and had the frame for a snowshoe.

He made a second one the same way—all of this didn’t take two hours—and moved on to the next step.

He would have to fill them with lacing and there was plenty of moose hide left but it was frozen outside. He brought it inside and let it thaw near the fire for the rest of the afternoon until he could unfold it and start to cut lacing to make the web of the snowshoe.

Here it was all mystery to him. He had seen pictures of snowshoes and had a vague idea that they seemed to be a web, kind of like a tennis racket—a very crude tennis racket—but that was it.

He had plenty of moose hide left and he started by cutting a lace half an inch wide. He did not know how much he would need but figured it should be long so he just kept cutting, running along the edge of a large piece of hide, cutting around and around the edge, stopping often to sharpen the knife on the stone until he had a pile of lacing lying on the ground by the fire.

By this time it was dark but he fed small bits of wood to the fire—the shelter was very tight and stayed surprisingly warm from just a small flame—and continued working.

He did not know how to make the rest of the snowshoe. He had seen pictures and knew it had to be a web of some sort but could not visualize how to start. In the end he just started in the middle and worked to the ends, tying the strips of moose hide crosswise, fastened to each side, making horizontal strips about two inches apart, each strap pulled tight and tied off in a double knot.

The hide was hard and he had to soften it by rubbing it over a stick to break it down, which slowed him, and it was late by the time he’d finished the crosspieces on one shoe but instead of going to bed he continued.

The strips that ran the long way he tried simply weaving into place but they were too loose and so he tied them off to each cross-strap as he went from one end of the shoe to the other, again with the straps about two inches apart.

It was moving toward morning when he finished the webbing on one shoe and he almost laughed at how it looked. He had not taken the fur off the hide strips and there was enough hair to fill all the holes with fuzz. He started to burn it off and then realized it would help keep him up in soft snow. He finally crawled into his bed to sleep about four in the morning, still smiling at how the shoe looked.

He slept hard until daylight—about nine o’clock—and then kindled the fire and restarted it with the coals that were still glowing. He had chopped some chunks of moose meat and he put a kettle on with slivers of meat and snow to make a breakfast stew and as soon as the shelter was warm went back to work.

The second shoe went much faster because of the practice he’d had on the first one and by midday he had finished webbing it. He ate the stew and drank the broth and then looked once more at his handiwork.

They looked odd, to say the least—downright ugly. The fur was so thick he could hardly see the lacing. But they also looked strong and now all he had to do was find a way to fix them to his feet.

He could think of no mind pictures, no memories that showed snowshoe bindings, and finally he simply tied straps across down the middle, as tightly as possible, to jam his feet beneath.

Then there was nothing to do but try them. He banked the fire so that the coals would hold for a time, got dressed and took the shoes outside.

They were very tight on his boots and felt snug and he set off trying to walk on them at once. Around the shelter the snow was packed down where he had walked and the shoes were easy—clumsy, but he could skid them along.

As soon as he moved away from the shelter in fresh snow everything changed. He took two steps and fell flat on his face in the snow. The tips kept digging in and tripping him and he tried holding his toes up, which didn’t help, and continued stumbling along, falling over frontward, until he thought of moving the foot strap forward a bit.

This just took a minute and then when he stepped off, his foot was farther forward and lifted the front of the shoe first, cleared the tip and pulled it across the top of the snow.

It made all the difference. He tripped twice more before he developed a pace that kept his legs far enough apart to prevent the shoes from hitting each other and then he moved into deeper snow.

It was amazing. The snow was powdery and the shoes didn’t keep him right on top as he’d thought they might. But he only went down three or four inches and stopped, instead of his foot going all the way down into two feet of snow, and as an added benefit the snowshoes kept the snow away from his feet and legs.

He didn’t get snow down his boots, his legs stayed warmer and dryer and that kept the rest of his body warmer and dryer but more, much more than that, he could
move
again.

He moved straight to a stand of dead poplar a quarter mile down the lakeshore. Poplars often died standing and for that reason stayed dry and out of the snow and were good firewood. He hadn’t been able to get at them because of the snow but the shoes made it easy.

He broke off limbs and knocked over small dead trees and, walking with a kind of forward churning motion, he spent the rest of the day bringing in wood until he had a huge pile next to the shelter—enough for a week.

It was incredible, he thought, how the snowshoes seemed to change everything, change his whole attitude. He’d been closing down, he realized—settling into the shelter, not paying attention to things, getting more and more into his own thinking, and the shoes changed all that. He felt like moving, hunting, seeing things, doing things again.

Thinking of hunting brought his food supply into his thoughts and he brushed the snow away from the moose meat and was stunned to see how much he’d eaten. He hadn’t gained weight, had lost a small amount as a matter of fact, and yet apparently without knowing it had been eating like a wolf.

He’d eaten both front shoulders, the back and hump area and one back leg—all the meat was chopped off the bones in those areas. All he really had left was the left rear leg and then chopping and boiling the bones to make the meat jelly-stew.

He would have to hunt again and that night he spent the hours until he slept making sure his war bow and big arrows were in shape, checking the lance and sharpening the hatchet and knife and retightening his snowshoes where they had become loose from gathering wood all day.

That night the temperature dropped like a stone, so that he heard trees exploding again, but he slept hard and down and tight in his shelter and dreamed of walking on white clouds…

Everything had changed.

Somehow he had thought that it would be like normal hunting except colder and whiter but it wasn’t—it all seemed a different world.

He made a breakfast stew and ate while it was still dark and didn’t open the shelter until close to ten, when the sun was well up.

Brian had never felt such cold, never thought he would see it, never thought that if he
did
see such cold he would live through it. He had his hood up and had to breathe slowly in through his nose to warm the air so that it would not stop halfway down his throat.

It was colder than before, how cold he couldn’t guess, but when he went to the bathroom some of his urine froze on the way to the ground and broke when it hit and he spit on a clear area of hard-packed snow and the spit bounced.

Still he did not feel cold. There was no wind, not a breath, and he soon warmed inside his parka as he walked and started to hunt.

He hadn’t shot in a while and wanted to try some practice shots but knew he would lose the arrows beneath the snow. He settled for pulling the bow back a few times and flexing his muscles and found that because the parka was so bulky he had to lean forward a bit to let the bowstring clear his sleeve. Also he couldn’t keep his mitten off for long or his hand would freeze, so he would have to have time to shake the mitten off before shooting.

Game was everywhere. They didn’t seem to mind the cold and he saw rabbits all over the place. He could have shot several but the moose had spoiled him. There was so much food in the large animal and only the one death—it still bothered him to kill—and it seemed more proper in some way. He would have to kill perhaps a hundred and fifty rabbits to equal one moose…

As it happened he did not get a moose. He didn’t even see a moose. He saw their tracks and they looked fresh but after following a moose track for more than a mile and seeing no moose and no change in the track he decided it was impossible to tell a fresh track from an old one in powdery snow. They all looked the same.

He was working back toward camp and had decided that he should start trying to hit rabbits when he saw the deer.

It was a buck with only one antler. Brian guessed the other one had gotten knocked off or had never grown. But the buck was good-sized for all that—nowhere near a moose, but large for a deer—and Brian studied the layout carefully.

Brian was on a small rise and the deer was slightly below, standing on the edge of a round frozen pond about fifty yards away—much too far for a shot. The deer was in snow up to its belly, biting the tops off small red willows, eating them slowly, but its ears swiveled constantly and Brian knew he could move no closer directly without being heard.

But down and to his left as he faced the deer there was a shallow depression that angled toward the buck—not quite a ditch yet deep enough to hide everything but his head as he moved and Brian, carefully raising and moving his snowshoes forward, slowly, a step at a time, only just clearing the snow, moved down the depression.

He watched the deer, only lifted his foot to move when the deer had its head down to bite a willow, a step, another step, slowly, so slowly, and in what seemed hours he’d moved sideways and fifteen yards closer.

Thirty-five yards. Still too far—twice too far.

Wait, another step while the deer ate, another wait, holding his breath, two steps, one, half a step…

Twenty yards.

Eighteen, sixteen, fifteen.

Fifteen long paces.

He had learned how to hunt, how to wait for the exact right moment and not waste his shot, and he eased his hand out of the mitten, let it hang on its cord, put his fingers to the string where the arrow lay and waited, frozen motionless.

The deer looked right at him, stared at him, then looked down, back up, stamped its right foot, looked at him again and, finally satisfied, turned to take another bite of willow.

It would not get better.

Brian raised the bow carefully, drew, looked to where the arrow would go, where he wanted it to be, and released.

There was a slight
thrum
of the string and the arrow leaped away from the bow. The deer heard the sound, had time to start to turn its head, and then the arrow disappeared into its side just to the rear of the shoulder.