Impasse (10 page)

With his coat on, he tried to shake the chill by moving about to inspect the cabin and rummaging through his pack to organize his gear. The cabin inspection took all of two minutes.
I'll have to clean it,
he decided immediately. There was no counter space upon which to prepare food, the yellow jackets were a lurking menace, and the rat slaughter demanded a thorough scrub. There was no stove. More distressing, there was no canned food tucked away on shelves or in a cabinet. In fact, there were no shelves or cabinets at all. Stu tapped on the walls to see if there might be a hollow space. No dice. He even got down on the floor and looked under the cot. There was nothing—no cans of beans or freeze-dried soup or even Spam. He began to get a sick feeling in his gut that was either hunger or dread, or both.

I'll have to hunt.

The cabin was also smaller than he'd thought the night before, which didn't seem possible. Seven by seven.
Forty-nine square feet, with the cot taking up fifteen of it and the fire pit five more.
The cot would have to double as the food prep area, Stu decided, and he wished he hadn't sprayed rodent guts all over it. His pack and duffel sat atop a cut log just inside the door, which kept them off the damp dirt floor. The cot still harbored small puddles of water courtesy of the hole he'd blasted in the ceiling. He wiped it off as best he could with his hand so he could sort his clothes. He already needed to hang his sleeping bag out to dry. With that thought in mind, he turned to the door. There was no more putting it off; it was time to face the day.

The wood groaned, and the flood of light made him wince. He poked his head out and glanced about for bears, then shoved the door fully open and stepped through. The first breath of air was sharp and clean in his lungs. The sun still hid behind the ridge to the east. Its generous light spilled over the mountain and into the valley, but it remained stingy with its heat.

“Friggin' brrr!”

Stu's human voice sounded foreign in the quiet clearing.
I don't belong here.
It also deflated the morning's bubble of surrealism. He could have mistaken his dim minutes inside the cabin for a bad dream, but once he breathed the chilled air and talked aloud in the silent glade, there was no denying reality. And when the lush green backdrop of immaculate forest didn't melt into the taupe and starched lace of his familiar bedroom walls on William Street, his Memory Foam pillow didn't materialize beneath his head, and Katherine wasn't pushing him off her side of the bed, there was no denying that he was thousands of miles from home in a completely ludicrous situation.

He hung his sleeping bag on a limb to dry and sat nearby on a log to read.
Edwin's
chapter 1 also had a short list of survival necessities. It first advised that a person should have appropriate clothing.
Check. Thank you, Great Beyond, and one-percent-cash-back Visa card.
He was supposed to secure shelter next, according to the list.
One rotting cabin. Check.
At least, it would be secured as soon as he did some roof repair and cleared out the wasps. A clean supply of water was the next priority. Stu looked down the hill.
One huge pristine lake. Check.
Then Stu's stomach turned.

Food.

He'd been avoiding thinking about it, but this was the killer. He had no food. The cabin had no food.
Edwin's
had suggestions. Wild vegetables. Edible flowers and trees. Hunting, trapping, or scavenging dead animals.
Dead animals?
Stu turned slowly.

The decaying body of one of the rats he'd clubbed lay nearby. Its lips were pulled back to expose its long teeth, and the resulting expression was an angry shut-eyed grimace.
Fuck you for killing me,
it seemed to be saying.
Especially if you're not going to eat me.
Stu quickly decided that he wasn't that desperate yet. He'd only missed breakfast so far. Besides, the flies were already at the body, along with one of his wasp friends.

There was a lesson, however; any food he left out for more than a few moments would be eaten by other hungry animals. The second rat corpse was already missing. It had been thrown beside the first one. His bloody shirt was gone too. Stu shuddered to think what he'd attracted by leaving it there.
A mistake. Edwin's
pointed out that “mistakes” in the wilderness accounted for more deaths than severe conditions. It also annoyingly reminded him that he should only kill what he intended to eat.
I wonder if rats wrote that section,
Stu thought.

He gathered wood for a fire. Another piece of advice from
Edwin's
. Filling the rock pit in the cabin took only a few branches, which he found lying around on the ground or snapped from nearby trees. He broke them to length by leaning them against the wall and stomping on them. He couldn't stack them very high in the pit or they crept too near the top of the rock and too close to the log wall. There was space for one large dense log, but he had no ax. In Cub Scouts he'd learned to start fires—small tinder on the bottom, larger kindling in a pyramid on top, logs later. Easy enough. Some underbrush seemed a good bet for the tinder, and he lined the bottom of the rock pit with it.

The Great Beyond fire kit contained a small box of matches along with the traditional and notoriously difficult-to-use metal match, designed to be used with a knife as a flint and steel. Stu went straight for the matches. Once he had a fire started, he could keep it going by adding wood. Simple. After that necessity was provided, he could try to learn the new skill. He went through five matches, however, without success. The shrubs caught, but the small branches didn't. As he reached for a sixth, he decided to count the remainder. Ten. Not nearly enough for a week at his rate of failure. He gritted his teeth, swallowed his Cub Scout pride, and consulted
Edwin's
.

Avoid damp or green wood
was the first hint in the little gray box in the margin. Stu slapped his forehead. Half his wood was directly from trees, and the other half had been rained on the night before, and who knew how many other nights.

Stupid.

He took another trip outside to find drier branches, and was soon crouched at the pit and at it again. This time the wood caught, sending a promising white wisp up the sheet metal hood.
Better.
Stu stacked some of his damp wood on the dry layer.

Now this stuff will catch,
he thought. And it did.

The smoke drove him from the cabin, and he stumbled to the ground beside his rat victim, gasping and wheezing. The space inside was so small that he'd noticed the black cloud gathering on the ceiling only moments before it descended to try to kill him. The wasps hadn't liked it either, and they'd come stampeding out right behind him, looking for something to sting. He'd avoided all but one by throwing his hood over his face and pulling his hands up into his sleeves until they gave up and wandered off.

The crude chimney hadn't worked, he realized, as he unwrapped his face and climbed to a kneeling position. And the small hole he'd shot in the ceiling certainly hadn't provided enough ventilation. Stu stared up at the roof as the wasp sting on his cheek started to swell. He didn't think he was allergic, and hoped to God he wasn't; there was no way he could get a shot of whatever stopped people from dying when they got stung. The chimney atop the cabin was a shorn plastic tube with a coffee can thrown over it upside down. The smoke coming from it was barely a trickle. It was blocked, obviously. Stu glanced down at the dead rat. Its grimace looked more like a grin now.

“Laugh all you want. I have to go up there to fix my bullet hole anyway.”

His fire was still burning, still producing gouts of black smoke, which rolled out the door. He'd left it open to air out, but guessed that there was still another hour's worth of wood burning in the pit.

I definitely got a fire going.

He'd thought about dashing in to feel around for his packs, but dying from carbon monoxide poisoning would be stacking stupid on top of stupid, as he used to say about criminal defendants who skipped their court appearances hoping their problems would go away.

And
Edwin's
probably has a chapter warning against running into a smoke-filled room.

The tree against which the cabin leaned had no lower branches to climb, but Stu was able to wedge himself between the stump and the wall. He placed his feet on the top half of the rounded logs, pressed his back against the tree, and inched his way up until he could grab the edge of the low roof, where he hung like a plucked chicken.

“Shit.”

He kicked his legs to swing back and forth, and finally pressed them against the tree to boost himself up onto his belly atop the cabin roof. He inched his way up and found the bullet hole first. It wasn't difficult to locate; a steady stream of smoke the width of a dime streamed up from it.

Got you.
He wedged a flat piece of bark beneath the upper shingle and tapped it into place with a stick he'd tucked in his pants for the climb.
Done.
Stu nodded, satisfied. It felt good to accomplish something after a night and morning of screwups and debacles.

He crawled up to the makeshift chimney. The can sat tilted on top. He removed it. Beneath, the pipe was filled with small woody debris.
A nest.
A smooth brown object was nestled in the center.
And breakfast!
Stu reached in and removed the smallish egg. He couldn't hold it in his hand and crawl, so he slid it into his mouth. The stick served to clear out the PVC pipe. Twigs and mud had been packed into the pipe ingeniously.
Instinctively,
Stu thought, and he began to plunge them out, careful to keep his face away from the opening to avoid the inevitable rush of smoke that would burst through.

Soon a thick abrupt stream of smoke poured out. Stu replaced the coffee can and sat back on the mossy shingles. He hadn't worked with his hands since he and Katherine had fixed up their home on William Street four years earlier. They'd poured a lot of sweat, and memories, into the place; he still recalled carrying her across the threshold when the floor was cracked mustard-yellow linoleum. It was a good place for them, practical, manageable, and scheduled to be paid off well before he retired. He'd forgotten the satisfaction of fixing things. Nothing he did in the law seemed to fix anything. He simply absorbed other people's problems like a conflict sponge. It felt good to set a shingle and repair a chimney.

Stu turned to look out over the valley, the lake, and the endless blue sky, his new domain. Perhaps doing guy stuff in the wilderness for a week wasn't so bad.

I fixed a goddamned roof and found some food,
he thought.
And without any help from a book!

He heard a creaking sound, and then the deeper groan of straining wood. He froze but it didn't matter. A loud
crack
was followed closely by a sudden feeling of weightlessness as the roof collapsed, and he watched the endless blue sky recede as he fell.

 

CHAPTER 13

Stu spat gooey egg whites and yolk out onto the dirt floor amongst broken shingles and green clumps of moss. There were injuries—a cut on his arm where he'd grazed the wooden cot, a lump on his head, and nasty soft-tissue bruises he'd certainly discover later. No concussion symptoms, it seemed—no loss of consciousness, no ringing ears or seeing stars, he knew who he was, and he was painfully aware of
where
he was. That was good. But when he sat up, his ankle screamed in pain.

Oh God, don't be broken,
he thought.

Stu dragged himself up onto the cot, where he prodded his rapidly swelling flesh, and grimaced. He was annoyed to look over and see his fire innocently blazing away, its smoke drifting happily up through the new and improved hole in the roof.

His backpack had a Great Beyond deluxe emergency kit in a large outer pocket, hopefully with some gauze to stabilize his ankle, whether broken or sprained. And his cut would need to be cleaned. Untreated, an infection could start. Stu limped two steps to his pack and hauled it back over to the cot.

The kit contained a cloth wrap, and
Edwin's
advised him to use it to immobilize and compress the ankle. It hurt, but soon he had his lower leg wrapped like a mummy's.

The emergency kit also contained three plastic tubes, the contents of which was not apparent at first glance.
Perhaps an antibiotic ointment.
Stu removed one. It was labeled
GREAT BEYOND GOOP
. The first ingredient listed was dried soybeans. They were “water activated,” it said. He read the fine print; the package boasted enough calories and nutrients to keep a man alive in the wild for one day for each tube.

Food!

He was not yet starving, but he was injured and he'd missed breakfast. Waiting for a lunch that might not arrive seemed unnecessary.
Better to get something in me,
he thought. The directions said that the contents formed a paste when mixed correctly. Easy. His pack had a one-liter water bladder built into it. He poured a bit into a collapsible plastic cup and squeezed in a tube of Goop.

It looked like russet-colored toothpaste and tasted like what he imagined baby food might taste like; that is, if the baby food was plasticized and pumped full of preservatives. Stu wondered if the brownish Goop would be better fried into a Goop fritter.
Everything tastes better fried, right?
He forced down the paste and chased it with a hearty swig of water. Then he checked the time on his receptionless cell phone. He was surprised to find that less than an hour had passed. The sun was still just peeking over the ridge to the east.

Time feels different out here
.
Slower.