Only the Dead (13 page)

He sat up, dizzy after so much spinning around. With an effort he got to his feet and made his way over to the shoulder of the road. There was no guardrail here. He took another step and found himself on solid ground. A few more steps and he was once again standing among the birches. The icicles seemed dangerously heavy now that he was in among them. If any of them fell and struck his head, he would definitely be injured.

The best way to find out where he was in relation to the Cross River was probably to go down to the lake and look for Baraga’s Cross, which was visible from quite a distance. Carefully he started forward under the bowed birch trees. As he moved, the icicles kept tapping against each other. Each icicle produced a different tone, depending on its size. Together they sounded as if someone were playing on a huge, untuned ice instrument.

He stopped to listen for anything that might indicate someone else was moving through this ice world along with him. He heard nothing but the rain striking the ice. As soon as he reached the parking lot, he’d find out whether his brother was still there or whether he’d driven off before the ice storm started. But first Lance wanted to go down to the lake to figure out how far it was to the parking area. He should be there soon. He just had to be careful not to tread on the slippery rocks.

Stooping a bit, Lance kept moving forward beneath the overhanging ice, afraid that a big icicle might break off and hit his head. The vast, open space of the lake suddenly seemed extremely enticing, but he hadn’t yet emerged from the woods. The forest went on and on. The feeling grew stronger that he was never going to reach the shore of the lake. He must have headed in the wrong direction, but how was that possible? Here? Between Highway 61 and Lake Superior? The strip of land between the water and the road was no more than a couple of hundred yards at the widest spot. How could he have missed the world’s largest lake? And yet he seemed to have done exactly that, because the forest didn’t end. Nor did it look any different.

The icicles formed a swaying latticework in every direction as they tapped against each other and against his ice-covered rifle. The cold, raw air gave him the feeling of being underwater, as if he were not moving among ice-laden birch trees but instead found himself deep inside an ocean that was in the process of freezing solid. An ocean or a lake. When he looked up he could no longer see the rainy gray sky. The trees were so coated with ice and so bowed down that they formed an impenetrable ceiling right above his head. It was getting a little harder to breathe, as if the weight of the ice were pressing on his lungs. What little light there was down here was being tossed back and forth between the swinging icicles. Fractured reflections of himself shimmered all around him.

Not a sound from outside. I can’t sit here all night, but poking my head out the door would be the same as putting it on a chopping block if he’s still alive. But there’s no getting around it. If I stay here in this hut, I’ll die of cold. I need to find Knut’s boat shed. From there it’s supposed to be a straight path up to their cabin. Knut and Nanette. Fire in the hearth, porridge in my stomach. I get up onto my knees, holding the rifle in my hands. The ceiling is too low for me to stand up. It’s now or never. Either I die or I arrive in America. With my left hand I cautiously move the birch bark aside. There he is, lying right in front of me in the moonlight. His hat has fallen off and is lying by itself a short distance away, but he’s still wearing the scarf. He’s on his back with his arms stretched out from his sides. His fur-clad boots are also pointing away. He looks like he’s sleeping.

I crawl out and stand up, right next to his feet. Then I no longer feel the cold, even though I’m naked from the waist down. Nor do I notice the pain gnawing at me from inside. I stand there, barefoot in the snow, with a fire burning in my body. No one else can be allowed to see this. What I see right now is for me alone. The Indian is lying on the hard-packed snow. He’s dead, and everything around me has turned so peaceful and quiet—inside me too. Except for a fire that’s burning in my limbs. In my arms and legs. In my heart. It’s so good to be alive in the middle of this forest, with this raging fire inside me. Now I can do anything. Should I just leave him lying here? But then someone might find him and see that he’s been shot. The safest thing would be to get rid of him. I take a couple of steps forward and then stop next to his head. I look down at his face. At the black, longish hair sticking out from under the scarf. He’s lying there in a big patch of moonlight. All around us are deep shadows. I can’t see where the bullet hit him. Or any blood on the snow. Just as I think that one of his eyes seems to have opened slightly, his hand suddenly grabs my bare ankle. I let out a loud scream. His face is completely changed. He looks like a demon from the depths of hell. He yanks and pulls at my foot, trying to make me fall. I aim the rifle at his head and fire. Nothing but a hollow clack in the silence. I do it again, but the gun only clacks.

The Indian is shouting wildly at me. I throw myself at him. Straddle his chest with my naked loins. He’s moving one hand, trying to find something. I know what he’s looking for. I hold the gun with both hands and force the muzzle under his chin. Then I use my weight to crush his throat. I hear a gurgling sound. At first I feel something blazing hot, as if a cat has clamped its teeth into me. But then he pulls out the knife and strikes again. Another stab into my arm. I scream with pain. Force the rifle farther down. Hear something break inside him. His throat goes limp and soft like a dead kitten. His mouth is wide open. His eyes roll up. But I don’t stop. I keep on killing him. It feels so good to kill. It feels so good not to be killed. It feels so good to arrive in America. I’m naked down below, and my manhood stands erect like a spear. I press harder and harder on that damned throat. A huge spasm passes through him. He shudders beneath me. The knife falls out of his hand. I’m injured, but feel only a heat in my arm where he stabbed me. I don’t want to stop. This is the best feeling I’ve ever had.

LANCE
TRIED
to figure out where he was. He was sitting on the ground, and next to him lay the oblong block of ice with his rifle inside. It shouldn’t be possible to get lost here, even under these conditions. It shouldn’t be possible for
anyone,
much less for him. But he’d been walking and walking without reaching anyplace that looked familiar. All he’d seen the whole way was the same dense, ice-covered birch forest.

The upper part of his left arm was aching from hitting the guardrail, and his whole body was probably black and blue after all the sliding around he’d done. Yet he would have preferred being back on the slippery road if he could just get out of this cold, raw stratum that formed the underbelly of the woods.

A surprising idea occurred to him. The more he thought about it, the more right it seemed. While he was sliding down the long slope, he’d spun around numerous times. When he finally came to a halt, he felt completely dizzy, and because of all the ice, both sides of the road had looked the same to him. Was it possible he’d entered the woods on the wrong side? He would have seen the same icy birch trees, no matter which side he chose.

If that was what happened, he had no idea where he was at the moment. There was no use trying to find the points of the compass if he couldn’t catch a glimpse of the surrounding landscape. He might find his way back to the highway by sheer luck, but in theory he could also just keep on like this all the way to Canada. In reality, of course, he would die long before he ever got that far. Down here, under this roof of bowed, ice-laden birches, a partial twilight had already set in. He couldn’t sit here for much longer. His only chance was to head in one direction and hope it would lead him out to the road, or to someplace else he recognized. But the problem was trying to keep moving in the same direction for any length of time when he had nothing to use to orient himself.

He stood up, feeling at once how the big, heavy icicles pressed against his back. Hunching over, he began moving forward. The strap of his rifle had become stiff, but he could still sling it over his shoulder. The big block of ice enclosing his rifle sent ripples of cold into his body. Because of all the ice touching his back and shoulder, he soon started feeling the effects of hypothermia. When he got out his cell phone, his fears were confirmed: there was no coverage. The tower on Leveaux Mountain must be down because of the ice.

For a while it felt like the terrain was rising steadily, and he wondered whether he was heading away from the lake and the road, toward the hills where he and Andy had been hunting earlier in the day. So he turned around and started off in the opposite direction, back toward where he’d come from. If he could just manage to stay on course, he should reach the highway eventually. But soon the terrain began rising again. He was about to turn around, when he realized how fruitless that would be. All he could do was keep going. If the ground was actually rising, that meant he was on his way north. And sooner or later he’d reach the belt of dense birch trees that extended from the shores of Lake Superior some distance up into the hills. In a more open type of forest he might have been able to orient himself. Right now it didn’t seem likely that he could even hold a steady course northward. He was probably walking in circles. No doubt he was just imagining the slight incline.

In the back of his mind he was dreading the darkness, which was no more than an hour or so away. He did have a flashlight in his jacket pocket, but that wouldn’t be much help as long as he could see only tree branches and ice in every direction. All day long he’d found it impossible to picture anything “after the hunt.” It just didn’t seem to exist for him. And now that was where he was headed, toward something that was simply cold and dark.

Soon he had to rest again. It was hard to walk stooped over, and besides, it felt good to put down his rifle, which was acting like a big cold-storage unit against his body. He lay down on the ground, stretching out full length. He lay there staring up at the chaos overhead. The slender birches were bowed under the weight of the ice, forming a tightly tangled web of branches visible through the shiny coating of ice. Hanging down from underneath everything were icicles of varying size, many of them so big that they might cause him serious injury. If he lay here long enough, one of them was bound to break off and fall. The biggest of them looked like they could skewer him. That was one way to die: skewered by ice.

His teeth had started to chatter. The muscles of his bulky torso were shivering. He knew this was his body’s means of defense against the cold that was threatening to invade. If he didn’t get indoors very soon, the cold would win. Yet he stayed where he was.

He tried to think of something pleasant, something that would make the time pass without too much anxiety. His thoughts stopped on three figures who were standing still, looking out across a darkened landscape, one big and two smaller figures. The moon was high in the sky, and below it, far in the distance, lay the lake, which faded off into space. Everything else was dark. The world consisted of the moon and Lake Superior. And those three people. Lance was looking at them from behind, but at the same time he remembered how it had felt to stand there, as one of them. What were they really doing there? His father had talked about something—that much he recalled. But about what? No, it was impossible to penetrate deeper into his memory, to grasp the words from that night at least thirty-five years ago.

Maybe he’d said something about their ancestors who had come to this lake from the island of Halsnøy, a place Lance had heard about all his life but never seen. As far back as he could remember, he’d heard about their ancestors who had settled at the base of Carlton Peak because the area reminded them of Tofte on Halsnøy. He didn’t know whether that was true. Was that what his father had talked about as they stood there?
That’s the stuff we’re made of.
Men who fell through the ice all alone and afterward survived a night in the woods with temperatures below freezing. These childish ideas about how it had all started. He’d run into them his whole life. The stories about what family surnames from Sweden and Norway actually meant, or why some great-great-grandfather had chosen that specific English name, which they all carried today. Rarely anything about the mundane reality behind it all—for instance, how their surnames had been hopelessly misspelled by the immigration authorities so that they became unrecognizable.

As he lay stretched out on the cold, raw forest floor beneath all those icy birch trees, Lance realized that the world his father had known had totally disintegrated. It simply no longer existed. What had once been the family’s history had now been reduced to something so incomplete and chaotic that a life could never be built upon it. At least not the sort of life his parents had lived. The way things had turned out, Lance would have to stand on his own two feet without having an orderly and comprehensible past to support him. He would have to live with the incomplete, with the lack of logical coherence between all things, and accept that his own history was a dark abyss, a depth that could never be fathomed. He did not come from anything or anyone; he came from a big nothing.

Lance was no longer freezing. He had no idea how long he’d been lying here. By this point, he almost felt comfortable. Underneath this roof of ice, it was already dusk, but maybe dark was starting to fall outside the forest too. No one was going to come looking for him. Andy was not going to report him missing. By now he was probably back home watching TV with Tammy. An ordinary man who would continue to live a long life on the North Shore. Lance, on the other hand, was lying somewhere in the woods, noticing that he was starting to get tired, yet he did not enter the land of dreams. He felt only a numbness in his mind, as if he no longer had proper contact with himself.

I don’t know where the lake is, he thought. He couldn’t recall ever experiencing that before. The location of the lake was just as natural to him as the position of his own spine or feet, but right now he had no clue. Nor did he know where anything else was located.