Gary Paulsen - Brian's Winter

It was more than double. Because everything was stronger, there were difficulties that would not have occurred to him.

Rain came on the third day of drying the heavy bows. Luckily, Brian thought, they had dried enough, and set them inside the shelter until the rain stopped.

Except that it didn’t stop. In the summer when it rained it might last half a day or even a full day, but then it cleared off and dried out. Even violent storms, like the tornado that had caught him and brought the plane up, were short-lived.

But this was fall, and fall rains were a whole new dimension in weather. It started to rain from a low, gray sky and it didn’t rain hard and it didn’t rain soft. It just… kept… raining. Brian almost went crazy with it. By the end of the first whole day it was all he could do to find dry wood to keep the fire going. By the end of the second day of constant drizzle he found himself looking at the sky hoping to see a hole, anything with bright light.

But it rained steadily for five days and while it rained it turned colder, so that by the fifth day Brian felt as if he were freezing. The only way he could find dry wood was by looking for dead logs that had hung up off the ground, and then by breaking limbs off beneath them where they weren’t quite as soaked as they were on top. By the time he got enough wood to burn for a few hours and keep the fire going against the rain he was so soaked that it took all the time the wood burned just to get him warm and dry enough to go out again to search for more wood.

The inside of his sleeping bag was damp at first, then flat wet, and finally as soaked from his body and the humidity as if it had been out in the open rain.

But still worse, with the rain he did not think he could hunt and so had no food. On the fourth day he found a four-pound northern pike on his fishline and he ate it at one sitting, saving the guts and head for bait.

But he got no more fish and by the sixth day, when it was clear that it wasn’t going to stop raining — he believed now that it would never stop raining — by the end of the sixth day he decided that he would simply have to live in cold rain for the rest of his life, and the morning of the seventh day he sat in his bag, looked outside and said:

“To hell with it. I’m going hunting.”

And he did. He strung his bow and took his arrows — after touching his medicine arrow for luck — and in a tattered T-shirt with the hunting knife at his belt he set off into the rain.

Hunting took his mind off the cold and he found to his immense surprise that hunting was better during a rain than it was in clear weather. Game could hole up for a day or two of bad weather but animals were governed by the same physics as Brian, and rain or no rain, cold or no cold, they had to come out and eat.

He took a foolbird not forty feet from the camp and got four shots at two different rabbits within another twenty yards. He missed the rabbits but was satisfied with the foolbird and went back to build up the sputtering fire one more time and made a hot stew — including the heart and liver and a tough muscle he thought must be the gizzard, which he had come to like — and ate it all before falling sound asleep in his wet bag.

He slept hard, in spite of being cold and damp, but in the middle of the night he opened his eyes, instantly awake, and waited for his eyes and mind to tell him what had awakened him.

No noise, nothing, and then he realized that it had stopped. There was no rain falling and he peeked out of the shelter to see a night sky filled with stars and a sliver of a moon and he looked up at them and said softly, “Thank you,” and went back to sleep.

In the morning it was cold, truly cold. He saw his breath in the dawn sunlight coming through the opening and when he looked outside he saw a ring of ice four or five feet out from the edge of the lake all around the shore.

He stood up out of the bag, shivering, and got the fire going until it blazed merrily and then sat close to it, watching the sun come up while he warmed himself. When he had stopped shivering he brought his sleeping bag outside and spread it in the sunlight away from the fire so that no sparks would hit it and left it there to dry.

Within an hour the temperature was in the comfort range and Brian stretched and let the sun cook his bones for a few minutes. The ground was still damp but he sat on a dry rock and looked at the blue sky and felt the hot sun and it was as if the days and days of rain had never happened. A kind of lethargy came over him and he just wanted to sit in the sun and try to forget the last week. He closed his eyes and dozed for a few minutes but a new sound, high and almost cackling, cut into his doze and he opened his eyes to see a flock of geese high above heading south, migrating.

It was a reminder — it did not get things done, sitting — and in the back of his mind was the thought that what he had just had was a warning. A week of cold rain to show him how poor he was, how completely unready he was for what he knew now was coming. And today the geese to cap it.

He must work now, work hard or he would not make it. No matter how nice the weather might be he knew he had no time left.

First the shelter. He had to make the shelter coldproof and rainproof. That meant sealing the fire inside and closing the door in some way, but he thought the smoke would drive him out.

Still, he thought, they did it. The people who came before him had tents and tipis and caves and they did not have stoves. So how did they do it?

He took kindling into the shelter and made a small fire, and closed off the opening to see what would happen. As he had predicted, the smoke quickly filled the small enclosure and drove him coughing and spitting out into the air.

He had to let the smoke out. They must have known a way — what did they do? Tipis just let it come out the top through a hole. He’d seen that in movies, old Westerns on television.

Brian went to where his wall met the rock and made a hole about a foot across just above where he had made the fire, then tried it all again.

This time when he closed the door and put some sticks on the fire it started to smoke again but as the heat developed it rose and carried a small draft through the hole in the ceiling. There was a moment of smoke; then it all magically cleared and Brian was sitting in a snug little hut with a fire warming his face. Clearly it would take only a small blaze to keep the little shelter warm, which meant less wood would be required.

The side of the shelter was still far from airtight but about this Brian knew exactly what to do. He had spent one whole day watching a family of beaver mix mud and sticks to make a watertight dam. He spent three hours bringing up double armfuls of fresh mud from the lake to pack into the low wall with sticks and leaves. When he was done he covered it with another layer of brush to protect the mud and when it dried by nightfall he had a truly weathertight shelter. He still had to seal the door but that night he sat with a fire warming the inside of his home and knew that as long as he had wood — and he was living in the middle of a forest — he would stay warm no matter what kind of weather came. He slept so soundly that the bear could have come in again and torn the place apart and he would not have known it.

In the morning he mudded the door and set it aside to dry and used more mud to make a seal on the wall, smooth and tight. Then he set back to work on the arrowhead problem.

He went to the lakeshore and looked for stones that would make an arrowhead. There were rocks everywhere and he must have looked at a hundred, turning them this way and that, tapping them against each other. None of them worked or fit or seemed right and he stopped and thought again about the arrowhead collection.