Gary Paulsen - Brian's Hunt

But he had seen both wolves and coyotes kill now and the entrails were their favorite part. And this dog was more wolf than not; a pure, friendly carnivore.

He skinned the rabbit and stretched the skin high in a tree to dry. The hide was thin and fragile and very far from prime and would not wear well, but he had in mind trying to make some lures with the hair and tiny hooks he had brought to see if he could use a willow as a pole and fly-fish some of the streams between the lakes for trout. He had seen them often beneath the canoe, some of them quite large, but they were very spooky and didn’t seem to want worms for bait, and wouldn’t stand for a shot with an arrow.

He made a fire and put some water on, using his largest aluminum pot, and dumped the rabbit carcass in whole, then covered it with a lid that slid down around the outside about an inch to keep the ashes out.

Then he took one of his fish arrows, without the bow, left the dog on the bank and let the canoe drift out a short distance into the lily pads, held the arrow over the side with the triple-barbed point about a foot underwater and wiggled the point, held it still, wiggled it again.

And here they came. Small bluegills and sunfish, four or five inches long, so curious they couldn’t stand not to get close, and with a sharp motion he jabbed the point down and took one in the side, flipped it into the boat, pulled the point out and put the arrow back in the water.

In twenty minutes he had ten fish and he took them to shore, scaled them with the back edge of his knife, split them neatly and fed the guts to the dog again before he dropped the fish, heads and fins and all, into the stew, which was boiling nicely.

From his pack he threw in a handful of rice, “To give it body,” he said, smiling, to the dog, and then, “Come here. Here.”

And the dog came to him and leaned against his leg with her good side and held her head up to be petted.

“You’re a friendly girl, aren’t you?” Brian rubbed her ears and studied the wound in the bright daylight. The sewing didn’t look half bad but now he could see that there were other lines as well, scratches, as if the dog’s side had been hit with a small, very deadly rake.

“Something with claws,” Brian said. “Not dogs, not wolves, not teeth. Cat, big cat, panther, or bear.”

There it was again. Bear. It almost had to have been a bear and either the dog ran off from its home for some reason and into a bear or. . what? Was attacked and then ran off?

“No.” He shook his head, absentmindedly petting the dog. “I wish you could talk — this doesn’t make any sense at all.”

The pot on the fire boiled over and he used a stick under the wire handle to lift the lid off and check the contents.

The rabbit meat had started to separate from the bones and the fish were right on the edge of disintegrating so he set the pot aside to cool and threw some green leaves on the hot coals. The day was starting to warm up and the black and horse- and deerflies were getting active. The smoke would keep them at bay while the stew cooled and he and the dog ate.

Then what?

He had a friend now, a new friend, and he smiled, thinking, First dog, his first dog, although technically she wasn’t really a pet and truly belonged to herself more than she did to Brian.

But she was a friend, a friend in need, and as the cliche said, a friend in need was a friend indeed. The cut seemed to be starting to heal, although he worried about the flies and thought of boiling up some kind of mud to sterilize it and putting it over the cut to keep them off. In a week or so he would cut the stitches out.

But he would need more food now than he did for just himself, and for that reason, he thought, he felt a sense of urgency that he had not felt before.

A need to go, to move.

But there was no real reason for it.

And yet it was there, the odd feeling, the odd push in his mind.

No plan, no direction, just a strange unease as if there was something he needed to see or do or hear or feel somewhere. . where?

All right. From the sparse sign Brian had found, it seemed that the dog had come from the north.

So he — no, not just he anymore, they— they would head north. The Cree summer camp was up there on that arrowhead lake with the island, maybe twenty, thirty miles. He would go see his friends and maybe they would know where the dog came from and even if they didn’t he might be able to meet Susan, Kay-gwa-daush, and tell her about the beauty mark.

Now they would eat the stew and he would make a sterile mud pack for the wound and they would head north. Just a nice, leisurely trip to see old friends.

But still he found himself pushing, hurrying, and he didn’t really know why.

Brian boiled lake mud and packed it, still wet but not hot, on the wound. Much of it fell off but some stayed and seemed to help and while he was doing it he thought of a better solution. He would get spruce and pine gum from tree sap where it formed on the trunks and melt it and put that over the wound. That stuff stuck to everything. He thought, I’ll do that when we stop this evening. He smiled. He was already thinking and saying we —it was like the dog had always been there.

He ate a little of the rabbit meat and two of the fish and gave the rest to the dog, still in the pot. And the dog ate everything, fish heads, bones, rabbit bones, meat, and then drank all the broth and looked at Brian in open gratitude, wagging her tail and folding her ears down in a submissive gesture.

“My, my, you were hungry, weren’t you?” Brian cleaned the pot and loaded the canoe, wondering how it would all work. He had become competent with a canoe, perhaps even expert, but he had never tried to take a large dog with him. Canoes were not the most stable of craft and a dog going crazy would pretty much upset the whole applecart. He tied the cargo down well and used a bit of cord to lash his bow and quiver so that if they rolled all the gear would stay with the canoe.

He needn’t have worried.

He pushed the canoe into the shallows, turned it until it was sideways to the bank and turned to get the dog but she jumped in ahead of the cargo and sat down and waited for Brian to get in.

Clearly, Brian thought, the dog had been in canoes before — as she would have done if she had been a Cree camp dog.

He pushed off and had not gone twenty yards when the dog’s full stomach, the warm sun and the rocking motion of the boat combined and the dog lay down on the floor of the canoe and went to sleep.

Brian stroked evenly, using a long reach and a straight pull back to move the canoe in a steady flow forward. There were thousands of lakes in the north country, and almost all of them were connected by streams or small rivers. The general flow was north, or northwest, although there was a lot of meandering through low hills. Brian moved to the north end of the lake looking for the outlet and saw a beaver dam across the stream that flowed there.

He had to unload the canoe on top of the dam, lower it by hand and repack it in the stream below. It was the only thing he didn’t like about the Kevlar canoe. It was light and wonderfully strong, but too flexible for hard work. He knew the Crees had heavy old thick fiberglass canoes and when they came to a beaver dam like this they would simply get up a head of steam and just slide over the top of it, down the far side and off into the stream.

But the dog jumped nimbly out of the canoe and back in with no problem and they followed the stream four or five miles, moving through several ponds and over five more beaver dams before coming to another lake.

Because of the time spent going over dams it was coming on to evening, time to find a place to stop before dark so he could catch some fish and maybe do an evening hunt for a small deer.