David Vann - Caribou Island

He tugged with the shovel, pulled into shallows until he was able to reach down and grab. Carried it up to Irene to show her.

I got that case of chili, he said.

Irene didn’t even look up. Kneeling before the stove, gazing into a pot of soup. Getting darker now, her face lit by the stove.

What the fuck, he said. Are you ever going to talk to me again?

You wouldn’t want to hear what I have to say.

Fine, he said. You’re probably right. I’ve heard about enough of your crap.

Gary went into the tool and supply tent to clear a space. Kneeled at the opening and stacked everything high on one side. Then went to the sleeping tent to grab his bag and pillow. I’m sleeping in the other tent, he said.

Irene like a monk over the soup. As if this meal were made of signs.

Gary stripped off his wet boots and pants and socks, put on dry clothing. Could feel his feet tingling back to life. I’ll take my soup now, he said. I’m sure it’s hot enough.

So Irene poured half the pot into a large plastic bowl and Gary grabbed a spoon and hiked down to the water’s edge. Found a good rock and sat looking into the darkness falling over the water. No longer snowing. In the far distance, on the opposite shores, no longer a clear divide between water and sky. The boat bumping in the waves, scraping occasionally on rock.

He wanted to live out here. He wanted to spend a winter, wanted to experience that. But he could see now it would be only one winter. In the spring, he would leave this place, leave Irene. He didn’t know where he would go or what he would do, but he knew it was time to leave. This life had finished.

Irene lay alone in her tent. A quieter night than usual, no wind. And she tried to imagine what it would be like in winter. Not so hard to do, really, after living at the edge of this lake so many years. As she walked out onto it, she’d find fault lines in the snow. A thin dusting, faint ridges raised up where the ice had cracked. No other footsteps, no tracks of any kind. Irene the only figure on a broad pan of white.

Early winter, the temperature minus fifteen. The mountains would be white, the lake and glacier. Only the sky a new color, rare winter sun, rare midwinter blue. The sun above the peaks moving sideways, unable to rise any higher.

Irene would carry her bow, her footsteps the only sound. The world prehistoric. Wind shifting the snow like sand, small dunes and hollows. The water close beneath.

Irene imagined herself not properly dressed for the cold for some reason. Wearing what she had worn inside the cabin, finished now: a blue sweater, thin down vest, wool pants and boots, a knit cap, white and gray. No gloves. Her hand holding the bow was cold. She walked toward the glacier, toward the mountains, away from the island. Walked slowly. Then stopped and looked around.

Without her footsteps, no sound. No wind, no moving water, no bird, no other human. This bright world. The sound of her heart, the sound of her own breath, the sound of her own blood in her temples, those were all she would hear. If she could make those stop, she could hear the world.

The water beneath her was moving, and that must make a sound. A dark current beneath ice, no surface to break, no ripples, but even that must make a sound. Deep water, layers and currents, and when one layer moved over another, something must hear that, some tearing of water against water. And over time, the changes in those currents, the shifts, the lake never the same from moment to moment. All of that must be recorded somehow.

Irene could imagine herself continuing on over the thin crust, holding the bow in her left hand, letting the other hand warm in her pocket. Continuing over light dunes of snow, pausing in an area of large flakes. The size of fingernails, individual snowflakes, their branches visible, lying at angles, razor-thin. They looked ornamental, contrived, too large and individual to be real. She squatted down for a closer look, touched a flake, then wiped her hand across the surface revealing the black of the lake, the color of ice over the depths. A vacuum of light. And no way to peer into it, the surface clear but so dark as to be essentially opaque.

The cold would press in. Not dressed for this, not prepared. Her legs and back cold. She’d be shivering soon. The sun so bright and without any warmth.

Gary, she said. And she stopped. This big lake, so flat, only the small drifts of snow. She looked at the far shorelines, turned a slow circle, tried to see it all at once, the immensity of it.

And then she would walk toward the nearest shoreline, wanting the cover of trees. The distances deceiving, elongating. At the edge of the lake, ruptures and monuments of ice, their peaks covered in snow, mountains of another scale. She stepped over a ridge, a giantess, slick ice beneath her boots and then rock, large pebbles, the beach. Into the trees quickly, home of winter birds: spruce grouse and willow ptarmigan, white-tailed ptarmigan. She’d seen small flocks of redpoll feed in temperatures colder than this.

No trail here. She stepped over deadfall, pushed through bare patches of alder, grown thick, food for ptarmigan, into the taller white trunks of birch, the evergreen Sitka spruce, tall and thin with branches bent at odd angles.

Irene looked for signs of life, saw and heard nothing. Her footsteps cracking. The forest nonconcealing, open to the sky, too bare, too stunted to cover. Wallow and swale, the flats and hollows, pushing again through denser growth right into a devil’s club, spiny knob rising out of the forest as high as her shoulder. She cried out, her left hand impaled with spines. Twisted cane with its knobby head, thick with spines. And now she saw there were many more here. A thicket, so she had to backtrack, go around the wallow, find higher ground again.

She would find a stand of white birch, easier going, more space between trunks, make good progress, the snow not too deep. A rise, finally, the flank of the mountain, dragging the bow behind her. The cold air heavy in her lungs. As she came over a small hill, she could see the mountain above, white above the treeline, rumpled and old. She’d climb until she reached the top. Many miles, and she’d never done this in winter, but it didn’t seem difficult now. It seemed almost as if she could be carried upward, as if she could float above the ground. Only the bow was holding her back, weighing her down, so she let it drop from her hand, didn’t watch it fall, didn’t look back, climbed faster, a new urgency, pulling at small branches with her hands.

Irene felt dizzy, lightheaded, the climbing a kind of trance, watching the snow in front of her, always perfect, small hollows around every trunk, everything contoured, the world traced and made softer.

Nothing more after that. Irene lost the vision. Could no longer see herself, could no longer see the winter. She was back in the tent, alone, thinking the world wasn’t possible as it was. Too flat, too empty.

Irene curled on her side in her sleeping bag, waited for sleep, which never came. The night an expanse. Hours of focusing on her breath, counting her exhales, trying to slip away. Then turning onto her stomach, her knees sore from the sideways positions.

Early morning, the wind coming up. Still dark out. She lay on her back, no longer trying for sleep. Just let the pain pulse through her head, drifted around in it, felt tears leaking from her eyes but couldn’t find any emotion attached. A general sense of grief, or despair, something empty, but not what you’d call a feeling. Too tired for that. Waiting for light, for the day to start so at least she could get up and there would be activity. Something to pass the time.

She closed her eyes again, and when she opened her eyes sleepless hours later, the blue nylon of the tent was just visible, and so this was the beginning of the day. Another half hour of waiting and it was light enough to rise and dress.