David Vann - Caribou Island

Gary stepped back and looked at his cabin. The outward shape of a man’s mind, he had thought before. A reflection. But he could see now that was not true. You could find an outward shape only if you entered the right field, the right profession, if you followed your calling. If you took the wrong path, all you could shape was monstrosity. This was without doubt the ugliest cabin he had ever seen, a thing misunderstood and badly constructed from beginning to end. The outward shape of how he had lived his life, but not the outward shape of who he could have been. That truer form had been lost, had never happened, but he didn’t feel sad any longer, or angry, really. He understood now that it just was.

Gary walked around back. He had meant for the door to open outward, but it opened inward. So he pushed in and propped it with a rock, the first time entering his finished cabin, a cabin with a roof, window, and door, and he set a stool in front of the window. This was not what he had imagined. In his visions and daydreams, the inside of the cabin had been warm, and he’d sat in a comfortable chair, smoking a pipe. There’d been a wood stove, the hides of bear and mountain goat, Dall sheep and moose, wolf. He hadn’t seen what the floor looked like, but it had not been unfinished ply. And the walls had not let in air. The cabin of his visions had been small but had extended outward infinitely in that dreamtime of belonging. Its walls traveled outward into wilderness. This lake and the mountains became him. No voids, no distance. And there was no Irene. In all the times he had dreamed of the cabin, he had never seen Irene. He hadn’t realized that until now. She was not sitting in a chair beside him, not standing at the wood stove. No place for her in Gary’s dream. He was smoking his pipe, sitting here by the window, looking out at the water, and he was alone in the wilderness. That was what he wanted. That was what he had always wanted.

This island was not right for Irene. The trees too close, too crowded. Trunks no more than a foot wide, spaced three or four feet apart, every space closed by the lower dead branches, thin curved half-hoops aiming at the ground, brittle and fracturing as she pushed through. Never an open space, never a place to run or look out over ridges and valleys. If she found a moose, she would be close enough to touch its hide with her hand. Her bow would be unnecessary. Tangled constantly in the branches. She kept having to yank it free. She was moving fast, a walk that was just short of running. And this was who she was meant to be, walking fast or running through snow and forest. A more open landscape, perhaps, but the same cold and snow. The uncountable generations before her.

She held the bow close, tried to keep it from snagging. Felt exhilarated. Looking for movement, listening to the forest, listening beyond her own footsteps and scrapings. Her blood running thick and beating outward to echo in the forest, a kind of sonar. Nothing could hide from her.

She stopped dead, planted her feet, brought the bow up and notched an arrow. Pulled back hard against the pulleys, felt them turn and break free into the easier part of the pull, held the arrow tight against her cheek and sighted down the razored tip to a cottonwood trunk fifty feet away. Let the arrow fly, the whip of the release, and the arrow buried deep into the trunk. The flight so fast it was instant memory, not something that could be experienced, only known afterward. Irene ran to the cottonwood, examined the arrow buried into the flesh of the tree, four slits lighter against the bark, almost invisible, radiating out from the post, and if she peered into these slits she could just see the back edges of the blades. No way to retrieve this arrow, so she held the bow close again and ran on.

Exhaustion. That was what she wanted. She wanted to run until she could run no more. But she was fueled by some other source now, something beyond muscle and blood. She never tired. She crossed all the way to the shore on the other side of the island, broke free into tufts of grass and rocky beach and saw Frying Pan Island, its graceful curve, notched an arrow, aimed high, and sent it soaring into another forest. Stepped along the water’s edge and hunted larger stones and shadows of reflection and ice, notched another arrow and ripped into the surface. Vanished then, hidden by ripples, and she thought she’d heard blades hit rock but didn’t know whether she’d only imagined it.

Two arrows left, and she would save those. She needed trees again, hurried back into cover, hunted patches of moss, from one to the next, up hills and down into swales, over ridges. Everything closed in, the trees too tight. She was freed against gravity, lofted over hills, scraped and crashing through. She’d been awake for more hours than could be counted, and somehow this brought a new power, her footsteps light in the snow, the air something that could pull her forward. And it felt as if the entire island were rolling, slowly turning over, capsizing. She had to keep her feet moving fast to stay upright. The island born long ago at lake bottom, rising to the surface on some kind of stalk, and now that stalk had been severed and the island was top-heavy, the hills of rock, the trees, and it would roll over until its slick flat underside was facing upward, wet and dark and known for thousands of years only to the lake, new to the sky. What would happen then? But Irene would no longer be here.

Origins. That was the problem. If we didn’t know where we had started, we couldn’t know where we should end, or how. Lost all along the way. Pulled into Gary’s life, the wrong life.

What Irene knew for certain was that this was not the beginning. She would not be made new again. And she would take Gary with her. That had been her mother’s mistake, taking only herself. It was not right that Irene’s father had lived on in some other life, a life without his wife or daughter, a life severed from its origins, a life that could not connect in any way to Irene. That life should not have happened, should not have been allowed.

Irene had lain awake all night again, and in those first hours she wept, raged against Gary and unfairness, injustice, wanted to punish but really wanted to come closer to him. Wanted to continue with him, as wrong as that was. Tried to find a path back, but finally she had calmed and known there was no path back. He didn’t love her, and he had never loved her, but he had used her life anyway. This was truth. Nothing she could do could make that change. It was beyond her power. She had felt her mind a vacuum, windblown space inside her, lain there empty for hours, waited for daylight, and finally this exhilaration, a gift, a final gift. It felt almost as if the pain might leave, still crowding her, still pressurizing, but promising to leave.

Snapping through branches, running downhill now, everything passing too fast to recognize. She had known this forest, and if she slowed, she might find signs, might recognize monkshood, its purple flower, the weight of that flower bending, but she was moving too fast, running, a full run, no stopping now, and she didn’t bother to shield with her arms. Let the branches scrape at her face.

Footfalls in snow and moss, the burn of skin on her hands and face and neck, the cold overcast sky above, and her body could weave on its own between trees. Irene, anything that could be called Irene, removed, quiet. Coming closer to the cabin, her legs slowed, a walk and then slower still, hunting as she had once hunted with Gary, making no sound, avoiding branches now, pushing at them carefully, bending to the side, not breaking. Emerging between the tents, directly behind the cabin. Standing still, listening for any movement, any sound, hearing nothing but a light breeze and small waves at the shore. Water and air, and blood, beating faster now. He wouldn’t be in the tents. He’d be in the cabin or at the shore. So Irene pulled an arrow free, set it and notched it, black bow, black arrow against white snow, walked silently toward the cabin door.