Marcel Theroux - Far North

Up on a shelf in the hut was a dead, three-legged wolf, wrapped up in string and parcel paper. Solomon said it had been preying on the herd for months, and had been a sonofabitch to catch. In the end, they had put down poison to get him, which they weren’t proud of, being hunting people. They were intending on carrying it back to the village with them, because their headman paid a bounty for wolves.

One by one, the herders trailed in as the sun set, banging through the hut door and, without a word, sitting down at the filthy table for some food. Solomon served them hunks of caribou, which they cut into thin shreds with their own knives and dipped in salt before they ate it. Then he gave them a soup of caribou tripe which smelled vile to me, but I guess it’s the closest they had to greens in the winter months.

As soon as one had finished eating, he would wipe the crumbs off the oilcloth with his hands and onto the floor, and get up to make way for the next one in.

One stretched out on his ragged bed with a battered old guitar and sang a song to himself.

I’d eaten a heap, travelled a long way, and the stove was pumping out heat, so I soon found myself drifting off to sleep on the cot they’d let me have. But I woke up in the middle of the night with the guitar player standing over me, asking me if I wanted to make him a trade for one or both of my guns. I let him know plainly that the only way he’d be getting one of my bullets was in his head, and very shortly, if he didn’t back off.

He shrunk back, complaining that I was being unfair to him. I said he should know better than to trouble someone when they’re sleeping, and that we would talk about trade in the morning.

First thing after breakfast, I showed them a bottle of my whiskey. They were keen for it, I could see immediately, but they tried to play it off, in their simple way, as though they weren’t too impressed with it. I knew otherwise, but I indulged them so they wouldn’t lose face.

We haggled for a while over the price of the meat. I had been thinking that the smart thing for me would be to take the caribou live. I could hitch them to the cart, they’d travel under their own steam, eating lichen from under the snow, and I could butcher them whenever I wanted, but the herders were adamant that in that case I’d have to pay for the skins as well. So we fixed on a price, spat and shook hands on it, and drank a tot of whiskey together.

Then they brought four caribou out of the herd and butchered them. They killed them one by one out behind the hut, gentling them until the last minute so the fear wouldn’t taint the meat and make it stiff. The animals’ eyes rolled as their throats were cut, and blood sprayed onto the snow. Then they dragged the carcasses away to flay the skins off and gut them, steam rising up from their innards as their eyes glazed. I let the herders keep the tripe since they were so keen on it.

The butchering was done, the sled was loaded up, and I was ready to leave by mid-morning. I had no desire to stick around there while those fellows binged on the whiskey. If they had sense, they would trade it on, but I wasn’t sure they did, and the guitar-playing fellow, whose name was Gustav, looked like he was fixing to go on a holy bender.

*

It turned out that he was much smarter than that. And I must have let my guard down, thinking that there was no one within fifty miles but a dead wolf and a half-dozen drunk caribou herders. Because after leaving the hut, and travelling all day, I broke my journey to make camp. And when I woke up in the morning, I found that someone had lifted my guns as I slept. My rifle, both my sidearms, and a great box of shells that had taken a great slice of my life to cast, all gone.

I cursed heaven for my being idiot simple, and my mother for raising me a fool, and the reindeer herders for their criminal cunning, and a good many other curses, none of which in the least succeeded in bringing my guns back to me. I had one old shotgun back at home and the rifle which I’d left for Ping to use, but nothing else.

There was no doubt that without my weapons I was dead, so I was left with a simple choice.

I saddled the mare and followed the tracks. Gustav had made no effort to hide them, figuring that I would hesitate before I went in pursuit of an armed man. I knew I had a faster mount, since he was riding a caribou, but he had god knows how many hours’ head-start over me.

I was careful not to catch him too quick. I knew my best chance was to creep up on him at night-time, as he had me. And when I sensed I was getting close, I dismounted and went on foot.

His cooking fire was what I spied first, and his tent beside it. There was no point approaching him until dark, so I bided my time.

Now, I had been running a few plans in my head, but as soon as I saw how he had left his camp, I knew what it was to be.

I crept up in the darkness and set his tent alight with embers of his cooking. The floor of his tent was a reindeer skin, but under that he had packed dry branches so as to sleep more soft. It caught quick, and the smoke and heat must have made him more dozy for a while — or perhaps he had been drinking — because it was a while before he appeared, like a drowsy bee, staggering away from a smoked-out hive, happy to have saved his skin, then less happy, when he realized the fix he was in.

Travelling in the Far North in winter, it’s always best to hang your coat outside your tent. The Tungus are pretty strict about it. Mainly it’s for the sake of the fur — it moults less and stays in better shape. But there’s another reason also. It’s a hundred to one chance, but it’s worth considering, that if you’re caught short in the night or you have to go outside for something, and by sheer bad luck or otherwise you kick your stove over, your tent will go up and so will everything in it.

And just after you’ve finished congratulating yourself for not burning to death, you’ll look up at the star-filled sky, and you’ll hear the ice crystals in your breath tinkling together, making the sound they call ‘the whisper of angels’, and you’ll rub your shirt-sleeved arms, and a bad feeling will come over you.

If I’d been that herder, I would have put one of the bullets from the stolen guns through my own head before I froze to death, because freezing to death is a terrible way to go. There were forty degrees of frost that night, and it took him almost two hours to die.

The last thing that happens to you when you freeze is that your body feels like it’s burning up. Your heart pumps the last of your hot blood to your skin as your organs shut down. That’s why you’ll tear off your clothes even as your liver is turning to ice.

I found him in the morning, followed the trail of his clothes deeper into the woods, and came upon him, naked, bluish, with rime on his hair and his johnson froze. Luckily, he still had on my guns.

KILLING ALWAYS SITS heavy with me.

Whether that’s because of my being a woman, or because my disposition is naturally soft-hearted for another reason, I don’t know.

I’ve had to fight the womanish things in my nature for almost as long as I can remember. These are not soft-hearted, womanish times.

Being tall, and broad in the shoulders, and deep-voiced, it’s been easy enough to pass for a man, but I still shed some tears over that lousy herder, though I railed against myself for the weeping, because I knew he would have shed none for me.

Softness — and conscience and good faith — is like the pianola, or the books in the old gunstore on Mercer Street. They have no place in these times. Yet just because I don’t eat dainty, and I don’t scruple to kill, and I can’t dance, or read music, that doesn’t mean I don’t hanker after doing so.