Peter Geye - Wintering

Gus rummaged through the pack and found the knife, put on his sweater and boots, and stepped out of the tent. The fawn still hadn’t moved.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“You’re not going to believe this.”

They jumped into a canoe and crossed the narrows. Harry splashed into the knee-deep water and took a few cautious steps forward. The fawn looked at him and baaed frantically before burying its nose in the rocks. Or what Gus thought were rocks. In fact it was the fawn’s mother. The doe was headshot, her legs splayed like a marionette cut from its strings.

Gus was having trouble sorting it all out. Between the fawn and the doe and his having just woken up, he thought that perhaps he was only dreaming. He tried to wake himself again, better this time, but found himself still standing at the canoe, watching his father step cautiously toward the fawn, his hand outstretched as though the little deer were a dog.

When he was within twenty feet he turned and glanced at Gus, looking confused himself. He shrugged and widened his eyes as though to ask, What should I do?

Gus shrugged back.

Ten feet from the fawn Harry stopped, stood tall, and put his hands at his sides. The fawn sniffed its mother, licked her ear, then turned and ran up the craggy shoreline. Gus and Harry watched it go.

He might still have thought he was dreaming if, a minute later, he hadn’t crossed the beach, looked down, and seen the dead doe. He stood beside his father, who had his hat in his hand as if he were paying respects.

“What the hell?” Gus said.

Harry still had the Remington slung over his shoulder. He removed it and checked the safety and laid it on a rock. “I’m sitting there drinking a cup of coffee while you were napping. The wind was back up. Fierce again.” He whirled his hands above his head as though this needed to be acted out. “I’d already put the gun away. So I get up to take a piss and have a look around. I’m walking up the shore”—he pointed across the lake at the huge boulder—“and looking up at the ridge, where the trees are down, and, no kidding, I see this doe and her fawn coming along the edge. I mean the very edge. A gust comes down and, I shit you not, the doe’s blown right off the cliff. Or she slips. Anyway, she lands here.” He gestured at her.

“Bullshit,” Gus said.

“I’m not making this up. Look at her legs. Look at her goddamned neck.”

“Then why’d you shoot her?”

“Because she wasn’t dead!”

Gus stared up at the cliff. “She fell from there and didn’t die?”

Harry scratched his head and put his hat back on. “That’s thirty or forty feet if it’s ten, eh? Just fell off. Two minutes later, that fawn comes walking up the rocks, bawling its fool head off. You heard it.”

“I think it woke me.”

Harry waved a hand above his head. “She just fell off. She landed here. She was still alive.”

“How?”

“I have no idea. None in the world. When I saw her twitching I went for the gun. Got it out of the case and walked over to that rock. That’s when I saw the fawn.” He reached under his hat and scratched again. “How in the hell ?”

They both stood over the deer for a spell until Harry said, “I had to shoot her.” He knelt and grabbed one of its hind legs. “It must be broken in a hundred spots.” He took the other hind leg in his hand. “They’re all broken in a hundred spots.” He stood back up and looked at Gus. “I guess we gut her.”

“I can do it,” Gus said.

“No. It was my shot.”

Gus took the knife from his belt and handed it to his father, who unsheathed it and knelt and rolled the doe onto her back. Before he cut into her he glanced up. “I guess the snow’s gonna beat us now, eh, bud?”

THEY SPENT two or three days at their camp on the narrows, waiting for the wind to blow through and jerking the venison. By the time they portaged up those falls, their larder was heavier than when they’d left home.

Gus had suggested when they broke camp earlier that morning that they wait for the fog to lift, but Harry insisted the sun would burn it off. It hadn’t. Half a day later they were paddling slowly, still staring into the whiteness. Every twenty strokes the trees hanging over the water came into view through the fog and Gus felt relieved. It was short in lasting, though, for the fog would swallow them back up almost immediately.

Harry sang the whole time. One of those chansons that had become anthem. “Petit rocher de la haute montagne, / Je viens ici finir cette champagne. / Ah! doux échos, entendez mes soupirs, / En languissant je vais bientôt mourir….” Gus hummed along even as he wondered what the hell the words meant.

They paddled for another hour before Harry stopped singing, rested his paddle, and stretched his back. “Half a goddamn day,” he said. “We’ve been four hours on this lake and it just won’t quit.”

“Could be Biwanago,” Gus said, though he had no hope that it was.

Harry studied the fog in each direction. “And this weather. Christ almighty.”

Gus took his compass from the hip pocket of his pants. Before he even took a reading, his father said, “Dead west.”

Gus held the compass up anyway.

“Dead fucking west,” Harry told him.

“Biwanago goes east and west,” Gus said.

“It’s not Biwanago, Gus.” Then Harry gripped his paddle and dug in for a hard pull.

—

But it was Biwanago. Most likely, anyway. They cut through that misty morning for another half hour before the fog was gone all at once. Not like smoke rising, which was what Gus was used to, but as if it had been shattered and shot across the water like blowing snow. Green pines suddenly came into view against a soft blue sky, the trees here dense and unbroken.

They paddled until they came to a point of gnarly granite. Gus moved ahead of his father without a word and passed into a long, narrow bay. Before he was halfway across he heard rushing water. He turned to look at his father, who had his ear canted toward the sound as though God himself were whispering across the water.

“Hear that?” Harry said as his canoe slid beside Gus’s.

“Yup.”

“Sounds heavy.”

Now Harry pulled out his compass, took his measure, and looked up at the sky. Their canoes came together and Gus made them trice by hooking his paddle over his father’s gunwale. The air was as still as the inside of a church. They sat in that stillness for a moment before Gus noticed that their canoes were being pulled slowly toward the sound of the rushing water.

They put ashore well above the falls. Gus could see the mist rising downstream. Harry was hunched over the strap of his Duluth pack, and when he stood he had the book of maps in a grip so tight Gus thought the veins in his hands might burst.

They walked the rocky shoreline to the sault. The first chute dropped five feet into a roiling white pool before spitting out into a hundred yards of churning water, its narrow path pocked with boulders and laced with fallen trees. At the end of the view, where the water veered west, it also appeared to slow down and smooth out.

Harry looked back toward the big lake behind them, tapping the moose hide onto his freshly shaven chin. “How in the hell did we miss it?”

“Miss what?” Gus said.

“The divide, Gus. The height of land.” He thumbed through the pages and mumbled something Gus couldn’t understand. Then Harry shook his head fiercely, glanced heavenward, squatted, and cupped a handful of water up to his mouth. When he stood back up, he said, “Maybe it’s time we turned around, eh, bud?”

Gus spun to face him. “You mean go home?”