Peter Geye - Wintering

“My, oh, my,” Harry whispered. He clapped Gus on the shoulder and then pulled the boxes from beneath the bunk.

The first one held two wooden buckets and a length of coiled rope. In the second was a jar of eight-penny nails, a carton of shotgun shells, a useless pack of wooden matches, two dozen paraffin candles, a stack of composition notebooks wrapped in cellophane, and a small sleeve that held the yellowing pages of a Bible.

Harry removed and replaced each item and pushed the boxes back under the bunk. He sat there on his heels and began chuckling and then erupted into such a fit that he fell on his rump, which only made him laugh more. When he collected himself he said, “This’ll do better than a wigwam, eh?” He stood still, laughing, and wiped a tear from his eye.

Unlike his father, Gus could not see the humor in their finding the shack. He felt more lost than ever. “This isn’t Fort le Croix, is it?” he said.

“No, it sure isn’t.”

“What is it, then?”

Harry took another look around the shack. “I don’t know, bud.” He wiped his eyes again and went to stand beside him. “I don’t know how this place got here or how we did, either. But it’s a good thing we found each other. I’m ready to admit that now.”

“Now that what?” Gus said.

Harry put his arm around his son. “Now that we’re here.” He gave him a shake. “Now that we’ve discovered this place.”

“We didn’t discover anything.”

“Have you ever been here before?”

“Of course not.”

“Then call it a discovery.”

—

After they moved their gear into the shack, after they swept it out and took a more complete inventory, after they inspected the roof and floor and surveyed the area around it — finding the remnants of a garden now overgrown with creeper — they stood outside, looking at the shack. From the thigh pocket of his army pants, Harry removed a flask and unscrewed the cap and offered it to Gus without a word.

Without a word in return he took a short drink. All that fire and flavor after a month of fish and jerky was heavenly, even as the whiskey made him gag. He handed the flask back.

His father raised the flask toward the house. “To wintering,” he said, then took a long swallow. Then another. “God damn. ” He took a third pull for good measure. “A hell of a reward, eh, bud? Those voyageurs used to haul rum by the barrel to their winter forts. I figured a couple sips wouldn’t hurt us.”

“Let’s not talk about voyageurs anymore.”

“Fair enough.” Harry held out the flask again, but Gus shook his head, and he screwed the cap back on. “We can finish this with dinner.”

Now it was Gus’s turn to cry. As he stood there, the whiskey still hot in his gut, his relief came at him furiously. There would be no more paddling. No more cutting through woods and swamps and rivers barely as wide as their canoes. They were home, even if they’d never known where they were headed.

Harry pulled his son into his arms and held him while he got rid of his tears. They’d be his last in the borderlands, Gus would see to that.

GUS RECALLED how the nights so often ended, pacing around the kitchen cradling his babies, finally drowsing after their fitful, colicky sleep. Sometimes he would nearly nod off with them while standing there looking out the window, watching the first reach into the darkness, twice seeing a fox cross the deck, stop to lift his nose toward the bird feeders, then jumping down onto the snow-covered yard. Usually it was his daughter, Greta, in his arms, Tom being quick to sleep. Gus could still see her eyes fluttering shut, and feel the heaviness of his eyelids and the lightness of her against his chest.

But above all, he could remember the quiet of those nights and mornings. So quiet he could hear Greta breathing. So quiet he could hear the flakes falling when it snowed, the drips of icicles in springtime, or Sarah rolling over in bed on the other side of the house.

When he woke that first morning at the shack it was to a similar silence. After a month of sleeping under a canvas tent, the quiet indoors was unsettling. It took him a long minute to realize where he was. He listened for any sound at all, but then gave up. Not even the wind moving the pine trees outside. He peeled himself from the sleeping sack on the floor and walked to the window. The world was white with frost again.

Harry was in a canoe fifty feet offshore, hunched over the gunwale and holding the end of a length of rope that disappeared into the steaming water. Gus watched as he marked the rope, then pulled it hand over hand. He wrote something in the book of maps, made five paddle strokes up the shore, and dropped the rope back in again. For ten minutes Gus stood at the window before he finally went outside and hailed his father.

As Harry paddled back toward shore, Gus said, “What are you doing out there?”

“Getting the lay of the lake bottom,” Harry said as he stepped out of the canoe. “So we know where to fish when the ice comes.”

“It’s cold enough I’m surprised the water isn’t frozen already.”

“That’ll happen soon enough,” Harry said. “Water’s not more than knee-deep for thirty feet off the point here, then it drops off. Twenty, twenty-five feet sheer. A good place to jig once the ice sets. We won’t have to travel far.” He nodded, satisfied with his soundings. “How’d you sleep last night?”

“It felt good to wake up warm and dry, that’s for sure.”

“You won’t get any argument from me on that account.”

“Whose place do you suppose it is?”

“I was wondering the same thing. I reckon it’s a trapper’s shack. Some fella who got tired of trudging all these miles through cold and snow for a hundred dollars’ worth of beaver pelts.”

“But there’s no trapping gear.”

“True. So maybe it’s a hunting camp.” He looked up at the shack for a moment. “It’s a lonely son of a gun who comes out here to hunt by himself, though, ain’t it? Hardly fit for a big party, is it?”

“No,” Gus said. “It hasn’t been used in a while.”

“Likely we don’t have to worry about the proud owner jumping us for trespassing.”

“Or anyone else, either,” Gus said.

Harry forced a smile then. “There are some things I need to tell you, bud.”

“All right.”

“You’ll want to punch me in the gut when you hear them.”

“I doubt that, but go ahead.”

Harry looked at the lake, then at the book of maps in his hand. “Fort le Croix—”

“What about it?”

“There never was such a place.”

“What does that mean?”

“What I just said. There never was a Fort le Croix up here. Or any other fort.”

“I don’t get it. Where were we going, then?”

“Here, I reckon.”

“What if we didn’t find here?”

“Hell, here or someplace like it. I told you before, we were going to be fine regardless. Set up a wigwam. I used to spend a week at a time with Freddy Riverfish up on his traplines. In the deepest part of winter. We were fine then, so we’d have been all right, you and me, without any shack.”

“What about the maps?”

Harry looked at the book in his hand again. “Yeah, the maps.”

“We followed them. They got us to Kaseiganagah, didn’t they?”

“They sure did.”

Gus was out of questions. He sat there, waiting for the truth.

—

On those mornings with his own children, once Gus had finally soothed them to sleep, sometimes while it was still dark outside but just as often after sunrise, when the house was warming with the morning, he would sit back in the big chair beside his fireplace and put his feet on the ottoman and pull the afghan from behind his shoulder. Greta or Tom would nestle into him, their fine and unruly hair tickling his chin. He would spread the afghan over them and close his eyes and fall asleep while their little hands lay between them.