Peter Geye - Wintering

I turned to face the house. I caught no reflection in the sliding glass door, not in the darkness, not even as I stepped to it and pulled it open. Inside, I sat and took off my boots and wiped my eyes again in hopes of righting myself.

Gus would call in a day or two. We would meet for coffee or lunch and he would tell me how it ended. Once he finished, I would tell him why his father had done all the things he’d done. I would tell Gus things he didn’t know because I loved him, I could see that now. I loved him because I loved his father, and because his father never told him where all this started, I would do so myself.

THEY WALKED BACK from the northern end of the lake and entered the bay and passed the smoldering remains. Inside the shack Harry stoked the stove and put water on for breakfast. It was unfathomable to Gus that his father could think of food, or of anything except the men who’d come in the night.

“Who was with him?” Gus asked.

Harry stood over the stove. “Probably Len Dodj. Maybe Len and Matti Haula.”

“Matti Haula’s an old man.”

“An old man without a pension. I reckon Charlie’s offered him a fair price for his time and effort.”

“What does he have against you?”

“Nothing that I know of.”

Gus wanted his father to turn around. He wanted to see his face. “Len Dodj?”

Now Harry did turn. “Len isn’t much more than a wood tick what climbed up Charlie’s shorts.” He poured oatmeal into their bowls, brought them to the table, and sat down. With his foot he nudged the second chair out, but Gus stayed on his bunk. His father’s face had given nothing away.

“We’re gonna need to hunt,” Harry said. “See about getting a deer. This”—he gestured at their meager provender on the shelf behind him—“won’t keep us fed for long.”

“Hunt?”

“Or fish.”

“How about getting the hell out of here?”

“And going where?”

“Home.”

“Home.” Harry shook his head slowly. “Right.”

“We can’t stay here.”

“Where are we?” Harry said, maybe too sharply.

Gus reached under his sleeping sack and felt the book of maps, both his father’s and his own. He thought of the days he’d spent alone in the wilderness, charting what he could of it for the express purpose of escaping this place when the time came. It seemed hardly possible that it now had arrived. But it had.

Gus almost pulled the maps from under his bedding but stopped. He and his father stared at each other for a full minute. Too long. So long they looked away simultaneously and spoke at the very same moment. Harry started to say, “We have to think clearly,” as Gus said, “I know where we are.” Their eyes met and there lapsed another moment of strained silence.

Harry said, “You know where we are, eh?”

Gus kept staring at him.

“You’ve been out scouting, is that it? In the middle of all this country, you’ve put us on the map?”

“I don’t think you’re one to talk about maps.”

“No?”

“Right now I don’t think you should talk about anything.”

Harry nodded his head as though to admit this truth.

“I don’t think you have any idea what you’re doing. I think you’re crazy.” The truth was coming out fast as a spring freshet. Gus felt no control over the things he wanted to say. Or what he said. “You’ve made a fool out of me.”

“Tell me one thing that’s happened that I didn’t say would.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Were you surprised Charlie showed up?”

“Was I—”

“Were you surprised it got cold? That it snowed?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Are you snug as a goddamn bug in your bunk over there?”

“It was a miracle we found this place. A miracle I found it.”

“Don’t throw that word around.”

“ ‘Miracle’?” Gus was incredulous. “There’re more miracles up here than there are trees. The biggest miracle of all — if that’s the word — is that you don’t see any of it. The danger you’ve put us in. How pointless this all is. You’re blind. None of this is worth dying for.” He thought he might suffocate, his breath was coming so short. “You can give up if you want, but I’m not gonna. I don’t want to die. I won’t.” He went back to his bunk and collapsed, burying his face in his hands to dam the flood.

When he looked up some minutes later his father had his own face in his hands. Gus surveyed the shack, making a quick inventory of their supplies. Charlie and his boys had burned a hundred or more pounds of meat out on the lake. All that remained of their larder sat on the shelf behind Harry. Rice and oats and coffee and half a sack of dried fruit. Some sugar and salt and chocolate bars. Enough to last them a month on starvation rations. Their cookware. Buckets. Tools. Guns. The packs and rope and their clothes, still dirty. Shabby socks and long johns and three shirts, worn hard and missing buttons.

Now Gus looked under his arm at where the maps were bunched up under his sleeping sack. He closed his eyes and traveled in his darkness down the lake and through the woods and for two days beyond. He could picture the clearing in the woods along that creek where he’d twice strung up his canvas and stoked fires. A day and a half south, half a day east, and where was he? Still camped between two spruce trees. Still a long way from home.

Gus looked over at the bearskin on his father’s bunk. The moose antlers he’d found across the lake. The Duluth packs hanging from nails on the wall, almost swaying over a draft coming through the shack’s pathetic walls. He looked at his father sitting there like a fool. He gritted his teeth against his anger.

And what if Gus had a paved highway between this godforsaken hovel and their house on the river? A full tank of gas and a sack of warm donuts and a thermos of hot coffee in the cab? He could drive home in three hours. But where would he be then?

His anger seemed almost flushed away by a sudden and very heavy weariness. He got up and gathered some of his clothes and laid them on his sleeping sack. He took one of the Duluth packs from the wall and put it there as well. The pot of water on the stove whistled, and Gus took it from the heat and set it on the table. His father still hadn’t moved.

He would take the handgun and a pack with the tent and his sleeping sack and enough food for a week. He would strap on the hatchet and saw. He would travel on snowshoes but bring skis, too. A change of clothes. The field glasses. He looked around the shack again. He would leave behind his mandolin and the books and cribbage board. Also the maul. Travel light. Leave right away.

He moved about the shack heavyhearted and slow of foot. Before he packed food he paused to eat the oatmeal Harry had poured earlier. The water just warm. He mixed both bowls and brought the second to his father, who merely set it on the floor between his feet.

What could have been going through his mind? What decisions were left to make? The notion that a fight in the wilderness would be fair no longer had any purchase. They were marked and immobile. Charlie had the eyes and means of an owl. They were moles.

Gus put his empty bowl aside and took another inventory of his provisions laid across his bunk. He’d need a canteen. And a lantern? Not essential, he thought. He rolled his sleeping sack and tied it off, which reminded him to bring rope. Glimpsing the maps now sitting on his bunk, he remembered once more the days he’d spent making them. It was the only thing he’d done up here. Make the maps and stack the wood and kill the bear. It was hard to believe that the night of the bear was only — what? — six or seven weeks before. Hard to believe how much he’d changed since then. He pictured himself in the woods, lifting the compass to check his direction.