Peter Geye - Wintering

The compass. The goddamn compass.

He spotted it on the shelf behind the stove. One compass. Another sitting at the bottom of that stream way back where they started getting lost. One compass and two men, one intent to stay, the other to go.

Maybe he could get home without it. For all the time he’d spent facing south and east, maybe he could tell those directions by sniffing them out and get home by instinct, with help from the sun and the stars. Maybe. But what about those wide-open spaces? The ten-mile lakes and deep rivers and streams winding through the cold and relentless woods? All of those places came back to him as a terrifying memory, and he knew that without the compass he was little better than a blind man.

Gus sat down on the bunk again and looked over at his father. “We only have one compass. I’m going to take it when I leave.” Harry still did not look up. “I’m going to finish getting my things together and go this morning. I don’t see any reason to wait around here.”

Finally, his father’s face fixed on him. “Okay,” he said, “we can go. But I think we ought to wait till tomorrow. We need to put ourselves right. Make sure we take only what we need.”

“I’ve already figured that out. One light pack. Skis and snowshoes. I’m leaving today.”

“Listen, Charlie won’t come back so soon. The reason he burned all our meat is because he wants us to suffer. To panic. He’s taunting us.”

Gus just stared at him for a moment. “I don’t really care when Charlie’s coming back or what he’s doing. I just want to leave. Today.”

“We’ve gone long enough without a plan. That’s my fault, I know it. And I’m sorry. But let’s put the right packs together and think carefully about what we’re doing. About how we’re going to get home. We can leave tomorrow morning, the minute the sun comes up.”

When Gus didn’t respond, Harry stood up, took the pot from the table, and added water for more coffee, then said, “Let’s have a look at those maps you’ve been drawing.”

—

There was little to plan or do. They studied Gus’s maps and compared them with the ones Harry had drawn months and years earlier, the books opened like two songs being sung, each over the other. For different reasons both of them worried Gus, but neither as much as the days that surely lay before them.

Harry cleaned and oiled the Remington and the pistol before gathering his own kit. They were both packed and ready before lunch without so much as a word between them. After they ate — rice and dried fruit, a chocolate bar for Gus — Harry brought the maul in from outside. He lined up the moose antlers on the floor, then stood there and looked at them for a long time. What he was pondering was something Gus never even guessed about, but he himself could not imagine those beasts’ anguish as their antlers locked. The horrible dance they must have enacted before tripping over each other and falling onto the shore, their eyes just a foot apart. What was one seeing in the other? How hotly did their breath mix in the small space between them? Gus scrutinized the antlers, and what a miracle it was how perfectly they were interwoven, how strong the fibers were that held together the symmetry of their entanglement. More than anything he wondered at their fear when the wolves finally came. For surely they would have come.

Harry swung the maul almost in concert with Gus’s final thought. Three swings it took to splinter the antlers apart. Their skulls cracked and rotten teeth scattered across the wood floor. The bone plates at their base split like logs. His father picked the pieces up and laid them into the stove, where the marrow hissed deliciously.

Harry set the maul beside the door and readied a fishing line, then put on his coat and grabbed the wooden bucket and went outside. Gus watched him go to the hole he’d cut in the lake ice, pull off the covering, sit down on the upturned bucket, and drop his line in the water, as if this were just another day of fishing. He stood at the window and watched for an hour, maybe two, until his father came in without anything to show for his effort but two gallons of frigid water.

Gus could not have imagined the depths of his father’s thoughts as he sat out there fishing in the cold. Nor the expanse of his memory, nor the horrible things held within it. It was no fault of Gus’s that this was true. No fault at all.

Instead, Gus reckoned how impossible it seemed that his father could have spent all these hours and days and weeks up here without giving a single thought to how they would get out. To have left as they did, Gus could see that. Harry had been betrayed and cuckolded, so his anger was explanation enough. But to have had all the time in the world to parse things out and come up with nothing, to have failed to see how he’d endangered them in so many different ways, that seemed — and always would, even with the benefit of thirty-odd years — the most intractable, unforgivable fact of their misbegotten adventure. And then there were all the years afterward, with hardly ever a word between them about their time up on the borderlands. What had those decades of silence actually meant?

They ate an early dinner of rice and Gus filled the stove with wood he’d cut. Before it was dark, they turned in for the last time in the shack. Gus did not dream, at least not that he remembered. But every night after, for years and even sometimes still, he dreamt of fire.

THE WINDOW SHATTERED and the floor beneath the stove and his father’s bunk erupted in flames, the suddenness of all that light and heat meteoric. Gus fell from his bunk as Harry jumped through the fire with the bearskin over his shoulder. “Put your pants on!” he shouted. The flames already governed the shack. “Grab your coat and boots and get the hell out of here!”

Harry had his arm up shielding his face. “My Lord!” He ran over to Gus. “You’ve got five seconds!” he cried above the pealing flames. “Take the sleeping sack, the pack, and get moving.”

Gus didn’t need any encouragement. In the time it took his father to bark his orders he’d put his pants and boots on and pulled his sleeping sack free. He had one hand on the door and the other on the Duluth pack, but the door wouldn’t budge. He put his shoulder into it three times in rapid succession, then stood back and kicked it with the heel of his right boot, but it didn’t give an inch.

Harry was standing beside him, still in his long johns but already wearing his boots and his red hat. “Stand aside,” he hollered, his face glimmering with sweat. Even before Gus stepped back his father was swinging the maul at the door. Only because he’d used it on the moose antlers was it in the shack at all.

He swung wildly as the shelf above the stove collapsed in flames. Harry’s bunk was engulfed and his sleeping sack blazing. After three or four heavy swings the door flew off its hinges. A piece of split oak had been wedged between the handle outside and the doorframe. The cold air that came rushing in whipped the flames up to the ceiling, and the trusses lit like tinder.

Both Eides fell out the door, Harry pushing his son forward. Under the weight of his pack Gus tripped in the snow, fell on his back, and stared up at the shack. The glare of the fire bright in the doorway. Smoke seething from chinks in the rough-sawn walls. His father started back inside and Gus hurried to his feet and raced to the door himself, lifted his arm over his mouth, and stepped inside.

For all the smoke, he couldn’t tell where his father was. The heat was hellacious and he jerked his coat and his mittens from the peg by the door, straddled the threshold, and screamed “Dad!” but couldn’t hear his own voice above the howling flames and the pops and cracks of the old wood.