Peter Geye - Wintering

Gus wore his snowshoes and his coat and hat. The Duluth pack had been fashioned into a harness and from it a length of rope was tethered to the canoe, where his father sat cocooned in the bearskin and wool and down of the sleeping sack, his red hat pulled down over his ears. His union suit was soaked through with a fevered sweat. One foot was in his stinking boot and the other wrapped in Gus’s T-shirt and stiff with frozen blood.

Pulling that load was, on the lakes and frozen rivers, with the north wind at his back, surprisingly easy. But up in the woods, through the underbrush and beneath countless soaring pines, around rocks and deadfall, into and out of the steep gullies of ancient streambeds, it could take an hour to cover a hundred yards. He consoled himself with the thought that hauling his father through the wilderness — bringing him home — was an act of deliverance, and then he felt he was sailing among the clouds. Until the straps of the pack pulled against his galled shoulders and returned him to earth.

And so when the going became most difficult he would hum those old chansons he’d learned the season before and press on, even as he sometimes plunged through snow up to his waist.

That fourth day, he labored through the gloaming and pitched camp between two trees alongshore. He packed the snow with his boots, hardly able to lift his legs after his day in the harness. At the mouth of the tent he built a fire, then gathered wood to last the night and melted snow in the pot he’d salvaged from the fire and forced his father to eat a ration of dried fruit and a chocolate bar. He had the same himself, blocked the wind with the upturned canoe, curled into the sleeping sack and the bearskin beside his father — now fallen into some fantasia between sleep and death from which he didn’t stir, except to eat and sleep and, later, rant and moan like a lunatic — and fell himself into a dreamless slumber. He woke on the hour to stoke the fire but knew this only because when he rose for good, ten hours later, the fire was still ablaze.

In that predawn darkness he melted enough snow to fill the canteen and ate the last of the chocolate and a handful of the fruit. He took down and rolled up the tent, and lifted his father into the canoe, pulled on the Duluth pack as later in life he would slip his blazer on for a day in the classroom, oriented them southward, and finally struck out across the lake for home, their campfire still burning behind them, the only thing warm or light in the entire world.

By daybreak snow was falling, and by noon even harder, but it did not start blowing until that night, when Gus raised the tent in a blizzard. Somewhere that day he’d lost one of his mittens.

—

Five days earlier — the morning Harry shot Charlie — Gus had kept his eyes closed for a long time indeed. So long it might have seemed he was sleeping. But when he finally opened them he saw an inch of powdery snow had covered his sleeves and the Duluth pack. The silence was deathly until he heard his father dragging himself back through the trees farther inshore, a trailing blood came along and his face was already ashen, his eyes nearly uninhabited. Gus would not allow himself to look around the woods for Charlie.

“Now it’s up to you,” Harry said as he tossed the Remington in the snow and collapsed beside him.

“What happened?” Gus said, pointing at the spattering in the snow. “Whose blood is that?”

Answering, Harry pulled his foot around. His grimace only made the colorlessness of his face more profound. The boot was shot half off and blood bubbled from the wound like a stew simmering on the stove. His hands were smeared with blood. Gus looked at his father’s bloodstained coat and union suit and asked him if he’d been shot more than once.

Harry shook his head, his eyes fluttering.

“Where’s Charlie? What happened to him?”

Harry tried to focus on Gus but was too far gone. He did manage to say, before he passed out, “Charlie who?”

—

Gus wrapped his father in the sleeping sack and the bearskin and ran back across the bay to where the shack used to be. All that remained was the chimney and foundation and the still-burning cord of oak that hissed and smoked in the snowfall. The warmth of the fire was splendid after the everlasting night beforehand. He was hoping the remaining canoe hadn’t burned, and indeed it had not, set off as it was on the edge of the clearing. He cleared off the snow and dragged it out to the icy shore. He went back for one more look at the fire, and that’s when he saw the pot sitting atop the ruins of the stove. He kicked a charred two-by-four that must have fallen from the joists and picked it up to reach for the pot, which was still warm to the touch.

Harry had pulled himself up against the tree by the time he got back. The bearskin and sleeping sack had slid off, and Gus pulled them back over him, then set about making a fire to melt water. The richness of this was not lost on him: setting another fire.

After he’d melted water he examined his father’s boot. This roused Harry, of course, and he came from his blackout like a man who’d been underwater — gasping for air, eyes wide in terror. But as soon as he understood who and where he was he asked Gus for something to bite down on.

The blood came steadily as Gus removed the boot. Its cap had been shot off, and so it was his father’s toes that were bleeding — three injured, two blown off altogether. He used his pocketknife to cut the sock away, and by the time he’d washed the foot with warm water and wrapped it in a T-shirt, Harry was unconscious again.

It was still midmorning when Gus fashioned the Duluth-pack harness and tied it to the forward thwart of the canoe. He had already arranged his father in the boat, resting his back against the yoke with the tent underneath him. The rest of their outfit Gus stored in the stern. The food supply was so sorry there wasn’t enough to feed a small child for the time it would take them to get home, never mind two men, one with the hardest job of his life before him. With no lantern. No fuel. His father didn’t even have any pants, and only one boot. Nor was there a first-aid kit.

And, for all they lacked, the load would still be too heavy, and Gus could not see how he would be able to pull his father home. Not even on a highway of ice did it seem possible. But that first morning he took one step and then another, and in fifteen minutes they had reached the fishing hole his father had cut from the ice. He filled the canteen, drank it down, filled it again, brought it to Harry, roused him, and made him drink. He filled the canteen a third time and stowed it in the canoe’s stern. The Remington sat among their provisions, and he lifted it out and started for the hole in the ice.

“Where are you going with that?” Harry said.

“We’re out of ammo.”

“So what.” His voice was already growing weak. “That’s my gun.”

“I’m sick of this shit.” He opened the lid. “Fuck it all.” And he dropped the rifle in the water. Then he pulled the harness back on and took a step. And another. And then he was at the beaver lodge out on the lake he did not have a name for, his father trailing silently behind. Gus turned south.

—

On the sixth day Harry began babbling and hallucinating. The sound of his ranting served only to make Gus feel more alone. All those solitary days he’d spent charting the land away from the shack had trained him to live in silence and the peace of his thoughts, which now was broken, profoundly, by his father’s whimpers.

“The ice is breaking. Papa! The fish. Papa! The ice. Look out!”

Gus would pause and take deep breaths with his elbows on his knees, his face down so he wouldn’t inhale any snowflakes.