Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“Don’t bother looking at the other foot,” said Duncan, propped up on his elbow.

After shaking the toenails out, I put the sock back on, which was far more painful than pulling it off. Duncan cut vents in the sides of my brogans so I could slip my swollen foot inside. He cut swathes from the skidoo upholstery and lashed them round my shoes with duct tape. When he was done my feet looked as if they’d been dipped in pewter.

“You look cheery,” I said.

“I feel a hell of a lot better. Sure, it’s weird — a spike of metal skewering me like a moth on a pin, but I can breathe almost full.”

“Should we risk it?” I said. “We could stay here, keep the fire going. We’ve got all day to gather wood. You have to assume someone’s looking for us by now, right? A search helicopter’s sure to spot the smoke.”

“What about food?”

“We might be able to kill something. Anyway, I heard a body can go awhile without food. A week at least.”

Duncan didn’t disagree in words. He simply packed up our meagre supplies and crossed beyond the guttering fire.

“It can’t be that way,” he said, pointing towards the steep incline we’d crawled down the night before. “And it can’t be anywhere that way, either,” he said, gesturing to where the van’s hood was pointing. Eventually he pointed east, where the whitened crest of escarpment merged into the cloud-strung horizon. “That way.”

“Okay, Dunk. But how far?”

“Four hours? Six? We can make it out before night falls.”

“You’re sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Such confidence! You’re an odd one, Duncan Diggs.”

“Odd as a cod, Owen Stuckey.”

We set off through the morning silence, boots crunching through the hardpack. The wind pushed gently at our backs. Our bodies were damaged, but the pain was manageable. We walked for half an hour before stumbling upon Drinkwater’s bivouac.

At some point in the night, with darkness falling and the snow swirling, he’d found a huge oak snapped in half. Its insides had been eaten away by termites and dry rot, leaving a hollowed-out bowl. The wood inside the bowl was scorched in spots. We sniffed the mingled smells of charcoal and urine.

“He … he slept in here?” Dunk said. “Holy shit.”

I doubted Drinkwater had slept. He’d probably scooped out the snow, hunkered down and capped himself in. He’d waited out the storm inside a tree trunk . He must be carrying a butane torch; he’d obviously set fire to the termite-softened wood.

“Look at this,” Dunk said.

A firepit lay ten feet from the tree, its coals still warm. A gutted carcass lay nearby. The smell gave it away.

Duncan said, “You ever hear the phrase ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a skunk’s asshole’? Drinkwater actually did.”

One of the skunk’s back legs was snapped and gored. Had Drinkwater found it in the fox trap he’d set for us? If so, that meant he’d carried it around for hours, trudging through the snow with a dead skunk strapped to his back.

Drinkwater’s tracks set off in a direction opposite to where we were headed. I considered: Drinkwater was exhausted, cold, probably injured. Depending on the freshness of that skunk, he might have food poisoning. Was he delirious? Did he even want to escape the woods? Maybe he wanted us to follow him like dogs chasing a coyote, running us in maddening circles. Was he happy enough to die if it meant killing us, too?

“We stick to our line,” I said.

The sun charted a course behind banks of iron-grey clouds. Though not especially bright, the day was unseasonably warm. The snow lost its glitter and took on a gleaming quality: long bands of light ran across its surface the way light fills the slack water between ocean waves. A booming crack rolled across the earth as dead timber split under a weight of heavy snow. A low pattering filled the air as clumps melted and dripped off branches.

I craned my ear over that pattering, searching for the thucka-thucka of helicopter blades. I desperately wanted to believe a search party had been dispatched. At the very least, surely Silas Garrow would have wondered about us by now? Or Dunk’s parents, when he hadn’t come home?

Quicksilver shapes fled along the periphery of my vision. At first I figured they were chimeras born of sleeplessness and frayed nerves, but I focused and saw the wolves were back. Had they ever left? Loping a few hundred yards to either side — the two smaller ones, probably females, on the left, the big male on the right. Ghost wolves , I thought.

We reached a meandering creek. The snow had melted along its banks to expose dark brown mud. I wondered if it was the same stretch of water where Dunk had held a thrashing mudpuppy in his palm years ago. We navigated the frozen creek bed, boots whispering over the ice. I scanned for signs of human intervention: fence posts, trail markers, a moonshiner’s still. Nothing. Even the rusted pop cans and plastic bags — tumbleweeds of the modern world — were buried under the snow.

As the day entered afternoon, a rifle crack carried out of the woods. Both of us ducked instinctively, but my heart leapt. Could it be a hunter or trapper who knew how to get to a road? Next a hollow scream rose above the trees. It wasn’t a human scream but the sound of a creature dying in agony or fear.

“What the hell was that?” Duncan said.

This was followed by a wild sobbing howl: a sound made by a human, yes, although the voice box must’ve been nearly torn apart from the strain. The howl fled into the icy sky, climbing steadily before dropping, only to climb again: the vocal equivalent of an air-raid whoop. It was the howl of a madman, and it belonged to Drinkwater.

“You figure he’s following us now?” I said.

“Could be.”

A gassy, fetid stink rose out of the earth. The ice took on a sickly yellow tinge. Duncan put his foot down. The ice cracked; water surged through glassy fissures. It was the hue of an alcoholic’s piss with webs of blackly rotted matter suspended within it. My mind made a terrifying leap: could this be the same miserable grey muskeg we’d walked through as kids, the one that sucked the sneakers off our feet?

There are plenty of muskegs out here , I told myself. It’s low country. Water collects at the bottom of the escarpment .

And I believed this, at least partially. That is the greatest trick of survival: making yourself believe the best-case scenario. It was when you started to believe the worst-case scenario that you were doomed. I breathed shallowly, trying not to vomit. The stink rising off the ice was nauseating. I couldn’t afford to lose whatever precious nutrients remained in my stomach.

“Hold up a minute,” I said, leaning heavily on a tree. My gorge throbbed against my Adam’s apple. The tree snapped, and I clutched desperately at the rotted trunk as I fell, splinters driving under my fingernails. My knees hit the ice, which spiderwebbed under my kneecaps. Rancid water seeped through to soak my trousers. A gas pocket ruptured, bubbles popping lazily through the ice. The stink was indescribable. Black dots swam before my eyes. I vomited helplessly into my mouth. It took every ounce of self-control to breathe deeply through my nose and swallow it.

“You okay?” Duncan asked.

Dark slivers lay under my fingernails. My knees were soaked with reeking water. I’d thrown up and swallowed stomach acid.

“Let’s just go.”

We left the muskeg and its sad shattered trees. The sunlight was fading and the snow took on a granular, slate hue. The chill crawled back into our bones.

The outline of a radio tower carved against the horizon. We progressed towards its lacework of man-made angles. Maybe it’d have a telephone or at least an emergency switch to pull … but no. It was only criss-crossed metal escalating to a cell-phone dish. Why would it have an emergency phone?