I'm writing this because I can't sleep and because saying what
happened in plain order feels like the only way to keep it
contained. I'm not using last names.
We were six people, me, Danny, Shane, Live, Kyle and Marcus.
We went to a cabin in northern Minnesota, past Ely, but not all
the way to the border. The cabin belonged to an old
neighbor of Shane's who said we could use it so long as we
packed out our trash and kept the pipes from freezing.
It was the third week of January.
The forecast said single digits during the day and well below 0
at night. We brought a generator, 5
gallons of treated gas, a toad of split oak, a toad of mixed
food, powdered soup, instant potatoes, jerky, oatmeal, 2
propane camp lanterns, a cheap two way radio set, a hand axe, a
folding saw, a small first aid kit with two mylar blankets, 6
headlamps with lithium batteries, and 1:30 thirty lever
action rifle that belonged to Shane's dad.
The idea was simple, two nights, maybe 3 of board games and
quiet. No one was planning to hunt.
There would be someday hikes on snowshoes if the wind wasn't too
bad. We were all in our 30s except
Marcus who was 26 and took pictures of everything.
I'm setting this down in the same order it happened and with
the measurements and times we noted at the time or soon after.
I know memory gets soft around shock numbers.
Help. The cabin sat at the end of a
seasonal Rd. that a local plow guy kept open to the last
mailbox. From there the driveway was 1/2
mile of two faint ruts through black spruce and Aspen.
We parked at the mailbox at 3:10 PM and hiked in with sleds and
packs. It was overcast, light wind from
the north. On the way we passed a set of
old snowmobile tracks crusted over, heading parallel to our
drive before cutting across it and into the trees.
The cabin itself was a one room structure with a small loft,
metal roof and a detached shed for the generator.
About 20 yards back behind the outhouse.
The front door faced S. There were two double pane
windows, one on the east wall, one on the West.
The door had a hasp and padlock, but the padlock was hanging open
and there was an old bent nail through the hasp.
Inside. The temperature was 19°F by the
little round analog thermometer. On the N wall there was a black
iron stove with some ash in it, a wood box with maybe 1/3 of a
cord of mixed Birch and Aspen, a small Table, 3 chairs, 2 bunks,
and a ladder to the loft that had plywood sheets and old army
blankets. We did a walkthrough, checked
cupboards for mouse sign, found some but not much, and then set
about heating the place. By 5:00 PM the stove had the
interior up into the 40s and the air felt less biting.
Shane primed the generator, set the choke, and had it running by
the third pole. The shed had a plywood door with
two hasps and a crossbar on the inside, so we left it open a
crack for ventilation and set the generator on concrete
blocks. We ran an extension line along 2
I screws to the cabin and now we had a light bulb A2 plug outlet
by the table and the small comfort of the fridge running.
It was empty except for a Mason jar of bare fat with dust on the
lid and a bag of frozen peas someone had left behind years
earlier. We ate soup and bread at 6:30
PM, did a quick round of cards and turn the generator off at
10:00 PM to conserve fuel. Planning to run it two hours on,
two hours off through the night for the fridge and to top off
phone batteries. The sky cleared after midnight.
Stars showed hard and small through the east window.
The thermometer read 65°F by then, and we all decided we were
fine with just the stove and our sleeping bags.
The first thing that felt wrong, objectively, not just nerves,
showed up the next morning at 7:20 AM.
Kyle and Marcus went out to get more wood while Danny heated
water. I followed to check the latrine
before it was too cold to want to sit there.
The light was flat, no wind -6°F by Danny's phone.
The snowpack was about knee deep.
Off the path, out by the woodpile, we saw tracks that
weren't ours, a single file line that cut in from the trees on
the West side crossed the packed path, circled the wood pile, and
then continued behind the cabin toward the generator shed.
The prints were long and narrow, more like dense than footprints,
each about 12 to 14 inches long and maybe 3 or 4 inches at the
width of the foot, if I can call it that.
The edges were crisp. The stride was between 5:00 and
6:00 feet, measured by Kyle with a ski pole held in place while I
stepped it out. I'm 510.
The top of my hip is at about 3 feet.
The thing that made my stomach go hard was the way the line of
prints would vanish for 8 to 10 feet and then start again, like
something had covered that distance without touching.
At first I said it was drifting, but the snow there was
undisturbed except for a thin skin that showed the last hour's
worth of spin drift. There were no wing marks.
There was no double line like someone stepping in their own
prints. We followed the trail to the
shed where it did 2 tight circles, passed behind and then
LED off into the trees again. The door was still barred.
The generator was fine. We took pictures.
We didn't make jokes. At 9:40 AM we went out on
snowshoes to the small lake that Shane said was a quarter mile
east of the cabin. We brought the rifle in a radio
pair on Channel 3. Liv stayed behind to tend the
stove and write down a supply list because she said it calmed
her brain to count things. The lake was iced over and flat.
We stepped off the shoreline and tested with poles.
The ice was at least a foot thick.
Where we stood there were old auger holes frozen over.
About 50 yards down the shoreline we found a place where
something had dragged a deer from the trees onto the ice.
There was a trail of hair and a stain that had spread under the
top layer of clear ice. Not bright, but a large pale
shadow in the ice itself. The drag mark stopped abruptly.
No sign of a fight, No scatter of prints around the kill site.
On the way back at 10:30 AM, we noticed Tufts of hair snagged
higher than seemed right on a dead balsam roughly 7 feet up.
The hair was coarse and hollow, like deer hair.
Pale, not from a dog. Danny bagged a tuft in a zip bag
because she does that kind of thing at work and the habit
carries. We said out loud that it was
probably a wolf. None of us actually believed
that we kept the daylight busy with wood and chores.
The numbers kept coming up off. At 1:00 PM, Shane checked the
fuel, 4 1/2 gallons left in our can and the generator had half a
tank. At 2:15 PM we noticed the bent
nail that had been through the hasp on the cabin door was on
the floor under the front window.
We had all used the main door through the morning.
No one remembered removing the nail and no one would have
tossed it. The hasp by on the door had a
fresh scuff that caught a fingernail.
Liv, who had stayed behind, swore she never opened the door
for anyone and never took the nail out.
We decided then to use the padlock the way we should have
used it from the start and we got a second nail and hammered
it into the jamb, angled down through the hasp so the door
couldn't rise under force. We cut 2 wedges from a scrap 2X4
and made shims for the hinges. It all felt like overkill until
4:40 PM when the wind came up and we saw how the trees along
the Dr. shifted and how fast visibility dropped with blown
snow. Then it felt necessary.
At 7:05 PM, the generator coughed and died on its own.
There was still gas in it. We'd plan to run it until 8:00
PM. We waited 2 minutes to see if it
would smooth out. Then Kyle and Marcus suited up
to go check it, and I followed because 3 is safer than two.
We used a rope we'd brought for hauling sleds and tied it to the
table leg, took two headlamps in the camp Lantern, and ran the
rope out the door and around the porch post as a guide.
The air had that dry squeal you get when it's close to 0 and
windy snow dust went horizontal. My beard froze at the corners of
my mouth on the first breath. In the beam of the headlamps, I
saw our rope swing drag and then snapped taut like something had
bumped it out there. I remember thinking it was only
the wind. The shed had snow piled up
against the W wall and the door was shut.
We had left it cracked for ventilation.
The crossbar was still in place from the inside, so Kyle had to
push the door in with his shoulder, get a hand through and
lift. The hole he made was at face
level. The smell that came out wasn't
gas. It was animal.
Not rot, not feces. Wet hair and blood.
When it's fresh, a copper Tang. The generator was sitting on the
blocks where we left it, but the choke had been snapped off.
Not just pushed to run, but physically snapped.
The plastic lever was on the floor of the shed.
There were two gouges in the pine door rail, right at eye
height, almost parallel, 3 inches apart.
Marcus lit them from the side with his phone flashlight so the
texture showed and said they looked like nail marks.
They were clean through the soft early wood.
We turned the generator off, which was easy since it was
already off, and we took the plug out and brought it back to
the cabin. No sense running it without a
choke in that weather anyway, and no sense leaving the shed
without a door we could control. We put the bar back in the
inside brackets and pulled the door till it wedged.
I kept telling myself it was a person.
I liked that answer better than anything that fit the stride
length. At 11:20 PM the first voice
came. We had the stove going hot, we
were all in long underwear and socks and had our coats hanging
near the door ready. The inside light was on and the
blinds were down, which made the windows into mirrors.
Over the shaking of the stove pipe and the little whistles it
makes at the joints and the occasional loud pop when a log
shifts, we heard a small voice from the West side of the cabin
say hey. It was the kind of voice you
hear on a trail when someone comes up behind you and doesn't
want to scare you. Literally the word hey, soft and
neutral. It came from outside the West
window. Marcus stood and walked toward
the glass like a moth. Danny told him to stop.
Then it said, still in that small voice, Can you help me?
Liv and Kyle looked at each other.
The way you do when something simple goes wrong in a way that
proves it isn't simple. What stopped us from opening the
door was that the voice didn't sound cold.
There was no shake. It didn't sound old or young.
It sounded like a recording played in a room.
Shane said we have a rifle. The voice said we have a rifle
after a gap of 3 or 4 seconds. Same tone, same spacing, no
rise, no fall. I wrote the time down because
writing small facts was easier than listening between 11:20 PM
and 1:05 AM. Others called out, always to the
same purpose. I'm hurt.
Help, please? Once, very clearly, Danny,
followed by Danny's last name. Then we have a rifle.
That same phrase again, exactly. We tried the radio on Channel 3.
The other said in the gear bin, answered with static, and then a
clean blast of our own voices, delayed by a second or two.
Kyle unplugged the cabin bulb and we turned the Lantern down
so we could see the windows in the reflection.
I could see my own face plain, and the doorway was a hole at my
shoulder height. Every time a gust came, the rope
outside twitched on the porch post and made a soft rubbing
squeak. At 1:37 AM, the West window
clicked in the frame in a way that I've only heard when
someone presses on the center of the glass with a flat palm.
That's not a noise wind makes. We stacked the table on its side
and then the bunks against the W wall.
There isn't much mass to those bunks, but a barrier is a
barrier. The stove dried the air until my
sinuses hurt. I could smell the wool of the
Army blankets and the stale, not dirty, smell of plywood in an
unheated space. This is a detail that returns in
my dreams. The shape of Marcus's headlamp
cone on the ceiling, narrow and white with a yellow ring,
steady, not shaking. While outside something scraped
a line across the clapboard at just above shoulder height and
stopped right where the seam of two boards met.
The scrape was 6 feet off the deck.
We measured that later, at 2:12 AM, not long after the scraping
stopped, we heard the voice again, but at the back of the
cabin. Same recordings of our phrases,
same Donny, then a new one, Liv. Then after 10 seconds, Liv
pitched a little lower and then lower still, like someone trying
out two sizes of the same shoe. Liv was the one who began to
cry. She did it without noise, face
bare, tears, straight down. Kyle put his hand on the back of
her neck and left it there. We had a talk we didn't want to
have about whether there could be a person out there and what
our responsibilities would be if there were.
We listed facts, temperature, wind, no tracks across the snow
to the windows since morning. The generator shed door wedged
from the inside. The choke lever snapped the nail
marks in the door rail. The fact that the voice had no
breath in it and copied us like a loop.
We decided we were hearing something that would say
anything to get the door open. The decision didn't make us feel
moral. It felt like putting a lid on a
pot that was about to pop. At 3 O 3:00 AM, something hit
the porch. That's the time on my phone,
recorded in my notes. The deck boards shook.
The wall by the door flexed. A cluster of small things fell
off the top of the fridge. The first hit was a single
impact. The second at 3 O 4:00 AM, was 2
feet, moving around, weight shifting.
The third was a slow, steady pressure on the door that made
both hinges creak. Danny stood up with the rifle
and clicked the hammer back. She didn't point it at the door,
just kept it at the floor at an angle.
We had two boxes of soft .20 rounds each.
We didn't want to shoot the door open for it.
At 3 O 6:00 AM the pressure stopped and there was a sound
like a big animal stepping off onto powder snow.
Marcus went to the east window and lifted the bottom edge of
the blind of fingers width. Then he whispered.
Oh, not surprised, not scared. Just like he had finally solved
a math problem he had wrestled with for an hour and didn't like
the answer. He didn't describe it then, and
I won't describe it in a way that throws a curtain over other
people's pictures. I will say it stood tall enough
that its head when it turned was above the eave, which was about
8 feet. I will say it was narrow at the
waist, shoulders too wide for the rest of it, and that its
elbows seem too far down. I will say a deer skin tears
easily when pulled the wrong way.
And the thing on the ice the morning before hadn't torn.
Daylight didn't end the problem, it changed it.
At 7:45 AM the wind fell. The temperature climbed towards
0. We made a plan to leave once the
lights settled. The road would be drifted, but
if we packed quickly and moved in one line, we could get to the
cars by 9:00 AM and get them started.
From there would be another problem, but a familiar one
involving shovels and calling the plow guy from the last
mailbox. We ate dry granola.
Danny said she thought she smelled iron again and opened
the east window an inch to prove there was no source in the
cabin. The air came in sharp and cut
down the stove draw so the smoke nudged out along the stove top
seam for two coughs. In that small breath, the smell
came with such clarity that even Shane stopped talking.
Fresh blood, cold hair and a sour note like old pennies.
She shut the window. By 8:10 AM we had packed.
We wrapped our sleeping bags around our torsos, inside our
coats to build a layer. We tied the hauling rope around
our waists with four foot spacing.
Kyle took the front to brake trail, then Danny, then Liv, me,
Marcus and Shane at the back with the rifle.
We had one rule that mattered. If one stopped, all stopped.
If one fell, the person behind went down on purpose and the
person in front braced. We opened the door at 8:18 AM
with the 3030 levelled at the frame.
The porch was clear. The temperature was -3°F.
The sky was uniform white. Visibility in the trees was 2
rows of trunks before everything merged into Gray.
We stepped off the porch and immediately saw the line of
those long narrow dents coming from the West woods into the
hard pack of our little yard. They circled the cabin once,
twice, then four times, then cut a quick path to the generator
shed and then back into the trees.
No prints crossed the final 12 feet from the edge of the yard
to the porch. We moved at 8:22 AM.
Twenty yards from the cabin, Liv's headlamp came off her hat
and swung down. She let go of the lamp instead
of the rope, and the lamp bounced in the second she bent
to catch it, something touched the rope between her and Danny.
Not a pull, a weight. It pushed the rope down in the
snow, and the rope burned across my hip as it took the slack.
I fell backward. Shane went forward to keep me
from jerking Liv off her feet and the rifle barrel dipped.
Danny did what you do when a dog runs between your legs on a
leash. She lifted and tried to set the
rope over it, and her glove came away with a Sheen of black hair.
That wasn't hair the way a dog's his hair, more like the outer
coarse hairs off a deer tail, but longer, 4 inches straight.
It was so black it showed blue. She stared at it for half a
second and then we kept moving. No one said run.
No one had to. At 8:28 AM, something paced us
to the left, in the trees West of the drive.
It didn't stay parallel. It would get ahead, then fall
back, then get ahead again. We could see it sometimes at the
edge of white. It was wrong in a plain way.
It would move behind a stand of three trunks, and then for too
long there would be nothing again.
And then it would step out where the line of those trunks
couldn't have hid the distance it had travelled.
Call it a trick of the eye if you want.
I'm only saying what I saw. At 8:34 AM came the voice from
40 yards ahead on the drive, our own flat spoken.
We have a rifle, like someone had set up a speaker at the bend
and toggled it. We paused for one second exactly
and then moved again. I will keep saying times because
they are the pegs that hold the thing up in my mind.
At 8:37 AM the line broke, the Dr. dipped and the snow was
deeper. Kyle misstepped into the ditch.
Danny braced, but her foot hit a buried log and she dropped to a
knee. The rope jerked at all our
waists like a pulled kite string.
Liv got pulled to the side. I sat down on purpose and dug my
heels in. Marcus took a step back to help
Liv, and in that instant whatever had been pacing us gave
up on pacing. I did not see it.
Take Marcus. I heard the rope sing and I saw
it saw into the top layer of drift.
And I saw the shape at the left edge of my vision block out a
band of Gray the width of a doorway, and I saw Marcus's
mouth open without sound. Before the sound came.
The rope went past me so hard it burned through my glove, and I
felt the heat of it through two layers.
Shane fired once, maybe twice. I know he worked the lever
between because I saw the brass kick and spin in the cold air.
The rope went slack and then tight, but the tightness was
wrong. It was high up from the snow, at
an angle that made no sense if Marcus was on the ground.
I leaned my weight into it and felt 0, like I'd hooked a line
into a tree and was pretending to help.
Danny shouted cut it and Kyle had his belt knife open from his
fall and slashed the section between Danny and Liv.
The hiss in my ear after the cut was the wind in the trees, sharp
and even, like a line of steam. Shane fired again.
Then again. The echo behaved the way sound
behaves in trees, which is to say it came back crooked and
delayed. Somewhere in that echo,
something screamed. It did not sound like any animal
I know, and I grew up around coyotes and foxes and the
strange holes they have in their throats.
This had language in it, but not words.
It stopped as if someone had put a hand on it and squeezed.
We got to the mailbox at 8:52 AM, four minutes under our plan,
but it felt like hours. Kyle's hands shook so hard he
dropped his keys twice. Liv couldn't get her seat belt
latched and made small sounds with her mouth open like a kid
practicing a whistle that won't start.
Danny kept saying Marcus and then quieting herself, which
made it worse. Shane sat in the truck bed with
the rifle pointed up at nothing in particular and watched the
tree line. I stood beside the driver's door
and counted out loud to 60 and started again because it gave my
mouth something to do. The first time the engine
turned, it coughed, caught, and then died because the idle was
low from the cold. The second time it caught and
held at 800 revolutions per minute, then dipped, then came
back. We were moving by 8:57 AM.
The snow on the seasonal Rd. had drifted, but the crust on top
had a crust on top, and the truck's tires found the ruts
from the plow. We fishtailed once past the last
big spruce and then saw the black ribbon of the maintained
Rd. through the blowing white. Kyle didn't stop at the stop
sign. There was no cross traffic.
There was nothing but that white and the black top and the
sensation of a fingertip lifting from the back of your neck.
Only when we reached the green reflector for the fire number
did anyone look back. The drive was a line of trees
and frozen air. If something stood in it, it
stood still. We found the plow truck a mile
down, turned sideways in the road while the driver knocked
snow crust off the wings. He'd been working up from town
and said he'd have been to us by noon.
Sorry if we got anxious. Danny asked him without preface
if he had seen anything large on or near our Rd. and he said he'd
seen a moose cow and calf 2 mornings back on the county
line. That was it.
We followed his truck into town with the heat up full and our
coats still on because the cold had gotten into us in a way the
heater couldn't push out. We stopped at the Sheriff's
Office at 9:30 AM and told them we had lost a friend in the
woods. We left out the voice and the
Prince. We said he had fallen into the
ditch and been separated and that we needed help combing.
I could see in the deputy's face when I mentioned the generator
shed and the broken choke that we were failing at neutral.
He asked why we were looking at a generator at night and we said
to manage fuel. He asked why we had a gun if we
weren't hunting and we said for wolves.
He said wolves don't come to people and I said we knew that
and I didn't add that sometimes we say things to keep living.
They took our statement and told us to stay put while they
contacted SAR. Search started at 12:10 PM
because there were other calls that day.
We sat in the Civic Center and folding chairs by a heater that
burned propane and made the air taste fried.
A man with a Gray beard brought coffee and told us to drink it
whether we wanted it or not. We did.
At 350 PMA Deputy came back, cleaned his boots on the rubber
mat and told us they had found the cabin and could we come look
to confirm our things so they knew they were in the right
place. We said yes.
The sun was down by then, and we drove in a little convoy of two
sheriff's trucks and the plow truck for the drifted sections.
We stopped at the mailbox. The deputies snapped snowshoes
on with the practice of people who grew up there and lent us 2
pairs and told the rest of us to stay behind the broke trail.
We reached the cabin at 5:20 PM. The door had been ripped
outward. The nail we had hammered was
bent like a hook and still in the jamb.
The padlock lay in the snow 4 feet from the porch, scuffed
with fresh marks as if someone had kicked it.
The West window had a star crack the size of a fist, 1 pane in.
Inside, the stove was open and dead.
The bunks and table we had stacked were slid sideways a
foot on the shed door rail. The two gouges we had seen we're
now 4 set in pairs. They measured 3 inches between
the inner pair and eight inches between the outermost.
One of the deputies put his glove in the longest and said it
felt like something had raked off sapwood with a dull fork off
the porch. The yard was overrun with prints
that matched nothing in the deputies collection book.
That book smelled like school and oil and made my stomach
turn. The prints were the same long
dents we had followed the first morning plus new ones narrower.
Some crossed two and two, some double stepped like something
correcting itself mid stride. The searchers said moose don't
do that. They said people can do that
with stilts, but not on a grade and not that far and not
leaving. No fall or check marks.
They did not say what made them. They did not find Marcus.
We stayed that night at a motel where the bedspreads were brown
and clean. Danny woke three times with her
breath caught and then slept and then woke again.
Shane put the rifle under the bed and saw that there was no
point in doing that and put it back in the truck.
After checking the chamber twice.
Liv laid out her mittens on the heater and stared at them.
Like you look at food you know you need to eat but can't start.
Kyle stood in the shower until the hot water ran out and the
steam drifted away and he was left breathing cold air in a
tiled box. I wrote all this down times,
tastes, temperatures, because it kept the bigger thing from
breaking the room in half in the morning.
We gave the cabin key back to the neighbor who owned it.
He said we'd had bad luck with a transient and he'd put a second
bar on the door and we were welcome again anytime.
He said he'd never had problems up there.
I did not argue. I did not use any of the words
we'd used among ourselves. We drove home, and we kept to
the slow lane for the 1st 50 miles, because passing looked
like a kind of risk we didn't deserve to take.
Over the next weeks, the sheriff called twice.
The second time he asked if we were sure Marcus hadn't talked
about leaving on his own. We said no, he had not.
The deputy said they'd found nothing but a scatter of hair on
a snag near the lake, in a place where the ice bore marks like
something heavy had been set on it and then taken away.
But the marks weren't clear enough to be useful.
He sounded tired. He sounded like a man counting
forms he had to file in triplicate before he could go
home. We said thank you.
After that, we stopped hearing from the county unless we
called, and even then it seemed like the phone lines did not
carry our voices with the same interests they once had.
I know what people think when they hear the word some locals
use for what I'm talking about. They think of a story passed
around as punishment or as a lesson about eating your
neighbor when the food runs out. Which is a lesson that remains
valid even if you don't believe in stories.
I am not telling this to satisfy anyone's want for the shape of a
thing. I'm telling it because the
details matter. The rope that sagged without
pulling. The flat voice that didn't rise
or fall and waited the same 3 seconds every time before
repeating the word it had filed. The lever on the generator
snapped clean at the fulcrum where only a twisting hand could
have done it. The nail Marks and soft pine
that came in pairs, like a person learning to use a tool
and getting better at it the second night.
The hair in Danny's glove that was hair and not and did not
bend so much as pivot. The smell that arrived with
clean air as if it were a component part of winter itself
and not an accident of a wound. We talk among ourselves
sometimes, not often by text or in short calls, and we keep to
facts. Danny transferred to a different
station and says she refuses to pick up out of town overtime.
In January, Liv left her lab and took a job in town and says she
does not sleep when the wind is under 10 miles an hour.
Kyle got a new truck and says he won't take the old seasonal
roads anymore, even in July. Shane keeps the rifle out now in
his own house, which he didn't before, and he says he knows
that doesn't change anything, but a person's hands still like
to hold equipment. Me, I write it down.
Writing the sequence makes it possible to be in rooms without
windows. Again, when people ask about
Marcus, we say what is true, that his car is still in the lot
by the Civic Center, and that his mother came to get his
clothes and that the deputies found nothing a person could
bring to a judge and put on a table.
If you go out there, you won't see a warning sign.
The trees won't have marks. The snow will look like all snow
looks when it is cold enough to squeak.
The cabin will be whatever it is now after someone else mended
the door and set screw plates over the hinges and put a new
lock on the hasp. Maybe somebody will stay there
and have a clean, quiet weekend and go home with a story about
how calm the woods can be when the air is sharp and empty.
I am not saying you will meet what we met.
I am saying we did, and at the end only some of us left that
road. I won't go back.
The others who came out with me won't either.
We set it to each other in the parking lot before we drove off
in three cars, one spot left open between them, the early sun
a white smudge over the town garage.
We said it without drama, like a rule.
We barely got out. That is enough.
We will not go back there again. This is a throwaway.
Don't try to find me. I'm writing this from a place
with no address and one Rd. that doesn't get plowed.
If I disappear after this, print it and hand it to the County
Sheriff or the DNR. Tell them not to say the name
out loud. Tell them I'm sorry.
The cold in the Superior Forest doesn't feel like weather.
It feels like a decision the world made without you.
It gets into your molars and sits behind your eyes.
It slows you down until even your thoughts start to creak.
We had a saying on search and rescue.
If you're sweating, you're dying.
If you're comfortable, you're lying.
That night, I lied to myself for the last time.
We got the call at 1622, two hours before the sun gives up in
December. A trapper named Walt hadn't
checked in. He had a line of Conna Bears set
out along the ice creeks that split the Jack pine.
His niece said he hadn't missed a check in in 20 years, not even
the winter. His truck spun into a ditch and
froze all the way to the axles. She called from town, voice
shaking. You could hear the store radio
behind her, a hockey game hissing through bad speakers.
It made the whole thing feel smaller than it was.
By 17 o'clock I was at staging in the snowplow Turn around off
County 44. My partner Matt thumped my
shoulder with a Mitt in the size of a roast.
He had a grin you could feel through his balaclava.
Last one this year, he said. We'll find him snoring by his
stove. You remember how to smile when
your beard's frozen? I asked.
It's a talent. Most of our team came because
the old men come out for the old men.
Neon jackets popped against the bruised dusk.
Radios rattled. We checked pack weights with
gloved knuckles, each of us pretending we didn't hear the
weather radio whispering numbers with minus signs.
The wind had started stacking needles of snow into the
ditches, making little dunes that wanted to be mountains.
There was one person at staging who wasn't us.
She sat on her tailgate with a thermos in both hands, steam
ghosting her face. I knew her as Dawn, the grocery
store cashier who calls everyone honey and gives kids candy when
their parents aren't looking. Anishinabe, late 50s maybe, so
light on her feet you'd swear the ground was smoother under
her. I'd seen her on the powwow
grounds in the summer, moving like she was made of water.
Her gaze slid past the trucks, past the Volunteer Fire.
Guys spit, laughing at nothing, and found me.
She didn't smile. You're going out there, she
said. That's the job.
You have spruce gum? She asked.
Not in a while. Chew some, she said.
It keeps your mouth busy so you don't say the wrong things.
Matt nudged me, the grin back in his voice.
What, like please and thank you? Don took a breath that looked
like a prayer she refused to say out loud.
Don't whistle, she said. Don't say your names.
Don't answer your names once you're under the trees.
This is the part where someone reading gets mad at me because
this is where I should have listened and stayed.
But I've stacked sandbags against the Rainy River during a
spring flood, slept in a helicopter that smelled like
spilled fuel and wet wool, followed a bleeding boot trail
into a Musk egg no map admits exists.
I knew cold. I knew lost.
I did not know. Hungry.
We strapped on snowshoes and went in.
The trail into the timber was a tunnel of blue light, the snow
reflecting the last of the day up into the furs so their
undersides glowed. We walked single file to save
energy. My pack frames creaked like
holes in ice. The only thing that kept time
was the squeak crunch of snow under our webbing and the
occasional radio check that came in as a mumble from someone's
chest. At 1812 we found Walt's truck at
the old forestry gate. The door was shut but not
locked. The thermos on the passenger
seat was capped and half full, still warm.
The dashboard had a photograph tucked in the corner, a boy in a
little orange hoodie holding a trapping license too big for his
hands. The boy wasn't the point, the
hands were the point. It was as if the picture was of
two hands luck had blessed and the face attached to them just
happened to be there too. We followed the snowmobile track
behind the gate. It ran clean through the 1st
flat of Pines, cut down to the old Tote Rd. and then kept going
north over a Beaver Dam that had turned to a lump of white in the
dark. Our headlamps carved cones into
the cold. The breath coming out of the
conifers hung around like fog. And then the track broke.
He jerked the sled hard right off the road and into young
popple little fists of trunks that slapped your sleeves.
We lost the line, found it again, lost it again.
Whatever happened, he'd been in a hurry.
I pictured the way old men get angry at their own bodies.
Legs that forget their legs, fingers that turn into useless
pink wood. We reached a Cut Bank where wind
had scoured the snow down to starved grass.
The trail turned to a smear. After 20 minutes of grid
searching, I smelled copper. I don't know how else to say it.
It wasn't blood. There wasn't any in that
temperature. It was the idea of blood, the
penny ghost of it, the way a coin tastes when you put it in
your mouth. I smell it too, Matt said.
We moved our lamps in long, slow sweeps.
The beam caught on something thin and pale, stuck in a
sapling, fluttering. It was a strip of hide, marten
by the feel, frozen just enough that it could wave like a flag
and not snap. It had been tied with green jute
twine, same kind Walt used to keep everything from coffee tins
to prayer bundles shut. The knot wasn't his, it was
clumsy and too tight, like whoever tied it had hands that
didn't remember being hands. Marker.
Matt asked. Maybe we followed strips like
that every 30 yards. A trail of small mistakes.
Twice. The strips were tied to nothing,
just crimes against the idea of nodding, hanging in mid air like
whoever made them didn't understand the sapling was what
made it an anchor. You tell yourself stories to
keep going. Mine was simple.
He'd gotten cold. He'd lost his mind.
He'd laced the world with little reminders of himself so the
world would have to give him back.
We hit the Creek at 19 O3. Its skin was black where the
current kept the ice, thin and silver where it had frozen solid
under blown powder. There was a snow bridge over it,
because the wind didn't care about us or the Creek or the
physics of all that weight. We crossed on the far side.
A balsam snag loomed like a hanging thing.
Someone had fastened more jute there around a fist sized
bundle. Don't touch it, Matt said.
I didn't hear him or pretended not to.
I pulled off a glove and unwrapped the twine.
Inside was a knot of rushes and old bones.
Squirrel, rabbit, a little bird skull with the beak missing.
Spruce gum glued the bundle into itself, amber, stiff.
I didn't know the meaning of it, I just knew the feeling,
watching your dad throw away a drawing you made because to him
it looks like trash. Because he doesn't understand
that in your hands it had power. Leave it, Matt repeated.
We should take it. I said if he made it, it means
he was here, and if he didn't? I wrapped the twine back around
and pulled the knot tight. It sounded like stepping on
frozen hair. There were tracks around the
tree in the snow. Not the tidy little ovals of
deer, not the punching circles of moose, not the two by four of
a man in snowshoes, either. These were narrow, wrong, as if
something that had once known how feet worked had forgotten
and was trying to reinvent them with sticks.
Long claws or long toes had gouged the crust so each track
had a ragged tail. The stride was wrong too.
Too long, too high, sometimes overlapping itself like a jitter
in a handwriting sample. I don't scare easy.
That's not a brag, it's a result of too much time alone in places
your pulse doesn't belong. But those tracks made a feeling
rise under my breastbone like lift on a wing, a sensation that
if I didn't hold on to something, I would be peeled off
the surface of the world and lost.
We moved by 20 o'clock we'd made a lean to from a tarp and found
the old line cabin on the topo, a small square by a nameless
Creek bend. The world had shrunk to what our
headlamps could bless. I kept my glove on the radio to
keep the battery warm. Every 15 minutes we checked in
with staging. All good, all good, all God.
The typo lives in that sentence. I keep it because it's what I
wrote in my log with a pencil that squeaked at 2110.
We saw the cabin. It hunched under snow like
something guilty stovepipe angled under ice.
We stamped down a pad and did our best to heave the drifted
door open. Inside smelled like mouse piss
and dry rot. A stove pipe yawned from a drum
stove painted with hunting scenes and black flake.
The bunks sagged with old blankets that had eaten so much
smoke they were a kind of hide now.
Better than dying in the trees, Matt said.
I'll get the stove. He shook his head.
You're colder, you light, I'll brew.
We moved in the quiet of people who know that noise takes
energy. I packed stove with splits from
the wood box. We had ultralight morality.
If you find a wood box stocked, you refill it before you leave,
even if it costs you. Someone had kept the rule.
I let a baseball of Birch bark loose under the kindling and
bent close, breath held, eyes stinging, until the bark decided
to be more than itself. The first crackle felt like
mercy itself remembering my name.
Something knocked against the far wall just once, a shoulder
bump. We both froze, then there was a
scraping along the logs, like antlers grown too wide for the
door frame dragging. Then two soft impacts.
Knuckles on a window testing porcupine, Matt said, and even
he could hear how bad the lie sounded.
Maybe a branch? I said.
He moved to the window with a headlamp and cupped his hands to
the glass. No prints, he said, just just
ice. We ate noodles out of the pot
with spoons. I hated every swallow for how
human it made me feel. How soft, how made of grain.
We didn't talk. Heat slowly rolled out from the
stove, and it was like being forgiven.
Every once in a while we heard something move outside.
Not circling, not pacing. More like a person learning to
remember a song they used to love.
Trying the notes in different orders, practicing AT22O6.
Someone called my name. It wasn't a voice.
It wasn't not a voice, Evan, it said almost gently, the way a
mother says now when you're making a scene in the grocery
store. Matt stared at me.
My spoon clanked the pot. I didn't, he started.
The voice tried again, as if something was re threading a
machine and jamming on the spools.
EV, Evan, I have never in my life wanted so badly to answer
my own name. I told you I don't scare easily,
but the desire was a hand on the back of my head.
It wanted me to turn it, to answer.
Present, I thought, the way you do when teachers call you.
Don's voice from the tailgate in my head.
Don't answer your names once you're under the trees.
I put my hand over my mouth and stared at the stove until the
red of it bled into my vision. Outside, the knocking stopped.
The scraping of antlers stopped the trying stopped the
practicing the play. Silence fell like a blanket the
landscape tucked itself into. We didn't sleep.
We were too warm to remember cold correctly, too cold to
trust. Warmth is anything but a trick.
At 1:00 I stood up because I needed to move or I would climb
the walls. I took my lamp and shown it
around the cabin and froze on the table.
Someone, something, had placed my boot laces there.
They were coiled into a perfect square.
That means nothing to you unless you've been in the woods long
enough to learn. The geometry can be a form of
intent. Animals don't make squares.
Wind doesn't men do, or things that envy men do.
My boots were still on my feet. My laces were still threaded,
but there they were, a pair of laces exactly like mine, worn in
the same places the aglet chewed where I used to bite it as a
nervous habit. They were also wet, as if they
had been in a mouth recently. Matt, I said softly.
He looked, then looked away so fast you could hear the muscles
in his neck refuse. He stripped his gloves off so he
could feel the wooden handle of his knife.
Walt, he whispered, like the old man might walk in and laugh and
tell us we'd been hazed by the world's worst camp prank.
I shook my head. We packed in silence.
The stove hissed and ranted with heat.
The aluminum snow shovel on the wall clicked as it expanded a
little metronome. At 2:11, the door tried to open.
I say tried, like a polite person at your house who's not
sure if they should let themselves in.
Pressure came and went, the latch ticking in its ring.
Twice it lifted high enough to clear.
Twice it let itself settle back. The third time it didn't.
The door swung inward and Cold walked in, wearing a man.
He was taller than any man I've ever known, not because of how
many inches there were from his feet to his head, but because of
how many inches there were from his head to the idea of a
ceiling. He had ended up with a human
shape, the way driftwood ends up in the shape of a woman.
Sometimes you could see the resemblance from the right
angle. If love was involved.
His face was a misunderstanding that had been allowed to become
permanent. Eyes too deep, mouth a little
too far back from teeth that had forgotten the courtesy of lips.
When he breathed in the cold pleaded with him to keep it, fog
moving backward into him. He wore antlers because some
part of him believed that was how you made yourself handsome.
He did not come in far. He did not need to.
It would be like saying the sea came into your house when the
tide rose and fingered the floorboards in a storm.
You went into the sea. Matt stood buried to the Hilton
himself. The knife looked like jewelry in
his hand, something you'd wear to a prom and regret later when
you saw the pictures. I had the ash handle of the
stove poker. It felt like something for a
different problem. The man thing tried my name one
more time. Evan, it said almost right and
old as a mouthful of winter. No, I said, because I didn't
know what else you said to weather.
He tilted his head and 1 antler touched the lentil of the door
and left a dirty mark like a mouse tail.
He looked at the stove. He looked at our water pot,
rhymed. He looked at where the laces lay
square on the table. Behind his teeth there was a
pinkness that made me want to lick salt.
I can only tell you how it felt. Imagine you are 5.
Imagine your mother has walked away in a store and you are
suddenly certain every person is your mother, if only you say mom
loudly enough. You walk up to a man at the end
of the aisle and you say it. He turns.
He is not your mother, but for a split second he is a thing that
could feed you. He took a breath and made a
sound that isn't a word in any language meant for people.
It sounded like wind across a bottle.
It sounded like hunger itself. Trying to learn to be polite.
It wanted to say, May I come in? It wanted to say, you did this
when you open the door. Matt whispered back.
Because even with that thing, three steps into our daytime, he
was my partner and we had trained together and he loved me
enough to get between me and an animal pretending at grace.
The thing stepped backward into the dark like a deer being
forgiving. It touched the door with the fur
on its wrist and the door closed because the door wanted that
more than it wanted to be a door.
We sat and waited for dawn that never came.
At 810 radio check from staging, I clicked and said all.
God, I rubbed my eyes. Good, I repeated, like a kid
being corrected at the dinner table.
We decided we were done being small together in that small
place. We stepped out into the bright
that comes after a storm, where every edge has been sharpened by
cold and every sound is elastic. Our tracks from the night before
had been polished by wind. The ones from the door had
filled in strangely, not drifted, but slumped.
No print of a boot, no sign of Walt.
There was one track that didn't need snow to remember it.
The door frame had teeth marks where the antler had kissed it.
We went north because the old man had gone north and because I
could feel N like a fever. Now I was aware of my tongue
against my teeth and how sharp they were not.
I was aware of my hands and how unfurred they were.
It is a special kind of embarrassment to feel how
unequipped you are, how unarmed to be a thing.
You OK? Matt asked once.
Yeah, I lied. We cut through low Bush Willow.
A Raven flew overhead, so high it was a moving piece of
punctuation against a story I didn't understand.
The Martin hide flags came fewer now, as if something had gotten
bored of pretending to help. At 9:37 we hit a ring in the
trees no wind could have made. It was a place where the snow
was tamped into something like muscle, and the trunks of the
spruce were scored chest high with long slices, as if someone
had taken a rake and tried to comb the bark down like hair.
In the middle of the circle was a pile of things that could have
been a nest or a list. A bent trap steak with mud
frozen on the tip. A wolf's scat with hair in it
that wasn't wolf hair. A piece of flannel shirt with
snaps. A shin bone of something small
and wrong. A ball of green jute twine, and
next to it a single aglet bitten from a lace.
Little brass tongue with teeth marks like moons.
I took a step toward it. The cold stepped back.
The cold was afraid of what lived here.
You smell that? I asked.
Like pennies? Matt said.
Like pennies that want you to be the slot.
He swallowed and nodded. What now we leave it, I said.
He grinned. You learning?
We turned to go, and the trees tilted, Not all at once, not
like a wind, like the woods had clenched.
The sound was a sound I had never heard before, and will
hear forever now. Snow sliding down bark, not
because gravity rubbed its hands together, but because bark had
become thinner in One Direction and thicker in another.
The circle of scoriated trunks flexed.
Small chips rained down like white moths.
I grabbed Matt's sleeve. He was looking up, mouth open.
Something moved in the canopy. I had never once in my life
thought about a thing like that. As an arboreal animal.
I had thought of it as a mistake that could walk, but there are
always new images for hunger. It came down the ladder of a
tree so fast the eye can't do that kind of math.
Matt screamed. It wasn't fear.
It was what your vocal cords do when gravity is not where you
remember it. I can't tell you what I saw in
sequence. I can tell you the shape of it
was wrong for descent, and it made itself right by bending
where nothing bends without breaking unless it's deciduous,
and it was not deciduous. There are rules about impalement
and physics and what happens if a body meets a stake moving at a
certain speed. The only rule that applied was
that something in those trees had memorized how thumbs work
well enough to make traps and then had forgotten immediately
because memory requires being fed.
The stake went into mat. We both had identical notes in
our logs. At the end of the day, the stake
learned a new use. I know because I found his
notebook later and read it with shaking hands, his pencil
strokes tearing the page. He didn't die.
That was the worst part. He did that flopping breath that
makes you want to tell someone a joke, Any joke, because if you
can make them smile, then surely they aren't drowning on dry
ground with their eyes trying to point in two different
directions. I turned the world into
sections. Section one, stop the bleeding.
Section 2, stop the thing. Section 3, get mad out.
Section 4, stop the thing. Section 5, stop the thing.
I had no bandages big enough to argue with what had happened to
him. I had a stove.
I had a nest we weren't supposed to touch.
I had a memory that old cabins sometimes have iron things in
them that can be made to remember they were stars once.
I need you, I told him and pressed my forehead to his, and
he said, Find Walt. I need you, I said again, and in
the corner of my vision something large reconfigured
itself in the branches, like someone folding laundry badly.
I ran. The world couldn't follow me
into the small circle of heat I built from panic and Birch bark
and a split Birch. But the thing could.
It came to the door of the cabin this time and leaned in, and I
understood too late that it hadn't wanted to come in before
because it had wanted us to invite it now.
It didn't care. I grabbed the stove's ash door
and wrenched until the pin screamed loose.
I jammed the plate into the coals until the iron went from
black to dull cherry to something that had to hurt to
look at in the doorway. The thing made that bottle
sound, that hunger noise, and the antler tip scored new
history into the log. It was patient when I was not.
That was its advantage. It could wait for me.
It could wait for winters. It had, it did.
When the iron burned white at the edge, I grabbed it with a
wool mitten, which charred instantly and glued to the plate
and ran into the clean kill silence of 10 below zero.
I can only give you a still from that moment, iron swinging up
thing leaning down, the smell of hot meat so pure and horrifying
it made my sinuses ache. The iron kissed the part of its
face that a human would use to smile.
The hiss was not steam, the hiss was language.
It was the sound of something that believes it can take
anything it wants from a world being told no by something older
than language. Metal, fire, falling stars.
It recoiled the way a deer does when an electric fence forgets
itself and becomes a memory. It knocked into a sapling, and
the sapling exploded into powder like a dandelion clock.
It backed away, not from me, but from the idea that anything
could refuse it. I did not chase.
I ran to Matt. He wasn't screaming anymore.
He had gotten small, the way big men get when the world jams them
into the cracks between seconds. I put my hand against his cheek,
the way people do in movies, as if heat could be argued back
into a person. I lied again.
You're good, you're good. I'm going to get the sled, I
said. He did not nod.
His eyes shifted toward me. I will spend the rest of my life
writing about the way his eyes shifted toward me and never make
it mean enough, Walt, he said. He was faithful to the end.
I lifted him the stake, tried to learn about leverage.
I told it no. Sometimes you can tell the world
no and it will listen for a second.
He made that whistling sound through his teeth that used to
make girls think he was cute. When we were 20, we were not 20.
I made a travoy from 2 saplings and a tarp and pulled him.
The world simplified. Pull, breathe.
Don't answer your name. Don't answer his.
Don't think about the noise in the trees that wants to be
laughter but keeps failing. Don't think about Dawn's hands
around that thermos, or the way she didn't say goodbye because
she didn't believe goodbye was a thing the night would recognize.
Somewhere behind us, the thing moved in a way that shook snow
like applause from the limbs. We did not go back to the truck.
We went to the road. We went to the thaw.
The plows kept wider than now. We went to the moonlight.
I am jumping time because you need me to live through this to
finish the story, and I need to live through it to get to the
part that matters, the part where I failed.
At 11:44, a snow machine crested the drift and the world became a
geometry of noise you could stake a heart to.
I waved, I yelled. I said nothing that meant
anything. The machine stopped.
A kid I didn't know pulled his goggles up.
You, Evan, he said. I nodded before I remembered the
warning. Saying yes is a way of answering
to your name, too. He looked at Matt and went wide
around him like the wounded have gravity.
Jesus, what? Don't say that either, I said,
because it felt like a prayer would attract a thing that feeds
on them. Just help.
We loaded Matt. We strapped him.
The kids mouth kept doing little fish opens as he registered the
situation in increments. We left the trees spitting heat
like a lip match all the way to the blacktop.
We threw him in the back of a county truck and slammed the
tailgate. I climbed in with him and put my
body around his like I could be a blanket and a God.
The kid gunned it in the mirror. I saw the edge of the forest
like a lip. Matt didn't make it to the
hospital, he made it to the bridge over the Pigeon River,
which is not a metaphor and not important to you, except that
the bridge's trusses make a sound when tires hit them.
A wonk like a heartbeat. His stopped between two wonks.
And the third one was for me. They cut the tarp away.
They cut me away. They cut his shirt away.
The emergency room was full of the smell of old coffee and new
bleach and the squeak of shoes. The doctor said words like
perforation and hemorrhagic, and the kid who had driven us threw
up into a glove because nothing else was handy.
They cleaned the blood from the metal boards on the table and
the blood froze on the floor where it had spilled, because
this is a place where water never forgives you for making it
be water. They gave me briefing questions
and I failed them. I failed the whole test.
I told them there had been a man at the door with antlers, and
they looked at me and then looked at the floor and then
looked at me again, as if I might turn into someone who made
more sense. I told them there had been a
square made of laces, and they nodded like this was a metaphor
they were supposed to encourage. When I told them about the iron
and what it did, they wrote nothing.
That part didn't fit into anyone's chart.
The sheriff's deputy asked if we had found Walt.
I said no. He asked if we thought Walt did
this. I said no.
He asked if I was sure. I said yes, because some words
require you to be brave even when you are a coward.
He said a lot of things about hypothermia, the paradox of
undressing, firewood, hallucinations, hiding in stove
ovens like witches. He gave the monster a story it
could wear to the dance. They let me go because there
were forms they couldn't bend into my shape.
I walked out into dark so clear I could count stars through
different layers of air. You can hear ice crack on a
river half a mile away on a night like that.
You can hear the highway sing and believe it's a voice.
I went to the grocery where Don works because I wanted to stand
near something alive and being a person.
Because sometimes you need someone to make you stand in
line and take your 20 and put your change in your hand and
that's how you get back inside yourself.
She was behind the counter. She looked up.
She saw me. She put down the rotisserie
chicken tongs. You took it apart, she said.
The bundle. I asked, because I wanted the
grace of misunderstanding. Winter, she said.
You took Winter apart and invited hunger in.
I put it back, I said, more loudly than a man should talk in
that store. She shook her head.
Once is enough. Don't say his name.
Don't say your name. Don't give it the map.
I burned it, I said. I burned its face.
She nodded, as if that, at least, was a grammar she could
live with. She poured spruce gum into a
paper cup and slid it across the counter.
Chew, she said. Keep your mouth busy.
I chewed. It tasted like clean.
I thought about the iron and the way it glowed, a small star you
could wrap your hand around, and the things recoil and I felt I
had held onto something that could be a life raft if I didn't
let it turn to a needle. I have to go back, I said.
Don't, she said. There's an old man out there in
a circle of trees being curated. You think he's alive?
She asked softly, not mocking, just measuring, a hope to see if
it would fit through a door. I think alive is not the only
thing you can be and still be saved.
I said and realized I meant taken back, not saved.
People die in the woods all the time.
We take the bodies back so their names stop wandering.
She nodded once and put something else in my hand, a
small pouch the color of snow when it's old, tied with hide.
Wear it on your chest, she said. Don't open it.
Don't ask me what's in it. Don't thank me.
You learn a new kind of obedience in a winter like that.
I went back that afternoon. The moon was up before the sun
was down, because that's how petty they are in December.
They fight and make you move between them like a child of
divorce. I didn't call staging because I
wanted to be the only idiot on the report if this went
sideways. I left my truck at the same turn
around and I walked in with my eyes lowered like something in
the trees had bright lights I didn't want to blind myself
with. The bundle on the sapling was
gone. The tracks had wandered over
themselves so many times the world was just footprints
pretending to be shadows. I found the ring in the trees.
By smell, I don't mean that as a metaphor.
It smelled like meat cut from bone and ice that had learned to
laugh. The pile in the center had
grown. There was a thermos cap with
teeth dense in it. There was a strip of old man's
flannel with a pocket, and in the pocket there was a license
card with a photograph of a boy in orange and the hands I told
you about earlier. The card was old.
The boy was older now. I hoped he could keep those
hands when this was over. Walt, I said, then clamped my
lips so hard I tasted iron that wasn't there.
A voice above me said Walt, and it didn't sound like me, and it
didn't sound like the bottle wind anymore either.
It sounded like a choir that had been told it could eat if it
learned to harmonize. Don't answer, I told myself, and
this time I listened. I made a plan out of three
parts. Plans are always three parts
when you want to feel like protagonists.
Part 1. Become less appealing.
Part 2. Make a mouthful.
The mouth will regret. Part 3.
Do not get invited. For the first, I stripped down
to my base layers, then wetted them from my canteen.
I rubbed ashes from my stove brick into my skin until I
smelled like something the world had already eaten.
For the second, I took the rest of the spruce gum and chewed
until my saliva was gluey. I spit it into the mouth of my
spare Nalgene and mixed it with powdered pepper and the little
bottle of pain cream from my kit and shook it until it looked
like something illegal. I poured it on the outside of my
parka, the sleeves, the back of my neck.
I made myself taste like medicine in tree.
For the third, I took Don's pouch and looped it where my dog
tags would go if I had ever been that kind of man.
It sat over my sternum like a small patient animal.
It warmed. Don't ask me to tell you what
was in it. I didn't open it.
I am grateful every day that I didn't give the story that
piece. I stepped into the circle.
The trees flexed. The thing moved along a branch
like a knot behind a rope. It had burned poorly around the
mouth. New flesh had filmed over the
edges in a way flesh doesn't do. It looked offended, which is a
ridiculous word until you've seen something that thought it
was the definition of desire. Meet something that said no,
Walt. It said.
Perfect. This time the name rang exactly
like the boy in the photo might say it in a kitchen while asking
for more pancakes. It said it again, Walt, and this
time the syllable went through me and came out the other side
and made the snow shiver. I tasted spruce and hurt.
I breathed through the pouch's slow heat.
I took a coal from the lidded stove box I had strapped to my
pack. I don't know if you've ever
carried a coal across snow. It feels like smuggling summer.
I dropped it into a nest of punky wood and bark.
I'd prepared and breathed and breathed and got a little
universe going. The thing hung back.
It was not afraid. It was cautious, the way cats
are when they realized the table has moved 1/4 inch and the
universe is thus unacceptable. It looked at the fire.
It looked at me. It looked at the pile of curated
wrong in the center of the ring. It made that bottle sound in
reverse, out instead of in. That somehow was worse.
I said I'm not inviting you. And when my mouth opened, the
pouch warmed until it hurt and I shut up.
It came down slow at first, then fast.
I had one trick. I threw my parka like a matador
throws his red. It hit the thing around the
shoulders and the hood flopped over its burned mouth.
It inhaled reflexively and filled its nose with menthol and
pepper and spruce and the idea of being chewed by humans.
It made a noise that could have been laughter, if laughter could
cut ice. I moved on it with the iron from
the stove lid again, and I knew this was hubris and stupidity
and men. I hid it.
It didn't matter how many times I hid it.
It mattered that I hid it once in the eye.
Not the eye, the place that held the idea of the eye together.
It reeled the trees, flung up snow like goats at a sacrificial
altar, shaking their stupid beards after drinking.
It leapt away from me the way a man jumps from a hose that has
surprised him by being a snake. It took the flannel scrap in its
claw hand. It took the thermos cap.
It took nothing else. It sprang into the canopy and
disappeared. I followed the crash sound until
I couldn't tell if the sound was in the trees or in my bones.
I went to the pile in the middle.
I went on my knees, because sometimes the only posture left
is the one where you don't pretend you can be tall.
There was a thing in the pile I hadn't seen because I hadn't
wanted to. A glove inside the glove.
A hand. Old man's hand.
The hand of the boy in the photo. 40 years later.
The skin was waxed into itself by cold and desire.
The fingers were curled as if they had died around something
they loved. I took that hand like it was the
only thing left in the world. I put it in my pack and it
warmed a little and smelled like trapped thyme.
I didn't know what else to do but give it back.
On the way out, I felt the thing following me along the tops of
the trees. Patient again.
Offended again, my parka steamed where I had drenched it in lies.
The pouch burned cold against my breastbone.
A strange contradiction that made sense.
The boy in the photograph had probably eaten pancakes with
real Maple syrup. Someone had slid the bottle
across the table and said don't drown them.
He had drowned them anyway. He had laughed and wiped his
mouth. I walked into the store and put
the hand on the counter on a paper towel.
Dawn didn't flinch. She reached out and touched the
back of the glove with two fingers, like a woman touching a
letter that says nothing and everything.
She nodded once, like a woman saying grace without moving her
lips. Then she wrapped the hand back
up tighter, smaller, more done. She placed the bundle in a
grocery bag and handed it back to me.
Take him where he belongs, she said.
I drove to the gate on County 44.
I walked the road all the way to the plow.
Turn around. I put the bag under the
photograph on the dashboard of Walt's truck.
I tucked the thermos cap next to it, because there are games.
Even hunger shouldn't be allowed to win.
I sat in the driver's seat and put my hands on the wheel and
breathed until the ice on the windshield crawled inward like a
spider dying. That was two weeks ago.
The thing comes to my porch at night and leans its antlers
against my windows because the glass remembers heat and makes a
sound that pleases it. It tries my name and there are
days it gets close enough that I feel my heart rise to go to it
like a dog to a whistle. I chew spruce gum until my jaw
aches so I won't say the wrong thing to the dark.
I keep the stove iron propped in the coals like a weapon I can
pretend is just a tool. I cannot tell if I have kept it
out or let it in politely in a way no one can see.
The hunger has learned something from me.
Maybe how to be patient. Maybe how to make squares out of
laces. Twice I have found my boot laces
on my kitchen table, laid out in little maps that look like
county roads in winter. Twice I have found my name
written in frost on the inside of the window and watched it
fade when my breath hit it. Once I woke with the taste of
penny in my mouth and the iron cooling beside my bed and a
small cigarette burn on my palm where I must have touched it in
my sleep. Once I woke standing barefoot in
the snow in my yard and only the pouch around my neck was warm.
I am not righteous. I am not a hero.
I brought something home because I wanted to draw a straight line
between a forest and a town and say here, it doesn't care about
lines, it cares about doors. If you live north of the 47th
parallel and you hear your name called from the tree line at
night, don't answer. If your window fogs up with your
breath and you see letters in it, you don't remember writing,
don't read them out loud. If you're out in the sticks and
you find a bundle of bones tied with twine, leave it shut, tie
it tighter, and walk away backward like you don't have a
spine to turn. And if you have an iron and a
fire, make a little star. Sometimes the world only listens
when you speak in a language it recognizes.
Heat and hurt, the kind that says you cannot eat here.
It will sulk, it will wait. It will learn your patterns and
your stairs and your songs. It will do a better impression
of you than you could do of it. It will notice that winter makes
us all smaller and some of us hollow enough to crawl into.
This is the part where I tell you I'm OK and that all you have
to do is follow these rules and you will be too.
That would be a different genre than the one I'm writing in.
At 2:13 this morning, someone knocked on my door.
Not the test knock. Not the polite am I invited.
This was a neighbor knock, the kind where someone comes to
borrow sugar. I got out of bed and took my
iron and set the iron on the stove and waited until stars
came back to live in it. Evan said a voice, not almost,
not practice. It was a voice I loved best in
the world. It was Matt, he had the little
upturn at the end he used when he wanted me to help him move a
couch. The sound that says you owe me
with a smile Evan, he said again because names are keys and I was
the lock. I didn't answer.
I threw up quietly in my mouth and swallowed.
I put my hand on the pouch and it was neither hot nor cold this
time. It was heavy.
It was a weight exactly the shape of guilt.
Evan Buddy, Matt said, and his breath fogged under the door in
a way breath doesn't when the night is this cold.
He laughed the same laugh from 20 years ago, the one that used
to kick soccer balls into lakes purely to see whether they would
skip open up. I opened the window instead.
I leaned out into the cut glass. Night, and I saw it finally,
without metaphor, hunger, wearing the coat of someone I
loved. The mouth had healed almost all
the way around the burn. The eye was milked in a way that
made it mournfully more beautiful, because nothing loves
tragedy more than the thing that caused it.
I lifted the iron, and the iron said language in white out the
window. It touched the skin the world
would call cheek if you were being generous.
It hissed. He dropped the voice he wore
like a fashion. He dropped the antlers down, the
way a man bows when he is forgiven by someone whose
forgiveness doesn't matter. He stepped backward into the
tree line, and he didn't run. He simply began.
He will come back. I know that now.
The way you know where the river is when you sleep by its bank.
I don't know what will happen when the stars in my iron go
out, or the pouches thread wears through, or I say my name while
dreaming and make my own door. I keep the spruce gum by the
stove. I keep my boot laces tied in
knots that have no names and practice them with my eyes
closed like prayers I have to invent.
I keep the photograph from Walt's truck on my kitchen wall,
the boy with the hands that were lucky and then old.
I keep the hand in the cemetery because that's what we do.
Put pieces back where they can belong, even if belonging is
only a polite lie. This is all I know how to do.
Speak plainly, warn you, and admit that if winter is a
decision, hunger is a habit. If you break one, the other
walks in. If you open the door even a
little, even because you are cold and kind, the thing will
try your name until you forget there were ever any other words.
So when you hear it tonight, do what I do.
Put your mouth full of tree. Hold your silence like a hot
iron. Let the knock happen, Let it
fail. And when you can't hold it
anymore, when the cold has made your thoughts creak, when the
letters write themselves in frost on your window, say this
to yourself and no one else. I am not invited, you are not
welcomed, I am full. Say it again, slower, like a
prayer. Then lie to yourself if you have
to. It's warmer that way.
And if I stop posting, if the gum hardens into a little
brownstone in a bowl by a cold stove, no one cleans.
If you hear a story about a man in a place with one Rd. that
doesn't get plowed, don't come for me.
Don't come for my name. Don't say it where winter can
hear.