Far North (3 page)

There was no doubt that without my weapons I was dead, so I was left with a simple choice.

I saddled the mare and followed the tracks. Gustav had made no effort to hide them, figuring that I would hesitate before I went in pursuit of an armed man. I knew I had a faster mount, since he was riding a caribou, but he had god knows how many hours’ head-start over me.

I was careful not to catch him too quick. I knew my best chance was to creep up on him at night-time, as he had me. And when I sensed I was getting close, I dismounted and went on foot.

His cooking fire was what I spied first, and his tent beside it. There was no point approaching him until dark, so I bided my time.

Now, I had been running a few plans in my head, but as soon as I saw how he had left his camp, I knew what it was to be.

I crept up in the darkness and set his tent alight with embers of his cooking. The floor of his tent was a reindeer skin, but under that he had packed dry branches so as to sleep more soft. It caught quick, and the smoke and heat must have made him more dozy for a while – or perhaps he had been drinking – because it was a while before he appeared, like a drowsy bee, staggering away from a smoked-out hive, happy to have saved his skin, then less happy, when he realized the fix he was in.

Travelling in the Far North in winter, it’s always best to hang your coat outside your tent. The Tungus are pretty strict about it. Mainly it’s for the sake of the fur – it moults less and stays in better shape. But there’s another reason also. It’s a hundred to one chance, but it’s worth considering, that if you’re caught short in the night or you have to go outside for something, and by sheer bad luck or otherwise you kick your stove over, your tent will go up and so will everything in it.

And just after you’ve finished congratulating yourself for not burning to death, you’ll look up at the star-filled sky, and you’ll hear the ice crystals in your breath tinkling together, making the sound they call ‘the whisper of angels’, and you’ll rub your shirt-sleeved arms, and a bad feeling will come over you.

If I’d been that herder, I would have put one of the bullets from the stolen guns through my own head before I froze to death, because freezing to death is a terrible way to go. There were forty degrees of frost that night, and it took him almost two hours to die.

The last thing that happens to you when you freeze is that your body feels like it’s burning up. Your heart pumps the last of your hot blood to your skin as your organs shut down. That’s why you’ll tear off your clothes even as your liver is turning to ice.

I found him in the morning, followed the trail of his clothes deeper into the woods, and came upon him, naked, bluish, with rime on his hair and his johnson froze. Luckily, he still had on my guns.

3

K
ILLING
ALWAYS
SITS
heavy with me.

Whether that’s because of my being a woman, or because my disposition is naturally soft-hearted for another reason, I don’t know.

I’ve had to fight the womanish things in my nature for almost as long as I can remember. These are not soft-hearted, womanish times.

Being tall, and broad in the shoulders, and deep-voiced, it’s been easy enough to pass for a man, but I still shed some tears over that lousy herder, though I railed against myself for the weeping, because I knew he would have shed none for me.

Softness – and conscience and good faith – is like the pianola, or the books in the old gunstore on Mercer Street. They have no place in these times. Yet just because I don’t eat dainty, and I don’t scruple to kill, and I can’t dance, or read music, that doesn’t mean I don’t hanker after doing so.

Wild dogs had took some of the meat from the sled, but there was still a good quantity of it left, so I guess you could call the journey a success. I had fresh food, and I still had my guns, and when I called to the mare she came out from the stand of larches where I’d left her hobbled.

We were slower on the journey back on account of the extra weight. It was a week’s travelling instead of five days, and I pulled into town beat and smelling pretty ripe.

When I knocked on the gate, Ping peeked out of an upper window with the rifle, and his face lit up to see me. We hung the meat out back, out of the sunlight. And then I got to thinking I would like to clean myself up properly.

It had got colder since I’d been away, and the water in the well had frozen. Ping had been making do somehow, not knowing any better, but I hated to go short of water.

There was still some light left in the day, so I took Ping out to the lake on the cart with the left, so Isaw and we cut blocks for a couple of hours, until we had a load. The blocks sparkled in the lengthening yellow light, like outsize sugar candy, or pale-blue Turkish delight dusted with powdered sugar. We took them home with us and stacked them in the courtyard.

I lit a fire in the stove in the bathhouse. My pa had built it of cedarwood and the air inside smelt sweet even when it was cold, but when it got hot the perfume seemed to seep out of the wood and crackle in your nostrils. I heated a little water in a copper kettle on the stove and when it was near to boiling I heaved in one of the ice blocks. It hissed and cracked on the heat.

It took a good hour for the bathhouse to get hot enough for a steam, and by then the sun had set, and the stars pricked the navy blue of night like needlepoints. I bundled myself up in a thick robe with towels and slippers as I crossed the yard. The smoke rose lazily on the freezing air, dropping as it cooled, until it spread sideways across the sky like a clothes line.

I hung my things up on the hooks outside the hot-room and went through that creaky door to face the wall of dry heat. The dirt seemed to leach out of me, making grubby pools in the folds of skin on my belly.

Ping was clattering outside in the yard, maybe hesitant about coming in, so I called his name. There was the squeak of tight wood, and his face appeared in the crack of the door. I didn’t want to lose any heat and the blood beating in my ears had made me fierce, so I yelled at him to get inside or shut the door, and the next thing is he’s standing inside, done up tight to his neck in Charlo’s old dressing gown and a few rolled towels, not an inch of skin showing.

He was looking at me wide-eyed. And I realized, of course, that he was staring at my tits, which had dropped out of the towel, and below that my bush. It must have been a shock, since he was expecting to see a fellow, not a rawboned girl in the buff, but it wasn’t going to make any difference to me, I knew what I was, and I didn’t know how I was going to break it to him otherwise.

But he stared for a long time. And then his mouth opened as though he was about to say something. And then his hands trembled on the knot of the dressing gown and he tugged at it, as though he was in a hurry to get it off. And it passed through my mind that he’d seen something he liked and wanted a piece of, which was not my intention at all. So I’d bunched my fist to give him the lights out if he took one step closer, but the next thing is, he’s dropped that old gown and half-doubled up with sobs, and tears and snot are running down his face.

And, strangest of all, it seems that Ping is a woman.

There’s no mistaking it: the pinch at the top of the hips, and the small oriental bosoms, and coal-black thatch of her bush. And that’s not the end of it: by the swell of her belly it appears to me that she’s not three or four months with child.

I let my hands drop and I felt Ping’s arms round me, and the rasp of her bald head on my cheek, and she howls into my ear like a soul that has lost its body.

Being a woman in these times, I know some of what she’s crying for. The world fighting itself like cats in a bag. The ordinary cruelty. The piles of unburied bones bleaching at the western edge of the town. And then there’s her relief. She must have been worrying days how to tell me.

With a shuddrsq recalled that shot in her shoulder, and thanked god I never slung her belly-down over the saddle.

She let me touch her stomach. There was a line down the middle of it like the seam on a broad bean, only dark. And her nipples were chocolate brown and wide.

I began to wonder how I ever could have thought she was a man. The truth is, save me, I never encountered a woman in the last ten years who wasn’t more or less some man’s wife or property. I wondered how she was living, where she came from, who the father is, but there are no words that would make her understand my questions.

Right then, she felt so small in my arms that it seemed like I was the mother and she my child. I held her and caressed her baby-bald head, until her sobs were just sniffles, and I couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or waking.

There was a stillness in the house the next day. Ping came down the stairs sleepily much later than usual, and looked at me almost shyly after the surprises of the night before.

The world felt a little different that morning with the idea of new life in it.

4

I
T
WAS
LATE
January when I came back from my visit to the caribou herders and learned Ping was with child. With the help of a calendar and some drawings of the moon, I got her to show me the likeliest time of conception and we calculated that the baby was due to arrive around midsummer.

As spring got closer, I started thinking about cultivating some more land, since there were going to be more of us.The one thing I had in abundance was packet seeds. Almost everything useful had been plundered from the stores downtown over the years, but a few oddments of things had got left behind, and in the farm supply on Willow Street there were boxes and boxes of packet seeds that no one had thought to touch. It stands to reason that if you’re chiefly concerned just to live until tomorrow, you must think how to fill your belly today and find a way to defend yourself.

Those two are tasks enough, believe me, so no one paid too much mind to planting a crop.

Those packets were stamped with dates in the past when they were supposed to go bad, but I knew that was just nonsense. A seed keeps it power. There are plants in the desert south where the seed just bides its time for a hundred or so years in the sand, waiting for the rain. Just waiting for a moment to bloom again. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve heard that every century or so, the rain comes and that whole bare stretch of rock and sand is a mess of flowers and plants.

On top of the fire-house is a lookout tower they used to use for spotting blazes in the forest. One day, after I’d been collecting seeds from the store, I clattered up the rungs and peered along the highway, east and west, watching it fold through the trees in the distance like a ribbon of white silk.

The city looked emptier than I had ever known. I tried to be thankful for it. I missed what it used to be, but between me and then stood an impassable gulf – a river of blood and fire.

It’s habits that keep you straight when everything around you is falling apart. Calling myself constable, keeping the tack clean and the horses in shape for the morning ride was all that stood between me and hopelesness – at least, until Ping came. I knew I hadn’t been constable in anything more than name since Charlo died.

It occurred to me for the first time that maybe I was the last. Maybe me and Ping were all that was left. Up to a month or two before, I knew of at least three families scraping by in different sections of the city. But at that moment, looking down from the old tower, I couldn’t see a sign of any of them.

The morning mist had lifted and it was a grey, frosty day of about twenty below, but there wasn’t so much as a curl of smoke from a household fire.

This place had been my life for as long as I could remember. I thought of the time before I was born when my parents had come to that city, along with all the other pioneer families. And in half a lifetime or so, it had emptied out again. From where I was standing I could see trees growing out of the bleachers round the softball field, which itself was a maze of scrubby bushes. The billboards along Main Street had shrivelled in the weather. The drugstore where I used to drink malted milk was a hive of blackened glass and wood. The train station that the line had never reached remained half-built and now would never be finished. All those hours and days of human struggle, thousands, millions of them, spent building up this place, only to have it kicked down like an anthill by a spoiled child.

This place had promised the first settlers everything. Now what was it? A ghost town, decaying back into wilderness.

 *

There wasn’t a soul left in the whole place save us, I grew surer of it by the day. Imagine: a city of thirty thousand reduced to two women and a bump. And yet, the odd thing was, I liked it a whole lot better. I started going round it by foot. Something I hadn’t done for years. It made me feel closer to the place somehow, crunching the broken glass and paper underfoot, spying the discarded things – a filthy doll, some spectacles, broken shoes – that told the story of my city.

The houses where the Challoners and the Velazquezes had been living were abandoned. I put a ladder up to their outside walls and had a look in. There was a pitiful scrawny tabby in the Challoners’ yard but no sign of a person. At the Velazquez house, I could see the place had been left orderly, with its furniture intact, and some sign that the garden had been dug, but there was no doubt they were elsewhere too. That killer Rudi and his brute of a son, Emil.

With the last humans gone, it seemed like nature decided to reclaim everything. On Considine Avenue, I came upon a herd of wild pigs, at least twelve of them, rooting around the old garbage heaps. The adults were black and square, like steamer trunks. I emptied both pistols from horseback and managed to hit two of them while the rest of them ran off squealing. I butchered them then and there on the street and dragged them home, chucking the lights and offal into the Challoners’ yard for the tabby.

Once I reached home and glanced back at the long smears of blood on the ice in the roadway, a strange feeling came over me. I unbuckled my empty guns and laid them on the kitchen table. It occurred to me that that was the first time in fifteen years I’d been anywhere in the city withVelazquezeloaded weapon.