Far North (7 page)

But we settled here out of conviction, as a handful of people had done in the past, because the land was empty and our parents wanted the freedom to create their world new. What an old story that is. You’d think people would be done believing in a fresh start by now, in thinking they can escape their own nature. The proof of it was all around us at Buktygachak: the slave armies that had been building a new dawn, the grim chimney stacks. But no, the godless commissars had had the wrong idea and we had the right one. This time the bright new future was really just around the corner, and with god on our side and a collective determination to do good, we’d put a bunch of New Jerusalems right here in the frozen north. What hooey.

This world is a scaly old snake. She is a cunning old woman, and I’m growing to be a cunning old woman, and the last human being that draws a breath on this planet will be a cunning old woman, who raises chickens and cabbages, has no illusions, and has outlived all her children. The world is not sentimental, but pitiless. I’ve given it to myself to know her mind. I flatter myself that I understand her a little. Maybe I’ve grown to resemble her. Only she’s going to go on for ever, and I won’t.

 *

So it was getting close to October and I was travelling again. It always feels good to move, and this time I had a dose of hope in my soul.

Every now and again along the highway, I’d pass a tree tied with faded strips of cloth, glass beads and old coins round its base. That was a Tungus custom. Some trees and places are holy to them.

And back in the old days, when there was real traffic on this road, before people piled into their creaky buses for their long jarring drives, they’d fix swatches of fabric and drop pennies here for a safe return. Strange what survives of us. Beads, a random footprint, some papers. How would anyone make sense of it?

At Buktygachak, in the punishment cells, there were patches of writing scraped into the walls: dates, maybe a name, or curses, as if they needed to leave proof that they’d really lived.

I can’t recall that I ever travelled in a bus, but maybe it was fearful. Giving yourself up to it. Something else’s motion. Like me in that lake. What would anyone have found of me?

The road was good. I counted on ten or twelve days for the journey, but I could have halved the time if I pushed it. I was happy with the horses at a walk, covering fifteen or twenty miles a day. Sometimes I would doze as we went, slumped into the saddle, eyes half-shut. In that half-sleep, I’d see visions. It always went back to me as a child. What seems like a good time to you, you figure must be a good time for the world. But in those years that I remember as either lit with sunshine or the comforting crackle of split logs in winter, there were already shadows gathering.

When I was seven years old, I was drinking a soda with my father at the grocery shop that used to belong to Walter Perryman, who came from a very old Quaker family someplace. I look back at it as part of the good times, because I don’t recall going without anything. I remember us as all pretty contented and well fed, and houses still going up, and a general kind of orderliness to things.

It was a hot fly-blown summer day. Walter was wiping down the countertop and chatting to my father. Then they stopped talking and walked together out onto the porch.

I followed them out with my soda, which was in one of those bottles we used to have that close with a glass ball. Walter made different flavours, but the best one was flavoured with birch syrup.

Walter and my father were staring at a wraith, a stick-thin form in rags, in bare feet that were soft and spreading like caribou hooves.

Someone called to her, but she moved like a person in a trance, big glassy eyes unblinking. She must have been walking for weeks. Walter touched her shoulder and she crumpled into a heap at his feet, panting. My father carried her into Walter’s store and lay her on the counter. They propped her head up and tried to get her to eat something. Her head shook, and she pushed them away from her, her skinny shoulders heaving. Then her eyelids fluttered shut and she died right there in front of us.

She was the first. On the outskirts of town, they found her baby. They buried them in the town cemetery, under a plain wooden cross that said: Mother and Son, Known to God. But the ones that came after her were just too many in number to get the same treatment. It wasn’t lack of consideration. Some of the townsfolk who buried them ended up unburied themselves.

 *

Snow started coming down towards the end of my first day on the road. I never minded riding through the weather, but the visibility had been cut down to no more than ten yards front and back. I liked to be able to see what was lying in wait for me, so the next chance I got, I ducked off the road to a clearing at one side behind a screen of trees. The snow covered my tracks. And I decided against laying a fire, on account of the smoke. By the time I pitched the tent, I was even too tired to eat, which saved me some food, but I woke in the middle of the night, hungry as a bear, and still dreaming of the smell of frying bacon.

9

A
ND
FOR
TEN
DAYS
or so that was pretty much the size of it. Ambling along, morning to dusk, keeping my eyes peeled for places to feed and water the animals. As we went, the ice got thicker, until it was no longer enough to give the top of a frozen stream a smart rap with a branch, and I had to dig out a hatchet and chop right through the crust.

Most nights I risked a fire. I hadn’t seen a soul on the road all day, and besides I kept my loaded guns in my lap.

The first clear frosty night I saw the Lights, billowing across the sky like god was shaking out his laundered sheets – if the Almighty sleeps on green gauze. Later in the season, the Lights would have more colours in them, but they looked pretty good to me now. There’s something comforting in movement, and that easy, flowing pattern of lights overhead felt like someone stroking my hair.

About a week in, I shot a moose, and camped for two nights in one place so as to butcher it properly. The skin I had to leave, the offal I don’t care for, but just about everything else I was able to smoke or freeze and carry with me.

I had a strange thought while I was cutting her up, which seemed to come to me out of nowhere. Once in my life, I said to myself, I’d like to taste an orange. That word: orange. It seemed impossibly beautiful. I thought of how an orange sky looked and tried to imagine its flavour: somewhere between caramel and strawberries, I guessed.

Under the Lights, with the planet rocking gently, and a week or so of food curing over the smoke, I felt hopeful that whoever had sent the plane would be waiting for me at the end of the journey. Sometimes I fell asleep and dreamed of arriving somewhere, and being met by a woman something like my mother, who was pleased enough to see me, but a little bit disdainful of my shabby clothes and the food I ate. She’d offer me a basket of oranges in the dream, and with a pleased-with-herself-smile she’d say, We’ve been saving these for you. But however many times I dreamed it, I always woke up just at the moment when I was putting one in my mouth.

 *

I got to Esperanza after a couple of weeks. I had the sensation from the road that this wasn’t the place I was looking for, but I rode into her anyway, just to be sure.

It was a copy-cat version of the town I’d left, without a soul in it, never mind someone who could fly a plane. That was the first time since I’d hauled myself out of the water that I felt a glimmer of doubt about what I was doing. It seemed like all that time on hat dangerous road just to get to a place worse than the one I’d come from, and I thought, What if this is all there is between here and Alaska, or beyond?

But the plane I’d seen was real, no doubt of it, and I’d buried her crew and passengers with my own hands. I tried to console myself by asking myself how I’d feel if normal life had been going on here all this time. That would sting, wouldn’t it? Me living like a cockroach in a cellar, and them here with, I don’t know what, schools, and funerals, and Christmas, and oranges.

In the old days I heard there were wars where soldiers disappeared into the forest only to come out decades later and find the fighting had been over for years, and their families enjoying peace and plenty while they’d been drinking water out of tree-stumps and chewing leeches to live.

That thought was a painful one. The idea that I’d just got separated from my proper world, and time was passing, and the other world moving on, and when I found it, I’d be showing up, like a savage in a loincloth, to a city of sparkling glass.

But I think I would have preferred almost anything to the burned-out houses, and trash, and the decay that just told another ten thousand times the story I’d been living in for so long.

And that night when I saw the Lights, they hadn’t a jot of consolation in them. They rolled coldly on overhead, like they will for another million years.

 *

That disappointment sobered me a little, but I kept on my way. The days were shortening and getting colder. Beyond Homerton, I knew the laid road ended and it was all ice roads between there and the sea. I had to put on my hunting furs to keep warm – Tungus stuff that I had to battle every summer to keep from becoming moth food: a wolverine jacket, snow-sheep pants and gloves, and soft boots of reindeer skin.

On clear nights, which they mostly were, the snow doubled the moonlight, and I went on, following the glow through the darkness. I tried to be merciful to the horses, but it was a task to keep both fed. They’d both got skinnier, and I knew in the back of my mind that sooner or later I would have to slow up, or get new mounts. There were Yakut ponies out in the bush, but finding them and breaking them might take until spring. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t afford the time, though that’s what I said to myself, but that the idea of slackening my pace was frightening to me. Forward, forward, said the hooves on the snow. I only wanted to go one way. Behind me, too close for comfort, was that dark shadow in the lake, and the recollection of Ping and her child which I still didn’t have the courage to face.

 *

Then, one day in early November, in the gloom of mid-morning, I came upon a felled tree by the roadside. When I saw it at a distance, I thought it had toppled of its own accord, but up close there was no mistaking the axe marks in the trunk, or the freshness of the cuts. It had been taken down recently. And further along, another. And another.

Still, just because someone’s smart enough for axe-work, doesn’t make them a friend. So I swung myself down off my horse, and I led them on foot through the thicker trees. I stumbled in the fresh drifts and sweated into my furs. It was slower going, but there was less chance of being surprised. And bit by bit I home in on an unmistakable sound: the zip of a woodsaw, working back and forth through timber.

I tied up the horses and went on alone, crawling on my belly under the branches, until I could just make out the feet of the two men working. They were wearing felt boots, which meant they weren’t Tungus.

Laying there, with a pile of snow in my face, gazing at their feet, I thought, This is what we’ve got to. In the Far North, walking up on a man is fraught with peril. The constant fear between people is like a fog that makes them seem larger than they are and all their gestures threatening.

 *

My intention was to stand up and approach them as slow and friendly as possible, but with one hand on my gun nonetheless.

The trouble was I got caught up in the thick brush at the edge of the roadside on my way out of the wood. My boot was trapped in the fork of a branch. They heard me struggling in it and stopped sawing.

When I tried to untangle myself, I ended up crashing out of the brush onto the highway, waving my gun in the air because I had lost my balance. The two men panicked and dropped their saw on the log with a clang. And then I noticed a third with a rifle who had been standing too far off for me to see. He turned and lifted his gun to squeeze off a shot.

I was lying on my back in the road with both guns aimed at his head, but I spoke as slow and deliberate as I could, telling him not to shoot.

He said to drop the gun, and there was a break in his voice that told me just how much he meant it. I kept on, calm and slow, saying that if I’d wanted to kill them, I could have done it easy before they had even seen me.

The clang of the saw seemed to be stretching out into the silence.

I knew he didn’t want to shoot me. Some people have a talent for violent deeds, and I could tell that he didn’t, but I was afraid he’d kill me as much out of fear as design.

So I holstered my guns and waited for him to come over.

It seemed to take an age for him to pluck up the courage to approach, and by the time he was standing over me with his rifle up my nose, my behind was getting cold and I was starting to regret putting away my weapons.

Now the others inched up too, their eyes beady and curious, but not daring to come as near as their companion.

He had a startled look on him. And he was older than I expected – not as strong as those other two, I supposed, so more use with a gun than a saw. He was wrapped more warmly than them, as though he’d been expecting to stand guard while they worked. He had a sharp-cornered frontier face that had been frost-pinched more than once, and a big gristly nose which was pink at the tip from the cold.

‘What’s your business?’ he asked. ‘Where you from? Who you with? How many of you are there?’

I asked him to take the gun out of my face, and told him that I was alone, and a constabulary officer from the incorporated city of Evangeline, and therefore licensed to bear arms.

He had some trouble digesting that iormation. ‘Evangeline?’ he said. ‘There’s no one alive there. Where are you really from?’

There was real indignation in his voice, as though I had told him I was from the moon and expected him to believe it. But the more I think of it, the more I’m certain the indignation he felt arose from shame. Catching him there, with his patched-up clothes, and old gun – to a man old enough to remember how things used to be, it was like opening the door on him in the outhouse.