Kept (34 page)

In this way more time passed. Quite how much time he could not say, for he found that he became lax at cutting the notches into the timber of the door frame. Or rather not lax but cautious. He would stare at the neat line of indentations unsure as to whether he had added to their number that day or not. Sometimes at the conclusion of this staring he would add a notch, sometimes not. It was the same with his routines. Sometimes he would awake from his half doze before the fire to find that he had let the pile of wood run down almost to nothing, and then a panic would seize him and he would spend an hour or more chopping a great pile of logs and arranging them in the lean-to. He supposed that he was becoming a little out of sorts, a little jittery at
the silence and the grey landscape beyond him. And yet he continued to look ahead, to plan intricately in his mind what should be done in the days after the boys arrived and they set off back along the trail to Fort McGurry. He found a fragment of mirror, no more than an inch square, in the pack in which he stored his bedding and, examining himself in it, discovered that the beard he had begun to grow when he had first come to the wild reached down almost to his breastbone. Well, he would shave that off when he got back to Fort McGurry. The thought tickled him, and he imagined himself calling for soap and hot water and the boys laughing at him as he set about his task. He continued to smile about it as he chopped the logs, built up the embers of the fire, read at his little volume of Tennyson and made an inventory of the pile of provisions.

One day—he did not quite know how long had passed since he had last done this—he found himself standing before the timber door frame and counting the notches. There were twenty-one. The number startled him, and he counted and recounted, thinking that there must be some error in his computation. The realisation of his predicament stole upon him by degrees. He was in a jam, he supposed, a high old jam, and he must settle down and decide what was best to do. In the meantime, though, he would chop more logs and make a further inventory of the supplies. The calmness of his demeanour as he did this surprised him as much as the long row of notches on the timber door frame. It was as if the person chopping the wood and calculating the extent of his provisions was someone else at whom he stared from above. The situation did not seem to have anything to do with him. But he was startled, again, by the sparseness of his inventory. Only a single canister of the biscuits remained, together with half a dozen pieces of pork, twice that amount of fish and some flour. Had he really eaten that much while the boys had been gone? Looking at the food as it lay on the tarpaulin, he conceived a notion of himself living frugally in the cabin through the winter, of being found by the first horseman who came riding along the trail in the spring and explaining modestly how he had survived. But the dwindling supplies scared him. That night he ate only a couple of biscuits and the half of a sun-cured fish before unrolling his blankets and settling himself to sleep.

In the morning he felt more confident than he had done for many a day. It seemed to him that he knew more about the functioning of his body than he had ever known before. He watched his fingers as they moved over the buttons of his coat. Sitting by the fire drinking his cup of coffee, he was conscious of his heart beating and a vein pulsing in his forehead. This comforted him, for it spoke of life and movement rather than the inertness that lay beyond the cabin door. Then, turning to refill the coffee pot, he made an alarming discovery. There was no more coffee. For a moment he brooded over this discrepancy, even searching a little among the canisters and the provision packets to see if he had overlooked anything, before, as it seemed to him, resigning himself to this new feature of his existence. He would have to do without coffee. Outside in the grey light there were a few snowflakes falling, and he watched them for a while, thinking how sombre and melancholy the land seemed. The sight reminded him of the routine he had previously followed, and he made his way down to the riverbed and stared northwards along the trail. With the snow the track had all but disappeared, he noted, only a faint depression in the lie of the land showed that it had ever been there.

A sudden sense of purpose overcame him. He would have to do something, he realised, take some decisive step before the snows came and covered him as they had done the trail. Surprised at himself, for he did not quite know from where the impetus had come, he found himself seizing an armful of discarded branches and an axe and fashioning a makeshift sled. There was a length of rope in the cabin, and he used this to lash the pieces of the frame into place. With what remained of the rope he constructed a harness that he could fasten over his chest and shoulders, enabling him to drag the sled behind. The sight of the sled lying on the patch of ground before the cabin door cheered him. The light was beginning to fade, and the outlines of the trees receded into darkness. Tomorrow, he thought, he would rise at dawn, pack what remained of his provisions onto the sled and set off down the trail towards firelight, warmth and human voices.

Somehow, though, he did not do this. It was difficult to explain how this came about, how he had conditioned his mind, as he thought, to do one thing and yet how another, unconscious conditioning had
compelled him to do something else. Midmorning on the next day found him once again sitting before the fire and brooding over the little volume of Tennyson. Wondering at his behaviour, he went and examined the sled again, silently appraising the curve of the birch-bark runners. The sky, he noticed, had already turned grey, which meant that there was snow coming. It would be foolish, he thought, to attempt anything today. Much better to stay by his fire. Wandering over to the lean-to, he was puzzled to find that only a handful of logs remained. Reproaching himself for this negligence, he set to work to replenish the pile.

The fire had burned almost down to nothing when he woke the next morning, and there was a great numbness in his limbs, despite the blankets and the coat that he had thrown over himself before he went to sleep. Thrashing his arms against his sides and stamping his feet on the ground, he built up the fire once more and the numbness receded, but the memory of it remained. It really was extraordinarily cold. He had heard of there being terrible cold snaps in the wild when birds fell frozen from the sky and animals survived only by burrowing under the drifts of snow, and he wondered if this was such a cold snap. There was no wind today, and though he was not an imaginative man, it seemed to him that the land had a terrible gauntness, a desolation that he could no longer bear to observe. Again, not quite knowing from where the impulse came, he found himself assembling his belongings—his teakettle, his canisters of food, his box of sulphur matches, his store of cartridges—on the sled. When he had arranged them to his satisfaction, he took the tarpaulin and fashioned it into a cover. The sound of the snow crunching beneath his moccasins reminded him of something else that he needed, and plunging off into the eaves of the forest, he returned with another armful of brushwood. From this, with the aid of various twists of rope and twine that remained to him, he constructed a pair of snowshoes.

Curiously, having finished these preparations, his sense of resolve began to recede once more. He looked at the fire again and at the timber of the cabin door, felt for the little volume of Tennyson that was stowed in his jacket pocket and reflected that perhaps he was being a trifle hasty. He wondered how far away Fort McGurry was, wishing
that he had paid more attention to the maps that the boys had examined in the early days of their excursion. It could not be more than seventy miles, he thought, say eighty at the outside. And even walking over fresh snow and encumbered by snowshoes, a man ought to be able to travel at fifteen miles a day. These calculations reassured him, but they did not reassure him as much as he wanted them to do, and he wished that he had a proper sled and a team of dogs such as those that the boys had taken with them when they disappeared up the trail all that time ago. He wondered idly—it was something he had not considered for several days—what had become of the boys and why they had not come back to find him, glancing all the while at the timber of the cabin door and at the embers of the fire. He wondered if he ought to leave a message for the boys, and so, tearing out a flimsy blank sheet from the back of the little volume of Tennyson, he settled down by the fire, so that his fingers would not become numb, and scribbled on it with a stump of pencil:
RETURNING TO FORT MCGURRY—R.F.
This he secured to a rusty nail on the back of the door frame. Seeing the note emboldened him in a way that his previous preparations had not. Casting a final glance around the cabin, strapping the rifle over his shoulder and settling the harness of the sled on his chest, he set out down the short incline of the frozen hill and pulled out onto the trail.

The pale Arctic sun was at its zenith, and a great silence seemed to have fallen over the land, even greater than the one he had remarked on his first day in the cabin. He was aware, as he moved, that he was frightened of the silence and yet, at the same time, feared to combat it, and that in setting his feet onto the surface of the snow he aspired to soundlessness. The noise of his breath irked him. He was forever dragging the runners of his sled into fresh grooves so that they would move more smoothly. The trail, he was relieved to find, was still discernible: a faint, sunken line in the snow that ran on past belts of dark fir trees and occasional banks of undergrowth. Once a white hare broke from cover and bounded nervously across the path. Aside from this, nothing moved. Two hours of daylight remained to him, and in this time he calculated that he covered five miles. Then at dusk he dragged the sled into a cluster of spruce trees to the right of the trail and set up camp for the night. He was methodical in this, for he was wise enough to
know that his survival depended on it, that it was imperative for him to stay warm and by staying warm to recruit himself for the rigours of the next day. He was aware that even five miles dragging a sled over his shoulders had exhausted him, and he knew that to overexert himself would be a foolish thing. Accordingly, he chopped a good pile of wood, lit a fire and cooked his frugal supper. When he had done this, his spirits lifted. He was out on the trail right enough. Four days or perhaps five would see him home. His only regret was the absence of coffee. He had never thought there would be a time when he would miss coffee so much. But apart from this, and the piercing cold, which caused him to huddle himself ever closer to the fire, he thought that he was comfortable enough. If the boys could see him, he told himself, they would be pleasantly surprised at how a
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could adapt himself to the land. Half dozing over the fire, he imagined himself striding into Fort McGurry and the look of surprise on the factor’s face.

There was a patch of darkness just beyond the firelight and beneath the margin of the spruce trees, and he watched it for a while, thinking that it looked remarkably like an animal stretched out and luxuriating in the warmth of the fire, like his own dogs lounging by the hearth in his guardian’s house back in his own country. Interested in this singular phenomenon, he found himself listening carefully into the night air, but there was nothing except the crackle of the fire and a faint hiss of steam from the kettle he had placed at the fire’s edge. Having drunk some of the hot water that it contained, he allowed his gaze to rest once more on the patch of darkness, but it seemed vaguer now, less distinct in his imagination. He wondered if here in the extremity of the wild, with each of his senses heightened to their utmost pitch, his eyes might be playing tricks on him. Sometime later he picked up a stick from the margin of the fire and threw it speculatively in the direction of the patch of darkness, but there was nothing there and he heard the stick fall hissing into the snow.

Next morning he awoke long before the rays of light had crept over the lines of spruce trees, ate his breakfast in darkness hunched over the embers of the fire, packed his things onto the makeshift sled and resumed the trail half an hour before dawn. No more snow had fallen,
and the surface beneath him was more tightly packed. In this way he made better progress than on the previous afternoon. Midmorning brought him to a region of open country between two banks of firs where the trail turned south along the banks of a frozen watercourse. The lack of cover oppressed him. It seemed to him as he moved forward that he was a tiny limpetlike creature clinging to the surface of an unending vastness, and he was glad when he returned a mile or so later to the bleak avenues of trees. He ate his lunch—half a slice of pork left over from the previous day and a biscuit—seated on the trunk of a fir tree that had fallen halfway across the path. He certainly was hungry, he told himself as he disposed of the food, but the dull ache in his stomach remained. Almost as the thought came into his mind, a jackrabbit bobbed into view from the undergrowth twenty yards away, and instinctively, such was his desire for fresh meat, he raised his rifle and loosed off a shot. But his fingers were awkward inside his thick mittens, and the jackrabbit slipped away out of range. Seeing it disappear, he wished now that he had not shot at it, for he had a curious feeling that by breaking the silence with that deafening report he had drawn attention to himself in a way that a more prudent man might have avoided. Some other impulse prompted him to examine the number of cartridges in his store. Finding that he had only seven, he resolved to shoot at no more rabbits.

Towards afternoon he reached another long low bank of spruce trees, sparsely arranged on either side of the trail. The forest was beginning to break up, he told himself, for the land that stretched away on either side was more variegated. There were hills in the middle distance, themselves mere spurs and outriders of yet more distant mountains. The discovery cheered him, for he understood that he must be closer to Fort McGurry, which, as he knew, lay in the dip of a stretch of higher ground. As he gained the avenue of spruce trees, where the trail ran for more than a mile, unerringly straight, like a road, some instinct—like the instinct that had urged him to shoot the rabbit and to examine his store of cartridges—caused him to glance over his shoulder.