The Survival Game (3 page)

Burl's first instinct was to warn the girl. He was afraid of what might happen if Cal found her in this of all places. Then Cal arrived at the end of the path. He stood with his hands on his hips, looking at her. Burl held his breath. Cal tipped his cap at Tanya and moved in on the bank beside her. She took a cigarette from her bag and, lighting it with her own, she placed it between Cal's lips. He took a long drag.

Burl laid his face down hard against the stone shore and fought to breathe, his mouth wide open.

He craned his head to see them. His father was laughing. Burl couldn't hear what they were saying. And now Tanya was holding something out of his father's reach and his father was grabbing for it, but it was all in play.

Something rose in Burl. It was hot like vomit in his throat, but it rose until it filled up his head, straining against his skull. Like a hot-air balloon, it carried him shakily to his feet.

Cal did not see Burl rise from behind the driftwood. He was still trying to grab whatever it was Tanya was keeping from him. Tanya saw Burl; Cal followed her gaze. He shook his head, swore under his breath, climbed to his feet. Tanya stood up, too, using Cal's arm for support.

That's when Burl's head blew up.

“YOU STEAL EVERYTHING!” he screamed, and he charged across the gravel spit towards them. “EVERYTHING.”

His voice fell apart at the seams – nothing but a boy's high-pitched squeal. He slipped and fell and got up again and scrabbled up the hill with his knife out before him like a tiny lance.

“Cal, do something,” said Tanya nervously, taking a step behind him. But Cal just threw back his head and laughed.

“This oughta be good,” he said.

His father waited for him, cocky with someone to impress. He stood in a brawler's wide-legged stance, knees bent, rolling his shoulders, his hands loose.

Burl only had one chance, and it wasn't his pipsqueak knife. He veered suddenly and sharply like a jet fighter peeling out of a tight formation and shot up the path towards the road. By the time Cal regrouped, Burl's legs had put fifty long strides of bush between the two of them.

“You'll pay for this!” Cal shouted.

“Not this time,” said Burl. The words were salty with sweat, but they tasted sweet in his mouth. “Not ever.”

When Burl was five he got lost. They were travelling west to Dryden to visit Granny Robichaud. It was before Laura died. They camped along the way and at every campsite his father told him and Laura – she was eight – not to wander off.

“If you get lost, find a stump and park your backside on it.”

But Burl wandered off. Way off. It took a search party to find him. Cal shook him hard.

“What'd I tell you, boy?” he said. “Why'd ya keep goin'?”

“I was looking for a stump,” Burl told him.

You don't need to find a stump if you have no intention of being found. Burl wasn't five any more. He was fourteen and growing up with every step. By the time he hit the CPR rail bed he was a little older than he had been back at the secret place. He ran along the rails a way, breathing in hot creosote, putting a thousand railway ties between himself and his father. By the time he hit the service road to Pharaoh, he was older still. And by the time he passed the abandoned hotel, the turn into the mill, the back way to the reservation at Leather Lake, he was really getting on in age. Childhood dripped off him in great huge gobs of sweat.

He turned down a logging trail he knew and finally stopped. His mouth hung open, gulping in air. It was cooling down. The sun was low over the forest. He had a stitch in his side. In the trees he heard a woodpecker.

Burl's best bet out of Pharaoh would have been to hop a freight train. He'd seen a guy do it. The trains slowed down and you ran along and jumped at the ladder. Always the ladder at the front of the car. That way, if you missed, you'd just bounce off the side. If you missed the ladder at the end, you'd fall into the space between the cars. And that was that.

But if you caught that first ladder, you could lie low on the roof and sleep under the stars all the way to White River. At White River you could hop off and hitch a ride up the Trans-Canada. The brother of a kid at school did that once. He broke his ankle when he jumped off, but he still made it all the way to Winnipeg.

Then there was the highway. The new 144 up to Timmins, which crossed the railroad a few kilometres north of Pharaoh. Or, if you could get down to Presqueville, you could take the 505 out to 17. If you wanted to avoid the police you had to be flexible. That is, assuming someone was looking for you. Burl wondered how many days his folks would wait for him to come back. They didn't have a phone. And try as he may, Burl couldn't imagine Doloris making it into Pharaoh to alert the authorities.

When Laura died, Doloris kept setting a place at the table for her for weeks before the old man hurled the plate against the wall, smashed it to bits. Burl wondered if she would keep setting a place for him.

The truth was, Burl knew all sorts of ways of getting away from Pharaoh. When you lived under the same roof as a man like Cal, you had to be ready to run and hide at a moment's notice. You learned to recognize the signs of a foul mood. The old Turd-mobile arriving in the yard too noisy, the engine revving too high, the car door slamming, footsteps too heavy on the porch. Then you had to be quick. Into the closet – the one Cal never finished – where you could squeeze way back out of sight and out of reach in between the studs of the wall. A place too small for a big man like Cal.

But Burl had grown too big for rabbiting himself away in cubbyholes. So he kept his ears open for bigger hiding places: Winnipeg, Toronto, Dryden. Dryden was big compared to Pharaoh or even Presqueville but it wasn't big enough. Cal would stomp into a town like Dryden and pluck the roofs off every house until he found Burl.

North by northwest. The bush he knew, at least a bit. He was too busy running away to worry yet about where he was going. And it didn't occur to him, not on that first blood-hammering-in-the-head afternoon, that he was actually heading somewhere.

There are paths in the forest. There are privately owned logging roads and way older overgrown trails from the days when logging was done in winter and horse-drawn sleighs dragged the lumber to the edge of a lake or river. Even older than the sleigh roads are the native portage trails. Then there are trap lines and survey lines. Burl knew something about paths.

And there are signposts: a rocky outcrop the shape of a head; a giant jack pine split by lightning; a burn area, the enormous black thumbprint of a forest fire. Burl knew something about signposts.

Cal was a hunter, and for a while when Burl was younger, the old man had taken him along. By the time he was six, Burl had learned how to clean a rifle and oil up the barrel. He could pluck a mallard or gut a pike or follow blazes cut into trees. Burl remembered playing soldiers with shotgun shells while waiting out a drizzle under a tarp slung between dripping spruce trees. He remembered men joking and smoking. His dad hadn't been so bad in those days, not when he was out in the woods.

But then Cal's fortunes changed. His friends changed. Hunting and fishing expeditions got longer with less game to show for it. And Burl didn't get to go along any more.

But he had a sense of this part of the wilderness. There were still paths and signs to follow and beyond that, he had a pretty good store of wilderness knowledge. Cal had given him that much.

“You steal everything!”

Over and over he replayed the scene at the secret place. Sometimes he killed Cal – drilled his little pocket knife right into Cal's heart. Then Tanya, released from her evil spell, would fall at his knees and beg his forgiveness. Sometimes he would forgive her. Sometimes Mrs. Agnew showed up and stood with him over the dead body of his father.

“So this is Koschei the Deathless,” she would say.

“Not any more,” Burl would answer.

He imagined going home. He imagined saying brave things and doing brave deeds. But he didn't slow down.

It got dark about nine or so. And just as the shadows were getting thick and the birds were having their mad half hour before the world ended, and just as the mosquitoes came out looking for blood, Burl came across an old trapper's shack. He hadn't known it would be there but he took it as a sign. Somebody was looking out for him. That's what he told himself.

Not that it was much of a sign. The door had been torn most of the way off its hinges. Deep gouges in the weathered slabs indicated a bear's work. There was garbage scattered around the cabin's single room and a huge dried-up bear turd sitting prominently in the centre of the floor. Weeds grew through the floorboards. Porcupines had eaten away a part of the roof. The forest was reclaiming this place as its own.

But there was a rust-stained mattress on the floor, which was more than he had hoped for. And as far as he could tell, nothing had been living there recently. There were no bowls of porridge cooling on the table.

He found a can without a label. It had rolled into a corner. There were bear-sized tooth marks in it. He pried up the top with his knife blade. Baked beans. He drank the contents cold. He had no matches.

He sat on the mattress, mosquitoes buzzing around his ears. He found himself hoping it would be cold that night so that he might sleep in peace. But then, if it were cold, what peace would he find with no coat, no cover, and only half a roof over his head.

There was a cup sitting on the floor beside the bed. In it was a harmonica. He picked it up, looked it over. He rubbed it as clean as he could with the tails of his shirt. He took a tentative blow. No sound. It was full of dust and pollen. He banged it hard against the palm of his hand. Blew again. The notes came out dry and lifeless. He blew harder into the little chambers from both sides, until finally he was able to clear enough guck out to blow a few good ringing notes.

Burl pulled his feet up onto the mattress and curled them under him. Leaning his back against the wall, he tried to think of a tune to play, a tune with just a few notes. He closed his eyes.

Rain beat down on the cabin. It moved in with him but was not content to share the space. As the wind gusted, the rain, like a predator, stalked Burl across the mattress, cornering him.

Something gouged him sharply in the thigh. He dug his father's stolen lure from his pocket. One hook had poked through the carton, sweaty and rain-soaked; the barb was caught in the lining of his pocket.

He sat up, shivering with cold, and tried to work the hook out in the darkness. From his other pocket he took out his knife and cut the hook free. Then he rolled himself up as tight as a millipede in a dead log. Someone watching over him? Not likely. He lay his hands protectively over the lure and the knife and the harmonica. They were all his worldly possessions.

It was a night of strange music: the rain banging on the tin roof, something rustling the bushes not far off. An owl, a whippoorwill. Wolves. A piano. No. That was just a dream. But so real-sounding. In Granny's church in Dryden there were angels. Burl wondered if this is what it was like when they played their harps. A cold, thin, distant sound as sweet as blackberries before they're quite ripe.

When you were hungry in a fairy tale, an old hag would pass by with a magic bowl or magic beans. Well, Burl had eaten what beans he could find, and when he awoke cold and damp in the morning, sure enough, the can was full again, but only with brown rainwater.

So he took a bite of the north wind for his breakfast and headed out, up a path that had once been a trap line, until it petered out and there was finally nothing before him but bush.

In a fairy tale, the woods might be deep but the paths led to a river where you could trick the boatman; to a castle where you could steal a golden goose; to a clearing in the forest where you could kiss a princess in a glass coffin. Fairy-tale trees towered darkly above lost children, but there was always a way.

Sometime around noon, Burl stumbled upon a small green stream heading the same way he was going. He cooled his scratched and bleeding legs in the dark water. No trout in a stream like this, a dead stream. But it widened, and he meant to wade as far out as he could from the shore and the leaning wall of vegetation, the better to escape the mosquitoes and blackflies and deer flies. A few steps out, however, his foot sank deep into the mud and, flailing wildly, he fought his way back to a firm footing. A loon-shit bottom, his father would have called it.

He found blueberries past their prime by the edge of a stagnant pond and ate until he could eat no more but was only hungrier for his effort. The blueberries reminded him of food.

He came to a place where the still stream widened out into a sphagnum bog. Seeing that the farther shore was rockier and less overgrown, he crossed on the spongy mattress of living plants, feeling it give under his every step but never give way.

In the low branches of a tree on the far shore he came upon a deserted robin's nest. There were two abandoned blue eggs.

Burl had never eaten a raw egg before, but he had heard of people doing it, and his hunger nudged his hand forward. He cracked the egg carefully so as not to lose any of the insides. But the minute it was cracked, a hideous rotten smell and a glimpse of wet feathers made him hurl the egg away. He stumbled, gagging and spitting the smell out of his throat.

He found his way along the shore of what turned out to be a massive beaver pond. High granite cliffs rose above him.

He came upon a dried wolf's turd full of red fur.

He came upon saplings draped with the velvet off a moose's antlers.

He came upon a tree used as a scratching pole by a bear.

He marked the sun when he could see it through the clouds.

He crossed the beaver dam, slipping in the rushing water, bruising his knee. There was a way up the cliff here but even as he started to climb, the rain came on hard, driving down. He cut away from the shore and took shelter in the deeper woods. He stopped in a grove waist-high with Labrador tea. Moose loved this shrub. Once, when his father had shot a moose, he slit its carcass open and buckets of Labrador tea poured from the beast's belly. When the twigs, leaves and flowers were young, they were aromatic; natives and trappers made tea from it. But when Burl tasted it now, with summer mostly gone, the fuzzy-bottomed leaves only made him gag.