The Trap (11 page)

The blank surface of snow gave no hint about which way Johnny should go. Both trails lay equally white and undisturbed. It reminded him of a poem he had read. One trail would take him to his grandfather, the other would not. It was that simple. It would take almost two hours to drive back to the end of either of the two trails, and it would take only a little less coming back, to return to this fork, by which time it would certainly be dark. If the old man was waiting warm and safe in either of the cabins, it would not matter which trail he took at this moment. But if his grandfather was in trouble …

With worry tight as a fist in the pit of his stomach, Johnny Least-Weasel said a small prayer, to whom or what he did not know, leaned forward behind the windshield, and took the left trail. At every turn, he hoped that he'd find his grandfather rounding a bend on his way down. But every turn was the same—white, unbroken, silent, and lonely—so he kept going, kept hoping that he would find the old man at his cabin with a plume of gray smoke rising from the chimney.

After several miles of winding up into the tortured landscape, Johnny came upon an opening in the forest of spruce and snow. It was a small lake, really more marsh than lake, perhaps only several hundred yards across. It was fed by a warm underground spring, and its surface was only partially frozen in the middle. There, the water was deep, and heated bubbles rose from the pressured depths of the earth. A layer of snow lay upon the surface, and the young man was unaware of the danger beneath it.

Johnny aimed his machine for the far side and raced across the marsh as fast as the snowmobile could go, its high-pitched engine screaming and kicking up slush and water and ice. Less than halfway across, Johnny realized his mistake, but it was too late to turn back or slow down. All he could do was lean back on the machine to keep the heavy engine and skis from diving in, hold the throttle down as far as it would go, and pray that it would not stall or run out of gas before he reached the other side. If he fell into the water, he would surely die within an hour.

The snowmobile slowed and rocked sluggishly as the rear sank into the darkness, but the wide track kept turning and turning, swimming its way toward the far bank. Then, close to shore, where the lake was shallow and weedy and where snow turned to ice, the straining machine and its nervous cargo rose out of the water and slid on its metal belly into the scraggly trees of the white, frozen forest.

A raven sitting atop a small tree watched, then flew away cawing loudly.

Sometime after noon, Johnny reached his grandfather's trapping cabin. There were no tracks in the snow, no snowmobile, no gray smoke billowing from the rusted chimney stack, and no grandfather.

He had taken the wrong trail.

Now, there would be only enough light to return to the fork. It would be dusk, even dark, by the time he'd set off up the other trail. Perhaps by then, he hoped, he'd find snowmobile tracks on it and he'd know that the old man had come down out of the hills and was on his way home.

Johnny made a tight circle in the small clearing around the cabin and saw that his gas-tank gauge was already below the halfway mark. The deep snow had slowed his ascent, caused him to burn more fuel than he'd expected. But going back would be faster. There would be his freshly broken trail, and it was downhill all the way. Anxiously making a quick calculation, Johnny determined that he had enough gas left in the tank to return to the fork and explore only the first few miles of the other trail. After that, he would have to use the extra fuel in the gas can strapped to the back of his snowmobile to return home.

As gravity pulled him down the mountain, ten miles an hour faster than he had come up, Johnny could only hope that his grandfather was safe inside the other cabin with a warm blazing fire and plenty of firewood stacked on the small covered porch. He was angry with his uncle for convincing him to wait so long and mad at himself for not being strong enough to go anyhow. He loved his uncle, but sometimes he did not understand him.

Burning daylight is a common northland phrase that refers to the shortness of days, and that's just what Johnny was doing now as he gripped the handlebars tightly, leaned into sharp turns, and raced against the sun. He braked only twice the whole way down to the fork, leaned close behind the windshield, and raced against time.

 

 

The other men were amazed and impressed. They had never seen such courage and strength in a man. When they returned to the village, Blackskin was made chief. He used his power only for good. He was truly a great man.

T
HE NIGHT WAS SO LONG
it seemed as though the sun might never rise again. After so many hours, the old man began to think it was too cold even for the sun. He imagined it huddled somewhere, waiting for the white world to warm up before it would return from its sleeping place somewhere far, far below the earth's easy curve.

For the most part, the dark had been silent and uneventful. Because of his pile of wood, he had been able to keep his fire burning, and because he had tossed the extra boughs onto his bed, the frozen ground was unable to steal the warmth from his trembling body. The freezing air, though, took as much as it wanted.

And it wanted everything.

In order to pass the night, the old man clung to his routine. He'd toss a few pieces of wood onto the fire, make sure it caught, and then sleep uncomfortably for maybe half an hour. He'd awaken, toss more wood onto the glowing bed of embers, watch and listen to the shadowy hills, and then he'd sleep again, his whole body trembling, his teeth chattering. Sometime during the night, the curious wolves came down but left without event. And sometime toward the end of the night, it became clear that his supply of firewood would not last. Keeping the flames warm and bright throughout the never-ending dark came at a price, and the old man found himself at a crossroads.

On the one hand, the small pile of firewood was running low and would be consumed, no doubt, in the next hour or two. To conserve his precious fuel, he further rationed it, but by doing so, the fire gave off too little heat, not enough to warm him even if he crowded it with his hands. On the other hand, he had his thick bed of spruce boughs. The pile kept him off the ground when he slept, but if he slept now, he knew that he might never awake.

Finally, the flame of dawn lifted over the mountaintops, and morning came into the huddled valley.

The old man's pile of wood was gone. He had survived the night, but to what end? Now he would have to face the day. The temperature had plummeted to around forty-five below. At such temperatures, the day is little warmer than the night. He had been in colder. Once, when he was a young man, the temperature was seventy degrees below zero. In such tremendous cold, the moisture in breath freezes instantly and falls to the ground like salt.

His one real choice was to burn his bed, keep a big fire so that the freezing would not go too deep into his old bones. Looking at the bed of boughs, most branches at least six feet long, he figured that he'd make it until noon. After that, nothing would save him. He would freeze and die, and someone would find him chained and frozen to this tree. Perhaps the lack of branches on the tree and the sturdy spear would tell them that he had made a good stand, that he had fought as long as any man could have fought, that he had missed nothing, forgotten nothing, that he had used everything, every resource and lesson, but that in the end, even the greatest grizzly bear cannot defeat winter.

But the old man knew better. He knew that without the fire the wolves would return, find him frozen like the moose hindquarters on the sled, and that they would fight over bits and pieces until there would be little for his son and grandson to find when they came into these hills in search of him after the cold had moved out of the valley.

Around noon, his fire gone save a glowing mound of embers and the very small ends and bits of twigs, the old man sat with his back against the tree, much as he had done for the past days, but now he had nothing to insulate him from the ground. He was very cold, and he huddled and tried to keep his body heat close. There would be no more fire, no more reprieve from winter. Finally, he was at his end. All living things must come to this lonely moment. Even the wolves that would no doubt fall upon him this very day, this night for certain, would in the next few years meet their own ends as well. The tiny shrew whose tracks encircled the tree would meet its end, most likely by the owl that called his name every night and that one day would wake and fly no more, and end. The irritated squirrel had already met its end. So, too, had the moose he had killed up the trail. The end came to everything that lived. Especially in these white hills where the circle of life was undisturbed, like the deep snow on the field.

And it would come to Albert Least-Weasel too.

Halfway toward a worried and dark sleep—sitting with his back to the tree, arms wrapped around himself and chin resting on his knees, his hood pulled tightly closed—he became aware of a sound, almost nothing at first. The old man felt himself wonder if this was the sound of his ending, a sound wolves and shrews and owls also hear at their ending, a kind of universal sound in the ears of all living things. But after a minute he looked up, pulled his hood back, cocked his head, and listened hard outside himself, above the sound of a slight breeze and his own breathing.

It was the unmistakable sound of a snowmobile far away. It was coming up into the hills. He turned his ear toward the sound, downhill, and strained to listen. Someone was coming. On this coldest day of the year, someone had left the village to come find him. The old man struggled to unbend himself and stand, to look down the trail as far as he could. His old body ached.

But then the sound dropped to a lower, more consistent level. It was so low that the wind blew it away like a brittle leaf barely hanging from a limb. He could still hear it when the wind let up, but it didn't seem to be moving. He knew where it was. It was at the fork less than two miles away. He imagined the driver trying to decide which trail to take. Left or right. One valley or the other. After a minute, the sound became louder, was on the move again, and it seemed to be coming toward him. But a short time later, the sound seemed to be moving in a different direction, away from him.

The diminishing sound was now going in the wrong direction. It had been an even chance to pick the trail that led to this tree, but even fate, it seemed, was against his rescue.

Least-Weasel listened to it fade off into the next valley. Then he stirred up the remains of the fire with his heel until he could see red beneath the grayish ash. He bent over and pushed his hands into the ashes and found some sense of warmth nestled at the heart. Even this little heat would soon be gone. The old man hunkered over the dying heat until the remnants that held it turned gray and cold. He figured it would take a good three or four hours before the snowmobile would return to the fork and begin to search this valley.

He had only to survive that long.

But it would be difficult without fire or shelter, and his reckoning, in the afterglow of his earlier elation, was that the challenge was beyond the capacities of his aged and unwilling body. His hands were fine for now, but he had not been able to feel his toes for the better part of the day, and he had trembled mightily during the last hours before dawn. With so much of his energy already lost, he had little strength remaining with which to put up a long, hard struggle. “Heroism is the task of the young,” he thought. Life is precious, but wolf or man, young or old, everything that breathes must, finally, accept the end. It is not simply the Law of Nature, it is the one common thread that binds all living things. Even the tallest trees in the forest, hundreds of years old, will one day reach up to the sun no more.

The old man sat back against the trunk and huddled again and closed his eyes. A strange memory came to him, one he'd not thought about for decades. Some thirty years before, one of the men from the village went up to his trapline. When he didn't return after a week, his relatives went looking for him. But they did not find him. More men from a village upriver joined them because his wife was from there, but he was never found. A few years later, Least-Weasel was hunting in that area and found a skeleton under a tree far from the main trail. It was white and dry and picked clean. Many of the longer bones were missing, but the skull remained, and there was a badly rusted rifle still leaning against the tree. It had the initials of the owner carved into the stock.

Albert Least-Weasel, then a much younger man, took the skull and the rifle back to the village, and the sons of that man knew that these things belonged to their father. For whatever reason, they nailed the white skull to the top of their meat cache, a small log house on tall legs, usually raised about seven or eight feet off the ground so that animals cannot steal its contents of dried meat or fish. Almost a year later, the largest grizzly bear they had ever seen stepped from the leafy forest, stood on its hind legs, and rocked that cache until it toppled, spilling its store of moose and salmon. The great bear ignored the food, and, taking only the skull, gingerly tucked it between his yellow teeth and padded quietly back into the forest.

No one really knows why it happened or what it meant, only that it did happen. Perhaps the man's spirit became that bear and simply reclaimed what was rightfully his. The family still had an old black-and-white photograph of the skull nailed atop the cache to prove the story was not myth or legend.

The man wondered what story they would tell about him. Would it be a tale of courage and strength or one of foolishness in old age?

For the next hour or two, the only things that moved were a lone raven and the man's huddled shadow slowly following the tree's as the low sun rounded the curve on its ancient path. The breeze came suddenly in small gusts and carried away the ashes of the fire like powdery gray snowflakes, until there was only a dark hole where the fire had burned itself into the ground, like a sled dog digging into the snow to hide from the wind.