Chapter 4 First Water, First Fire

She woke before dawn with her teeth in her jaw and every joint in her body reporting at once. Her forearm had bled through the sleeve of her jacket and the blood had frozen, which was the one mercy of the night, a dark scab of it holding the wound shut while she slept. She lay in the boughs and took stock the way she had learned to take stock in a cockpit, from the outside in. The sky was clear. The wind had died. The tarp had held. Her feet, when she flexed them, sent up a dim report from very far away, which was better than nothing and worse than warmth. The first thing was fire. Not water, not food, not the wound. Fire first, because fire was how she would have everything else. She got the satchel and the small kit out of her pocket and laid them on the rock and began to build, and her hands told her the truth about her situation in a way her mind had been too busy to notice: they did not work. The fingers on her right hand bent and held but the fingers on her left would not close all the way, and when she tried to pinch a twig between them the twig slid free and fell, again and again, and she had to lean down and pick it up and she could not feel whether she had it. So she built the fire with two hands the way a person builds a fire who has decided to build a fire, slowly and stupidly and without pride. First the tinder: birch bark, peeled in thin curls off a dead trunk whose paper had gone orange and dry, the best fire-starter in the north, and dry spruce twigs snapped fine as a sparrow's bones, and the dead grass under the sedge at the edge of the bar. She stacked it in the shape of a small house, and then she laid the survey stakes, split with the hatchet into lengths like the fingers of a hand, around it in a teepee, sized from pencil to thumb. Then she took the ferrocerium rod out of the small kit and she set the rod against the birch bark and she drew the striker down it, and the sparks flew into the bark and died. She did it again. And again. On the ninth or tenth try a spark landed in a curl of bark and stayed, and she fed it a breath, a small breath, and the corner went orange and then black and then orange again, and she fed it twigs, and the twigs caught, and the fire stood up in her hands, small and yellow and alive. She sat back on her heels and let it burn a moment before she touched it, because touching it too soon was how you lost it, and she watched the flame do the thing she had watched it do ten thousand times and had never once, until now, needed. Then she fed it. Then she fed it more. Then she stopped feeding it and let it lie down in its bed of gravel, out of the wind, and by the time the sun had cleared the shoulder of the Wahtuk and laid its low light across the bar like a thing being measured, she had a fire she could keep. Water next. She took the pot to the creek and broke the new ice along the edge and filled it, and she set it in the coals to boil, because giardia was a two-week problem and dehydration was a two-day problem and she would take the two-day problem first but there was no reason to take either when the fire was already lit. While it came up she drank from her cupped hand, the creek water so cold it made her teeth ache into her jaw, and then she drank the boiled water when it was cool enough, and it was the best thing she could remember tasting in years, and she drank a quart and then another and then she sat and looked at her hands. The wound on her forearm was seven inches long and shallow at both ends and deep in the middle, a clean tear from the door frame or the yoke, whichever had opened her. It had stopped bleeding on its own and the cold had done the rest. She boiled more water and let it cool until it was hot and not scalding, and she washed the wound with it and picked the fibres of jacket and gravel out of it with tweezers from the first-aid pouch, which was a thing she had to do slowly and with the fire between her knees for warmth, and when it was clean she pulled the edges together with the butterfly strips and taped them down, and then she sat for a while with the arm wrapped in a clean dressing and did not move, because it hurt and because she had earned the right to sit. The ribs she could do nothing for. They were cracked or they were bruised and either way the treatment was the same, which was breathing, which she had to do anyway, which was the entire joke. She would tape them if they got worse and she would not tape them if they got better, and meanwhile she would not carry more than she could carry, and she would learn what she could carry. She spent the rest of the day on the shelter and on the firewood. She gathered deadfall from under the spruce, dry branches that snapped instead of bending, birch and willow and spruce, and she cut them into stove lengths with the folding saw and stacked them under the tarp along the wall, and she laid a floor of flat rocks from the bar so that she would not have to lie on the ground when the boughs froze through. The sun set at eleven minutes past four and by then she had a lean-to she could sleep in, a fire she could keep, water enough to drink, and a wound that was dressed. She got out the pencil stub and the back of the map envelope and she wrote the first entry of the log she would keep for reasons she could not yet name. She wrote the date. She wrote the coordinates as near as she could guess them from the map and the shape of the lake. She wrote: Aircraft down on the Nakwasin gravel bar at the west end of Oolamut Lake. One aboard. Moving. Then she looked at the word moving for a while, and she underlined it, and she folded the envelope away. Above the bar, in the top of a spruce, a raven sat and did not move. It had been there since the fire caught and it had watched her all day with one eye and then the other, and when she looked up at it now it did not fly, and she said to it, out loud, because the sound of a voice in the valley was worth something, "You can wait." The raven waited. ---