第11章 Smoke on the Ridge

The smoke she saw on the ninth of December, and she saw it because the day was clear and cold and the air had gone so still that a column of anything could stand in it a long way off. It was on the far ridge, the ridge that closed the valley to the north, on a bench about halfway up where the dark spruce gave way to the grey burn of an old fire, and it was thin and straight and grey and it went up into the blue and was gone, the smoke of a small fire that had been built by someone who knew how to keep it small. A fire that size would be built to cook and to warm a body and not to be seen, and she had seen it only because she had happened to walk to the bar on a day when the air had forgotten how to move. She stood in her own great pale arrow on the gravel bar and looked at that thin line of smoke on the far ridge for a long time, and she did everything she could think of to convince herself it was not what it was. Steam off a spring. Frost blowing off a tree in a way she had never seen. Nothing. Because a fire on that ridge was twelve kilometers from her cabin, which at her present rate was two days of walking in deep snow, and a body that walked two days in deep snow at thirty-five below spent more calories than it carried, and burned more of itself than it could afford. She went anyway. She would wonder about that decision for the rest of her life and she would never be sure it had been a decision. There was food in the cabin for a week and she ate a double ration the night before and slept in her clothes and left at first light with the satchel and the snowshoes she had made and a roll of boughs for a bed if she had to sleep out, and she walked. The snowshoes were the ugliest things she had ever built and they worked. She had made them from green willow bent into a hoop and laced with the inner strands of the paracord and a hundred little crossings of wire, wide and round like a bear's paw, and on them she floated where she would otherwise have sunk to her waist, and she learned within an hour what every person who has ever used snowshoes learns, which is that the country at forty below on a good pair of shoes is a different country from the one that buries a person to the knee. She ate the ground up. She went up the valley on the river ice and the creek mouths and the old trail of blazes, and she crossed to the north side at the narrows, and by dark she was at the foot of the far ridge and she had covered more ground in a day than she had in weeks. She slept that night in a snow trench she dug with the hatchet and lined with spruce boughs, and she kept a fire going and fed it from a deadfall she found, and she ate a hare she had brought frozen and half raw because fuel in a snow trench is a luxury and a body can burn raw meat if the meat is clean. She was warm enough and she was alive and she lay in the trench and watched the stars come out and turn slowly overhead, and she felt something she had not felt since the crash and for a while could not name, and then she named it. It was purpose. She was walking toward a fire, and a fire meant a person, and a person meant a radio or a trail or a reason that someone else had built a fire in her valley, and after six weeks of waiting to be found she was going to find someone instead. She reached the bench at midday. There was no one there. There was a fire ring, a good one, built of rocks laid in a circle with a flat stone for a hearth, and there was ash in the ring, and the ash was cold. She knelt and dug into it with a stick and found that the cold was only a skin; two inches down the ash was dry and loose and there were coals at the bottom, dead but not long dead, and when she pushed the flat stone aside and set her palm to the earth beneath it, the earth was frozen, but not as frozen as the earth at the edge of the ring. The fire had been out a week, perhaps. Perhaps less. She looked around the bench. There was a place where a body had lain, a flattened circle of boughs and a bare patch of ground, and there was a stick driven into the snow at its head, and on the stick there was nothing, and beside the hearth there was a fish bone and the tail of a fish, frozen, whitefish by the look of it, the kind that live deep under the ice of the lakes and come shallow at the freeze. There was no shelter. There was no tent and no tarp and no cabin, only the fire ring and the bed and the stick, and no tracks, because the bench was wind-scoured and the snow had been swept off it clean down to the frozen ground and a track could not last on it an hour. She sat on the hearth stone and she took off her snowshoes and she looked at the fire ring and the bed and the fish bone, and she had never in her life been so close to another person and so unable to reach one. Whoever had made this fire had come up onto a ridge the wind had scoured bare, and built a fire with a hearth stone, and eaten a fish and slept on boughs and driven a stick into the ground at the head of the bed, and had done all of it in a place with no shelter and no water and no wood within a hundred meters, which meant the wood for that fire had been carried to it, which meant the person had come there on purpose and had known, before he came, that he would find what he needed when he got there. Which meant he knew this bench the way she knew her own clearing. Which meant he knew the valley the way she was learning it, at the speed of foot. The stick at the head of the bed had a notch cut in its top. She looked at the notch and she did not understand it and she would not understand it for a long time, and then she did something she had not planned to do, which was to take one of the survey stakes out of her satchel and drive it into the ground beside the fire ring and tie to it a strip of the red cloth that was her marker, and on the flat of the stake, with the pencil, she wrote her coordinates and the words claim cabin, cook stove, the hut. And then she sat with the stake in front of her and understood that she had just done a thing a person does who believes there is someone to write to. She looked for tracks for another hour without finding one. She ate the food she had brought. She filled a gap in the fire ring with a stone that had fallen out of it, because the ring was good and it wanted to be whole. And then, because the light was going and because the ridge was no place to sleep twice, she put on her shoes and started back down. She had gone a kilometer when she heard, behind her, very faint through the cold air, a sound that her body knew before her mind did, and she stopped and turned and listened with everything she had. It did not come again. It might have been the ice in the trees, cracking with the dropping temperature. It might have been a raven. She stood in the middle of the far ridge in the last of the blue light and looked back up toward a bench where there was no one, and she did not know whether the sound had been a voice, or the wind, or the ice, or the long slow working of a valley that did not care whether it was heard. She turned and kept going down, and the sound did not come again, and she never found out what it was, and she carried the question home with her along with the fish bone, wrapped in cloth in the bottom of her satchel, a piece of evidence of a person she could not prove existed and could not stop believing in. ---