第12章 Hunger Arithmetic

The fish bone sat on the shelf above the bench and she looked at it every day, and the days she looked at it the longest were the ones when the snares were empty, which by the middle of December was most of them. The country had tightened. The hares had gone down into the swamps under the deep snow and the runs she had learned in November were buried and abandoned, and the ones she could still find held a hare perhaps one morning in five, and a hare one morning in five was not a winter. She had eaten the last of the flour on the twentieth of December, and the last of the lard the day after, and on the twenty-second she sat down at the bench with the pencil and did the sum and made herself look at the number. She weighed herself as best she could by carrying the two avgas drums, one in each hand, to a known weight and using her body as a scale, a method that was crude and consistent, and the answer was that she had lost between fifteen and twenty kilos since the crash. She could see her ribs. The fat was gone from her face, and there was a hollow under each collarbone the size of a shallow cup, and her wrist, when she wrapped her other hand around it, no longer filled the circle. She was, she wrote, at the edge. The snares would not carry her. The cabin would keep her warm enough to starve slowly. And the lake behind the bar was full of fish. She went down to the lake on the twenty-third, the shortest day of the year, and she took the hatchet and the saw and the wire and the twine and the last tin of the syrup, which she did not intend to eat and intended to use, and she walked the four kilometers of her own trail through the frozen muskeg to Oolamut, and she stood on the shore of the lake and looked at two feet of ice the color of old bottle glass and understood that she was going to have to make a hole in it with tools built for a smaller job. It took her three hours. She chipped with the hatchet through the outer ice and swept the chips with a piece of bark and chipped again, and when the ice grew grey and rotten near the bottom she stopped chipping and started driving a billet of frozen spruce into the last foot of it, and she drove it down and down, and the ice cracked and the black water came up through the crack and spread across the hole, and she had a hole. She cleared it and widened it with the axe and she sat back on the ice with the sweat freezing on her face and her arms shaking and she had, by the middle of the first short day, a circle of open water the size of a barrel mouth in the middle of a frozen lake. The fishing was the simplest thing she had ever made. She had bent a nail into a hook over the hot stove weeks ago and it had a barb and it held. She had unwound a length of the inner core of the paracord and tied the hook to the end of it and tied the line to a stick a foot long, and she had a jig: a hand line and a hook with a scrap of hare gut on it, and she kneeled at the edge of her hole and lowered it into the black water and jigged it up and down the way she had seen men do it, and on the fortieth or fiftieth lift something took it and the line went alive in her hand. She hauled it up through the hole and it was a whitefish, a foot long, silver and perfect, and it flopped on the ice and froze as she watched it in the manner of a fish in that country, which is to say it stopped. She caught four more before the light went. She went home in the dark with five whitefish in the satchel and she was so hungry and so pleased that she ate the smallest one raw on the trail home, cut open with the knife, its flesh white and firm and cold and tasting of the deep, and she did not get sick and she did not care whether she did. The fishing worked. It worked for a while the way a good job works, and it kept her alive through the darkest month of the year, and she learned to catch six and eight fish a day at the good hole, and learned to keep the hole open through the night with a spruce slab over it, and learned that the lake talked, that the ice boomed and cracked and sang all night in a language of its own, and that the sound of it, once you had learned to fear it, was terrible, and once you had learned to read it, was nothing, and once you had learned to love it, was the most reassuring sound in the world, because it meant the ice was thick and holding and alive. But she was not alone at the lake. That was the thing that came back with her, the thing she wrote in the log with a hand that was steadier than she felt. On the fourth day at the hole she found the hole was not the hole. She had marked it with a stick and a strip of red cloth, and she came down the trail in the morning and found her stick still standing and her cloth still tied and her hole frozen and cut and re-opened, a new clean circle of black water beside the old one, the chips from the new hole swept into a neat little pile, the way a person sweeps the floor of a shack. And on the edge of the ice beside it, set down on a piece of board so that it did not touch the snow, there were two fish, and they were not her fish, and they had been taken from their own hole, and they had been left, and the person who left them had swept up his chips and taken his fish and given her two of his and gone away without a word in the snow the wind had already begun to close. Haldis stood on the ice in the short grey light with the two fish at her feet and she looked at them for a long time, and then she did a thing she had not done since the first weeks. She looked up and down the long white shore of Oolamut Lake and she said, out loud, in the flat and carrying voice she used on the radio, "Thank you." The words went out across the ice and did not come back. The lake boomed once, far out, in the deep, like a door closing in a house. ---