第17章 Fever

The cough had come in with the cold snap and by the first week of March it had her. It was not, she thought at first, anything to worry about, because a person in a cabin for five months with smoke in the air and frost in the corners is going to cough, and she had coughed for weeks in winters past and had gone on flying. But this one settled in, and it took her chest and made it its home, and on the third of March she woke with a fever that she could measure not with a thermometer but with the way the cabin walls moved when she looked at them, and the way the stove doubled, and the way the boiled moose in the pot smelled like something from a house she had lived in as a child. She had fever for four days and she remembered them the way she remembered the amoxicillin days in November, as a broken series of stills. The fever did something to time. In the cabin there had never been much of a clock except the light and the stove and the ache in her back, and the fever took what little there was and threw it away, so that an afternoon could be a week and a week could be an hour and she could not have said, when a stretch of grey light crossed the floor and moved up the wall, whether she had been watching it for a minute or since morning. She would surface, sometimes, into a normal clarity, and use it the way a pilot uses a hole in cloud, to fix a position: there was the stove, there was the pot, there was the door, the door was shut, she was in the claim cabin in the Keshika in the last week of the winter, and the clarity would hold for a little while and then close over, and she would be down in the warm grey again with her mother's voice somewhere and the smell of a house she had not lived in for twenty years. She remembered the wood going out and the cold coming in and her not caring, and then caring, and then the crawl to the stove across the cold stones, which took an hour. She remembered the pot. She remembered drinking half of it and then not remembering, and she remembered the water freezing in the cup on the bench and drinking it anyway because there is no such thing as too cold to drink when the fever is on you and you are made of fire. She remembered talking to someone at the foot of the bunk, a shape against the grey light of the door, and she remembered the shape being there for a long time, and she remembered, or thought she remembered, its hand on her forehead, dry and cold and light, the way you touch a stove to see if it is warm without wanting to find out. And she remembered the pot being full when she woke, and the stove being fed, and the fire being there in the morning when she could not have been the one who had fed it, and a cold compress on her forehead made from a strip of the red cloth she had tied to the trail, wet and wrung and folded, and the floor swept. She lay in the bunk on the fifth morning with the fever gone out of her like a tide and she looked at the evidence with the dull attention of a woman reading her own log for the first time. She had seen the mitten on the nail, and the mitten had come from a hand, and the wood had come from a hand, and the fish on the board had come from a hand, and all of those had been outside her, at a distance, explainable by a person she had never met. But the pot had been full and the fire had been lit and the cloth had been folded and wet, and those had happened in the room where she lay, and if a hand had done them then the hand had been in the room with her, and the shape at the foot of the bunk had been a shape, and the touch on her forehead had been a touch. She got out of the bunk and went to the door and opened it and stood, and the world outside was the same world, and the clearing was the same clearing, and the woodpile was longer by a day and the trail down to the creek was packed and there was no print in the snow, because the wind had been working all night and there is never a print in the snow. She closed the door. She made a fire and boiled water and ate the last of the moose and sat with her back to the warm stove and did what she had learned to do in flying: she took the evidence and she took the doubt and she put them both on the table and did not pick a favorite. Expression the first: there is a person in this valley who does not want to be found, and he has been kind. Expression the second: I am forty kilos of a woman who has been alone in the dark for five months, and I have no witness, and my witness is myself, and the self that keeps the log is the same self that would have to be lying for any of the other things to be true, and the two of them cannot both be trusted. She wrote neither of them in the log. What she wrote, in the end, was the thing that was true whichever way the valley fell, and it was this. Whatever is out there, I have taken from it and it has taken from me, and I do not know its name and I will not give it one. I will keep the door barred. I will keep the fire. I will keep the trail. I will go down the river when the snow lets me walk on it, and I will leave all of this behind and I will not look back for it, and if it is a man, I hope for his sake he is gone by then, and if it is my own mind, then I hope for mine that the river is far enough away from it. She sealed the entry with a line across the page and she banked the stove and she slept, and in the morning her chest had loosened a little and the sun was up an hour earlier than it had been the week before, and she could hear, under everything, the first drip of the melt coming off the eave of the cabin onto the step, one slow drop at a time, a sound she had not heard in four months and had to lie still to believe. ---