第19章 Down the Nakwasin

The sticks were a road. She found them every kilometer or two, all that second day and the next, a stick driven into the ice at the edge of the deep channel with its top notched, and where the river made a bend and the ice went bad, the sticks came close together, and where the ice was thick and clean they stood far apart like fence posts on a line, and she followed them the way she would have followed the lights of a runway, which is exactly what they were. Whoever had cut them had walked this river before the melt, on snowshoes, and had known where the water moved under the ice and where it did not, and had left the knowledge standing in the open for anyone who came after, and she followed the notches down the Nakwasin with the sled creaking behind her and a feeling in her chest that she did not have a name for and would not have admitted to. The crust lasted four days, and she used every hour of them. She made eight, ten, eleven kilometers a day, the sled running light on the frozen shell, the map on the clipboard in her hand, the sun going up in the morning on one side of the valley and down in the evening on the other, and each night she camped on a bed of boughs with a fire and ate a measured portion of the moose and slept like the dead. On the third day the temperature never went below freezing and the world turned to water, and she learned what the melt does to a river. The overflow came up through the ice at the bends, a grey sheet of water on top of the frozen surface that soaked through her boots in a step and lay in wait for a sled runner, and she went through an overflow on the fourth afternoon up to her knees and got the sled out and took off her boots and poured the water out of them and put her feet inside her jacket next to her skin and sat on the sled and did not move for an hour, and she got away with it, and she wrote the date and the place and the word overflow in the log that night, and under it, in the margin, the sentence that was becoming the whole of her method: the river writes its own rules and reads them to you once. She saw the figure on the fifth evening. The sun was down behind the ridge and the valley had gone the deep violet it goes before the last light leaves, and she was on a straight reach with the sticks on her left, and across the river and up a long way, on the shoulder of a bluff, something stood upright against the sky. It was a person's height and a person's shape, and it stood the way a person stands who is watching, and she stopped and took up the sled rope and looked at it and knew that the sensible thing was to keep walking and the other thing was the thing she did, which was to put her hands to her mouth and shout. The word went across the valley and came back as an echo and the shape on the bluff did not move. She shouted again and got her fire kit out and built a fire on the ice, a small one, a signal, and she stood beside it with her arms up, and the shape stood, and the dark came up from the river and took the bluff and the shape with it, and when the moon rose she climbed up there with the hatchet in her hand and found nothing on the bluff. There was a burned stub of a black spruce at the edge of the bluff, killed by an old fire, twelve feet of dead wood standing alone against the sky, and from below it was a perfect silhouette of a man who has come out to watch the river. She walked around it in the moonlight. There was no print in the snow because there never was. She stood with her hand on the cold black wood and she said, once, quietly, into the dark, "If that was you, thank you." And the river ran, and the ice behind her cracked and settled with a sound like a door, and she went back down to her fire and slept beside it and did not dream of anything. The confluence came on the eighth day. She saw it before she felt it: the valley opened, the walls fell back, and the Nakwasin ran out into a wider river and joined the main stem, and the main stem was the size of a road, a great grey-brown band going south under a lid of soft spring ice. And on the point of land where the two rivers met, where the old survey map in her jacket showed a crossing and a winter road and the name Talvosk at the end of it, there was a cabin. She stood on the bank and looked at it for a long time before she went near it, because it was the first building she had seen that was not a wreck or a ruin, and a building that is not a ruin in a valley like this is a building with a reason. It was a line cabin, small and low, with a plank roof held down with poles and stones and a door that had a hasp, and smoke-staining above the chimney, and beside the door a board with a ten-digit number painted on it in white and beneath it, in the same paint, the word radio. She read the number and the word and then she sat down on the sled in the middle her firing, and she put her face in her hands, and she cried for the first time since October, because she had been walking for eight days toward a thing she was afraid was not there, and it was there, and it was real, and it had a sign that said radio. Inside there was a woodstove and a bunk frame and a bench and a stove and a shelf and a plastic bucket and, on the shelf, an old battery-operated transceiver in a canvas case, the kind carried by line crews and fire crews, with a stub antenna and a speaker and a dial with the aircraft band marked on it in cracked white paint. She lifted it down and set it on the bench and turned the switch, and nothing happened, and she turned it again and shook it and nothing happened, and she unlatched the battery compartment and looked at the cell inside, an old gel cell, and put the back of her hand against it and it was stone cold and dead. She sat with the dead radio in her lap and looked out the cabin window at the river going south under the soft ice, and she thought about the man at the bluff and the sticks with the notches and the fish on the board, and she thought about how the road she was walking had been walked before her, and she thought about the small stubborn fact that had been in the back of her mind since the first notched stick, which was this. The marks on this river were not old. The snow had not filled the notches. Whoever cut them had cut them this spring, after she had left the cabin, ahead of her, all the way down, and had stood on a bluff to watch her come, and had left her a cabin with a radio in it, and the radio was dead. She looked at the dead battery for a long time. Then she took it out of the case and put it inside her jacket against her ribs, where her body had one thing left to give, and she wrapped her arms around herself and sat by the cold stove and began, very slowly, to warm it. ---