第5章 The Ordway Claim

On the fourth morning she woke before the light and lay in the boughs and listened, and what she listened for was the sound of an engine, because in a valley like this an engine was the only thing that could arrive from somewhere else. There was no engine. There was the creek, and the tick of new ice sliding along the gravel, and a small persistent rustle that she finally identified as snow settling on the tarp above her head. She had spent three days on the bar and she had learned three things about it. It was a wind channel, because the valley funneled the air along the river and the river ran through the wind's chosen road. It had no fuel worth the name, because the spruce grew on the far side of the water and everything on her side of the water was willow the size of her thumb. And the aircraft was going under. Each morning the tail sat lower and the ice crept further up the fuselage, and each morning she understood a little more clearly that the wreck was not a shelter and not a landmark and not a rescue, it was a machine slowly being erased by a river, and that she had three or four weeks at most to strip it before it was lost beneath the freeze for good. So on the fourth day she did the thing she should have done on the first. She stopped waiting and went looking. She went upstream along the bar because upstream was where the land began to rise, and because on her map the contour lines upstream made a bench above the creek, and because Ragnhild, the pilot in Talvosk with the frostbitten hands, had told her once that every valley in this country had been walked before her, and that the men who walked it first had left their marks if a person only knew what to look for. Ragnhild had said that and then she had held up her two stumps and said that in her experience the country was generous in exactly one way, which was that it had already been solved by somebody, and the solution was still there, waiting, if you could read it. Haldis walked upstream with the satchel on her back and the compass in her hand and the wound on her arm beginning to complain under its dressing. She walked slowly and she walked with her eyes up, and about a kilometer from the aircraft she found the first blaze: a strip of bark cut away from the trunk of a black spruce, the wood beneath gone grey and hard, the axe marks in it soft as old scars. She stopped and touched it and looked around and found another, ten meters on, on the other side of the creek, and then a third beyond it, and the blazes laid out a line, and the line was a trail. She followed it. It climbed away from the creek and up through the spruce, and the spruce thinned into a stand of birch whose leaves were all gone, and then the ground leveled onto a bench that had been cleared a long time ago, because the stumps were still there, sawn flat and grey, and the stumps were the width of her two hands together, and men do not cut trees like that for a camp. They cut them like that for a living. The cabin stood at the back of the clearing with its back to a rise of rock and its face to the south, and it had been built by someone who knew what he was doing. Logs, spruce and birch, chinked once with moss and mud and mostly still chinked. A door a man could walk through upright, though it sagged on one hinge. No windows, which was wrong for a house and exactly right for a cabin, because glass was how a man lost his heat. A roof of poles and sod that had given up along the south eave and held along the north. Beside the door a barrel stove, its legs sunk into the dirt floor by fifty winters of weight. And behind the cabin, up on four poles taller than a man could reach, a cache, a box of nailed planks with a lid of tin, which meant that whoever built this place had known about bears. Haldis stood in the middle of the clearing for a long moment and did not move, because something in her chest had gone loose and warm and she did not want to give it a name yet. Then she walked to the door and put her hand on it and pushed it open. Inside, the light came from the door and from the gaps at the ends of the logs, thin lines of it drawn across the dark, and in that light she could make out the shapes of the place. A bunk along the north wall, pole frame, no mattress, a pile of old spruce boughs in it gone to dust. A bench under the south wall. A shelf of planks that held a coffee can of nails, a whetstone, a spool of brass wire, a tin cup with no handle, a stub of candle, and a hand-crank grinder, its paint long gone, its burrs still true. A piece of stovepipe leaning in the corner. A rusted trap, a number four, hung from a nail. On the wall above the bench somebody had penciled a list of dates and numbers, weather, maybe, or the counts of something, and under them, in the same hand, a name. She read the name and did not know it and would never learn who he was, and she would think about him many times before the winter was over, a man who had built a good cabin in a hard place and left the lid of his cache nailed down. She went back outside and stood in the clearing and looked up at the sky, which was the white of a coin held against a lamp, and she finally let the thing in her chest settle into a word, and the word was, absurdly, home. Not the building. The idea that someone had thought this valley was worth living in, and had been right. She worked the rest of that day without stopping. She swept the boughs out of the bunk and replaced them with fresh ones cut from the spruce behind the cabin, thick and dry and smelling of resin. She cleared the stove and found the flue mostly sound and fitted the stray length of pipe where the roof collar had rusted through. She chinked the worst gaps with moss pulled from the rocks and a paste of mud that froze in her hands before it would hold and would have to be redone, and she would redo it a dozen times before spring. She laid a floor of flat stones and poles so that her bed was off the ground. And when it began to get dark she built a fire in the barrel stove and sat in front of it with her boots off and her feet on the stone and watched the flames stand up in their iron room, and she was warm for the first time in four days and she thought she might never leave. She thought that. She was wrong, and part of her knew she was wrong even as she thought it. Because the cabin was three kilometers from the gravel bar, and the aircraft was at the gravel bar, and the aircraft was the only thing in the whole valley that a search could find, a metal cross in the snow visible from two thousand feet, and a woman in a cabin under a bench was a woman no one would ever see. The plane was her signal and the cabin was her life, and they were not in the same place, and no amount of wanting would put them there. So the decision she made, sitting in front of the barrel stove with the heat on her face and the frost on the inside of the door, was the one that would define the winter. She would live in the cabin and she would walk the trail to the bar, over and over, until either the search came or the snow was too deep to walk, and at the bar she would build the biggest thing a woman with a crate of survey stakes and a tarp and two drums of avgas could build, because a signal that no one is currently looking for is still a signal, and one day the planes would come back into the valley, and when they did she intended to have made their job easy. That night she wrote in the log: Claim cabin found 2.5 km upstream from wreck. Stove works. Water at creek. Will mark trail and return to bar at daylight. And then, because the pencil had more room and her hand was warm, she added a line she would later be embarrassed by and had every right to write: Not alone in this valley anymore. ---