第7章 Snare Line

Hunger, when it arrived properly, arrived without drama. She had been hungry for days, but that was the ordinary hunger of a woman eating too little, and it came with a kind of fog and a slowness of thought that she mistook for the fever's residue before she understood that it was simply her body beginning to eat itself. Then the last of the pemmican went, and the last of the rice that had been in the mail sack went, and she stood in the cabin and looked at what was left, which was half a bag of flour, a fist of sugar in a paper twist, a tin of coffee, a small sealed tin of syrup, and the lard. She laid the food out on the bench and did the arithmetic aloud, because arithmetic done in the head at forty below had a way of arriving wrong. Two thousand calories was what a person needed to sit still and not lose herself. Three thousand was what a person needed to work in the cold, and she was working in the cold, and she had perhaps twelve thousand calories in front of her, and the shortest day of the year was five weeks away. Twenty thousand calories was a month of sitting very still. It was not a winter. It was a month, and then she would be burning the bench. So she learned to hunt, which is a grand word for what she did, and what she did was to kill small things with wire. She had the spool of brass wire from the shelf above the bench and she had the knowledge that every animal in the north runs on trails, and that a trail is a decision an animal makes over and over, and that an animal that has made the same decision a thousand times will keep making it until the country changes or the animal dies. The snowshoe hares had their highways under the spruce along the creek, worn paths through the snow as wide as her hand, and she set her first snares on those paths, loops of wire the size of a fist, anchored to a stake she drove into the frozen ground with the hatchet, and set at the height of a hare's head when it hopped. The first two nights she caught nothing. The third night she caught a hare, and she knew it because she heard it, because a hare in a snare makes a sound that carries, and she came out of the cabin in the dark with the knife and the anger went out of her when she saw it, and she did what she had to do with a hand on its back and her own face turned away, and then she carried it inside and skinned it the way a woman skins an animal she has killed, by feel and by asking her hands to remember a camp she had worked at when she was twenty, and gutted it and saved the blood and boiled the whole thing into a soup that she ate with her fingers and a tin cup in front of the stove. That hare was, by her rough count, six hundred calories, and it had been made of willow bark and spruce needles and the one or two things it had found to eat, and what she learned from it was the arithmetic of the north, which is that a country this poor grows poor animals and a woman this hungry needs a great many of them. So she set a line. She set forty snares along the hare highways and the runs between the birch, and she checked the line every morning, because a snare left unattended in this country gave its catch to the foxes and the ravens, and a fox eats a hare that was a day of her life. The line began to pay. Two hares one morning, one the next, none on the fourth, a spruce grouse on the fifth, which flew into a snare set for something else and strangled itself, and which was, roasted over the coals with the fat running, the best thing she had ever eaten, though she knew that hunger was the cook. She gathered what the country offered besides meat. There were berries under the snow on the slope above the creek, crowberry and lingonberry, frozen hard and sour and full of a bright cold juice, and she gathered them in the tin can by the pint, and she ate them with the fat from the hares, and found the combination so specific and so good that it stopped her mid-mouthful like a remembered song. There were rose hips on the willow flats, red as new blood against the white, and she gathered them and boiled them and drank the tea and knew, from some old voice in her training, that the hips were the vitamin in the country where the summer was too short to grow a garden. What she did not have was fat, and fat was the trouble, and she understood the trouble precisely the way a pilot understands weather, as a fact with a shape and a direction. A hare is nearly all protein, and the north will not let you live on protein and nothing else, because an animal made of lean meat and no fat will feed your muscles and starve your brain, and she had heard the word for it once, rabbit starvation, and had thought at the time that it sounded like something out of a story that was not true. She would eat a hare a day and grow thin. So she husbanded the lard like money and rendered every scrap of fat from every animal and kept it in a coffee can by the stove where it would not freeze, and she never once threw out a bone without boiling it for the fat and the marrow. She built a meat cache, because she was beginning to have more than she could eat at once, and because the country would take back anything she left lying. She copied the design she had seen at the claim. Four poles, a platform the height of a man's reach above a standing jump, a box of poles lashed with paracord and green with new wood, and she hung the meat inside in the cold and left the cache lid loose so the wind would dry it. She was, she realized one afternoon in the middle of driving a pole into the hard ground, becoming someone who had a cache, who had a line of snares, who knew the taste of the berries on her own slope. She had been here five weeks. The valley did not know her and would not miss her, and she had begun, without wanting to, without noticing, to make herself at home in it. That was the danger and she knew it, and she wrote it in the log in the plainest language she had. Five weeks. Cabin, snares, fuel. Still no signals. Keep walking the bar. The planes have not come. Do not settle. Because a person who settles in a valley this far out settles into a grave, and the only thing standing between her and the grave was the memory that she had not been put here on purpose, that there was a chair by a stove in Lossett with her name on it, and that somewhere the search was either going on or had stopped. ---