side stiffen.
When he’d collected a large bundle of dead wood, he tied it with leather straps and climbed the mountain once again, almost crawling under the weight, as the scream of the howling winter night bit at his frozen ears.
I am so tired. I feel all the excitement and fear of the fight with the bear leaving me.
Nearing the ledge of the cave, he thought, ‘I could go to sleep now.’
And for a long moment, on all fours, the bundle of wood crushing down upon his back, he stared long and hard at the rock beneath his numb fingers, thinking only of sleep.
Back in the cave he fed the wood that wasn’t too wet to the fire, watching the smoke escape through some unseen fissure in the roof of the cave. He held his cracked and bleeding fingers next to the flames.
The Boy knew what that meant.
He’d known and planned what he must do next without ever thinking it or saying that he would do it. But if he was to have the skin of the bear, then what needed to be done would need to be done soon.
The bear was too heavy to drag off the ledge, back here into the cave near the fire.
He held up a handful of oats to Horse. Horse sniffed at them but refused to eat as he turned his long head back to the fire.
Okay, you rest for now.
Outside the storm blasted past the ledge. Everything was white and gray and dark beyond, all at once.
When he found the snow-covered bear, he began the work of removing the skin.
He completed the cut up onto the bear’s chest. He cut the legs and then began to skin the bear from the paws up. His strength began to fail as he worked the great hide off its back, but when he came to the head, he made the final cut and returned to the cave to warm himself again. He took a handful of the oats, watching Horse’s sleeping eyes flutter, and ate them, chewing them into a paste and swallowing.
Returning to the wind and the night, he dragged the skin into the cave and laid it out on the floor.
I can work here for a while and be warm by the fire.
But he knew if the meat froze on the carcass he would never get it off the bone.
For a long time after that, he crouched over the bear, cutting strips of meat. When he’d gotten all the usable meat he washed it in the snow and took it back into the cave. He spitted two steaks and laid them on the fire.
Into the cold once again, he cracked open the bear’s skull for the brains and took those inside, placing them near the skin.
For the rest of the night he worked with his tomahawk, scraping the skin of flesh and fat and blood. When all of it was removed, he stepped outside, carrying the waste to the edge of the cliff and dropping it over the side.
The storm had stopped.
It was startlingly cold out. His breath came in great vaporous clouds that hung for a moment over the chasm and the ice-swollen river below and were gone in the next. The stars were close at hand. Below, the river tumbled as sluggish chunks of ice floated in the moonlight.
He washed his hands in snow, feeling both a stinging and numbness on his raw flesh.
He stood watching the night.
Clouds, white and luminous, moved against the soft blue of the moonlit night. Below, the river and the valley were swaying trees and shining shadows of sparkling granite. ‘I am alive,’ he thought. ‘And this is the most beautiful night of my life.’
DAWN LIGHT FELL across the ledge outside the cave. The Boy looked up from the skin he’d worked on through the night. The light was golden, turning the stone ledge outside the cave from iron gray to blue.
He felt tired as he returned to the skin once more, rubbing the brains of the bear into the hide.
“This is all I can do to cure it,” he said aloud in his tiredness, as if someone had been asking what he was doing. As if Sergeant Presley had been talking to him through the night. But now, in the light of morning it all seemed a dream, a dream of a night in which he worked at the remains of a bear.
But I have not slept.
“There is too much to do,” he said aloud.
The Boy lay down next to the fire and slept.
Chapter 17
In the days that followed:
He rubbed ash from the fire into the hide of the bear.
He smoked meat in dried strips.
He swept the cave with pine branches.
He had to lead Horse down the mountain to drink from the river at least once a day. He could think of no method to bring Horse enough water.
Winter fell across the mountains like a thick blanket of ice.
The Boy constructed a thatched door to block the entrance to the cave.
At night he stared at the wall and the moving shadows in the firelight.
By the time he’d collected firewood, watered Horse, and foraged enough food, the daylight was waning and he felt tired.
In the night he enjoyed listening to the fire and watching the shadows on the cave wall.
Winter had come to stay, and it seemed, on frost-laced mornings and nights of driving sleet, that it had always been this way and might continue without end.
Chapter 18
One night, as the wind howled through the high pines, he took Sergeant Presley’s bundle out of his pack.
He stared at it for a long moment, listening to the wind and trying to remember that autumn morning when he’d found it next to the body.
In the bundle was a good shirt Sergeant Presley had found and liked to wear in the evening after they had bathed in a stream or creek and made an early camp. That was the only time Sergeant Presley would wear the good shirt he’d found behind the backseat of a pickup truck they’d searched in the woods of North Carolina.
Red flannel.
The shirt would be there.
The map. Sergeant Presley’s knife. The shirt.
He undid the leather thong on the bundle and tied it about his wrist.
The soft cloth bundle opened and out came the shirt, and within were the knife and the map. And there was a leather thong attached to a long gray feather, white at the tip, its spine broken.
He laid the knife on his whetstone.
He laid the map on another stone, one he ate on by the fire. He left the broken feather and its thong in the bundle.
