Hunter's Moon Read online

This prompts Trey to remark that he isn’t being fed too well. A cup of instant oatmeal for breakfast, beef jerky and a protein bar for lunch, freeze-dried noodles for dinner. He reckons his ratio of calories out to calories in at three-to-one, making it clear by the sulky glances he tosses at Rick and Elise that he blames them for his privations.

  To avoid overloading the floatplane and to make room for their camera gear, two boxes of food had to be left behind at the airstrip in Fairbanks. “Better that we lighten up with that than with warm clothes,” Rick said. “We can subsist off the fish we catch and the game we shoot.” He must have been recalling his hardscrabble youth, when he kept his mother and himself off welfare by filling the freezer with venison every deer season. I’ll admit that living off the land appealed to me at first; it lent a survivalist tint to what otherwise would have been a sporty adventure. I’ll admit to this, too: young men Trey’s age had been leading patrols in Afghanistan while he and his girlfriend hatched their drug-smuggling scheme; I thought that a little hardship, a little suffering, might benefit his character.

  But so far we’ve caught few fish and have shot nothing, making this more of a character-building exercise than I’d bargained for.

  * * *

  The gunshot wakes me from a dream that flees my brain the instant my eyes open. I free myself from the sleeping bag, crawl outside, and see Rick, Elise, and Trey trudging up the saddle, toward a dark form lying in the snow on the mountainside. A couple of inches fell during the night, but the morning sky is unblemished. By the time I lace up my boots, throw on a jacket, and walk over to the others, Rick has fetched a camera and is photographing Trey, striking the standard poses with the caribou he has killed. While I slept, they’d spotted the animal making its way down the mountain. Trey got his rifle and lay down in a shallow depression, Rick and Elise beside him, whispering to wait, wait, wait until the bull was in range.

  “One shot, Dad!” Trey says, his face alight. The bull isn’t large, its rack modest as caribou racks go; but it is Trey’s first one, and Rick has smudged his forehead with its blood—the hunter’s ancient rite of initiation. My father had done the same with me when I shot my first deer at age fifteen. “We saw him when he was way up there”—Trey gestures at the peak, white and sharp and curved, like a fang—“and when he turned broadside, I dropped him. One shot!”

  The picture-taking over, Rick draws his knife and, kneeling beside the carcass, begins the messy labor of gutting, skinning, and quartering. We all pitch in, and it’s done fairly quickly.

  “What the hell is going on?” Elise chimes in. She squats down to scrub her hands in the snow. “The college-boy cheechako catches the most fish and shoots the only game.”

  Trey beams.

  I’m guessing that the “Hard-Bitten Bitch of the Far North” has, with this compliment, redeemed herself in his eyes. A breeze lifts a wisp of his broom-colored hair. I forgive his silly boast, shake his hand, clasp his wrestler’s shoulder, and for a moment see him at twelve, grinning after he’s kicked the winning field goal in a Pop Warner league game. He leans toward me, then draws back, almost imperceptibly. He senses, accurately senses, a certain half-heartedness in my congratulations.

  We pack out the quarters, carrying forty pounds more apiece than we carried in. Although it’s all downhill, the trek to base camp takes three hours. We arrive worn out, then turn to the tedious work of boning and trimming. The meat is crammed into game bags, and those are strung up in the tallest tree we can find nearby, an aspen. It’s only twenty feet high at most, but the bags should be out of a bear’s reach. Rick has saved the backstrap, which he slices into strips that we spit on sharpened willow sticks and roast over the fire and eat with our hands. Dress us in furs and we’d look like some band of Neolithic hunter-gatherers. We’re so hungry that the lean tenderloin doesn’t fill the hollow in our bellies, so Rick fetches an onion and green pepper from a food container, chops them up, and mixes them with a mess of shoulder meat for a stew. I can’t remember tasting anything quite so good. A shot of hip-flask whiskey in a tin cup, sipped as the late sun tints the mountaintops, finishes things off nicely.

  * * *

  At first light the next morning, sitting on a bed of glacial till, we glass a mountain whose slope is spotted with Dall sheep, once again ewes and lambs and a few adolescent rams. Rick, standing behind a tripod-mounted camera, his head shrouded in a black cloth, is taking landscape shots. His instrument is big and bulky and could have been used by Ansel Adams. A four-by-five Crown Graphic, he told me earlier, more than fifty years old. Despite its antiquity, no digital camera can come near it for capturing the sweep of wide, wild country.

  The stillness is like none I’ve experienced in the Michigan woods. There, even when you can’t hear a man-made sound, the air seems to carry echoes of chain saws, traffic on distant highways, the shouts and laughter of campers. This is a silence never broken by humanity’s clatter; it is layered, dense, virgin, alien—a disquieting quiet, if you will. All the otherness of the natural world is in it—a world complete unto itself, independent of man’s endeavors and conflicts, his plans, schemes, joys, griefs, his egoistic certainty that he is a child of God. Compared with it, the noise I’ve left behind—the chatter at faculty meetings, TV sound bites, campaign speeches, talk-radio yelps, the whole busy racket—has all the import of crickets chirping. The thick soundlessness almost makes me hallucinate; once, I think I hear voices, an indistinct murmuring, as of a distant crowd. It’s probably nothing more than the wind playing tricks, but a part of me wonders if it’s the mountains speaking, in a language beyond my understanding.

  “I see it! My ram!” Trey cries, and yanks me out of my reflections. He lowers his binoculars and points. “Up there on that ridge! The ledge just under the ridge!”

  Rick ducks out from under the hood and falls prone behind the spotting scope, trains it on the ledge.

  “Good eyes, Trey. A full curl.”

  I find it through my field glasses. It’s kneeling on all fours, its horns swirled like massive whelks. He’s so beautiful I would just as soon leave him up there, in magisterial repose, but I cannot deny my son his moment.

  A bluff sheers down to the river; beneath it is a gravel strip, like a sidewalk beneath a building. We file along it, using the bluff to mask our approach—Dalls have eyesight equal to a 10-power scope. So Rick says, and I have no reason to dispute him. The river on this stretch, below cascading terraces, is deep and jade green. Fallen spruce lay out on the surface—giant quilled brushes swaying in the current. Sweepers, they’re called. Upstream of the trees, a boulder big as a garage juts out from the bluff, blocking our path. We climb up and around it, shale and scree crumbling underfoot. Acutely conscious that we’re out of contact with civilization—Fort Yukon, the nearest human settlement, is a hundred fifty miles away—I take great care with each step.

  Now we begin to scale the ridge, the ram several hundred feet above us. Rockslides lead up the slope, the rocks piled one atop the other, precariously balanced, too unstable to walk on. We climb the tundra between the slides, clinging to willow bushes, tufts of grass, anything we can grab. It seems to take ten minutes to go as many feet. The goal, Rick says, are two limestone plinths, split into a V, that rise at roughly the same altitude and less than a hundred yards from the ram, perched on the ledge. Trey is to position himself in the notch and use his backpack as a rifle rest.

  “I’ve seen you shoot, and it should be an easy one for you,” Rick says in a subdued voice. The praise delights Trey. “But we’d better be quick,” he warns, motioning to the north, where lead-colored clouds have begun to tower.

  But the terrain won’t allow us to be quick. Besides the precipitous slope, impenetrable willow thickets force us onto a rockslide, on which each step must be measured and tested before taking the next. In no time, the squall blows in at forty miles an hour, driving before it dense flurries that swoop and swirl. The willow brakes thin out and we hop off the slide, but the wind is howling with s
uch force we can’t climb any farther. All we can do is flatten ourselves against the ridge so we aren’t blown off and wait for the squall to pass.

  It doesn’t. The snowflakes, whipping our faces, feel like hailstones.

  Elise voices what I’m thinking: “This is fucking nuts!”

  Rick agrees. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” he shouts, and starts to toboggan downhill on his butt.

  “I can make it!” Trey yells, and scrambles on all fours in the opposite direction.

  I am just able to grab him by an ankle, and I hold on with both hands.

  “Goddammit! Use your head!”

  “Goddamn you!” he hollers, looking back at me over his shoulder, a bright, wild, predatory glitter in his pale eyes.

  He kicks free. A second later Rick calls out, “Look!” and jabs a finger at the ledge. The ram has abandoned it and is confidently picking its way, niche by niche, up what looks like a wall. Snow flurries and cloud obscure him for a minute; the next time we see him, he’s standing profiled on the ridge top, as though to taunt us, and then he goes over and out of sight.

  “Shit! Shit and son of bitch!” Trey cries out in frustration. He swats the air, I suppose in lieu of swatting me. “He was mine! I could have had him!”

  I know what he’s thinking: after he’d worked so hard, after he’d come so close, the ram’s escape was unfair. Still, his tantrum is disproportionate to what was lost—a trophy, that’s all; a pair of horns to hang on a wall.

  “He wasn’t yours,” I say. “He never was.”

  Going down is as harrowing as going up, even more so what with the buffeting gusts, the slick footing. Reaching the bottom, we retrace our route along the gravel strand under the bluff. The squall at last passes beyond us, rolling southward with the river. The sky is clear, except for a few ragged clouds. Well overhead, two golden eagles, wings outspread, gyre on the thermals.

  Trey grows impatient with our middle-age plodding and stomps out ahead, still hot with anger and disappointment.

  Rick, Elise, and I catch up to him at the giant boulder. On this side, it slants gently to its domed top; it drops straight down on the side facing the river, which picks up speed as it sweeps past, forming a series of low, standing waves. In a fit of youthful bravado, or just to show off, Trey digs his fingers into a fissure a little above his head, pulls himself up, and then crawls over the huge rock while we do the sensible thing and climb around it.

  The rounded top is wet from snowfall. He slips and falls into the river, a ten-to-twelve-foot plunge. He lands feetfirst, and for a slivered instant, he stands in water that comes almost to his neck; then the current scoops the sandy bottom from underfoot, gives him a shove, and carries him on his back into the jumbled sweepers ranked downstream. All this happens in two seconds, too fast for me to react until I see his arms lunge through the surface and seize the first tree in the row. How, in his heavy clothes, weighed down with a pack and rifle, he stayed afloat, I count as miraculous.

  With Rick and Elise, I sprint down the shore to the root-tangled base of the fallen spruce. Trey is perhaps only fifteen feet from me, with one elbow hooked around the trunk, the other around a branch. He is struggling to haul himself onto the trunk and straddle it, but he can’t overcome the weight pulling him down, the current sucking at his legs. What had begun as a mishap now threatens to become a catastrophe—his clothes insulate him, but in water that cold, he hasn’t got more than ten minutes. If, that is, he doesn’t drown first.

  I step out onto the tree, with no thought but to reach him.

  “Take this! Tie it around him!” Elise hands me a coil of line. For some reason—really for no reason whatever—I observe that it’s a bright-yellow synthetic.

  Walking the spruce trunk is as close as I’ve ever come to walking a tightwire. It bobs under my weight. I keep my balance by grasping the branches sticking up in the air. Standing over Trey, I make a loop with a slipknot and drop it to him. He is looking up at me, shock on his face. Shock from the fall, shock from the cold. It’s ceramic white.

  “Grab it, Trey. Grab it and put it over your wrists and I’ll pull it tight.”

  “I can’t move my hands, Dad.” His fingers are almost blue. “I’m going to let go and—”

  “No! Don’t!” My boy is going to die. The words crash into my head. If he does let go, he’ll sink and become trapped in the submerged branches. My boy is going to die. In such circumstances, the human mind tends to attribute powers of intent to unconscious nature. The river seems a malevolent force that wants to drown my son; the branches underwater, waving in the current, are green tentacles, groping for him. But of course the river is only a river, of course the branches are only witless branches; the one will go on flowing, the other go on with their swaying motions whether Trey lives or dies; and that absence of all regard strikes me as more abominable than any malign purpose. “Grab it! Grab the rope!” I cry again.

  He attempts it, but his fingers are frozen into claws. Bending forward as far as I can without falling in myself, I slip the loop over his left wrist, then the right, and cinch it.

  “Hang on, Trey. We’ve got you.”

  I make it to the shore. The three of us, in a tug-o’-war row, pull hard and haul him onto dry land. He lies facedown, trembling from a cold I mistake for fear, or joy at being rescued, or both.

  “He’s in second stage,” says Elise, meaning second-stage hypothermia. “Get him to his feet, strip him to the waist. You, too, Paul. Strip to the waist, hug him, get your body heat into his core. Now.”

  Trey is unsteady on his feet and shuddering uncontrollably when I embrace him. It’s as though I’m hugging a stone statue, his skin is so cold. When he speaks, what comes out is gibberish. Second stage. There is no stage after the third. I press my chest against his, lock my arms around his back, imagining myself not as a father but as a kind of mother—a mother, yes, connected to him by an invisible umbilical cord, pouring my body’s warmth into his.

  Elise pulls a paperback book from her pack, rips out a few pages, balls them up under a pile of twigs, and strikes a match.

  “He’s not out of the woods yet. Keep holding him, walk him around, until I get the fire going,” she says. “One time, a guy we thought was okay went into his tent to lie down. He died right there.”

  I don’t need to hear that. Did we save him from drowning only to lose him to something so petty as a few degrees of body temperature? All the pain of Cheryl’s long labor—seven hours—all the anxieties of nursing him through childhood illnesses and making sure he did his homework and trying so hard and so often failing to keep him out of trouble and when he got into it, getting him out of it because we believed in him, was all that to be for nothing? Trey’s head lolls against my shoulder. I kiss his chilled cheek and indulge the need to plead, picturing myself down on a supplicant’s knees. His mother will be devastated; I will be devastated. We love him, we love him, do you hear?

  Though I’m not religious, I am looking up as these words fly through my mind, looking up at the sky, against whose blank, annihilating blue the two eagles turn and turn without a sound. And in their silence I hear an answer.

  Rick has broken off branches from a dry driftwood log and stacked them in a teepee. They catch, and in a minute or two a small bonfire blazes.

  “How are you doing?” Elise asks Trey.

  Nodding, he mumbles that he’s all right. He’s a bit groggy, but the shivering has abated. Placing her hands on his shoulders, she turns his back to the fire, holds him there for a while, then turns him again, and yet again, as if he’s a roast. I notice then that the book she tore up for tinder is her own. How to Wipe Your Ass Without Toilet Paper: Survival Tips for Cheechakos.

  “I was going to give it to you when we got back, signed by the author, too,” she says, with the same playful twinkle bestowed after my massage. “But I’ve got lots of others. I’ll mail one to you.”

  Rick has meanwhile piled rocks behind the fire and draped Trey’s jacket, shir
t, and undershirt over them.

  “Better get your boots and socks, too,” he tells Trey. “Better get everything off and dry. It’s a hike back to camp.”

  Trey takes off his boots, removes his socks, and wrings them out before laying them on the rock pile, but he demurs about stripping his pants and long johns.

  Elise hoots, covering her eyes with both hands. “Promise not to look. I’ll bet your swim made you a little Mr. Grape Nuts, am I right?”

  And we all laugh.

  * * *

  His “swim” took more out of him than any of us realized. He’s listless and subdued, spending the rest of the morning in the tent. Recalling Elise’s tale of the man who had seemed to recover from exposure only to die in his sleeping bag, I check in on Trey a couple of times.

  Rick and Elise leave to take more photographs and return in midafternoon. We lunch on caribou steaks, seasoned with pepper and fried in butter. Rick shows Trey an image on his Nikon—it’s the ram, which he captured with a 300-millimeter lens as it stood this morning on the ridgetop, facing the camera, great horns curled in a natural coronation. It looks as if it’s posing for its portrait.

  “I’ll make a print, send it to you,” he promises. “Way better than a wall hanger. You’ve got a story to tell.”

  Trey’s glance rises from the view-screen and roams over our faces.

  “Thanks … Y’know…”

  “No problem. Not like I’ll have to make prints in a darkroom like in the olden days.”

  “No … I mean … all of you … thanks for, y’know, saving my life.”

  Rick pauses to peel the backing off a piece of nicotine gum. “Sure,” he says. “You can thank us by doing something serious with it.”

  * * *

  The sun, not yet risen over the mountains, brushes high cirrus clouds with orange and peach. We break camp in preparation for the floatplane’s arrival. We don’t know when it will—could be an hour from now, or two, or five—but we need to be ready. Rick humps his cameras, the tripod, and other paraphernalia to the lake, then returns for his backpack. Elise, kneeling on both knees, shoulders a duffel bag containing the big supply tent and stands, bent under the load, like some refugee fleeing with all her belongings.