Brian's Return (3 page)

“See? You don’t believe it, do you?”

Caleb shook his head. “I meant that I wanted to know more. Please tell me about it.”

And so Brian did. He had been moving around a clearing one day on snowshoes, hunting. It was cold but not the crippling cold that came sometimes and he had an arrow on the bowstring of his war bow just in case, when he looked out in the clearing and saw a fox make a high, bounding jump and bury its head in the snow, its tail sticking up like a bottle brush.

The fox came up with snow all over its face, looked around—Brian froze and the fox didn’t see him— then looked down at the snow again. It cocked its head, listening, then made another leap, fully four feet in the air, and dove headfirst into the snow again.

This time it came up with a mouse wriggling in its front teeth. The fox bit down once, killed it, swallowed it and then listened again, bounced in the air again and came up with another.

The fox did it eight more times and got three more mice before trotting out of the clearing and away. Brian watched the whole thing, wondered briefly about eating mice and thought better of it. Not that he was squeamish but he had a deer by this time and plenty of meat and besides, it would take probably thirty or forty mice to make a meal and cleaning them—gutting each mouse and skinning it—would take a lot of work and time.

Still, he was curious. He hadn’t thought much about mice but now that he did he supposed they would be hibernating. But the ones that came up in the fox’s mouth were wriggling. Clearly they hadn’t been sleeping.

Brian moved into the clearing and stared at the snow, listening as the fox had done, but he couldn’t hear anything. He took off his snowshoes and used one of them as a shovel, carefully scooping away the snow until he was down to grass, and it was here he found the truth.

The grass had been tall when winter came. When the snow fell on it the grass bent over on itself and made a thick, thatch-like roof the snow couldn’t penetrate. It was beneath this roof that the mice lived.

Brian cleared more of the snow and found small, round tunnels leading from one snug grass room to another, little homes under the snow. In itself the grass would not have been that warm but the snow— two feet of powder over the top—made a wonderful insulator and the rooms were dry and cozy looking. When Brian lay on his stomach and looked down one of the tunnels he saw that light penetrated the snow, and as he watched, a field mouse came around a corner and saw Brian. It froze and turned and ran back. During the ten minutes he watched five more mice came down the tunnel and ran back when they saw it was open.

A whole city was under there, he thought as he watched—a mouse city. There must have been hundreds of mice down in the grass tunnels and rooms, protected and snug for the winter, except that it wasn’t completely safe. The fox knew they were down there and with those big ears it listened until it heard one moving through a tunnel. Then it leaped in the air and pounced headfirst, driving down through the snow and grass to catch the mouse.

“The fox didn’t hit all the time,” Brian told Caleb, finishing the story. There were probably hundreds he missed living down there, so most of the mice were fine. It made me feel foolish, trying to keep my cave warm, working so hard to live. The mice had it all figured—”

“Does anybody else know this?”

“I haven’t seen it in books or anywhere. And nobody would believe me if I told them.”

“I believe you.”

“Well—almost nobody.”

“Tell me more.”

“About the mice?”

“About the woods. What time is it?”

“Three o’clock.”

“Oh. I have another appointment at three-thirty. Why don’t you come back tomorrow and talk to me?”

“As a counselor?”

“No—there’s nothing wrong with you.”

“There isn’t?”

“Not a thing. In the attack you were simply defending yourself—the best way you knew how. I just want to hear more about the north woods. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to—and tell your mother there’s no charge. It’s just that you make it sound so . . . real. I want to hear more.”

“All right.” Brian rose. “I’d be glad to come back tomorrow.” And he was surprised to find as he walked to the door that he meant it.

At first, things didn’t go nicely and he would look back later and wonder at the timing and the way life worked. It was spring, with two months of school left. School became difficult for Brian—everybody knew about the fight. Some thought he was a hero and some thought he was crazy, and most kept away from him. He ran into Carl Lammers now and then in the hallway and Lammers stayed well clear of him.

Susan decided Brian was just exactly the Right Person in the Whole World for her and made an effort to be near him whenever she could, walk with him whenever she could, talk to him whenever she could. He knew she was a good person, but she was very popular, a member of all the clubs who did all the activities, and she was always trying to draw Brian out, to make him talk about himself. Finally he began to avoid her, in as nice a manner as possible, but word went around that he was stuck-up, and soon Susan and everybody else left him alone.

Though he liked the solitude, oddly it made him feel bad and made going to classes difficult. He began to hate school and went only because he had to. He studied out of habit, and strangely his grades stayed up. Months later he thought that he would have gone crazy except for Caleb and the dream.

The dream came when he was awake. In school, at home with his mother, whenever there was a moment of quiet or boredom, his thoughts would glaze over and the dream would come.

It was a dream of getting ready. Always that—getting ready. Ready to go back. Ready to go . . . home. To go home to the woods and find . . . he didn’t know what. To find himself, something about himself. Often the dream would be about what he would take. The kind of weapon—always a bow, never a gun—the kind of arrows, fishing equipment, clothing. Not just to go back and survive this time, but to live and to be happy where he lived. Just to be. The right kind of equipment. His canoe. A good bow, several dozen good arrows. The right pair of snowshoes. Some hooks and line. A good sleeping bag. Tarp to make a shelter. Maybe a tent. A pot to cook in. No, two pots. One big and one medium. Clothes for fall and winter. Good boots, moccasins.

He worked the list endlessly in his mind, improving it, changing it and, finally, writing it down on the list. He carried it in a notebook wherever he went, making changes as they came to him, meticulously noting each detail of each item.

I have become truly anal, he thought once when he changed the kind of arrowheads from the fancy new razor heads to the old-fashioned MA-3s—three-bladed army-issue arrowheads that needed sharpening but were so strong you could hit a rock without hurting them.

But it was more than just being picky. In the end he was keeping his sanity, arranging his life. At first the List was a guide from the dream to reality but when he had perfected the List he started to gather the items on it, ordering from catalogs in the backs of hunting and fishing magazines. His mother knew he was ordering but she was involved in other things and left him mostly to himself, and as he received items he put them in his room and she didn’t question him.

The first thing to come was a bow. He did not want to get too complicated and stayed away from the compound bows with wheels and pulleys. They were more accurate, maybe, and far easier to pull, but he sensed they would break with rough use. Instead he wrote to Blakely, a man who made longbows and shorter recurved bows and ordered what Blakely called a short longbow. True longbows were fine but very long, as the name implied, and Brian knew that in brush they would hang up on branches and be hard to use. He ordered a shorter version with forty-five-pound pull at twenty-six inches. He hadn’t been sure of the pull weight, but he told Blakely his size and what he wanted to use it for— general hunting—and Blakely told him to keep it low. Blakely made bows with up to 120 pounds pull, but they were brutal and, he wrote, “If the arrowhead is sharp it will penetrate from a softer bow as well as a hard one.”

The bow was beautiful, a mix of ironwood and rosewood laminated in thin strips with fiberglass on the front and back. Blakely included four extra strings. He also sold arrows so Brian bought a hundred Port Orford cedar shafts and all the tools and precut feathers and nocks he would need to make his own arrows. Blakely also sent along fifty of the MA-3 broadheads and field points for the arrows so he could practice without using the MA-3s. Brian had never made arrows before but there were full instructions with the equipment and Brian found it easy to do. He went to a garden store and brought home three hay bales. He put them up in the backyard and put a cardboard target in front. When he had six arrows finished he started shooting each day.

It was incredible. He was used to weapons he’d made with crude arrows and fire-hardened points, and he was amazed at the difference. The bow was smooth and clean and quiet and the arrows flew with a tight accuracy that at first he couldn’t believe. On the first day he had several shots where he actually hit one arrow with another in the center of the cardboard target.

To protect his fingers he used a simple leather tab that Blakely had thrown in and he must have shot two hundred times the first day. He didn’t use sights but shot by instinct—let his mind and eye “feel” where the arrow would go as he’d done with his war bow in the woods—and within a week he could consistently hit a six-inch circle in the cardboard from twenty yards.

Just this one part of the List, the bow and arrows, took two and a half weeks, not counting the time for shipping. The work gave him something to do, kept him active.

Along with the List and practice, he had Caleb. Five days a week he went to Caleb’s house after school. His mother thought it was for counseling, though she wondered that no bills came. In a way, it was true. Counseling was a matter of telling somebody something and getting help with a problem, and that was what he was doing with Caleb.

He told Caleb about his life in the woods, and though Caleb seldom said much this talking helped Brian to understand himself and what was happening—and what was going to happen to him.

Caleb would make a pot of tea—nothing fancy, just hot water and a tea bag with some cream and sugar—and have a cup waiting when Brian got there. Brian had never thought much of tea but the first time he put sugar in it and sipped it while he spoke it somehow seemed to always have been a part of him. It was so natural that after only a small bit of thought he added tea to his list for the woods. Tea—and sugar in cubes.

He would take the tea, sit down in the iron chair, look at Caleb and say. “What do you want to hear about today?”

“I wouldn’t even know what to ask. You pick it.”

And Brian would think a moment and then tell a story of moose or fishing or the sun on the water or the way beaver build a house or the lonely cry of a loon in the night or the stomach-tightening wail of a wolf singing to the moon and Caleb would listen quietly, his eyes staring off, sometimes crying or laughing, sometimes surprised, sometimes sad.

Then there came a day when school was nearly done, when Brian had received nearly all the things on the List, and Caleb sighed and said, “It’s time for you to go back, to find what you’re looking for.”

Brian agreed. They’d spoken about his going back and how he had to know what it was that pulled him and made him feel empty. “But I don’t know exactly how to do it,” Brian said.

“I’ll help you.”

“You will?”

Caleb shrugged. “I’m supposed to be helping you ‘recover your mental health,’ aren’t I? Well, it’s clear that for you to be mentally healthy you have to go back to the woods and find what you left there.”

“That’s true.”

“What about that Cree family who rescued you? The trappers?”

“The Smallhorns.” Brian thought of them often. “What about them?”

“Didn’t they want you to come back and visit them?”

Brian stared. “Of course. It’s perfect. Why didn’t I think of that?”

It wasn’t easy at first. He had expected difficulties with his parents and he wasn’t mistaken. His mother had a terrible fear of the bush—which had developed in the weeks when he had disappeared and she had had to believe he was dead. They talked many nights before she relented. He was older now, more seasoned, and she knew that. He had done well the past summer, when he had returned with Derek. With Caleb’s help, his mother came around.

“How will you find the Smallhorns?” she asked.

“The pilot, the man who flew me out, will know where they are.”

Brian had kept the pilot’s name. The man had a one-plane operation working out of International Falls, on the Minnesota-Canada border, and Brian called.

“The Smallhorns? Yeah—they’re up in the Williams Lake area in a fish camp but I’m not due to go up there until fall. I’m booked solid all summer with fishing charters. I can’t take the time to run you up there.”

“How about getting me close? I can make my own way in a canoe.”

“Just a minute.” Brian heard papers shuffling as the pilot went through his records. “Yeah, here. I’m due to take a couple of guys fishing in ten days. We’re going to the Granite Lake area and with my fuel I can take you maybe another hundred miles. That’s still a hundred miles short of the Smallhorns’ camp but it’s all chain lakes up there and you can do it without any really bad portages. I’ll give you a good map. How heavy is your gear?”

“Maybe two hundred pounds, plus me and a canoe. Can you haul a canoe?”

“Sure. On the floats. We’re taking one canoe and I can fit yours on the other float. When are you figuring on coming out?”

“I’m not . . . sure.”

“I’m due to make a supply run to them in the fall before trapping season and bad weather sets in. You could come out then.”

“Sure.”

“All right—you just fly up to International Falls and I’ll meet you there.”

He didn’t exactly lie to his mother, he just didn’t tell her the whole truth. She thought the plane was taking him all the way and he didn’t correct her. When he called to tell his father about his “visit,” he left the same impression, although he didn’t think it would have mattered to his father that he planned to do the last hundred miles by canoe. His relationship with his father had also changed in the last year— they had grown somehow farther apart and closer at the same time. His father no longer seemed to think of him as a boy and didn’t talk down to him. Now he spoke to Brian more as an equal.