Brian's Winter (7 page)

Now there was nothing.

He crawled out of the bed and opened the door of the shelter. Or tried to. It seemed to be stuck, frozen in place. He pushed harder and finally half stood, crouched, and pushed out with his shoulder against the door.

At first it still didn’t move and only when he crouched back and slammed into it with his shoulder did the door fall away, letting him look outside.

It nearly blinded him.

The entire world was white, bright white with new morning sun glaring off and through it and so intense that it made his temples hurt.

Snow had fallen in the night. Soft, large flakes, nearly four inches deep everywhere. On limbs, logs, the ground, on the lake ice—all over, an even four inches.

And it was cold. Colder than it had been so far. His nostril hairs seemed to stick together when he breathed and the air caught in his throat. The world was so incredibly, wonderfully, stunningly beautiful that for a full minute all he could do was stare.

“Ohh…”

He had seen pictures of the woods with snow and had seen snow in the park and in the city but this was different. He was
in
it, inside the snowy scene, and the beauty of it became part of him.

He stepped outside the shelter and as he stepped into the snow realized that he was barefoot. He jumped back inside and put on his tennis shoes and fur boots and the rabbit-skin shirt and moved back outside.

He had never seen anything so clean. Because it was all new there wasn’t a mark, not a track in the surface of the snow, and he took four or five paces just to look back at his tracks.

“It’s like a bigfoot,” he said aloud. And indeed, the boots left a large, rounded hole for a footprint.

He moved around, did his toilet—drawing a picture in the snow when he did—and was amazed how well the boots worked, kept his feet warm and comfortable. As he came close to the shelter he saw a mouse appear almost magically out of the snow, run across the surface for three feet and then dive under again.

Brian moved to where the mouse had run and studied its tracks. Little dots in a parallel line with a small line in the middle where the tail dragged.

But clean, he thought, and neat and so easy to see and follow and everything, everything that moved in the woods would leave tracks.

Would be easy to see.

Would be easy to follow.

Would be much easier to hunt.

He still had some venison left but he decided to hunt. Because the snow was new and he’d never hunted in snow, because the sun was bright and fresh, because his clothing seemed to work, he decided to hunt, and it was in this way that he found the moose.

He prepared for hunting by putting his hatchet and knife on his belt and one of the butane lighters in his pocket. He started to take the light bow but thought that he might see something big and want to take a shot and so took the war bow under the theory that he could shoot something small with the big bow but he couldn’t shoot a deer with the small bow. So he took the large bow and the new lance and five arrows with stone points and went hunting.

At the start he almost couldn’t hunt. The woods were so beautiful, so changed—it was a whole different world—that he walked slowly along and feasted his eyes on first one scene and then another. It should all be framed, he thought—framed in some way to take back.

Take back. He hadn’t thought that in a long while either. Pictures of home were fading. But if he could show this to his mother, he thought, just for her to
see
this…

He shook his head and almost at the same instant saw a rabbit. It was sitting under an overhanging evergreen limb, back in the shadow, but still very easy to see because it was brown. On its back there were several white spots, each about as large as a silver dollar. Brian had seen several rabbits with similar white spots and had thought they were some kind of fluke or mutation but he guessed now that they actually changed color in the winter and became white so that they wouldn’t be so visible.

Without it, Brian thought, they were dead meat. A week or so earlier he had walked through and seen one rabbit in this area. He now took twenty steps and saw seven, all at varying ranges, none close enough to shoot, all standing out like sore thumbs because they were brown against the white snow.

He moved easily, slowly, waiting for a close shot. When it came—a rabbit not more than twenty feet away—he shot carefully and only missed by a hair, actually cutting the fur along the top of the rabbit’s shoulders. The rabbit dodged left, then right, and vanished in the underbrush and Brian went forward to get his arrow.

At first he couldn’t find it. He’d seen it fly, had seen exactly where it went into the snow—there was a hole marking the arrow’s entry—but it wasn’t there. He dug in the snow but still couldn’t find it and didn’t find it until he’d stepped back and lined up the flight of the arrow and worked along the snow scooping it out every foot. The arrow had gone more than thirty feet
after
entering the snow, skittering along beneath the surface before coming to rest. He’d have to be careful of his shots, he thought, pulling it out and blowing the snow off the feathers—he’d lose all his arrows on one hunt.

He moved on, still taken by the beauty, and had three more shots, all of which he missed because the targets were so small—rabbits—and he wasn’t used to shooting the heavier bow yet.

I’ll have to get closer, he thought—work right up on them, get into the thicker brush.

He slowed his pace even more and moved into a large stand of brambles and thick young evergreens, packed so closely he couldn’t see more than ten feet, and that only by crouching down and looking along the ground. It was hard going. Every limb pulled at the bow and he had to be careful not to wreck the feathers on the arrows as he moved.

There were rabbits everywhere. The snow was covered with their tracks and he had moved nearly fifty yards into the thick brush when the sound of a breaking limb stopped him cold. Rabbits and foolbirds did not break limbs when they moved. Deer broke limbs, bear broke limbs.

Almost simultaneously he saw different tracks in the snow in front of him. Big tracks. Huge tracks. The hair went up on his neck. They were big enough for bear and what he really didn’t want to do in his whole life was meet a bear in thick brush, especially if it was a bear that had a memory of a bad night with a skunk.

But when he leaned down to study the tracks he saw they had a cloven hoof, like those left by deer but larger. Much larger.

Moose. He knew instantly. He had seen moose several times since he had been attacked last summer. Once he had seen a bull with a rack so large that Brian could easily have fit between the antlers; the rest had been cows. They were all unbelievably big, and after he’d been attacked by the cow along the lake he’d given them a wide berth. When they got angry it was like having a Buick mad at you.

But, he thought—just that at first. But.

But what? But the moose are smaller now? But I’m tougher now? He shook his head, pushed the thoughts away, the sneaky thoughts, the ones that said he was hunting meat for food, moose were made out of meat, he had a larger bow, primitive people hunted moose with weapons like his, he
was
different now.

He heard the sound again. A breaking limb. Close, maybe thirty yards, and he crouched down and looked along the snow as he had for rabbits.

There. A brown leg moving, then another, like small trees they were, suddenly moving small trees.

He held his breath and crouched, watching. He could not see more of the moose, just the legs, and as he watched they moved off to the left a bit, hesitated, then turned left again and started moving slowly.

Directly at him.

Ahh, he thought. There it is—like it or not I am about to hunt moose. His stomach tightened and he stood and quickly glanced at his position. The brush was too thick for him to run even if he had wanted to and the truth was he didn’t want to. He
was
different, he
did
have better weapons—and there was a lot of meat on a moose.

No room, he thought, to maneuver or to shoot. He moved his head to the right and all he could see was thick brush, then to the left, and it was the same.

No. There, a small opening. Not four feet across and about four feet off the ground—almost a tunnel through the brush—but if it all worked right, all worked exactly right, he might be able to get a shot.

He moved to the left and stood facing the opening, leaned the killing lance against a nearby bush, held the bow up—with the top tipped slightly to the right to keep it out of the brush—and put his best arrow on the string ready to draw and waited.

And waited.

Time seemed to stop.

Somewhere to his left he heard the soft sound of a bird’s wings, then the scratchy sound of a chickadee.

Brush cracked directly in front of him but he could see nothing.

Another bird flew past.

He aged, waiting, and now he heard the moose stepping, its hooves shussh-shusshing in the snow, and another breaking branch and then a line, a curved line as the side of the moose’s front end came into view in the tunnel.

Brian tensed, his fingers tightening on the string. The edge of the shoulder moved slowly, ever so slowly to the left, bringing more and more of the moose’s chest into view.

A third there, then a half, then two thirds and then the whole chest.

Brian drew the shaft back.

A cow, his brain registered, a large cow moose. No antlers. A little spit dripping from the side of her mouth. Brown eyes looking at him but not seeing him, or at least he hoped not.

Twenty feet, no more. Six, seven paces at the most.

He released the bowstring.

He could see it all later in his mind’s eye so it all must have registered but when he did it everything happened so fast—and yet incredibly slowly—that it all seemed one event.

The arrow jumped from the string and he saw the feathers fly straight away from him and at the moose and slam into the moose’s neck just above the center of her chest and in that instant, in the same split second, the moose caught the movement of the bow and arrow and Brian’s head and charged, so fast she almost met the arrow.

If Brian had expected the brush to slow her down, or the arrow striking her to handicap her, he was sadly mistaken. She was at him like a cat, so fast that she seemed a blur, and yet his mind took it all in.

I hit her. The arrow hit her in the neck. She’s charging. She’s charging at me. Another arrow. No, no time. The lance. That’s it, the lance.

He threw the bow aside and reached for the lance, all in one motion and all too late. He felt his hand clamp on the shaft of the lance and at the same time she came out of the brush on top of him. He had one fleeting image of a wall of brown hair with the feathers of the arrow sticking out of the middle and he went down.

He would never know what saved him. She was gigantic and on him and he thought she would crush him, mash him into the ground. But either the arrow hampered her movement or her momentum carried her too far and she went on over Brian and had to turn and come back at him.

He was hurt. His leg, his shoulder, yet he could move, and he rolled, still holding the killing lance, and came up to a kneeling position. He raised the head of the lance just as she hit him again.

One image. She threw herself at him, her eyes red with rage, and he saw her run onto the lance, the point entering her chest just below the arrow. Then her head hit his forehead. Brian saw one flash of white light, as bright as all the snow, then nothing but pain and darkness.

A great weight. Something heavy on him. His mother was calling for him to come back. He was little again, a small boy and playing outside, and his mother was calling for him to come inside but he couldn’t move because there was a huge weight on him, holding him down, keeping him from coming home…

Brian opened his eyes slowly, closed them against the brightness and the pain in his forehead, then opened them again.

It was, he thought, the same world. Snow all around, bright sun, he was breathing, had a pounding pain in his forehead—it reminded him of the plane crash—and had what appeared to be an entire cow moose in his lap.

He twitched when he looked down at her. Her eyes still looked mad, and her head plowed against his chest. But he realized she was dead. He started to examine his own situation.

Nothing seemed to be broken. He could not at first believe this and moved his arms and legs several times to make certain, then squirmed his way out from beneath the moose. She was lying half on him, her head on his chest pushing him back, and when he stood it was the first time he got a long look at how big she was.

From nose to back end he guessed a good eight or nine feet, maybe more. He paced her off and came up with four paces in length, counting her legs, which were sticking out a bit.

Maybe ten feet. And she was taller at the shoulder than he stood.

He wondered for a moment if she was the same moose that had attacked him earlier in the summer and tried to feel that she was, tried to feel some animosity toward her. But the truth was that killing her made him sad—elated and sad all at once, as he had been with the wolf-killed doe.

She was ugly and beautiful at the same time, lying there in the snow, blood from her chest wounds smeared where she lay—an ugly beautiful animal, and she was ended now. He had killed her, ended her life so that he could live, and he felt as bad as he felt good.

He turned away for a moment, shook his head and then turned back. There was much work to do and for a moment he thought it would be impossible. It was perhaps half a mile back to camp and there was absolutely no way he would be able to drag her.

He tried lifting a back leg and it was all he could do to get it off the ground. Dragging her would be simply impossible. She must weigh six or seven hundred pounds.

He would have to cut her up here and take her back to camp in pieces and that nearly stopped him. How, he thought, do you cut a moose up? Never in all his life had he
ever
thought about cutting a moose to pieces. Where did he start? There were no dotted lines the way there were in the diagram at the meat market…