Sharing Spaces (17 page)

Jack took a swallow of beer as the burgers were slid in front of them and avoided George's question by glancing up at the man who'd delivered his order. “I see you have a new cook?”

“Yep. Some high-browed lodge owner stole Gordina from me a week ago and thought he was really getting something, that's the joke on him. I got me a real chef now. Business is already picking up. Gordina couldn't cook worth a damn, and she was a sour old bitch, to boot.”

Jack leaned toward George after the pub owner had shuffled off. “Guess which high-browed lodge owner stole Gordina from this place a week ago?” he said, lowering his voice. “And he's right, she can't cook worth a damn and she
is
a sour old bitch.”

“You're not going to tell me about her, bye, are you?”

“It's the admiral's granddaughter, you old coot. Am I that plain to read?”

“I can read the tracks a woman makes on a man's heart as well as I can read animal tracks in the woods. Pass that ketchup along. It's good to see you like this. You need a good woman, and if she's the admiral's granddaughter, then I'd say you done all right for yourself.”

“The lodge is booked for the summer, George. I could use another guide once you're up and about. Hell, I could use two of you, and if you know of anyone who can cook or clean rooms, or do prep work, or anything at all…”

“I'll think about it.” George nodded, squeezing ketchup on his burger and fries.

“You can do your thinking at the lodge, while you recuperate. There's a bunk with your name on it in the guides' camp.”

“I'd like that, Jack, bye, I truly would,” George said. He set down the ketchup and the two men shook hands solemnly over the table before eating their burgers.

L
UNCH WITH
G
EORGE TOOK
over an hour, and by the time Jack got the plane back into the air it was two o'clock. He opened up the throttle, flying into a stiff headwind laden with rain and wondering if Senna would be worried. No doubt she was getting madder by the moment, wondering if he was shirking his work, wondering if the plane had crashed, worrying needlessly about nothing at all. By the time he landed on the Wolf, he was dreading how angry she was going to be and wondering how he was going to explain his tardiness and the lack of petunias. He carried the box of meats up the steep ramp, wanting to get some into the refrigerator and rest into the freezer as soon as possible. Inside the lodge he heard laughter in the kitchen and entered the room to the unlikely sight of Wavey and Gordina playing cards.

“What the hell's going on?” he said, setting the box down on the work island. “For cripe's sake, with all the work that has to get done, you're playing cards?”

“We stopped for a cuppa,” Gordina said defensively, nudging the teapot on the table. “We were tired and need a break.” Wavey said nothing, just stood and left the room with a hurt, pouting expression on her face.

“Where's Senna?” Jack asked Gordina.

The older woman looked surprised. “We haven't seen her all day. We thought she was with you.”

Gordina's response caught Jack completely off guard. For a few moments he stared at her, hoping he hadn't heard her speak those words. And then, all at once, his heart rate surged off the scale as adrenaline flooded through him. He turned and went to Senna's room, banging on the door and bursting in. Empty. Chilkat was snoozing on the rug in front of the living-room fireplace, and looked as if he'd been there all morning. Jack's blood had turned to ice by the time he returned to the kitchen. “Where's Charlie?”

“Down to your cabin, I expect. Not much wood gets cut in a hard rain.”

Jack ran to the guides' camp, relieved to find Charlie on his bunk, reading. “Charlie, Senna's missing. She's been gone all day. I need your help. Get the crackie and come with me.”

As he spoke he picked up his pack and began cramming things into it. Survival stuff for a cold overnight in bad weather. Compass on a thong around his neck. Map in the front compartment of his pack. Dry clothing. Rain gear. Flashlight. Fire starters. Gorp and jerky. Sleeping bag. Tarp. Everything he could fit in went into the pack, and it was a big pack. He filled his thermos with strong, hot coffee left over from that morning, the pot still on the woodstove. It was as black as tar and would float a teaspoon. He added about a cup of Charlie's instant hot cocoa mix and a generous tablespoon of real vanilla extract. From past experience he knew this particular brew could practically jump-start a dead man. He stuffed the thermos into the pack. His stomach was filled with nameless dread.

“The last time I saw her was early this morning,” he said, shouldering the pack and picking up his rifle. “She
was standing on the dock when I flew out of here. We'll start the search there. Charlie, for the love of God, get a move on!”

 

S
ENNA WAS HUDDLED IN A BALL
, knees to her chest, shivering, when she heard Jack's plane fly over. It took a few moments before the distinctive roar of the engine insinuated itself into her dazed mind. She leapt to her feet, ducked out of her shelter and raced out onto the open esker, hoping to catch sight of the old plane, hoping she could orient herself to its direction, hoping she could use it to navigate her way back to the river. But the gray, murky overcast, the thick veils of mist that shrouded the dark forest, and the steady rain all conspired to obscure it from her sight. She strained her ears trying to hear some change in the engine's pitch, but she couldn't really tell which direction the noise was coming from.

Tears filled her eyes as the sound faded into the vast silence of the wilderness, which closed back around her in a thick, suffocating blanket and smothered the last glimmer of hope. She was cold and wet and plagued by the mosquitoes but none of that mattered a damn compared to the depth of fear she felt. She was scared, and that was the most frightening sensation of all. She was really, truly scared. She'd never been scared of anything, ever, but she'd never been this lost before. It had taken every ounce of her self-control to stop the frantic search for the game trail she'd followed. It had taken all of her will power to realize that she was running in circles, exhausting herself, becoming colder and more panicked by the moment.

That very terror she was experiencing had overwhelmed and killed others who had been lost in far less
wild circumstances, and it was her knowledge of that deadly panic that had undoubtedly saved her from the same blind, hopeless fate. This was the stuff wardens had talked of, when hunting season rolled around. Stories of men getting disoriented in the woods, running until they dropped from exhaustion and perished of hypothermia. One man even threw his rifle away and was found two days later after a massive search, dead from exposure, but the real cause of his death had been his succumbing to panic. She'd read the little orange survival book that all hunters were encouraged to carry and tucked away all those nuggets of knowledge, never realizing that she would one day need them desperately.

This was the day.

When she'd realized how fast and how furious she was using up all her reserves and getting nowhere at all, she'd stopped, gasping for breath, and then stock of her situation. She had no compass. She had no matches with which to kindle a fire. She had no hat. Her jacket was water resistant but that didn't do much good after such a long, steady exposure to the rain. She had no emergency food, no signal whistle, no knife. In short, she had none of the items that the little orange survival book recommended all people carry with them when they went into the woods, but she did remember the gist of what the book had preached. “When you realize you're lost, stop and make camp. Prepare to spend the night out. You might be uncomfortable, but if you put enough effort into the shelter you build, you can be reasonably protected from the elements.”

Shelter was the first order of business. If she were going to survive this experience, she'd have to create some sort of cover from the elements, without the ben
efit of an axe or saw, and in a land where two-hundred-year-old trees stood barely twenty feet tall. Once Senna knew what she had to do, she focused on the project and her sense of panic abated. She scouted the adjacent woods until she found a spruce that had been uprooted by the strong winds, laying the trunk over at a forty-five-degree angle before the tip became caught up in a thick tangle of other trees. Since black spruce was the abundant tree, she began breaking the longest boughs she could from the biggest trees she could find, until she had amassed a huge stack. Then she layered them thickly, beginning at the base of the uprooted tree, until she had created a tiny lean-to just big enough for her to sit under. She then gathered more boughs and laid them inside the lean-to to keep her off the wet ground and crawled inside. While not completely waterproof, the majority of rain was turned by the thick thatching, and if she could have kindled a fire at the lean-to's opening she might even have been comfortable.

She'd sat there for what seemed like hours, leaving the shelter periodically when the cold became so intense that she was shivering uncontrollably. She would crawl out and run in circles to get her circulation going, and when she became too tired to keep moving she'd crawl back into the shelter. The rain kept on, the dreariness contributing to her growing sense of despair. When she'd heard the plane approaching she had scrambled out of the lean-to, craning skyward and calling out Jack's name as if he would hear her, and when the plane passed over unseen and the sound faded, she fought back the tears as she crawled back inside. Jack would soon know she was missing, he'd figure out she was lost,
and he would find her. All she had to do was wait inside her lean-to, stay calm, and he would find her.

 

J
ACK CURSED THE RAIN
. He cursed it loudly, savagely, repeatedly. He cursed the cold. He cursed the wild land and the dark woods and Charlie's crackie, who was moving forward ever so slowly, stopping to delicately sniff every dripping branch, every wet rock, and he wondered if the little dog was really trying to pick up Senna's scent or if Ula was just reading all the stories of the forest. The rain had washed away all but the deepest of tracks. He'd found the blurred paw print of a big wolf at the river's edge, and Senna's boot track beside it, but those were the only two defined tracks they'd seen. The rest of the search had been based on the crackie's painstakingly slow progress away from the river and into the woods.

Charlie had taken Ula to the one imprint of Senna's boot track, held out Senna's crumpled nightshirt for her to sniff, which Jack had thought would be the best item of clothing to use, and that was all. For the past hour they'd been following her along this old game trail while she acted as if she were on a relaxing Sunday jaunt.

Who the hell knew what the crackie was smelling. Wolf? Caribou? It could be any of the dozens of animals that called this land home. The crackie was nothing more than an Indian hunting dog. Sure, she had a keen nose, but no training in search and rescue. Jack had never felt so hopeless as he did following that useless little chicken killer. He was already hoarse from shouting Senna's name into the unforgiving wilderness. Damn the crackie for moving so slowly. Damn the rain for making so much noise. Damn his heart for beating
so loudly in his ears! And damn Charlie for his stoic expression. The boy never displayed any emotion whatsoever.

It was cold, and the rain was like ice water. Senna had been out in it since 6:00 a.m. and here it was, nearly twelve hours later. Search and rescue statistics had shown that for every hour that passed, the search area expanded by countless square miles. There were only two of them; they couldn't possibly walk a grid that would cover the amount of territory that twelve hours of being lost could encompass. If they hadn't found her by 10:00 p.m., he'd send Charlie back to the lodge and have him call for the rangers to come in. Jack would stay out and keep looking. He'd look forever if he had to. He'd look until he found her.

“Hanson,” Charlie said.

Jack stopped and turned back. Charlie had picked something out of a spruce branch and he held it out to Jack. It was a long piece of dark hair. Four pieces, actually, a tiny lock of what had to be Senna's hair. Jack looked ahead to where the little black crackie moved slowly and purposefully along, sniffing this and sniffing that.
Find Senna,
he willed the dog silently.
Find her, and you can eat all of Goody's laying hens and I'll buy you more when you're done with them.
He tucked the lock of hair into his jacket pocket, took a fresh grip on his rifle, and walked forward into the chilly rain.

 

W
ITHOUT A WATCH IT WAS DIFFICULT
to say what time it was, but Senna became aware that the gray gloom was deepening. That meant it had to be past 11:00 p.m. She was exhausted from running to keep warm and spent longer periods of time sitting in the little shelter,
clenched up with shivers. The hunger pains she'd felt hours ago had long since passed, but the cold had intensified. Jack was out there somewhere, looking for her. She had shouted his name a few times, knowing it was futile but feeling comforted by the sound of his name. She knew he was out there and she knew he would find her.

She dozed off at one point, in spite of her misery, and had a strange dream. She dreamt that a black wolf came through the forest of black spruce, walking on silent feet, in the deep moss, and stood in front of her lean-to. She felt that the wolf was Raven, and that she was trying to tell her something, and she wondered if maybe the animal was carrying a message from her grandfather. What was he trying to tell her? It was so hard to read the expression in those intense yellow eyes. The wolf was tall at the shoulder with long gangly legs and thick fur dripping with rain. Big paws splayed strongly upon the wet earth, as if the animal knew just where it belonged.

“Hello, Raven,” she murmured aloud in the midst of her dream. “Tell the admiral I wish I could read his letter. Maybe you could tell me what was in it….”

And then she woke and blinked her eyes and the black wolf was gone. It was dark, but the cold was easing. She felt her shivers beginning to ease as a curious, sleepy warmth soothed through her. Jack would find her soon. All she had to do was stay awake….

 

T
HE CRACKIE LOST THE TRAIL
where it went into the bog and the water closed over any scent that might have remained. Jack couldn't believe it. He and Charlie kept walking wider circles, looking for some sign, any sign
at all. Jack was hoping that Senna would have come out on one of the higher eskers but they'd been thrashing around for over an hour and the damn dog was clueless. He thought about firing his rifle to let Senna know where they were, but he was afraid she'd try to come to them, and hurt herself in the dark.

“Too wet here,” Charlie said, stopping on one of their passes and shaking his head.

“Senna came out of this bog somewhere, dammit!” Jack responded savagely, unable to suppress his emotional outburst. “We'll keep walking bigger circles until Ula smells something.”

He knew he should send Charlie back to the lodge as he had originally planned, but if Charlie went, so would the crackie, and he'd lose any chance of picking up Senna's trail. It was after midnight now, and hard to make out the shapes of things in the raw, wet gloom. He stumbled into knee-deep water and cursed, then heard a sound that made the hair on the back of his neck prickle; the long, low drawn-out howl of a wolf. The crackie froze, lifting her small, finely shaped head, sharp pointy nose tasting the air. And then, without warning, she bounded off through the muskeg, throwing up plumes of water.