The Skeleton Tree (14 page)

I couldn't believe that Frank was serious. How did he imagine we would kill a grizzly bear that weighed a thousand pounds? With a gaff and a jackknife? He really was out of his mind.

Every moment that we sat there talking, the bear came closer. Each step brought it another yard along the beach. In fifteen minutes it would reach us.

“Come on,” said Frank.

To my huge relief, he picked up the fish with his good hand and started on his way. He didn't even glance at the bear, but I kept looking back. It stayed exactly the same distance behind us, plodding over the stones.

“We could make some spears,” said Frank. “We could sharpen sticks and forge them in the fire.” He kicked a bit of wood, sending it skittering over the stones. “If I found some stuff I could make a crossbow.”

The thought of killing a grizzly bear excited him. “We could dig a hole and put stakes at the bottom,” he said. “A Bengal mantrap. I saw it in a movie.”

Rain started falling in big, heavy drops. I listened to the tiny crabs scuttling away in front of us, as though a stream was flowing under the stones. As we came to a turn in the shoreline I looked back and saw the bear still lumbering along behind us, but not quite so close anymore. When we climbed to the cliffs and looked down, I couldn't see him at all.

Now Frank is on his way. I hear the sound of his boots in the meadow and look back to see a mist shimmering around his feet as he kicks through the grass.

I'm pleased to see him.

He pats the wooden saint on the shoulder, then sits in the chair beside me. North and south he looks, out across the sea. “No one coming yet?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“Still early.” He stretches out his legs and crosses them at the ankles. Then he tilts back to let the sun fall on his face, and he closes his eyes.

I start reading again. But it's hard to concentrate on the story when I expect to see the men arrive at any moment.

The baby Kaetil was still alive when the ravens came. One was Cloud and the other Storm, and they were big, strong birds with beaks like pickaxes. They could have killed the baby easily, but the thought did not occur to them. Ravens are not killers. Feeling nothing but pity for Kaetil, Storm carried him away to their nest to raise as her own. Into the lining of feathers and moss she tucked him, to hide him from the vultures.

The cabin guy has scribbled right across the page
Vultures in Greenland???
I can almost see him shaking his head.

A raven's love is deep and endless. Storm tucked her wings around the baby and cried the sound of happiness. Down upon mother and child, the northern lights burned like a river of melted stars.

I love to see the northern lights. They're a shimmer as pale as smoke, a veil of blue and green. Now dim, now bright, they plunge toward Earth and rise again. Sometimes they crackle and hiss. The first time Frank and I saw them, we knew they marked a change. Summer fogs had given way to autumn storms, and now winter was beginning.

After nearly forty days in Alaska, our lives had changed. We weren't kept prisoners by the darkness anymore, trapped in our little cabin from sunset till dawn. We had turned sticks and plastic into torches; we carried fire in our hands.

Frank came in from the forest, sweeping shadows in front of him as he held his torch. “You can see the northern lights,” he said. “They're burning down upon us like a river of melted stars.”

Our fire had been burning steadily for three days, and it smoldered in the stone circle on the floor. A dozen fish hung drying in the curls of smoke. I had to push past Frank in the doorway because he wouldn't move aside. Then I looked up through the trees and saw the aurora shine and flicker.

“Let's go out to the point,” said Frank. “We'll see it better from there.”

I chose a torch from our supply in the corner. Its head was a plastic bottle, stuffed with anything that would burn. When I lit it from the fire, it burned with spurting flames and putrid smoke. But nothing could put it out. As we walked through the forest with our torches guttering, we must have looked savage and wild.

Around the skeleton tree was a growing heap of plastic junk, a little mountain held down by strips of fishing net. It was Frank's obsession to build it as high as he could, to make a signal fire that could be seen from fifty miles away. From our torches flew fiery spurts that fell to the grass in blobs of flame.

We watched the northern lights swirl and stretch, flashing blue and green. As though to add to their mystery, wolves began singing in the distance. Their howling songs seemed to match the changes of the northern lights, as though they sang to the aurora. Frank said softly, “Makes you feel kind of small, doesn't it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Insignificant.”

He chose the biggest word he'd ever used to say how puny we were in that enormous world. In a way he was right. But in a way he was wrong. We had beaten the darkness, holding back with our torches the wild animals, the ghosts and the skeletons. We were the most powerful things in our little part of the planet. But in the larger world, we were also nothing.

“If I die, no one will care,” said Frank.

“What about your mom?” I asked. “What about your friends?”

“They won't know,” he said. “If they don't know, how can they care?” The torches made his face grim and ghastly. “Nothing will change. The sun will keep going around, and the tide will rise and fall, and down in the city it will be just another day.”

He didn't sound afraid. He didn't even sound angry. I wasn't sure what he was trying to tell me.

“We're just a bunch of atoms,” he said. “If I die, my atoms get scattered around and that's the end. Maybe the northern lights are the atoms of dead people.”

“But you're not going to die,” I said.

“Chris, it's getting worse.”

He held out the black glove, as though he could see his hand inside it. “I don't know why we try so hard to stay alive,” he said. “What difference does it make?”

I wanted to tell him that it made a
huge
difference. But I couldn't think of why that was. Disappointed, Frank threw his torch out over the water. It flew in a flaming arc across the northern lights, like a comet trailing fire, and vanished in the blackness of the ocean.

Our world shrank. With only
my
torch to keep it away, the darkness crept closer. When the flame started sputtering, we fled for the cabin.

It was another cold night, another wintry morning. When I saw frost on the ground, I knew Frank had been right all along. Winter would be long and hard, and we needed more fish.

But he didn't want to go to the river that morning. “I've got things to do,” he told me.

“Like what?

He only shrugged. But it wasn't hard to guess. As soon as I was out of his sight, I thought, he would start building his catapult or his Bengali mantrap. Frank had a grizzly to kill.

So I went alone to the river. Not even Thursday was with me. He was
never
around when wolves were nearby.

I didn't feel afraid as I came near to the river. I was wary—like a deer—but I wasn't afraid. For ages I crouched beside the pool, but the only fish that floated past were either dying or dead. I remembered how the water had churned with masses of salmon, and it was hard to believe they had vanished so quickly.

I climbed the rocks at the side of the falls and walked upstream, watching for the bear. I told myself it had a huge territory and was probably nowhere near me.

Rising above the forest, the blue slopes of the mountain were speckled with fresh snow. But the river had shrunk again, and dead fish lay draped over stones, snarled among bushes and logs. I saw fish with no tails, and tails with no fish, and shapeless blobs that squirmed with maggots. The smell was strong and terrible. Massive flocks of gulls pecked away in a frenzy. I saw four or five ravens, and was pretty sure that Thursday was among them. But he didn't come to greet me. He was too busy picking brains from the skulls of dead salmon.

I walked right up the middle of the river. In the shallow places I saw the last fish still struggling, their whole backs out of the water. I gaffed them and hauled them out, clubbed them on the banks of the river, and on I went.

With the gaff in my hands, the birds scattering in front of me, I felt hugely powerful. I was the king of the river. Eagles soared away as I came near them. Little animals scurried off into the bushes. And the masses of gulls split apart, screaming. Every creature on the river made room for my passing, and I bulled my way through them all.

Carrying eight fish on my back, I rounded a bend in the river.

And there was the grizzly bear.

It was only fifty yards away, wading toward me down the deepest part of the stream. Its head was lowered, its tongue hanging loosely. Water dripped from its snout and the fur on its belly. Its hump shifted as it swayed along.

Between the bear and me, all the birds on the river suddenly rose in a mass and flew away. They went with the sound of a breaking wave, with a rustle of feathers and wings.

The bear was heading straight toward me. If it didn't look up it would blunder right into me. But if it
did
look up it would see me blocking its path, and what would happen then?

Through my mind whirled things I had read and things I'd been told: Never run from a bear. Stand your ground. Play dead. Fight back. Then the bear lifted its head, and our eyes met.

Its muzzle thrust forward, its eyes squinted. Slowly, it rose to its hind legs, just as it had on the first day I'd seen it.
He can't see very well,
Frank had said then.
Don't move,
he'd told me.

The bear opened its mouth and roared. I saw its teeth, its dark gums, the black tunnel of its throat.

Make yourself look small. Make yourself look big. Scream and shout. Wave your arms. Back away slowly. I had heard every imaginable bit of advice, but still had no idea what to do.

The bear fell again to its four feet, splashing into the river.

I thought of the fish that I carried on my back, that wet and slimy cluster of salmon. They reeked of blood, of rot and flesh. To the bear, I must have smelled delicious.

It stepped forward.

I stepped back.

For a moment, again, we stared at each other. As the bear swung its head, the hairs bristled on its back like a porcupine's needles. With a bellowing roar, it started running toward me.

It came faster than I would have believed was possible. It
galloped
through the water, its muscles heaving, its feet churning foam from the river. Before I could even raise my arms to protect myself, it was right in front of me.

And then, just inches away, it planted its front feet in the riverbed and slid to a stop. Gravel piled up in front of its paws, and the river flowed gray from the silt and the dirt it had kicked up.

I was still holding the gaff. I was still holding the fish. Our eyes were almost level, and all I could do was stare right back at the bear. I was too petrified to look away.

I smelled its breath, hot and fishy. I trembled as it gnashed its teeth, a sound like stones being knocked together.

I trembled until I thought I might fall to pieces. If the bear was going to kill me, there was nothing I could do. I couldn't outrun it; I couldn't fight it. I felt like screaming, but I couldn't even do that. I let my eyes close. I let my head sag and my hand fall to my side. I felt the rope unwind from my fist, and the salmon slide down my back to the river. I whispered, “Please don't kill me.”

The bear roared. It snapped its teeth again with that terrible sound. The gaff flew out of my hand as I tripped on the stones. I thumped flat in the shallows, shocked for a moment by the coldness of the water. Sprawled on my back, I tried to squirm away across the gravel, over the rotted corpses of the fish. I had become one of them, a desperate thing trying to swim where there wasn't water.

Step by step, the bear came closer. It sniffed at my foot, at my leg, at my stomach. I could see its nostrils twitching; I could hear its breath going in and out. I lay as still as I could as the river flowed around me.

The bear straddled my legs with its paws. It sniffed at my chest; it sniffed at my shoulder. I thought I had never seen anything so big and so frightening. The bear was enormous, its legs like stumps. I saw the long, thick hairs on its chest, the short bristles on its muzzle, the black curl of its lips.

I closed my eyes as its nose touched my chin. Its lips brushed my neck. I breathed in the air that it breathed out. As it snuffled and sniffed, I began to cry. I sobbed.

The fur on its chin rubbed across my cheek. Its hot breath whooshed over my eyes.

“Please don't,” I said again.

Maybe it understood. Maybe not. If it thought like Frank, it was merely satisfied; it had made it very clear who owned the river, whose territory we were in. It had stood its ground, and now could leave.

With one more roar, it raised its head and backed away. When I dared to open my eyes it was already plodding up the river. But I didn't move, even after it passed out of sight again, not for a long time later. I just lay in the icy water, looking up at the sky and the treetops, at the mountain with snow on its peak.