covered my tracks. And I decided against laying a fire, on account of the smoke. By the time I pitched the tent, I was even too tired to eat, which saved me some food, but I woke in the middle of the night, hungry as a bear, and still dreaming of the smell of frying bacon.
9
A ND FOR TEN DAYS or so that was pretty much the size of it. Ambling along, morning to dusk, keeping my eyes peeled for places to feed and water the animals. As we went, the ice got thicker, until it was no longer enough to give the top of a frozen stream a smart rap with a branch, and I had to dig out a hatchet and chop right through the crust.
Most nights I risked a fire. I hadn’t seen a soul on the road all day, and besides I kept my loaded guns in my lap.
The first clear frosty night I saw the Lights, billowing across the sky like god was shaking out his laundered sheets – if the Almighty sleeps on green gauze. Later in the season, the Lights would have more colours in them, but they looked pretty good to me now. There’s something comforting in movement, and that easy, flowing pattern of lights overhead felt like someone stroking my hair.
About a week in, I shot a moose, and camped for two nights in one place so as to butcher it properly. The skin I had to leave, the offal I don’t care for, but just about everything else I was able to smoke or freeze and carry with me.
I had a strange thought while I was cutting her up, which seemed to come to me out of nowhere. Once in my life, I said to myself, I’d like to taste an orange. That word: orange. It seemed impossibly beautiful. I thought of how an orange sky looked and tried to imagine its flavour: somewhere between caramel and strawberries, I guessed.
Under the Lights, with the planet rocking gently, and a week or so of food curing over the smoke, I felt hopeful that whoever had sent the plane would be waiting for me at the end of the journey. Sometimes I fell asleep and dreamed of arriving somewhere, and being met by a woman something like my mother, who was pleased enough to see me, but a little bit disdainful of my shabby clothes and the food I ate. She’d offer me a basket of oranges in the dream, and with a pleased-with-herself-smile she’d say, We’ve been saving these for you. But however many times I dreamed it, I always woke up just at the moment when I was putting one in my mouth.
*
I got to Esperanza after a couple of weeks. I had the sensation from the road that this wasn’t the place I was looking for, but I rode into her anyway, just to be sure.
It was a copy-cat version of the town I’d left, without a soul in it, never mind someone who could fly a plane. That was the first time since I’d hauled myself out of the water that I felt a glimmer of doubt about what I was doing. It seemed like all that time on hat dangerous road just to get to a place worse than the one I’d come from, and I thought, What if this is all there is between here and Alaska, or beyond?
But the plane I’d seen was real, no doubt of it, and I’d buried her crew and passengers with my own hands. I tried to console myself by asking myself how I’d feel if normal life had been going on here all this time. That would sting, wouldn’t it? Me living like a cockroach in a cellar, and them here with, I don’t know what, schools, and funerals, and Christmas, and oranges.
In the old days I heard there were wars where soldiers disappeared into the forest only to come out decades later and find the fighting had been over for years, and their families enjoying peace and plenty while they’d been drinking water out of tree-stumps and chewing leeches to live.
That thought was a painful one. The idea that I’d just got separated from my proper world, and time was passing, and the other world moving on, and when I found it, I’d be showing up, like a savage in a loincloth, to a city of sparkling glass.
But I think I would have preferred almost anything to the burned-out houses, and trash, and
9
A ND FOR TEN DAYS or so that was pretty much the size of it. Ambling along, morning to dusk, keeping my eyes peeled for places to feed and water the animals. As we went, the ice got thicker, until it was no longer enough to give the top of a frozen stream a smart rap with a branch, and I had to dig out a hatchet and chop right through the crust.
Most nights I risked a fire. I hadn’t seen a soul on the road all day, and besides I kept my loaded guns in my lap.
The first clear frosty night I saw the Lights, billowing across the sky like god was shaking out his laundered sheets – if the Almighty sleeps on green gauze. Later in the season, the Lights would have more colours in them, but they looked pretty good to me now. There’s something comforting in movement, and that easy, flowing pattern of lights overhead felt like someone stroking my hair.
About a week in, I shot a moose, and camped for two nights in one place so as to butcher it properly. The skin I had to leave, the offal I don’t care for, but just about everything else I was able to smoke or freeze and carry with me.
I had a strange thought while I was cutting her up, which seemed to come to me out of nowhere. Once in my life, I said to myself, I’d like to taste an orange. That word: orange. It seemed impossibly beautiful. I thought of how an orange sky looked and tried to imagine its flavour: somewhere between caramel and strawberries, I guessed.
Under the Lights, with the planet rocking gently, and a week or so of food curing over the smoke, I felt hopeful that whoever had sent the plane would be waiting for me at the end of the journey. Sometimes I fell asleep and dreamed of arriving somewhere, and being met by a woman something like my mother, who was pleased enough to see me, but a little bit disdainful of my shabby clothes and the food I ate. She’d offer me a basket of oranges in the dream, and with a pleased-with-herself-smile she’d say, We’ve been saving these for you. But however many times I dreamed it, I always woke up just at the moment when I was putting one in my mouth.
*
I got to Esperanza after a couple of weeks. I had the sensation from the road that this wasn’t the place I was looking for, but I rode into her anyway, just to be sure.
It was a copy-cat version of the town I’d left, without a soul in it, never mind someone who could fly a plane. That was the first time since I’d hauled myself out of the water that I felt a glimmer of doubt about what I was doing. It seemed like all that time on hat dangerous road just to get to a place worse than the one I’d come from, and I thought, What if this is all there is between here and Alaska, or beyond?
But the plane I’d seen was real, no doubt of it, and I’d buried her crew and passengers with my own hands. I tried to console myself by asking myself how I’d feel if normal life had been going on here all this time. That would sting, wouldn’t it? Me living like a cockroach in a cellar, and them here with, I don’t know what, schools, and funerals, and Christmas, and oranges.
In the old days I heard there were wars where soldiers disappeared into the forest only to come out decades later and find the fighting had been over for years, and their families enjoying peace and plenty while they’d been drinking water out of tree-stumps and chewing leeches to live.
That thought was a painful one. The idea that I’d just got separated from my proper world, and time was passing, and the other world moving on, and when I found it, I’d be showing up, like a savage in a loincloth, to a city of sparkling glass.
But I think I would have preferred almost anything to the burned-out houses, and trash, and
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