Read Online Far North by Will Hobbs - Free Book Online

dowel stuck out of the handgrip of the device, and a short flat bar stuck out of the cap piece. I glanced at the old man; he was keenly interested.
    â€œI think it’s a fire starter,” Raymond said, scraping the flat striker against the metal dowel and producing a heavy shower of sparks, which greatly impressed the old man and both of us as well. Raymond showered the white cube with sparks. Nothing happened. Nine, ten times he tried, but nothing happened. “I guess it doesn’t work,” I said.
    Old Johnny Raven took out his pocket knife and scraped the top of the cube a little. It had the consistency of soap. He made a few little shavings on the top surface of the cube, then set the cube back on the ground carefully so the shavings would stay in place.
    This time Raymond’s first shower of sparks set the cube aflame. Johnny Raven’s eyes went wide and so did ours. The flame rose to a height of about five inches. The old man snatched up a handful of snow and smothered the flame, retrieved the cube, and set it on his palm admiringly. I borrowed the cube and took a sniff of it. “Some kind of petroleum product,” I reported toRaymond. The old man inserted the cube back into the case, which he snapped shut. Then he cut a length of parachute cord and hung the fire starter around Raymond’s neck. Raymond stuffed it inside his parka. “We’ll only use it if we have to,” he said.
    As soon as our inventory was done, the old man had us pack everything up. Evidently he wanted us to leave this spot. It took quite a bit of doing for him to explain himself, since he had so few English words and Raymond had so few Slavey. Johnny Raven wanted us to move upriver. The day was gray, windy, and bitter cold, and we had a good fire going, so we didn’t get too excited about the idea. Finally, by acting out an elaborate pantomime, the old man made us understand that there was plenty of dead wood upstream for firewood and very little here. “I should’ve known that,” Raymond said. “I just didn’t think. Green spruce like we have here is hard to get to burn. You need a lot of dead wood to get it to burn at all. And we need to make a big fire, for the search planes.”
    We lugged everything up to the new camp, on a rise above a small creek a couple hundred feet back from the Nahanni. The creek was almost completely frozen over. At the edge of a stand ofdead timber Raymond and I started our signal fire. We built it up big and threw on a couple of rotten logs to make plenty of smoke.
    We stood back and watched the smoke rise high in the sky. Raymond said, “We have to keep this fire burning good every day in case they’re looking anywhere near here.”
    I said, “I keep thinking about what you said this morning…how somebody might have seen our plane turn away from the river, toward the mountains. I keep thinking, what if nobody saw that? Then what? They’ll just keep searching up and down the Liard, right? What’s it like along there? All forest, isn’t it?”
    â€œThat’s right—like you saw. Cottonwood trees along the river, spruce everywhere else.”
    â€œHard to see a plane in a thick forest like that, right? So they’ll keep searching over and over, thinking they’ll eventually find the plane hidden down in the trees somewhere.”
    â€œI guess so.”
    â€œOr they could think the plane must have gone down in the river, and that’s why they can’t find it. It could’ve sunk.”
    Raymond shrugged.
    â€œI’m just trying to think,” I said. “If they don’t show up soon, I guess we just have to hang onhere until they widen the search and start looking way up in the mountains. I hope the weather back here doesn’t get too bad for flying.”
    When we returned to the new campsite, the old man took the ax from us and quickly fashioned three long poles from skinny spruce