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Maybe there’s something else at the cabin or down on the beach I can use. Dad had all sorts of tools. Not all of them can have burned, right?
I don’t want to get up. I want to lie down and sleep, and never mind the cold. But I grit my teeth. I stand. I whistle to Bo. I walk.
It’s harder this time. My foot drags worse than before, and my arms are tired from all the chopping. I carry only the backpack, now empty, and the rifle. I don’t really need it. The things that are likely to kill me out here, I can’t stop with a bullet. But when I go to set it down, I can’t. I keep seeing my father’s face, the instant his eyes met mine. Fear kicks me in the gut, and I can’t bring myself to let go.
Halfway back to the beach, I find a long, straight stick. It’s just the right size for a walking stick. Not quite as good as the metal cane I used to have—the one George hid the day I left, that I searched for until I had to leave or miss the plane—but it still helps.
I make steady progress until I get close enough to smell it. The smoke is gone, but the stink of char still hangs heavy in the air. I can make out the blistered, charred remnants of the cabin between the trees. I halt, swallow. I should search the cabin. But I can’t bear to think about digging through the rubble.
I know I should, but digging around feels too much like digging up a grave. Like digging up my father’s grave, and I can’t do that, I can’t even think about it, or what happened.
So I’ll just look. I’ll walk around the edge, and see if anything survived.
I start forward. Every step, my chest gets tighter, until I can hardly breathe. Even with the rain, the air stinks of soot and smoke.
My father built the cabin himself. He came up one summer and selected each tree, straight and strong. He felled them and trimmed off the branches, stripped the bark, smoothed them down. He cut notches in them so that they would sit firm and even against each other, crossing at the corners of the house, and he sanded and smoothed them until they fit together so perfectly not the slimmest breeze could steal its way inside. He even cut a window, fit it with glass, hung curtains. Built himself a chimney and a table and a pair of stools.
All of that is gone now. The floor is charred black. The walls have collapsed. A few segments of log remain, blackened and crumbling. The woodpile, stacked along the side of the cabin, is burned up completely. You can just make out where the bed was, and the interior wall, but that’s about it. The fire was thorough.
I walk along the edge. The wind stirs the damp ash; metal glints. The head of Dad’s ax. The handle’s been burned away, and the head is completely black except for one little strip at the edge—but whole.
I creep close enough to lean out and drag it to me. It’s heavy, but I can carry it. I can manage it. And if the ax head has survived, other things might have. I’ll search, I promise myself, already shrinking back, as if the heat still lingers, as if it can still burn me.
Later.
I fit the ax head into the outer pocket of the backpack and zip it up. My fingers are stained black. I rub them on my jeans unsuccessfully, only managing to spread the stain around. The shed’s next. The day before it burned—yesterday, was it only yesterday?—Dad hung a deer carcass in there. Stretched out its hide on a rack.
All burned now. I can’t even tell what might have been deer. There are bits of metal here and there, but nothing whole enough to be useful that I can spot.
Somehow, though, the fire missed one corner of the shed almost completely. A section of unburned logs reaches as high as my hip, and in the corner sits a small pyramid of glass jars for canning. I bend over and pick the top one up. They’re coated in soot, but I rub at it with my sleeve to read the label.
MOOSE, it says. My heart leaps with excitement.
Then sinks. The jars are empty. No moose meat for me. But the jars themselves can still be useful.
I tuck five of them into the main compartment of the backpack, where they shift and clink against each other. I can’t fit any more without worrying they’ll break; I’ll come back for them later. I straighten up. Nothing more to do here; the outhouse certainly isn’t going to have anything helpful.
I limp down to the water. Every step hurts. I’ve stopped trying to lift my bad leg, just lean hard on my walking stick and drag it forward across the pebbles.
At the shore I bend slowly, agonizingly, and fill one jar. Two. Three. Now the bag is getting heavy, and I stop. I’ll sip slowly. I’ll leave the jars out to collect the rain. I’ll be fine. I’ll need to boil the lake water in any case, which means fire is even more of a priority, and I can’t waste time.
I look along the shore. It’s so empty. The trees stand mutely; no birds flit or call in the branches. Silent as a grave, I think, and a shudder goes through me. Where’s Bo? Not here. Gone again, because it’s what he does, he’s half wild and he belongs to this place. Not like me, shivering and cold and half-starved before I’ve even gotten through a single day.
Two cans of food, that’s it, and after that it’ll be the long slouch to starvation or one quick, cold night or a foot in the wrong place that leaves me dying of thirst on the forest floor. I’m not a wild girl. I’ve never lived outside the city, never been on my own at all. I’ve never been so alone, and the silence stretches out forever, for miles, through endless woods and endless empty sky, and the panic grabs hold of me, grabs hard, a bruising fist around my ribs.
And then a splash. A fish leaping up, falling back into the water, and a second one, ripples sprinting over the surface of the water before it turns back to glass. I take a deep breath. Fish. There are fish in the lake, and that’s food, right there, if I can just figure out how to catch it. And then I see something else: a familiar green bulk. The canoe. It’s sitting there, upended to keep the rain and debris out.
I should leave it, but I don’t know that yet. I shouldn’t be here in the first place. I should be building the shelter, or at least letting myself rest. Instead I walk down to the shore (mistake). I flip it over (mistake), groaning with the effort, and an oar falls out. There’s a seat that lifts up for storage. Inside is a little first aid kit, which I gleefully tuck into my bag. And rope. And a tackle box.
The rope is thinner than my finger, white and blue. I can’t guess at how much is coiled up—fifty feet? One hundred? But I’m grinning as I pack it away. I pull the tackle box out last and close the seat, standing a minute to admire the canoe.
The canoe means I can travel all along the lake. I’ll have to paddle even though my back is wrenched, sure, but it’s not nearly as bad as my leg, so using my arms and letting my leg rest is a good thing.
The lake hooks at the southern end, sort of boot-shaped, so you can’t see a big section of it from the north shore where I stand. Who knows what’s down there? My dad said there was good fishing and trapping on the south side. I don’t have poles, but I have the tackle box with its fishing lines and hooks and lures—and a knife. I can fish.
I grin at the lake. “I think it’s going to be okay,” I say. “I think we’ll be okay.”
I start to think that I’m not going to die, just as I’ve begun to believe I will. This is the biggest mistake of all.
