AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I eye my fishing rods, knowing that I shouldn’t savor this victory over the deer for too long. I have three of them; they even have reels—aluminum cans with a wooden dowel punched through them. The dowel is attached to the rod, and the can spins around it to wind the fishing line. It means I can cast farther, reel fish in faster. And it only took me about a week of staring and a half dozen failed experiments to make them work, too.
I can build the fire so that it lasts long enough for me to go fishing, but I don’t want to go out on the ice again. Not after yesterday.
Instead I go to check my traps. Over time, I’ve gathered all of them that I can find, and I spent one entire evening sitting, figuring out how to set them properly. I have a dozen of them arranged in an easy loop behind the cabin, marked with strips of red cloth tied to nearby branches so I won’t lose them.
Today I’m lucky. The first trap has a stoat in it, already dead. I tie the stoat to my belt and reset the trap. They’re not the best eating, but their fur is warm, and I’ve been wanting a new hat.
The next snare is missing its bait; the next three are untouched, but there’s another stoat in the next one. It’s still breathing, barely. I break its neck with barely a blink.
That’s the last prize, but it’s plenty. A strange concept: plenty. I have managed, from time to time, to be satisfied.
I have managed, from time to time, to be content.
Sometimes I think that Bo and I could live here forever.
And then my hand strays to my pocket, and my fingers close around the smooth, cold metal of the sixth bullet.
My mother is dead. My father is dead. I don’t have anything to go home to, but I have things left undone. The bullet reminds me. I am not merely surviving. I am waiting. I am preparing.
I roast the first of the venison that night, on a spit above the pan to catch the grease. I eat my fill and more; I let Bo have as much as he wants and a bone to gnaw on after. I look at the wall, where those first words—SMART, NOT STRONG—have been joined by dozens more.
Pay attention to the wind.
Steep drop west of the snag.
Say something out loud at least once a day.
Remember they’re coming.
The notebook lies on the shelf. I have filled in every last page by now, and added more, pages scavenged from the end of the thriller, from the field guide. I have written on the backs of the photographs and the files in the crate. I have made a record of my days.
I will not vanish. I will not fade. I was here. I’ve made it through another day.
I sleep fitfully, with the wind as a poor lullaby.
The wind is like a living thing to me now. It paces around my cabin and tries to find a way in. It lashes out and leaves destruction scattered everywhere when it can’t get its way.
But the wind is also protection, in a way. The days the wind is the worst, I know Raph won’t come; the weather’s too dangerous for flying. I both crave the wind and dread it. The wind means not yet, not today.
The wind makes its way into my dreams. It flings me into the air. I rise and then I fall, and when I crash down to earth I’m in the car again. My whole side hurts and I can’t figure out why, until I realize that the side of the car is crushed in, that pieces of it are lodged in my leg, pieces of it are grinding pebbles of glass into my skin. The pain is strange and distant, a disconnected fact. Then I look over. Then I see my mother. And—
And then we are driving again, and she’s turning to say something to me, and then her arm flies out across me as if she can hold me back, as if she can shield me from what’s coming, and there’s a roar in my ears.
But that roar is only the wind, and my mother is dead, and I’m lying alone in the cabin, trying not to cry because I don’t cry anymore.
When I wake like this, the firelight low, I squint to see the words I’ve written across from the bed, unsteady letters on the wall.
This is not enough.
I need something more. More than existence, more than survival.
Some days, I hold on to Bo. Keeping myself alive means keeping him alive, and I love him more fiercely than any living being.
Other days, I think about my old life. Friends. Food. Television. Takeout.
But Bo can live without me, and my old life doesn’t feel real, and without my mother in it I’m not sure I even want it back.
And so I always come back to one thing. One reason to keep going. To beat the winter. One reason to survive the cold, the hunger, the loneliness: revenge.
