Brian's Saga Volume 5 - Brian's Hunt

Brian's Hunt - Gary Paulsen

1

He was in his world again. He was back.

It was high summer coming to fall and Brian was back in the far reaches of wilderness—or as he thought of it now, home. He had his canoe and bow and this time he’d added some dried food, beans and rice and sugar. He also had a small container of tea, which he’d come to enjoy. He had a small cook set, and a can to make little fires in the middle of the canoe; he put leaves on to make smoke to drive the flies and gnats and mosquitoes away. He had some salt and pepper and, almost a treat, matches. He still could not get over how wonderful it was to just be able to make a fire when he wanted one, and he never sat down to a cook fire without smiling and remembering when his life in the wilderness had begun. His first time alone.

He dreamt of it often and at first his dreams sometimes had the qualities of nightmares. He dreamt he was sitting there in the small plane, the only pa.s.senger, with the pilot dying and the plane cras.h.i.+ng into the lake below. He awakened sometimes with sudden fear, his breath coming fast. The crash itself had been so wild and he had been so out of control that the more he had grown in the years since, the more he had learned and handled difficult situations, the more insane the crash seemed; a wild, careening, ripping ride down through trees to end not in peace but in the water, nearly drowning—in the nightmares it was like dying and then not dying to die again.

But the bad dreams were rare, rarer all the time, and when he had them at all now they were in the nature of fond memories of his first months alone in the bush, or even full-blown humor: the skunk that had moved in with him and kept the bear away; how Brian had eaten too many gut berries, which he’d later found were really called chokecherries (a great name, he thought); a chickadee that had once landed on his knee to take food from his hand.

He had been . . . young then, more than two years ago. He was still young by most standards, just sixteen. But he was more seasoned now and back then he had acted young—no, that wasn’t quite it either. New. He had been new then and now he was perhaps not so new.

He paused in his thinking and let the outside world come into his open mind. East edge of a small lake, midday, there would be small fish in the reeds and lily pads, sunfish and bluegills, good eating fish, and he’d have to catch some for his one hot meal a day. Sun high overhead, warm on his back but not hot the way it had been earlier in the week; no, hot but not muggy. The summer was drying out, getting ready for fall. Loon cry off to the left, not distress, not a baby lost to pike or musky; the babies would be big enough now to evade danger on their own, almost ready to fly, and would not have to ride on their mother’s backs for safety as they did when they were first hatched out.

He was close in on the lily pads and something moved suddenly in the brush just up the bank, rustling through the thick, green foliage, and though it sounded big and made a lot of noise he knew it was probably a squirrel or even a mouse. They made an inordinate amount of noise as they traveled through the leaves and humus on the ground. And there was no heavy footfall feeling as there would be with a moose or deer or bear, although bear usually were relatively quiet when they moved.

High-pitched screeeeee of hawk or eagle hunting and calling to his or her mate; he couldn’t always tell yet between the cry of hawk and eagle.

A yip of coyote, not wolf because it was not deep enough, and not a call, not a howl or a song but more a yip of irritation.

He had heard that yip before when he’d watched a coyote hunting mice by a huge old pine log. The log had holes beneath it from one side to the other and the mice could dance back and forth beneath the log through the holes, while the coyote had to run around the end, or jump over the top, and the mice simply scurried back and forth under it to avoid him. The coyote tried everything, hiding, waiting, digging a hole big enough for himself under the log so he could move back and forth, but nothing worked. After over an hour of trying to get at the mice, he finally stood on top of the log looking down one side, then the other, raised his head and looked right at Brian as if he’d known Brian was there the whole time, and gave an irritated, downright angry yip. It was, Brian felt, a kind of swearing.

Up ahead four hundred yards, a moose was feeding in the lily pads, putting its head underwater to pull up the succulent roots, and Brian knew it would be an easy kill if he wanted it. Canoes seemed such a part of nature to the animals in the wild—perhaps they thought canoes were logs—and if a person kept very still it was often possible to glide right up next to an animal near the water. In many states it was illegal to hunt from a canoe for just that reason. Brian had once canoed up next to and touched a fawn standing in the shallows. And with feeding moose it was simpler yet; all you had to do was scoot forward when the moose had its head underwater and coast when its head was up, looking around.

Brian had plenty of arrows: a dozen and a half field points with sixty extra points and a hundred extra shafts and equipment to make more arrows, and two dozen broadhead arrows as well as fifty extra broadhead points with triple-blade heads the military had designed for covert work many years before. These were called MA-3s. Deadly. And if sharpened frequently, they were strong enough to reuse many times if you didn’t hit a bone or miss and catch a rock.

Looking at the moose, he salivated, thinking of the red meat and how it would taste roasted over a fire. But then he decided against it. The moose was a small bull, probably only six or seven hundred pounds, and nowhere near the fourteen or fifteen hundred pounds a large bull would weigh, but even so it was a lot of meat to deal with and he couldn’t bring himself to waste anything he killed. He had gone hungry so long when he had first come to the bush. . . . Food had been everything and the thought of wasting any of it went against every instinct in his body. Even if he made a smoke fire and dried most of it in strips he would still lose some meat. . . .

Still, he could see the shot. Close to the moose, close in but far enough away to avoid an attack, the bow already strung. Wait until he ducked under to draw the bow and then as soon as the head came up release the MA-3 just in back of the shoulder, under the shoulder blade, and the broadhead would go straight into the heart. . . .

He shook his head. Rehearsals were all right—he did them all the time, came up with imaginary scenarios and how they would play out even if he didn’t act.

Like with Kay-gwa-daush. He thought of her often. She was the daughter of the Cree trapping family he had found that first winter in the bush. He had met up with them at the end of winter and had lived with them for three weeks, until spring arrived, and with it, a plane to take him back to civilization.

Kay-gwa-daush’s white name was Susan Smallhorn but he seemed to be thinking of her more and more by her Cree name. He thought of her constantly. She was his age, came up to his shoulder and a little more, had smiling almond-shaped brown eyes, a full mouth and straight nose and long, thick, richly black hair, and he had never met her. Her father, David Smallhorn, had shown him her picture, and Brian had missed her because she was away at school.

The attempter. That’s what her Cree name meant and her family had given it to her because when she was little she was afraid of nothing, would try anything, which had given her a small scar on her left cheek when she was four years old and tried to fire a high-powered rifle. As Brian sat in the canoe, he thought it was almost like the beauty marks women used to wear on their cheeks. Hmmm, beauty mark. Strange to think of it in that way. Strange to think in that flow, scar from rifle to beauty mark. True, she was pretty and that was nice but he did not really know her, but he thought how she might laugh when he met her and told her how his thoughts were running.

The Smallhorn summer camp was north four or five lakes and some river travel from where he sat, perhaps thirty miles. He wasn’t sure which lake they were on, but David had told him it was a lake the shape of an arrowhead with a large island on the north end. The island almost touched the land there and they stayed on the island because there were fewer mosquitoes out on the lake where the breeze could get at the camp. It was their permanent summer camp while they waited to move into their trapping area in the fall.

He was heading toward their camp anyway, working north to see new country. Here all the rivers that ran from lake to lake flowed north and west until they poured into the giant Lake Winnipeg and from there the rivers moved north and east to run into Hudson Bay, way up above the timberline.

He had in mind to go see that country. Just head north. South was cities, people, and he was fast coming to think that people, and what people did with their lives, with their world, were not good, were in most cases ugly and wrong.

That was south. Ugly and wrong. And north was country to see, natural country that man had not yet ruined. So he worked north, not in a hurry, in his world, listening to loons and coyotes and frogs and birds and seeing new and beautiful things—sunlight reflecting on the water, blazing red sunsets, black star-studded skies—each day and night.

Sliding, he thought, the canoe was sliding north. And maybe he’d stop and see his friends and meet Kay-gwa-daush and they could have a laugh talking about how his thoughts ran.

Beauty marks from scars.

Ha.

She would laugh.

2

He glided along the lily pads in the sun, half looking for fish he might eat, and let his mind float back a couple of months. . . .

He had returned to his world, the wilderness. He had sworn that he wouldn’t, once he’d gone back to civilization, even when he found out that once he was sixteen he could actually quit school if he wanted to and had his parents’ consent. But he didn’t want to do that because he had discovered that there was this incredible thing that happened with studying: you learned things.

It sounded dumb when he thought of it, kind of like duh, really, no kidding. But before the plane crash so much of his schooling had been simply getting by, trying to learn just enough to pa.s.s the tests and never really knowing anything.

When he’d gone back, he started to run into things in books. That was how it had happened at first. He’d been in the bush and survived with only a hatchet because he’d begun to try to learn about things that happened to him; basic things, even idiotic things. You eat the gut berries, you throw up. Don’t eat the gut berries.

It sounded silly when he thought of it in that simple way. But when he’d gone back and after the furor over his survival was finished and all the television and media hype was done and all the doctors had examined him to make sure he was “all right,” he’d tried to get his life back to normal. But he never really had of course because he had been in a place so completely different. He found that he looked at everything the way he had in the bush when his decisions were a matter of life or death.

If a teacher handed him a history book he didn’t just scan it and learn the dates of the Battle of Gettysburg or when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. He had a great thirst to understand, to know things as he’d known them in the bush, to know. And so he tried to find out more about everything that came to him, tried to learn about what happened in Gettysburg and came to find that it was not just something in history to take a test about; it was an appalling battle where over fifty thousand American soldiers were slaughtered in three days of horrendous fighting and so thick were the bullets flying at each other that you could still find bullets swaged together, because they hit each other in flight and fell to the ground; he learned about the Minnesota First Volunteers, that of 262 who started the battle only 47 were left standing at the end, and most of those were wounded. And Alexander Graham Bell didn’t just invent the phone, he was actually trying to find a way to help deaf children communicate with their parents and he came very close to inventing the airplane before Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Brian learned these things. He knew.

And though he had come back to the bush now because he couldn’t be with the people back in civilization, and because he knew he would probably never fit in, he did not hate school, or the concept of studying and learning.

And he did not hate his parents. He loved them. He’d wanted to see if there was some way he could make the two worlds work together, but he could not; their world was ugly to him and was filled with awful tastes and smells and people who all wanted what he thought were the wrong things; wanted just that, things, and money, and the right cars and the right girls and the right clothes. At first he could somehow tolerate how they lived, and he tried to find a way to make it work for him as well. But at the end of two years, he simply could not stand it; he had reached some saturation point, where he could not watch television, could not listen to discordant loud music, could not stand traffic noise, hated the fact that it was never dark at night and he couldn’t see the stars because of city light. He went into a state of overload and a kind of shock and open disbelief that people could actually live, or pretend to live, the way they did.

So he had worked out a way to homeschool on his own up here. He had brought some paperback textbooks with him, one on history, another on math, one on nature and biology (he’d already found some errors in that one, especially concerning how animals think or even if they do, clinically, think), several books of literature and of course his Shakespeare, and he’d promised his parents and the school that after he studied them he would take a test to prove he knew these things and then, the next year, they might try more books and more tests.

This procedure wasn’t openly accepted, but the school authorities gave him credit for his surviving fifty-four days with nothing but a hatchet—they acknowledged that it showed an ability to learn. Everyone was trying to be flexible because it was clear that he really did want to learn.

There. He stopped, back-paddled the canoe until it didn’t move. Under a lily pad, lying still like a small green log, was a large northern pike. Four, maybe five pounds. In some dumb fis.h.i.+ng magazine he’d seen in a doctor’s office, he’d read an article that said northern pike were not good to eat because they had a series of floating Y-bones down their sides that made it so you couldn’t filet them, couldn’t cut steaks off the side of them very easily. It also said that they were “kind of slimy.” The truth is all fish are slimy because they’re covered with an antibacterial coating to keep disease out. The way Brian cooked them, with the guts out but otherwise whole on a flat piece of wood facing a fire, the slime turned a nice blue and came off with the skin. In a cookbook, he found that the French have a recipe called pike à bleu, where they bake the fish and serve it on a platter blue from the slime.

Still, he thought, it’s a long way from looking at a northern under a lily pad to actually eating one. They were a first-cla.s.s predator, would take not just other fish but frogs, ducklings and baby loons and now and then had been known to bite people. Like all good predators, they were very fast and very cautious—predators could not afford to be hurt; even a minor injury was a death sentence, because then they could not catch their prey.

He had brought some line and a few small hooks but he rarely used them. It was much easier and more selective to shoot fish with the bow and he’d even brought a few triple-pointed barbed fish heads glued onto the ends of shafts without feathers, just for small fish at very short range. But this was slightly different. The northern was too big for the little fish points, because of the spread of the three points. They wouldn’t go into the big fish very far and would just wound it, and the arrow would fall out when the fish thrashed around and it would get away.

He’d have to get a solid arrow with a field point into the head of the fish to kill it and he was lined up all wrong for the kill. He was skirting the lake heading north with the lily pads on the right of the canoe and since he shot right-handed it was awkward to pick up the bow and swing to the right and get a shot off without exposing his whole body, which would probably scare the fish away. The same problem existed if he raised himself in the canoe and tried to turn around and face the other way to get a shot; he had the cargo bundle in front of him with all his gear and he was sitting in the rear of the canoe. If he tried to rise and turn he would undoubtedly scare the fish away. And besides, with the way he was kneeling and with the small amount of room it would be almost impossible to turn.

Still, it was early in the day and there was plenty of light left, plenty of time before he stopped for the night. He crouched down toward the front of the canoe and with careful, extremely slow motions of the paddle he took almost ten minutes, ten crawling minutes to turn the canoe around so it was facing the other way.

Just like so much of what he did now, so much of how he hunted, it was a stalking procedure. He had learned long ago that to hurry is to lose. Patience was the key, the absolutely most important part of hunting anything, from fish to moose. You needed to take the time required. When he was learning more about the north country, he’d read that Inuits hunting seal on the ice would squat over a seal breathing hole for hours, even days, waiting for the seal to come up in the hole to get air. The Inuit would put a small piece of feather over the hole and stand with bone harpoon ready and when the seal came into the hole the air pus.h.i.+ng ahead of its body would ruffle the feather and the hunter would lunge with the harpoon and bury the barbed head in the back of the seal. The seal might weigh four hundred pounds and the harpoon didn’t kill it but was merely attached to a line the Inuit was holding, so the whole process was very dramatic, like trying to hold a good-sized bull with a piece of string. The hunter had to hold the seal with one hand and probe with another killing spear to kill the seal while it was trying to pull the hunter down through the ice into the water. Needless to say it didn’t always work and he read that the hunters were so patient that if the seal never came or they lost it after the first strike they would not be frustrated but merely shrug and go to the next hole. And, Brian learned, polar bears hunted seals the same way, the bear waiting by the hole for a seal to come take a breath—squinting so its eyes wouldn’t give it away and covering its black nose with a white paw for the same reason—and when the seal came, the bear lunged down, grabbing it by the nose and pulling the entire three- or four-hundred-pound seal up through a six-inch hole in the ice, pulverizing it, turning the insides of the seal to a kind of stew.

It took that kind of patience. Brian crouched, peeking over the edge of the canoe at the northern all the while, barely moving the paddle until the canoe had completely swapped ends, looking from beneath the water, he hoped, like a slowly drifting and turning log.

It must have worked. Once the fish seemed about to move—its back arched and its gills flared—but a smaller northern came by and Brian could see it was merely defending its territory.

At last the canoe was positioned right and the northern was still there, in a slightly better place because the lily pad was partially covering the fish’s eyes.

The bow was strung and, still crouched forward, Brian gently slid a wooden arrow out of his quiver and laid it across the bow, nocked it onto the string, put his left hand on the handle and raised the bow even with the gunwale of the canoe, then a little higher, so the arrow would just clear the side of the canoe.

Then, holding the bow almost sideways, he pushed it while pulling the arrow back, tucked the feathers under his chin, aimed at the bottom edge of the fish to allow for refraction. He’d learned that the hard way, by missing the fish when he’d first started hunting after the plane crash. He released the arrow.

The arrow was slowed only a tiny amount as it traveled through the water and hit the northern with full force just above the right eye. Whether by luck or design it was an almost perfect shot and the shaft slammed through the brain, cutting the spinal cord, stopping halfway through the northern.

The fish, dead in an instant, gave a spasmodic death jerk, a sideways arching of its body, which flung it off into shallower water, perhaps five feet deep. It became still and began to sink, the buoyancy of the wooden shaft slowing the process.

“Ahh,” Brian said aloud, “I thought it might float. . . .” All fish have air bladders, which they use to control their depth, and sometimes when they are killed they have enough air in the bladder to make them rise to the surface. Sometimes, as with this northern, the air is expelled and they sink.

Brian was wearing only shorts and he put one hand on each side of the canoe and lift-jumped himself over the side into the water. He slipped beneath the surface with his eyes open and though his vision was blurred and the northern’s color made it almost impossible to see, the arrow shaft was a bright white line. He grabbed it and pulled the fish up to the canoe and flopped it over into the boat.

Thank you, he thought, as he always thought when he killed. And then, Good meal, full meal. What he had come to think of as a can’t-walk-meal, or a lie-down-and-sleep-meal.

He could not save fish in the summer. If he had a smokehouse or a way to dry the meat without flies getting to it he might be able to keep some, but in the late-summer heat with no refrigeration it was impossible to keep meat for very long and if he tried and ate spoiled fish, it could easily kill him.

He had found a government book on the Internet that had been put out for farmers and hunters and trappers back in the 1930s. It cataloged and described each kind of meat and how to raise the different animals and how to slaughter them and preserve them. There were many surprises, such as the fact that venison, and especially moose meat, were very low in nutritional value and protein while rabbit was the highest. He learned that fish meat was vulnerable to a kind of ptomaine and worse, botulism, which was often fatal. There were doc.u.mented cases of Native Americans dying from eating dried salmon and other fish because of these poisons. There were also many cases of predators, scavenger birds like eagles, and wolves and foxes and coyotes being found dead from eating bad fish that had died and drifted up onsh.o.r.e.

So he would eat the whole fish, and he smiled remembering the first time: First Fish, and how small it had been and how wonderful it had tasted.

He still felt the same way about it. He still felt wonder at the food, and he looked for a clearing on the bank to make a fire.

Good meal. Full meal. Thank you.

3

He had changed. He thought at first that he had changed again, that there were steps in how he had done so, but he realized that he was changing constantly as the world around him s.h.i.+fted, as he learned more.

His approach to “camping” was a good example. When he had first been in the bush just after the crash, he had needed shelter and a settled place to be. Or he’d thought he did—he had since decided he’d been wrong to stay with the plane. With his knowledge now he would make weapons and start to move south, hunting as he moved, hunt-traveling.

But back then he had needed a camp and had thought they would find him soon. They hadn’t, because he’d been so far off course. And then too he had not had an easy time making fire. To move constantly and try to make a new fire each night with the hatchet and a rock, or at least each time he wanted to cook meat, would have been very slow. Next to impossible.

But he had changed. Now he did not spend an inordinate amount of time on campsites. So he found a clearing in a short time, beached the canoe, made a fire with one waxed match, gutted the fish and threw the guts in the lake, where they immediately attracted small panfish that cleaned them up in moments, and set the northern on a flat piece of wood to cook one side.

It was done in ten minutes and he stripped the meat off the side, still steaming, into an aluminum pot from his cook set and turned the fish over to cook the other side while he ate the first. He had salt but was favoring it less and less. He ate the meat with his fingers, picking carefully through the bones—including the notorious Y-bones—until nothing was left but bones and by that time the second half was done. He ate the meat from that, then broke the head open and ate the brain and eyes (he had long ago stopped being picky or squeamish), put the bones and carca.s.s back in the lake where the panfish could get at it and set to his gear.

He was meticulous about his gear and he tried to check everything once a day, starting with the canoe, which was Kevlar and almost bulletproof. Next, the two composite paddles. Then his weapons. He had the bow, a laminate straight, almost a longbow, that pulled forty-five pounds at twenty-six inches’ draw. He had tried stronger bows, tested them for a time, and looked at compounds. But they had pulleys and cables and tuning requirements, too tricky to be much good for hard use in the bush.

He checked the bow, and string, and his two spare strings, and then each arrow, using his small stone to touch up the sharpness of the broadheads, which he kept like razors (they could shave the hair off his arms), making sure the arrow he had used on the northern was set to dry right and the feathers would stay straight.

Then his knife. He had a straight-edge hunting knife always on his belt—almost a copy of Second World War Marine Corps–issue knives called K-Bars—and he used the same small stone he used on his broadheads to touch up the blade.

Then a small double-edged cruiser axe that he used as a general tool for cutting wood or setting up a lean-to with the canoe. And then each piece of clothing, checking the st.i.tches and using a sewing repair kit to fix any problems. Next, his moccasins, of which he had three pair, including a knee-high pair that he could fas.h.i.+on into mukluks for cold weather.

He had a light jacket, and a pullover anorak that came down to his knees made of breathable waterproof cloth and two Polarfleece pullovers to wear under the parka and two pair of Polarfleece pants and four pair of brown jersey gloves, which he found to be as good as anything. He could not stand a hard winter but he was good for anything less—way better than he’d been for his first winter—and when all the gear was checked he boiled some water from the lake and made a pot of tea and when it had cooled he drank the whole pot and leaned back against a log nearby and sat watching the fire, his stomach full, evening on its way and a drowsy mood coming over him.

He had a sleeping bag in the canoe, a good five-pounder that would keep him warm to ten above, and a closed-cell foam pad for a mattress. He thought of getting them out and setting up a land camp to spend the night but decided against it.

The bag was really too much for weather this warm. If there wasn’t strong wind and it didn’t rain, he had taken to sleeping in the canoe out on the lake. He had a small grapnel hook with dulled, rounded points, only four inches across, and a hundred feet of light nylon line, and he would drop the hook and let it bite into the weeds and mud on the bottom and feed out enough line to hold the hook down and in place and then tie it off to the bow of the canoe and unfurl his pad in the bow, in front of the cargo, and sleep there with the cargo and its covering tarp for a pillow.

Most of the lakes in the north country were shallow, scooped out by ancient glaciers, rarely over fifteen or twenty feet deep, and if the wind didn’t come up it was like sleeping in a cradle. Usually, out on the water a way, the mosquitoes were not much of a bother. It was late summer now and they were not as bad as they are in the first part of the year, when driven by the need to hunt and get blood and lay eggs before fall. In the first hatch in summer Brian had seen swarms so bad they plugged his nostrils—lord, how he’d hated them when he’d first crawled ash.o.r.e from the plane crash. They had torn him apart.

Dark was coming now and he made sure the fire was out, loaded his gear back in the canoe and paddled out offsh.o.r.e a hundred yards. Here he stopped the canoe and drifted for a few minutes, checking the weather. But the sunset was beautifully calm, serene, and not a breath of wind, and he nodded and slid the hook over the side until it hit the bottom, then back-paddled until it bit, tied it off to his bowline and arranged his bed to sleep on top of his bag because the air was still warm and mellow. He lay down to rest, listening to the evening cry of loons calling to each other across the mirrored water.

A perfect day among many perfect days and the last thought he had before slipping into sleep was that he was in exactly the right spot at exactly the right time in his life.

Perfect.

4

A strange sound awakened him.

He had been sleeping hard, dreaming, of all things, about Kay-gwa-daush and beauty marks, and at first his body did not want to come up into consciousness.

But so much of him was tuned now to reacting to odd things, a line that did not belong where it was, a sound that should not be there, an odd color or smell. He had almost gone crazy on his last visit back to civilization. Sirens and stink of smoke and bangs and rattles and noise—it had all meshed together and desensitized him to the point where he’d heard nothing because it was so overwhelming.

Here, now, every odd sound or color or line or smell meant something. He had watched wolves hunting once and they would trot or walk along and stop every few feet and look and smell and listen and they checked everything out. Everything. Any little rustle in the gra.s.s, any soft whisper of sound, every scent.

And now here he lay, awake, knowing only that a strange noise had cut him out of sleep but not what sound or where it had come from and he opened his mouth to clear his ears and held his breath and waited, listening.

The night was perfectly still. The temperature had dropped so that he had without awakening pulled his unzipped bag over the top of him to stay warm, and it was cool enough that even the odd mosquito had gone down and it was so quiet he heard his heart beating in his ears.

But no other sound.

The moon was half full and seemed close enough to touch and made it so bright the lake around him could be seen easily. The canoe rode softly on the slick water, the little anchor still holding well. Nothing wrong there.

He sat up a bit. Nothing on the sh.o.r.e that he could see; of course it was far enough away—a good hundred yards—that even with the bright moon he might not see something small.

But no, nothing. No sound, not even bugs, not even a loon.

And yet he was awake. Why? He trusted his instincts implicitly here in the bush and he knew there had to have been something, some big or little thing. The dream was not enough to wake him. There had to be some outside influence involved. But he could hear or see nothing. . . .

Wait. There.

A sound. What was it? Very soft, so that he could just barely hear it, and there again, soft, whimpering. . . .

A whine. A soft whimpering whine the way a dog might sound if it was begging or injured.

A dog?

Now he sat and scoured the bank but could see nothing. A coyote, perhaps, brush wolf as they called them up north, or maybe a timber wolf, two wolves, one begging from the other.

He had a small monocular in his pack. Binocu-lars were too heavy but there were times when he wanted to see things from a distance without disturbing them—he was especially interested in the eagle nests on many of the lakes because he wanted to see the young but didn’t want to get too close to them.

He took out the monocular and studied the lakesh.o.r.e. It was only eight power, but it pulled in a lot of extra light from the moon and he broke the sh.o.r.eline down into sections and tried to see the wolf or coyote. Or maybe it was a fox.

But there couldn’t be a dog out here, could there?

He saw nothing on the first sweep. He looked at the moon and was thinking it was probably two or three in the morning and perhaps he should just accept that it was a coyote or wolf or maybe even a small bear and get some more sleep when he heard it again.

Not louder, but somehow more persistent, perhaps a little longer in duration.

He started another sweep and was halfway through his swing, carefully studying the sh.o.r.eline foot by foot, when he came to the area where he had made a fire and cooked the northern. And then he saw it.

By the log where he had lain back after eating there was a shape. Not moving, just sitting or hulking, not a coyote but certainly not as big as a wolf either.

A dark shape that might be a small bear—there were many bears in the bush, blacks, some of them cinnamon-colored blacks, and worthy of much respect. He had had a couple of run-ins, one with a bear that he had come close to shooting, another with a bear that had tried to move into his winter shelter and had been driven off by a skunk. But this didn’t look quite like a bear either.

Now it moved, stood slowly, and he saw that it had four legs, was slightly larger than a coyote, had a s.h.i.+ny patch on its shoulder, and unless he was completely insane was almost a.s.suredly a dog.

Out here.

And looking at Brian across the water whining, whimpering.

Well, he thought. Just that. Well.

I might as well go see what it wants.

He sat up, completely awake now, and fetched the anchor line from the bow rope and pulled the little grapnel up and paddled toward sh.o.r.e.

Close on he stopped, forty feet from the bank, sixty from the dog, and studied it again. Rabies was a very real disease and while it usually killed the infected animals before they could go far or do much damage, he didn’t want to get torn up or killed if the dog was rabid.

He used the monocular again, even this close, because it gathered so much light, and scrutinized the animal. When he had paddled in the dog had come closer to the sh.o.r.e to meet him, but it moved poorly and seemed to favor its right side. Brian held the scope on it to see what was wrong.

It was most certainly a dog—he could see it was a female even in the dark—a nondescript kind of dark-haired malamute cross that the Crees sometimes had in their camps to pull sleds in the winter or pack in the summer. They were not so much sled dogs as just camp dogs and companions that pulled sleds when necessary. And this one seemed friendly enough, wanting to greet him. The dog had that s.h.i.+ny place on her shoulder but otherwise its coat was a dark brown.

And then she turned and Brian saw the s.h.i.+ny spot better and realized that the dog had been wounded in some way, perhaps in a fight, and there was a slash that started just at the top of her right shoulder and went down and back at an angle almost to her rear end. It had bled all down her side, and much of the blood had clotted, but in the moonlight Brian could see the s.h.i.+ne of fresh blood.

“Oh man,” Brian said aloud, his voice almost startling him because he so rarely spoke, “what in G.o.d’s name happened to you?”

And the dog whimpered to him again in a sound that it seemed dogs reserved just for talking to humans, a soft asking sound, a soul sound, and Brian dug the paddle in and slipped up onsh.o.r.e to help.

5

When the dog saw the canoe move toward sh.o.r.e she at first moved to meet it, head down, tail wagging, but Brian hesitated just once more before touching the bank with the bow of the canoe.

This was all very strange, and strange things in the bush often deserved more study. The dog was here, she greeted Brian as a friend, but why? Why a dog? Why was it here? Was there more to it, more people here, something possibly not good waiting for him on the bank?

But he waited just a few seconds because when he was this close the dog first sat, whimpering with pain, and then lay down on her good side with the wound up and waited, just waited for Brian.

It was enough and he pushed up on the bank and jumped out of the canoe. He went to the dog and knelt next to her.

Of course it was still dark but there was the halfmoon and he saw that most of the wound, a foot-and-a-half-long rip down the side, was very superficial, just breaking and peeling back the skin, and it had clotted well. Here and there wet blood oozed but even as he watched, it seemed to diminish.

Still, it needed tending to and to do that he needed light, a fire.

“You stay here,” he told the dog. “I have to get wood and make a fire.”

Either because she understood or perhaps just that she was in pain, the dog stayed by the front of the canoe while Brian moved in the moonlight and found dead wood and dry gra.s.s and started a small fire nearby.

He took a burning stick and held it closer to see better and it frightened the dog. “Easy, easy, I have to see it. . . .”

He put his hand on the dog’s head and she settled immediately, responding to the soothing sound of his voice. Brian held the light up again and in the relative brightness saw that the rip, however it had been caused, had torn back a flap of shoulder skin about half as big as his palm.

He could see exposed flesh, muscle. Although the meat was not too damaged he knew he would have to fix it in some way, cover it.

“Or sew it up,” he said aloud. “I have some fis.h.i.+ng line and a needle. I wonder if you would let me sew the flap down?”

He went to the canoe and got out his sewing repair kit. He had thread there but thought it might be too light for the job, would pull out. The fis.h.i.+ng line would work better except that he would have to use the large needle with it.

This, he thought, moving back to the dog, could go wrong in so many ways. She wasn’t a really large dog—perhaps forty pounds—but she had teeth and Brian had seen dogs fight in the city and had seen wolves kill deer and knew what those teeth could do. He’d read somewhere that the teeth at the back, the molars, even in a moderate dog could come down with twenty-six hundred pounds per square inch. The cross section of the bone in my arm, he thought, is about a square inch. Hmmmm.

Still, he couldn’t leave the wound that way.

“I have to hurt you,” he said to the dog, petting her head. “I’m sorry, but we have to sew that up. I’ll talk and tell you what I’m doing but if we don’t sew it and cover it the flies will plant eggs in it. . . .”

All the time he was talking he was preparing himself, kneeling by the dog, threading the fish line through the needle in the firelight—in itself no mean feat—and hoping his talk would soothe the dog.

“I’m going to clean the wound with a little water,” he said, dipping water from the lake. He knew it wasn’t hygienic but the wound was full of dirt and gra.s.s and the water was cleaner than that. He thought of boiling it but then he would have to wait for it to cool and that would take too long. The dog was steady now but might not hold for a long time.

He washed the wound with water as best he could, splas.h.i.+ng it gently until the water ran clear without blood or dirt and then folded the flap of skin back up over the wound opening and was dismayed to find that it was too small to cover the s.p.a.ce.

It lacked a quarter inch all around, seemed to have shrunk. He would have to pull it and stretch it back while he sewed.

He winced, thinking how it would feel to do it to himself—first stretch his skin and then pull a large needle with fish line through it, again, and again. The dog had remained quiet while he washed and pulled the flap back over—quieter than Brian would have believed—but he did not believe she would lie still for what was coming.

“It’s more of a problem than I thought,” Brian said. “Maybe going to hurt a little more . . .” Later, much later, he would remember talking to the dog that first night as if she were a person and would not think it odd, never thought it odd. He talked to all animals, deer, birds, wolves, sometimes even fish. But only the dog seemed to understand, seemed to know what he meant.

Well, he thought, here goes, and he pulled the flap, had to tug it sharply into place and took the first st.i.tch with the needle, surprised at how hard he had to push to get the needle through the skin. It was almost like cured leather and he had to exert way more force than he thought the dog would tolerate, just for the first edge. Then he had to pull and tug the flap of skin into position and push the needle through the second edge, again, having to push very hard to get even the sharp needle through the hide, then pull the two edges together with the string and tie a first knot to hold it, then move a quarter inch—which seemed about right—and push-pull it through again. . . .

And again.

And again.

And talking all the while, waiting for the dog to come around and hit him.

“You’re such a tough dog. I couldn’t take this, I know. You must have good genes, tough genes, a tough mother and a tough father, to take this pulling and pus.h.i.+ng and poking and just keep taking it and taking it. . . .” His voice even and smooth, trying to calm the dog, ease her mind.

And not once did the head come around. Only at first, when Brian jerked the string to pull the two edges together, was there a reaction, a low, deep rumble from the dog’s chest and the head coming up, but it was not a growl so much as a moan and the head never came around, the teeth never bared. The dog just looked at him, looked right in Brian’s eyes in the firelight, a look of understanding, of complete and utter trust, and then the head went back down and there were no more rumbles, no more moans, no more glances. She lay there with her eyes closed, content to let Brian work. Almost relaxed.

Thirty-two st.i.tches Brian sewed, each one knotted in place, twenty across the top and twelve down the front side, all about a quarter inch apart, all tightly sewn and pulling the flaps together, and then it was done.

He had a small first-aid kit in the canoe and he took out the disinfectant bottle. It was not enough to have washed the wound but he trickled it in a line along the sewn-up seam edges and it must not have been painless as the bottle said because the dog rumbled again, though she didn’t open her eyes or change her breathing.

Then it was done.

Brian cleaned the needle and put the kit away in the canoe, washed the blood from his hands in the lake, found more wood for the fire and built the flames up.

The dog stayed where she was, four or five feet from the fire, and rested. Soon Brian could hear the sound of her snoring over the crackle of flames.

Brian squatted by the fire and let his mind float free, glad the dog was so friendly, glad he hadn’t been bitten.

He looked to the east and thought he could see a glow. Maybe a couple of hours to daylight and then . . . what?

Try to figure it out, he thought. The dog was clearly not wild, clearly friendly to people, had heard-smelled-felt that Brian was out in the lake sleeping in his canoe, had awakened him by whining.

Clearly wanted help.

But where had she come from? There was no collar on her, Brian had checked that right away, and it was a her, not a him, Brian had also seen that, but she wasn’t just a loose, wild dog.

She must have come from a trapper’s camp somewhere, maybe a Cree camp, perhaps near, perhaps far. She must belong to somebody. But Brian had seen or heard absolutely no sign at all of any people anywhere within miles, and if there had been a camp or people he would know. Animals in the bush react to people, “feel” differently if there is anyone about, and he had not “felt” that difference. Nor had he seen tracks, smudges in the gra.s.s, had not smelled smoke.

n.o.body was close.

And yet, here was the dog. Obviously a person dog, a dog that wanted to be with humans, a dog that couldn’t hunt for herself well—she looked thin—and needed to be with people yet had, for some reason, left her people?

No sense there, Brian thought. He put more wood on the fire and studied the dog in the brighter light.

The dog slept soundly, snoring gently, the wounded side moving up and down. Brian liked the sound of her breathing and he thought of never having had a dog. There had always been some reason his parents wouldn’t let him have one. They were too dirty. They shed hair. His mother had allergies. He wasn’t responsible enough to take care of a puppy. Lord. Back there. His parents. He shook his head—had that ever been real, that life? That whole silliness?

He watched the wound move with the dog’s breathing.

The wound came from a fight with someone or something. It was a slash wound, not from a fall or hitting a stick.

How had it happened?

A fight with another dog? He had considered that possibility while working on the dog. It had been in a major battle with another dog and had been driven out—but Brian wasn’t sure if that sort of thing happened outside Jack London novels and he had come to realize that much of what Jack London wrote about the bush was utter nonsense. He might have been a tough man, and he might be a good writer, but he’d also been a hammer-drunk and there was a lot of silliness in what he said about wilderness.

Besides, most people wouldn’t let a fight get that far out of hand. A dog that was ripped up that badly couldn’t do much work for a while and trapper dogs were used for work, packing, pulling toboggans. And he didn’t think a dog that liked people as much as this one seemed to would leave just because of a fight.

So something else.

But nothing else made sense. The dog wouldn’t leave her home unless she was driven out and the wound was serious enough. . . .

Wolves? Brian’s thinking rolled free. Perhaps the dog was out away from camp, hunting or something, and ran into a pack of wolves. Say they hit her, wound her and in panic she doesn’t run home, back to her camp, but runs off, maybe confused, bewildered until she comes to the lake and finds Brian sleeping in his canoe. . . .

No. If wolves had hit her—and David Smallhorn had told him that sometimes they killed small dogs and ate them—she would either have run back into camp or the wolves would have finished her, eaten her. No dog in the world could outrun or outfight a wolf pack.

The wound didn’t seem to have been man-made but that was a possible explanation and one that made sense. If a man was cruel enough to injure a dog this badly the dog might run off and not come back, and Brian knew there were men that bad, had read about them, seen them in the news. Beasts. Beast-men.

But the wound didn’t seem to be a cut either, did not seem to have been made by a weapon but by teeth, or claws.

There were some big cats. Brian had seen lynx on several occasions and a forty-pound lynx certainly could inflict a wound like this. But lynx could easily get away from a dog if the dog was foolish enough to chase them, and there were rare mountain lions here in the bush, called panthers or painters in the north country, but the same rule applied. While they could easily wound or kill a dog this way, they much preferred to avoid conflict. They would kill and eat a person rather than tangle with a dog, unless it was very small. Brian had seen several accounts of mountain lions stealing poodles and other small dogs from homes around Los Angeles. One mountain lion there had actually taken a woman who was jogging near L.A., killed her, dragged the body off and eaten part of it.

But not dogs, and that wouldn’t explain the dog leaving its main camp.

Deer, moose, could inflict such a wound with their hooves or antlers if attacked, and dogs were sometimes badly injured while trying to attack deer, although more often it was the deer that were injured. Many deer each year were mauled and killed by domestic dogs; people just had no idea how vicious their pet German shepherd could be if it packed with three or four other dogs and ran up on a deer. Or sheep. Or, sometimes, a child.

But again, that wouldn’t explain why the dog ran off. Even if she tried to attack a deer and the deer injured her this badly, she would go home for help. Not run off.

And that left what?

Just one animal left in the north woods could do this.

Bear.

One blow with a clawed paw could easily rip a dog in just this manner. And heaven knew they were strong enough to do it. Brian had seen a bear throw a quarter-ton log through the air, looking for grub worms.

But again, it made no sense. If the dog was injured by a bear it would run home, not away.

No sense.

It was almost light. He put a pot of hot water on the fire to boil and make tea. Today would be busy. Like it or not, and he was coming to like it, he now had a family, someone to look after.

The dog would need food and more care and that meant he had to hunt, to kill.

He could take more fish, even panfish to feed the dog at first if he needed to, but in the end the dog would need good meat, red meat, just as wolves needed it.

A moose would be too much but a small buck deer would fill the bill and between him and the dog there would be no waste.

He would first cast for a trail and see if he could pick up sign where the dog had come from, at least a direction, and at the same time see if he could get a deer.

He could think more that evening on how the dog had come to him. Now there was other work.

6

When he took his bow and quiver in the dawn light the dog tried to follow him.

“No, you have to stay,” Brian tried to tell her. Then held out his hand and said more firmly, “Stay!”

But the dog had gotten to her feet, and, still favoring her wounded side, had tried to follow Brian out of camp.

Finally Brian took the anchor line and fas.h.i.+oned a nonslip collar and a leash and tied the dog to the front of the canoe.

The dog could easily chew through the cord and follow him anyway but she finally seemed to understand with the line tied that she was supposed to stay. At first she sat and watched while Brian walked away, and then she lay down. Brian had left her enough slack so she could get to the water and drink and once in the brush Brian peeked back, well out of sight, and the dog got up, drank a bit, then lay back down and seemed to go to sleep.

Brian worked carefully, slowly, used his best abilities at watching for sign, studying everything he could, and found almost nothing to help in the mystery of the dog.

He started with a small circle, or half circle since it ran from the lakesh.o.r.e, out three hundred yards and around and back to the lakesh.o.r.e and on this first loop he saw the dog’s tracks in soft mud in a small clearing coming from the north.

He began to work in that direction, making small arcs, but he found only one more mark, again to the north about a hundred yards from the first one, a dog footprint in soft dirt and just a tiny touch of blood on a leaf.

That was it.

It would have been easier in the fall, and of course much easier in the winter, in snow. In the fall there were no leaves and the gra.s.s died back and it was much easier to see things. Now, with thick foliage, you had to be standing almost on top of a track to see it, and he could find no more.

Maybe, probably, the dog had come from the north. That was it. He didn’t know from where, how far, or even if that was the true direction. The dog might have come from the east and turned south when it heard or smelled Brian. Or from the west.

And no deer either.

Oh, he saw sign. He found one pile of dung that was still warm to the touch but the brush was too thick to see a deer, let alone get close enough for a shot.

He came on a snowshoe rabbit and decided to take it. He changed to a field-point arrow—he’d been walking with a broadhead ready in the bow—but the arrow caught a twig on the way and deflected slightly so the rabbit was. .h.i.t low, in the gut, and had time to scream before he got a second arrow in and killed it. They gave a piercing scream sometimes when they died. Brian had heard it many times at night when predators caught them—it was nerve-wrenching and sounded like a baby screaming for its mother. He hated it.

But more to the point, the scream—and this was probably why it had evolved—alerted all animals within a quarter mile that a predator was hunting and that was the end of hunting, for two reasons. One, all the small animals went into hiding and the deer left the area. Two, the scream brought other predators that were curious about the kill. All wolves, coyotes, hawks, cats, weasels, fox, owls, eagles, marten, fisher—any predator—in the immediate area headed for the scream and that ensured that the rest of the small animals stayed in hiding. Probably the only exception to this rule were ruffed grouse, which seemed to be so dumb that nothing really affected them, but they had excellent camouflage covering and in this thick foliage it would be next to impossible to see one, though they had good meat, dark meat.

So rabbit it was, and fish, and aside from chastising himself for making a shot when there was a twig in the way, Brian was grateful and thanked the rabbit.

He worked his way back to the campsite, keeping one eye open for a grouse, but he saw none. He found the dog sitting by the end of the canoe, still tied—she had heard the rabbit scream, and Brian coming, and gotten up to greet him.

“Hi, dog,” Brian said. “We have food. I’ll get some more in a bit and make a stew. . . .”

The dog wagged her tail and stood, moved against the rope and Brian untied her and had to lift the rabbit high to keep the dog away from it.

“Not raw,” he said. “Not the meat. I’ll give you the guts in a minute. . . .”

He set his bow aside, took out his knife and made a neat incision up the middle of the carca.s.s, scooped the entrails, heart, liver and lungs out and gave them to the dog, which virtually swallowed them whole and then c.o.c.ked her head, tail wagging gently in the puppy begging stance, asking for more.

“Some manners . . .” Brian smiled and thought of himself when he had first come to the bush. Watching a dog eat raw guts would have brought his stomach up.

But he had seen both wolves and coyotes kill now and the entrails were their favorite part. And this dog was more wolf than not; a pure, friendly carnivore.

He skinned the rabbit and stretched the skin high in a tree to dry. The hide was thin and fragile and very far from prime and would not wear well, but he had in mind trying to make some lures with the hair and tiny hooks he had brought to see if he could use a willow as a pole and fly-fish some of the streams between the lakes for trout. He had seen them often beneath the canoe, some of them quite large, but they were very spooky and didn’t seem to want worms for bait, and wouldn’t stand for a shot with an arrow.

He made a fire and put some water on, using his largest aluminum pot, and dumped the rabbit carca.s.s in whole, then covered it with a lid that slid down around the outside about an inch to keep the ashes out.

Then he took one of his fish arrows, without the bow, left the dog on the bank and let the canoe drift out a short distance into the lily pads, held the arrow over the side with the triple-barbed point about a foot underwater and wiggled the point, held it still, wiggled it again.

And here they came. Small bluegills and sunfish, four or five inches long, so curious they couldn’t stand not to get close, and with a sharp motion he jabbed the point down and took one in the side, flipped it into the boat, pulled the point out and put the arrow back in the water.

In twenty minutes he had ten fish and he took them to sh.o.r.e, scaled them with the back edge of his knife, split them neatly and fed the guts to the dog again before he dropped the fish, heads and fins and all, into the stew, which was boiling nicely.

From his pack he threw in a handful of rice, “To give it body,” he said, smiling, to the dog, and then, “Come here. Here.”

And the dog came to him and leaned against his leg with her good side and held her head up to be petted.

“You’re a friendly girl, aren’t you?” Brian rubbed her ears and studied the wound in the bright daylight. The sewing didn’t look half bad but now he could see that there were other lines as well, scratches, as if the dog’s side had been hit with a small, very deadly rake.

“Something with claws,” Brian said. “Not dogs, not wolves, not teeth. Cat, big cat, panther, or bear.”

There it was again. Bear. It almost had to have been a bear and either the dog ran off from its home for some reason and into a bear or . . . what? Was attacked and then ran off?

“No.” He shook his head, absentmindedly petting the dog. “I wish you could talk—this doesn’t make any sense at all.”

The pot on the fire boiled over and he used a stick under the wire handle to lift the lid off and check the contents.

The rabbit meat had started to separate from the bones and the fish were right on the edge of disintegrating so he set the pot aside to cool and threw some green leaves on the hot coals. The day was starting to warm up and the black and horse- and deerflies were getting active. The smoke would keep them at bay while the stew cooled and he and the dog ate.

Then what?

He had a friend now, a new friend, and he smiled, thinking, First dog, his first dog, although technically she wasn’t really a pet and truly belonged to herself more than she did to Brian.

But she was a friend, a friend in need, and as the cliche said, a friend in need was a friend indeed. The cut seemed to be starting to heal, although he worried about the flies and thought of boiling up some kind of mud to sterilize it and putting it over the cut to keep them off. In a week or so he would cut the st.i.tches out.

But he would need more food now than he did for just himself, and for that reason, he thought, he felt a sense of urgency that he had not felt before.

A need to go, to move.

But there was no real reason for it.

And yet it was there, the odd feeling, the odd push in his mind.

No plan, no direction, just a strange unease as if there was something he needed to see or do or hear or feel somewhere . . . where?

All right. From the spa.r.s.e sign Brian had found, it seemed that the dog had come from the north.

So he—no, not just he anymore, they—they would head north. The Cree summer camp was up there on that arrowhead lake with the island, maybe twenty, thirty miles. He would go see his friends and maybe they would know where the dog came from and even if they didn’t he might be able to meet Susan, Kay-gwa-daush, and tell her about the beauty mark.

Now they would eat the stew and he would make a sterile mud pack for the wound and they would head north. Just a nice, leisurely trip to see old friends.

But still he found himself pus.h.i.+ng, hurrying, and he didn’t really know why.

7

Brian boiled lake mud and packed it, still wet but not hot, on the wound. Much of it fell off but some stayed and seemed to help and while he was doing it he thought of a better solution. He would get spruce and pine gum from tree sap where it formed on the trunks and melt it and put that over the wound. That stuff stuck to everything. He thought, I’ll do that when we stop this evening. He smiled. He was already thinking and saying we—it was like the dog had always been there.

He ate a little of the rabbit meat and two of the fish and gave the rest to the dog, still in the pot. And the dog ate everything, fish heads, bones, rabbit bones, meat, and then drank all the broth and looked at Brian in open grat.i.tude, wagging her tail and folding her ears down in a submissive gesture.

“My, my, you were hungry, weren’t you?” Brian cleaned the pot and loaded the canoe, wondering how it would all work. He had become competent with a canoe, perhaps even expert, but he had never tried to take a large dog with him. Canoes were not the most stable of craft and a dog going crazy would pretty much upset the whole applecart. He tied the cargo down well and used a bit of cord to lash his bow and quiver so that if they rolled all the gear would stay with the canoe.

He needn’t have worried.

He pushed the canoe into the shallows, turned it until it was sideways to the bank and turned to get the dog but she jumped in ahead of the cargo and sat down and waited for Brian to get in.

Clearly, Brian thought, the dog had been in canoes before—as she would have done if she had been a Cree camp dog.

He pushed off and had not gone twenty yards when the dog’s full stomach, the warm sun and the rocking motion of the boat combined and the dog lay down on the floor of the canoe and went to sleep.

Brian stroked evenly, using a long reach and a straight pull back to move the canoe in a steady flow forward. There were thousands of lakes in the north country, and almost all of them were connected by streams or small rivers. The general flow was north, or northwest, although there was a lot of meandering through low hills. Brian moved to the north end of the lake looking for the outlet and saw a beaver dam across the stream that flowed there.

He had to unload the canoe on top of the dam, lower it by hand and repack it in the stream below. It was the only thing he didn’t like about the Kevlar canoe. It was light and wonderfully strong, but too flexible for hard work. He knew the Crees had heavy old thick fibergla.s.s canoes and when they came to a beaver dam like this they would simply get up a head of steam and just slide over the top of it, down the far side and off into the stream.

But the dog jumped nimbly out of the canoe and back in with no problem and they followed the stream four or five miles, moving through several ponds and over five more beaver dams before coming to another lake.

Because of the time spent going over dams it was coming on to evening, time to find a place to stop before dark so he could catch some fish and maybe do an evening hunt for a small deer.

They had seen four moose during the day, feeding in the ponds, and two of them would have been easy kills. Brian had come very close on one of them, a small bull. But still, he was over six hundred pounds and even with the dog that was too much meat to deal with and he didn’t want to waste it.

The dog’s reaction to the moose had been interesting. Rather than bark or whine or even make a fuss the dog had merely crouched in the canoe, laid its ears down to lower its silhouette and watched in silence, now and then looking back at Brian as if to say, “Aren’t you going to shoot?”

He found a flat place near the outlet to the stream into the next lake and pulled in to sh.o.r.e.

“Out,” he said to the dog, which he had been doing with each beaver pond, and the dog obeyed. Brian let the canoe drift back out and used the fish arrow to spear a dozen small panfish—there were hundreds under the lily pads. He used a piece of string for a stringer, which he fed through their gills, and left them in the water to keep.

He tied the dog up again, took the bow with his quiver and moved into the brush. From the canoe he had seen another clearing farther up the sh.o.r.e and he knew white-tailed deer liked to come in to clearings in the late day, probably to get away from the flies in any evening breeze. He moved as silently as possible through the trees and thick willows toward the clearing.

He stopped and watched a rabbit move past him and freeze into what would have been an easy shot and a quick kill. Good meat, but he felt confident about the clearing and didn’t want to take a chance. He had become extremely good with the bow, exceptional. Twice now he had taken grouse on the wing, an almost impossible shot. He knew he was good.

He was good with a bow because his eyes were quick and he saw “inside” things, where the arrow had to go, and “saw