The Wild (5 page)

They found an abandoned fur traders' cabin. It was built into the base of a steep hillside, protected from the worst of the winds. It consisted of two large rooms, and in the center of one they found an old Klondike stove. Jack had left his own stove way back in Dyea, and it was a welcome sight for all of them. An hour after arriving, they had a good fire going, and there was even a lean-to behind the cabin beneath which a pile of logs had been drying for some time. The wood spat and sizzled, but it burned well enough. The cabin grew warmer, and the three men could go about without gloves and hats.

Over the course of the next few days they brought all their possessions up from the boat. It was a three-mile hike across the base of a hill and down to the river, and after each excursion they had to rest for several hours to gather their
strength. The journey along the treacherous rivers had weakened them more than they realized, and it took many days for them to regain some of their lost energy. The cabin was just big enough for the three of them; they used one room for storage and sleeping, and the other was where they spent most of their days talking, cooking, and dreaming of the gold they would find come spring.

Young though Jack was, he sensed the two men looking up to him. This appealed not to his pride, but rather to his intellect. He had always felt himself the leader of their little team, and their time in the cabin confirmed that. He had his books, and he took to reading long passages to the other two men. Darwin's
On the Origin of Species
, Milton's
Paradise Lost
, and others, each of which seemed particularly pertinent to the situation they found themselves in. For their part, Jim and Merritt welcomed Jack's readings, and the men often spent a long time after each discussing the merits or otherwise of the passage.

“Godless heathen,” Jim muttered after Jack read yet again from Darwin's book.

Jack blinked in surprise and glanced at Merritt.

“You're not a fan of Mr. Darwin's?” Merritt asked.

“Fan?” Jim said. He sat up, becoming more animated than Jack had seen him in hours. “The man denies centuries of teaching. He shuns God, who put him here, gave
him his ship, the means to explore, the knowledge to—”

“And God gave him his intelligence?” Jack asked. “A mind to inquire?”

“Of course he did,” Jim said. “It was Darwin's choice to misuse it.”

Jack leaned forward, ready to say some more, but he bit back his words. For him, God was as real as many other things he had never witnessed, and he wasn't ignorant enough to dismiss him out of hand. But similarly, a work of such scientific genius and aesthetic beauty as Darwin's book—his theories bold, extravagant, and challenging—should not be shunned. If God had given Darwin such a mind, he had surely meant for him to use it.

“So where's
your
book?” Merritt asked, voice raised in surprise and growing angry.

“I have it all up here,” Jim said, touching his temple. “And I believe it here.” He tapped his chest.

“Well, if Darwin was right and it's survival of the fittest, I'll see you get a good burial,” Merritt snapped.

Jack stood and raised both hands, imploring the men to calm down. He changed the subject quickly, reading another long passage from
Paradise Lost
, exaggerating his reading voice to try and break the icy atmosphere with warm humor. But the first of many tensions that would build through the winter had found root in that cabin.

The weather grew worse. The temperature dropped, the cold now freezing the men's breath, crackling their saliva if they spat. Often when they woke in the morning, ice had frozen on their beards and glued their eyelashes together, so they had to warm their eyes before they could open them. Snow fell day after day, and when it stopped several weeks into their stay, it was three feet deep and crunching underfoot.

That first morning without blizzard, Jack was more determined than ever to capture them something to cook and eat. He and Merritt went farther than they had before, staying out longer, and they returned past midday with a skinny rabbit. As Jack started gutting and skinning it, Jim asked why he was so cheerful.

“I've spent another year living in this amazing world,” Jack said quietly. He could hardly feel his fingers, and the knife slipped from his hand several times.

“It's your birthday,” Merritt said.

Jack nodded and smiled.

“How old?” Jim asked.

“Eighteen. I feel eighty.” He looked up from the rabbit, and the two men were staring sadly at him.
What?
he thought, but he glanced down at his hands again and knew. He was the only one of the three of them who, in the depths of their despair and more and more convinced that
this winter would be their last, could still find wonder in their surroundings. The other men recognized only harshness and impending death. Jack saw beauty.

“Happy birthday, Jack,” he whispered to himself.

Jack took to walking on his own. It was against his own earlier advice, and the other two objected vehemently, but Jack would have his way. He always carried a rifle, ready to shoot any game he saw, but he was never fast enough. There were snow rabbits and squirrels, but they always avoided his sight once the barrel was pointed their way. In truth, though, Jack did not venture out from the cabin to hunt. He went on his own because something was happening to him, and the more it happened, the more he relished the experience. He was falling in love with this wilderness. The cold hurt his bones and made his muscles slow and heavy, but inside him a new warmth sparked to life.

The landscape was incredible. He came to see it as the great white silence, because if he stood still out in the snowfield, all he could hear was his own breathing and the thudding of his own heart. There was not a breath of wind out there, as if the air itself were frozen into immobility. The land slept beneath the thick carpet of snow. Sometimes it snowed some more, but other times the air was crisp and clear, and even though the sun didn't rise so high above the horizon, he could see a long way. Closing his
eyes, standing out in the snow, he always knew from which direction his watcher observed.

Because it was still there. Jack had grown used to its presence, though never comfortable with it. He had not seen the wolf since that incident on the river. But here in the wild it felt like an echo of the land, a manifest wildness that observed him perhaps as an invader, and certainly not as an equal. He felt examined. He felt insignificant, less than a forgotten breath exhaled by this place. And for someone of such a strong mind, the sensation was curiously welcome.

Sometimes he thought it was death waiting to take him away. The end was ever closer; he understood that as well as his two friends back in the cabin. The chances of their surviving were becoming starker by the day. And he remembered what that vision of his mother had said:
Doom in the north, a cry of death in the great white silence, and the spirits will bear witness
. He watched for this spirit watching him and dreaded meeting its eyes.

Yet in some ways, Jack was more contented than he had ever been before.
This is where I belong
, he would think as the weeks and months went by.
I'm a stranger here no more
. He thought that perhaps his spirit had always dwelled here in the wild, watched over by the wolf and whatever it represented, and that it had taken eighteen years for his body
to find its way here. Perhaps that explained his constant wanderlust, and the way he had always felt unsettled, until now. He felt whole for the first time in his life, and though he was nothing compared to the greatness of this place, that pleased him.

He might be one snowflake in a billion, but he was starting to know himself at last.

O
N THE DAY
J
ACK
L
ONDON
died for the first time, the snow came without warning.

He was out on one of his walks. Almost twelve weeks had passed with them sheltering in the cabin, and they had fallen into a routine. Jim and Merritt would hunt together in the morning while Jack prepared the cabin for the coming day. He would cook whatever they caught or, if they caught nothing, he would prepare a meal from their dwindling supplies. Then they would talk for a while, sometimes over a coffee, and Jack would venture out for his daily walk. The two men rarely questioned him about where he went or what he did, and Jack would never tell them.

But behind the routine lay the dawning comprehension that the three of them were going to die. The supplies would not last for much longer, and when a few days came
during which they caught nothing to eat, they'd start growing weak. The weaker they became, the harder the hunting. The cold would bite in more. The darkness would haunt them. Jack saw this knowledge in his friends' eyes when he looked at them, and it hung heavy when the three of them talked together.

He struggled to fight off the feeling, but his acknowledgement of the fear seemed to bring that thing watching him from the wilderness much closer. He looked for prints in the snow and listened for distant howls.
A cry of death in the great white silence
.

He had walked up the hillside. Far up, with the cabin out of sight below, he had spent some time in the shelter of a fallen tree, looking out over the great river valley and trying to imagine a world without people. It was not a difficult scene to conjure, and the sense of loneliness unsettled him more than he could have expected.

He thought of Eliza back at home and hoped that James had returned to her safely. He thought of his mother and wondered whether the house was still hers.

And then the blizzard came in.

Like a predator stalking its tender prey, the storm broke silently over the head of the hillside and started shedding its load into the valley. The first flake drifted down in front of Jack and he glanced up, expecting to see
a small creature disturbing the snow-laden branches of the tree above him. Another flake landed on his cheek, another on his nose, and then it was snowing wildly.

He was unconcerned at first. The way to get back to the cabin was to continue downhill as far as he could, so he was not worried about becoming lost. They'd had a decent breakfast that day, so his body was warm, busy digesting the rabbit meat. He carried a rifle.

And then he saw the shadow in the snow, passing from tree to tree just out of sight above him on the hillside.

He started running downhill. The snow fell more heavily, completely silent and unflustered by even the hint of a breeze. He glanced back, but already he could barely see more than a dozen paces. Working his way downhill, looking back every few steps to make sure nothing was closing on him under cover of the snowfall, Jack did not see the hollow scooped from the hillside until it was too late. The ground disappeared beneath him, and for a while he was held in space. There was no sensation of falling. It was as if the snow bore him through the air. And then he hit the ground, snow cushioning the impact, but still the wind was knocked from him, and he banged his head against a buried stone.

Looking directly up at the lip of the hollow as he blacked out, Jack saw a gray shape leaning over and staring down upon him.

 

When he came to, he knew he was dying from the cold.

Yet still you'll die in the snow, cold…and almost alone
.

No!
he tried to say, but his lips were frozen together.

He tried to move, but his arms would not obey his commands. He looked down across his body, and it was buried. He blinked quickly to clear snow from his eyes. His lashes were heavy with ice.

No
, he tried to say again. His mouth opened, and ice sprinkled into his throat.

His mother was with him. She walked in from the silent white distance, visible even though the snow still poured heavily from the sky. She looked sad, but there was condemnation on her face as well, and when she opened her mouth, he knew that she was going to blame him for everything.

And then the wolf was there again, Death, standing between Jack and the image of his mother. It snarled, and she turned away. Then it disappeared into the blizzard once more, leaving him alone.

Cold.

Dying.

Jack felt his heart slow, as if the blood were freezing in his veins just as the waters of the mighty Yukon had drawn to an icy standstill. He had read that the last sense
to leave a dying man was hearing, and when he opened his eyes he saw nothing; when he drew in a breath he smelled only void.

In the distance, just as his hearing faded into oblivion, he heard the mournful howl of a wolf.

 

Jack came back from nothing, rising out of a different sort of white silence with a huge gasping breath, as though waking from an awful dream. Pain clutched at his chest, a giant's fist pressing down upon it, crushing, and then abruptly it pulled away. He breathed in ragged gulps of air, all his senses rushing back to life, and with every breath his nostrils filled with the stink of blood and his throat gurgled with it.

He choked, let his head fall to the right, gagged, and spat.

Blood. There could be no mistaking the iron taste; the rich, meaty odor; and beneath it the smell of animal fear and death. He could not feel his hands or feet—he was paralyzed, a prisoner inside the frozen slab of flesh that his body had become. But he was slowly growing aware of a warmth trickling down his sides and spreading across his chest. In some places it soaked through his clothing.

Savaged, torn apart, not even given the dignity of a frozen death…

Steam rose from his face and throat, and as he managed
to crane his neck slightly, thoughts dull and sluggish, his eyes widened. The blood that coated his tongue and filled his nostrils, that warmed his face and neck and chest, was not his own. His heart might have stopped—in the back of his mind he believed it had, though for how long he could not guess, and how the cold might have preserved him he did not know—but the weight upon his chest came not only from pain.

The rabbits had been torn open, their steaming entrails spilled onto Jack and strung along his arms and legs. They had bled all over him and now covered him in a heap of dead flesh. And there were things other than rabbits as well, including a pair of owls, three wolverines, and a ravaged cougar nestled against his left side. A rush of fear and revulsion swept through Jack, and his vision blurred.

The stink was rich in his nose, the taste in his throat causing him to gag slightly. But he did not retch; he hadn't the strength for it. In the deep perpetual gloom of that Yukon winter, he studied the dead things. Those that had spilled off him to lie in the snow had frozen rigid by now, dried blood rimed with ice. They had been replaced by fresher kills. Replaced
on purpose
. Their lives had been stolen to save him, their blood warming him and—hideous as the thought was—
feeding
him.

Once more the darkness encroached upon his vision,
but he dared not close his eyes again. If he did not move, he would die here. He knew that. Here was meat, and in the meat, life. He had been given a chance. He had a hunting knife in its sheath at his hip, as well as flint.
Get up, Jack. You have to build a fire, or you're done.

His right hand tingled with a trickle of warmth. Though his fingers were numb, he thought he felt the brush of fur on the frozen skin. With deep concentration, he tried to lift his hand, and though his limbs felt like lead, he just managed it. But he would need more than dull clubs made from frigid fists to survive, and so he tried to move his fingers.

Pain lanced up into his hand and all the way to his elbow, like red-hot wires feeding through his veins. Jack cried out, but the only sound that emerged from his throat was a ragged hiss, a sort of death rattle. The sound terrified him more than anything. What sort of death was this for a man who had lived by his wits and his fists, and who had extinguished from his heart any trace of fear he had ever found? No, this was not a fitting end. Jack had been determined to conquer the wild, and he would not let it destroy him now.

He heard something, the twitch of a nearby tree branch, and stiffened.

“Hello?” he rasped, barely a whisper. “Is someone there?”

There was no reply, but then he
felt
it, that familiar presence, the weight of the wolf's regard. With a shuddering breath, he let his head loll once more to the side, and there it was, standing in the trees off to his right with its head high, some kind of small, furred creature in its jaws. Blood stained the wolf's chest. Its eyes gleamed in the smoke-dark winter evening.

Not death, but life!

Jack could not breathe. This huge wolf had seemed, before, to peer at him from some spirit world, from the wild heart of the Yukon. But now it trotted toward him, paws leaving tracks in the snow. His mother had spoken of a spirit accompanying his death, but Jack should have listened to his own heart more. This beast was not observing him but
protecting
him. She had often spoken of spirit guides, and perhaps this might be his own.

Yet the gray beast existed as more than a specter of the mind. It came to him now and dropped the small dead thing into the snow. Pinning it with its paws, the wolf tore it open, blood spattering dark against winter white, and then quickly snatched it up and edged closer. It had no fear of Jack, and rightly so. He had become so weak that he could barely move and hardly think. The blood spilled down from the dead thing. Jack tried to turn his face away, stomach growling with hunger and twisting in disgust at the same time.

The gray beast existed as more than a specter of the mind.

The wolf issued a low, warning growl. Jack went still, let the blood splash his lips and nose and throat, but pressed his mouth tightly closed. Whatever the wolf's intentions, he'd had enough of surviving on the hot blood of dead things.

Again it growled, dropping the little corpse right on his face in a move that seemed almost petulant. The wolf sniffed at Jack as though inhaling his exhaled breath. It nudged his cheek with its snout, then grunted and moved away. Halfway to the trees it stopped, tipped its head back, and howled. The sound reached inside Jack, curling around his heart, and filled him with sorrow and frustration, and a longing unlike anything he had ever known.

The wolf glanced at him again, almost as though it wanted Jack to join it, to run with it through the snowy woods, but Jack could not run. He could not even stand.

From stillness to swiftness, the wolf bolted into the trees, howling again as it vanished into the winter forest. Jack listened for as long as he could, but when the howling seemed so distant as to disappear, he felt himself sliding back down into darkness, though whether the void beneath him might be unconsciousness or true death he had not the focus even to wonder.

 

There were whispers in the dark. Voices. Since one of them sounded much more like Merritt Sloper than Saint Peter,
Jack decided he must still be among the living. He tried to open his eyes but could not. His lips were parted slightly, and he could feel a muzzle of ice coating long weeks' worth of beard. Only by probing with his tongue could he find the small opening that his own breath had managed to maintain in that icy mask.

“He's breathing. I told you he was breathing,” said one of the voices.

Jim
, Jack thought.
Goodman. Good man, Jim
. Inside, he smiled, but his facial muscles did not seem to respond.

“He'll have frostbite for sure,” Merritt replied. “If he lives.”

“He'll live,” Jim retorted. “Look at him. Someone wanted him kept alive. Maybe a mountain man or Indians.”

“Look around. Do you see any footprints at all?”

“Just wolf tracks. Wait…you think a wolf did this? Caught all these animals and just left the meat here? With all due respect, Merritt, such behavior is far beyond the norm for the lupine species. It isn't in their nature—”

The sound of their bickering warmed Jack. One of them dropped onto his knees in the snow beside him, and a moment later, when he heard the voice, he knew it was Merritt.

“There isn't anything natural about this,” the big man said. “Now help me, Jim. We've got to get him back to the
cabin and in front of a fire, or even the angels won't be able to save him.”

Jack felt his head rocking slightly, but it took him a moment before he could feel Merritt's fingers probing his face. The man cupped his hands on Jack's cheeks, trying to warm them. The heat of his friend's flesh brought needles of prickling pain into his cheeks as a trace of feeling returned.

He could hear Merritt blowing onto his own hands before he repeated the process.