Never Alone, page 14
Each day I work from first light until it’s time for the sunset song. The wobbliness in my thighs comes and goes, but though the hunger never leaves me, my legs continue to carry me and do what I ask of them. There are still a lot of cranberries around, but just thinking about them still makes my stomach clench and my mouth water with nausea.
One day I decide to wander down to the blueberry zone.
The bushes are getting harder to see as more of their brilliant red leaves lie faded on the ground. Every time I come the berries are more shriveled and increasingly apt to squish before I can get them to my mouth. I lick all I can off my fingers, where the sour juice mixes with the bitter spruce pitch and gets significantly less delicious. But still, they’re blueberries, and even bitter blueberries are amazing compared to none at all.
I’m probably not gaining many more calories than I’m spending, but I carry on, crawling into the thickets on hands and knees, until the front of my buckskin pants are stained a deep purple.
When I’m cold enough that I have to stop or risk hypothermia, I pry my eyes from the low bushes in front of me and see that the sky is already glowing with color. There’s just enough cloud cover to bounce the dusky golden light back down onto the rocks, where the pale granite diffuses it over everything. It’s that magical time of day when you feel like you’ve suddenly stepped into another world.
I’m out on the end of the peninsula, where the rocks are wide open and I’m more aware of the wind and the waves and the vast scope of this place. Everything feels magnified—the sky above me immense, the cliffs on the distant shore even more rugged and mysterious than usual, the water in front of them impossibly wide. The exhilaration warms something inside me even as the wind sucks the heat from my hands and face. I want more. I want all of it, so I climb a little higher until I’m as far up the rocks to the north as I can get. From here I can look out across the lake in three directions. It’s been more days than I can remember since I’ve had a real meal. I have been working to the edge of my capacity, and still not bringing in any food but these meager berries every few days, but I can’t remember the last time I felt so incredibly happy, so blessed. There’s no other place in the world I want to be. I can’t believe my luck. I could have been dropped anywhere, but they put me here—here on this jaw droppingly beautiful peninsula, the most incredible place on earth—where the chickadees flit and the aurora dances before my eyes and I can hear the voices of the ancestors whispering through the trees.
My heart aches trying to hold it all. A gust of wind sets the brilliant yellow birch leaves fluttering in the golden light. Emotion wells up behind my eyes and I let it flow. I turn in slow arcs, overwhelmed by it all, salty tears stinging my crusty lips. I don’t even know why I’m crying, it’s just all so wild, so impossibly wild and rugged and untamed that I can’t hold myself back. I love it so much there are no words for it, there are only tears, and laughter, and then more tears. I weep with awe at this place, and with joy and wonder and gratitude. I adjust the tripod, hating to film this moment, but knowing this is the most important footage I can give the world. More real and true than anything I can share about traps or shelter.
“This right here,” I tell the camera. “This is what it’s all about. Loving the world so much that you can’t help but weep about it. This, everyone…This is the real survival skill.”
And I feel warm all the way back to the shelter.
29
Making Out with a Birch Tree
Though getting extra hours of sleep is a great way to conserve calories, ironically, most people have a hard time resting well while calorie deprived. I’m getting used to the routine of lying awake for an hour or more before falling asleep and then for another hour or two at some point in the middle of the night. I keep my ears strained, but the dream beasts never gallop through during these wakeful times, only in the dead of night when I’m somewhere between dreaming and consciousness.
Each morning I grab a handful of spruce tips from the wall and toss them into a pot of hot water. It’s lovely to have tea fixings within arm’s reach, but I need to do something about these walls. Spruce needles are resinous—once they dry out, this whole place will be a tinder bundle. My plan has been to build solid log walls around the hearth to prevent accidental fires. With the wind that whipped through my walls last night though, it feels clear that no amount of packed boughs are going to stand up against arctic storms. If they are coming right through in September, I don’t want to see what they can do in January. I’m going to need solid walls everywhere, not just around the fire, and soon.
I look into the camera and wince. My lips are so stiff with dried pus that I can’t drink without them cracking open. Before I can enjoy my tea, I soak the toe of a clean sock in it. It stings against the raw flesh of my lips, but it’s warm and comforting, and spruce has mild antimicrobial properties. As the tea drips down my chin, the hard crust softens and sloughs off. When I can move my lips with less pain, I guzzle the rest of the pot, sour with the vitamin C of the needles. The warm liquid hitting my gut starts another sensation there, and I cross my fingers I’ll be able to poop today. How long has it been? Am I even keeping track anymore? Are berries alone enough to keep my digestive system moving?
I heat a second pot of tea and peel the long johns off of my oozing thighs—losing a little of the tattered skin stuck to the cloth in the process—to give the same treatment to my welts. They are still weeping a bit, but starting to scab over, thank goodness.
My plan for today was another moose hunt, but after a sponge bath to reduce my scent and touching up my broadheads, I pause and just stare into the fire.
Nothing is as simple as it appears in a situation like this. Every expenditure of energy must be carefully weighed. Calories spent versus potential for calories earned. Resources gained versus daylight lost. I’ve had no luck anywhere near the peninsula with my moose calls and have seen no sign except nibbled twigs from months earlier in the season. The farther I range from home, the farther I have to haul back whatever food I gain. And I don’t have free range to wander—each participant has an assigned area that they aren’t allowed to leave, but there are no visible boundaries and no maps. The only way I’ll know if I’m out of my home zone is if I wander past the invisible “geofence” and get a beep on the gps device that sends and receives signals. That means if I get close to the edge of my home zone and wound a moose, it could wander beyond my boundaries where I can’t follow it without being disqualified.
The whirring hamster wheel in my head is incessant, thoughts tumbling over each other in every waking moment. Food, shelter, firewood, containers. When we get heavy winds and fresh snow, shelter pops to the top of the list. When I’m dealing with cold sores, welts, and constipation, self-care leapfrogs back up. There are never enough daylight hours for everything.
I laugh at my concerns of last summer, thinking that one of the challenges would be avoiding boredom in all my spare time. Oh, the irony!
I head out to call for moose in a new location anyway and am returning home, disappointed, when I pass a grove of birch trees and one tree jumps out at me and grabs my attention.
“Hey,” I can almost hear it whisper. “Over here.”
I’m generally on the lookout for good birch bark, but I wasn’t even thinking about it just now. It’s uncanny how the longer I’m out here, the more the landscape answers my questions before I even form them.
I’m about to ask if it’s willing to be peeled, but of course it is—that’s why it reached out to me.
I’ve never gone so long without human contact, but the word “lonely” has never crossed my mind. The bigger the gap in companionship, the more communication I receive from the land around me, like this tree that basically waved at me to get me to notice it.
My thanks flow through my fingertips as I lay my knife against the trunk and give it a good whack with a fallen branch. I’ve released the bark at the top of the section I want to peel and am working on the bottom cut when I notice a shiny line running down the birch bark. Water? I wipe it with my finger and lick it. It isn’t water, it’s sap! Oh my god, it’s birch sap—but sweet!
I have tapped a lot of maple trees, and the unboiled sap has been refreshing, with just the slightest hint of sweetness. It takes forty gallons of maple sap to make one of maple syrup, and at least twice that much for birch syrup, by all accounts. It’s cold enough by now that there shouldn’t be any sap running; it should all be safely stored away in the roots for the duration of winter, as it’s been in every other tree I’ve cut thus far. Even when it’s truly flowing, there’s no way it should be this sweet. And yet, here is this delicious nectar flowing out of a tree I would have walked right by if it hadn’t flagged me down.
I’m just about to lean in for more when I freeze, remembering the scabs on my lips and suddenly terrified I’ve contaminated this generous tree. Is it too late? Have I already transferred the sores? Then I catch myself and laugh out loud. Oh my god—it’s a tree, Woniya! It doesn’t even have lips. It’s not going to catch your cold sores.
Clearly the line between human and non-human is already fuzzier for me than I’d realized. Still giggling and lit up with delight at the flavor, I give myself over to the sweet stickiness, lapping at the cut marks and chasing the drips running down the smooth trunk. I hold the GoPro out at arm’s length, imagining how the scene will look to viewers back home. “There’s Woniya out in the woods by herself,” I narrate, “making out with birch trees.”
Eventually, the sap stops running, and I don’t want to harm the tree by cutting it more than I need to. The flavor lingers on my tongue long after the encounter. It tastes like a promise. Other creatures are surviving in this place. There’s food here, and this land seems to want to feed me. It’s just a puzzle I haven’t yet solved.
Another flight of honking swans whips my head up. It’s becoming an almost daily phenomenon, but today the energy is different. They are flying high and fast without stopping. I understand their urgency, but flying south isn’t an option for me, so it’s time to get my walls shored up.
30
A Place to Call Home
I’ve got a dilemma. I want solid walls outside of my spruce boughs to stop the wind from packing ice and snow into them, but that leaves dry branches around my fire, so it doesn’t solve the whole “every wall of my shelter is a dry, resinous tinder bundle” issue.
Double walls with insulation in between would solve both problems, but would be a tremendous amount of work. If I don’t bring in more food than just birch sap, the effort might use up enough of my reserves that I won’t need to be worried about the harsh winter weather anyway; they might have me packed onto a plane home before it arrives in earnest. What to do? Should I build for the long term, trusting that things will work out for me, even though in a week and a half I have managed to gather only a few handfuls of berries, seven grubs, and a few tablespoons of birch sap? Or do I conserve calories and do just what’s necessary to get by, knowing it won’t see me through the winter but might grant me another couple of weeks out here before I burn through all my body fat?
I know the logical answer—that it’s foolish to waste the calories I have left in a big building effort. But logic is just one way of knowing, and not necessarily the most trustworthy. Instead, I breathe deep into my belly and hold each option in my mind, sensing my body’s reaction to it.
The answer is clear. The logical, but fear-based route—conserving calories rather than building substantial walls—goes against my instincts and makes my body contract into itself. It’s a deep body “no.” Choosing to trust—building for winter and believing that the puzzle pieces of how to remain that long will fall into place—feels like a sigh. A relaxation throughout my core. My body says yes to it. Double walls it is!
I lay my biggest trunk on the ground for a sturdy sill log and begin stacking the smaller-limbed poles of rough-barked black spruce up into an angled wall against the outside of the boughs. I lash them occasionally as I go, to make sure the walls are structurally sound enough not just to withstand arctic blasts, but errant bears out looking for a final snack before holing up for the winter.
Lashing with paracord innards, thinner than spaghetti and a good deal floppier, is an exercise in frustration. I look around and see a jagged triangle of wood in my firewood stack—the piece that results from sawing my firewood partway through and then breaking it the rest of the way. I carve it down into a long, smooth hourglass shape, tapered to a rounded point on one end. I wrap a length of cord around it, then tie another one onto the end of the first with a surgeon’s knot, and repeat. Soon I’ve got a long wooden spool of thin cordage that I can easily pass back and forth through my wall like a netting needle. I’ve invented a new building tool—the paraspool.
Chinking the wall with fluffy sphagnum moss as I go, I’ve got a waist-high, totally solid wall by the time the sun is getting low.
It feels ten degrees warmer tonight as I huddle around the hearth for my evening tea. It’s wonderful knowing I have at least one wall that even arctic winds can’t blow snow through, but the outer wall has pushed the boughs in tighter, closer to my fire. It’s oppressively dark and cramped inside now, and even more flammable than when I started.
The next morning I stare at the interior wall considering this new dilemma. I’d figured on making my interior wall just like the outer wall, but fall equinox isn’t far away and when the daylight goes, it’s going to go fast. I imagine sitting huddled around the fire between dark gray walls for countless hours of pitch-black winter nights. I contrast that with living in light-colored walls of peeled poles—walls that would reflect the light and heat of the fire back at me and into every corner of the shelter. They’d also dry quickly, adding insulation instead of staying wet and heavy all winter. No brainer. At the same time, peeling every pole will easily take four or five times longer and cost me a lot more calories.
I’ve been limbing with the sharpened back of the folded saw, using it like a machete, but I have yet to try using it as a drawknife. Let’s try it out before deciding whether or not to peel my poles. There’s a little birch tree with a funky side branch not far from the doorway. I wedge a pole between this branch and the trunk and, with one end there and the other on top of my wall, I’ve got a perfect sawhorse.
I lay the back of the saw against the pole and pull it toward me. Curls of bark peel off like butter and the clean, spicy scent of spruce pitch wafts up with every stroke. My whole body tingles—this is exactly what I was picturing when I was designing this tool back home. The peeling is so easy and satisfying, particularly after striking out on hunting and fishing day after day, that I find myself singing before I’ve done half of the pole. My body hums, tuning to the work. It’s as if the sawhorse tree grew this way, with this unusual side branch, in anticipation of my needing a woodshop space right here. I don’t even stop to ask myself if I should build the inside walls with peeled poles; I just begin on another after the first one is peeled and smile gleefully as bark piles up around my ankles.
I wedge each peeled pole in behind the angled uprights of the shelter’s frame and they are held in place by the tension of the spruce boughs pressing in. At three logs tall, it already looks like a wall instead of a particularly thick patch of forest. I can finally see the home I’ve dreamt of emerging from this humble shelter.
I’d love to just keep peeling, but though I’ve got trunks lined up along my front walk, they all need to be limbed first.
Now I use the sharpened back edge of the saw like a machete again, standing the pole on its butt end and whacking off one branch at a time. I alternate limbing and peeling and am going along at a good clip. Soon I’ve got just a few more poles to limb. The second to last one has some particularly thick side branches, and as I give one a good whack, searing pain stabs through my right thumb. I drop the saw in shock. What did I do? Hit the branch with my thumb? I look down at my glove.
No, no, no…I can see a ragged slice in the thumb of the glove, and through the deep ache in my thumb I feel a slimy, wet texture against the grain of the leather—blood. Oh god!
My chest tightens and my breath is shallow and fast. I’m terrified to pull my hand out of the glove, but I have to. What if the tip of my thumb doesn’t come with it? I ease the glove off and look down. My thumb is flowing with thick crimson droplets. I shake the glove, wincing in anticipation. A spray of blood dots the ground, but no thumb tip, thank god.
The camera is rolling, of course. I film everything out here besides my increasingly rare latrine trips. I tip the lens down to get a good angle on it as I assess the damage.
Don’t let it need stitches, don’t let it need stitches, is my mantra as I grab the first aid kit and start to clean it. Of course, I do have that homemade needle…
It’s bad, but not as bad as I’d feared. There are three deep holes in the pad of my thumb, as if someone drove a knife into it several times. At first I can’t understand what happened, but then I figure it out. The locking mechanism that keeps the saw folded got loose from the whacking during limbing. On the other hits I had been grabbing the blade and the handle together, thus holding the saw closed. Apparently on the last strike, my grip had been just on the handle and the saw had opened a bit. When I raised it, my thumb slipped between the blade and the handle, and when I hit the branch, all that force had driven the tines—the half inch, double row, razor sharp tines—straight into my flesh. If they had gone much deeper, they would have neatly sliced off the pad of my thumb. As dumb as I feel for this stupid mistake, I know I’m actually incredibly lucky.
