Never Alone, page 28
The realization floods me with peace. I never would have thought that months of starving on this stark and rocky peninsula would somehow turn my life’s deepest sorrows into my greatest strengths, but now I can see that it’s absolutely true.
62
The Island Giveth
As if in confirmation, when I head back out to finish walking my trapline, I find the biggest, meatiest snowshoe hare I’ve trapped yet. The love goes both ways—the more I listen to this place and let it change me, the more it shows up for me.
And there’s more. At dusk, the lake ice is five inches thick at my watering hole. It’s finally time to get out onto it. The day I’ve been dreaming of for so long is finally here!
It’s too late in the day for an ice-fishing venture, but the island just off my south shore—the one that has teased me since launch day—is a short walk away. I’m doing it!
My pulse races as I step out onto the ice, trepidation and excitement all tumbled together. I know it’s thick enough to hold me, but it’s equal parts unnerving and thrilling to set foot on what has been open water for months. To be able to walk out into this vast new landscape, utterly unavailable any other time of the year—that is the real wilderness, the ultimate adventure.
It’s happening! I’m out on the ice! I made it to freeze-up!
The solidity underfoot makes short work of my trepidation and soon there’s nothing but exuberant joy.
My world has just quadrupled in scope. Imagine the islands I can explore, the distant shores I can reach, the fish I can catch. But the light is already fading on me. First things first—that island! The lake surface is a little too slippery to feel stable on my feet, so I glide-step my way across, not quite ice skating and not quite walking. In no time I’m hauling myself up the low rocky ledge of its shore. It’s thigh-high, so I leap up and do a belly flop, wriggling up onto the icy granite like an awkward seal, very glad I don’t have the camera running.
It’s a small island, so it doesn’t take me long to circumnavigate it. The terrain is much like the mainland—open rock and scattered spruce trees. No rabbit tracks, so my hopes of a new trapping locale where the rabbits might not be as wary don’t look promising. Then a weird pattern of rocks catches my eye. It’s a circle. Dear god, it’s a campfire ring! And jutting out from the snow is an out of place but familiar shape—a straight piece of metal. Oh my god, it’s a handle! I give it a pull with awkward mittened fingers. The snow sloughs off and I’m holding a rusty but serviceable frying pan! A frying pan? Are you kidding me? This is gold!
Containers of all kinds are incredibly vital in wilderness survival situations, but none more so than those that you can cook with or store water in. This pan could be the key to my health and well-being. If I’d had something like this, those constipation episodes might have been far less horrendous. All those weeks of letting myself get dehydrated because I couldn’t melt water and cook food at the same time, and right here, not fifty yards from shore, has been another cooking vessel! No sign of human life on my whole peninsula, and I’ve been staring every day at someone’s old fishing camp and never suspected it.
The sun is well below the horizon by the time I’m done kicking the snow clear to be sure there aren’t any other hidden treasures. I head back across the lake, a beaming smile on my face and pan in my hand, in the last of the day’s light.
By the flames of my evening fire, I can tell that the pan is too pitted with rust for cooking hares, but perfect for melting snow. I prop it up on the hearth rocks. Now I can use my pot to cook on the coals and sip warm water from my pan at leisure while I work my culinary magic. Food and water simultaneously, and a frying pan just as my fishing possibilities are coming to fruition? Total game changer.
63
Raining Creosote
A noise wakes me in the night. A storm is whipping the trees around me into a frenzy and grabbing at the limbs of the living spruce trees I’ve lashed my front wall to. The noise is the whole cabin creaking as they sway to and fro. I want to peek out the front door and see what’s happening out there, but the air bites my nose the second I poke it out from under the scarf I use to help seal the hood of my sleeping bag. There’s no way I’m getting up. I roll over, spooning my snuggle rocks tighter, and do my best to go back to sleep.
When I wake again, the rocks are cold, hard weights in the bag. They thud against the floor as I heave them out of my sleeping bag one by one. The creaking hasn’t subsided and I’m shivering just from opening the bag those few inches. There’s no point in staying in bed (minus-forty sleeping bag, my ass), so I shrug myself out into the air and peer out the door. The snow whips past my nose in a solid wall of white. This is the kind of storm I’ve been bracing for since day one.
So much for ice fishing. It must have dropped another twenty degrees overnight, and with that wind, unbroken over miles and miles of lake, going out onto the ice would be a death wish. This life takes bravery and determination every day, but there’s a difference between bravery and stupidity.
I put on every layer I’ve got and keep up a good pace to maintain body heat while I walk the trapline, but the snares are all buried in snow and there’s not much point in digging them out only to be buried again. It’s so cold that the water in my new pan freezes unless I have it nestled right in the coals, so I switch it out with the rabbit stew I’m warming up. The stew has a hard shell of ice on top by the time I’ve got drinking water. Dear god, these temperatures are not messing around!
For three days the storm rages over the landscape, the wind screaming up and over the peninsula. I hang close to the cabin, venturing out only to harvest and haul firewood, walk the trapline, and go to the bathroom. Several times a day I thank the folks who left this pan on the island, grateful to be able to melt snow for water while staying within the relative shelter of the little stand of trees. From the doorway, I can barely see the rock arena through the swirling snow.
Thursday arrives. It’s dance party day, and I said I would dance every Thursday, but I just can’t make myself do it. How can I shake my booty when there’s so little of it left and when it’s too cold to move properly?
Even double walled, the cabin feels like it’s barely keeping the storm outside. The ceiling is sparkling with ice crystals—condensation from my breath and cooking steam that freezes the second it hits the frigid tarp. I have to straddle the fire to feel any warmth, and my back is freezing even as my legs get uncomfortably hot.
I heap wood onto the fire to give me a bigger envelope of warmth and am just starting to feel slightly more comfortable when plink—a drop hits my pot lid. I wipe it up and look at the brown smear on my finger. What the heck—is that blood? How is there blood dripping from the ceiling? Another drop hits my sleeve, then one lands at the hearthstone by my feet. They’re half-frozen, sludgy, and reek of smoke. Crap, now I get it. The ceiling is covered in tarry creosote from my smokey fires, and when I raise the temperature above freezing up there, the ice melts and mixes with it and it all comes raining down together. Great—I can either freeze my butt off, or have sticky, stinky creosote rain all over me and my things. Neither option is acceptable, so whenever there’s a brief break in the storm, I head out and harvest materials to insulate the underside of the ceiling. By wedging short poles between the ridge pole and the walls, I can weave spreading spruce branches in behind them as a framework, and then work bushy tips behind those for insulation. It doesn’t entirely stop the creosote rain, but it slows it down and keeps the worst of it off me and the bed.
By the third day of the storm, I’ve finished the ceiling, tanned most of my squirrel skins, and eaten every scrap of the snowshoe hare down to the marrow. I swallow the last swig of my flavorless Starvation Soup the morning that the wind finally settles and the sky clears.
64
Getting Humble
The drop in temperature wasn’t just my imagination or the wind chill. It’s now reached the point where my nostrils freeze together for a fraction of a second on every inhale—which generally indicates at least twenty below, in my experience.
Just getting out of bed and dressing in these conditions takes almost an hour and is exhausting. Everything feels exponentially harder. It’s so cold that a pot of hot liquid starts crusting over with ice within a minute of pulling it off the fire. It feels like a full-time job just to keep myself hydrated and to keep my digestive system up and running.
With all the tea I’m pounding, I’m peeing all day long, and I’m noticing a new and unsettling phenomenon. I usually have stellar bladder control. I’m the kind of person who can notice I have to pee and then remember an hour later that I still haven’t gotten around to it. Not so these days. If I don’t start unbuttoning my pants the second I feel the urge, things could get ugly. I used to try to get a good distance away from the cabin to pee, but now it’s all I can do just to get outside in time. It freezes as soon as it hits the cold granite, so now I’ve got a growing yellow mound on the north side of the cabin—a bona fide pee slick. Fascinating as it is, I decide not to capture it on film.
The cold also makes my nose run constantly and causes my breath to freeze on my eyelashes, making blinking awkward. I’ve got frozen snot covering the back of each mitten, and when it gets too icy on both my mittens and sleeves to keep wiping my nose without chapping it, I just let the snot go. With the wind constantly whipping my hair into my face, before long it too is coated in frozen snot. This flakes off throughout the day, so maybe it’s taking some of the dirt and grease along with it. Freeze-dried snot—the new shampoo.
One day I’m trudging along the trapline, digging it out of the snow, when I notice a strange lump in my pants, swishing around between my legs. Did I tuck my shirt in funny? I fish around but don’t find the lump.
I go back to the cabin to thaw out with some tea and see what is going on. Since getting freaked out by the droopy skin on my belly a while ago, I’ve decided that looking closely at my body isn’t helpful. I judge by how I feel, not what I look like, and I’m still feeling good. So when I drop my pants to see what is going on, it’s pretty shocking to see how shrunken my thighs look and how my knees bulge out below them. Oh my god, that’s what the lump was. My underwear, once taut across my ample rump, is no longer actually touching my butt. It’s dangling loosely from my hips with so much air space between the cloth and my body that it’s gathered itself up into a ball between my legs. It isn’t something in my pants, it’s the absence of something. My butt and hips. Wow.
I sink to the ground. I’m digesting my own muscles. I can no longer deny the degree to which my body is showing the strain of what I’m asking of it.
When I head back out again, at the far end of the trapline I see a sight that stops me dead in the middle of the trail.
No, no, no! Fox tracks headed right toward my best trapping zone. I’ve been seeing lynx tracks in the snow with some frequency, but they’ve never bothered my snares. Foxes are different, as experience has shown. I can feel my pulse in my ears as I follow in its footsteps, fresh and crisp in the deep snow. When I reach the far hollow, the biggest trap area with the most rabbit sign, I let out a moan. The area is torn apart with fresh dirt tossed up onto the clean snow. The fox has dug into the hillside and gutted the rabbit’s home zone. My hands fall limply to my sides and my shoulders sag. This is disastrous. I need this trapping area—it’s the only place I’ve been successful lately.
I walk down to the lakeshore, plunk heavily onto a big boulder, and stare out across the frozen lake.
I just lost a handful of potential fishing days to the storm, I’ve barely been eating, and now my trapline is shot. I’m already walking a knife edge out here—any medical check is the one that could send me home. Do I relent and accept that the next one will be my last?
No, I tell myself. I’m not giving in. I’m going to do anything it takes to stay out here. I simply don’t have enough daylight hours to keep up my trapline, outfox the foxes, and ice fish as well. Okay then, it’s time to stop prioritizing the trapline and focus on fishing. For serious ice travel, I need to make a safety device—a ladder or cross beam of wood so that if I fall through the ice, I’ve got something to keep me from going all the way down and that I can use to haul myself out of the water. Working as fast as I can to get it made, I’m still not done before the sun sets.
I know it’s too close to dark to fish, but I’m feeling reckless in my desperation, so I head back to the cabin and start pulling out my hooks and hand reel—long abandoned in the back corner. I’ve got them in my traps pack when I look down at my bait pile—a frozen tower of rabbit guts. Every time I clean a rabbit or squirrel, I put its stomach and intestines on a piece of bark and tuck it back here. Now they are all stacked up in a disheveled pile of lumps of frozen innards.
Oh man, I think to myself looking at it. Okay, Woniya. How much do you want this?
Ice fishing is a gamble, but there’s actual food value in this gut pile. People all over the world eat stomachs and intestines regularly. Am I any different? Am I too proud to eat the one calorie source I’ve got left, even with it staring me in the face?
Anything it takes to stay here, I told myself earlier. But really?
I sigh. Yes, really. I set down the fishing gear, pick up a stack of the frozen guts, and get some snow melting in the frying pan.
Alright, I tell myself and the camera as I set myself up under a spruce tree with a pot of warm water. It’s time to get real humble.
It’s freezing cold and almost too dark to see without my headlamp, but this isn’t a job for inside the cabin. I take a frozen gut puck and thaw it in the hot water, then snip the intestines open with my Leatherman scissors and spill the contents onto the ground. The ropey tissue is slimy under my fingers as I slide my nails along the inner membrane and scrape out the green-brown goo, but at least the smell is milder than I’d imagined. Still, it’s hard to fathom putting this in my mouth. I don’t have time to stop and think about it—the water is already icy cold before I grab the second puck, so I have to work fast. I dunk the emptied ropes of intestines in the pot, which turns the water a disgusting shade of brown and stings the deep cracks in my fingers. It’s too late to worry about infection now; I’m committed. I shift my knees to avoid the growing pool of intestinal contents, hoping it’ll freeze solid before it oozes into my buckskin. Suddenly the humor of the situation strikes me. This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done, and I’m filming it for international television. Talk about humbling—it doesn’t get much more real, folks. Arctic survival at its finest. Should I just have left the camera off? Too late now.
It takes over an hour and several changes of water to clean three rabbits’ worth of digestive systems, but when I’m done, I’ve got a pile of fairly clean-looking protein heaped on a fresh piece of birch bark.
I creak unsteadily to my feet, stiff from all the crouching, and head inside. It’s not going to look any more appetizing with time, so let’s get this over with before I change my mind.
The intestines twist and squeak in the pot and a bubbly foam cooks up out of them, filling the cabin with a sour-smelling steam. Holy cow, am I really going to eat this?
I’m grateful I’ve got a salt button left, because I don’t think I could face this meal without it. When they’re cooked through and well salted, I hold the pan lid up to the camera. “Are you ready for this?” I ask it. “I’m not sure I am.”
I take a tentative bite. Chewy and strange, but actually not that bad. Not exactly meaty, but not poopy either, thank god. It turns out they’re nowhere near as gross as you’d think. By the time I’m done with them, I’m wishing I had cleaned more.
65
Becoming Ancestor
I’m planning on just walking the trapline but not resetting much in the morning, and then, incredibly, I find not one, not two, but three squirrels in my snares—more animals than I’ve gotten in one day yet. The squirrels must be especially active after so many days of waiting out the storm.
I almost weep with gratitude as the first whiff of cooking organs hits my nose. Like always, I make up an ancestor plate and place it on my largest hearthstone. The rest of the organs go down so quickly they barely even touch my hunger. I get the squirrel legs steam-sautéing, and while they’re browning, I find that I can’t stop staring at the ancestor plate.
Do you ever hear the world speaking to you? Not audibly perhaps, not actually hearing voices, but from somewhere deeper—a knowing that springs forth out of nowhere and can’t be denied? It’s that way when I ask a tree if I can cut it and instantly feel the “yes” or “no.” It was that way when I felt I ought to go to the far side of the rock arena to harvest poles and found my lost arrow in the tree trunk. It’s happening with this ancestor plate now.
My offerings have been an incredibly potent part of my time out here, and they still feel just as important, but something is shifting. For the first time, I feel pushed to eat this offering. I pick up the ancestor plate and look around, speaking to something unseen but increasingly present in everything I do here.
“I think I need to eat this,” I say out loud.
A deep feeling of “yes” rolls over me, followed by the message, “Of course you do. We’ve been waiting for you to realize it.”
Though my logical brain hasn’t quite caught up to the idea, I feel the rightness of the answer deep inside.
I take a piece of liver from the plate with tentative fingers and slowly chew it, experiencing it more deeply than the rest of the organs put together. It feels strange, but also right, to be eating from a plate set aside for ceremony. If eating food when you’re actively starving isn’t ceremony, I don’t know what is.
