The Great Alone Read online

  The effort he made to keep his temper in check was apparent. As the days shortened and the nights lengthened, he began pacing after dinner, getting agitated and muttering to himself. On those bad nights, he took the traps Mad Earl had taught him to use and went trapping in the deep woods alone and came back exhausted, haggard-looking. Quiet. Himself. More often than not, he came home successful in the hunt, with fox or marten furs to sell in town. He made just enough money to keep them afloat; but even Leni could see the empty shelves in their root cellar. No meal was ever big enough to fill them up. The money Mama had borrowed from Grandma was long gone and there was none to take its place, so Leni had stopped taking pictures and Mama barely smoked. Large Marge sometimes gave them cigarettes and film for free—when Dad wasn’t looking—but they didn’t go into town often.

  Dad’s intentions were good, but even so, it was like living with a wild animal. Like those crazy hippies the Alaskans talked about who lived with wolves and bears and invariably ended up getting killed. The natural-born predator could seem domesticated, even friendly, could lick your throat affectionately or rub up against you to get a back scratch. But you knew, or should know, that it was a wild thing you lived with, that a collar and leash and a bowl of food might tame the actions of the beast, but couldn’t change its essential nature. In a split second, less time than it took to exhale a breath, that wolf could claim its nature and turn, fangs bared.

  It was exhausting to worry all the time, to study Dad’s every movement and the tone of his voice.

  It had obviously worn Mama down. Anxiety had pulled the light from her eyes and the glow from her skin. Or maybe the pallor came from living like mushrooms.

  On an especially cold late November day, Leni woke to the sound of screaming. Something crashed to the floor.

  She knew instantly what was happening. Her dad had had a nightmare. His third one this week.

  She crawled out of her sleeping bag and went to the edge of the loft, peering down. Mama stood by the beaded door of their bedroom, holding a lantern high. In its glow, she looked scared, her hair a mess, wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt. The woodstove was a dot of orange in the dark.

  Dad was like an untamed animal, shoving, tearing, snarling, saying words she couldn’t understand … then he was wrenching open boxes, looking for something. Mama approached him cautiously, laid a hand on his back. He shoved her aside so hard she cracked into the log wall, cried out.

  Dad stopped, jerked upright. His nostrils flared. He was flexing and unflexing his right hand. When he saw Mama, everything changed. His shoulders rounded, his head hung in shame. “Jesus, Cora,” he whispered brokenly. “I’m sorry. I … didn’t know where I was.”

  “I know,” she said, her eyes glistening with tears.

  He went to her, enfolded her in his arms, held her. They sank to their knees together, foreheads touching. Leni could hear them talking but couldn’t make out the words.

  She returned to her sleeping bag and tried to go back to sleep.

  * * *

  “LENI! GET UP. We’re going hunting. I’ve got to get out of the g-damn house.”

  With a sigh, she dressed in the darkness. In the first months of this Alaskan winter, she had learned to live like one of those phosphorescent invertebrates that roamed the sea floor, their lives untouched by any light or color except that which they generated themselves.

  In the living room, the woodstove offered light through a narrow window in the black metal door. She could make out the silhouettes of her parents standing beside it, could hear their breathing. Coffee gurgled in a metal pot on top of the stove, puffed its welcoming scent into the darkness.

  Dad lit a lantern, held it up. In its orange glow, he looked haggard, tightly wound. A tic played at the corner of his right eye. “You guys ready?”

  Mama looked exhausted. Dressed in a huge parka and insulated pants, she looked too fragile for the weather, and too tired to hike for much of a distance. In a week of rising nightmares and middle-of-the-night screaming, she wasn’t sleeping well.

  “Sure,” Mama said. “I love to hunt at six A.M. on a Sunday morning.”

  Leni went to the hooks on the wall, grabbed the gray parka and insulated pants she’d found at the Salvation Army in Homer last month, and the secondhand bunny boots Matthew had given her. She pulled down-filled gloves out of her parka pockets.

  “Good,” Dad said. “Let’s go.”

  This predawn world was hushed. There was no wind, no cracking branches, just the endless sifting downward of snow, the white accumulating everywhere. Leni trudged through the snow toward the animal pens. The goats stood huddled together, bleating at her arrival, bumping into each other. She tossed them a flake of hay and then fed the chickens and broke the ice on their water troughs.

  When she got to the VW bus, Mama was already inside. Leni climbed into the backseat. In this cold, the bus took a long time to start and even longer for the windows to defrost. The vehicle was not good in this part of the world; they’d learned that the hard way. Dad put chains on the tires and tossed a gear bag in the well between the front seats. Leni sat in the back, her arms crossed, shivering, intermittently falling asleep and waking up.

  On the main road, Dad turned right, toward town, but before the airstrip, he turned left onto the road that led to the abandoned chromium mine. They drove for miles on the hard-packed snow, the road a series of sharp switchbacks that seemed to be cut into the side of the mountain. Deep in the woods, high on the mountain, he parked suddenly, with a jarring stomp on the brakes, and handed them each a headlamp and a shotgun before hefting a pack and opening his door.

  Wind and snow and cold swept into the bus. It couldn’t be much above zero up here.

  She fit the headlamp over her head, adjusted the strap, and turned on the light. It provided a bright thin beam of light directly ahead.

  No stars, no starlight. Snow falling hard and fast. A deep, abiding black full of whispering trees and crouching, hidden predators.

  Dad took off in front, trudging through the snow in his snowshoes, forging a path. Leni let Mama go next and then fell in step behind her.

  They walked for so long that Leni’s cheeks went from cold to hot to numb. Long enough that her eyelashes and nostril hairs froze, that she felt her own sweat accumulating under her long underwear, itching. At some point, she started to smell, and it made her wonder what else could smell her. It was easy to go from predator to prey out here.

  Leni was so tired, just trudging forward, chin down, shoulders hunched, that it barely registered that at some point she began to see her own feet, her boots, her snowshoes. At first there was the gray, ambient glow, light that wasn’t quite real, bleeding up from the snow, and then the dawn, pink as salmon meat, buttery.

  Daylight.

  Leni finally saw her surroundings. They were on a frozen river. It horrified her to realize she had followed Dad blindly onto its slick surface. What if the ice was too thin? One wrong step and someone could have plunged into the icy water and been swept away.

  Beneath her, she heard a cracking sound.

  Dad walked confidently forward, seemingly unconcerned about the ice beneath his feet. On the other shore, he cut a path through stubby, snow-coated brush, stared down, tilted his head as if he were listening. His face above the snowy beard was red with cold. She knew he was following sign—droppings, tracks. Snowshoe hares did most of their feeding and movement at dawn and dusk.

  He stopped suddenly. “There’s a hare over there,” he said to Leni. “At the edge of the trees.”

  Leni looked in the direction he pointed. Everything was white, even the sky. Shapes were difficult to distinguish in this white-on-white world.

  Then, movement: a plump white hare hopped forward.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I see it.”

  “Okay, Leni. This is your hunt. Breathe. Relax. Wait for the shot,” Dad said.

  She lifted her gun. She’d been target-shooting for months, so she knew what to do. She breathed in and out instead of holding her breath; she focused on the hare, aimed. She waited. The world fell away, became simple. There was just her and the hare, predator and prey, connected.

  She squeezed the trigger.

  It all seemed to happen simultaneously: the shot, the hit, the kill, the hare slumping sideways.

  A good clean shot.

  “Excellent,” Dad said.

  Leni slung her shotgun over her shoulder and the three of them set off single file for the tree line and Leni’s kill.

  When they reached the hare, Leni stared down at it, the soft white body sprayed with blood, lying in a pool of it.

  She’d killed something. Fed her family for another night.

  Killed something. Stopped a life.

  She didn’t know how to feel about it, or maybe she just felt two conflicting emotions at the same time—proud and sad. In truth, she almost wanted to cry. But she was Alaskan now, this was her life. Without hunting, there was no food on the table. And nothing would go to waste. The fur would be made into a hat; the bones would make a soup stock. Tonight Mama would fry the meat in home-churned butter made from goat’s milk and season it with onions and garlic. They might even splurge and add a few potatoes.

  Her dad knelt in the snow. She saw the shaking of his hands and could tell by the grim set to his mouth that he had a headache as he turned the dead hare onto its back.

  He placed his blade at the tail and cut upward, through the skin and bone, in a single, sweeping cut. At the hare’s breastbone, he slowed, positioned one bloody finger under the knife blade, and proceeded cautiously to avoid accidentally cutting any organs. He opened the animal, reached in and pulled out the entrails, which he left in a steaming red-pink pile on the snow.

  He picked out the small, plump heart and held it up to Leni. Blood leaked between his fingers. “You’re the hunter. Eat the heart.”

  “Ernt, please,” Mama said, “we’re not savages.”

  “That’s exactly what we are,” he said in a voice as cold as the wind at their back. “Eat it.”

  Leni’s gaze cut to Mama, who looked as horrified as Leni felt.

  “Are you going to make me ask again?” Dad said.

  The quiet of his voice was worse than yelling. Leni felt a ridge of fear poke up, spread along her spine. She reached out, took the tiny blue-red organ in her hand. (Was it still beating or was she trembling?)

  With her father’s narrowed gaze steady on her, she put the heart in her mouth and forced her lips to close. Instantly, she wanted to gag. The heart was slippery and slimy; when she bit down it ruptured in her mouth, tasting metallic. She felt blood trickle out of the side of her mouth.

  She swallowed, gagged, wiped the blood from her lips, felt its warmth smear across her cheek.

  Her father looked up, just enough to make eye contact. He looked ruined, tired, but present; in his eyes, she saw more love and sadness than should be able to exist in one human being. Something was tearing him up inside, even now. It was the other man, the bad man, who lived inside of him and tried to break out in the darkness.

  “I’m trying to make you self-sufficient.”

  It sounded like an apology, but for what? For being crazy sometimes or teaching her to hunt? Or for making her eat the hare’s beating heart? Or for the nightmares that ruined all their sleep?

  Or maybe he was apologizing for something he hadn’t done yet but was afraid he would.

  * * *

  DECEMBER.

  Dad was edgy, tense; he drank too much and muttered under his breath. The nightmares became more frequent. Three a week, every week.

  He was always moving, demanding, pushing. He ate, slept, breathed, and drank survival. He had become a soldier again, or that’s what Mama said, and Leni found herself tongue-tied around him, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing.

  With as hard as she worked after school and on the weekends, Leni should have slept like the dead, but she didn’t. Night after night she lay awake, worrying. Her fear and anxiety about the world had been sharpened to a knifepoint.

  Tonight, as exhausted as she was, she lay awake, listening for his screams. When she did finally fall asleep, she landed in a dreamscape on fire, a place full of danger—a world at war, animals being slaughtered, girls being kidnapped, men screaming and pointing guns. She screamed for Matthew, but no one could hear one girl’s voice in a falling-apart world. And besides, what good would he be? She couldn’t tell Matthew this. Not this. Some fears you carried alone.

  “Leni!”

  She heard her name being called from far away. Where was she? It was the middle of the night. Was she still dreaming?

  Someone grabbed her, yanked her out of bed. It was real this time. A hand clamped over her mouth.

  She recognized his smell. “Dad?” she said through his hand.

  “Come on,” he said. “Now.”

  She stumbled over to the ladder, climbed down behind him in an utter darkness.

  None of the lamps were lit downstairs, but she could hear her mother breathing heavily.

  Dad led Leni to the newly fixed and steady card table; guided her to a seat.

  “Ernt, really—” Mama said.

  “Shut up, Cora,” Dad said.

  Something banged onto the table in front of Leni with a clatter and a clang. “What is it?” he said, standing right next to her.

  She reached out, her fingers trailing across the rough surface of the card table.

  A rifle. In pieces.

  “You need better training, Leni. When TSHTF, we’ll have to do things differently. What if it’s winter? Everything might be dark. You’ll be off guard, confused, sleepy. Excuses will get you killed. I want you to be able to do everything in the dark, when you’re scared.”

  “Ernt,” Mama said from the darkness, her voice uneven. “She’s just a girl. Let her go back to bed.”

  “When men are starving and we have food, will they care that she’s just a girl?”

  Leni heard the click of a stopwatch. “Go, Leni. Clean your weapon, put it back together.”

  Leni reached out, felt for the cold pieces of the rifle, pulled them toward her. The darkness unnerved her, made her slow. She saw a match flare in the darkness, smelled a cigarette being lit.

  “Stop,” Dad said. A flashlight beam erupted, blared into being, focused on the rifle. “Unacceptable. You’re dead. All of our food is gone. Maybe one of them is thinking of rape.” He grabbed the rifle, disassembled it, and pushed the pieces to the center of the table. In the blast of light, Leni saw the rifle in parts, in addition to a cleaning rod, cloths, some Hoppes 9 solvent and rust protector, a few screwdrivers. She tried to memorize where everything was.

  He was right. She needed to know how to do this or she could be killed.

  Concentrate.

  The light clicked off. The stopwatch clicked on.

  “Go.”

  Leni reached out, trying to remember what she’d seen. She pulled the rifle parts toward her, assembled it quickly, screwed the scope in place. She was reaching for the cleaning cloth when the stopwatch clicked off.

  “Dead,” Dad said in disgust. “Try again.”

  * * *

  YESTERDAY, on the second Saturday in December, they joined their neighbors for a tree-cutting party. They all hiked out into the wilderness and chose trees. Dad cut down an evergreen, dragged it onto their sled, and hauled it back to the cabin, where they placed it in the corner beneath the loft. They decorated it with family Polaroids and fishing lures. A few presents wrapped in yellowed pages from the Anchorage Daily Times were positioned beneath the fragrant green branches. Magic Marker lines pretended to be ribbon. The propane-fueled hanging lanterns created a warm interior, their light a sharp contrast to the still-dark morning. Wind clawed at the eaves; every now and then a tree branch smacked hard against the cabin.

  Now, on Sunday afternoon, Mama was in the kitchen, making sourdough bread. The yeasty fragrance of baking bread filled the cabin. The bad weather kept them all inside. Dad was hunched over the ham radio, listening to scratchy voices, his fingers constantly working the knobs. Leni heard the staticky sound of Mad Earl’s voice, his high-pitched cackle coming through loud and clear.

  Leni sat huddled on the sofa, reading the ragged paperback copy of Go Ask Alice she’d found at the dump. The world felt impossibly small here; the drapes were drawn tightly for warmth and the door was locked shut against cold and predators.

  “What was that, say again, over?” Dad said. He was hunched over the ham radio, listening. “Marge, is that you?”

  Leni heard Large Marge’s voice come through the radio, broken up, spangled with static. “Emergency. Lost … Search party … past Walker cabin … Meet on Mine Road. Out.”

  Leni put down her book, sat up. “Who is lost? In this weather?”

  “Large Marge,” Dad said. “Come in. Who is it? Who is lost? Earl, you there?”

  Static.

  Dad turned. “Get dressed. Someone needs help.”

  Mama took the half-baked bread out of the oven and set it on the counter, covering it with a dishcloth. Leni dressed in the warmest clothes she had: Carhartt insulated pants, rolled up at the hem, parka, bunny boots. Within five minutes of the call from Large Marge, Leni was in the back of the bus, waiting for the engine to start.

  It would be a while.

  Finally, Dad got the windshield scraped enough to see through. Then he checked the chains and climbed into the driver’s seat. “It’s a bad day for someone to get lost.”

  Dad slowly maneuvered around in the axle-deep snow, turned toward their driveway, which was a thick, unbroken layer of white without tire tracks, bracketed by snow-covered trees. Leni could see her breath; that was how cold it was inside the bus. Snow built up and disappeared on the windshield in between each swipe of the wiper blades.

  As they neared town, vehicles appeared out of the curtain of falling snow in front of them, headlights glowing through the gloom. Up ahead, Leni saw amber and red lights flashing. That would be Natalie and her snowplow, leading the way onto a barely-there road that led toward the old mine.

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