The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [93]
“No, I miss you,” she insisted.
“I miss you too,” I said. And I realized I did. The observation warmed before it alarmed.
I took plenty of food with me: hardtack biscuits, dried venison, and beef that I jerked from my Coulee City neighbor’s stock. I added carrots and potatoes beginning to sprout eyes. I stored all this in the shack, along with fish pemmican the Warrens traded with me. I knew how to locate the best spots and set traps for the winter weasels, those ermine whose pelts were valued regardless of size. I could identify the slides the otters made on the stream banks, and beavers leave tracks even a child can find. I had the right bait (chicken parts Louise sent with me and, when my traps were full, scent glands from the animals). Lucky came too, and I welcomed not only his brawn but his fierce barks warning of wolves or bears. I understood that for my benefit, Louise had given up her own precious time with him, a clear sacrifice.
Lucky’s tail wagged when I placed the usual animal innards in his dish one morning. Wood smoke from my stove made my throat sore, or so I’d thought until my cough turned into a seal’s bark. Fatigue visited more quickly than I’d remembered, but I had to check the traps. As I trudged through the woods, Lucky trotted behind me on the narrow trail. Snow fell, sugaring the pine and firs and filling in my snowshoe tracks. Fur-lined boots kept my feet warm, but the coughing caused me to stop more than once, gloves on knees. I felt a buzzing in my head after each bout. “I should have fixed a mustard pack,” I croaked to Lucky, who panted beside me.
For the first time, I was too weak to finish the trap lines. Instead, I took what I had and dragged it back to my shack, unloaded Lucky, and stood in the crisp air to flesh and stretch them. Despite my stupor, I ran my hands over the smooth fur, exerting energy to tie the edges to the circular frame and salt them. More hides waited, but I needed to eat. I rested for an hour before I fixed my supper of vegetable stew with pieces of beaver tail and fat floating on the top. I curled up beneath a fur blanket. I’d rest then finish. That was my plan.
When I awoke, it was morning, and my chest felt like an elephant sat on it. I knew I ought to remain where I was, fight the fever growing within me, but I needed to finish the line. Lucky licked my face, and I rose, stopping to cough, my lungs vibrating against my chest. Breath came with difficulty. I sat down on my cot to pull on my pants. I tried to stoke the fire, but now I shivered and dropped kindling. The ends of my fingers were white as bone, and when I caught my face in the mirror over the washbasin, my lips looked blue.
Even now, all these years later, when Ida gets up to stoke the fire, I remember how my hands trembled that day, lips and fingers numb, as close to giving in to final silence as any time in my life.
“I should eat,” I mumbled to the dog.
I reached for a pan to heat water and watched the wood floor come up to smack my face.
THIRTY-SIX
Servicing
I wheezed in and out of memories. Once Ida flashed before my eyes, telling me how cold the hog house was and that Johnny was sick. Words wouldn’t come for me to tell her I was so sorry that he was ill, that she was cold, that I was cold too, and that I wished it had been me instead of any of them, me instead of my mother having to ache and grieve the rest of her life. In dreams, words fail to express the heart, but the soul knows of the longing. Olaf swirled in my memory, flying up into a cyclone. I thought that dying would be good now, but someone wouldn’t let me, lifted my head instead.
I opened my eyes to the brown face of Young Warren.
I smelled juniper, tasted bitter broth that Older Warren now spooned into my mouth. I lay back shivering. “Very sick, Miss,” he said. “We stay.”
And they did.
Lucky had been lucky for me. I’d let him outside,