“I already told them, but they're mostly just sitting around the stove in that big clubhouse they built, you know, playing cards and board games and that sort of thing.”
“What about Verbie, you tell her?” She poured herself a cup of coffee and eased in at the table across from him, the space so tight their elbows clashed every time they lifted the cups to their mouths. “If anybody'll get it done, she will. She's a pretty dynamic girl.”
Steve ducked his head and looked away. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I told her.”
Another pause. A gust ran across the roof like a jet plane coming in for a landing. She glanced up at the window and saw the first white driven flakes in horizontal motion. “How's that coming,” she said, “you and her?”
He caught her eye for an instant, then glanced up at the window. “Guess I was wrong,” he said. “But it won't amount to anything. Won't even whiten the ground.”
“You and Verbie,” she said, and she felt her lips forming into a smile. “It's a romance, isn't it? Come on, Steve, we all know you like her-Star says you two have been going at it pretty hot and heavy-”
Now his eyes came back to her, two settled green eyes with a hazel clock in one of them. “It's more than that, Pamela-I love her. I do. To me, she's the greatest thing that ever happened-I've been helping them with those half-built cabins, you know that, right? Because they're a little short on manpower since Pan and Sky Dog and what's his name-that one that looks like a horse going backwards-”
“Dale.”
“Right, Dale-since they left.”
“What did they, go back to California?”
“No, hell, no-they all moved in with Joe Bosky in that place he's got down on Woodchopper. The bachelor hole. Four skunks in a burrow.” He looked beyond her, into the intermediate space of the cabin that was like any other cabin, cramped and cluttered and hung with all the accoutrements of life lived in a place without a garage or a basement or a convenient three-bedroom, two-bath, kitchen/dining, liv/fam floor plan. “I don't want her sleeping in a tent all winter, but I tell you, they haven't even got roofs on those cabins, or stoves either. You know, I was thinking, I've got my place in town and all, and I know it isn't much, but-”
There was a thump at the door, and Sess was there, his hair dusted with snow, a look of high excitement in his eyes. “Better sharpen up your _ulu,__ Pamela,” he was saying, the words jerked out of him as if he could barely stand to waste breath on them, and then he was snatching the rifle down from the crossbeam above her head and spinning back out the door, checking the action. “The garden,” he said, “look at your garden,” and the door pulled shut behind him.
The startle came into Steve's eyes and he jumped up from the table and cracked his head on the crossbeam, heading for the door behind Sess even as she dashed into the new room to look out the window above the bed, where she could get a view of the garden and this strange white element beating against the green of the leaves and the black nullity of the plastic. She had a moment, only that-seconds-to register the hulking dark form grazing there in the midst of the windblown vegetable garden like an overfed cow, and then there was the report of the rifle and the thing went down without a fuss, without a whimper, three hundred fifty pounds of meat, fur and fat delivered right up to them, right in their own garden, and she hardly had time to register the joy and triumph of it when she spotted the cub. It was a yearling, with its big bottom and narrow shoulders and pale stricken face, and it hurtled through the Brussels sprouts like a cannonball, going so fast Sess's second shot didn't have a chance of catching up to it.
The snow didn't last-a few handfuls of white pellets flung at the windows and lost in the gray-green weave of the tundra-but there was a hard frost that night and the next morning dawned cold. Sess was up at first light, out in the yard fooling with the dogs. He had five of them now, enough to pull a sled over his forty miles of trapline, but he kept saying he'd like two more, for speed, so he could mush his wife down the river to Boynton in style on a Saturday night and have a few shots and a burger and maybe dance to the jukebox into the bargain. Pamela had felt the bed give when he slipped out of it and she'd smelled the rich expiatory aroma of coffee wafting in from the other room, but she'd stayed in bed, wrapped in furs, listening to the cabin tick to life around her. Sess had done a pretty good job of banging things about in the next room, metal clanking on metal, the thump of the big black cast-iron pan hitting the stove, and then the crackle of meat sizzling-bear, fried in the fat it was no longer wearing out there in the watercourses and swamps of the world. The smell was something new to her, or reminiscent, anyway-she hadn't eaten bear since she was a girl out there in a summer tent with her mother and Pris and the man with the gray-seamed beard and cracked blue eyes she called Daddy-and her olfactory memory triggered a hundred other memories until she drifted back to sleep over the image of her father stumping into camp with the hindquarter of a black bear slung over one bloody shoulder and a grin as wide as the Koyukuk River.
She woke to the sound of Sess's voice rising high and strained over the clamor of the dogs and the bludgeoning thump and screech of a resistant object jerked by main force through the high grass and willow. “Gee!” he shouted, “gee, you fuckers!” And “Haw! Haw! I said. _Haw!__” She raised her head, peered out the window. Sun slammed at the yard, at the garden, at the still-smoldering smudge fires. Most of the plants were standing and green still, but she could see where the frost had blackened some of the leaves of the snap beans and the cherry tomatoes. It was something that registered with her in the moment of waking-frost, smudge fires, minimal damage, new sun, more sun-but which she hardly had time to reflect on before a blur of man, dog and sled interposed itself between the window and the garden and then was gone. “Haw!” Sess cried. _“Haw!”__
Then she was out in the yard in a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt, seven forty-eight by the clock she insisted on over Sess's objections, and the morning warming toward the low forties. She watched him make a turn at the edge of the woods, then tear up along the bank of the river, turn again and come straight for her with the dogs digging at their harnesses and a whole world of dust and threshed weed gone up into the air. He did manage to stop them more or less in the yard, throwing the brake (a sort of anchor that flailed and leapt and finally dug a furrow a hundred feet long), and wearing out the heels of his boots while he roared commands and the two wheel dogs went for each other's throats in one of those ill-tempered canine disputes that seemed to erupt every five minutes throughout the day. He let go the handles and got in between the dogs, kicking and cursing, until they finally got over whatever it was and sat panting in their traces. Sess was powdered with dust and weed, his shirt was torn and both his forearms were drooling blood where the dogs had bitten him. “Hey, baby,” he smiled, “want to go for a ride? I'll take you round the world-you know what that means?”
“Don't get dirty on me, Sess.”
Then he was holding on to her, rocking her gently back and forth. “You know I wouldn't do that,” he said, breathing into her ear.