Walking Out with Nothing

I.

The plane came down on a Tuesday, though they would lose track of days soon enough and Tuesday would become a word without weight, a thing from the country of clocks.

There were five of them. Ren Aldecott, who had been flying the Beaver and who therefore bore the specific guilt of having put them here. Laird Bosko, sixty-one, retired geological surveyor, who had chartered the flight to reach a sampling site on the Peel River and who kept saying, in the first hours, that the emergency locator should bring someone within forty-eight hours, should bring someone, should. Nadine Bosko, his wife, who said nothing about the locator and instead inventoried their supplies with the focused calm of a woman who had lived in field camps for thirty years and understood that panic is a luxury paid for with calories. Ty Okafor, twenty-four, a graduate student in Laird’s department, who had come north carrying romantic notions about the land the way a man carries a photograph of a woman he has never met. And Sable — that was all, just Sable — a Kluane backcountry guide whom Ren had picked up in Dawson because she knew the terrain between the Ogilvie Mountains and the Peel Plateau, and because Ren had flown enough bush to know that you do not go into that country without someone who has walked it.

Sable had walked it. She had walked most of the country between Whitehorse and Inuvik at one time or another, guiding hunters and geologists and the occasional filmmaker who wanted footage of caribou and got footage of rain. She was thirty-six. She was Tlingit on her mother’s side and Scottish on her father’s, and she carried this inheritance the way she carried her pack: distributed evenly, the weight where it belonged. She had hands that knew knots, and she could read weather in the shape of cloud-shadow on a ridge, and she did not talk about the wilderness as though it were a cathedral or a church. It was where she worked. You do not genuflect to your office.

The Beaver had lost oil pressure over the Blackstone Uplands, and Ren had put it down on a gravel bar in a nameless creek drainage — put it down well, all things considered, though the landing gear had collapsed and the left wing had folded back against the fuselage like a bird tucking in to sleep and would never unfold again. No one was badly hurt. Laird had cracked two ribs against his seatbelt. Nadine had a cut above her eye that bled with theatrical enthusiasm and then stopped. Ty had bitten through his lip. Ren had a bruise the colour of an eggplant spreading across her left thigh where the yoke had caught her, and she walked on it stiffly, and did not mention it.

They had: two sleeping bags, one tent, a first-aid kit, a tarp, a cook pot, seventeen granola bars, a bag of trail mix, two lighters, a fixed-blade knife, a hatchet, Sable’s daypack containing a water filter and fifty feet of paracord, and the emergency locator transmitter, which Ren had activated immediately upon landing and which sat on a rock beside the wreckage, blinking its small red light into the September sky like a heartbeat.

They had: no satellite phone. Ren’s had been in the door pocket, and the door pocket was now part of the accordion of aluminium that had been the left side of the fuselage.

They had: approximately nine hundred kilometres of roadless tundra and boreal scrub between their position and the nearest settlement.

“Someone will come,” Laird said, sitting against the bent fuselage with his arms crossed carefully over his ribs. “The ELT is broadcasting. SAR will pick it up. Forty-eight hours, maybe less.”

“Maybe more,” said Sable.

She said it without emphasis. She was crouched by the creek, filling water bottles through the filter, and she said it the way she might have said the water is cold or the light is going, a statement of condition rather than opinion. But Ty heard something in it — or heard the absence of something, the missing note of reassurance — and he looked at her with the expression of a man who has just noticed that the floor he is standing on is not entirely solid.

“How much more?” he said.

Sable screwed the cap onto the bottle and stood. She was not tall. She moved with the economy of a person who has learned that every motion in cold country costs something, and that you do not spend what you cannot replace.

“The Blackstone Uplands are not a priority search area,” she said. “We were off our filed flight plan — Ren diverted to avoid the weather over the Tombstones. If the ELT signal is clean, they’ll come. But if the signal is bouncing off the terrain, or if the battery took damage in the landing, the signal might be intermittent. And intermittent signals in this drainage, with these ridgelines —” She looked at the hills around them, the long shoulders of tundra rising to grey sky. “It could be days. It could be a week.”

“We can wait a week,” Laird said.

“We can wait two days,” Sable said. “After that we walk.”

II.

They waited two days. The ELT blinked. The sky produced nothing — no plane, no helicopter, no contrail, nothing but the slow September weather moving east across the barrens in systems so vast they had no edges, only gradients, the light shifting from pewter to iron to the brief, aching gold of subarctic afternoon and then back to pewter, the whole cycle taking fourteen hours and repeating with the indifference of a machine.

Sable used the two days. She dried meat from a ground squirrel she snared with paracord. She waterproofed the tarp seams with spruce pitch. She studied the terrain south and west, climbing a ridge behind camp and standing there for a long time, reading the country the way Ren read instruments — not with hope but with measurement, the eye moving over drainage patterns and vegetation lines and the faint trace of a game trail contouring a distant hillside, assembling from these details a route that was not easy but was possible, the way a pilot assembles an approach from ceiling, wind, and runway length.

Ty watched her do this and asked what she was looking for.

“The Dempster Highway,” she said. “It’s about a hundred and twenty kilometres southwest. Four days if we move well. Six if we don’t.”

“Four days of walking.”

“Four days of walking.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I came up here because I wanted to see the real North. The actual, unmediated thing.”

Sable looked at him. Her expression was not unkind, but it contained no softness either, the way a good knife contains no softness — it is simply what it is, shaped for function.

“You’re seeing it,” she said.

They left on the morning of the third day. Ren was limping. Laird’s ribs made every step a negotiation between the desire to breathe deeply and the punishment for doing so. Nadine walked beside him and carried his share of the weight without being asked, because she had been married to this man for thirty-four years and knew that asking would cost him something he could not afford to spend. Ty carried the tent. Sable carried everything else.

The country they walked into was not hostile. This is the thing that must be understood about the northern barrens, the thing that the romantics and the nature writers so often get wrong. The land is not hostile. Hostility implies intention, and the tundra has no intention. It is simply a set of conditions — temperature, wind, terrain, the caloric math of effort versus intake — and these conditions are neither for you nor against you. They are the terms. You meet them or you do not. The tundra does not care which.

They walked south-southwest, following game trails where they could, contouring along the grain of the land where the ridges ran roughly parallel to their direction of travel. The ground was tussock and moss and the ankle-turning rubble of frost-shattered rock. Every step required decision — here, not there, this tussock, not that one — and the accumulation of these small decisions over hours was a fatigue that lived not in the legs but in the mind, a grinding, granular exhaustion that Sable knew well and the others were learning.

By noon of the first day they had covered seven kilometres. It was not enough. Sable knew it was not enough. She did not say so.

The body is an engine. London knew this — not Jack London the author, though he knew it too, but the London of the Klondike, the London who watched men reduce themselves to their animal components in the cold and who understood that beneath the speech and the sentiment and the accumulated furniture of civilization there is a mechanism, and the mechanism runs on fuel, and when the fuel runs out the mechanism stops, and it does not matter what the mechanism believes or hopes or has been promised. The body is an engine. The tundra is a grade. The equation is simple and it does not yield to argument.

They ate four granola bars that first night, split among five. Sable boiled creek water and made a broth from the dried ground squirrel, which tasted like what it was — rodent and desperation — and which provided roughly the caloric equivalent of a piece of toast. Ty ate his share and said it wasn’t bad, and everyone understood that he was being brave about it, and no one said so.

III.

Laird stopped on the second day.

He did not announce it. He did not make a speech or explain. He simply stopped walking, on a stretch of tundra that looked like every other stretch of tundra they had crossed, and when Nadine turned and saw him standing there she knew, because thirty-four years is a long time, long enough to read the cessation of effort in the set of a man’s shoulders.

“I can’t,” he said. His voice was quiet and factual, the voice of a man reporting a measurement. “The ribs. I can’t.”

There was a discussion. It was not heated, because they did not have the calories for heat. Nadine would stay with Laird. They would shelter under the tarp beside a creek bend where there was willow scrub for wind protection. The other three would continue to the highway and send help. This was logical. This was the correct decision by every calculus of survival: the group splits, the able move fast, the injured wait. Rawicz would have recognized the structure. It is the oldest arithmetic of the long walk — you go forward with what you have, and what you cannot carry, you leave.

Sable gave them one sleeping bag, the first-aid kit, a lighter, and four granola bars. She kept the other sleeping bag, the tent, the cook pot, the knife, the hatchet, the water filter, and the rest of the food.

“Two days,” she told Nadine. “Three at most. Stay by the creek. Keep a fire going — a small one, just enough. Don’t move.”

Nadine nodded. She had already begun gathering willow. She was a woman who understood that grief and efficiency are not mutually exclusive, that you can be terrified for your husband and simultaneously correct in your selection of firewood, and that the second of these is what keeps the first from becoming fatal.

Sable did not hug her. She put her hand on Nadine’s arm, briefly, and the gesture said what it needed to say.

They walked.

Three now, where there had been five. The weight redistributed. Ty took the tent. Ren took the cook pot and the hatchet. Sable took the sleeping bag and the food, which was to say she took the margin — the difference between walking and dying, measured in granola bars and the few grams of dried squirrel meat that remained.

Ren’s limp was worse. The bruise on her thigh had deepened from eggplant to something closer to the colour of a storm cell seen from altitude, and she walked on it with the focused disregard of a woman who has spent her life trusting her body to perform under conditions that her body would prefer to refuse. She had been flying bush in the Yukon for eleven years. Before that, she had flown cargo in northern British Columbia, and before that she had been a flight instructor in Kamloops, and before that she had been a girl in Williams Lake who looked at the sky and saw not emptiness but a medium, a place you could enter and move through if you knew how. She knew how. And she knew that knowing how, in the air, was the same as what Sable knew on the ground — that competence is not glamorous, that it looks like silence and repetition and the daily unglamorous work of paying attention.

They made eleven kilometres that day. The terrain was opening, the ridges falling away to a broad valley that Sable said would lead them to a tributary of the Blackstone River, and from there to the highway. The sky was enormous, the way northern sky is always enormous, a dome so vast it renders the human figure not insignificant but simply accurate — this is your actual size, it says. This is what you are.

Ty was talking less. This was not a bad sign. In the first day he had talked constantly — about his research, about the landscape, about the raw beauty of the country they were crossing — and the talking had been a kind of spending, a disbursement of energy that was emotional rather than caloric but no less real. Now he was quiet, and in his quietness Sable could see the thing she had been waiting for: the moment when the wilderness he had imagined and the wilderness he was walking through finished their negotiation and the imagined one lost.

He had come north with ideas. They were good ideas, defensible ideas — the North as last redress, the barrens as antidote to the carpeted clutter of southern life, the wilderness as the place where a man could find out what he was made of. Krakauer wrote about this impulse, or rather Krakauer wrote about the consequences of this impulse, which are not the same thing. The desire for the wild and the reality of the wild occupy the same landscape but not the same country. Ty was crossing the border between them, and the crossing was costing him, and the cost was visible in his face, which had gone from eager to solemn to something harder and less legible, a face that was learning the difference between a story about walking and walking itself.

On the third morning Sable found frost on the tent. Not heavy frost — a skin of white on the nylon, thin enough to scrape off with a fingernail — but frost in early September in the Blackstone country meant that the season was turning, and that the margin she carried was thinner than the frost itself.

She did not mention the frost. She boiled water for broth, and they split one granola bar three ways, and they walked.

IV.

Ren fell on the third afternoon.

She did not trip. She did not catch her foot or twist her ankle. She fell the way a structure falls when a load-bearing member gives way — suddenly, completely, the compromised limb simply refusing to continue the pretence that it was functional. She went down on the tussock grass and did not get up.

Sable knelt beside her. Ren’s face was white. Not pale — white, the bloodless white of a candle, and she was breathing in short, shallow pulls that Sable recognised as the breathing of a body managing pain so acute that deeper respiration would be an indulgence it cannot afford.

“The leg,” Ren said.

“I know.”

Sable looked at the thigh. The bruise had migrated. What had been a localised contusion was now a swelling that ran from hip to knee, taut and hot under Ren’s trousers, and Sable understood, with the understanding that comes from years of first-aid in places where the hospital is a plane ride away, that this was not a bruise anymore. This was a haematoma, a pocket of blood pooling in the tissue, and it was compressing something — a nerve, a vessel — and Ren was not going to walk on it.

The arithmetic again. The oldest arithmetic.

They made camp beside a creek. Sable gave Ren the tent, the sleeping bag, the water filter, and the last of the food. She kept the tarp, the knife, the hatchet, and the cook pot. And she kept the paracord, because paracord is the universal currency of the north — it is snares and lashings and shelter and the thin filament between you and the country’s indifference.

“The highway is maybe thirty kilometres,” Sable said. “I’ll go fast. I’ll send someone back.”

Ren looked up at her from inside the tent, her face framed by the hood of the sleeping bag, and said, “You should take the food.”

“No.”

“Sable. You’re the one walking. The math —”

“I know the math.”

She did know the math. The math said take the food. The math said the walking body needs the fuel and the resting body can survive longer without it. The math was correct, and Sable refused it, and the refusal was not sentimental — it was the decision of a woman who understood that survival is not only a physical negotiation but a moral one, and that arriving at the highway having left a woman with a shattered leg and no food would be a kind of arrival she was not willing to make.

Ty said he would come with her. He said it quietly, and he meant it, and Sable looked at him and made a calculation that had nothing to do with mathematics. He was twenty-four. He was strong. He was also twenty pounds lighter than he had been three days ago, in the way that young men lose weight in the bush — quickly, visibly, the fat going first and then the padding around the eyes, the face sharpening to something angular and uncertain. He could walk thirty kilometres. He might slow her down.

“Come,” she said.

They left at dawn. Two now.

V.

The tundra was the tundra. It did not change and it did not end and it did not care that two people were crossing it with empty stomachs and blistered feet and the particular grinding determination that is not courage, not exactly, but is instead the simple inability to think of an alternative to continuing.

Sable walked. Ty walked beside her. They did not speak. Speech was fuel, and they had none to spare, and the silence between them was not uncomfortable but was instead the silence of two animals moving through a landscape that had reduced them, over three days, to the essential: locomotion. Warmth. The next step.

Markham would have seen it from the air — two small figures on an immensity of brown and grey-green, the tundra rolling to every horizon, the creek they followed a silver thread stitching the valley floor. From above, their progress would have been almost imperceptible, two specks inching across a surface that dwarfed them so completely that the word “progress” lost its meaning. But Markham would also have known — because Markham knew the view from inside as well as from above, because she had been the speck, had been the small thing moving through the large thing, in Africa, in the air, in the country of her own endurance — that from inside, the view is different. From inside, the next ridge is the whole world. The next creek crossing is the whole world. The body’s negotiation with the next hundred metres of ground is the whole world, and the world is sufficient, and you do not need the aerial view to know that you are alive, because your feet are telling you, and your lungs are telling you, and the particular ache in your lower back where the pack sits is telling you, and all of these messages arrive with a clarity that comfort never provides.

Sable set snares that evening with the paracord. Two for ground squirrel, one for ptarmigan. The ptarmigan snare was optimistic but optimism costs nothing to deploy and everything to withhold. She built a shelter from the tarp and willow branches, a low lean-to that trapped body heat the way a cupped hand traps a candle flame.

Ty lay under the tarp and said, “I thought it would be different.”

Sable was feeding willow twigs into a small fire. The flames were the size of her fist, and she kept them that size, because fire in the bush is not a bonfire — it is a tool, and you use a tool with precision.

“What did you think?” she said.

“I thought — I thought it would be harder in a cleaner way. Like a test. Like the land would test you and you’d pass or fail.”

“And?”

“It isn’t a test. It doesn’t care if you pass.”

Sable fed another twig into the fire. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”

“Then what is it?”

She considered this. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the darkness a fox barked, a single sharp sound that was swallowed by the tundra’s acoustic immensity, and the silence that followed was not silence at all but was instead the sum of everything the tundra was doing that was not for them — wind on grass, water on stone, the thermal contraction of rock as the temperature fell, the entire machinery of the planet turning without reference to the two small warm things huddled beside their fist of fire.

“It’s conditions,” Sable said. “You meet them or you don’t. That’s all.”

“That’s bleak.”

“It isn’t bleak. Bleak is a judgement. The country doesn’t make judgements. People go into the bush carrying judgements and mistake them for the country’s. The country is just the country. It’s cold. It’s large. It will kill you if you’re not careful, and sometimes if you are. There’s nothing bleak about that. It’s honest.”

One of the squirrel snares produced. Sable cleaned the animal and boiled it in the cook pot with a handful of Labrador tea, and they ate in silence, cracking the small bones and sucking the marrow, and the meal was not good and was not bad and was simply what it was: fuel, measured in grams against the kilometres remaining.

VI.

She saw the highway from a ridge at midmorning on the fifth day.

It was a dark line across the valley floor, straight where everything else was curved, geometric where everything else was organic. From this distance it was barely visible — a thread, a scratch — but Sable knew it the way a pilot knows a runway, the way a sailor knows a light on the horizon: by the fact that it is made, that it has intention, that someone put it there on purpose.

Ty was two hundred metres behind her. He was still walking. He was walking the way a man walks who has passed beyond tiredness into something else, a condition that is not second wind but is instead the body’s acknowledgment that it has nothing left to give and will now operate on whatever remains after nothing — stubbornness, perhaps, or the mere mechanical memory of motion, one foot and then the other, the ancient bipedal rhythm that predates speech and thought and the elaborate nonsense of civilization.

She waited for him. He came up the ridge and stood beside her and looked at the highway and did not say anything for a long time.

“There,” Sable said.

“Yes.”

“Two hours. Maybe three.”

He nodded. His face was a sharp thing now, all angles and hollows, the graduate student’s easy roundness replaced by something lean and provisional. He looked like what he was: a young man who had walked into the country of his imagination and found that the country was not imaginary, and that the distance between wanting the wild and surviving it is measured in days without food and nights without warmth and the slow, systematic jettisoning of everything you believed about yourself.

They reached the highway at one in the afternoon. A truck driver hauling fuel to Eagle Plains found them sitting on the gravel shoulder, and Sable told him calmly and completely where the others were, and the driver radioed Dawson, and by evening a helicopter had extracted Ren and was flying back for Laird and Nadine.

Everyone survived. This is not always the way of it, and Sable knew this, and the knowing lived in her the way the knowing of Doyle’s choice lived in Doyle — not as guilt and not as pride but as fact, the irreducible fact of what happened, which is that she walked and they lived and the tundra continued without them, and will continue, and does not know their names.

VII.

There is a temptation, at the end of a survival story, to make the survival mean something. To arrange it into a shape — redemption, transformation, the discovery of some essential truth about the human spirit — and to offer that shape to the reader as a kind of gift, a return on the investment of attention.

Sable would not permit it. She went back to Kluane. She guided another party of geologists into the St. Elias Range the following spring. She carried her pack the same way, distributed evenly, the weight where it belonged. She did not write a book. She did not give interviews. She did not stand on stages and tell people what the wilderness had taught her, because the wilderness had not taught her anything she did not already know, which is that the body is an engine and the land is a grade and the equation does not yield to argument, and that the only reliable response to conditions is competence, applied quietly, day after day, without romance and without complaint.

Ty went back to his program. He finished his thesis. He did not return to the North, though he spoke of it sometimes, carefully, the way a man speaks of a country he has visited and does not fully understand. The romantic notions had not survived the walk, but something else had — something harder and less beautiful, a knowledge that lived in his feet and his empty stomach and the memory of a woman feeding willow twigs into a fire the size of her fist and saying, It’s conditions. You meet them or you don’t.

Ren flew again. The haematoma healed. She was in the air within four months, the Beaver replaced by another Beaver — same model, same paint scheme, different registration — and the barrens unrolled beneath her wings the way they always had, immense and indifferent and shot through, on certain September afternoons, with a gold light so pure it seemed to come from inside the land itself rather than from the sky above it.

The tundra did not remember them. The creek where the plane went down thawed and froze and thawed again, and the wreckage of the Beaver settled into the gravel bar by imperceptible degrees, and the willows grew around it, and in time it would become a thing the country had absorbed, the way the country absorbs everything — bones and metal and the small, fierce hopes of the people who cross it — without malice, without mercy, without interest.

The land is the land. You walk through it or you do not. And the walking is the whole of it.