Winter Kill: A Tale of Survival in the Canadian North

By David Laursen

Two men and one woman are stranded in the remote Canadian bush in the dead of winter. Hope for rescue by search planes is dwindling day by day. Hungry wolves are fast depleting the surrounding country of game. An abandoned trappers shack is providing shelter but they have no food.

Survival of the injured husband and his very beautiful wife depends on the competence of their guide who is in fact an expert at winter survival and living off the land. But is he capable of acting in a positive way? His obsession for the woman has already caused him to set aside some personal ethics and invite disaster. What next? He knows very well that if they go hungry for long the injured husband will certainly die first. What then? Will the wife see him as her savior, or as a murderer? How will he see himself? What point is there in surviving the cold and the wolves if the law will be there waiting?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 8, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595826995

David Laursen

David Laursen spent most of his career as a Technical Writer for Medtronic, Inc. a large manufacturer of pacemakers. He lives in Walker, MN with his wife Kathy and they own an operate a Bed and Breakfast on Beautiful Leech Lake. David has 4 children, Donald, Laurie, Scott, and Nicole.

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PROLOGUE

Jacques Dupre (Jock to his friends) made his morning rounds at the Thunderbird Lodge, an upscale fishing resort on the shores of 100-mile-long Lac Lakota. He made these rounds every morning, but today it was particularly critical. There were 75 corporate bigwigs from IBM arriving today, among others who were already here, or soon to arrive, and he had to be ready. He believed he was ready, or as ready as he could be, considering that the unexpected usually happened when dealing with a group this size.

Much still remained to be done, but there would be all day today to do it. The guide boats needed gassing up, the Indian guides sobered up and ready to fish, the bar stocked with sufficient beer and spirits to slake the seemingly bottomless thirst of the corporate people when the company was picking up their bar tabs. With their bosses watching, most behaved well enough. His only concern was that they would take booze in the boat and share it with their guides. He hoped he had made that point clear with the corporate organizers.

There was also the bait shop to be stocked with sufficient worms, leeches, and shiner minnows to last the weekend. The bait truck would arrive at noon, and the bait dealer had assured him last night that there would be no problem with supply. The problem was keeping the damn shiner minnows alive until he sold them. Others sold chubs and fathead minnows, which lived longer, but walleyes preferred shiners and so did his customers.

That left only the restaurant and his wife managed that. She did not like him meddling there, but he was nevertheless concerned that she had accurately estimated the steaks, the loins, the chops, the walleye fillets, the heads of lettuce, and all the other items on the menu. But he knew enough to let it go. She was usually right, and their daughter-in-law helped her with the planning. One of the happiest days of his life was the day his son brought his new wife home and agreed to follow dad into the resort business. His youngest son and daughter enjoyed coming home, but not to deal with customers. Neither did he, but there was a time when it put food on the table. Now it was habit.

He stopped in the dining room where a few early risers were having breakfast and refilled his coffee mug, nodding to those he knew as he moved into his office. He pulled the door shut and also closed the sliding panel door which let him see into the hall and through which customers passed their credit cards when checking in. A closed panel door meant come back later. There was a permanent sign on the outside of the sliding door which directed customers to seek help from the waitress if they were wanting to check in or rent a room.

At the moment he did not want to be disturbed, or even be seen. An e-mail just received had affected him in ways that he could not quite predict, and though he was not afraid of tears, he was not sure that his face would not reveal something that he might be asked to explain. This was not something he cared to explain. Not that tears were any rarity in him these days. They came too easily, usually over happy things. The sad or the tragic he could handle. He read the e-mail again:

Jacques: I found out quite by accident that my son and his bride will be honeymooning at your establishment. He loves to fish and wants to make a fisherperson out of her. If you can find time, why don’t you take the two of them fishing? I’m sure you will like them both. They’re a handsome couple. I’m having champagne and flowers delivered to your attention. Will you please see that it gets to their room? Laura Kindseth

He put the email aside, aware of a hollowness in the pit of his stomach. At one time, any letter from her would have been opened with trembling fingers and the most violent agitation. Which would it be: The Lady or the Tiger? Her precious love or destruction by her attorneys? He had done her wrong. She could have destroyed him with a word, but had withheld that word. He always thought he knew why.

He sat there in the rosy fingered dawn that was now creeping across his desk and let his mind wander back to that long-ago winter when Laura and her husband had checked in at his small resort which had since been torn down to build the Thunderbird. Today, with transponders, global positioning systems, and better radios, that disaster might not have happened. Then again, he thought, who could say? The bush was still a dangerous place. And the human heart still held the seeds of its own destruction.

As he sat there musing, he was absolutely certain that she too was thinking about that long ago winter. And as a matter of fact, she was.

PART I

Chapter 1

Beside the road leading to the little town of La Pas in Northern Manitoba is a sign that reads: ENTERING THE BOG. A hundred miles and two or three hours later, another similar sign says: LEAVING THE BOG. It was the unexpected appearance of this second sign which disturbed Hal Kindseth’s musings and made him look sharply at his wife.

We’re leaving the bog, he said.

She gave him a blank look, as though to say: what bog, and he knew she had not noticed it. That was not so very strange either. This bog was detectable only on its periphery. Otherwise, it was indistinguishable from the surrounding country. The same mixture of spruce and birch grew in the bog as grew out of it. They grew there in almost the same proportion. The only difference was that the trees of the bog were strangely stunted. Hardly any were more than six feet tall. Once you had made that slight mental adjustment, it was easy to believe that all the world was bog and stunted trees.

Watching his wife’s angry reflection in the windshield, Kindseth was aware that their marriage too had entered the bog but he could not have told you exactly when or where it had happened. It might have occurred in the minutes following the birth of her second stillborn child, or when he traded his desire to write fiction for a career in advertising which had succeeded beyond his fondest expectations, or when she discovered his drunken, one-time coupling with a dark haired copywriter from the Northern Aire beer account whose name he could no longer even remember.

Whatever the reasons, they mattered little to Kindseth now. Like many who at some point in their life find themselves unexpectedly lost, escape from the bog had become the only thing that mattered. Yet the bog refused to give them up.

He looked at his wife but his look drew no response. She was staring straight ahead, seeing or possibly not seeing the frozen ditch and snow and twisted spruce that passed beyond the window.

Kindseth started to say something, then changed his mind and turned up the radio. The music rose like some retaliatory wall and he saw her face relax slightly as the threat of unwanted conversation passed. She hadn’t put together a complete sentence since leaving Minneapolis two days before when he had insisted she accompany him on a holiday/hunting trip he had been planning for some weeks. Then she had said a great deal, in a loud voice, quieting only when she realized he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

Did she really dislike his company that much, he wondered? Or is this what a little prosperity did to people? It was almost impossible for him to believe that this was the same woman with whom he had wandered the mountain trails of Glacier and the Tetons eating hardtack, fruitcake, and honey in the comb—the woman who had conceived her first child at 10,000 feet on a bed of spring flowers between remnant snowbanks and running water. Now, the finest bed wouldn’t suffice. She complained of the hardness or the softness of the mattress, of the burden of his weight upon her—indeed, of some new shortcoming every time he touched her.

Perhaps he should have listened more closely to her in those early days. It was quite possible that she had recognized the bog even then and her complaints were a warning rather than a begrudging of his small successes. Yet it seemed strange that the more successful he became the more violently she complained. Get involved, he had told her. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Other people have lost children and survived it somehow. Forget your own troubles for a moment and start helping other people with theirs.

So she had. And that had been a mistake, he realized, because during those several years of deceptive calm all her activities—the politics, the social work, the religion, the group analysis—had been nothing more than an attempt to escape the truth of the bog. She no longer asked for help or even complained very much but her eyes and silence every day gave evidence of his failure. They were irretrievably in the bog and its horizons had long since vanished.

Rose Dupre lay in hurt silence on the cot, still naked though love had fizzled some 20 minutes earlier. Actually, love had fizzled before that, when Jacques had innocently remarked on what a fine day it was going to be to cut the aspen in section 26. Those words were no sooner spoken when her black eyes glazed over, rigor mortis set in, and all further apologies became pointless.

He looked at her once more before leaving and said:

You better get dressed. Jack’s awake. Your folks might come over.

She gave him a defiant look and didn’t move—if anything, prostrated herself still further, and he went outside and threw his tools in the back of the pickup. To hell with her, he thought. She could lay on her bare bottom till her ashes froze if that’s what she wanted. He might have waited a bit longer before telling her he planned to spend this Sunday cutting wood rather than taking in the snowmobile races in town, but what the hell? He had a contract with the paper mill. The wood needed to be cut.

Twenty minutes later, still raging, he pulled the truck off the road, parked it, and carried his chainsaw, measuring stick, and gas can past the piled logs and around the stumps and tangled slashings to where he had left off cutting the day before. A light snow had started to fall which gave the woods a subdued, dreamy quality that swallowed the noise of his footsteps and frustrated his mood. The forest was an irresistible peacemaker, and peace was the last thing Jacques wanted today. So he resisted as long as possible, and was remarkably productive. So quickly did the trees fall around him that one watching him from a distance, with only noise and movement as clues, might have assumed that Jacques had helpers. Ultimately though, after forgetting to eat lunch and cutting a great many logs, peace prevailed, and Jacques felt only his tiredness and the pain in his stomach where his lunch should have been.

Darkness was not far off, and Jacques hurried to limb and cut into eight-foot lengths the trees he had felled earlier. He was topping one of those downed trees when it happened—exactly how he wasn’t sure because of its suddenness—but the naked trunk dropped, or he slipped, or both, the falling tree driving the saw against his outstretched leg, the touch not hurting at all. The snow was soft, and he was able to extricate his leg from beneath the trunk and roll onto his side. He had disengaged the throttle even before the chain touched and now he shut off the saw and examined his leg. Shredded wool protruded from the wound and he picked the shreds out one at a time and discarded them, more curious than concerned because this wasn’t his leg at all—or if it was—only a dream of his leg and that not even a bad dream happening as it was in the dim warmness of the woods with its light snow falling.

He noticed then that the wound was moving. It was very strange, he thought, that a wound should move, even in a dream, so he tried to catch it, his hand reaching out tentatively and withdrawing, cautiously like a child’s groping for some strange insect. He opened his hand very slowly, curious to see this thing he had caught, and after looking at his hand and at the movement he didn’t try to stop it again. He knew what it was.

He looked around quickly, the woods darker seemingly and no longer warm. This was very bad. He removed his flannel shirt, bound it very tightly around the leg, and tied the arms together. Oh yes, this was bad. He stood up with difficulty, his hands using the felled aspen for support, and then the dizziness passed and he smiled and limped towards the pickup. Not as bad as he thought. Just a scratch. Scare hell out of Rose though. The thought made him happy and he was anxious to be home. This little accident might be just enough to teach her that he wasn’t indestructible, that one day he might not get home.

He climbed into the truck with some difficulty and started it. He could operate the clutch all right, but had difficulty feeling the accelerator pedal. He pulled the truck ahead, cramped the wheels, and shifted into reverse. The tires grabbed, then spun, and the truck’s rear end shifted sideways slightly. He tried pulling ahead. The truck wouldn’t move. He shifted to reverse, this time letting the clutch out more slowly. Again, the wheels spun and the truck slid still further sideways—dangerously close to the spruce now. Once in the spruce he would never get the truck turned around. He climbed out and hobbled to the rear of the truck, his leg stiff and throbbing. The truck was hung up. He had pulled off the logging road just enough to let the wheels drop crosswise into the shallow ruts made before the ground froze. He glanced about, worried now and feeling lightheaded.

Given another hour of daylight and a sound leg he could jack the truck out but he didn’t have either. Nor was there enough clearance between frozen ground and axle to get the jack under. Not unless he crawled under and did some chopping first. And his leg wouldn’t take that. It was bleeding again and he sat down on the running board and retied the flannel shirt very tightly. With the axe he might cut down the ruts enough to get out but the axe was down in the woods and one bad swing in the dark would cost him a tire. Better to try pushing.

He leaned in, put the truck in low gear and let the clutch out. The wheels kicked over and spun and he moved around to the front of the truck and laid his weight into it, rocking it. If the son of a bitch went the spruce would stop it. He rocked very hard, lifting and pushing simultaneously, the darkness and his impatience giving him strength, the truck rearing high on its springs, and higher, the wheels half way up the rut, then three quarters, then right to the very edge and tottering, tottering, tottering…

How long he lay unconscious in the snow he did not know for time had ceased to mesh, had slipped its clutch somehow, spun now even as the wheels spun and like the wheels went nowhere. He knew only that the snow was cold on his cheek and above him the truck shook on monotonously, endlessly, tires whining and stinking of burning rubber.

It was very comfortable lying there in the snow, the truck shaking, the tires whining, the sweet stink of exhaust in his nose. Too comfortable. He raised himself on one elbow and shook his head woodenly, his eyes not seeing and charged with fear. He lay there a moment, head pounding. God, how it pounded. His hand went instinctively to the flannel shirt and found it slimy wet. And not from snow. Oh no, not from the snow. But the snow gave him an idea and he scooped up large handfuls and packed it down under the bound shirt next to the wound.

He stood up, waited a moment for his dizziness to pass, then shut off the truck. The leg was all right. The leg didn’t worry him. The leg he could control but this weakness did worry him. The weakness was much more dangerous than the leg because it could take him back into his dream.

He closed the door of the truck and started walking. Ahead of him lay a quarter mile of logging road and eight miles of highway. Ahead of him lay Rose and the fire and town with its doctor and all else that lived. And he would make it there. In spite of his weakness he would make it. The pull of the living was very strong—the stronger the farther away you were. The pull of the living became weak only when you yourself were of the living.

His injured leg was a wooden four-by-four without joints, the rutted logging road a trap of holes and humps and darkness that drove him blindly, staggering, out finally onto the highway, and halfway across it before the sudden smoothness underfoot struck a warning in his brain, and then too late, for the ground dropped away and he plunged headlong down the frozen ditchbank.

He was slow in climbing out. His leg was agony and he rested several times, his weakness a frightening thing and pumping strength into his dream. He could hear it. The dream was greedy; its sucking, pumping, pounding filled his head and calmed him for he saw in a burst of clarity what the dream was, what it wanted with him.

He sat in the soft snow at the edge of the road and repacked and retied the flannel shirt. The total darkness with time absent had no distractions, no urgency, and his mind attacked the problem methodically, without illusions. Life so far from life was very good. Too good to let go of. He started walking. Slowly he walked and stiffly, like a drunkard, his shoulders hunched forward, his boots kicking for the smoothness of the highway like a dog after scent, the smoothness his lifeline to life and Rose and the fire. The snow fell in his eyes and melted there and he unblinking saw nothing but the fire at the end of the darkness and Rose on the couch, Rose looking in some strange way different now, the same Rose in the same position but attracting rather than repelling.

He walked on, his legs moving involuntarily and in rhythm like his lungs moved, expanding and contacting without thought. Yes, he thought, like his lungs. He could sleep and rest and wake and when he woke they would still be moving, like his lungs. There was no worry.

Chapter 2

Kindseth checked into the hotel and carried his two suitcases up the stairs to their room on the second floor. It was the same room he and his father had occupied during two or three fall fishing trips many years before, and although his father was dead now, the room had survived practically unchanged. No paintbrush, he was sure, had touched those cracked and peeling plaster walls in 15 years. A waterstain in the center of the ceiling, evidently caused by some upstairs tenant who had carelessly overflowed the tub long ago, still sprawled there spiderlike, neither larger nor smaller than he remembered.

His wife had followed him silently in. She took no notice of the room but made her way to a wooden rocker next to an antique-looking cast iron heat radiator and sat down. Taking a book from her purse entitled Love in the Christian Family, she opened it and started to read. She had neglected to take her coat off. When he reminded her, she let him take it but made no effort to help.

The next hour he spent unpacking. He carried in their rifles and hunting gear and put his portable typewriter on the oak writing desk. To the right of the typewriter he placed a rack of briar pipes and an unopened ream of typing paper. Before leaving Minneapolis, he had been commissioned by a local magazine to do an article on the Trappers Festival and he wanted to get the story researched, outlined and possibly written before starting to hunt. Although the article only paid a few hundred dollars, it allowed him to write off his trip expenses as a tax deduction. The story at any rate would be no trouble to do. The local newspaper no doubt did an article on the Festival at least once a year and if they had a copier there he intended to simply copy the articles and rewrite the most interesting paragraphs for his own story. The idea of a little plagiarism didn’t disturb him.

Nobody would know the difference, and he had been in advertising long enough to realize that there was very little new in the world. Most good writing was simply creative plagiarism.

Obtaining quality photographs would be more of a problem because the Festival didn’t take place until February and he wouldn’t be here to shoot his own. But the local Herald would have photographs in their files from previous years that they would lend him if he promised to credit the source in his article. He thought, with some satisfaction, that not having the talent to write anything worthwhile had turned out for him to be a blessing. It had made him rich. He had succeeded in advertising not because he could write but because he could sell, and he had long ago realized that sales were what made the economy go. If you could sell a service, you could always hire some technician to perform it.

It was not quite four o’clock but already growing dark. Down on the street, lights were coming prematurely on, not brightening the dusk but simply glowing in it like spent flashlights. He took down his parka from a hanger in the closet and put it on. A gift from a client, it was an expensive down-filled piece with a hood trimmed with wolf fur. He was extremely anxious to test it out but until now had not found a place cold enough to be comfortable wearing it. He had attempted to test it driving through the bog with the window open and the heater turned off but his wife had raised such a fuss that he had been forced to terminate the experiment before giving it a fair test. He had been foolish to give in so easily, he thought. He had talked the client out of a similar parka for her but she had been too stubborn to put it on.

Before leaving, he turned on the lamp, not because he was concerned that she would strain her eyes reading but to keep her honest. The book was no more than a weapon to keep him at bay. She looked annoyed without looking up and quickly underscored several sentences on the page with her pencil. He was quite certain she hadn’t read them.

He descended the stairs, feeling huge in the bulky parka. In the lobby, the same three old men were sitting in the same three chairs they had occupied all afternoon. Their eyes had constantly followed him as he carried in his bags but he hadn’t noticed them