She felt ill again. Her body was overheated, but she was too weak to do anything about it. The only thing she could see was darkness above her, and her breath forming clouds as she exhaled. Wherever she was, she wasn’t outside. The air was stuffy but dry, and she could smell a hint of burnt wood, like a fire had been in use recently.
She had no memory of how she got there, or where there was at all, and it made her heartbeat quicken until she was in a full-blown panic. She tried to sit, but a pain in her gut made her cry out and topple sideways into a pile of dried leaves.
“You snore,” said Niibin, somewhere nearby. “Do you always snore?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Niibin rolled her onto her back again, settling her into the furs she’d been wrapped in. She checked her forehead, the sides of her face, and fixed her hair a little. Her hands were rough and cold, and smelled of smoke. “Still no fever. A good sign. Do you want to tell me your name now?”
Past Niibin’s shoulder, a small fire muttered to itself near the mouth of the cave, more embers than flame, and beyond it was a ragged slot of grey daylight with snow banked up against the bottom of it. Niibin had been sitting by the fire, it seemed, in a hooded coat cut from an old grey blanket and belted at the waist. Her moccasins were off, set on a flat stone by the embers, steaming gently.
The answer was there. She could feel it was there…but she couldn’t quite reach it. “I…I don’t know…”
Niibin gave her a sour face. “Fine. Then we’ll have to call you by your nickname: Ugly Rabbit. Ugly for short.”
That elicited a laugh. “Why not Rabbit for short?”
“My cave, my rules.” She handed Ugly—she hated that her name was Ugly, but had nothing better in mind—a little wooden dish filled with berries. “Here, eat. I didn’t drag you all this way just to have you starve to death.”
It took some effort to lift her head enough to eat, and the first bite made her feel so ill, she thought she might vomit all over herself. It was only the pain in her belly—which was getting more pronounced by the second—that kept her from twisting over and spitting the berries out. Twisting for any reason terrified her, so she just opened her mouth a little and let the food fall out.
Niibin stared at her as she did it. “Well that’s offensive.”
“I’m sorry,” said Ugly. “I just feel so ill.”
“And I feel hungry, because I’ve given all of my food to you. So please don’t waste it, or I will feed you to Thunderbum.”
Ugly frowned. She’d followed every word up until then, but that last one made no sense at all. “W-what is—”
Niibin pointed toward the back of the cave, and Ugly turned her head—with some difficulty—to see why. There, tucked into the narrowest part of the space, where the walls arched into a single darkened point, was something very large…and covered in fur. It was curled in on itself, nose tucked away somewhere out of sight, a black heap of a thing that filled the back of the cave from wall to wall. As she watched, the whole mass of it rose, very slowly…and then, a long time later, sank again. It took Ugly a second to process what she was seeing, but when she did, the weakness and pain she felt burned off in an instant as she scrambled to get away.
“That’s a bear!” she gasped.
Niibin put a finger to her lips. “You don’t want to wake him.”
“Why is it in your cave?” Ugly said, vision spotting from her exertion.
“The better question is: why are we in its cave? And the answer is: because it’s warm.” She picked one of the berries off Ugly’s dish. “There are two problems with living with a bear. One: when it stops hibernating, it will be grumpy…and I’m not entirely sure when that will happen.”
Ugly stared at her, incredulous. “So you’re saying it could kill us at any second?”
Niibin thought for a moment before offering: “It might only maim us.”
Ugly re-positioned herself so she didn’t have her back to the bear anymore. In her current state, she wouldn’t be able to outrun it…but at least she’d know the end was coming.
Now that she knew to listen, she could hear it, too: a slow, deep, whistling breath, so long between one and the next that every time, she was sure it had stopped for good. There was a smell under the woodsmoke she hadn’t noticed before, musky and thick, like wet dog and old leaves. The warmth in the cave wasn’t all from the fire. Some of it was coming off him.
A thought came to her: “What’s the other thing?” she asked. “The other problem?”
“Ah,” said Niibin, stealing a few more berries. “Patience, Ugly. First, you rest. The other problem can wait.”
Something hit her face. Small and sharp, it collided with the skin just below her eye and tumbled off, somewhere she couldn’t quite fathom. She was so tired, it was hard to force herself to wake, but when she opened her eyes, she saw Niibin across the cave with a handful of berries, getting ready to throw another.
“You’re up,” said Niibin. “Good. We have a busy day ahead.”
Ugly tried to sit up, but her belly seared with pain, and all she could muster was a pitiful whimper and a slight shifting of the furs draped over her. She had no sense of time anymore. She’d been in the cave for at least a few days, she figured, but how many, she couldn’t say. She wasn’t hungry, but she only remembered eating once. Something didn’t add up in her mind, but every time she tried to pin it down, the world started to spin and she forgot what she was doing.
“What are we doing?” she asked, voice not much more than a whisper.
“Going for a run,” said Niibin. “Come on, let’s go.”
Niibin reached a hand out. Ugly didn’t want to comply, but felt like she had to at least make an effort. She tried to move her arm to meet Niibin’s open hand, but her muscles outright refused to cooperate. She started panting from the effort of doing nothing at all.
Niibin watched her carefully. “Try harder.”
“I am,” said Ugly. “I just can’t.”
“That’s what I used to say, back when I was five, when my mother brought me on runs ‘round the lake. I said I couldn’t, she said I could. And you know what? I could. I just didn’t see it like she did. So try harder, Ugly. Do it.”
Ugly took a shaky breath and summoned every last ounce of energy she had in her, channelling it into her arm, willing it to move. The muscles spasmed, and the furs around her shifted, and she—
—couldn’t follow through. Her arm went limp.
Niibin sighed.
“I suppose there’s a slight difference between being a five-year-old and getting shot. You keep resting. I’m going to go make some dead-end tracks.”
Shot. The word went past her and kept on going, like a stone dropped down a well, and she waited to hear it hit bottom. It never did. Her hand found its own way to her side, to the stiff pad of cloth bound tight around her middle, and stayed there. Shot. By whom? Why? There was nothing. Not a face, not a sound. Just the word, and the throb under her palm, and Niibin by the cave mouth, already tugging on her mitts and saying something about tracks. Dead-end tracks.
Ugly frowned. “Why?”
Niibin paused, like she had something to say, but wasn’t sure how to phrase it. “Ask me again later.”
She felt something sliding along her skin, from her nose to her cheek, and along her jaw. It tickled, almost, and she started to smile even before she knew she was awake. When she opened her eyes, Niibin was right there, running her finger across her face like she was studying a map.
Up close, Niibin’s face was all angles, wind-chapped red across the cheekbones, with a little scab on her lip from something or other. Her black hair was pulled back in a single braid and tied off at the end with a strip of red wool, and a few loose strands had escaped to fall across her eyes. She didn’t seem to notice them.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Ugly, because she truly didn’t. The enormity of that realization hit her harder than she expected. A thought came to her: “Where am I?”
“In a cave with—”
“No, I mean…where am I in the world?”
Niibin settled back, giving Ugly some room. “Anishinaabe land. Nowhere in particular. Where would you like to be?”
Ugly wasn’t sure. Every time she tried to grab at a memory, or a sense of a memory, it came apart in her hands like ashes and smoke. Where would she like to be? Home. Where was home? How would she ever know?
“Where are you from?” she asked Niibin. “Where is your family?”
Niibin’s eyes darted downward, and her fingers began to fidget. “I’m not supposed to get involved,” she said. “Look, but don’t touch. Your being here is…” She sighed. “Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy our pointless chats, I do. But the longer you stay empty-eyed and useless, the more trouble I’m going to be in.”
“Trouble with whom?” asked Ugly. “Your family?”
Niibin started to stand. “I’ll get us dinner. Learn to walk again, please. I can’t do this forever.”
This time, nothing was touching her when she woke up. She felt nothing at all, except the warmth of the air inside the cave, and the warm blankets wrapped all around her. Her wound hadn’t even woken her this time—it was a sound. A quiet sound, almost imperceptible: crying.
She opened her eyes to see Niibin sitting there, across the way, with an ornate frame in her hand. She was looking down at it like it was a holy relic, fingers hovering over the image like she was too in awe to touch it. But she wasn’t crying tears of joy. The hurt in her features was palpable.
“Are you alright?” Ugly asked, quietly, tentatively.
Niibin sniffled, started to shake her head, but seemed unsure of the action. “You ever disappoint someone, Ugly?”
“I don’t know.”
“No, of course not. Well I have. And I am. You know you’ve been here a month? A month. Haven’t moved an inch without me carrying you. And that right there is the problem. Without me. I can’t keep doing this, Ugly. I can’t. You have to go.”
A month. Ugly had thought it was days. She looked down at herself—really looked, for what felt like the first time—and saw her wrists gone thin as kindling where they poked out of the furs, and her nails grown long and ragged. The wound under its binding wasn’t wet anymore, but a hard, pulling knot. The woodpile by the cave mouth that had been chest-high—she was almost sure it had been chest-high—was down to a few split ends of birch. And Niibin’s cheeks had gone hollow. All of it had happened while she lay there, and she hadn’t seen a single day of it go.
Ugly felt a tug of guilt in her guts that was far more painful than any bullet wound. Without pausing to think about the how or why, she grit her teeth and started to move. She rolled to her side, cautiously, and felt the wound pull tight as a drawstring, and stopped dead, waiting for it to tear. It didn’t. Not yet. Then she twisted and struggled until she was on her hands and knees. The twist was the worst of it. Something deep in her side gave a hot, sickening lurch, and she was sure—absolutely sure—she’d torn herself open again. But when she dared to look, there was nothing on the furs. Just her own sweat, dripping off the end of her nose. Her arms were shaking so hard her elbows knocked. Then, taking a halting breath, she shifted her right foot so it was flat on the ground beneath her, braced one hand on her raised knee, and the other on the wall of the cave, and—slowly, painfully—began to push herself upright.
Niibin watched her in amazement, her smile broadening, broadening, as Ugly found her balance, and straightened her body, and—
—hit her head on the low ceiling.
“Ow!”
Niibin burst into laughter, rolling onto her side as Ugly fell down to her knees again, rubbing her head.
“Sorry, sorry, that’s not funny,” said Niibin. “But thank you for cheering me up.”
Ugly glared at her, but couldn’t help but smile, too. “Glad I could be of some help.” After a moment, she nodded toward the frame. “What’s that?”
Niibin looked down at the frame like she hadn’t expected Ugly had seen it. She turned it around and held it out—not to take, but to see. It was a drawing, in charcoal, maybe, of a young woman by a tree. She sat with her back against the trunk and a book open in her lap, one hand laid flat on the page to keep it from turning, her long, dark hair loose over one shoulder. Whoever had drawn her had a keen eye: they’d caught the little crease between her brows, and the way her thumb marked her place, like she meant to get back to it any second now. The woman was looking toward the artist, but not quite at them, like she was caught in a daydream, just shy of reality. It was an image of perfect serenity. Ugly could see why it affected Niibin so.
“My mother,” she said. “Back before I ruined her life.”
“She’s beautiful,” said Ugly.
Niibin winced at those words. “She’d hate people saying that. But you’re right, she is beautiful. I wish I could see her again.”
She turned the frame back around and ran her thumb along the edge of it, slowly, back and forth, the way you’d smooth a child’s hair. The gilt had worn away there, right down to the wood.
“Why? Where is she? Why do you live alone?”
“I don’t,” said Niibin, pointing a thumb into the back. “I’ve got Thunderbum.”
“But your family—”
“My family really believes in staying out of other people’s business,” said Niibin. “Whatever it is, we’re there to watch, not touch. A man asks for directions, and you shake your head like you don’t know his tongue. It doesn’t matter why he’s asking, the answer is the same: that is your life to lead, and I cannot change it for you.”
She shrugged, the tears in her eyes threatening to return once more. “We fought. I said some things I regret, and she made some threats that…” She shrugged, wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Anyway, I don’t have a family anymore. All I need is myself, and—” She frowned as a thought came to her, and she set the frame aside, digging around at the edge of the cave for something buried beneath her blankets.
“What’s wrong?” asked Ugly.
“You’re useless,” said Niibin. “At walking, for now. But just because you can’t move, doesn’t mean you can’t…aha!” She came out with a pile of sticks, broken off random trees. Ugly barely had a chance to process the sight before Niibin threw the whole lot at her.
“What are you doing?” she asked, trying and failing to shield herself. “What’s going on?”
Niibin pulled a knife from her belt, and let the blade catch the pale light coming in through the cave mouth. Ugly froze at the sight of it. She was flat on her back, a month weak, and a woman she barely knew was standing over her with a blade in her hand. It didn’t take a memory to be afraid of that.
“W-what’s going on?” she asked again.
“You, my dear Ugly, are going to earn your keep.” She flipped the knife around so she was holding it by the blade, and held it out. “You broke my trap, and I need a new one. So you’re going to make it for me.”
Ugly didn’t take the knife. Didn’t even try to reach for it. “Me?”
Niibin raised an eyebrow. “Have you ever carved wood before?” she asked.
Ugly looked at the branches, at the knife, at her own hands. “I…I don’t—”
“It’s easy,” said Niibin. “You hold the stick like so. You hold the knife like so. And you—ouch!” She pushed the blade too hard and nicked her finger. She stuck it in her mouth and kept talking: “Now you try.”
Ugly’s hands trembled as she picked up the stick, fingers hovering over the hilt of the knife for a few seconds too long.
“In the hand,” said Niibin, urging her on. “Works best if it’s in your hand.”
Ugly set down the branch, frustrated without understanding why. “What if I never remember who I am?”
Niibin frowned. “Unless you were a master wood carver, I don’t see how that’s relevant. Get working.”
Ugly felt an overwhelming sense of despair, and wondered why. But Niibin was right: she was useless, and a burden, and a waste of effort. She had to make an effort, no matter how terrible the rest of her life felt.
She took the knife from Niibin, set the blade against the stick, and made long, careful strokes down the edge, letting the bark come off the wood in strips. It was easier than it looked. The bark curled away pale and damp underneath, and smelled green and sharp, like something still alive. Niibin joined her, too, with another one of her knives. She was much more confident than Ugly, if not exactly skilled.
After a few minutes, when she felt a little more confident in herself, she asked: “Your mother is—”
“Let’s not talk about my mother anymore,” said Niibin, slicing the end of her stick into a point. “Let’s talk about you. The best way to remember who you are is to actually try to remember who you are. So tell me what you know. Tell me about you.”
Niibin may or may not have been right about that—Ugly truly didn’t know—but one thing she did know was that the very idea of trying…that scared her more than she could express. She tried to pull together pieces of herself that she couldn’t quite define. There were memories there, somewhere beneath the surface, but whenever she tried to focus on them, they dissolved into the ether. She had a flash of coldness, a flash of searing heat, a gut-wrenching despair and the oddest sensation of love…but each image stayed just out of reach.
“I don’t know about me,” she said, quietly.
“You say that, but there must be something you can recall, if you just—”
The cave erupted with a booming, rumbling sound that made Ugly gasp and shrink away in fear. Niibin, though, reacted differently: she snatched a long cloth off the floor and wrapped it around her face several times, masking her nose and mouth. For a second, Ugly didn’t understand why…until she smelled it. An awful stench filled the space, and she gagged, feeling so ill she thought she might retch.
Niibin pointed at the bear. “Thunderbum.”
At the back of the cave, the great black heap shifted, just a little. One paw slid out across the leaves, claws and all, and lay there. Then the long, slow breathing started up again, and the paw stayed where it was.
Every inch of the way tugged at her side, but Ugly still found the strength to crawl across the cave and pull Niibin’s cloth away enough to cover her own nose and mouth.
“That smells awful…”
“I said there were two problems with living with a bear, didn’t I?”
Ugly laughed, despite herself. “I need one of these scarves, too.”
Niibin gave her a judging stare. “I’ll make you one when you remember something about yourself. Until then, you’ll have to suffer with the stench.”
“But what if I can’t—”
“I think there are a lot of things about your past that you want to forget, Ugly. Why you were shot, for one. But that’s just a tiny part of you. There must be someone out there who misses you, and wants you back. So let’s separate the good you from the bad, and see where she leads us.”
Once again, Ugly’s wound burned like she’d been shot all over again—but this time she hadn’t moved. She hadn’t so much as breathed wrong. It was the words that did it. Like something inside her was clawing to get out, trying to escape. There was a secret in there, and her whole being was trying to warn her don’t let it go! don’t let it out! and she wanted to obey, but she also needed the pain to stop—to find the peace she was denying herself.
She forced herself to take a breath, to calm down a little. Maybe this was all for nothing. Maybe the secret was nothing at all, and she was working herself up over the fear of a fear.
Maybe it was better to exorcise the demon, rather than burying it deeper.
She took another breath.
She had to unwind it. She just wasn’t sure she could bear it.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said, softly.
“I’m always right,” said Niibin. “Now here, let’s start small. Whose face do you see when I say ‘love’?”
Ugly’s brow twitched as a stream of images tumbled past, all too fast to pull into focus—but she thought, for just a fraction of a second, she saw a man smiling at her and—
“Oof, it’s cold out there,” said a man’s voice, coming in from the mouth of the cave. He was dressed in a coat, but no gloves, his cheeks rosy, and snow in his hair. He dusted himself off, and a little shower of snow pattered down onto the stone and hissed where it reached the edge of the fire. Then he sat opposite them, close enough that Ugly could feel the cold still coming off his coat, and let out a loud sigh as he settled.
“There’s a bear in the back,” he said, with a roguish grin on his face.
Ugly couldn’t look away from him; every time their eyes met, she felt a flash of heat in the pit of her stomach. She just sat there, entranced by this new stranger in their midst.
“What’re you talkin’ about?” he asked.
“Memories…” she said. “Happy memories…”
“Anything at all,” nodded Niibin. “Focus on love.”
“Love…” said Ugly.
“Love?” said the stranger, like the idea amused him. “No. I have to say no. Rememberin’ lost love’s not going to do anyone any favours. I say if you’ve forgotten his face, best let him go. Focus on the here and now.”
The words hit Ugly harder than she understood. He was exactly right: whoever she was, however she’d ended up like this, it had all stemmed from love. From a lost love. That’s why the light and darkness of her memories were so intertwined: because her greatest sufferings had come about by chasing her greatest loves.
She didn’t want to remember her past. She wanted it to stay lost, like holding onto that puff of smoke. She wanted to blow that smoke away, and never think of it again.
“I don’t want to remember,” she whispered.
“What?” said Niibin.
“Atta girl,” smiled the stranger. “The future’s yours, if you take it.”
“I want to,” nodded Ugly. “I want to take it.”
“Take what?” asked Niibin. “What are you talking about?”
“As soon as that wound’s healed,” said the stranger, “it’s time to chart a new course. Someplace new. Someplace west.”
“Someplace west…” echoed Ugly. “Yes, someplace—”
Niibin took Ugly’s chin in her hand and turned her head to face her. She felt her forehead, squinted into her eyes. “Are you alright? What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing,” said Ugly. “I just realized he’s right.”
Niibin glared at her. “Who’s right?”
Ugly didn’t understand. She looked across the cave to the dashing stranger sitting there. He gave her a wink.
“Him…” she said, pointing.
Niibin’s eyes went wide. “Ugly…” she said, cautiously. “There’s no one there.”