“That’s lookin’ good,” said the stranger, crouched low next to Ugly. “Very good indeed.”
They’d been lying behind the same deadfall since first light, bellies to the ground on a bed of wet spruce boughs that had stopped doing any good an hour ago. The slush had long since soaked through Ugly’s skirt at the knees and elbows, and the cold had gone from biting to dull to something she couldn’t feel at all, which was probably worse. Her left foot had been asleep for so long she’d forgotten she had one. Every so often a clump of snow slid off a branch overhead and landed somewhere with a soft whump, and every time, both of them flinched.
Ahead of them, across the clearing, a rabbit was inching its way through the melting snow, watching its surroundings with warranted caution. The winter was in its dying days, and the air was thick with the smell of trees on the verge of coming back to life. The rabbit was heading for a small tuft of grass exposed by the receding white; soon the whole forest would be thick with green, but for now, it had to take what it could get.
“Just a little farther,” said the stranger, eyes wide with anticipation.
Ugly gave him a warning glare: please shut up.
On her other side, Niibin noticed. “Go away, ghost man,” she whispered, to the empty patch of snow on Ugly’s far side.
“Just ignore him,” replied Ugly.
“No, you ignore him. If he scares away another—”
The rabbit heard them. It must have heard them from the start, but now it knew they weren’t leaving, and were probably watching it. It tipped its head at an angle as it listened more carefully, and Ugly and Niibin both held their breaths, waiting anxiously for something to break, one way or another.
The stranger held his breath too, leaning even closer to Ugly to say: “It’ll work. Don’t worry.”
She wanted to swat him away, but couldn’t afford to move. A drip of meltwater ran off the end of her nose. She let it.
The rabbit’s ears twitched as it tried to decide how to react. And then, deciding it didn’t like the atmosphere it was stuck in, it turned to go—
And the trap sprang, wrapping it in a tight net.
Niibin let out a joyous squeal as they leapt from their hiding spot—Ugly half-falling on her dead foot, pins and needles shooting up to the knee—and raced into the clearing, watching the rabbit thrash around inside the net, up around eye level. It wasn’t getting away. Not any time soon.
“It actually worked!” she laughed. “A trap worked!”
“It was only a matter of time,” said Ugly, wrapping an arm around Niibin’s shoulder. “We had all the pieces, we just needed the moment to be right.”
Niibin gave her a sideways scowl. “That makes it sound like luck.”
“Mmhmm,” said Ugly.
“It was skill.”
“Mmhmm,” said Ugly.
“You’re awful. I’m not sharing my rabbit with you. You can keep eating berries.”
She reached up with her knife to cut the trap down, but hesitated. The rabbit was still thrashing, still trying to get free. Niibin lowered the knife, took a step back.
Ugly watched her for a moment, then asked: “What’s wrong?”
“Once I cut it down, it’s over. Months of effort, just…done. The end of an era.” She looked down at the knife in her hand. “The whole time I’ve been out here, I’ve been waiting for this moment. My whole life has been defined by this moment. The anticipation of this moment. And now that it’s here…”
“You’re afraid of it getting away?” asked Ugly.
“Yeah,” nodded Niibin. “The moment, not the rabbit. Alright, also the rabbit. Mostly the rabbit.” She handed the knife over. “You do it.”
Ugly looked at the knife in her hand, then at the rabbit. She had to kill it first. Let it bleed out, then cut it down. A simple enough action, but for whatever reason, the knife felt so heavy in her hand, like she was incapable of holding onto it much longer, let alone do what she knew she had to do. Her mouth had gone dry. Her palm was slick against the worn wooden handle, though her fingers were numb with cold, and the closer she looked at the blade, the more it seemed to be looking back—like a word on the tip of her tongue that she was afraid to say out loud.
“I don’t want to remember,” she said, looking at the sharp edge of the blade, pitted and scratched from a winter of half-baked survival. “I mean…I think I don’t want to remember.”
Niibin frowned. “I’d tell you to close your eyes when you do it, but I think we both know that would end badly.”
“No, I mean—”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” sighed Niibin, decidedly not making eye contact. “But the thing is, Ugly, whether you’re a singer or a princess or a researcher or whatever you may be—you don’t belong here. Somewhere in that head of yours is a purpose, and you can’t avoid it forever.”
“I’m not avoiding it. I tried to remember. I did. But maybe the memories are staying buried for a reason. Maybe my purpose is something I need to forget.”
“Aye,” said the stranger. “Maybe it is.”
Ugly pointed at the stranger. “He thinks so, too.”
Niibin blew out her cheeks. “He’s imaginary, though.”
Ugly looked at the knife in her hand. The weight of it. The darkness to it, to her when she held it. Something about it felt wrong, and she was desperate to never find out what that meant.
“What if I don’t want to go back?” she asked, quietly.
Niibin was struggling with something just as heavy as Ugly. She’d been alone out here for a long time before Ugly came along—long enough to name a bear—and every word she was about to say would be pushing her only friend out the door. She reluctantly turned to face her friend—and they were friends, after all this—and touched Ugly’s arm lightly as a sign of uncertain camaraderie. Ugly smiled at her, letting hope creep into her expression just a little.
“Maybe you shouldn’t go back,” said Niibin, delicately. “Maybe you should. The problem is, Ugly, you don’t know which answer is right. I can’t let you throw away a life you might have wanted.”
“But—”
“My people have a saying: ‘Every sunset is the same, except the one you didn’t watch’.”
“What does that—”
“It means you can’t skip the details. You can’t assume, based on a few clues here and there, that you know what you’re running from. I can’t let you stay until your decision is an informed decision.”
Ugly rolled the words around in her head, feeling something close to betrayal, mixed in with despair. When she’d woken up, she’d been so desperate to remember who she was, and why she was…but as she’d gotten to know Niibin, it had felt like she was being given a chance to leave a different version of herself behind. A chance to start over, and do it right. She didn’t especially like the idea of starving to death, foraging for berries and failing to catch rabbits in half-baked traps…but it was a life she understood. The alternative was…terrifying.
“Alright,” she said, nodding faintly. “Alright. You’re right. I’m—”
“I’m not trying to—”
“No, you’re right,” said Ugly. “As soon as I’m ready, I’ll—”
“I’m not saying you have to go now,” Niibin said, reaching for Ugly’s arm again.
Ugly pulled away. “It’s fine,” she said, then turned the knife around in her hand and plunged it into the rabbit, killing it instantly.
It was quick. Quicker than she’d have thought she knew how to be. The thrashing stopped, and the net hung still, and a little warm blood ran down the blade to her knuckles and steamed there in the cold.
She waited for the wrongness to come. It didn’t. There was nothing at all—just a dead rabbit, and the drip of the trees, and her own hand, perfectly steady.
They didn’t say a word the whole way back to the cave. Every few minutes, Niibin would clear her throat like she had something to say, but then fail to follow through. The closest she’d come to outright communication was when she’d stepped in a slushy puddle, and started muttering about cold feet for the next ten minutes—her moccasins had been patched and re-patched all winter, and nothing she stuffed in them kept the wet out anymore. But that was to herself. She and Ugly were in totally different worlds.
But in Ugly’s world, there was the stranger.
“She didn’t say you had to go,” he said, pacing them easily, like the terrain around him didn’t matter at all. Where they sank to the ankle in rotten snow, he left no mark. “She isn’t kicking you out. All she said is you have to remember first, and then decide to stay.”
He swung around a tree, winking at her as she approached. “And who’s to say your memory has to be true? It’s not like she’d know, is it? Tell her you remember, then. Something sad, and tragic. Something worth runnin’ away from. An abusive lover, maybe?”
Ugly shivered at the words, but she didn’t know why.
“Alright,” said the stranger. “Maybe not that. Oh! A dead lover. Shot dead by the man who left you bleeding in the snow.”
She felt ill. She felt so ill, and she couldn’t even comprehend why. Was he telling her her own truth? Did he somehow know what had happened to her? Had he been keeping it from her all this time?
“That’s a good reason to start fresh,” he said. “Get away, someplace new. Somewhere west.”
She glared at him. He was always going on about leaving, about running away, but he never said why. Was that it? Was she running away from the man who’d killed her lover? Why couldn’t she remember? The lover, the shooter—anyone! It was all so infuriating, and it was made worse by the stranger’s apparent delight in dancing around the truth.
He looked into the sky, like he was navigating by the stars that weren’t out yet. “This is west enough, I suppose. Further west, at least.”
Further west. Further west than what? West of wherever she’d started, which meant she hadn’t started here at all. She’d come from somewhere east—somewhere the sun came up—and whatever she was running from was still back there.
Ugly’s heart stopped. She hurried forward, grabbing Niibin by the arm and spinning her around. “What’s east?” she asked. “East of here. What’s east of where we are?”
Niibin winced, plainly not wanting to be put on the spot. “I’m not big on geography per se, so—”
“Anything,” pleaded Ugly. “What’s the first thing you think of when you think ‘east’?”
“I mean…” Niibin said, screwing up her face. “There’s a lot that’s east. Like Québec, or Montréal, or—” Her face dropped suddenly as something caught her eye: “Uh oh.”
She dashed off, leaving Ugly behind, leaping over thawing streams and fallen trees to close the last few yards to their cave, where—
Ugly saw it too, and ran to catch up with Niibin. The cave sat low in a shelf of grey rock under a stand of hemlock, its mouth no wider than a cart, and all winter there’d been a sheet hung over it from a pole wedged across the top—the thing that kept the warmth in on the cold nights. Behind it was everything Niibin owned in the world: the furs and blankets they slept in, the cooking pot, the jars and bottles she’d scavenged and lined up along a ledge in the rock like a shopkeeper’s window. Now the sheet was torn down, lying in a muddy heap in the slush. That meant one of two things: either someone from the outside had found their hiding spot, and was rummaging around…or it meant Thunderbum was awake.
Niibin skidded to a stop to the side of the opening, laying flat against the rock while she caught her breath and readied her knife. Ugly hurried until she was on the other side of the opening, ears working hard to hear sounds from inside—one way or another, she had to be ready.
A quick gesture toward the ground from Niibin and Ugly had a better idea of the situation: the snow right outside the cave was flattened and soggy, but there were no tracks coming from afar. That meant they weren’t dealing with dangerous humans—only a dangerous bear.
She glanced over at Niibin again, mouthed: What should we do?
Niibin gave the look of a woman who was out of her depth. She shrugged urgently and mouthed back: Don’t get eaten.
Just then, they heard the sound of snapping wood, and breaking glass. Ugly knew what it was instantly, but Niibin’s expression said what it meant: Thunderbum was destroying their belongings. Niibin’s belongings.
Ugly shook her head as a warning: don’t do it, but Niibin was already committed. She crept around the edge, into the cave and, cupping her hands to her mouth, called out: “Hey ugly!” Then, sideways: “Sorry, not you. The bear.” Then, back into the cave: “We’re out here!”
There was a low grunting sound inside—so deep that it made their lungs rumble—but Thunderbum didn’t seem interested in what she had to say. More things broke, and Ugly heard the sound of fabric tearing. Niibin was torn between the horror of losing the few things she had that weren’t broken traps and numbing berries—the blankets, furs and knick-knacks she’d accumulated along the way—counterbalanced by the terror of being killed by a bear.
After another crunch of glass, she made up her mind which would hurt more.
She picked up a stick from the ground and whacked it on the cave walls, shouting out a strange and deranged noise that was impossible to ignore. Ugly motioned for Niibin to join her around the side, to take cover, but she wouldn’t stop. She kept going, peering into the darkness, trying to see—
Thunderbum emerged so suddenly, Niibin fell back into the snow with a crash. The black bear had always been large to them, but out in the open, standing at his full height, he towered over them like a mountain of muscle and fur. Up close, in daylight, he was nothing like the sleeping heap at the back of the cave. His coat was matted and dull, hanging loose on him where the winter had burned the fat away, and the stink of the den rolled off him in a wave—musk and rot and months of his own sleep. His muzzle was grey at the tip, and wet, and his breath came out of him in clouds. Niibin was sprawled out beneath him as he let out a furious roar, arms raised, teeth bared, ready to fill his stomach after a long winter’s rest. And he’d found his first meal.
From around the side of the cave mouth, Ugly reached for Niibin—but she was too far, too trapped to get close. She was frozen in fear, staring up at the last thing she’d ever see, mouth hanging open to scream, but unable to make a sound. One of his forepaws came down in the snow beside her head, claws as long as fingers, and she didn’t even turn to look at it. She just lay there, hands still clutching the stick, waiting.
Ugly’s heartbeat pounded in her ears so loudly it made her head spin—
—and then somehow, for some reason, her body went calm.
“No,” warned the stranger, somewhere nearby. “Don’t.”
She pulled the dead rabbit out, holding it aloft, and stepped out into the open. The blood on the rabbit’s fur was still wet, filling the air with a metallic smell that was impossible to ignore—and impossible for Thunderbum to resist.
He turned to face her, nose working hard to be sure he sensed what he thought he did.
“Come on, you big stinky oaf!” called Ugly, taking a step back. “Come and get it!”
“Ugly, don’t!” gasped Niibin.
“Free food!” said Ugly, backing up further, to give the bear more of a hunt. It didn’t occur to her—not in that strange, cool calm—that every step she gave him was open snow she’d have to outrun him across. The calm wasn’t thinking. It was only doing.
For a second, Thunderbum just wavered there like he wasn’t sure which snack he wanted more. Did he know Ugly was holding a dead rabbit, or did he think it was her blood he was smelling? Would he bother giving chase when he had Niibin right there in front of him?
And then he made up his mind: he dropped to all fours and charged at Ugly. She turned to run, the fear she should have been feeling all along suddenly flooding over her like a tidal wave. There was so little space between them, there was no way she could outrun him. She scrambled through the snow as fast as she could manage, but knew in her bones it was futile.
She wound back to throw the rabbit into the forest—maybe far enough to buy her and Niibin a few more seconds to—
She heard him behind her, close, the crunch of the crust giving under his weight, and felt the air move against the back of her neck—
His paw hit the side of her head so hard, the whole world went black.