“Winter’s coming,” he said tersely, even though it seemed to me that the sunny autumn was lasting forever. When I got back to sleep, I dreamed of two people frozen to death in their single bed, locked together in the shape of a double S. When the spring sunshine crept under the door, the bodies defrosted and melted. An unknown man came upon the cabin, hacking his way in with an axe through the stems of a thorny rose which bound the door shut. I saw his hand, rough and hairy, reach out to pull back the sleeping bags, revealing faceless pulp, like the slippery guts of fish. I woke sweating and terrified at the image and the feeling I was left with, but even worse was the realization a few seconds later that no man would ever fight his way into die Hütte to find our decomposing bodies; there was no one left in the world but the two of us.
My father made me stop playing the piano and together we carried the bow saw, which lived on a hook in the rafters next to the scythe, into the forest. My father had tensioned its wooden frame and sharpened its teeth with the file until they shone with vicious intent. When he balanced it on end, the saw stood as high as my shoulders. We worked on cutting the forest’s fallen branches into manageable sizes—running the full length of the blade through them, moving the saw backward and forward between us. We talked about all sorts of things while we worked. But often my father used our time together in the forest as a lesson.
“Always use the full length of the saw.”
“Always use the full length of the saw,” I repeated mechanically, without waiting for his question.
“This blade has ten teeth per inch, but there are others in the chest for finer work if you ever need them,” he said.
I was concentrating on our rhythm, comforting in its regularity. I breathed in the autumn smells of humus, fern, and fresh wood sap. I watched the sun freckle the forest floor, and when a patch of warmth found me I lifted my face up toward it.
“Punzel! Pay attention. This is important for you to know.”
“Why?”
“In case I’m not here and you need to cut wood.”
I laughed. “But you’ll always be here.”
He carried on sawing while I sat on the thin end of a branch to steady it and to keep the cut open, so the blade would move without snagging.
“What if I have an accident? Retreaters need to know these things.”
“I’d rather be a survivalist,” I said. “In a bug-out location.” I rolled the words around my mouth to see how they sounded. I hoped they would make my father smile, but there was just the slightest of pauses in his sawing and he didn’t look up. “That’s what Oliver said,” I continued.
“What else do you know about Oliver?”
“Nothing,” I answered, remembering the conversation in my bedroom just before he had slammed the front door.
“Oliver said a lot of ridiculous things.” My father pushed and pulled the blade faster, head down. “He said he was a Retreater, a survivalist, but it turned out Oliver Hannington was interested in other things and too pathetic to even try it.”
“Not like us, Papa,” I said, but he couldn’t have heard me, because he continued speaking.
“He liked to talk the talk, Oliver, but he didn’t walk the walk.” On every “talk” and “walk” my father pushed forward, hard, so the saw ate deep into the wood and I had to grip tighter to keep my balance on the bouncing end. “The cabin is in the perfect location,” my father said in an accent which copied Oliver’s disturbingly. “Fully equipped, James, stores of food for the winter.” He stopped imitating Oliver’s voice and continued speaking. “He showed me die Hütte on the map, told me about the fresh running water and herds of deer; it was even supposed to have a root cellar and an air rifle tucked out of sight on one of the roof joists. He told me that all I would need would be the gun pellets. So I bought boxes of pellets, boxes and boxes of pellets, but no bloody gun.” My father was panting and his words came out breathless and jerky. He wasn’t talking to me any more. “Oliver had never bloody set eyes on the place.”
“But if we hadn’t been here when the rest of the world disappeared, we would have died too. So really, we should be grateful,” I said.
My father stopped sawing, his expression vacant as if my words were taking time to go in. He turned his face away from me just as the branch complained and split apart, and I landed on the ground with a bump.
For the rest of the day, my father pulled and rolled branches to the cabin so we could chop them up with the axe. I collected bundles of kindling, which we tied together with home-made cord and my father attached to my shoulders. I staggered back, remembering an illustration from a book of Christmas carols: a ragged man bent double under his load of winter fuel.
The day after, outside die Hütte, my father balanced one log on top of another and gave me a lesson in how to use the axe.
“Watch, Punzel: right hand near the head, left hand at the bottom of the handle. Swing up”—he hoisted the axe above his head—“let the weight take it forward, and your right hand will slide down to join your left.” The blade flew, its own momentum cleaving the top log in two. He crouched behind me, and with four hands on the axe we tried it together.
Remembering the rabbit, I shut my eyes as the tool swung crookedly and wedged itself in the bottom log.
“Keep your eyes open,” he said, and I wondered how he knew when he had been standing behind me. “Try again.”
Over and over we swung the axe together until I thought my arms would dislocate from my shoulders.
“I think I can do it by myself now,” I said, although I didn’t mean it and just wanted the job to be over so I could go indoors to play the piano.
“Show me,” he said.
I gripped the axe tight with both hands and, tightening my stomach, swung it up over my head, shut my eyes, and let it fall forward. When I opened them, the top log was still in place, and the axe head was again deep in the bottom log. This time I couldn’t even wiggle it loose.
My father laughed. “Maybe next year,” he said.
We stacked hundreds of logs around the exterior walls. By the time we had finished sawing and chopping, they covered all four walls, right up to the eaves; only the door and the window with its tent curtain were left uncovered. My father put me on his shoulders for the last two rows, passing up one log at a time. He was delighted with our second layer of insulation.
When we had as much wood as my father’s calculations said we needed, we worked on gathering food to store for the winter. We smoked fish, squirrel, and rabbit meat over an outdoor fire which we kept alight day and night. And then we hung the pieces, as brown and flat as old kippers, from the rafters, between strings of dried mushrooms and berries and upside-down bouquets of herbs until the roof space was swathed with macabre decorations. Near the river we found a boggy area where a bed of bulrushes grew. We pulled them up, eating the stalks and storing the roots in the tool chest, hoping they might keep like potatoes. We spent days raking through the leaves in the forest, searching for mushrooms, until at bedtime, when I shut my eyes, patterns of brown and orange leaves danced behind the lids. My father had an eye for mushrooms, and while I was bored after twenty minutes, he returned with oyster, hedgehog, ceps, chanterelles, and beefsteak. There was too much food for us to keep up with the preserving, so we ate the rest fresh. Every meal was a feast, as though we were fattening ourselves up for hibernation, and all of it was delicious. We were healthy, plump, and well fed. I lay in bed, looking up at the dark shapes dangling from the ceiling, thinking about the hard work it had taken to gather and preserve them, and I was sure my father must now be satisfied.