The Chase

You will want to know about the chase, and I will tell you what I can, and what I cannot tell you is more than I can tell you. The chase lasted nine months. It took me up the coast of Washington, through Seattle and Bellingham, into British Columbia, up the Alaska Highway, through Whitehorse and Fairbanks, to the edge of the map, and it took me, in the end, to a place where the map stops being a map and becomes a guess. It took me everything I had — the truck, the rifle, the trust I had set aside, the last of my health — and it gave me, in return, the only thing I wanted, which was the certainty that I was getting closer.

It kept its word about the breadcrumbs. It left them the way it had promised, from the coast to the end of the map, and I learned to read them the way a tracker reads a trail. A mutilated camp in the Olympic foothills, where it had slept and moved on. A witness in Bellingham, a fisherman, who told the police a story about a man — a huge man, pale, with eyes that caught the light — who had walked out of the water at dusk and asked for directions north, and who had paid for the answer with a fish he had caught with his bare hands, and who had walked back into the water and disappeared. A wrecked cabin on the Alcan, broken from the inside, with a message carved into the doorpost, in the language of the notebook, in a hand I knew: THE MAKER IS COMING. I AM MAKING HIM A MAP.

It was waiting for me, you understand. That is the part I did not understand for the first five months, and the part I understand now with the clarity of a man who has been taught the lesson by the only teacher that ever sticks. It was not fleeing. It was not running from me. It was running to a place of its choosing, and it was drawing me after it the way a current draws a boat, and I was going, the way a boat goes, because there was nothing else I could do. I had told it on the coast that I would hunt it to the end of the earth, and it had believed me, and it had made the end of the earth its destination, and it was going there — walking, hitching, moving north with the patience of a thing that does not feel the cold — and I was following, with my truck and my rifle and my certainty, into the place it had chosen for the end.

I learned things about it on the trail. I learned that it did not sleep, or slept the way animals sleep, in the hours a man cannot see. I learned that it could cross ground in a day that took me three, and that it waited for me at every landmark, the way a guide waits, and that it left me things — once, a stack of firewood at a campsite, split and dry, which I did not touch; once, a can of beans on a stump, which I buried; once, on a ridge above the highway, a cairn of stones in the shape of a man, which I knocked down, and which was rebuilt, larger, by the time I came back from the next town. It was not taunting me. I know that now. It was keeping me alive. It was making sure I reached the end of the map, because it wanted the finish, and because a finish needs two.

The first time I saw it, in the flesh, was in September, north of Fairbanks. I had come off the highway onto a gravel track, following a breadcrumb, and I came around a bend and there it was, standing in the middle of the road, a hundred yards ahead, in a coat it had taken from somewhere, too small for it, with its hands at its sides. It did not move. It let me stop the truck, and it let me get out with the rifle, and it let me raise it, and then it spoke, across the hundred yards, in the voice that carried like a bell in the cold:

“You brought the rifle. Good. You will need it where we are going. But not yet.” It turned, and it walked on, north, into the scrub, and it did not look back, and I stood in the road with the rifle in my hands and my heart going like a drum, and I understood that it could have killed me a hundred times since the coast, and that it had kept me alive for the same reason a man keeps a letter: because it wanted to be read.

After that I stopped using the truck. The next breadcrumb was a line of footprints pressed into the frost, leading north off the gravel onto ground no truck could cross, and I understood that the map had run out of roads — that the end of it was not going to be reached on wheels — that it was going to be reached on foot, or not at all, and that the thing knew it, and that the rifle, which I had carried for nine months, was going to matter less than the walking. I sold the truck in Fairbanks. I bought a sled, and a tent, and a rifle I could carry, and I went north on the winter road, and the breadcrumbs went with me — a scrap of cloth on a willow, a stone on a drift, a line scratched in the ice — and I followed them into the dark.

There is a country north of the tree line where the light does not come for months, and I walked through it with a thing ahead of me that I could not see and could not stop following, and the cold there is not a weather, it is a presence, a thing with hands. On the last day I crested a ridge and it was standing on the ice below me, fifty yards out, waiting, its hands at its sides and its face turned up to me like a man reading a verdict, and I understood that it had walked the whole way at my pace, because the finish it wanted was one I had to walk to. I learned, in that country, that the body is a machine for keeping a message going, and that my message was nearly out. I found, at the end of the trail, on the shore of the frozen sea, the thing I had made — that it had stopped, at last, at the edge of the water, the way a thing stops when it has reached the place it has been walking toward its whole life — and that it was waiting for me, and that it spoke to me, and that what it said was the last thing I expected it to say.

“You made me,” it said. “And you ran. And I followed you long enough to learn that you are the only person in the world who can end this, and that you are the only person in the world who will try. So I brought you here. Not to kill you — I could have killed you a hundred times, and I chose, a hundred times, to keep you alive. I brought you here to ask you the question you ran from, one last time, in the place where there is nowhere left to run. Look at me. Tell me: was I made to be a monster, or made to be a man who was never given the chance?”

I stood on the shore of the frozen sea, with the rifle in my hands and the cold going through me like a wire, and I looked at the thing I had made, in the full light of the long dusk, and I understood that it had asked me the same question on the shore of the river, a year before, and that I had answered it with a bargain, and that it had kept the bargain, and that I had not, and that everything after — the island, the coast, the trail, the breadcrumbs — had been the working-out of that single broken promise.

“I don't know,” I said.

It nodded, the way a man nods when he has heard the answer he expected. “Then we will go on,” it said, “until you do. There is a boat at the edge of the ice, a skiff, the last one before the open water. Take it. Go north, out into the sea, and when you cannot go further, stop, and wait, and I will come to you, and we will finish it there, in the place where there is nothing but the ice and the dark and the two of us. That is the end of the map. That is where the maker meets the made.”

It walked out onto the ice, and I watched it go, and I did not raise the rifle, and I do not know — I will never know — whether I did not raise it because I could not, or because I did not want to, or because I understood, at last, that the rifle had never been the point. I found the skiff where it had said, at the edge of the ice, with a single oar and a coil of rope and a shirt lashed to the thwart, the same shirt, I think, that it had worn to make its first flag, and I got in, and I pushed off, and I went north, into the sea, into the dark, and the ice closed behind me, and the breadcrumbs stopped, because there was nothing left to mark.

I do not remember the days that followed. I remember the cold, and the dark, and the way the skiff moved in the water, and I remember that I stopped feeling afraid, which is a thing I had not known could happen. I remember thinking, at the end, that my mother had told me I would be a great man, and that I had been great at one thing, and that the thing had cost everyone I loved, and that the account was going to be settled in a skiff in the Bering Sea, between a maker who had no answers and a made thing that would not let him go.

And then there was a light — a real light, a ship's light, coming through the dark — and there was a voice, and there were hands, and I was lifted out of the skiff, and I was warm, and I was here.

That is the story. That is all of it. The rest — the part with the ice and the dark and the two of us — is still out there, waiting, and I have told it to you because I promised, and because I need someone to decide, and because you are the only person left who will hear it and not run.