Drop City

over, his whole body jolted with the shock of it. He was all ice inside, the liquid supercooled in that flask beneath the trees till it was a new kind of death he was pouring down his throat, and he only wanted it out of him. It wouldn't come. He was on his hands and knees, gagging--gagging and coughing and retching--the fire laughing in his face, Joe Bosky slumped silent on a throne of spruce cuttings, and he kept gagging till all that cellular _material__ that constituted the lining of his pharynx and esophagus sloughed loose and the tensed muscles of his limbs just couldn't keep him off the ground any longer.

Drop City
    32
    The first night on the trail they camped in a cabin that seemed to have been generated out of the earth itself, no different qualitatively from a cluster of boulders or a stand of trees. It had a shed roof, one sharp slope from the high end to the low, and the battens of ancient sod that composed it had sprouted birch and aspen and a looping tangle of stripped canes and leafless branches. There was a cache in the foreground, from which a hindquarter of moose wrapped in burlap hung rigid on a strand of wire, and in the flux of the moonlight it could have been something else altogether, something grimmer, darker, and Marco had to look twice before he was convinced. The dogs had no qualms, though--they made a dash for the place and then sat impatiently in their traces out front of the cabin while the moon flashed pictures of their breath rising over the dark hunched shapes of them.
    He could see the doghouses now, strung out beneath the trees, crude boxes knocked together from notched logs and roofed with symmetrical mounds of snow-covered straw. There was a hill behind the cabin, soft with reflected light, a creek in front of it. Everything was still. If you didn't know the cabin was there you could have passed within a hundred feet of it and never seen a thing, except maybe for a glint of sunlight off the panes of the single window--in the right season, that is, and at the right time of day.
    They'd taken turns riding the runners and jogging beside the sled, and he'd jogged the last mile or so and was sweating inside his parka, a bad thing, a dangerous thing, because the sweat would chill you to a fatal point if you didn't get yourself in front of a fire as soon as was reasonably convenient. “What do you think the temperature is?” he'd asked Sess half an hour earlier as they tossed the last of the five stiff-frozen martens they'd caught into the sled and rebaited the trap, and Sess had grinned and knocked the ice out of his mustache with a mittened hand. “I guess about minus forty,” he said.
    There was a thermometer nailed over the doorframe of the cabin, and after he'd helped Sess stake out the dogs and toss them each a plank of dried salmon, he consulted it in the pale lunar light. The mercury was fixed in the null space between the hash marks for minus forty and minus forty-two. “Good guess,” he said, as they pushed their way into the dark vacancy of the cabin, its smells--rancid bait, lamp oil, spruce, fish, the intestinal secrets of lynx, marten, fox--stilled by the hand of the untenanted cold.
    “Hell,” Sess said, “it just dropped an extra degree in the meantime--but let's get a fire going and get comfortable, what do you say?”
    “Sounds good. What can I do to help?”
    They were standing in darkness, in the chill, and then Sess had the lamp lit and the cramped clutter of the place took on definition. “Nothing,” he said. “Just sit and make yourself comfortable.” Marco sat, shivering now, and watched as the kindling in the sheet-metal stove took the light from the match and the frozen kettle appeared atop it and Sess bent to retrieve a blackened pot from the earthen floor and swing its weight to the stove in a single easy motion that culminated with the sharp resistant clank of metal on metal. “Keep it simple,” Sess said, “that's my motto.”
    They both moved in close to the stove as the fire caught and rose in a roar of sucked air and the room came to life with a slow tick and release. Smells came back. The kettle jolted and rattled, seeking equilibrium. “What's in the pot?” Marco wanted to know, and he'd never been hungrier in his life, in need of sugar, of fat, lard, sticks of butter, the basic grease of life, and no wonder the Eskimos subsisted on seal blubber--you really had to readjust your carburetor up here.
    “Moose stew.” Sess was fumbling