by Paul Doiron
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For my uncle Augie
Tell me this is the future,
I won’t believe you.
Tell me I’m living,
I won’t believe you.
—LOUISE GLÜCK
1
The hill is steep here, and there is no guardrail above the river. I think I am being careful, keeping a light touch on the wheel, feathering the brakes. But then I come around the curve and see the spiked objects scattered across the asphalt in my headlights. They look like barbaric versions of children’s jacks. Or medieval caltrops laid on battlefields to maim horses—except that these hunks of metal have been welded from box nails and placed here for the malign purpose of blowing out automobile tires.
The front wheels of the Jeep run over the first of them before I can react, and the sound is like two muskets being fired in tandem. The wolf dog in his enormous crate in the rear lets loose a strangled yelp. And now the back tires are bursting, too, and the steering wheel tugs one way, then the other, and when I pump the brake pedal nothing happens because I’m going too fast. I am over the edge before I can exhale.
I feel the drop in my stomach. The high beams touch the frozen river a microsecond before the vehicle itself does, crashing into and through the ice with such violence that the engine block lurches under the hood. The airbag bursts like an outsized puffball in my face. My lungs let go of their oxygen. And icy water rushes up around my legs to pierce my groin.
The cold delivers a body blow, the assault fiercest upon my heart. My breathing becomes rapid-fire, insufficient to my lungs’ needs.
Because fear moves faster than thought, I experience the panicked recognition of what has happened—of what is happening—as scalding heat along my scalp. Then neurons flash inside my brain. And I am fully awake to my predicament.
My first thought is of Shadow, trapped inside his kennel.
The danger to me registers as a secondary concern—except as a scolding voice inside my head.
Bowditch, you idiot.
I’d taken the blind curve too fast. Should have known better than to pump the brakes when the tires detonated. Shouldn’t have tried steering through the blowout. Not that my mistakes matter now.
Another nanosecond passes before I realize that the upended Compass hasn’t broken entirely through the ice but is stuck, half in and half out of the Androscoggin River. I am staring down, past the bobbing airbag and the spiderweb cracks in the windshield, into shimmering brown water illuminated by halogen bulbs.
Cold crushes my chest. I slam my left fist on the controls in the door to bring the windows down, but I am too late. The electrical system shorts out, and darkness floods in as absolute as the river.
Just sounds now: the water sloshing, the thrashing of Shadow in his cage, the crunch of ice, my own overloud heart.
At a course I took with the Michigan State Police—part of my continuing ed as a Maine game warden—the students practiced escaping a sinking vehicle. But I was surrounded by rescue divers that day, and the water was as warm as a bathtub. It surprises me that memories of that distant exercise still reside in my muscles. I’m not making decisions exactly. My hand finds the seat belt release button. The buckle snaps back, and I fall forward into the flood.
Half blind, I twist and turn, trying to get my legs out from under the airbag and steering wheel, and knock my kneecap on something hard. I find my face above the surface for the briefest of moments. Sinuses burning, I snort out water.
The Jeep is settling as the ice cracks beneath its weight. I glance overhead at the lift gate and see a grayish haze. I am looking through the back window into an unaccountably pale sky.
I grab the headrests and pull myself backward, halfway between the front seats, but something catches at my waist as I try to kick-swim through the gap.
The gun in its holster on my belt.
I use most of the muscles in my upper body to push against the seats, feel something give, and then I am through, the rising tide close behind.
High-pitched barks alternating with snarls—cries of fear and rage.
Shadow’s enormous kennel is made of rotomolded plastic, double-walled and crushproof. I bought it on the strength of an internet video that showed the box resisting a shotgun blast from a distance of ten feet. It has lived up to its warranty. The walls are intact; the gate remains shut. Despite the violence of the fall and Shadow’s desperate efforts to break free, the straps securing it to the frame haven’t given an inch.
Climbing into the back, across the folded-down seats, requires awkward contortions. The same web belts that kept the crate from coming loose during the impact have become an actual web, blocking my passage. I reach for the folding knife in the front pocket of my jeans.
The Gerber 06 Auto is no gentleman’s folder but a massive hunk of machined metal: an aluminum and steel bar containing a razor-sharp switchblade for use in combat. It weighs 7.1 ounces. The drop point blade, serrated at the hilt, is forged from S30V steel alloy and measures 3.6 inches from tip to finger guards. My friend Billy Cronk carried this knife on his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and survived while thousands of his fellow warriors perished. Although Billy never said so, I believe the blade may have taken lives. He gave it to me as a gift on my thirtieth birthday. His nickname for it was “The Beast.”
When I push the oversized button on the handle, the blade swings open. It doesn’t spring from the tip like a switchblade from a 1950s movie. The serrations are sharper than wolf’s teeth; I saw easily through the nylon straps.
But now the untethered box lurches. One hundred and forty pounds of drowning canine causes it to move. And at first I can’t get past. Then the crate bucks again, creating an opening, and I seize my chance to swim through.
I reach down for my sidearm to blow out the back window. My fingers slap my side expecting to close around the grip of my SIG. But I find—nothing. Straining to squeeze between the seats, I have dislodged the paddle holster. It was designed to slide in and out of my waistband without my having to remove my belt.
The light inside the Jeep is all but gone. The last pocket of air is closing. I need to break the glass.
Then it hits me: I’ve been holding the tool I need the whole time. Opposite the blade of the tactical knife, at the end of the pommel, is a strike point, which is a fancy name for a window smasher.
Now I am completely underwater, and my lungs are burning like I’ve inhaled chlorine. I drive the strike point into the window. The glass explodes into shimmering bits that catch light as they drift past in the coffee-dark current.
As soon as I undo the latch, the wolf bursts through the door of the kennel. Swimming, a foot catches my hand, and I feel a searing pain as his curved claws rake my skin.
I let out a gasp and the last of my precious air bubbles away.
For an instant, I am paralyzed again, unable to think or act. The lack of oxygen is popping my eyeballs from my skull. I don’t recognize
the black ribbons before my eyes as the blood from my hand.
I manage a few lame kicks, and I am sucked through the broken window as if by the current, although it’s just the weight of the Jeep descending to the rock-tumbled bottom.
Training to become a game warden, I learned that a corpse will sink before it rises, that the human body loses buoyancy after our last breath leaves us. Half-dead, I float. With almost no help from my dangling arms and legs, I rise toward the surface, only to knock my skull against the drifting ice. I have been carried past the hole made by the Jeep.
All day, I’d been following the half-frozen Androscoggin, observing the wide river with no expectation of having to rescue myself from it. I recall stretches of open water disappearing and reappearing from beneath vast silvery sheets of ice. I recall steam rising, because the air is so much colder, through the ragged gaps.
I’m trapped and out of oxygen and caught by the current.
Swept along by the river, I repeatedly bump my head against the impenetrable ceiling. Even if I had the strength to scramble along, feeling for a hole to admit me into the December night, I probably wouldn’t find one.
This is the way it ends for me, I think.
Maybe Shadow found his way out. It makes it easier to believe he did.
My eyes close.
My bobbing skull strikes the ice again, bounces off, rises one last time. And somehow my face has found its way above the surface. I choke out river water, take the biggest breath I have ever taken, and look up at snowflakes blowing like feathers across the sky.
2
Early that morning, my best friend brought his daughter to my house to see the wolf.
Billy Cronk lived with his large family in a small house down the road from mine, in Ducktrap Village. I had asked him to help me load the crate into my Jeep because it was a two-man job. I had also wanted to ask his advice about a sensitive personal matter. He had surprised me by bringing along little Emma.
When I’d first met Billy years ago in the black forest of Down East Maine, I was convinced I’d run into a lost descendant of the Norsemen who had briefly invaded North America during the time of Leif Eriksson. He stood six feet five inches tall with a golden beard and blond braids. And he possessed some of the weirdest eyes I’d ever seen in a person—the disquieting ice blue of a sled dog. That day like most days, he’d worn a hunting knife in a sheath on his belt that could have served most people as a machete.
The uneasiness I’d felt in his presence was more than a reaction to his intimidating appearance. Billy had served as a light infantryman during some of the most brutal battles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and carried himself with the perpetual alertness of a professional soldier. He was a man who had killed other men, and violence followed him like a shadow. I’d once watched a barroom packed with drunk loggers and hunting guides—some of the meanest brawlers in the North Woods—fall silent when he stepped through the door. Some of these roughnecks even slipped out the rear exit rather than cross his path leaving.
Billy Cronk was no gentle giant.
The man was brutal against anyone who threatened his family or his friends. A year after we’d become close, I had occasion to witness the violence of which he was capable, and what I’d seen had chilled me to the marrow. Based in part on my testimony, he’d gone to prison for the crimes I’d watched him commit. He was only free thanks to a questionable pardon issued by our blowhard ex-governor.
Which wasn’t to say that there was no kindness in the man.
He wrote heartfelt (if poorly composed) poems about summer sunrises and migrating monarch butterflies. He wept openly when he listened to Cape Breton fiddle music. He made a quiet practice of rescuing and rehabilitating injured animals. His current charge was a blue jay, blind in one eye, he’d nicknamed Racket.
Given this secret tenderness, it was hardly a surprise that his youngest child, his only daughter, had made him her slave.
Emma was even blonder than her father, platinum-white, with her mom’s rosy complexion and thoughtful gaze. While her four brothers were all husky for their ages, Emma Cronk was almost elfin in her smallness. The fairylike quality was reinforced by her current obsession with the Harry Potter books. This morning, she was wearing a black wizard’s robe her mother had sewn for her out of fabric bought from one of the local dollar stores. Pink snow boots peeked out from beneath the salt-stained fringe.
Upon entering my drafty, unswept house, she announced, “You don’t have a Christmas tree!”
She wasn’t any blunter than other kids. It was just that as an unmarried man of thirty-one, I found most children to be discombobulating.
“I’ve been busy, Emma. I haven’t had time.”
“But you don’t have any decorations at all, Uncle Mike.” She emphasized her words with the wand Billy had carved for her. “How will Santa leave you presents if you don’t have a Christmas tree?”
It was December 21, the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. The holiday was less than a week away. It seemed too late for a tree, especially since I would be traveling for Christmas—although I wasn’t yet sure of my destination. That particular conundrum was what I’d wanted to discuss with Emma’s father.
“I don’t want presents,” I said, squatting down to her height. “I have everything I need.”
Her eyes bugged out. “What?”
Emma Cronk delighted in gifts. She delighted in making lists of gifts she wanted. She delighted in tearing open gifts with puppylike eagerness. She delighted in unwrapping other people’s gifts, not always with their permission.
“Uncle Mike will get a tree,” said Billy in his bearish growl. “Don’t you worry, Emma.”
“Well, he’d better!”
I moved to ease her dismay by making a cup of hot chocolate.
“Your dad and I need to talk outside for a few minutes,” I said. “Would you like me to put on the TV?”
Emma, in her tiny voice, said she’d prefer to write, thank you. She produced a little journal and pen from the pocket of her robe.
“What are you writing?”
“Spells.”
Billy and I took our coffee mugs onto the porch, overlooking the wooded enclosure where the wolf lived.
“Do her spells work?” I asked him.
“The crazy thing is I think they do,” he said, breathing steam from his mouth. “Aimee had the flu, and it went right away after Em cast one of her ’chantments. Now she’s working on making it snow for Christmas.”
The dawning sky was clear enough that I could see Venus. “There’s none in the forecast.”
“Those weathermen have no idea what they’re up against in Emma.”
It was past seven, but the sun hadn’t cleared the treetops. The understory was a study in sepia: drab alders, gray maples, fossil birches. We’d scared a flock of pine siskins from the feeder tray, and the birds now chided us from the nearest branches, their calls hoarse and buzzing.
The morning air had a snap to it, but Billy didn’t seem to feel the cold, any more than a grizzly would. He wore only a shawl-neck sweater over a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and his usual neoprene hunting boots. And that long knife on his belt, of course.
For my part, I’ve always subscribed to the maxim “There’s no bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.”
My outfit consisted of a hooded down-filled parka over a commando sweater, over my government-issue ballistic vest, over a merino wool base layer. Beneath my blue jeans (admittedly not a good choice for a day with a forecast high of twenty-five degrees), I wore merino long johns and heavy wool socks. My boots were specially designed by L.L.Bean for use by Maine game wardens in all weather: waterproof, hard-toed, insulated with PrimaLoft, and fashioned with the stickiest lug soles I’d ever worn.
On my belt I wore my badge on a clip and my service weapon, a SIG Sauer P239, in its paddle holster. I’d dropped a couple of magazines in the pockets of my parka almost without thinking. As always, I wore my father’s Viet
nam dog tags around my neck and carried the push-button knife Billy had given me.
I figured I would be spending the day in the Jeep and had little need for gear beyond what I carried in the government vehicle.
I leaned against the porch rail. “Maybe she can try bewitching my new neighbor.”
“The lawyer who bought the land across the river? Mr. Purple Polo? I thought he was just a summer complaint.”
It was an impolitic term for a second-home owner. The downside to living in Vacationland was that we year-rounders found ourselves outnumbered during the warmer months—and forced to reckon with the economic carrots and sticks wielded by our fair-weather neighbors.
“He claims no one told him when he bought the place that there was a wolf across the river,” I said. “He and his wife came up for leaf season and heard Shadow howl, and it just about froze their blood. The sheriff explained the situation, but it didn’t satisfy Mr. Purple Polo. He and his wife showed up here last week in their BMW X5 to have a look at the beast and threaten me with a lawsuit.”
Billy scratched his beard, which might have been woven from gold and copper wires. “Shadow’s not a beast. He’s a dog.”
“He’s a wolf dog. Recently living in the wild.”
A brave siskin returned to the feeder and cracked a sunflower seed with his sharp bill.
Billy lowered his voice to keep from scaring off the songbird. “Shadow doesn’t budge when you go inside his pen. He lets you scratch his ears.”
I didn’t mention that every time I reached out to pet the wolf, I wondered if I would draw back a bleeding stump.
“He’s not tame, Billy. Maybe he was once, but he won’t ever be again. I made a commitment to take care of him, no matter what. I heard at the Lincolnville General Store that my neighbors have a history of suing people who irritate them. They know most of us locals can’t afford the cost of hiring attorneys—”
My friend rested a hand on the hilt of his knife. “Do you want me to go see them for you?”
