Through the field glasses he could see an infant wolf or coyote at the core of this ruck, teeth hooked into its flesh, the two largest wolves rending, angling for leverage, their hackles raised, the bounty shorn between them, snow mottled in purple and red. Core crouched there a long while looking.
He stepped sideways down the escarpment and lost his footing in the snow, then slid several meters until he stopped against a boulder. He sidestepped again the rest of the way until he again met the talus at the plain. There he crouched again and watched through the glasses as the rout of wolves consumed the last of the carcass. He checked to make certain the rifle’s magazine was full, then loaded the first round into the chamber, the safety switch still engaged. He set off slowly across the valley floor, the crimped surface hoar crunching underfoot as if it were in pain. He lost sight of the wolves for a time but knew when the wind shifted west his scent would lift and reach them. He was afraid with every step in this snow, aware of the loaded rifle on his shoulder.
On a healthy day in a healthy land the wolf will run from man, turn at first sniff or glimpse—they want nothing of men. But he’d witnessed them prey on bison and caribou, a brigade of only four grays defeating five hundred pounds of beast with a lethal rack of talons. This was what he wanted for himself, he guessed. Unmanning, dismantling. A body for a body. Why come all this way for a bereaved woman he’d never met? Why then this futile hunt? He thought of the cigarettes and chocolate, of her scent on the sofa.
He could have ended himself at home. A pistol or rope. A razor. Or pills if he lost all nerve. Or his truck running in the shut garage, garden hose duct-taped to the tailpipe. But the almost pleasant nightmare that had played through his mind the night before he received Medora Slone’s letter showed his lax body rent by wolves in an ice-blue scape he could not name. Her letter was the summons he wanted, the sentence that should have come long before. And his daughter in the city here? She was only the daylight reason. He’d never seen a daylight detail that could compete with midnight’s verity. The predawn dark never learned to lie.
He walked on and topped the last small crest in the plain. The wind lifted his scent and in minutes the pack knew he was there. From a quarter mile off the wolves stared, their snouts to the air. Core stopped to stare back. He took several steps and stopped again. They looked stymied by confusion, bereft of their instinct to flee. Still they stared, tails raised. He walked toward them.
And they began their charge then, half head-on, the other half split on each flank. They’d surround him, he knew—he’d seen them do it. He dropped to one knee, pulled off a glove with his teeth, and stayed there in wait with the rifle aimed at the alpha out front, a male no more than six, a hundred and twenty-five pounds—it should have been heavier. Take it down, he knew, and the others would lose their will.
The white dust of trampled snow rose among the pack, glittered in broad frames of sun through an open stitch of cloud. Was this the wolf that took the children of Keelut, this deep silver gray with a gloss of cinnamon and that faultless stride?
He centered the wolf’s skull in the crosshairs of the scope. In a minute or less the pack would be at him, the alpha ripping his throat, the others threshing at his limbs. Laudable teamwork. They knew his disease of spirit, his want of this. Or else in their own disease mistook him for something other than a man.
He imagined slow-motion and no sound. He knew they must be mad to charge him this way, must be only days away from starving. He unsquinted and lowered the rifle, then let them come to him. This was penance, he knew. The silence of his living room, the thought of painting another oil portrait of the female gray he’d shot, the nightly whirring of his microwave—all an anguish he could not abide, already a death. Most of him wanted this reckoning. Some of him didn’t. And he let them come.
When at the last instant he raised the rifle again and fired at the air above the alpha’s skull, the pack halted at the crack of the round and glanced to one another. They knew the sound. When they neither advanced nor retreated, another shot above their skulls scattered them west from where they had come at the far end of the valley. He watched them go. He felt nearly surprised at his lack of tears. For the last year he’d imagined this moment a tearful one.
He stood and watched until they were gone. He’d return to Keelut now. He would tell Medora Slone that the wolves were fled from here. Remind her that what was done could not be undone, that blood does not wash blood. She’d have to live on with her lot. He knew no other way.
* * *
He trekked back through the late morning and afternoon, the day stiffened and already falling toward dark. He rested when he could, a long spell on the talus after the plain. He packed snow into an aluminum thermos and slipped it inside the caribou one-piece—the clothing of Vernon Slone, he could not forget. Then he sat in a crack in a ridge, safe from the wind. He ate the mixed nuts and ribbons of dried meat Medora Slone had also prepared for him. He thought of sleep. When the snow melted in the thermos he drank it, and then he packed more.
The walking began to feel automatic after that, his legs propelled by an engine wholly apart from him. He thought not of warmth or meal, wife or daughter, only of each step and then the next until he forgot to think about even those. And he walked on like that through the scanting light of day.
When he arrived back at the cabin his lungs felt weighted with rime. Medora Slone did not answer his knock. When he entered he saw her bedroom door ajar, clothes spilling from a closet and strung along the carpet—jeans, sweaters, a negligee of green lace. A suitcase with a cracked handle lying on its side. He called her name. The cold still infused his face; fatigue moved in surges through his limbs.
Weak light knifed through from beneath the narrow door that last night he had thought was a closet. When he opened it a chill hastened up from a never-finished root cellar. The rounded steps had been fashioned from available rock, the sharply slanted ceiling so low he had to duck to clear his head—a stairwell designed for storybook dwarves. A bare lightbulb lit this cramped space. The scent of soil and rock. Crates on an earthen floor. Mason jars of dried food he could not identify. Lumber and visqueen stacked in a corner. Rodent droppings on the dirt.
His breath hung before him as he moved beneath the bulb. Stones had long ago been dislodged from this wall beside the steps. A nook had been carved into the earth with a shovel or pickaxe.
The bulb’s weak light did not reach here. He removed a glove to dig free his lighter from a pocket. He moved nearer. Inside this space he saw the boy—the frozen body of the six-year-old Bailey Slone leaning against the earth, cocooned in plastic, his open eyes iced over, mouth ajar as if exhaling—as if attempting a final word of protest.
He would rest here now for some time, sitting in the corner on an overturned Spackle bucket, his legs and back already sore from the hunt. At the airport the day before he’d read in an article that the cosmos consisted mostly of what we cannot see, energy and matter averse to light. He believed this though it sounded insane. He remembered then his hand around the throat of Medora Slone, how she had begged for a punishment, a purifying she could not grant herself.
III
Russell Core hollered down the center stretch of Keelut, his legs wasted from the day’s long trek. He pounded madly on doors at dinnertime, shouted his breath onto the frosted glass of windows. The villagers came slowly, warily from their cabins, out into the road, some with rifles, others with lanterns in hand. Some still chewing food, evening fires at their backs. Some holding toddlers who looked upon him with dull suspicion, their ochre skin lovely in the lantern light. All emerged to see this wolf-man messenger Medora Slone had hailed, to confront the sudden roar he’d brought to their night.
“The boy,” he yelled. “The boy. Bailey Slone.” He pointed behind him toward the dark, told them all the boy was dead, frozen in the root cellar. Most seemed not to understand, or not to want to.
A man they called Cheeon—Vernon Slone’s lifelong friend, h
e’d later learn—rushed past him with a rifle, in untied snow boots and a flannel shirt, in dungarees that had been mended with myriad patches from other denim. Others followed him. Core stayed, bent and panting with hands on knees, attempting to recall the exact age his father fell from cardiac arrest.
When he regained half his breath and straightened in the road, he saw her there at the edge of a cabin less house than hut—the shrunken Yup’ik woman he’d encountered before dawn that morning. He limped to her, his left leg tingling from fatigue, his bared hands beginning to numb. Where were his gloves? He’d left them in the root cellar by the corpse of the boy.
“You knew this morning,” he said. “You knew. When we spoke this morning. You knew what she did to the boy.”
She only stared.
“You knew,” he said.
“What can an old woman know?”
“How could you not say something?”
Above them a makeshift streetlamp throbbed with weakened light, fangs of ice hanging from its shade. The old woman smelled of wood smoke and something foul.
“Go back,” she said. “Leave this village to the devils. Leave us be.”
Core thought to grab her arm, to lead her to the Slones’ cabin to see the boy, to make her understand. But she turned, and on a shoveled path through snow she wobbled behind her hut and dissolved into darkness.
He remained beneath the lamp wearing the one-piece caribou suit and boots that belonged to Vernon Slone. More villagers hurried past him, some saying words he did not know. A snow machine screamed by, its one headlamp coning into the black. He could smell its gasoline fumes in the cold. He tried to follow but his legs wouldn’t work and he sat in the road hearing himself breathe. Beguiled by this climate. Terrified of the facts he’d found and fearing already that he could not explain them.
When he reached the Slones’ cabin he wedged through the villagers amassed at the door. The whispers he heard had no tone he could name and he wondered if they were accusations against him. In the root cellar, Cheeon had taken the boy from his tomb, untangled the cellophane from him, laid him on the earth floor. He and others were kneeling by the body, afraid, Core thought, to look at one another. A washed-out bruise coursed across the boy’s throat and Core knew then he’d been strangled.
In the stagnant cold of that cramped space he heard himself say, “Where is she?”
When no one responded, he asked again, “Where is Medora Slone?”
Cheeon turned to him but would not answer. A brailled scar made a backslash from the corner of his mouth. His black hair was gripped at the nape by a length of clothesline rope. Core could not say what spoke in this man’s face—it seemed some mix of boredom and rage. Cheeon said words in Yup’ik to the teen kneeling beside him, then took his rifle from the top of a crate and elbowed past others on the steps. Some remained kneeling by the body but then they too went.
Alone again with the boy, Core felt a kind of vertigo from the sight of him. Children are full of questions but they do not question their own being, are not troubled by their own living. Like animals, they cannot conceive of their mortality. Living seems to them the most natural state of things. But infants, he remembered, were repelled by the elderly, howled in the arms of the olden, as if they could sense, could smell the elderly’s proximity to decay.
Core saw a woolen blanket inside a crate and used it to cover the boy. He remained there by him for many minutes, attempting to remember prayers he’d discarded long before this night.
Upstairs in the front room of the cabin again, he waited for someone to speak to him. Perhaps to comfort him. But the villagers only whispered among themselves. Most were Yup’ik, some were white, some mixed. All regarded him with an anxiety that felt both personal and old. Their clothing clashed; one woman wore animal-hide pants and a red jacket with the embossed name of a football team. Core somehow understood that police had been summoned from town, an hour’s drive, longer in this snow and dark.
He looked to the whiskey on the shelf, then drank to let it tamp the dread in him. Where were the cigarettes Medora Slone had given him last night? He sank into the same armchair he’d sat in when he arrived the night before. Still no one would speak to him.
He’d never had trouble comprehending how people are what they are. If you live long enough, he knew, you see that the natural world matches the human one. Most are pushed on by appetites no more complicated than a wolf’s. A wolf expelled from its pack will travel hard distances to find another—to be accepted, to have kin. It wants to stanch hunger, sleep off fatigue, make itself anew. He understood that. But Medora Slone. How could he explain this? Why did these people refuse to acknowledge him? They began leaving the cabin by twos and did not come back.
He creaked from the armchair to take another pull of whiskey, alone now in the Slones’ cabin. At the open front door he squinted out into a mass of ebon silence and could not fathom where these people had gone. Shouts came from somewhere in the village. The barking of sled dogs. Another snow machine screaming through trees. When the wind lifted it carried clouds of snow into the cabin and Core closed the door. He built a hasty fire in the hearth, half surprised he could do it with hands so shaky.
He unpeeled the caribou suit from himself and returned to the armchair, woozy from two pulls of whiskey. From the day’s long hunt. He thought of water and food but couldn’t move. The heat of the fire flared against his face and he thought then of the husband, of Vernon Slone. Of how these facts would reach him. Of how a husband and father is ravaged by this.
And what he remembered before he blinked into sleep was his own father just after his mother had left the family for reasons no one knew. Ten years old, Core had thought his father would retreat into drink or Jesus. But instead he went to the cinema every night, that one-screen theater with the neon marquee in their nothing Nebraska town. Oftentimes he stayed in the theater to watch the same movie twice—Spartacus, Exodus, Psycho. Core would walk down to Main and Willow to search for him after dark. He’d steal into the exit door of the theater and find his father there—alone before those colossal talking faces, snoring in the chair with an empty bucket of popcorn aslant on his lap.
* * *
Police were in the Slones’ cabin now, three white men wearing civilian clothes, winter hunting garb. Upright in the armchair, Core woke to the sound of their wet boots grating against the wood floor. He’d been asleep nearly two hours, he thought, maybe more. He wiped the spittle that had run into his beard, then stood to speak to the man who looked in command, the one with the crew cut, the russet beard, the cigarette behind his ear.
Donald Marium introduced himself to Core; he had the soft hand of a barber and beneath his beard a creaseless face. Core spoke too quickly—who he was, why he’d come, what he’d found—and Marium told him to sit, to breathe. He went with the two others into the root cellar to see the boy, and minutes later came back to Core, told him to begin his story, to begin where it began. They sat at the table and smoked.
When Core finished his telling, Marium said, “Tell me again, please, why she asked you here.”
“I don’t know that. She’d read my book on wolves.” He glanced about the room for his book but could not see it. From the pocket of his flannel shirt he took the letter Medora Slone had written him and passed it across the table to Marium, who read it in silence.
“And you decided to come here why?”
“To help,” Core told him. “She said wolves had taken children from this village. It’s in the letter. See for yourself. She said no one would help. I came here to help.”
“Wolves did take two kids from here last month. They weren’t found. We came here to try and help these people, but I’m not sure how anybody can help that. You can’t just walk onto the tundra looking for wolves.”
“But no wolf took Bailey Slone,” Core said.
Marium flattened his filter into an ashtray, then stood back from the table. Core did the same.
“We’ll have to get
it all figured out.”
“Are the others on their way?” Core asked.
“The others who?”
“The others. The police to find Medora Slone. Shouldn’t there be more men here? Investigators? The TV shows have investigators.”
“Investigators? Mr. Core, things don’t happen here the way they happen anywhere else. And definitely not on TV.”
“No investigators? Just you?”
“For now. You have to understand where you are. We don’t have full membership to the rest of the world. And we mostly like it that way. But let’s take one thing at a time, please.”
“What time is it? Midnight?” His watch was missing from his wrist.
“It’s six o’clock, Mr. Core. You’re not acclimated here. You said it was just dark when you arrived back here today? That was three-thirty, then.”
“That can’t be. I left before dawn. I wasn’t gone for so many hours.” He felt at his left wrist as if he could rub his watch back onto it.
“Dawn is at ten a.m. now, Mr. Core. You’re not acclimated here.”
“My watch is missing. I don’t understand.”
“Apparently a woman is missing too.”
Core sat again. “I tried to talk to these people but they wouldn’t talk to me. Did they tell you anything?”
“Nothing much. Not yet,” Marium said. “We spoke to some outside. As you saw, they don’t talk much to anyone who isn’t one of their own. Let’s go back down to see the boy.”
In the root cellar the men clicked photos of the body on the floor, of the cavity clawed into the earth. The fat one scratched in a notepad; another with a mustache stood before a laptop on a crate. Core pointed, explained how he’d found the boy, that the man called Cheeon had removed him from the hole and unwrapped him from the plastic sheeting.
“He was upright in there?” Marium asked. “Wedged in?”
Hold the Dark: A Novel Page 4
