Wintering

by Krissy Kneen

  What? Jessica shook her head. A chill had caught her. She would be sitting here shivering if they weren’t all staring at her.

  ‘Soon. Tomorrow night.’

  The television was showing the weather channel silently in the background. Two degrees overnight; a maximum of eight. All cloud. That ought to be enough to deter them, surely?

  Maude shifted forward in the chair, a whiff of stale piss from her pale overblown skin. No one was looking after Maude. Even Maude had stopped looking after Maude. ‘I’m bringing a rifle. You’re coming with us.’

  Jessica shook her head.

  ‘Have you got a gun?’ said Maude.

  ‘She’s got a gun.’ Marijam, staring straight at her, those sharp, rheumy eyes. ‘She’s a hunter, this one.’

  Jessica shook her head again. Why would she walk into the icy dark of the forest with a bunch of crazy women with guns?

  But when she stepped out into the night, pulling the coat uselessly around her shoulders, feeling her teeth rattling together, she could smell him. She turned to see Crystal limping towards her ute, leaning heavily on Maude’s arm and cradling her belly. It was mad to believe he was out there in the dark, watching her, running between trees, keeping pace with the car as it laboured over the badly maintained road.

  When she pulled out onto the sealed road she stepped hard on the accelerator. She swung too fast and wide around the corners, driving like she was in a hurry, and she was. Trying to outrun it. Him. Wanting to get home before he did. She wanted to be safely inside with the door locked before she smelled that wild animal smell and felt the eyes staring deep into her.

  Jessica sat in the car at the edge of one of the forestry tracks. Maude had given terrible directions and she had taken the wrong turn at first, juddering over potholes for ten minutes before realising she was in the wrong place. She was here now, though. Duck Hole Walk. An easy stroll, said the sign, glinting in the headlights. She slid herself out of the car and into a slurry of mud. They had all left at the same time but somehow, even with her wrong turn, she had arrived before them. Perhaps she had passed the other cars in a daze, worrying about her incredibly poor judgment in getting into this ridiculous adventure. Maybe they’d dipped their lights to pass her. The only thing she could concentrate on was the weight of the gun in the pocket of this strange, heavy jacket.

  ‘You’re going to catch cold without a coat,’ the women had said to her back at Maude’s house. Jessica shrugged. No point explaining the science, that you catch a virus, not a chill from the air. You hunt an animal not an imaginary beast, and no one seemed to care about the science behind that. The coat they lent her was too large, and smelled. Wood smoke and an underlying whiff of body that unsettled her. Whose was it? Too big for Maude. It must have belonged to her husband. Was it his sweat she was smelling? She shrugged it off and left it on the front seat of the car. Reached into the pocket and slipped her hand around the cold metal of the gun.

  An arc of light swung up over the road, bouncing erratically across wild grabs of forest. It was the uneven road: potholes, fallen branches, boneshaking corrugations. Crystal’s ute pulled up and she slipped down out of the cab, dwarfed by the huge vehicle. Just a child, really, her boots too big for her tiny ankles, even wrapped in thick woollen socks. Jessica wondered what it would be like to be carrying the baby of a dead father. Every kick a reminder.

  Crystal reached into the back of the ute, stretched across the bulk of her own stomach and emerged carrying a rifle, semiautomatic, the gun almost as tall as she was. She swung it up over her shoulder looking comfortable, balanced.

  Not the defenceless child Jessica had imagined.

  ‘—kay.’ Crystal’s little-girl voice was at odds with the size of her rifle. ‘Ready to hunt?’

  No. Jessica knew that much. But she gripped her handgun firmly and nodded.

  She turned on her torch—a ridiculous thing, a tiny cylinder attached to her keys, made to find a keyhole in the dark—and led the way up to the start of the track. To one side of the path the bank reared up, heavy with old-growth trees, moss clinging to them. On the other side, the rocks tipped down to a creek. The wan torchlight glinted off white foam as if someone had tipped bubble bath into the little stream.

  She trained the light on her shoes and moved forward. The forest seemed to settle around her, and for a moment she was her ten-year-old self, setting off in secret with the other kids from the compound into the hot scrub at the back of Toowoomba. Knowing they were both brave and wicked. The same sense of an illicit adventure beginning.

  A tree had come down on the path. Jessica knew she couldn’t climb over it; it was taller than she was, a trunk fat as two men pressed together and then a smaller branch stretching out above it. There was room to squeeze under, a little room. She looked back towards Crystal and shrugged.

  ‘Bad start.’ They had barely stepped into the forest, hunting in pairs, each couple taking a different track. She wondered how Marijam would manage, then remembered how much effort it took to haul the boat out every morning. She’d do just fine.

  Crystal tutted. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  She pressed the butt of the rifle into the stony path and jumped easily, despite her bulk, up onto the log, then swung herself over like a child playing in the park. Jessica heard the easy thud of her boots hitting the ground.

  Jessica turned the torch off and hitched her skirt up. She ducked down into a hunch, balancing on her palms while crab-shuffling sideways. She grunted to standing, feeling as old as her mother, tired to her bones. She should be in bed right now.

  The light from the full moon disappeared into the thick forest canopy to their right, but the creek and the cleared path cut enough of a gap to let a little moonlight in, enough to see a few paces ahead. Jessica walked slowly behind Crystal. She slipped here and there but the path seemed solid enough. The damage must be recent, the fallen trees, the section of wooden boards that had lifted and skidded down towards the water. It would all be fixed by spring, when the tourists returned, but for now the path was unpredictable. When her feet plunged into icy water she turned her torch back on and sidestepped a little creek that burbled along the track.

  Footsteps.

  She turned her torch off and Crystal did too. They waited. The thud of her heart. She shivered. She would buy a winter coat. Tomorrow. She would go to the shops in Huonville, no, Hobart. She would drive to Hobart for a thick winter coat.

  Somewhere out there the women were hunting. She should have stayed with them. They were insane, of course, but they were out there somewhere with guns. It was stupid to have split up into pairs. Disastrous.

  Footsteps. No, the thump-thump-thump of a wallaby. Jessica turned her torch back on and lit up the muddied toes of her boots. Crystal had the rifle at the ready, but what was the point? They couldn’t hit anything in the dark.

  ‘Stay close,’ Jessica said, loud enough for even the wallaby to hear. Speaking to Crystal but aiming the words out into the dark as if to warn him. Matthew was gone, dead. She knew that. She did. But there was this uneasy glimmer of hope in her, faint as the padding of soft paws in the leaf litter, pointless as the thin beams of moonlight that cut the canopy and highlighted scant edges of trees and undergrowth.

  An uphill climb with every step a backslide. Treacherous here in the dark, despite the easy stroll the sign had promised.

  Voices now. Distant. She crouched instinctively, but the sound was thin, miles off. Some of the other women? The sound of them carried on a faint breeze scented with unease.

  Bye, baby Bunting, Crystal was humming. Her rifle pointed straight ahead, her torch gripped against the barrel. Jessica knew the words and her mind inserted them beside the tune. Daddy’s gone a-hunting. Gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap the baby Bunting in.

  Voices blown on the wind.

  ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘No. Shhhh. Don’t scare it.’ That child’s voice.

  Thumping. A kangaroo. And rustling. Closer.
Rustling. She hugged her shoulders. The walking hadn’t warmed her, her bones were ice. Were they women’s voices? Could be forestry workers out late, kids drinking in some clearing…surely there were no houses out here in the old-growth forest.

  A woman’s voice. Here for a second, clear as if she were standing just around the next bend—gone in an instant. Jessica continued to walk.

  ‘I can hear it.’

  Jessica stopped, listened. ‘We can’t kill it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Even if there was a tiger out here, how could I kill it? If it was my Matthew, your husband? Would you?’

  ‘It isn’t your man anymore. It’s something else. Evil.’

  ‘There is no such thing as evil.’

  ‘The thing that stole your husband. The thing that took him. Devil dog.’

  Jessica pressed her hand against her forehead and the little torch described great arcs of leaves and water and trunks. How long had they been walking? Ten minutes? Twenty? She turned and swung the beam around to where they had come from. A sliver of light swallowed up by dark space.

  A crack like a branch falling or a small tree losing its foothold on the creek bank. A scuttling as something hurried away from the fall. Something large in the bush close by. Some breath from substantial lungs. She held her own breath to listen, heard a heavy tread and a yapping. Not a cry she recognised—but she wouldn’t know a bettong from a bandicoot if it came to that. It was close, though. And it was loud and seemed tinged with anxiety. A warning call, perhaps; some large animal calling out to its mate. Hunters at large. Humans in the forest. No rest till they are gone.

  Stay close. Even though he was dead and gone and she would never see him in the flesh again: stay close. And the girl humming quietly, almost tunelessly. Daddy’s gone a-hunting.

  The beast broke cover.

  Jessica scrambled back, the ground dipped, her foot slipped on mud, her hands stretched out to catch anything, twigs snapping between her fingers, her balance gone, her body pitched off-centre and beginning to fall, a handful of leaves sharp and cutting, a sapling gripped and bending, holding as her feet slipped and scrambled on the steep slope, holding the sapling one-handed, swinging her other hand to grab a branch.

  The torch was gone. Still in the clumsy moment of falling, she saw it. Something, pale, the glint of eyes, too big for a devil, too hunched for a roo, too cat-like for a possum. A pale flank in the moonlight. And even as she fell she was looking for stripes. Moonlight through branches, saplings cutting her view, she saw them. Stripes, of course, but anything would be striped in this light, a feral cat grown to the size of a dog, a dog, lost and wandering the forest.

  The glint of metal as Crystal flicked her torch on, swung her rifle up and it was there. Not where Crystal was pointing, but to the side of her, its long mouth pulled back, staring at her, grinning. The thing was focused on the girl, crouching, ears flat back. Angry, ready to pounce. Not a dog. Not even vaguely dog-like, maybe a cat, but no. It was something other. Short back legs, stretch of teeth, utterly alien.

  Crystal spun around to find it in the dark, her belly seeming to swing round after. She lifted the awkward bulk of the rifle, but the thing was up and, in the air, and Jessica raised her gun and sighted and squeezed the trigger. The creature lurched to one side. A hit.

  She remembered. The cans exploding on their log perches, her mother looking at her with narrowed eyes, a new respect. Sighting. Shooting. Killing. No cry, but a thud as the body hit the ground, a pale flash, kicking, a leg struggling for purchase in the soft ground and then the head flopping over. The eyes on her. And it was only now that she saw her mistake, the terrible mistake. She dropped her gun in the mud of leaf litter, the unthinkable error evoking her mother’s voice. Never drop your weapon. You will kill someone. That seemed to matter less now that she really had killed someone.

  He lay with his eyes open. Pale hair, thin as a whippet. The bullet had entered his forehead right in the centre. A clean shot, but she knew the exit wound would be a mess. She’d shot a lame horse once and she remembered the clean entry, the horror show of bone and brain exploding outward at the exit point.

  His lips were parted as if he was about to speak. The eyes stared through her. He was young, with a full dark beard, but the chest below it smooth as a child’s. His ribs protruding. Half-starved by the looks of it, hipbones jutting out over the genitals.

  Crystal fell—for an instant Jessica thought she must have shot her too—crumpling like a puppet cut free. Her body fell onto itself, the big egg of her belly draped with lifeless arms, her mouth hanging open. But she wasn’t dead. There was a high sound coming from her like a plane approaching, getting louder, and then her body began to rock back and forth in the dirt.

  This was how Jessica came to know that the dead man was the father of the child: as Crystal crawled through sharp vines and mud and hard stones, dragging her knees through the muck to lie with him, completing the family portrait.

  Jessica could not feel her feet. She lay in the cold wet but she wasn’t shivering. She wasn’t feeling anything. Maybe she’d broken her spine in the fall. Maybe this was the anaesthetic that fear shoots through a body. She had lost her arms, her legs, her sense of self and of time. Her world had shrunk down to the scene before her. A mother and a father and the child crushed between them. Just a pale edge of moonlight to give them substance; enough to burn the image into her mind. It would replay, she knew it. She would come back to this scene of loss and grief and love. The idea of devil dogs and evil had disappeared. There was only a family broken, a fatherless child.

  She could see it now, the man living like an animal in the bush, naked, hungry, perhaps mad. Six months in the wilderness. It was not a dog she’d shot but the mad crouch of a man who had lost his mind.

  She heard the women. A sound like cattle pushing their way through the scrub, a racket so loud that all eleven of them might have been pushing down old growth to get to her. But when they appeared, panting, limping down the cleared path there was only the two of them. Maude in the lead, Marijam not far behind, keeping a good pace on her strong old legs.

  Their torchlight swung before them and settled on the scene. Jessica began to feel her fingers again. Her hands were empty. The torch was on her keyring; her keys must have fallen from her fingers. Would she find them in the dark? Had she locked the car anyway? Could she climb back into it and sleep safely in the dark? Could you sleep when you had killed a man? Would she ever be able to sleep again?

  Jessica could smell Maude approaching in a fug of fear and sweat and urine, and then she rested a hand on Jessica’s shoulder and the smell became overwhelming. Jessica scrambled away and retched. Nothing but bile stinging her throat, turning her mouth to acid as she heaved again and again, convinced all her organs would be expelled from her body, but of course they weren’t.

  When the urge to vomit passed her ribs felt bruised. She crawled to her feet, swaying.

  ‘I lost my keys,’ she said.

  Maude raised her pistol: for a moment Jessica thought she was going to shoot her. Jessica, a murderer now, and the only thing to do would be to put her down humanely. Maude raised the gun above her head and shot twice into the air. It was the signal for the others to all gather: two shots for Duck Hole Walk. They would descend on her, closing ranks.

  Maude shone her torch down at her feet where there was a glint of metal. Jessica stooped and picked up the pathetic little finger of torch. Clutched at her keys as if she’d fallen overboard and they were a line back to the solid hull of the world.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jessica said finally. Maude frowned. Marijam was standing close to, but not touching, the corpse. Leaving Crystal to her wild grief.

  ‘Why would you be sorry? This is what we came here to do.’

  ‘I killed a man.’

  ‘You killed a tiger. A rabid beast. Shot it dead like you ought to. Rid the world of one piece of evil.’

  ‘You’re insane.’ Jessica shoo
k her head. ‘That’s the dead body of a man.’

  ‘It’s not a man. Not her man.’ Maude was nodding over to the three of them, the nativity sketched out in shadow and moonlight, underlined by Crystal’s sobs.

  ‘Her child has lost its father.’

  ‘Her child has lost a creature that would have stalked her and maybe killed her in the end. Or worse, taken her to become one of its own.’

  There was no reasoning with them. Mad women. All of them mad women. Here were the facts, laid out in the mud and filth. The naked truth of the man. The terrible grief of the woman. The loss. Why couldn’t she see the loss?

  ‘I’m going to jail for the rest of my life,’ she said, the last of the numbness leaving her. She felt sharp now, alive to the truth of it all. One moment to change a whole life.

  ‘No, you’re not going to jail.’

  ‘But—’ Jessica stared towards the dead man, and found she had no more words.

  ‘Leave him to us. There won’t be repercussions, no one’s looking for him anymore. He’s already dead. No one’s looking, and no one will find him.’

  Jessica shook her head weakly. She couldn’t be here, having done this.

  ‘Go back to the car. Go home. Say nothing. Promise me you’ll say nothing.’

  She was shaking her head.

  ‘Nothing has happened. And there’ll be no consequences. We’ll look after you, we’ll protect you, but you have to keep your mouth shut. Promise me.’

  She shook her head but her mouth was moving, forming words. She heard her voice, weak but clear. ‘All right.’

  The sound of the word shocked her. She would go to jail. No crazy old women could protect her. She should go to the police now. An accident. How many years would a confession, a plea of manslaughter, save her? How would she survive any amount of prison time at all?

  She was nodding. ‘I promise,’ she said, and felt the ice of her words slip down over her shoulders and along the length of her spine.