Wilderness

by Lance Weller

  The old soldier raised his rifle a dozen times before noon, sighting clusters of branches that resembled antlers, bare twists of slide alder that he mistook for the curve of a muscled haunch. Each time, he’d still himself, crouch, and squint down the sight, then lower the barrel with slow disgust. The dog watched, mouth open and weary, as Abel leaned and spat and cursed. “I suppose you could do better?” he asked it.

  It was early afternoon when he heard it bugle again. A long, drawn-out wail that hung in the chill, white air. He heard wild, savage barking, and the dog began to tremble and whine. Abel hushed it and cocked his head, sucking at a loosened tooth until he tasted blood. After a time, he cursed and started on again.

  The scat, when he came upon it, was still warm. Behind him, the dog stopped abruptly, hackles raised. Abel broke the rifle, checked the shell, and suddenly thought of David Abernathy swearing clumsily and fumbling with his gun while Yankee bullets chewed up the pines of the West Wood all around them. The old soldier grinned and moved slowly up the slope.

  The trees gave way to the back of a steep ridge that fell before him in a confusion of frost-coated stones as though something great and beastly had raked the back half of the hill raw. The day was clear and sunny on this side of the pass, and the old man could see across miles of snowy foothills down into the rolling green of the Puget Sound. He saw the blue of the inland waterways, cold with the sun bright upon their faces, and he saw distant smoke rising from stacks at Port Angeles. And he could see far to the east, where night was already darkening the Cascades, folding Mount Rainier in shadow while a round white moon rose behind. The gun was heavy in his hand, and he squeezed the stock to feel the baling wire bite into his palm like a comfort. Abel began to tremble. He closed his eyes a moment to imagine the smell of the town-smoke, to hear the trains running fast and metallic eastward toward home. Another ocean and another coast. Tilting his head, he sniffed the cold, blue mountain air, then looked down the ridge and softly swore.

  The wolf harried the elk through the scrub pine and the boulders fallen from the mountain’s shoulder. Huge. Dark about the face, with silver-gray fur running to dark again at the tips. A chest broad as a man’s two hands. A dark shape low to the ground, moving like water over stones. It was silent as it ran, and it leapt with forelegs splayed, popping its jaws with its hackles rising between its shoulders. For its part, the elk ran, throwing powder into the air and swinging about its great, antlered head. The wolf, alone, had no chance to bring it down, but hunger, desperation, instinct, drove it on, and the elk ran and the wolf ran until the dark forest closed around them and they vanished.

  Abel swore and spat. He swore and spat and sat down hard in the snow with his legs before him. The old man took great, deep breaths and his eyes were closed, his gray hair damp. The dog limped up beside him and lay down near his thigh. It whined softly and pawed at his trousers and Abel stared at it a long moment, seeing how it was and feeling something break apart within him.

  As snow began to fall once more, he looked at the mountains. To his left and right, the peaks disappeared behind the snowfall and the air trembled with cold. He knew the signs. A day, maybe two, and the pass would be unreachable from either side and the cold would go bitter. Before him, he could still see down across the Sound where lights had come on in the towns to sparkle there, cold, remote, and now forever unreachable. “Goddamn it, Buster, but we got close,” he murmured.

  The snow ticked softly as it fell. Like a myriad of clocks in a quiet library, it spoke of age and memory and endings. Abel sniffed and spat. He set the barrel of the rifle to the side of the dog’s head. “Goddamn you anyway,” he said tenderly. The dog’s tail brushed through the snow. It rolled its eyes to look at him and opened its mouth.

  An hour later, the old man made his slow, painful way down through the trees, trying to follow his own tracks back to the plain before they filled with snow and disappeared. Throughout the day, the sun had pressed cups into the snow, and now these all filled with shadow so there appeared to be innumerable dark pools all about him. He limped steadily, carrying the dog yokewise across his shoulders. Its tail worked weakly against him, and he turned to look it in the eye. It blinked at him and opened its mouth. “Don’t you be looking at me like that,” he muttered. “And don’t you go getting used to this me-carryin-you shit neither.”

  Ellen Makers followed thin game trails that paralleled the main track as she went slowly up the mountain. Bruised, hurt and sick with worry and regret over leaving Glenn behind, she raised her rifle clumsily at every small sound crackling from the dark woods and waited with motionless dread until she was sure whatever she heard was not made by man. After years of living in a fluttery shade of fear, she had never been so afraid before.

  She walked the day long and on into the first dark of the evening when shadows fell in great black panes from the canopy and robbed all color from the world. And then she crouched in the brush between the trail and the track and tried hard to hear him if he was close. She could not and he was not, yet still she waited and feared the outcome of her wait.

  She made no fire that night and the night was long. Ellen wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and every few moments she reached through the dark to touch the rifle where she’d leaned it. Things moved in the forest. Crackling, bestial noises all out of agreement with the creatures making them; Ellen imagined bears and cougars and saw by pale moonlight the furtive silhouettes of rock rabbits and deer stepping about on wire-thin legs. Time and again, with quick, panicked breath, she raised the rifle to point it at the Haida come to her in the night shapeshifted in the way she’d always heard his folk could. And each time, as she set the gun down once more, she silently cursed Abel and herself and fixed in her mind the image of the big Indian crouching in the tent, stroking the rifle barrel as though it was his member and watching as Willis did things to her.

  She slept but fitfully, and once when she woke the moon had run to dark and the sky had clouded. Her breath haloed her and the fallen pine needles crackled urgently with gathering frost. The world smelled quick and icy, and after a time it began to snow. Ellen could see it falling through the trees onto the wagon track that led to the pass, salting the mud and whitening the puddles where they’d skinned themselves with ice. Breathing against her hard palms, she rubbed them together, then pulled on a pair of Glenn’s working gloves. After a while, she slept again.

  And early in the morning she heard a wolf cry from the high slopes. A single wolf that sang to the moon though there was no moon to sing to. And this was not singing. Its call went on and on, rolling down the slopes and into the valley where the trees thinned near the coast until the wind caught the sound and swept it to sea and it was gone as though it had never been.

  When it was light enough to travel, Ellen ate a little bread and cheese. She stood and stretched, then went into the trees to make her toilet, dug a trough through the snow to the soil below with her heel to cover what she left behind, then rolled her blanket and slung it soldier-style, as she’d seen Abel do. She looked around her little camping place once, then twice, then walked up the trail toward Marmot Pass, where she figured she’d find one or the other of them.

  It was night again when Abel came back onto the plain. The wind gouged designs into the snow, and the dark little shack upon the apron of white was dark within as well. He watched from just without the treeline with the dog across his shoulders but could not see the candle flame that had quivered in the window before. The thin scent of woodsmoke still flavored the wind. After a while, Abel grunted and started forward.

  He set the dog in the snow before the shack. It pawed the crust and lifted its head to seek the old man’s eyes. Abel bent over it and spoke and stroked its brow and its fine, soft cheek and ran his hand through the fur along its flank. The dog lay its head on the snow. The old man could see the shape of its death in its eyes and took a great, shuddery breath, but fell quickly quiet to hear the sound of the girl sobbing from within the shack.<
br />
  Abel stood quickly and winced for the sudden pain of it. He stared at the door and wondered what he should do.

  Swallowing and wincing, he gripped the rifle and stepped forward as quietly as the snow would let him. He went to the door. The wind picked up and blew against it, rattling and moving the old, rotten boards, and from its motion Abel could tell it was unlatched. Behind him the dog whined and struggled in the snow. He put his palm on the door and pushed it open.

  The Haida sat spraddle-legged before the hearth, where only two coals still lived. He’d ruptured sometime in the night but the blood had barely soaked his clothing before freezing. Abel sniffed. A wave of nausea broke over him and he reached out with the barrel of the rifle to touch the Indian’s shoulder. He did not move and no breath played from his lips. His eyes were closed and his raven-hair fell cold and stiff down his long face. The big Indian had a length of filmy, pale blue lace, as of a bride’s garter, wrapped around one hand as though he meant it to be the last thing he’d see before dying.

  Abel looked at the lace, then looked at the Indian. “No,” he said. “You had too much badness in you to be comforted like that.” And setting the rifle down, Abel worked the lace from the Indian’s cold fingers and tossed it in the hearth where it lay smoking a moment before tiny yellow flames came dancing up along the tatting to throw about a shivering light.

  Abel watched it burn, then stood and dragged the Indian’s body outside. The moon went behind a cloud and it was fully dark. Snow fell. The snow raced over the plain on the wind as the wind rose once more. His clothing snapped and popped. He trembled and swallowed, could taste blood in his mouth, and swallowed again.

  Abel walked to the dog and knelt beside it where it lay dead in the snow. He brushed snow from its face, then sat and pulled its head onto his lap. He told it what a good dog it had been and spoke softly, telling it things. Abel closed his eyes and said its name and rocked it back and forth in the cold and the falling snow. Save the wind, the only other sound was the ticking of the snow falling like soft laughter, like lost time.

  After a while, Abel stood and went into the cabin to tend to the girl, to build the little fire up, to take care of what he could and let go the rest.

  The man who smelled of dogs and leaves and sweat returned. Jane Dao-ming remembered hearing him outside with the dog and then, after he came in, how quiet he was. A leaf-colored blur that moved across the floorboards and soon heat came from the hearth. And then a dragging sound and the old man’s soft curses. And then he came back again and sat on the edge of the bed to help her dress. Speaking to her all the while, with a voice meant to be soothing but pitched all wrong for such work. The old man made small, sharp sounds when he came upon the places the Indian had put the knife on her and his voice was thick when he asked her name and thick again when he repeated it back slowly and carefully.

  He asked could she see him. She felt the air disturbed before her face and realized he moved his hand there so told him yes. The man made a doubtful sound, then described for her his actions: how he was building up the fire and how that was all they needed, a good, strong fire. And the more he spoke the more tired and pale his voice became. And when Dao-ming’s leg brushed against her mother’s cold, dead arm in the bed beside her, she began sobbing.

  The man who smelled of leaves and dogs sat beside her on the bed while she wept. He held her hand and stroked her hair and let her carry on without comment. And when she finished, he asked if she was hungry. She told him yes and then began to weep because of that particular, sharp, and constant pain. The old man did not move for a long time. Finally, he took a deep breath and stood.

  She heard him go outside and he was out in the snow a long time before coming back. He rummaged noisily around the shack and soon she smelled meat cooking. When it was finished, he fed her carefully and the meat was stringy and tough but very sweet. It made her cry again to taste it and the old man told her try and sleep because in the morning they’d be leaving.

  After the girl was asleep, Abel went outside to gather the last of the firewood. It didn’t take many trips to exhaust the woodpile, and when he finished Abel stood in the center of the shack and watched the girl sleep. “What the hell are you goin’ to do?” he said quietly, making fists with his strong right hand.

  There was a sudden, burning itch high in the back of his throat, and he staggered outside to cough and retch into the snow. When he was finished, Abel went to the dog and carefully lifted it. It was very light. When a single tooth clicked like dumb stone against his thumbnail he thought his heart would break, and he could not look at the place on its thigh where he’d used his knife.

  Morning found him sitting on the floor of the shack with the dog’s head cradled in his lap. There was a small smile on his cracked, bloodied lips and his fingers turned ceaseless circles through the soft fur behind the dog’s ear. When sunlight touched his face, he carefully eased the dog to the floor and went outside.

  He found Dao-ming’s father buried by snow and grimaced when he saw what the cold had done to him. Going back into the shack, Abel woke the girl and sat her on the floor so she faced the fire, then carefully eased the thin, stained sheet out from under her mother and took it outside.

  There were no tools about the shack, so Abel had to use the butt of his rifle to lever the man’s body from the ice. And in the end the stock broke and the baling wire cut his hand. He stood looking at the ruined rifle. Then he leaned, spat, and wrapped the man in the sheet and carried him inside and laid him on the bed with his wife and covered both of them with the blanket.

  The girl sat on the floor where he’d left her, her blind face tilted toward the fire where it crackled in a yellow dance upon the firewood. One hand rested on the dead dog’s cheek and her face was wholly wet. He said her name and she stood to face him. Abel told her they were going and she held out her arms to him in the way he’d always imagined his own daughter would have. Sniffing wetly, he wrapped her in an extra blanket from the bed and leaned to lift her onto his left hip. Abel’s crippled arm fit snugly around her as she set her arms about his neck and he knew that even though he might weaken, the arm would not. Nor would it bend from its crook so she would not fall from his grasp. Abel looked at his old, ruined arm where it fit around her and held her as though made for that purpose. “Well, imagine that,” he murmured, rocking this way and that to test his grip. “Well, my Lord in heaven.”

  The fire burned brightly in the stove as Abel took a final look around. He looked down at the dog where it lay. “Goddamn you anyway, Buster,” Abel said softly, and he kicked over the stove and stood to watch a moment as the flames spread like water.

  Afterward, they stood together to watch the shack burn, the girl with her half-blind face turned toward the heat. Abel smelled the sweetness of her childish breath and thought of green grass and springtime, of horses and things running wild with joy. He took a breath and turned to start across the bright, snowbound plain.

  At the tree line, Abel sat heavily down, wheezing with his breath burning in his chest. “All right,” he panted. “All right now.” He struggled to his feet and went weaving through the snow between the trees. Behind them, the burning shack threw a pillar of smoke into the sky.

  “Am I too heavy?” asked Dao-ming, her accent thick, but her English clear.

  “Naw,” Abel panted. “No, I’m just too damn old.” He glanced at her face and by the daylight could see the damage the cold had done to her dark eyes. Two pale stains rimmed by blood. Her feet were frostbitten, as were her hands and nose, and while Abel had wrapped her for warmth as best he could, he knew there was no way she could walk on her own. Swallowing, he staggered on, the breath rattling out of him. “It’s just a march,” he said. “Only a march.” And he struggled on through the snow, down the slope between the trees.

  They walked the day long and into the evening. They walked until the light was such that Abel could no longer be sure of their direction, and then they stopped in a small cl
earing where the trees stood windrucked in strange, tortured shapes like some wrongful orchard.

  The girl was sobbing now. Her hands and feet were swollen red and hard. And the night, for the child, was long and cold. Abel did what he could: built up a tiny fire that constantly blew out, opened his coat and held her tiny, cold body against his own. And he spoke to her. He spoke all night long but did not know if she heard. Abel knew no stories to tell a child so instead described for her the stars and the planets in the heavens above. How his father would take him those long ago years to the hill south of their home where they would listen to the singing from the Negro church near the pine woods and look up at the stars. The pale ribbon of the Milky Way. Proud Orion in his glittering belt. The majestic ruin of the harvest moon and far, distant Mars that stirred men’s blood to warring. He described for her the Leonids and pointed out four stars that fell for them that night. At intervals a wolf howled from the slopes above, lonely and long and wild and sad. And sometime that morning, well before the sun rose to pale the dark, Abel Truman rose with her from the snow and carried her onward.

  As they went along, he described for the child’s blind eyes the look of the snow in the forest and the characteristics of the trees around them. He told her how to make a tea from certain types of moss and how the sun pressed cups into the snow on the upper slopes. He recited all the hidden colors of the gray ocean and how it looked on summer evenings when warm winds blew and the stars lay reflected forever across its surface—as though there were two skies and no earth—and he described the mornings, too, when the fog lay close upon the waves and spilled from the forest so it seemed you were at the bottom of a great, warm cauldron. All these things and more, he told the child as they went along.