by Lance Weller
Abel walked until his feet went numb and he began to stumble. He spoke until his voice was croaking. And once, late in the day, Abel Truman raised his strong right hand before himself as though to push something back, away. He bent to lace his boots tighter and ate handfuls of snow to cool his throat. And he went on.
He told the girl of things he’d seen in his life—his soldiering days and the good people he’d known. He told her the story of the Wilderness where he fell and of Hypatia, who saved him there. He spoke to her of Glenn and Ellen Makers, and as night fell once more, Abel looked for stars above the canopy but saw only dark clouds. After a while, the snow began to fall again and steadily. A cold wind shifted. He carried her on, down the mountainside, through the dark trees.
Ellen Makers went slowly up the mountain through the snow. She held the rifle tightly crosswise and smelled the smoke long before she saw the column standing over the trees in the place she knew the trapper’s shack to be. She stood watching it a moment, then rubbed the damp from beneath her nose and went on.
The track gave out onto a broad, snowy plain ringed by ice-veined mountain rock, and on the far side of the plain lay the smoldering ruins of the shack. Ellen crossed to it and stood warming herself beside the embers, wondering what to do. There were wolf tracks round about, and off to one side a dark mound upon the snow. She walked to it and took a fast breath to recognize the Haida laying there. She stood for some time thinking about things and trying to decide how to feel. It was not as she thought it would be, and she was fretful, her stomach knotted up with worry. She tried for some time to piece together a picture of the events by the clues left behind, but her skill for such unriddling was wanting and the day grew long and the embers cooled.
Eventually, the sun set and moon came out and by its high, blue light she saw a set of footprints leading into trees that stood silently and dark where the slope plunged valleyward again. A wolf howled close by, and Ellen jumped. After a moment, she turned to follow the trail down.
By morning, it had clouded over and begun to snow again. It fell thickly and fast, filling the steps behind her and painting the white world whiter still. The tracks she followed weaved ever downward through the trees and Ellen worried that she’d lose them to the snow. Late in the morning, she found where they’d camped and realized another set of tracks there. Smaller, as of a child’s feet shuffling through the snow, they disappeared after a very short distance. “He’s carrying someone,” said Ellen. She took her gloves off, and as she crouched to touch two fingers to Abel’s bootprint, a wolf stepped out of the forest.
The rifle was cold and heavy in her bare hands, and she had no way to know how long the wolf had been watching her before it came out of the trees. Dark about the face, the wolf was speckled with snow. Ellen could see the dog in it; in the folds of its ears and in its eyes, which gave glimpse to the workings of its innermost heart. She saw the collar it wore: crude and dull and handmade. The wolf stood without moving, watching her with its mouth open and its breath fogging the cold.
Ellen swallowed and brought the rifle quickly to her shoulder. As she sighted down the barrel the wolf lay down in the snow. She blinked and the wolf rolled over and stood, crusted in powder and beautiful amidst the snow-feathered trees.
Ellen held the rifle on it. She squinted down the barrel in the way Glenn had taught her and stood that way, watching the wolf without moving, for a long time. It turned and paced, and as it did she saw again the dull gleam of metal about its throat. And when she lowered the rifle, it barked once and ran off, disappearing into the trees and the falling snow.
When she walked to the place it had been, she heard it bark again and looked to see it waiting for her farther down the slope. Ellen looked around. She wore a scarf tucked into her coat, and she took this off and tied it around her head and face for the warmth of it, then nodded. “All right,” she said. “Show me.”
She followed it the rest of the morning, through the trees and down the slope, and the walking was hard in the deepening snow. The air grew colder the farther down she went, and she could hear the wolf ahead of her, panting and crunching through the snow. Every now and again came great cracking sounds as branches, over-heavy with snow, came crashing down. Other than the wolf, there was no wildlife round about—only the soft tick of falling snow, the branches cracking like gunshots, and the ancient trees creaking ceaselessly like the speech of old men remembering other places, other times. There was no wind now, and the snow fell straight to earth, a hazy, pale scrim that made of the cold forest a phantom wonderland terrible in its beauty.
She was thinking of Glenn as she stumbled along, worrying for him, imagining the line of their life together, and seeing them in their age—quiet, a bit sad, but strong in their love. When a clump of snow slid from the branches and struck her shoulder, Ellen stopped. She could no longer hear the wolf, and when she looked, she saw its tracks veering away from the course it had followed all day to cut back up the slope between the trees and gone. As she stood wondering what to do, she heard the child sobbing from the trees ahead.
Ellen skinned the gloves from her hands. Taking a deep breath, she started slowly forward. She’d not gone fifty paces before finding Abel Truman where he lay propped against the thick trunk of an old spruce.
He looked up at her, his face a frozen map that showed her the byways of his cares. Abel’s coat was wrapped around a bundle held fast in the crippled crook of his left arm, and the cold had been at him, darkening with frostbite the tips of his ears and his fingers and his nose, and his lips were a shade of blue.
She threw the rifle down and knelt beside the old man. For all his manifold hurts, his eyes were bright, and when he opened his mouth his voice was hard to bear. “Lizzy,” he whispered. “My ’Lizbet.” Abel raised his hand to touch the side of Ellen’s face where the scarf covered it, and she took his hand in her own, then hissed to feel the cold in it. “Oh, I missed you.” He smiled a terrible smile. “God damn girl,” he panted. “But I missed you so.”
Ellen said his name and shook her head and the bundle he held made a sound. Abel swallowed and looked to it, then back to her. “It’s our Jane,” he said, blinking. “I went out … went out and brung her back.”
With shaking hands, Ellen worked open his frozen coat and saw the child and saw how it was with her in the dark cold. “Oh, my God,” she breathed, touching the girl’s face to feel the heat at her cheek.
Abel made a sound, blinked fast as though coming awake, turning back from some place he was bound. “Ellen,” he breathed. “Good … Her folks was killed up above … You go on, take her.” And when she leaned to lift the child, she had to work to free her from Abel’s crippled grip.
He leaned forward and pressed a little charm, a white cross carved of bone or something like bone, into Ellen’s hand. He worked his lips about. “For the girl,” he whispered, his tongue licking out over his lips. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them once more to look at her, she could tell he was far away and moving farther.
“You see?” he whispered. “You see, Hypatia? I told you I’d bring you along.”
Abel closed his eyes. He was running. The grass was green with spring and fragrant, knee-high and cushioning his steps. And there was sun and a warm wind blew. Men called to him from the trees just atop the rise. He ran. He ran to them.
In the end, it took Ellen the rest of that day and all the next to get back down the mountain with the both of them. She made a crude travois from branches and strips torn from her scarf and laid Abel upon it. She held the child tightly, still wrapped in the old man’s coat, for she cried out whenever Ellen tried to take her from it. The frame kept coming apart, so their progress was slow and wearying, and when they finally reached Makers’ Acres, Glenn, looking thin and sickly, was waiting on the porch. They held each other a long moment, and then he helped her as best he could to get them all inside, where there was a fire and warmth.
They lay Abel and the girl together in the back room, covered them
with blankets, stoked the fire, and left open the door so the heat would circulate. They stripped them from their frozen clothes and covered them again naked with blankets. When she saw what had become of the old man, Ellen turned away, and Glenn bid her leave the room while he tended them.
She stood near the hearth to watch the fire. Snow fell against the roof and the wind blew past the chimney, and for a moment, she fancied she heard the wolf howling from the hills above. Ellen went about the room touching dust from shelves that bore no dust upon them. The old, sweet smell of apples lingered.
Her frozen clothes were thawing, turning wet, and she began to feel cold. A dark stain of blood marked the hearthstones, and she ran her tongue over her broken teeth, then stared out the window, where the night was clearing. Glittering points of stars appeared, and she reckoned at least some should be falling. But none did. Instead, the moon came out to hammer the fallen snow silver and blue.
At some point Glenn came and sat down across from her. He looked wearier than she had ever seen him, and his unwounded hand trembled on the table when he laid it down. Ellen watched it there a moment before settling her own into it. It was warm and it was strong and when she looked at him the questions in her eyes were easy for him to read.
“She won’t get her eyes back, I don’t think.” He shrugged and shook his head at the pity of it. “I think she can still see a little, or maybe just sometimes, but I’d be surprised if it lasts.” He shrugged again. “If we’re lucky, she’ll keep most of her fingers … a few of her toes.”
“He said her parents were dead. Killed.”
Glenn pursed his lips. “Well,” he said. “There’ll be time enough for sorting all that out.”
Ellen nodded. She traced the flour-whitened wood grain as though she’d conjure a primer from the tabletop. Setting her lips together over her broken teeth, she looked out the window to the stars where they glittered as only stars can on snowy nights in the dark of the wilderness. “Abel?” she asked.
“Dead,” said Glenn.
A Note on the Author
Lance Weller has published short fiction in several literary journals. He won Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. This is his first novel. He lives in Gig Harbor, Washington, with his wife and several dogs.
Copyright © 2012 by Lance Weller
This electronic edition published in September 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Weller, Lance.
Wilderness / Lance Weller.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60819-937-2
I. Title.
PS3623.E4668W55 2012
813′.6—dc23
2011048741
eISBN 978-1-62040-061-6
First U.S. edition 2012
www.bloomsburyusa.com
