I had to make a decision: stay or go? I decided to wait just until the show was over, last leaves had fallen away, and the first layer of snow had drifted in. After that I would go.
The real truth was I was waiting for the snow because I wanted to see the tracks of the creatures that I knew were playing a game of hide and seek with me on my hiking expeditions. I sensed that they were close, a hunch, a side effect of war, but they never revealed themselves to me.
I chopped six cords of wood, covered them under a tarp, and waited for the first snow to come. I didn’t have long to wait. Overnight it blanketed the ground in white, hushed the air, and changed the landscape into a Christmas picture card.
I packed a bag and left early.
Four
Kit
The pre-dawn forest was a wonderland of freshly fallen snow. The spruces stood tall and black against the sky, and the complete stillness was disturbed only occasionally by a Raven’s caw, or the sound of a twig breaking with the weight of the snow. My breath formed ice crystals on the fur rimming my hood.
In the pale light, for the first time since I moved into Durango Falls, I saw their tracks. I crouched down to study them. Wolves! Big ones.
In an instant their paw prints changed everything. I was no longer a soldier so sick with what I had witnessed I had to hide at the edge of some godforsaken town. I was suddenly taken back in time, a century back. I was standing in the land of the men who had come in covered wagons, the settlers and explorers, of the old West.
If their lurid tales of killer predators were to be believed, I was looking at a short, unequal scuffle on the snow before it was all over. My bones would become part of the forest, and no one would know better. They’d just think I’d packed up, and gone back to wherever I had come from.
As I hiked along the tree line I realized I was being watched … stalked. A lone, dark shadow was moving slowly along the frozen ground. Without warning the shadow broke from cover.
A huge midnight-black timber wolf.
His hide gleamed in the pale light. He headed towards me, running with the loping, loose-jointed grace of his kind.
I stopped, slipped off my pack and waited. My breath came in quick, shallow gasps. A hundred yards away he stopped, raised his head, and tried to get my wind. The air was still, so he wove through the trees, then stopped again, and looked at me.
The great beast was close enough for me to see his eyes: bright yellow and penetrating. He stood tense and alert, but made neither movement nor sound. We stood watching each other. It was weird, but I felt as if I knew him. From another lifetime. Or another realm.
I saw him for what he was: a guardian of the land. He had a timeless understanding of the mountain, the forest, the land, and the seasons. It was the kind of intelligence that was rare even for some humans.
Humans thought fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean a hunter’s paradise, but without wolves, the unchecked deer population will eat a mountain into barren ground, a lush prairie into a dust bowl.
There was a cracking sound in the woods, and the black beast whirled away, and disappeared soundlessly into the shadows. From that moment on I knew I would be staying for good. I had some money saved so I bought Old Man’s Creek, which of course, turned out to be the best decision I ever made. If I hadn’t stayed, Adam would have died.
Adam was my first.
That was the year the bears had woken up early and the berries were late. They were hungry. If you left a bowl of fruit out where it could be seen through a window, a bear would come fucking crashing through your walls as if wood logs were nothing more than cardboard. I almost had to put a couple of rounds into a black bear that year, they were so aggressive.
Adam was only a pup then. He couldn’t have been more than a couple of years old. Badly mauled by a bear, abandoned by his pack (yeah, the animal world is nearly as cruel as ours), and barely able to drag his mangled bloody body, he miraculously made it all the way to my backyard.
He was damn near dead when I carried him back in. I put him on a bit of blanket on my kitchen floor, and he looked into my eyes. I knew then he had no fight left in him. He was ready to die. In his dim stare there was no anger, violence, or even a clawing desire to hang on. There was only an acceptance of his impending demise.
In a strange way it was like looking at a deeper, wiser portion of my own soul. That part of me that knew. Nothing was permanent. All must wither away and die.
Fuck withering away and dying. He was only a pup. I’d be damned before I let him die on me. Back then I didn’t know much about wolves, and the roads were so bad I couldn’t even rush him to a vet, but I knew how to wash a cut and bandage a limb. Hell, I had more experience with that than I cared to remember. I made a teat out of a plastic bag and dripped warm milk into his mouth.
It didn’t take long to gain his trust.
Over the next few weeks I nursed him back to health, or what I thought was pretty close to it. Angry scars covered his back and side, and one of his legs never worked right again even though I was sure it wasn’t broken. In spite of that I watched him grow stronger and bolder day by day.
He began to wander further and further away from the house. I was certain by the time the spring winds came, he would vanish. Instead, he started sleeping on the porch. When he came up the stairs, jumped on my bed, and washed my face with enough saliva to wet a cat, I knew he would stay.
I named him Adam because he was first, but others would come after him. As they have. One by one they joined the tribe and I’ve named each one. It’s important to me to get to know all of them. They are my family. In fact, they are the only company I keep these days.
Until today, when I spoke to Lara Young.
She had a sweet voice. Musical. I could almost imagine her laughing. She sounded young too. Almost childlike. And yet she had enough sass to burn down a house. I don’t carry a white stick around for fun.
Ha, ha. I smiled. I used to like them fiery. Once, when I was still a man looking for a woman. My mind wandered off to what she looked like, and then pulled myself up short. What the fuck was I thinking of? I didn’t want a woman. I certainly didn’t want a relationship. I knew only too well what humans were capable of. Lies. Deceit. Murder. Corruption. Manipulation. Greed. Cruelty.
The list was endless.
The people I trusted could be counted on one hand.
Why? Why did I put that job advert up? Who the fuck really knows?
I was dreaming of a time past when my mother read to me.
I was lonely.
I wanted to look at a woman who could not see me staring at her.
I wanted to be with another human being who could not see my scars.
I wanted to hear a woman’s voice in my empty house.
Maybe I wanted to know if I could still act like a normal man around a woman after living for years with only wolves for company.
I thought of old Andak wandering around the fields out back – he was one of my oldest wolves, probably the wisest. He was also almost blind. How carefully he moves along the fencerow, letting his nose do most of the work. His sense of smell was so heightened he was sharper than wolves much fitter and younger than him.
I thought of Lara Young. What would she sense with her heightened awareness?
Five
Lara
I knew the moon was whole that night because the air always became full of something unknown every time it did. Often, I could even feel the strange and precious magic running like wild fire in my veins. It poured out of my fingertips as I worked my art. Like a woman possessed I worked until the early morning hours, creating things that I packed and shipped off to a gallery in New York.
In the beginning, I didn’t tell Sasha Smirnov, the owner of the gallery, that I was blind. I wanted people to buy my pieces because they were beautiful, and thought provoking, not because they were created by an artist with a “condition”.
I didn’t want to be indulged.
“Does someone tell you which colors to use?” he asked, circling me restlessly as I worked on my sculpture.
“No.”
“Have you ever been able to see?”
“I was born blind.”
“But how do you know colors if you have never seen them?’ he asked, baffled.
“I feel them, by smell and texture.”
“The colors smell different?” he asked, astonished.
“Absolutely.”
He stood behind me and watched me work for a whole day, but he left for New York none the wiser. I suppose it must be impossible for those with sight to comprehend a life based not on what your eyes tell you, but what your other senses show you.
He couldn’t understand that the images in my brain were no less vivid than those in the world he lived in. He assumed that I lived in terrible darkness. He was shocked when I told him my blindness was a gift. I’m better blind. I’m blessed. My art is more beautiful because I can’t see.
“Don’t you want to see?” he asked incredulously.
I chewed my bottom lip. To be perfectly honest no one had ever asked me that before. “I don’t know,” I told him truthfully.
“Why not? If someone asked if me I wanted to experience something new, I’d say, yes.” He seemed genuinely perplexed.
I thought about his statement carefully. “But what if you had to give up something very precious to you to have that experience?”
He couldn’t figure out what I was talking about. “What do you have to give up?” he asked incredulously.
It was impossible to explain. Depth, motion, perspective, vantage point, surfaces, contours, edges, and other characteristics that sighted people seem to completely miss. When I touch a piece of wood, it talks to me. I don’t see it as a piece of wood.
No one else in my family was blind so when I was young people would pity me a lot, but they shouldn’t have. Since I had never experienced sight, it had no physical, psychological, or social meaning. As a child, I wasn’t even aware that I was without sight.
I ran down the stairs, swam, played in the garden, ate, talked, fought with my brother. I was constantly bumping into walls and furniture, and always wore a collection of bruises in different stages of healing. My mother said I’d fall, and if I wasn’t hurt too badly, I would pick myself up and run off into my next adventure totally unaware what the fuss was all about.
When I grew older I learned that the world was designed for people with sight. My mother taught me that it could take me twice as long, but I could always do whatever I wanted.
When it was time for me to go to a school, my mother told me I was too special for a little school like the one we had in Durango Falls. She was adamant she would teach me herself.
After she died many years later, I found her diaries, and had them all translated into braille. That was when I realized that she had homeschooled me because she was afraid the other kids would snatch away my guide cane, steal my lunch, make fun of me … Actually, the list of misfortunes that she thought could befall me were literally endless.
It made my eyes well with tears to know how frightened she had been for me, but how wise she was never to let even a single one of her fears infect me. It allowed me to trust fearlessly. Even when I had no reason to, I simply trusted and never stopped believing in myself.
Nobody believed I could ride, but I trusted my horse and she put wings on my back. She went from giddy up to breakneck speed real fast, but I just hung on like a tick, the wind in my hair, and the knowledge buried in my heart that I could lasso the moon if I really, really tried. When she came to a sudden halt I went flying into the air, but I landed well so that was okay too.
When we were young Elaine would do that thing with the puddles, where she would shout, “puddle” while we were out walking and I would jump to avoid stepping into it.
Sometimes she would shout puddle even though there was no puddle. I would jump and she would laugh at me. It should have made me angry, but it didn’t. I liked to hear her laugh.
When you trust, good things happen.
Six
Kit
I fought the sheets like a wild dog caught in a trap all night long, and woke up before dawn. The brilliant full moon had sunk beyond the trees and the room was filled with blue light. I was restless and excited. My stomach felt like a dark pit filled with twisting snakes.
For the first time since I arrived at Old Man’s Creek another human being was going to be in my space! I was about to have a visitor. Problem was I didn’t know if I could still interact properly with one of my kind anymore. I was used to listening to nothing but the sound of my own heart and the wild critters around me.
“It’s your own damn fault,” I grumbled to myself.
I’d even taken to talking to myself. Pushing back the blanket, I realized the house was cold. Far too bitter for a young lady. I jackknifed out of bed, got dressed quickly, and went downstairs.
Downstairs it was dark and cold. Like the wolves I had got used to the cold, but it would be nice to light a fire. I hadn’t lit a fire since last winter. I opened the front door and went out into the frosty morning air. Andak was curled by the porch chair. He raised his old bones and came to sniff my hand. I rubbed his head.
“You better be on your best behavior cause we’re having a visitor come around, old boy,” I said to him.
Chepi, a young female, and the latest addition to the pack, bounded next to me as I walked to the shack. I stopped to watch her playfully roll on the snow. She was inviting me to rub her belly. Of all the wolves, she was the closest to me. Sometimes she behaved more like a pet dog than a wolf.
I obliged before filling my arms with firewood. Back in the house, I cleaned out the fireplace and made sure the chimney was clear, then I lay down tinder, made a grid of the kindling, and finally arranged the logs using an old Indian trick that maximized air flow.
I sniffed the air. I thought it smelled okay, but it was entirely possible that I had become immune to the smell of wolf and unwashed man. From the cupboard under the sink I took out dusters, cloths, cleaning sprays, a bucket and a mop.
For the next hour, I dusted, vacuumed, wiped, and polished like a demon. The time passed quickly and the mundane activity made the tight knot in my chest go away. I stood back, looked at my living room and felt pleased with myself. The place was cleaner than it had ever been. All traces of fur were gone, and the floor was polished to a high shine with some kind of lemon wax.
I sniffed the air again.
Better.
I did the hallway in a third of the time and moved to the kitchen. Pale yellow sunlight was filtering through the trees when I finished. I started to put away the things.
Toilet?
What if she wanted to use the toilet? Taking out the cleaning stuff again, I gave that a good cleaning. Made the taps shine like a mirror before I realized she wouldn’t be able to see them.
I went back into the living room and crouched in front of the fireplace. I lit the tinder using lighter fluid, and watched the fire crackle and roar into life, from the center outward.
With it burning merrily, I fitted the fire guard and stood. The entire house would be toasty and warm in a couple of hours. I took the stairs two at a time and made for the shower. The water was freezing cold, like needles on my skin. I came out refreshed and stood in front of the mirror. My skin was red and I had a flash of when the explosion happened.
A white flash.
I didn’t hurt at all.
Afterwards, lying in a hospital bed in Kandahar. Third degree burns on forty percent of my body, the skin on the right side of my face hanging in tatters. It hurt like fuck then. Oh fuck did it hurt. I screamed like a stuck pig.
I touched my face. T
he scars weren’t bad enough to scare little kids, thank God for that, but they were bad enough that they made them stare and point. Bad enough that I never, ever forgot they were there. And worse, I would never forget how they got there.
I turned away from the mirror, scowling. What the fuck was the matter with me? It was years since I allowed my mind to dwell on the past. I got dressed in clean clothes and went downstairs. The fire was doing nicely, and the house felt warm, and smelled clean. I went out to the porch. The air was frozen. My breath came up in puffs. I clenched and unclenched my hands nervously. Strange, that I should be so wired up about a woman coming to my house. I haven’t given a shit what people think of me since I was a kid.
Chepi lifted her head off the floor, turned it toward the road, and perked up her ears. When it came to an unbelievable sense of hearing, nothing in this world could beat a wolf. An old Indian friend of mine told me that wolves could hear as far as ten miles away out in the open, and their hearing was spades greater than that of most dogs. I can vouch for that, as I’ve seen them alert to a vehicle well over fifteen minutes before it actually passes the turning into the dirt road.
In other words, my wolves serve as the best security system I could possibly have.
Sure enough, a few minutes later I watched an old blue Toyota drive slowly down the road. The three wolves near the fence hauled themselves up and sauntered around the back of the house, towards the hill beyond. They almost always made themselves scarce when someone ventured this way. Usually it was someone lost and seeking directions.
The car stopped halfway up the dirt road.
My body was still, but my heart was beating a little too fast and my mind was in overdrive: she had changed her mind. She wasn’t coming up to the house. I didn’t realize until that moment just how much I’d been looking forward to her arrival. Acute disappointment filled every cell in my body.
Blind Reader Wanted Page 2
