The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  “Now when you go on a vision quest, you’re not supposed to eat or drink or sleep. You’re supposed to just sit there—on your buffalo hide or whatever—and get in tune with nature and eventually, supposedly, your spirit animal will shuffle out of the forest and tell you something you won’t ever forget, at least not for a little while. And then you’ll go back to your village a man. So this Red Morning, he finds a nice meadow and he waits for the spirits to call, maybe two weeks, before—”

  “You can only last four days without water,” Graham says. “Then you die.”

  “Indians are made of different stuff. They’re tougher.” He aims the knife at Graham. “And if you interrupt me again I’m going to throw you in the river.”

  Graham smiles and then covers up the smile with his hands.

  “So he waits there three weeks. Lips cracking. Skin blistering. Spiders and ants and mosquitoes biting him. And finally his spirit animal comes. When it first comes out of the woods, he thinks it’s a man, draped in furs. But it isn’t. It’s tall and naked and covered fully in coarse, black hair. It smells like spoiled meat. And it has long yellow claws. But Red Morning doesn’t feel afraid. He knows it’s going to tell him something important. It says only one word before returning to the woods: ‘Kill.’ ”

  He falls into a reverie, speaking softly, telling them how Red Morning stands up then and stretches his aching muscles and is about to gather up his buffalo hide, when he sees in the near distance, just around the bend in the canyon, where his village is, tentacles of smoke rising into the sky.

  He runs home as only a fifteen-year-old Indian boy can run, so fast that his feet leave the ground and he is actually flying. He no longer feels hungry or thirsty. There is still a pain at the bottom of his stomach, but it’s a different kind of pain, as if all the blood in his body is pooling hotly there.

  Near the village, he climbs up an embankment so that he can see what the trouble is before he faces it full-on. He stares in disbelief at the scene below him. The smokehouse is burning. The sweat lodge has been kicked in. Several wickiups have been kicked open, slashed apart. Bodies lie strewn about everywhere, his mother and father among them, with holes the size of fists in their chests and stomachs. Then he spots the soldiers. They wear gray pants and blue coats that fork in the back like a devil’s tail. There are five of them and they stand in a half circle, smoking rolled cigarettes and laughing quietly.

  These are the white men he has heard rumors about but never really believed in. The ones who kill elk and deer only for their antlers, sawing them off and leaving their bodies to rot. Here, they have killed everyone and filled their leather satchels and saddlebags with dried venison and bone necklaces and carefully carved pipes and blades and arrowheads. Anything that shines prettily or promises to fill their bellies, they take. They are led by a hawk-faced man wearing a white hat.

  At that moment Red Morning remembers the word the creature whispered to him. Kill. His pulse takes to the rhythm of it like a drumbeat. Kill.

  Justin’s father pauses here to wet his throat with another sip of beer. His face is red and hollow-eyed from the fire. He has whittled his stick down to a splinter. Shreds of wood decorate his thighs.

  He continues, telling them how Red Morning cups his hands around his mouth and howls a war cry, opening up his throat and bouncing his tongue, so that his voice fills up the canyon, echoing off its walls and trees, making it sound as though the whole world is full of Indians hungry for the scalps of white men.

  The soldiers throw down their cigarettes and look in every direction. They seem ready to fight at first, but what are they fighting for? They have taken everything there is to take. So they leap onto their horses. When the hawk-faced man urges his horse into a gallop, the strap of his satchel breaks and it comes loose from his shoulder and disgorges itself upon the ground. The food and the jewelry and weaponry fall as a mass that breaks into many pieces that roll and bounce among the hurrying hooves of his horse. It stumbles and kicks and throws him from his saddle. His men continue a good thirty yards and stop haltingly because all around them the canyon still vibrates with Red Morning’s war cry.

  The shadows on Justin’s father’s face move when he talks. But that’s it. That’s the only thing that moves. His body stays absolutely dead still. Even his voice is a level drone, so slow you can pick each word from the air and examine it.

  “Stop!” the hawk-faced man cries to the men, scrabbling across the ground to where his rifle has fallen. “Come help!” He is about to yell for them again when an arrow strikes his neck and takes away his voice and sends him reeling. His hat falls off and soaks up a jet of arterial blood that escapes from him. He struggles to right himself. Another arrow shaves him narrowly. And then another, this one finding its mark and dropping him.

  “The other men leave him there, but each in his own turn meets death, some with their throats slit, others brained by rocks. He finds all of them.” Justin’s father’s voice rises and falls and levels once more. “And then he skins them and guts them and eats their meat and breaks their bones and sucks the marrow from them. And with every bite he takes, his skin grows hairier and his nails grow longer, as long and sharp as talons.”

  Graham laughs and his grandfather gives him a severe look before his attention drifts off toward the dark forest and the less dark sky. “If you’re walking through the woods and if you see a tree with scratches on its bark?”

  They follow his gaze, expecting to find such a tree. “The Indian once known as Red Morning has been there, sharpening his claws and teeth. He wanders the forest, still hungry for revenge, searching for men with rifles, someone to blame for what happened to him and his family.”

  Graham makes big eyes even as he grins to prove he isn’t afraid.

  For the next few minutes they sit quietly. Then an owl swoops near the fire, its wings arched against the warm updraft, exciting the flames with the air it displaces. Justin shifts his legs. His feet have needles in them, having fallen asleep. And the log beneath him feels suddenly cold and hard and unwelcome.

  Justin awakes with a full bladder and ventures out of the tent and into the evening stillness. The moon is gone, the canyon lit only by the glow of the stars. He pauses after a few paces, his last breath and footstep the only lingering sound. The hair on his arms prickles as it does when you feel you are being watched. He thinks of his father’s story, able to believe in it for a moment, his mind drugged with sleep. Then he shakes his head and in doing so shakes off his fear like a cobweb. He moves hesitantly forward, away from the campsite, to the place they designated their toilet.

  When he lets loose a steaming arc of piss, his eyes wander the sky. An owl banks and wheels, its silhouette blacking out the stars in the shape of a mouth. He follows it until it vanishes against the backdrop of a fast-moving collection of clouds. They come from the west. He stands there awhile—half-asleep, entranced by the gray mystery of the night—and for five minutes, maybe more, watches the clouds become a thunderstorm crisscrossed with wires of lightning. Soon the canyon will darken with rain. He shakes off and hurries back to camp and observes nearby the abandoned tent. Its black hump makes it appear like the huddled remains of a beast that has run and run only to collapse exactly there, perishing where it lies, like the shadow-filled skeletons of cattle in John Wayne movies.

  He lies awake until the night fills with the dull, even noise of rainfall. The entire world seems to hiss. The wind flares up for a moment and the canvas rattles and flaps, joined by a sound like the crack of whips as branches break off trees. He clicks on his flashlight, revealing their four bodies crowded into a tent that droops and breathes around them with many damp spots dripping and pattering his sleeping bag.

  When you put your head on your pillow and listen—really listen—you can hear footsteps. This is your pulse, the veins in your ear swelling and constricting, slightly shifting against the cotton. He hears this now—an undersound, beneath the rain—only his head is nowhere near his p
illow. He has propped himself up on his elbow.

  There it is. Or is he only imagining it? The rasping thud a foot makes in wet grass—one moment behind the tent, the next moment in front of it, circling.

  The front flaps billow open with the breeze, the breeze bearing the keen wet odor of rabbitbrush, a smell he will always associate with barbed-wire fences, with dying, with fear. Outside, thousands of raindrops catch his flashlight’s beam and brighten with it. He imagines something out there, rushing in—how easy it would be—its shape taking form as it moves from darkness into light.

  His father releases a violent snore. Justin spotlights him with the flashlight, wanting to tell him shh. His father’s fingers twitch like the legs of the dreaming dog he drapes his arm over. His mouth forms silent words, his eyeballs shuddering beneath his eyelids, and—not for the first time—Justin wonders what is going on in there, inside him.

  Morning, a sneezing fit wakes Justin. He wipes his nose and then the gunk from his eyes to see that his father has already risen, his sleeping bag left crumpled and empty on his cot like a shed skin. Justin can smell wood smoke and hear the crackle of the campfire made from the wood they kept dry by storing it in the tent.

  His son still sleeps, an arm thrown over his face, so Justin rises as quietly as he can, pulling on his jeans and the Patagonia longsleeved crew he paid way too much money for the other day, when he and Graham went shopping at REI and got carried away, spending over four hundred dollars after an overeager saleswoman wearing a green vest bullied them into a family membership while dragging them rack to rack, talking at a fast clip about how important gear was—that was the word she kept using, gear—emphasizing, among other things, dry-core weave as an essential component in any shirt, the way it wicked moisture away, etc. He wishes he had spent the money instead on an air mattress. He hasn’t been camping in years and he’s not used to the time away from his bed. His spine feels like the hinges have gone stiff, like the oil has leaked out of them.

  He steps outside and pops his back and takes in the morning—the trees that remain in shadow down low, while sunlight ignites their upper branches. He then notices the dewy grass trampled down in a path that leads around the tent. He follows it, slowly, as if expecting something to leap out at him around every staked corner, until he has made a full circle. Then he steps out of the ring of trampled grass and stares at it for a long time, the memory of last night surfacing in his foggy brain. He does not feel the fear he felt before, but a mild discomfort brought on by this observation: whatever has visited them—whether deer or bear or coyote, he wonders—hasn’t simply prowled near for a sniff. The wide path of tramped-down grass indicates a continuous circling that reminds him of vultures wheeling in the sky.

  A pitch pocket pops and draws his attention to the campfire, left unattended.

  He looks around for his father, looking to the east, where the last of the clouds move slowly away from him, seeming to drag the blue weight of the sky behind them. The rain has left behind a dampness that creeps from the ground as a milky mist. A quarter his height, it covers the meadow and makes everything farther than ten yards away gray and indistinct. As he peers into it a red-winged blackbird darts out, flashing past him, toward the river, where he hears a dog bark.

  He walks a few paces from camp, toward the hum of the South Fork, until it becomes visible. Along it the mist drifts thickly riverward. He spots his father, naked along the shore. He appears as if upon a cloud. A sudden whirl of mist hides him for a moment. And then, while running his hands through his wet hair, he emerges from its dense vapors as if throwing off a shroud.

  The cold water has tightened and pinkened his skin and his dampened hair looks completely black, flattened like seaweed against his head. Justin sees him for a moment as he was, so many years ago. The picture of health. He remembers how his father used to lift weights in the basement and how the house would shake when he swung 250 pounds over his head and then back to the floor in a power lift. He remembers how his father once broke a wrench when wrestling with a rusted-over bolt. How, one winter, after his woodpile receded faster than he knew it ought to, he drilled a hole deep into a piece of firewood and filled it with gunpowder and sealed it with putty—and when the living room of his neighbor, Mr. Ott, exploded several days later, Justin’s father called FTD with a smile on his face and ordered flowers to be delivered to the hospital.

  In this way he is like a force of nature, moving through life with reckless abandon, wiping away any kind of opposition as a storm would wipe away a village, the low growl of his voice like a distant shout of thunder that makes you pause in whatever you are doing and look up.

  Now he dries off his body with a towel and then spins it into a whip to snap Boo, who barks eagerly and runs a few paces away from him and back. He drapes the towel over a boulder where his clothes lie in a pile. He pulls on a well-worn pair of Wrangler blue jeans and a thermal shirt whose long sleeves he pushes up to his elbows. And then wool socks, Browning boots whose laces he double-knots. Once dressed, he tosses the towel over his shoulder and moves toward Justin. As he does, he seems to grow older, the wrinkles fanning out from his eyes and the yellow creeping into his teeth when he smiles his hello. Age spots dot his skin. Plum-colored pouches bulge beneath his eyes. He says nothing but lays a damp hand on Justin’s shoulder. The chill remains after he takes it away.

  Boo follows the circle around the tent, his nose to the ground, sniffing excitedly. He pauses now and then to press his snout fully into the grass, his tail wagging. And then he stiffens and whines and regards the woods a moment before returning to whatever invisible tendrils of scent he discerns.

  “He was doing that earlier.” Justin’s father rubs his head and beard with the towel before tossing it over a log near the fire. “Something prowled close for a sniff last night. That right, Boo?” He squats down next to the dog and pulls him into a headlock and kisses him on the snout. “What do you smell, Boo Boo? You smell a raccoon? You smell a possum? You smell the big bad wolf?”

  He hikes to the edge of the forest, twenty yards away. Here he hung a red canvas bag shaped like a huge sausage. It contains their dirty clothes and cooking supplies, anything that might carry the smell of food. There is a handle on the hind end of the bag and he has run the forty-foot rope through it and made a slipknot that he choked tight. He then threw the free end of the rope over the lowest branch, twenty feet above the ground and yanked at it until the bag hung suspended just below the limb, like a massive cocoon. The free end of the rope he secured to the trunk in an anchor hitch he undoes now, lowering the big bag until it impacts the ground with a metallic clatter as the pots and pans and plates readjust themselves.

  Justin’s father asks him to fetch some water for coffee. He unzips the bag and rifles around in it until he finds the kettle and throws it at Justin, who catches it fumblingly. There is a cold spring in the nearby forest. From it bleeds a marshy stream, one of so many that trickle to the bottom of the canyon and feed the South Fork. Justin pushes his way through the woods. By this time the mist has mostly burned off, only a few skirts of it surrounding the trees and billowing in his passage. A swarm of tiny brown toads hops away from him when he approaches the spring.

  Here it is—the size of a hot tub—surrounded by willows and sun-sparkled stones. And there, next to it, a pair of tattered boots, one of them lying flat against the ground, the other pointed skyward, like a gravestone. He has paused without realizing it. Now he takes several hesitant steps forward to see beyond the boots, where a strewn puzzle of bones and cartilage come together and form a body.

  The kettle falls from his hand to the forest floor with a thunk.

  The man has been dead a long time. So long Justin can only identify him as male by his clothes and even then he cannot be certain. His jeans and flannel shirt have been torn open and scattered in pieces as though he has exploded and left the shrapnel of his person lying here and there among the weeds. The vultures and the coyotes and the flies and
the worms have had their way and licked the skin clean off his bones. His bones are the color of old paper, a yellowish black, their surface scored from the gnashing of teeth. Justin imagines the coyotes howling when they ate his remains, fighting over the juiciest cuts of meat.

  His ribs look like the legs of a dead spider, curled upon itself. Crab grass grows through his knuckles and around his skull like hair. He seems to have grown out of the soil and is now receding into it. A moth lands on the skull, flexing its wings and tasting from the black pool of an eye socket, before taking flight.

  At that moment the world seems to stop. The moth ceases flying, frozen in midflight. A tree limb, bowed by the breeze, stills. A pinecone falling from a branch hangs motionless in the air and an immobile chipmunk watches it not fall.

  Justin feels a fist-sized pressure in his chest that comes from holding his breath. With a gasp, the pressure vanishes and the world unlocks and resumes its flow, as the moth flutters away and the pinecone crashes to the ground.

  And then he runs. He runs and probably makes it fifty feet before he stops and finds his cool and steadies his breathing and returns to the spring, slowly. There is a taste like salty pennies in his mouth and he realizes he has bitten a hole in his cheek. He swallows the blood and calls for his father. And then again, before a voice faintly calls back to Justin from the campsite, “What?”

  “I need you to come here. Come here right now.”

  Something in his voice must alarm his father because a moment later Justin can hear a crashing in the woods and then breathing beside him. Boo trots forward and Justin’s father grabs the dog by the collar before he can disturb the corpse.