The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  Justin remembers what Graham said about a grizzly being able to travel one hundred yards in nine seconds. This seems a low estimate as the distance between them vanishes in an instant. There is a wailing sound next to Justin. He only vaguely recognizes it as a scream. Graham is screaming. Justin knows he ought to, too, but can only watch when the bear approaches the perimeter of logs and rises up on its haunches—becoming a broad brown column of fur.

  Justin feels so small, and he shrinks down, pulling Graham into him, under him, waiting for a paw to come slashing down on them. But the grizzly turns at the last minute, falling into a four-legged position once again to circle away. Like a semitrailer, its enormous bulk has shifted the air in its passing and for a moment the fire leans sideways before righting itself.

  They stand on the side of the fire opposite the bear. Justin has moved in front of Graham. He snatches his rifle and squares his shoulders against a second charge.

  When the bear reaches the edge of the forest it again turns to face them. Here it sinks its head and rumbles low, a growl that sounds like the idling of an engine, the machine of which will be their undoing. When it starts forward again, it does so as a trembling curtain of cinnamon-colored fur. They do not scream. They are too enraptured by the sight of it to scream. In his silence Justin registers the force of its stride, every step like the blow of a rubber mallet, like the fierce beating of a heart with chambers as vast as a ballroom.

  When it nears the camp, it lifts its paw—its claws long and yellow—swinging it against the log where Graham was sitting. A splintery gash opens up and the log goes rolling into the fire. They leap back just as the log hits the coals and sends a cloud of sparks swirling all around them. The bear again retreats to its earlier position. When it comes at them the third time, Justin knows it is in earnest as it lets out a growl that seems to suck all the light from the air and smear their faces with charcoal.

  Only then does he remember the weight of the rifle in his hands. He gets off three shots, but his aim is wild and the bullets tear off into the night. The noise startles the bear. It slows and thrashes its head from side to side as if to bite the bullets from the air. And then releases a roar so powerful that the air seems to tremble. The bear is close enough for Justin to see the saliva swinging from its chops in long ropes.

  He holds his rifle out before him, ejects brass, fumblingly reloads the chamber with a bullet from his pocket, and squeezes off another shot in such a hurry that the scope kicks back into his eye and cuts it open. For a second he sees nothing but white—and then a redness through which the world comes back into focus. The bear spins around wildly and heads off into the woods, struck by the bullet, though Justin doesn’t know where. Just before disappearing into a dark cluster of pines, it throws a glance over its shoulder. It seems to be trying to send them a message through its obsidian black eyes.

  A thin stream of blood runs down Justin’s cheek. He wipes at it with his forearm and it smears away red. Already the skin has begun to swell around his eye so that he can see only half-lidded. He looks at Graham: his mouth is a big black O. Otherwise Justin doesn’t think he has moved, seemingly fossilized by what he has witnessed.

  “You okay?”

  Graham rolls his face toward Justin with his eyebrows knit together in confusion, as if he never really believed in the bear until now. An oily film covers his eyes. His tongue works around in his mouth, working something toward the front of it, a curse: “Fucking shit,” is what he says. It is the curse of the boy who feels overwhelmed by the world. He wipes at his eyes and makes the sort of face that normally breaks into crying, but doesn’t.

  From the forest comes a series of grunts and woofs. The noise of sticks snapping. Noises that could be noises heard on any night, or not. A crack. A rustle. The fingers of firelight can only reach so far, and then the imagination takes over. “We better go now.”

  “Without Grandpa?” Graham says, and then, more softly, “Without him.”

  A sound rises up and spreads over them like the groaning of the earth itself. The bear. Fifty yards away, maybe closer, maybe farther. The sound of it like a subtle force pushing Justin back, making him want to fire his gun into the darkness.

  “We’re leaving without him.” There. He has said it. He is not saddened because he is beyond sadness; it can come later. Right now there is only room for the need to keep his son safe. He is trying to steady his breath, trying to keep his face from contorting into a mask of anguish—to remain calm—but the fear, this black-spider-scrabbling-out-from-under-his-pillow fear, has found his blood, is in his blood. “Just come on.” When he waves his son forward in irritation, his hand looks like a claw savaging the air.

  His fear hurries his heart into a fast beat that matches his feet upon the ground. They begin to run, but in the sluggish way you sometimes dream of running, where the ground clings to your boots and the air tangles around your legs and makes you feel as if you are moving in slow motion.

  Above all else he feels the fear and then the stress of stumbling over stones and blundering into trees, as they hurry through the meadow and then follow the blur of the logging road with the big lodgepole pines rising above them, with the river hissing behind them, with the darkness swirling around their legs so they hardly know where to put them. All about them gather invisible threats, shadows.

  Justin reaches out a hand for Graham so that their fingers twine and they remain together. It is his job to extract the boy from the canyon and he knows he must to do it swiftly, powerfully. They at first run—and then hike when unable to run anymore. Their boots feel full of lead. They breathe in huge sections of air as they ascend the steep grade of the road with the feeling that something is following them. At their backs, Justin cannot help but imagine, the bear capers along, maybe dancing some old bear dance, experiencing a kind of glee at having them so close at hand and bewildered by the dark.

  Before them the trees part and make way, but when he glances over his shoulder the branches seem to knot together like so many fingers, giving them no choice but to proceed, no matter how badly he wants to return to the seeming safety of the fire.

  In his chest he feels as if dust has gathered in the shape of a heart. That is how tenuous his courage is, so that a single breath could scatter it through his ribs and upon the wind.

  When a great, thick flapping of wings announces itself from a nearby tree—no doubt an owl—he cries out, even as he tries to suppress his terror for the sake of his son.

  Frogs drum. Crickets chirp. A small creek spills across the road and the moon makes a milky circle on it that they splash through. At one point his son trips and Justin grabs him and drags him along.

  Every now and then he pauses—his head cocked, listening—as does his son. Not looking over his shoulder is impossible. Whenever he can, he shoots a brief glance to the forest, to the road behind, expecting a dark shape hastening toward them. But the woods are too black to tell him anything except run, run, run.

  Where he moves, his son follows. They are in the grip of the forest. They lurk and watch and run and hide. Instinct has taken over.

  When they finally reach the rim of the canyon, Justin hears a low sharp sound beside him, like someone drawing a blade across wood. He stops and leans into the noise and discovers that it comes from his son. He is bent in half, his hands on his knees, struggling to breathe. The air rasps in and out of him. “Where’s your inhaler?” Justin says and pats at Graham’s jeans, his pockets, trying to find it, finding only wetness as his son has pissed himself in fear.

  “I don’t—” Graham pauses for a moment to suck in a few breaths. “I don’t have it.” He sits down in the middle of the road. He does not seem in charge of his breathing, his chest working according to its own will, wheezing the air in and out of him. He brings his hands to his throat as if trying to choke himself.

  Justin looks over his shoulder for what must be the thousandth time that day. Nothing moves in the darkness. The road, he thinks, is empty. T
o follow it back the way they came seems impossibly far—not to mention insane—but so does pursuing it in the opposite direction, through the Ochocos, such a long distance until it first becomes asphalt and then branches into a highway with semis groaning along it.

  It is then that he sees, in the blackened distance, the heavy machinery. A skidder. A bulldozer. A backhoe. A payloader. Two front-end loaders. The moon gleams across their windows and brightly lights their metal blades. He grabs Graham by the hand and they stagger toward them—Justin isn’t sure why. Perhaps because they seem, all crowded together, like a fortress they can lock themselves away in—or perhaps because they represent what he seeks so desperately—civilization, the very thing that promises to contain and annihilate whatever wildness pursues them.

  They situate their bodies against a payloader. Justin sits on the ground, his back to the big tire, and Graham sits between his legs, his back to Justin’s chest. With every breath he makes a little growling noise. When Justin hugs him close, he can feel the growls against his own chest. “It’s okay,” Justin says. “It’s okay.” Graham’s body begins to shiver and twist in a way that reminds Justin of the snake. Even with a hole in its head, he remembers, it continued to turn over and over and craft itself into so many unusual designs. He prodded it with his boot and even picked it up and felt its hard cold muscle alive and dead in his hand. When five minutes passed and it had not stilled, he remembers feeling bothered and wanting to put it underneath a stone so he wouldn’t have to look at it or think about it anymore.

  Which isn’t so different from the way he feels now, holding Graham and whispering sh and petting his hair, even as he glances around, wishing he was anywhere else. He tries to forget about his father, about the darkness and the threat that the darkness holds, as he cradles his son and whispers to him and coaches his lungs until so many minutes later he takes a deep, calm breath and Justin says, “Good. That’s good.”

  He can breathe. And if he can breathe, he can live. That is something. In this instant, several images tumble through his head—his wife curled up on a hospital bed with a sodden pad tucked between her legs, his father positioned by the edge of the canyon with a faulty heart beating its ragged beats. The united losses and gains of the past and present stir up a groundswell of emotion that surges through him. He thinks for a moment it might be more than he can handle.

  Then his son turns to look at him and Justin can just see his face, a dim oval shape. “Do you hear something?” he asks in a whisper.

  He does not. Not at first. Then he strains to open up his ear to every sound in the forest and nearby hears footsteps that sound, very faintly, like shovels digging.

  Both of them stand. Justin takes a deep breath to calm himself and the breath is full of the odor of Graham’s urine. He remembers how keen a bear’s nose is compared to its eyes—making the sharp, tangy smell equivalent to a trail of bread crumbs.

  At that moment the clouds close around the moon. There is a time of bewildering darkness. “I can’t see anything,” Graham says. Justin holds a hand in front of his eyes and can see it only faintly and only when his fingers wiggle. An unseen shaft of heat passes over him—a breath, he feels certain—that sends him reeling back.

  “Dad?” Graham says in a panicked voice and Justin says, “I’m here,” and the clouds scud away from the moon and its blue light reveals only their frightened faces and the collection of machinery in a clearing edged by trees.

  Justin asks Graham if he is ready to go and he says yes, he is. He stares into Justin’s eyes with a mixture of fear, daring, and trust that fills Justin with the desire to hold him forever and keep him from harm. Together they step forward, temporarily renewed—until, at the far end of the clearing, a dimly seen shadow comes alive and moves toward them—growing more and more distinct—the broad triangular head, the wetly spiked fur, and the tumbling bulk of the bear.

  They stop and so does it, matching their movements. Its shape seems to waver, almost indistinguishable from the woods, its movement like the movement of leaves in a high wind.

  Then Justin takes one step forward, and in either ridicule or contest, it matches him, moving into the moonlight, its broad head rising up into a silver-striped hump. Murky eyes come into view and focus on him, like a dim pair of flashlights deep in a cave. It opens its mouth and grumbles in its throaty language. This time he moves back a step and it moves forward another. He remembers Graham’s book and studies its ears. They are horribly small.

  Graham makes a whimpering noise and the bear retreats, blurring into the shadows. From behind the tractors Justin hears its labored breathing and the thud of its weight, its footsteps, at measured intervals. He pushes his son against the giant tire of a backhoe and tells him not to move, to keep his eyes and his ears sharp. The wind pauses and an important stillness descends upon the forest. The air seems almost to hum at a frequency he cannot hear but feels.

  Then, only ten feet away, a woof announces a shape materializing out of the darkness. The bear has circled around them. Near the edge of the cliff, with the expanse of the canyon behind it, it regards them. The silver stripe along its back glows in the moonlight.

  The bear lowers its body a few inches, as if readying to spring. Then comes a whooshing noise as its lungs swell, the breath before the roar. Justin lifts his rifle to his shoulder and squints down the line of it, hesitating at the trigger when the bear takes two shambling steps forward and unhinges its jaw. Thunder comes. Justin feels the air shake, just barely, like when you grip a train track, a trembling.

  He suffers from the sense of detachment sometimes experienced in the classroom. He feels as if he is floating away from his body and watching everything from the outside, from someplace remote, separate from the horror of it all. He understands how fragile the whole situation is, how if he moves too fast or shoots too far to the right, the bear will lope toward them and crack open their skulls with its jaws.

  Then comes a gunshot that drags him back into reality—the low, flat crack shocking him so much he drops his rifle. Because he has not fired. He has not felt the kick, as powerful as a horse’s hoof, against his shoulder. The gunshot has come from beside him, from his son, who has stepped away from the backhoe and compressed the trigger of his rifle. Flame seems to jump from the end of its barrel. And in the brief yellow light, while the noise of the gunshot widens around them, the bear staggers. The bullet has zipped past its snarling teeth, over its lolling tongue, and into the shadows of its throat. The bear collapses into a heap, maybe ten feet away, thrashing its head and coughing as though it has swallowed a bee.

  Justin does not have time to pick up his rifle. He does not have time to think. He only has time to acknowledge this heart-drumming, bladder-bursting fear as he breaks from his trance and hurries forward to intercept his son.

  “Quick,” he says when he grabs Graham by the arm and drags him—where?—into the night again. He goes one way, and then another, and then the backhoe is before them, only a few feet away. He pulls himself up by the handrail, and then his son, both of them balanced on the small metal step. He yanks at the glass door of the cab. It swings open. They crawl inside, Justin on the seat, Graham on his lap. They are a few feet off the ground and surrounded by glass. He can only hope that the bear cannot find them here, if they remain still and quiet.

  But at that very moment it rouses itself into a four-legged stance to consider them, looking right at them. Its tongue hangs from its mouth and blood drains off it, making what looks like a steadily growing shadow on the ground. The glass of the cab is thin and Justin can hear the growl, the bubbling sound beneath it.

  Justin reaches for the ignition and finds it empty. He yanks down the sunshade and the key falls to the floor and he pushes Graham off his lap and reaches around in the dark space between his feet and claws up the key and shoves it into the ignition and looks out the window to see the bear lumbering toward them.

  He cranks the ignition and the engine comes to life with a roar. He h
as operated heavy equipment before, working for his father. The light is dim and the controls somewhat different from what he’s used to, but he figures out the boom, the dipper, the bucket. He disengages the safety locks and jams down the stick and the backhoe comes to life, rotating, swinging the boom, the bucket, like a scorpion’s tail.

  Something has come loose inside him. Rage. He is in a trance of rage. He feels it expand inside his body, filling him up, pushing against his joints, his skin. It finds an exit through a scream so feral it seems to belong to someone else, separate from what he is capable of, powerful. There is a kind of joy that joins his craze, a heightened thrill.

  The grizzly rises up on its haunches just as the bucket hits it—the backhoe shuddering—the bear staggering back and teetering at the edge of the cliff, grappling with the dark air, swinging its arms madly in a vain attempt to find some purchase. And then it is gone.

  He imagines the wind roaring in its ears. He imagines its enormous body turning over and over again in the air, as the bear plummets toward the bottom of the canyon, so that the moon in the sky is visible one moment and the moon reflected in the fast-approaching river the next. He imagines all of that soft fur seeming suddenly to gather into a fist and the great snap of its spine breaking against the water. He imagines the water carrying it away, a great shape vanishing into nothingness.

  Maybe a minute passes before he cancels the ignition and pulls his son again into his lap and wraps his arms around him in a crushing hug. They remain there for a long time. They remain there—in and out of sleep—until the darkness, like a curtain, slowly lifts and the sun washes away the stars and colors the canyon red, a color that to his agonized imagination looks like blood.