Kept

by D. J. Taylor

  There was a patch of darkness just beyond the firelight and beneath the margin of the spruce trees, and he watched it for a while, thinking that it looked remarkably like an animal stretched out and luxuriating in the warmth of the fire, like his own dogs lounging by the hearth in his guardian’s house back in his own country. Interested in this singular phenomenon, he found himself listening carefully into the night air, but there was nothing except the crackle of the fire and a faint hiss of steam from the kettle he had placed at the fire’s edge. Having drunk some of the hot water that it contained, he allowed his gaze to rest once more on the patch of darkness, but it seemed vaguer now, less distinct in his imagination. He wondered if here in the extremity of the wild, with each of his senses heightened to their utmost pitch, his eyes might be playing tricks on him. Sometime later he picked up a stick from the margin of the fire and threw it speculatively in the direction of the patch of darkness, but there was nothing there and he heard the stick fall hissing into the snow.

  Next morning he awoke long before the rays of light had crept over the lines of spruce trees, ate his breakfast in darkness hunched over the embers of the fire, packed his things onto the makeshift sled and resumed the trail half an hour before dawn. No more snow had fallen, and the surface beneath him was more tightly packed. In this way he made better progress than on the previous afternoon. Midmorning brought him to a region of open country between two banks of firs where the trail turned south along the banks of a frozen watercourse. The lack of cover oppressed him. It seemed to him as he moved forward that he was a tiny limpetlike creature clinging to the surface of an unending vastness, and he was glad when he returned a mile or so later to the bleak avenues of trees. He ate his lunch—half a slice of pork left over from the previous day and a biscuit—seated on the trunk of a fir tree that had fallen halfway across the path. He certainly was hungry, he told himself as he disposed of the food, but the dull ache in his stomach remained. Almost as the thought came into his mind, a jackrabbit bobbed into view from the undergrowth twenty yards away, and instinctively, such was his desire for fresh meat, he raised his rifle and loosed off a shot. But his fingers were awkward inside his thick mittens, and the jackrabbit slipped away out of range. Seeing it disappear, he wished now that he had not shot at it, for he had a curious feeling that by breaking the silence with that deafening report he had drawn attention to himself in a way that a more prudent man might have avoided. Some other impulse prompted him to examine the number of cartridges in his store. Finding that he had only seven, he resolved to shoot at no more rabbits.

  Towards afternoon he reached another long low bank of spruce trees, sparsely arranged on either side of the trail. The forest was beginning to break up, he told himself, for the land that stretched away on either side was more variegated. There were hills in the middle distance, themselves mere spurs and outriders of yet more distant mountains. The discovery cheered him, for he understood that he must be closer to Fort McGurry, which, as he knew, lay in the dip of a stretch of higher ground. As he gained the avenue of spruce trees, where the trail ran for more than a mile, unerringly straight, like a road, some instinct—like the instinct that had urged him to shoot the rabbit and to examine his store of cartridges—caused him to glance over his shoulder.

  There, thirty yards behind him, muzzle down in the snow, grey ears pointed and alert, walked a wolf. He was not such a newcomer to the land that he could not recognise a wolf. Standing uncertainly with his feet planted on either side of the sled, he watched as the animal slid towards him, saw him motionless and came to a halt some twenty yards away, resting its paws on the ground before it and curling over its tail as a cover for them. He knew enough about wolves to realise that this was an impressive specimen—gaunt and showing signs of malnourishment, but fully five feet from nose to tail and perhaps thirty inches at the shoulder. It occurred to him that it had been following him since he had set out on the trail, and the thought was not pleasant to him. Still, he had a rifle at his shoulder and seven cartridges, and he determined to be sanguine. Pulling the string of the sled against his shoulder and casting a last look behind him, he set off once more along the trail.

  After an hour the shadows began to steal up among the spruce trees and dusk fell upon the land. He selected his camping place for the night with care: a patch of ground beneath the boughs of a particularly large tree. Having chopped a stack of kindling from the brushwood that lay to hand, he lit a fire and established himself in a declivity at the base of the tree with the fire before him. With warmth and food his spirits rose again. Two days or maybe three would see him in McGurry, talking to the factor and having his beard shaved by the fort barber. He could not see the wolf, had not done so since he commenced to build his fire, but he believed that it was there. As the darkness grew more complete, his eyes grew sharper and he began searching through the murk beyond the arc of the firelight. He had almost convinced himself that the beast had gone, sprung fresh meat somewhere along the trail and pursued it elsewhere, when he realised that what he had thought to be a thicket of shadow thirty feet beyond the fire’s edge was the shape that he had distinguished the previous night. As he watched, the wolf rolled over, like a dog that lies in front of a drawing-room hearth, and he saw its eyes flash like live coals. Without pausing to reflect, he took the rifle from where it lay on the tarpaulin next to him and raised it to his shoulder, but the click of the safety catch alerted the beast and it slipped lazily to one side even before he could bring the weapon to bear. Looking up a moment or two later, he saw that it had reestablished itself quite comfortably a yard or two away from its original place.

  He did not sleep much that night but dozed unhappily, troubled by a dream in which he ran steadily down a stony beach pursued by some white, flapping thing like a sheet whipped up by the air, always moving at the same speed, waiting only for him to flag. Waking once from one of these dozes, he saw that the fire had burned low and the wolf lay only a dozen feet away, close enough for him to make out the bristling fur of its jaw and the twitching of its grey flanks. He watched it for a long while as he renewed the fire with brushwood and then settled himself once more in his position against the tree trunk. In the morning—a very grey morning it was, with the promise of snow in the lowering sky—his first act on waking was to look for the spot where the wolf had lain, but there was no sign of any living thing. This cheered him, and he ate his breakfast with greater relish than he remembered eating a meal for days. Then, as he picked up his belongings and stood warming his feet at the embers of the fire, he saw from the tail of his eye the wolf come slinking out of a clump of whin bushes away to his right. In its absence the man had not ceased to reflect upon the wolf, and he now brought into his mind certain of the reflections with which he had comforted himself. If the wolf wished to follow him down the trail to Fort McGurry, then he had a rifle and seven cartridges and he could build a fire beyond which the most obstreperous wolf in the northern territories would not care to venture. Let the beast wander after him if it wished! It was of no account to him. In this way he regained his composure, slung the string of the sled over his shoulders and pulled out once more onto the trail.

  He was in luck that morning. The snow had kept off, and the ground remained crisp underfoot. Moreover he recognised, or he thought he recognised, certain signs suggesting that Fort McGurry was not far away: a broken stirrup cast onto the side of the trail; a blackened campfire only half covered by the snow. These convinced him that his journey might soon be at an end. In this access of high spirits he found that he could refrain from looking over his shoulder for as much as five minutes at a time. When he did so he saw that the wolf continued to plod thirty or forty yards behind him. Well, if it wanted to do this, let it! What did he care? It was while turning back from one of these scrutinies of the trail and the grey shape loping in his wake that he fell into danger. Scarcely seeing that he had done so, he had come almost to the outer margin of the trail, to the point where it was bordered by brus
hwood and bushes concealed by the snow. Here he put his foot upon a prairie hen’s nest, and the bird came whirling up in a frenzy into his face. Startled, he beat the creature away with his hands and in doing so tripped on a root and fell heavily onto his ankle. He was up in an instant—the outraged hen continued to flutter around his head—conscious, as he did so, that his foot would not support him. Standing on one leg and using the upturned rifle as a crutch, he examined the foot with the fingers of his right hand, gritting his teeth against the shards of pain that now coursed up his leg to the level of his knee. He had either broken the ankle or badly sprained it, he did not know which. What he did know was that he could place no weight on it and thus was all but unable to move.

  It was by now about midday, and the weak winter sun had irradiated the trail with pale, phantasmal light. The wolf had stopped twenty yards away and, head down over its paws, was regarding him with interest. He stood there foolishly for a moment or so, sensible of the pain in his ankle, wondering what he should do. There was nothing for it but to build a fire and conduct a proper examination of the ankle. Accordingly, as the sun began once more to slip beneath the rim of the sky, moving awkwardly on his one sound foot, he constructed a small fire at the side of the trail, waited until the flames had risen and then, with the tarpaulin spread out beneath him, removed his moccasin and his thick sock and exposed his foot to the raw air. It was bruised and swollen to almost twice its normal size, and believing that he had sprained it rather than broken it, he bound it up with strips of cloth, replaced sock and moccasin and settled down to consider what he ought to do. There was nothing for it, he decided, but to stay the night where he was and trust that by the time he awoke in the morning he would be sufficiently recovered to proceed. And so, working slowly and occasionally crouching in the snow the better to accomplish his task, he built up a great pile of brushwood next to the fire and, cursing over the exposed nature of the spot in which he found himself, sat down once again to await the coming of nightfall. The wolf, twenty yards away, regarded him keenly. As the shadows began to lengthen he noticed it sidle slowly nearer to him until it lay barely ten feet distant from the arc of the fire. Its languid movements here in the warmth of the fire were, he decided, deceptive, for he was aware that the beast watched and registered each move that he made, following the descent of his hand as he reached for the biscuit canister, flattening its ears and preparing to retreat if he showed signs of struggling to his feet. He spent a restless night, troubled by the pain of his ankle and the thought of the wolf stretched out beyond the circle of firelight, and his own defencelessness.

  He started awake to find the fire almost extinguished and the wolf scarcely two yards from where he lay. He cursed, seized a glowing fragment of wood from the embers and threw it in front of him, causing the beast to back away. There was a great ache in his ankle, he realised, and it had begun to snow quite heavily; already a coating an inch or two thick lay over the surface of his tarpaulin. He told himself that he was not afraid, that he would lie up here on the edge of the wild until his foot was healed, that he had a rifle and seven cartridges, and yet he was conscious that if he stayed where he was the snow would surely cover him. His salvation, he knew, lay in movement, that movement that the wild despises, and yet to shamble even a few feet was agony. The wolf continued to watch him as he made his preparations, assembled his belongings beneath the tarpaulin on the sled and then, again using the upturned rifle as a crutch, attempted to pull out onto the trail. He managed perhaps a dozen yards and then fell over in the snow, cursing at his ankle and at the fate that had brought him here to the wild, taken the boys from him and sent a prairie hen to sprain his ankle. The wolf retreated a few paces at the noise of his cursing and then, seeing that he did not mean to move, settled down to watch him.

  It was snowing hard now, and staring at his thick mittens, he could see on each of them a layer half an inch deep. Hastily he brushed it off. Instantly further snowflakes descended onto the surface of the wool. He was startled by how calm he felt. Here he sat, amid falling snow, on the margin of the wild, with his ankle sprained and the boys mysteriously gone from him—he wondered idly about the boys and what had happened to them—and the wolf silently regarding him, and yet he had a curious sensation that he was somehow detached from his own body, looking down from some warm, airy vantage point in the skies at the figure sitting hunched up on the trail with the rifle cradled in his arms and the wolf a dozen yards behind him. The snow continued to fall.

  XX

  ROMAN À CLEF

  In the vicinity, though not quite the near vicinity, of London Bridge, halfway along Tooley Street and in sight of Hay’s Wharf, at the junction of a crossroads of thoroughfares where packhorses and covered wagons jingle at every hour of the day and night, much to the dissatisfaction of the Tooley Street inhabitants, lies an inn named the Black Dog. Quite where the Black Dog, a vivid representation of whom dangles from a square frame above the grey stone doorway, came from, the Tooley Streeters are uncertain, but he is generally thought to be of ancient lineage, for the establishment to which he gives his name contains, in addition to his stygian portrait, a box concealing half a dozen bullets fired by Cromwell’s men into the statuary of the neighbouring church and a glass case harbouring an antique sword, its blade mottled with rust, which is generally assumed to have cut several heads from their shoulders in some remote era of Tooley Street history.

  The attractions of its bullet box, its rusty cutlass and its dangling sign notwithstanding, the Black Dog wore at this particular moment in time—eleven o’clock on a May morning—a somewhat desolate and forlorn air. The shutters on the ground-floor window were only half-open, the door—upon which the Black Dog gazes down balefully, as if he had half a mind to gobble it up with his great jaws—only half-ajar and the potboy sluicing water upon the step, over which the fumes of spiritous liquor seemed to hang in a kind of fog, only half-awake. Within, all was similarly cast down and mournful: the public bar all grey and ghostly in the half-light, with the chairs still resting on the wooden table-ends, the dirt very prominent on the beams and the windowpanes and the floor very much decorated with last night’s detritus of tobacco fragments, pieces of bread, shrimp heads and the like. That such an environment has a lowering effect on the temperament was clear from the behaviour of the landlord, who stood by the bar regarding an upturned beer barrel with an expression of such melancholy that Mrs. Landlord, arriving downstairs in a muslin dress and a cap, somewhat greasy from a late breakfast, took fright and began to dart round the room, gathering up the spittoons under her arm and administering sundry little polishes to the tables with a duster.

  Here, in a corner, flanked by a lugubrious print of the Tower and a faded bill dating from ever so long ago announcing that Mr. Felix Benjamin’s benefit is finally to come off under the patronage of the Honourable Mr. Makepeace, JP, his face well-nigh hidden behind a newspaper, sat Mr. Pardew, very demure in a frock coat and peg-top trousers and his feet squeezed into the neatest little pair of lacquered boots you ever saw, which was a tribute to Mrs. Pardew or whoever else dressed him that morning. A specimen Tooley Streeter, a cabman from the rank up by the station forecourt, or one of the wagoners thundering past in the road outside, who poked his head through the Black Dog’s half-open door (pushing his way past the potboy, who had now absolutely sat down and gone to sleep on the step) would perhaps have remarked that the relation between Mr. Pardew and the landlord and his wife was rather peculiar, and that though each side was cognisant of the other, both were trying deliberately to ignore the undoubted fact of the other’s existence.

  The specimen Tooley Streeter might also have noted that Mr. Pardew, though studiously absorbed in his newspaper—indeed with a pencil in his hand with which he made certain emendations in the margin—and with a glass of something (brought by whom? The landlord seemed to know nothing about it) before him on the table, was waiting for someone and that this someone had delayed his or her appearance to a point suffi
cient to cause him vexation. Certainly, Mr. Pardew had not come to the Black Dog to read his newspaper or to drink his glass of Foker’s Entire, for he was forever squinting at his watch, comparing that instrument’s progress with a clock that hangs on the far wall next to a facsimile of Sir Walter Raleigh and additionally patting the pockets of his frock coat in such a manner as to reassure himself that something dear to him still lay within it. Eventually, these signs of nervousness could be borne no longer, and Mr. Pardew jumped to his feet, jingled his money in his pocket and took a turn around the bar, looked at the print of the Tower and the encomium to Mr. Felix Benjamin, ran his hand meditatively over the bullet box, shook it in fact as if it held dice, and came to rest alongside the glass case containing the rusty sword.

  “Dear me,” said Mr. Pardew, half to himself and half to the landlord, who stood, still regarding the beer barrel, a few feet away, “but that’s a fearsome weapon.”

  “I daresay it is, sir,” remarked the landlord, to whom the sword, formerly one of the baubles of his tenancy, had now mysteriously become an item of no account. “I daresay it is.”

  “Feel that on your neck and you would know about it,” Mr. Pardew observed pleasantly. Mr. Pardew was about to say something more, but their colloquy was interrupted by the arrival of a timid young man with light-coloured hair who came marching hastily into the room, flung his gaze around with an expression of apparent horror and might almost, it appeared, have marched out again, had not Mr. Pardew taken it upon himself to intervene. The landlord, had he taken any account of the proceedings, might have said that Mr. Pardew’s behaviour was masterful. Without appearing to make any decisive movement, indeed still seeming to take an interest in the glass case, he contrived to interpose himself between the young man and the door, not exactly standing in the visitor’s way but positioning himself, so to speak, on the flank of his retreat. Again, the disinterested onlooker might have been forgiven for assuming that there was some peculiar relation between Mr. Pardew and the landlord, for the latter instantly ceased his occupation of the bar and disappeared into his private quarters, leaving Mr. Pardew and the young man alone in a silence broken only by the flap of the half-open shutter and the wagons in the street.