Bella scrambled up and down the hillside twice without faltering. Not only did she procure water and blankets, but a tarp full of kindling, along with the first aid kit. At the conclusion of her second trip, her dad met her with a weak smile, grimacing through his pain.
“Okay, baby,” he said. “You’re doing great, baby. I’m so proud of you. Now comes the hard part. We’re gonna need to set daddy’s leg.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we have to straighten my leg out how it’s supposed to be.”
“Daddy, I can’t,” she said. “I can’t hardly look at it. I’ll get sick, I promise.”
“Bella, you can do this, I know you can. Don’t think of it as my leg, just think of it as a thing that needs to be fixed.”
“But, Daddy . . .”
“First, you need to go to the edge of the meadow and find two sticks—about this thick, and this long,” he said, demonstrating. “And they gotta be really straight, baby, and green, so they’re not brittle, you got it?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Take the big knife out of the pack, and the bear spray—you might need it. And be very careful. Cut with the serrated part—the side with the little teeth at the bottom, okay? And always keep your hand clear like Daddy showed you.”
“But I don’t want to leave you,” she said.
“You have to, baby. You won’t be long. You gotta go quick while there’s still light. Take my headlamp, just in case.”
Bella dug the knife, still streaked with blood, out of the pack and hurried toward the meadow.
“Don’t run with that knife!” he shouted after her.
It only took Bella a matter of minutes to find two bare fir boughs low to the ground. Both limbs were a half-inch thick, and about three feet long, neither one tapering much.
When she arrived back at her dad, it was nearly dusk.
“Okay, baby. There’s a rope attached to the tarp, I want you to cut it off, then I want you to cut in three even pieces, okay?
Bella nodded.
“Use the toothy part of the blade, okay?”
Sawing the rope free of the bloodied tarp, Bella laid it out, and began cutting it in two-foot lengths.
Her dad’s breathing was scratchy and shallow, and he was paler than she’d ever seen him.
“Look at the rope, baby,” he said. “Not at me.”
Bella could feel the hot lump rising in her throat once more as the tears began to blur her vision. Once the rope was at the ready, next came the dreaded task of confronting the leg again.
“Okay, now,” her dad said. “Remember what I said: it’s just a thing that needs to be straightened out. I’m gonna help you. I’m gonna hold the upper part of my leg steady, and you’re gonna put the two ends so they’re lined up again.”
“I can’t do it, Daddy, I can’t.”
“Baby, look at me: you have to. Daddy can’t do it by himself.”
Wiping away her tears, Bella took firm hold of his calf and deliberately guided the bone until the muscles seemed to pull it in place. Her dad gasped in pain through the ordeal, but when it was over she saw a little of the color come back into his face.
“That’s it, baby,” he said in a breathy voice. “Much better.”
It was all but fully dark as her dad guided her through the process of splinting the leg, securing the apparatus tightly with the rope at the ankle, then both above and below the knee.
“Perfect, baby,” he said. “You did amazing. Almost as good as new.”
But her work was far from done. Next she gathered up the kindling and started a fire, and when it was burning sufficiently to leave untended, she returned to the meadow by the light of a headlamp, where, at once electric and numb with dread, the darkness crowding in around her, she collected heaping armloads of limbs and hurried them back to her dad, her heart racing.
Each time, he seemed a little weaker upon her return. By the final trip, he’d given up greeting her with encouragement. For ten minutes he fell silent completely, eyes wide open, much like the deer.
“You must be starving, baby,” he said, at last.
Indeed, she was famished enough to drag the deer carcass across the snow to his side, where, propped on one elbow, sweating, and still looking pale in the firelight, he managed to butcher two steaks from the loin.
“Now, baby,” he said, his arms bloodied to the elbow. “You’re gonna need to drag the rest away and cover it with the tarp.”
“Back to where I got it?”
“Farther,” he said. “We don’t want to attract company.”
And even after she’d dragged the bulky thing the length of a football field, her work was not done. Before she lay down next to him, she made three additional trips to the forest and back, arms loaded with more downed limbs, until there was enough fuel for the fire to get them through the night.
Her dad, who had not touched his steak, grew weaker as the night wore on, his body wracked with shivering. She covered him with blankets, tucking them tight beneath his torso, and fed the fire to warm him. Eventually, he slipped into a fitful sleep, his breaths ragged and uneven.
Still, for hours afterward, despite the heaviness in her bones, Bella’s thoughts raced, as her senses remained on high alert. Her tears did not return. Instead her emotions hardened into a state of relative indifference, as her fear assumed a different shape, less a hindrance, and more an instrument of her survival. This, she imagined, must be what it felt like to be an adult.
Somewhere in the middle of the chilly, starlit night, sleep finally came for Bella, and when it did, it came suddenly and completely.
N’ka
If their journey was arduous before, it had become almost unbearable now. N’ka’s hide boots were beginning to deteriorate, and his feet, purple-toed, blistered, and numb, were beginning to swell. Though the makeshift sled was miraculously holding up, it was beginning to bow beneath the dead weight of his mother. Though a little antagonism might have boosted N’ka’s energy, his mother remained silent until he finally coaxed her out of her shell.
“Why aren’t you complaining?” he said, over his shoulder.
“Why should I complain?” she said. “This is better than walking. Pick up the pace, would you?”
“Let me know when you’re ready to pull,” he said.
Such banter heartened N’ka, but all the while he found himself fending off a relentless anxiety that his mother would never be the same, and that moving forward into their new lives she would be dependent upon him.
They’d been moving steadily southeast all morning as the sun burned through the fog. By late morning they were again skirting the hills, as the mountains behind them began to peek through the clouds, a stout and craggy range, though not quite the equal of the mountains they’d left behind. The place, as much as any place along their way, reminded N’ka of home. The thought was almost comfort enough to stave off the hunger gnawing at his insides.
He knew they should have eaten the wolf carcass. They could’ve made good use of the pelt, too, for that matter. But N’ka had refused to lose time on such an endeavor. How thoughtless he had been.
If only their fortunes would change suddenly with the appearance of a stray calf, or a mangy mule deer. N’ka would swiftly rise to the occasion. Surely his flagging senses would snap back into sharp focus, if only the opportunity would present itself.
By afternoon, the sun had caught up with them and was shining just over N’ka’s shoulder.
“I thought for sure today was the day,” he said. “I felt it in my bones.”
“The day’s not over yet,” she said.
But the words were no comfort to N’ka, as the grim reality of starvation settled in. If they didn’t starve, they were liable to freeze, or worse. N’ka’s mind followed this dark path for hours, until suddenly a vaguely familiar sound from the south gave him pause, setting his neck hair on end.
What was this? Listen. What was that sound? Low and steady it came beneath the wi
nd. Is it . . . ? Could it possibly be . . . ?
N’ka redoubled his effort over the ice. A dozen steps more and he paused once again to listen.
“Haha! Listen, mother! Listen to it!” he said.
Now, the sound was unmistakable to N’ka’s ear, a sound he only ever heard in late spring, a sound that never failed to evoke joy in this frozen world. Yes, yes it was, the mighty rumble and hiss of rushing water.
“Do you hear it?” N’ka said breathlessly.
“Hear what?” his mother said weakly from the sled.
“We’re here,” he said. “We made it.”
Without further pause, he began trundling the sled furiously across the ice toward the thunderous drumming that grew louder with each step. When he arrived at the edge of a snowy rise, he released the sled.
“Stay here,” he said.
“As if I have a choice,” she said.
N’ka plowed forward through the knee-deep snow toward the drumming of the water, his heart thumping madly. As he approached the top of the rise, he began laughing aloud.
Haha, yes, he knew it! He knew in his bones, knew it all along!
Still, it would be impossible to overstate N’ka’s relief as he crested the rise and glimpsed the other side. He was moved almost to tears as he beheld the torrent of water roaring out from beneath a shelf of ice as though it were in hurry to get somewhere.
And something else soon aroused his senses as well, a faint but comforting odor riding on the breeze: the acrid aroma of fire.
“I told you!” he hollered down the incline to the tiny, prostrate figure of his mother, strapped to the sled. “Didn’t I tell you?”
That was the exact instant when a terrible flash of movement caught his eye. His entire body turned suddenly to ice. His voice seized up so that he could not so much as call out to warn his mother about the five specks of brown and gray, noses to the ground, scuttling four-legged across the ice toward her helpless form. The beasts were already fanning out as N’ka began barreling down the incline. Losing his footing almost immediately, he tumbled end-over-end twice through the snow.
As he scrambled to his feet, N’ka could hear the snarling brutes take hold of her. The scrum was so sudden, so vicious and chaotic, that N’ka could not see clearly what was happening to his mother as he charged down the hill. But he could discern her agony readily enough in the quick, clipped desperation of her cries, as the beasts ripped at her from all sides, yipping and biting at one another in a snarling frenzy.
As he neared the bottom of the slope, N’ka regained his voice, and began taunting the beasts at the top of his lungs, waving his arms about wildly, though the wolves paid him little mind.
When he finally reached the besieged sled, N’ka threw himself in the thick of the pandemonium, where instantly, he felt the crushing scissor-grip of a jaw as it clamped down and began to tear at the muscle and tendon.
N’ka kicked and flailed madly, lashing out with his free arm. He cried out, though his agony was all but drowned out by the bloodthirsty thrall of his assailants, ripping and tearing at him.
Even as he fought for his life, N’ka feared the worst for his mother. Close on the heels of this revelation was the realization that he, too, was going to die a violent death, though he was determined to go down fighting.
N’ka managed to get one of the fiends by the scruff of the neck, but no sooner did his hand find a purchase than another had attached itself to his shoulder. He managed to wrest one arm free, but almost immediately another beast seized it in its snapping jaws. He tried to roll over on his stomach, and ball up for protection, but he couldn’t seem to get there.
Then, something inexplicable happened, something so far beyond the realm of probability that N’ka believed it could not possibly be real: all at once came a fiery blur of orange and black, as the wolves released their ferocious grips and scattered in an instant, whimpering and gnashing their teeth.
“Mother,” he said, groping blindly to his right with the one arm he could still move.
But his mother’s body was twenty feet from where it began, torn free of the sled and dragged across the ice, now spattered with blood.
“Mother,” he said, overcome with grief.
But his mother did not budge, nor make even the weakest response.
Like a vision, out of nowhere there descended a second fiery limb of blackened spruce, tracing orange through the chill air, followed immediately by another. Both torches landed on the snow near the sled with a hiss, while the wolves, still slathering at the jowls, teeth and gums bared, still dripping his mother’s blood in the snow, retreated farther with mincing back steps, whining and whimpering at the flames.
Before N’ka could assign any reason to these events, a blurry figure emerged out of the trees in front of him, wielding still another torch, howling as it came, screaming words unfamiliar to N’ka’s ears.
Soon, the figure stationed itself directly above N’ka, and looked down upon him with concern.
“Oosah vita!” it shouted. “Oosah vita!”
Distant voices responded.
The stranger looked kindly down into N’ka’s face and spoke, her words incomprehensible to N’ka.
“I do not understand,” he managed weakly.
Only then, dazed and bleeding, did N’ka recognize the face looking down at him as none other than the face of the little girl, she of the neatly cinched hide whom N’ka chased futilely through the forest two days prior. She whom he was certain they had lost forever.
“I am N’ka,” said N’ka, his mouth filling with blood. “She is S’tka.”
But the little girl could no more decipher N’ka’s words than he could decipher hers.
Instead she placed a cool hand upon his forehead and looked deeply into his eyes, as if to reassure him.
“At last,” he whispered through parched lips.
But the girl only smiled sadly and stroked his forehead once more.
Soon a second, and then a third face joined the girl, crowding in to look down upon N’ka. Like the girl, they were clothed in cinched hides, their faces smooth and hairless. Gravely, they spoke amongst themselves as they considered his condition. Unlike the sharp-edged, guttural articulations of N’ka and his mother, the language streamed musically and un-haltingly from their mouths. The sound of their voices was hypnotic.
Expecting the worst, N’ka attempted to turn his head to the side in order to check on the condition of his mother. No sooner did he begin the maneuver than a bright light flashed behind his eyelids and he slipped into oblivion.
Duane Barlow; Marine
“You can argue that Dave should have never stopped taking his meds, and you can argue that he never should have been on them in the first place, but you can’t say Dave didn’t have foresight. Because once Dave came back from his third tour, just about everything he feared would happen did happen. Did he bring some of it upon himself? Sure, it’s what we do as human beings. Dave wasn’t unique in undermining his own self-interest. He wasn’t the first guy to push away the people that loved him most, or the first guy to quit going to counseling, or the first marine to stop eating his benzos, and he sure as hell wasn’t the first guy to make questionable life decisions—and yeah, some of the decisions might look pretty damn bad from where you’re standing.
“But that doesn’t mean Dave deserved what he got. You want to point your finger at somebody, point it at Bremmer, point it at that knucklehead Bush and his overlords. Point it at neocon interventionism, or Islamic fundamentalism, or the UN, or the Kurds, or point it at the damn mirror, but don’t you dare point it at a kid who didn’t know any better. Dave and I and the rest of us, we were just doing as we were directed to do—that’s what we signed up for.
“We were serving some purpose beyond ourselves, though the nature of that purpose became more and more elusive every day. We were blunt instruments in the wrong hands—hammers, that’s what we were. Hammers for the Coalition, hammers for the politicians, hamme
rs for all the shoppers back in America. And so we hammered. We hammered cities to dust. We hammered the shit out of those poor sonsofbitches—men, women, children, didn’t matter. Because when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Dale Duvall; Owner, Dale’s Diner
“As a general rule, we take care of our own here in V-Falls. But if I’m being honest, we’ve had our blind spots, like everybody else. The plain truth is, after his third tour, a lot of the hero polish started to wear off of Dave around here. He wasn’t quite the same guy, and neither were we. We weren’t prosperous anymore. We weren’t relevant; at least that’s how it felt. I guess a lot of us, we started looking the other way when it came to the wars over there. They seemed a long ways removed from where the whole thing started. Maybe we just didn’t want to see the collateral damage. Like we didn’t want to share the responsibility for what happened to Dave, or the rest of those kids. I suppose maybe we didn’t want to connect the dots between our lifestyle and the price of gas, and the cost of living, financial and human, and where Dave fit into making it all possible. And I was as guilty as the next guy of looking the other way.
“But not anymore. Everything that happened up there really put it all in perspective for me. It really made me think about what Davey Cartwright must have gone through in his life, and what could drive a man to go up there and try to make some kind of life and end up the way he did. And that little girl. Well, she just breaks my heart.”
IV
The Book of Healing
Tristan Moseley; Caseworker
“Everything is relative when we talk about the care of children—culturally, financially, spiritually. Sure, there’s some baseline indicators of abuse and neglect, some comprehensive standards a caseworker adheres to, but there’s no universal golden rule regarding the proper raising of children. A situation isn’t always what it appears from the outside. I’ve seen Vietnamese kids with their necks and backs rubbed raw from silver coins. Abuse, or dermabrasive therapy? Depends on who you talk to. I’ve heard it actually cures a cold.
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