by Daniel Mills
The other snares were empty. I wiped my hands and donned my gloves then walked eastward to the woods and lingered at the margin. Judah limped up beside me, muzzle smeared red with the squirrel’s innards. His long tongue lapped at his nose.
Sunrise. The forest opened before us, shadows swimming down from the branches to hide a sky of fire. I looked back to the house where the lower windows showed as squares of red-gold. The upper windows threw back the sun and dazzled so I could not see beyond them. When I closed my eyes, the windows appeared there, black as pupils in the world under my lids.
We entered the woods. Our footprints from yesterday were visible, their outlines. We followed them north and east toward the river and the pine-grove and the pit-traps dug out this summer for deer. Judah went ahead, as he often does, leaving rusty streaks where his snout dripped and stained the snow-cover, the one thing of color in that gray world beneath the trees.
Quiet settled into our tracks, sifting down with the snow. The light struck through the branches overhead, painting the earth with its shine. The first of the pits, northernmost, was empty, as were the second and the third. Judah allowed these only the briefest of glances before continuing. His shadow, elongated, stretched behind him to reach me though I trailed at a distance of ten paces with the rifle at my shoulder: loaded, ready. I listened for turkey, woodcock, heard only snow beneath my feet.
We reached the river and turned with it toward the pine-grove to east, the dead-wood surrounding. We came within sight of it: three trees tall as ship’s masts and acres of empty forest spread round, the soil barren with needles and undercut by pine-roots. It is a place for the dead, as is the whole of this valley, where no living crops grow. We skirted round to the south and were nearly clear of the pines when Judah paused.
His ears stood up, his tail too, and a wind rattled the trees, driving the powder in squalls between us. He ran. He took off toward the pine-grove, kicking up needles and powder though I shouted after him to stop.
He did not go far. Twenty paces, no more. He reached the edge of that expanse of dying wood. He slowed then stopped to bay at the white clots which dropped from the dead branches all round and shattered into whorls which glittered like sparks to hide him from sight til the wind fell and the snow with it, forming ripples on the ice-crust.
Two crows burst up from the ground. Judah barked again, retreating, and I brought the gun to my shoulder to sight the birds as they rose, though I did not fire.
A moose lay nearby. It had been felled by wolves which proceeded to feast upon the flesh, rending the hide in strips, exposing the ribs. The organs were missing, tugged through gaps in the barrel-cage of its chest, while the haunches were likewise shredded down to bone, the fatty meat gnawed free. A mess of overlapping tracks showed where the pack had feasted then retreated north, the ground showing orange and white and spattered with black drips from the flesh they carried with them.
I turned my attention to the moose or what remained of it. The crows had eaten what the wolves had left and even the hide was beginning to fester. I slipped the knife from my belt and knelt down to saw through the ruined hindquarters. I cut away such tendons and ligaments as had proved too tough for wolf’s teeth and traded the hunting knife for a hatchet with which I split the joints which held together the long bones of the thigh.
Judah came behind me, panting and eager. I swung the hatchet a second time, cleaving the bone through then braced one end with my boot to prize it free. Judah stamped, snorted, could not wait. He snatched the bone from my hand and bolted away with it to find some place where he might lie with it and break the bone and suck the juices from within.
He would be some time, I knew. Beside me the moose lay on its side with one eye open, looking up. Inside it my own reflection was visible, but darkly, shimmering in place with the light behind it. My face: bearded and haggard and without expression. The face of a man much older or of a young man from whom the soul has passed. I could not bear to see it. I kicked at the ground, spraying up dirt and needles til the skull was well-covered and Judah, at last, returned.
The thigh-bone was gone. Likely he had buried it, as is his habit, bedding it deep in soil like a seed to give no life, and the rest of the day proved similarly fruitless, passed without incident as we hunted in the wood. At dusk the tree-shadows lengthened to reach the shade cast by the mountains, closing off the valley. We turned back to the west with the daylight waning and allowed our steps to carry us away from the river, the pine-grove and its buried dead.
To this cold house, this darkened room. Three winters I have passed in the valley, a sojourner in a house which is not mine and never was.
The fall was past and winter settling when first I came to this place. I was exhausted, half-starved and near-killed of it, when the house appeared out of the dawn. It was square and small, two floors huddled beneath a single gable with a central chimney. The siding was stripped so the house showed gray as the morning, rearing up like Lazarus as I drew near, with whitewash for grave clothes and windows for eyes showing nothing: a house no longer but the mere ghost of one, a standing ruin of slate and timber, its spirit long departed.
But the mouth was open, yawning. The door, ajar, creaked with the wind behind it and the sound reached to the orchard with its un-fruited boughs, sounding down that field of beaten-down sedge that once had been a garden but wherein nothing grew. I called ahead of me as I approached but received no answer, and there were no lights inside, no hands at the curtains.
Weeds grew high about the doorway, brittle with frost and with summer’s blossoms dried and clinging. Three slates, terraced, formed a crude stoop before the door, and this was scattered with mildewed leaves stained black with rot. I mounted the first of the slates, unsettling the leaf-cover and causing objects to surface: children’s blocks, a girl’s rag-doll.
The door fell open, an invitation. Again I shouted ahead of me but the house swallowed my voice and gave no echo. I went inside. The door screeched behind me but would not close. Its hinges were bent, the lock smashed, and I knew I was not the first to stumble on this abandoned farmhouse seeking for shelter.
By then, the Village was far behind me, a distance of weeks and miles. The autumn was spent like Cain in his wandering, feeding on roots or wild carrots while the flesh thinned and withered, the skin stretched. In logging towns, I begged for scraps at the doors of churches and even turned to thievery, stealing clothes from a blind couple and a hen from a poor farm.
I survived. The season in turning swept us north to a crest of bald mountains soaring up to halve the sky. I was ill-equipped to climb but followed along the rock-face til it opened into a channel where a river spilled to south from a gash between mountains. Here the ground was low and level, good for walking.
Late November: the air was cool and sharp with snow, the smell of it, the trees all bare and brown but for the pines in the grove. They beckoned, spreading arms to dim the sun and bring the night, longest night.
Then, in the morning, there was the house. The curtains were drawn, the windows shut, its interior as dark as that place under the pines. I drew back the curtains to reveal chairs and quilts, a long table with one place set. The wood-box was full, stacked with dry logs with a fur of dust upon them, and indeed, the dust was everywhere: it whirled up in clouds at every step as I climbed to the upper floor.
The smaller bedroom was bare of ornament while the larger was well-furnished with a bookshelf, a bedstead. A writing desk was placed against the wall near the window with two bottles of scotch on it, empty. The sash was fastened but the shutters swung back and forth, one then the other, causing the room to vanish then resurface with the changing light outside.
I opened the window. I pushed out the shutters, secured the latch. Behind me a washbasin took shape, dividing from its shadow. The bowl was full, choked with ash and scraps of burnt paper with the loops of a man’s handwriting just visible—the same man, perhaps, who had broken the door and stacked the wood-box and slipp
ed silently away.
He was a soldier. I found his coat in the nursery where it lined the inside of the crib as though for a bedsheet. The coat was dark blue in color with yellow sergeant's stripes while his cartridge box was laid within the crib where once a child had slept. His rifle was there too, leant up in the corner near the rocking horse. The barrel glinted, a flash of teeth.
In my twenty-four years, I had never before handled a gun, and for days after coming here, I allowed myself to starve because I could not stand to touch it. Each day I grew weaker til little choice was left me but to load the rifle and fell a rabbit in its running.
My aim was poor. The shot struck the beast through the hind-leg, dropping it to the ground. It shrieked for a time then quieted and it bled out as I watched, too weak to do what was needed though I had the knife in hand.
Winter changed me. The river froze, the mountain passes closed. Snowfall buried the orchard, the barren acre of the old garden, and I became someone else: I hunted game with the soldier’s rifle and wore his coat. Afterward I warmed my hands at another man’s stove and slept in the blankets his family left behind.
Even this book is his, not mine. I found it by chance three days ago when I attempted to make a fire and found the tinder too damp for lighting. Then I remembered the old almanacs and went upstairs to the larger bedroom. I knelt before the bookshelf, pulled as many of the yellowed volumes from the shelf as I could carry.
This journal slipped free from among them. It fell open on the floor. A name was scratched into the inside cover. August Fitch, it read, paired with a date nearly ten years before as well as a short inscription: To war & arms I fly. Pages were missing from inside, ripped from the binding so only blank sheets remained, and I recalled how the basin was full when first I came to this house, piled high with burnt paper.
August Fitch. A name and nothing more, a life erased by fire.
I crossed it out, wrote my own in its place.
David Stonehouse, Exile. Foundling.
Judah, too, was a foundling. I was two nights in this valley when a wailing came from the woods, a high scream like a child’s. It cut the gray morning and drove me outside half-clothed, half-dreaming. He was near the river-bend at the edge of the dead forest surrounding the pines. He was in the ground. I found him writhing where the soil, rain-soft, had given way beneath him. He howled and kicked against the mud so only his head showed: the long snout, the eyes wide with fright or madness. He showed me his teeth. He snarled at me but still I went to him.
I dropped to my knees and thrust my arms into the mire. He snapped and howled and did not quieten though I dug out the clay from the red roots which ensnared him then plunged in my hands again to grasp him about the middle, to haul him up.
He came out of the ground. I fell back with his weight upon me and attempted to shield my face as he slashed at me, his claws unsheathed. He kicked at my chest, tearing my shirt and carving channels down my breast. His neck snapped from side to side, biting at the hands which saved him, which held him still.
I let him go. He leapt up and away through dead trees and I did not try to follow. My fingernails were broken. The wounds throbbed down my chest, dampening my shirt. The blood clotted slowly and I slept and woke to find him standing over me, his legs spread and paws planted, head cocked to one side looking down. His mouth dropped open. The tongue unrolled and washed across my forehead, sweeping away dirt and dried blood.
He was pitifully thin, a hound of indeterminate breed. The hipbones protruded. His coat was tawny in color and ragged, knotted into tangles about his throat so he resembled a lion, caked in mud and half-crazed with hunger. Perhaps he had strayed from his owner—or been abandoned—and for this reason if no other I forgave him my injuries and made him my own.
We walked back to the house. Our surroundings, it seemed, were of little interest: he trailed behind with his head lowered and made no protest though I scrubbed him down with water from the well and combed the mud-clumps from his fur.
He shook himself dry. The day was warming, a breath of spring in fall. He yawned and lay down and slept with the wind in his fur and the weak sun shining on him, a lion at ease.
I found a dead man in the river.
Yesterday was warm, almost unseasonable: the ice yielded in the night. The noise startled me from slumber and I lay awake a long time afterward. I could not sleep but waited for daylight then shouldered the fishing-rod and struck north to the river.
The channel was clear. The river had shattered itself to flat pieces like eggshell, which floated downstream with the surging current. The water frothed and spat, running high, and the sun made streaks upon the surface which folded back on themselves with the wind.
Judah chased the sun downriver and I was alone on the bank. Hemlock trees formed a wall at my back, green and fragrant and softly rustling. The pine-grove was visible beyond the hemlocks, their high branches like closed hands holding whispers. Inside the satchel I brought were hooks and a hatchet, a jar for bait. I threaded the hook with a maggot from the jar and cast my line toward the opposite bank.
The fish came up quickly, three in succession. Their silver bodies twitched as I drew them from the water but I clubbed them with the hatchet til they ceased to move. I whistled after Judah but he was gone, chasing scents or sounds invisible. I re-baited the hook and followed the bank eastward, drawing nearer the grove, where I cast again.
My line caught, tangled in the limbs of a drowned tree. I went after it. I sprawled on my belly with my hands in the water, and that was how I found him. The dead man was hooked in the crotch of a branch with the remnants of an undershirt and suspenders wound several times round him, fixing him in place as he bloated, decayed, and did not rise.
How long, I thought. At least since the autumn and likely earlier. Five years, perhaps. Long enough for the river to peel the fat from his hands and forearms so the bones showed through and the skull peeked out from a tangle of hair.
His head was submerged nearest the bank. I grasped at the hair, knotting the strings of it round my fingers. I pulled up, gently, meaning only to test the strength of my hold, but the scalp came away in my hand and I let go. The scalp did not sink but floated away downriver, turning on the current like a living thing. I gagged, tasting acid. My gut contracted, heaving, and I waited for the sickness to pass.
His bones cried out for burial: I went for the hatchet. The blade cleaved water and fabric together. The rags of his shirt parted round the hatchet and the body shifted, rolling onto its side.
With my other hand I caught hold of the exposed breastbone and tugged the man by his ribcage out of the water. I dropped the axe and adjusted my hold to drag him by his armpits onto the bank and then down the rise to the dead trees and the place where we had found the moose some days ago.
Pine-needles covered the ground, drifted inches deep in hollows where the ground lay low. The pines were visible on their mossy hummock with their three crowns like green lace spreading, doubled by the roots beneath my feet. How far they stretched. What horrors they compassed. The pines undercut the forest for hundreds of yards surrounding so the elms, uprooted, lay upon the ground. Sapling maples leant, gone bald where the bark had peeled from the trunk, and the hemlocks, too, were withered and sere.
I buried him between two maples. They were dead trees, standing snags, and the earth was hard with the winter just behind us and red roots webbing the soil. The hatchet served me for a spade. I chopped at the ground repeatedly, breaking through layered frost and hollowing a space in the ground as the morning passed and the sun reached its meridian.
The grave perforce was shallow, sufficient only to cover the pitted bones and ragged clothes, his fish-eaten boots. The shape of the boots was distinctive, as was the color, the toes tapered to steel points sheathed in dark leather where the rest of the boot was lightly tanned. The soles were rotted out, marked under the heel with Roman numerals or maybe the man's initials: what looked like an I, a V. His toes protruded from the
ground, but I covered them with hemlock-boughs and marked the grave’s head with a cross of sticks and fishing line.
I thought of nothing, or rather, would not think, would not let myself remember, and hours had elapsed when Judah appeared. He lingered at the margin where dead trees and living divided and would not come near the grave. His tail dragged on the ground. His limp was more pronounced than before and he was shaking, I noticed, body drawn taut like catgut struck to sound a single discordant note. His eyes were wide, jowls foamed with spittle.
I left the drowned man’s graveside. I held out my hand with the palm open, up. Judah sniffed at it then recoiled as if I had struck him. His jaws snapped open, shut. He barked, whined. Our eyes met, and he was afraid.
A sound behind us: scarcely audible, a rustle of leaves.
Judah ran.
He leapt forward then stumbled over his bad leg. He fell, regained his footing, and continued to run, and would not stop. I gave chase but it was all for naught and I was breathless and dripping when I returned to the riverbank after an hour to retrieve my rod and bait and the fish I caught.
The sun was yellowing, shadows stretching to run together. I made haste to pack the satchel and turn toward home, crossing the orchard just as the wolf-pack awoke and filled the vale with screams and echoes. Judah was at the house, waiting. He sat upon the slate steps, gazing eastward toward the apple trees with ears and tail erect. In the wood, the wolf-pack howled at the kill, gorged with blood and near-frenzied, but Judah remained seated, a sentinel keeping watch. He would not abandon his post, not for anything, and would not come inside til I fastened the halter round his neck and dragged him cross the threshold. I closed the door, secured the bolt.
