Wilderness (35 page)

The Haida pursed his lips. The girl’s eyes were closed, but Abel could tell her life by the rise and fall of her chest. The Indian rested the blade against her bare throat and looked at Abel. “They was in quite a state when I come crost ’em,” he said. “Lord knows how long they been up here. Stuck. Just plumb stuck.” He nodded toward one wall to indicate the snow-bound plain outside. “Horse wandered off, wagon busted to shit, and them already out of food.” He sniffed and scowled.

“What did you do to them?”

The Haida shrugged. “Not much, really,” he said. “The man, well, he pulled on me so I was obliged to defend myself.” He flashed a smile that held within its margins not a trace of mirth. “And this one here was sickly and looked about half starved anyway,” he said, nodding to the thin gray corpse of the woman behind him. “She passed this morning. So that just leaves the little one.” He dandled the girl on his knee, and she moaned softly. “And I don’t believe she’s long for this world either.” He looked at Abel and smiled. With a quick move of his hand, he drew a thin, thin line along the girl’s cheek with the point of the blade. “But she’s sweet as a peach, ain’t she? Like a china doll.” He grinned again and chuckled. “China doll,” he said. “That’s funny.”

“You son of a bitch.”

The Haida shrugged.

The girl was perhaps seven years old and impossibly thin. Even through the stained folds of her tattered dress, he could see the crude angles of her limbs, the sharp points of her elbows and knees. Perhaps the first dark blush of frostbite at her fingers, toes, and ear-lobes. And he started when she opened her eyes, for they were milky as though thickening with cold.

Abel blinked and swallowed painfully. “She got a name?” he finally asked.

“Hell, I don’t know,” said the Haida. “This one”—he nudged the girl’s dead mother, and the corpse trembled stiffly in the bed while the girl moaned and squeezed shut her eyes—“this one called her all kinds of things, but I couldn’t make much sense of it.” He blinked as though concentrating. “Shit, it don’t matter none anyway.”

Abel ignored him and slowly, painfully, crouched until he was at the girl’s eye level. “Hey there?” he called softly across the room, and the girl opened her eyes and blinked. Abel held her eyes and said, “Don’t you worry, honey. We’ll figure something out.”

Abel stood panting, his eyes heavy and warm in their sockets. The
close warmth of the shack set his throat to itching, and he steeled himself, but no cough came.

“What are you goin’ to do?” he asked the Haida.

The Indian pursed his lips, shifted a little, and hissed with the pain of it. Abel watched the way he held himself, the way he moved and breathed and blinked and sweated. Abel lifted his chin and said, “That Chinaman put a little metal into you.”

The Haida scowled. “Little fucker,” he said. “Shit. I told you he wasn’t none too friendly when I came up.”

“Gut?” asked Abel.

The Haida’s lips drew back from his teeth.

Abel snorted. “You’re a dead man.”

The Haida stared reflectively into the middle distance. “Maybe so, maybe so,” he said, nodding. “But I’ll tell you what, this little peach is goin’ with me.” He settled the flat of his blade back against the girl’s throat and she whimpered softly and closed her eyes.

Abel put his hand up, fingers spread. “Why?” he asked.

The Haida shrugged. “’Cause I can,” he said.

“Goddamn it!” shouted Abel. He took off his hat and threw it on the floor, then picked it up again, holding it awkwardly between his hands. “All right,” he said, taking a breath. “All right. Suppose … Suppose I get you down off this mountain. Get you back down to … that little farm. I’d do that.”

The Haida’s eyes narrowed. “Would you?”

Abel tucked his upper lip inside his lower and nodded. “You let me get that girl down off this hill, and I would. If your partner ain’t shown up yet, there’s no one else coming.”

“I’m not afraid of dyin’, old man. You?”

Abel snorted. “You got no idea, son.”

The Haida looked him in the eye. “You’re a liar,” he said, and wrapped one fist into the girl’s hair. Abel shouted, and outside the
dog began to bark. The Haida grinned and lifted his chin. “You go on and get that elk you was hunting,” he said. “Bring me back a little meat, and we’ll talk about what all else you’ll do for me.”

“You’re crazier’n a loon if you think I’m goin’ to leave her alone here with you.”

The Haida shrugged. The girl’s throat was stretched across his knee and he tapped the point of the blade against the hollow above her breastbone. “I’ve seen folk die all kinds of ways,” he said. “But I ain’t yet seen nobody just bleed themselves to death. That’d be something new to see.” He glanced around the cabin and shrugged again. “I burned the chairs, but you go on ahead and settle down on a piece of floor. We can watch her together.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“What are you goin’ to do, old soldier?”

Abel scowled, clenching and unclenching his good hand. His crippled arm ached to the bone, and he was tired. His chest rattled, and after a few moments he ducked his head to catch the girl’s eye. She blinked her hurt, gelid eyes, and her dry lips cracked open. “You wait here for me, honey,” Abel told her. “You wait here, I’m coming back.” He straightened and looked at the Haida. “You hear that?” he asked, turning to the door and going out again, into the night and the cold.

The dog struggled up to meet him, and Abel nodded and spoke to it and spent a few minutes going from the woodpile to the front door, making a small pyramid of firewood there that would be easy for the Haida to reach. The Indian’s image trembled through the windowglass. Then Abel freed the dog and together they started slowly off across the plain with the wind blowing all around them, making the yet-unfrozen snow hiss like something deadly.

Abel heard the shack door creak open as he walked into the trees where the mountain began in earnest. He heard the Haida’s voice,
mixed in with the sound of the wind and the sound of the new snow that fell sizzling to the frozen crust. It was a small thing in all the world, that sound, and Abel paid it no mind.

He slept that night propped against a massive blowdown he judged as old before the coming of Columbus. He slept with the dog in his lap and the thin, torn blanket wrapped tightly about both of them. His hands shook, nor he could not stop them. His breath came clattering from his lips as though his very lungs were ashiver. The dog lay without moving, only opening its eyes now and again to gaze upon Abel Truman’s face where his tears left thin trails of ice curling down his cheeks to pearl in his whiskers.

The dawn they woke to was still dark. White clouds hovered silently, and the mountains stood black and close. Neither man nor dog cast a shadow. As though their shadows abandoned them in the night, they walked shadowless and pale as lost spirits on the wander.

The old soldier raised his rifle a dozen times before noon, sighting clusters of branches that resembled antlers, bare twists of slide alder that he mistook for the curve of a muscled haunch. Each time, he’d still himself, crouch, and squint down the sight, then lower the barrel with slow disgust. The dog watched, mouth open and weary, as Abel leaned and spat and cursed. “I suppose you could do better?” he asked it.

It was early afternoon when he heard it bugle again. A long, drawn-out wail that hung in the chill, white air. He heard wild, savage barking, and the dog began to tremble and whine. Abel hushed it and cocked his head, sucking at a loosened tooth until he tasted blood. After a time, he cursed and started on again.

The scat, when he came upon it, was still warm. Behind him, the dog stopped abruptly, hackles raised. Abel broke the rifle, checked the shell, and suddenly thought of David Abernathy swearing clumsily and fumbling with his gun while Yankee bullets chewed up the
pines of the West Wood all around them. The old soldier grinned and moved slowly up the slope.

The trees gave way to the back of a steep ridge that fell before him in a confusion of frost-coated stones as though something great and beastly had raked the back half of the hill raw. The day was clear and sunny on this side of the pass, and the old man could see across miles of snowy foothills down into the rolling green of the Puget Sound. He saw the blue of the inland waterways, cold with the sun bright upon their faces, and he saw distant smoke rising from stacks at Port Angeles. And he could see far to the east, where night was already darkening the Cascades, folding Mount Rainier in shadow while a round white moon rose behind. The gun was heavy in his hand, and he squeezed the stock to feel the baling wire bite into his palm like a comfort. Abel began to tremble. He closed his eyes a moment to imagine the smell of the town-smoke, to hear the trains running fast and metallic eastward toward home. Another ocean and another coast. Tilting his head, he sniffed the cold, blue mountain air, then looked down the ridge and softly swore.

The wolf harried the elk through the scrub pine and the boulders fallen from the mountain’s shoulder. Huge. Dark about the face, with silver-gray fur running to dark again at the tips. A chest broad as a man’s two hands. A dark shape low to the ground, moving like water over stones. It was silent as it ran, and it leapt with forelegs splayed, popping its jaws with its hackles rising between its shoulders. For its part, the elk ran, throwing powder into the air and swinging about its great, antlered head. The wolf, alone, had no chance to bring it down, but hunger, desperation, instinct, drove it on, and the elk ran and the wolf ran until the dark forest closed around them and they vanished.

Abel swore and spat. He swore and spat and sat down hard in the snow with his legs before him. The old man took great, deep breaths and his eyes were closed, his gray hair damp. The dog limped up beside him and lay down near his thigh. It whined softly and pawed
at his trousers and Abel stared at it a long moment, seeing how it was and feeling something break apart within him.

As snow began to fall once more, he looked at the mountains. To his left and right, the peaks disappeared behind the snowfall and the air trembled with cold. He knew the signs. A day, maybe two, and the pass would be unreachable from either side and the cold would go bitter. Before him, he could still see down across the Sound where lights had come on in the towns to sparkle there, cold, remote, and now forever unreachable. “Goddamn it, Buster, but we got close,” he murmured.

The snow ticked softly as it fell. Like a myriad of clocks in a quiet library, it spoke of age and memory and endings. Abel sniffed and spat. He set the barrel of the rifle to the side of the dog’s head. “Goddamn you anyway,” he said tenderly. The dog’s tail brushed through the snow. It rolled its eyes to look at him and opened its mouth.

An hour later, the old man made his slow, painful way down through the trees, trying to follow his own tracks back to the plain before they filled with snow and disappeared. Throughout the day, the sun had pressed cups into the snow, and now these all filled with shadow so there appeared to be innumerable dark pools all about him. He limped steadily, carrying the dog yokewise across his shoulders. Its tail worked weakly against him, and he turned to look it in the eye. It blinked at him and opened its mouth. “Don’t you be looking at me like that,” he muttered. “And don’t you go getting used to this me-carryin-you shit neither.”

Ellen Makers followed thin game trails that paralleled the main track as she went slowly up the mountain. Bruised, hurt and sick with worry and regret over leaving Glenn behind, she raised her rifle clumsily at every small sound crackling from the dark woods and waited with motionless dread until she was sure whatever she heard
was not made by man. After years of living in a fluttery shade of fear, she had never been so afraid before.

She walked the day long and on into the first dark of the evening when shadows fell in great black panes from the canopy and robbed all color from the world. And then she crouched in the brush between the trail and the track and tried hard to hear him if he was close. She could not and he was not, yet still she waited and feared the outcome of her wait.

She made no fire that night and the night was long. Ellen wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and every few moments she reached through the dark to touch the rifle where she’d leaned it. Things moved in the forest. Crackling, bestial noises all out of agreement with the creatures making them; Ellen imagined bears and cougars and saw by pale moonlight the furtive silhouettes of rock rabbits and deer stepping about on wire-thin legs. Time and again, with quick, panicked breath, she raised the rifle to point it at the Haida come to her in the night shapeshifted in the way she’d always heard his folk could. And each time, as she set the gun down once more, she silently cursed Abel and herself and fixed in her mind the image of the big Indian crouching in the tent, stroking the rifle barrel as though it was his member and watching as Willis did things to her.

She slept but fitfully, and once when she woke the moon had run to dark and the sky had clouded. Her breath haloed her and the fallen pine needles crackled urgently with gathering frost. The world smelled quick and icy, and after a time it began to snow. Ellen could see it falling through the trees onto the wagon track that led to the pass, salting the mud and whitening the puddles where they’d skinned themselves with ice. Breathing against her hard palms, she rubbed them together, then pulled on a pair of Glenn’s working gloves. After a while, she slept again.

And early in the morning she heard a wolf cry from the high slopes.
A single wolf that sang to the moon though there was no moon to sing to. And this was not singing. Its call went on and on, rolling down the slopes and into the valley where the trees thinned near the coast until the wind caught the sound and swept it to sea and it was gone as though it had never been.

When it was light enough to travel, Ellen ate a little bread and cheese. She stood and stretched, then went into the trees to make her toilet, dug a trough through the snow to the soil below with her heel to cover what she left behind, then rolled her blanket and slung it soldier-style, as she’d seen Abel do. She looked around her little camping place once, then twice, then walked up the trail toward Marmot Pass, where she figured she’d find one or the other of them.