Wilderness (8 page)

The dog lay down by taking short little steps with its forelegs, and Abel sneered. “Now I suppose you’re just going to go on to sleep, ain’t you? Never even crossed your mind to bring me nothing.” He sighed dramatically and, as the dog watched, reached a twist of venison from his pocket. The dog pricked up its ears as he chewed and Abel shook his head. “Don’t even think about it,” he said. The dog barked softly, cocked its head, and pawed the ground. The old man took another bite and tossed the remainder to it. “You’re pitiful, you know that?” he said as the dog gulped down the dried meat.

Abel settled down and lay on his back to look at the stars. The moon was a silver coin and Mars, just there, a small dot pale as a freckle in the western night. He studied the stars, how their rarefied light glistened. Raising his arm, he traced Orion’s belt and outflung arms and touched the dippers as his father had shown him when he was a boy. Abel moved his shoulder so he could reach to touch some few other constellations, but such movement sent ripples of pain through his left arm and he swore softly and settled down again.

The tide rolled slowly in, attended by the rush and clatter of the seabed, but the forest behind was still and quiet. The occasional call of a far-off owl and the creak of the trees in a high, soft wind. Out on the water, algae glowed weirdly green under the moon and stars, the faint band of the Milky Way.

The light that night was such that when Abel looked he could see the shadows individual trees cast along the beach and out onto the water and upon the carved stones at the headland. The solid black shadow of the forest itself, as though the forest was a single thing and not composed of many and much. Abel raised his arm again and his hand seemed strangely aglow, insubstantial so that he wondered was he man or ghost. Wondered for a moment if he, indeed, had fallen
dead in the Wilderness and had all these long, blue years since been nothing but a form of dream or dreaming.

Abel lay back. He closed his eyes against the brightness of the night and listened to the constant sound of the ocean at its labors. Underbrush crackled softly as deer explored the slopes above the beach. Abel closed his eyes and tried hard not to see her, to keep seeing her. He tried not to see either of them, but it came back, like it always did, in the fall when the air grew crisp and the leaves began to turn, then die and fall.

His child was dead, his wife followed soon after, and that happy portion of his life in a house beside a lake with a family ended that morning well before the war came because he had to bury his daughter in a grave too small and commit the wife to a sanitarium in up-state New York where her grief was such it finally killed her. Abel locked the house—for all he knew it still stood—and left that place because he could no longer take being there. His own grief was nothing but suffering, then passing through sorrow, rage. A black gall. Nights steeped in drink. Days of hungry wandering. Begging, petty thievery, and a single wretched night of a full moon passed out facedown in some churchyard’s grass. And when war did come, Abel Truman found himself in North Carolina with a regiment of Tar Heels for no other reason than that was where he had happened to be. And then all the rest had happened, and finally, ten and twenty years in a one-room shack on the shore of the cold, gray Pacific, and his life was blown. Passed him by like a slow, tannic river easing out to sea. He’d eked out a meager life beside the waters and when he felt he’d finally had enough he’d walked into the ocean and the ocean had cast him back.

The old man woke to the sound of the dog growling softly. It was still dark, and the tide was up like a dreamlike and unsteady floor. Ragged chains of waves curved southward down the beach. The dog was beside him, hackles raised, its growl low, deep in its chest.
Its battered ears stood cocked, and Abel could feel it tense with straining excitement.

“What?” he asked. “What’re you—” And then it came again. Far off, miles away and inland, a long, choked howling as of a single wolf in the low country where wolves did not often visit. The old man sat up against the rocks, frowning but with a curious thrill prickling his skin. This was not singing. Even though the moon had risen to hang silver and bright in the cold sky, this was not singing. This was longing and fear and pain such as Abel had never heard from an animal before. It howled again, and the moon fled behind a cloud as though chased. The howl stretched out over the vast, rolling wilderness, echoed along the inland waterways, and fell softly on the dark tide, leaving in its wake a sudden silence slowly filled by ocean sounds and wind. The dog whined and paced round about the old man’s sleeping place as though it had heard something that much disturbed it.

Abel sniffed and licked his lips then and suddenly fell into a harsh coughing that went on and on. He swore softly, and when it was over his throat was raw. He listened hard for any other distant sound the wolf might make or for others to answer, but there was nothing, and the night fell quiet once more. Abel spat. A rank taste and hot. The dog settled back beside him. Pulling the blanket close, Abel reached out and unconsciously twisted his fingers into the soft blond fur behind the dog’s ears. It sighed quietly and closed its eyes and Abel eventually fell back to sleep and dreamed no more that night.

The next morning was overcast and cold. A wet mist clung to the lower trunks of spruce and pine and cedar and hemlock. Bigleaf and vine maple thrust up from underbrush, colored bright by spikes of brilliant purple foxglove and ghostly, floating blossoms of cow parsnip. False hellebore like stalks of corn in miniature, and occasionally the slender red slashes of madrone trunks stood curved and twisted from the forest understory. The dog went crashing through the
thickets and a junco chitted at it from its hiding place and Abel paused to squint into the general, fog-shrouded gloom until he spied it perched upon a spruce branch, half hidden amidst the soft needles. The bird stared at him, its unblinking eye bright in its dark hood, sang once more, then darted back into the forest and was vanished.

The brown trunks of the forest behind him ran to ground straight and orderly as though the whole of it was of a single piece: one great, confusing mosaic of green and shades of green and cool blue darkness that never saw the light of day and never would. A step into that green, and longitude would fall away. Compasses would read strangely or not at all. The Indians would call him a fool. The old man would hunger, he would fall. His body would be torn open by one of the greater predators—wolf or cougar or bear. Tiny creatures living beneath the fallen leaves and needles—beetles, worms, other, smaller things for which Abel had no names—would harvest from his bones the soft parts of his body. They would curl in the shells of his ears and spin webs across his mouth. Abel knew what became of the unburied dead in a wilderness. The particular way that bones became polished over time, yellow-brown like parchment. Ribcage, skull, and leg bone. Abel shuddered and walked more quickly down the beach, head down, wind blowing past his shoulders.

By early afternoon the threatened rain had not yet come, and the sun had burned away the morning fog. The rain clouds drew back to the horizon in luminous gray clumps that promised a hard wind to blow them back. The air still smelled of rain, but now the sun beat down upon wet stones and Abel smelled a soft electricity in the air as the rocks dried and the tide rolled out. He made his way carefully around a rocky headland, stepping slowly from stone to stone to stone and bracing himself with his walking stick. The wind was strong and the dog some distance behind, chasing gulls and splashing in the surf.

When he’d gotten far enough around the rocks to see the next stretch of beach, Abel paused, then stopped and crouched. He glanced back toward the dog, saw it was still making a fool of itself in the water, and then looked about for a smooth, flat boulder. Finding one, Abel crawled onto it and unlimbered his rifle.

The deer clustered around a small creek that ran seeping from the forest onto the wet sand. The sand there was very brown, with the water cutting a shallow trough before running out fanwise across tide-kicked pebbles to the surf. There were some half-dozen black-tailed deer bent drinking from it, and Abel squinted down the barrel at each in its turn until he was satisfied he had found one lamed, or perhaps merely old. It stood apart from the others with a dull pelt and a certain hesitation to its movements as though it ached deeply. Abel pursed his lips, turned his head to spit once for luck, then fired.

The deer’s head snapped to the side. It bucked up once, then fell to the sand half in the seep as the others leapt into the dark forest and away. Abel spat again, nodded solemnly as though in silent acknowledgment, then stood and started toward his kill. Behind him, he heard the dog’s nails scrambling for purchase on the rocks. As he stepped from the stones onto the beach, Abel called over his shoulder, “You wasn’t no kind of help, so don’t think you’re getting a good goddamned bite.”

The deer was dead by the time Abel reached it. Parenthetical tracks were stamped into the wet sand all around. The dead doe was soft-eyed, with a creamy patch of fur at the base of her throat and two old scars along her flanks where the fur had never grown back. Abel wondered what had been at her and how she got away. He wondered was it barbed wire or something that had once hunted her. He sniffed, spat, stopped wondering, and bent to work.

He knew there were any number of things he should be doing, and were he home or bound that way, the old man knew that he would do them. As it was, Abel was loath to waste any part of the
deer but knew there was no way to carry all the meat. Shooting the deer had been like an instinct. He’d not fully realized that he had shot and killed it until he began dressing it and felt the warm blood in his palm. He fisted his strong right hand around the blood, squeezed and watched it run out onto the sand as if it were his own. The dog sat to watch. Abel opened his hand and set his tongue to his fingertips. Heat and gamey salt and life but recently faded. He closed his eyes and breathed. The sand was red. The deer’s eyes were closed and soft. Abel laid his red hand upon her flank. He closed his eyes again and waited to see if the deer would come alive again. After a while, he sniffed and looked skyward where a fat October moon had risen over the tree line as the sun slid toward the westward wall of ocean. With blood on his hands and the tide murmuring behind him, Abel knelt in the sand and stared at the pale, risen moon like a primeval hunter quick with awe.

Finally, he took off his blanket roll and haversack and dropped them to the sand. The dog circled about with its head down and ears up. Its nose worked furiously, and the old man took up his knife and pointed it at the dog for emphasis. “Don’t even think about it,” he told it.

In the end, he cut just enough meat from the deer’s thigh for his supper and for supper the next evening, then drug the carcass off into the forest. The deer was heavy with death and hard for him to handle with his crippled arm. Abel’s legs felt good and strong as they always did, but his chest and shoulders burned with the effort of the last few days. He laid the deer in the forest, covered it with a layer of soft sword fern, and stood over it a long time, trying to think if there was anything else that needed doing. “Goddamn it anyway,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He walked out of the trees and stood looking out at the surf where a sea stack resembling a great phallus stood from the waves. Abel sucked a tooth and walked on down the beach.

Later that evening, he built his fire near another creek in a little ring of soot-blacked stone that he had used for that purpose on other trips. Abel put on as much dry wood as he could gather and let it burn down until the coals glowed like orange gemstones in the black sand. Cutting the meat into thin steaks, he laid them sizzling on the coals. The old soldier sat cross-legged, humming a slow, sad song to himself as he watched the fat come bubbling up along gristle lines. Off to sea, the sun slowly slipped behind far distant rain clouds, shedding an even light along the horizon like a soft, dull bruise.

After a time, the dog came out of the woods like it had the first night it had come to Abel. It materialized out of the dark between the trees and came down the beach to sit across the fire from him with a look composed upon its features as though it sat in judgment on the old soldier. After a few long moments, the dog sighed heavily and faced the ocean, seeming to watch the otters out amidst the waves where they floated on their backs or dove beneath the surface for shells and stones.

Abel moved the little deer steaks about on the coals with his bare fingers, quickly touching each to his tongue afterward to ease the heat from them. He cooked the strips on one side and then the other until they were just brown with the blood running from them in watery pink streams that went sizzling onto the coals. The meat smelled rich as it cooked, with tiny, snapping flames coming up all around it, and when it was done to his taste, Abel set the steaks on a flat stone and used his knife and fingers to cut and eat them. Juice ran down into his beard and fell dripping onto his shirt. The old man breathed deeply through his nose as he chewed, grunting softly his satisfaction and enjoyment.

When the cooked meat was half gone, Abel set to it with his knife again, dividing what remained into small cubes. He jerked his chin up to the dog, and it came around the coals to stand nearby. It looked at him as before, and the old man nodded and watched as the dog ate
very carefully from the flat of his hand. “You poor, dumb son of a bitch,” he said softly.

Their meal finished, Abel threw sand on the remains of the fire before walking with the dog out across the beach into the surf. The massive, dark sea stacks rose from the water like strange teeth from the floor of the ocean’s jaw. Occasionally the setting sun would come flaring through the clouds to silhouette a tiny hogsback island farther out to sea. The old man and the dog sat together on a boulder and watched the tide come in all around them.

Here, in the cool evening under a sky of gray cloud behind which the sun was setting, the water was a dark green color. Wisps of dirty foam veined it weirdly, marking the subtle motions of tide and current the way a field of tall grass will mark the shape of the wind passing through it. Farther out, on other, smaller stones, stood cormorants like Old World gargoyles of strange sculpture, wings outstretched to dry fingerwise against the failing light, their eyes black and dull as chips of coal, their faces bright and baboon-gaudy.