Hold the Dark: A Novel

by William Giraldi

  “Shouldn’t you go talk to those people? I can wait here.”

  “There aren’t any clear roads to that mining camp now, but I got a guy going to interview Slone’s buddy. We’re going to find that hot spring behind Keelut, Mr. Core.”

  As they drove through town, Core saw shops alight in dull fluorescence, their storefront windows thick with frost, slow shapes inside like fishes beneath lake ice. Bags of sand and salt stacked on a pallet in front of the hardware store. Someone had long forgotten to take down a wind chime and it hung now before the grocer’s like a birdcage of ice. Stray citizens passed on a sanded sidewalk, sacks of larder slung across their shoulders. The hands of the clock tower frozen to the wrong time. The temperature was twenty below. Marium rushed into a diner and returned with egg sandwiches and coffee.

  “We won’t have more than two hours’ air time after sunup,” he said. “You get caught in a blizzard this time of year and you lose the horizon. Then you hit a mountain or the ground and never even know it. You know what day it is?”

  “Friday,” Core told him.

  “It’s the winter solstice. Longest night of the year.”

  “All the nights here feel pretty long to me,” Core said.

  “Tonight is eighteen hours and thirty-three minutes of darkness.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means we have to get back before that dark begins to fall. Slone’s buddy left a message at the station at six this morning, and if he’s right that he just saw Slone heading somewhere, that means Slone’s got a four-hour lead time on us.”

  “Do you think this friend is right about seeing Slone? I doubt the man would let himself be seen.”

  “Shan Martin is a thief and I never met a thief that wasn’t a liar too, so I don’t know. But if Slone came out of the bush then he must have needed something. Food or ammo, or maybe he’s hurt. The woman at the mining camp told us she shot the shit out of his truck.”

  “Call him, then, this Shan Martin,” Core said.

  “I tried, he’s not picking up. I got a guy going there.”

  The sun broke then over the range, orange-pink and frigid-looking.

  “What’s the weather say?” Core asked.

  “Says clear for now. But this place doesn’t play by weather rules. Denali makes its own weather.”

  “Mount McKinley, you’re talking about?”

  “Denali, please, Mr. Core. You forty-eighters should quit calling it McKinley. Denali is the weathermaker. I’ve seen six feet of snow fall from a sky that two hours before was all baby blue with a smiley-face sun. There’re more lost planes in this state than there’re lost kittens in a city.”

  When they approached the lake, the sky was beginning to bruise in maroon and blue, a dim amber east through trees. At the shoreline the ski plane was dressed in insulated covers on its engine, tail, and wings—a lava-colored Cessna incongruous against this vast white. Core helped Marium unfasten the covers, then with brooms they swept snow from the flanks of the plane, the air so stinging he wondered how machinery could be coaxed into motion. How metal didn’t fracture, crack from so much cold.

  Core took the caribou one-piece suit from his duffel bag and began dressing at the door of the plane.

  “Fancy outfit you got there,” Marium said, still sweeping snow from the wing. “Where does a guy get one of those?”

  “This belongs to Vernon Slone,” Core told him. “The boots too.”

  Marium stopped sweeping then. He watched Core button the suit. He looked either appalled or superstitious but said nothing.

  The engine belched twice before catching, before the propeller would consent to a throaty fan. Core had expected the leather and metal odor of a vehicle but he smelled only the cold, an odor that was no odor at all. A cold that forced him to breathe through the nose. When he breathed through his mouth his throat seized up into a coughing fit.

  “How’s any engine start in this cold?”

  “It shouldn’t be this cold so soon in the season. And I don’t know where all this snow’s coming from in such cold. Snow needs moisture and there’s no moisture now. Something’s wrong with the weather, I don’t know what. But overall this isn’t really cold, Mr. Core. Wait till February. That’ll be cold.”

  “As long as this plane stays up.”

  “This plane doesn’t quit till forty below. Guys working up in the arctic? They leave their Cats running day and night, never shut them off ’cause they won’t ever start again. But us here: twenty below is a lark.”

  “Some lark.”

  “Thirty below, you gotta be a little more careful. Forty below and you better make sure a fire is five minutes away. And fifty below, don’t even leave the house. People on the outskirts of town, living in dry cabins? They’ll walk out in fifty below, walk down to a creek bed to cut ice for water, thinking they’ll be gone maybe twenty minutes, so they don’t dress right, and they never come back. Freeze solid right where they stand.”

  They waited for the engine to warm. The crown of sun crested distant trees, and all along the lakeshore wooded acreage breathed in snow. Through a break in the wood Core saw a large home, too many windows for a day this cold, its chimney awake with smoke. A kind of madness to live here, in this land that merged weather and flesh, that didn’t let you forget.

  He recalled reading accounts of those almost frozen to death in the arctic: first the lassitude, then the slurring of thoughts, memories in confusion, and then just before death you forget the freeze, a warmth spreads through the blood before your organs quit. As long as you feel the cold you’re not about to die. Core could not remember being colder.

  The last time he’d been in a plane this small he was twenty years old, being flown to pass twelve days in the remotest north of Minnesota. That was a winterscape like this one, limned with snow and ice, in the sun a crush of bright. The weather, he remembered, was like this—it had its own language, its own grammar of invigoration and hurt, but he was young then and welcomed it.

  A plane floats on air as a boat floats on water. A friend from high school who became a Navy pilot had once told him this, but he could not understand the sense of it, the physics that performed the feat. Many tons of metal midair always seemed to him a supernatural act.

  The cockpit warmed quickly. In the headset Marium’s voice sounded less severe. The anticipation of flight lent it a lightness it lacked elsewhere. The skis upset snow in trailing mists as the plane sped to takeoff—white birch in easy blur along the lakeshore—and when they lifted it was not with thrust but a seamlessness he did not expect. The skis were so waxen along the snow of the lake that at first he did not even realize they were airborne, not until he turned to see the sinking spruce and birch, the lake falling away from them by feet.

  Eastward from the lake he saw the sun fleshing pink all the white below it. Denali loomed to their left and looked not of this world. Beyond town were scattered homes, then broad fields etched with the day-old harrows of snow machines, mostly covered by new fall. Behind them slate clouds like fungus, storms hidden within. Minutes later a rolling whiteness, drifts of snow like waves from this height, ripples across a plain that then erupted into hills, into swells of snow. The marvel of this land cloyed with white. It seemed to Core a miracle it should ever have been discovered, ever have allowed itself to be trod on.

  In twenty minutes Marium pointed as they came upon Keelut. “Tell me what we’re looking for now,” he said.

  “Northeast,” Core told him. “That valley there past the village, over those hills. You can tell the hot spring because it’s the only spot down in the side of the rock that isn’t covered in snow. Aim for those bluffs there off the plain.”

  “You see those there below us? Those tracks in the plain where the trees stop? Those are new snow machine tracks.”

  “Those could be anybody’s,” Core said.

  “They’re somebody’s, that’s for sure.”

  Soon they neared an oval of hills, uneven cliffs wi
th a pan between, a rift inside a fort of crags. They passed low along hummocks, along corniced ridges. They looked for tracks in the snow of the escarpment. Core pointed to the steam exhaling thinly from a bald hollow in the brow of a crag, brassy rock sprouted from snow.

  “That’s it there,” Core said. “See it? I don’t see a truck or tracks. You can’t be down there without making tracks to show it.”

  “It snowed last night. Not much, but enough to cover whatever tracks were there.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Core said.

  “Let’s look closer. I can set her down there between those hills. We’ve got a bit before those clouds catch us.”

  “You’re landing here?”

  “I’m a smooth lander, Mr. Core, don’t worry.”

  They set down on a suede drag and circled back closer to the cliffs. Marium strapped the scoped Remington across his jacket and gave the field glasses to Core. Leaning against the aircraft they smoked and ate chocolate. In quiet they considered the crags, this rock forged epochs ago. The wind came in raspy blows and chafed snow from the wide face of the cliff. The day was gaunt, already half gone, and to the west of them the land looked laced to sky.

  Marium passed Core charcoal heating pads. “Slip two of those into your bunny boots,” he said. “And save two for your hands. Fingers and toes are the first to go out here. It’s probably twenty degrees colder than it was when you were last out here. Probably more. Do you recognize where we are?”

  “I came that way, through that break in the hills there. But I was on the other side of these crags. I can try to get us there.”

  Kicking through new snowfall on the talus, trudging over landslips and scree, they sought entrance through this rise of cliffs. They had to breathe sideways when the wind swiped from the plain. Core touched great polyps and pikes of ice on the rock walls, some clear as shellac, others opaque as bone, one like a waterfall on pause. For fifteen minutes they labored along the sloped perimeter of cliffs. Core stopped when he came to the wolf tracks stamped in the shallow felt of snow, tracks that padded from view around the bluff.

  “How fresh are they?” Marium said.

  “An hour or two, I’d say. Four of them. Adults. A hundred pounds apiece, give or take.”

  “Four of them. Where’s the rest of the pack?” Marium unstrapped the rifle and bolted the first round, snow and beads of ice on his beard of mixed browns.

  “Not far, I’d guess. Their den must be near here. Should we go back?”

  “Let’s look a little farther,” Marium said.

  “We don’t want to meet those wolves.”

  “Let’s look a bit farther. If we see sign of anything we’ll turn back.”

  More hard walking along the scree and gusts turned to gale, air of solid snow swept quick from the plain. Marium pointed to a cavity in the spur of the crag and they moved up into it. They sat on rocks free from the whited wind. They smoked, watching walls of snow blow by them.

  “Can we take off in this?” Core said.

  “Not in this. It’ll pass soon. This isn’t whiteout. You’ll know whiteout when it comes because you won’t believe it.”

  And then: “When I was a kid my mother told me about an Eskimo woman who had to make half a day’s journey from one village to another and midway she got caught in a blizzard. A heavy, blinding whiteout. She was carrying a bearskin to bring to the other village, and she burrowed a hole down into the snow, four or five feet deep, curled up in the bearskin and went to sleep. The blizzard roared for two days straight, and when it stopped, she woke up, crawled out, and walked on to where she was going.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “She stayed dry. You get wet out here, you’re dead. You ever read Last of the Breed, that book by Louis L’Amour?”

  “No. But my father liked that one. It’s one of the last things I remember about him. The paperback—I remember it was a thick blue paperback.”

  “Yeah, the cover shows Joe Mack running through the snow. There’s a scene where Mack swims across the river in below-zero weather in Siberia, and then just keeps going, like he was in Honolulu or some goddamn place. If you get wet like that, in that temperature, and don’t make a fire in five, six minutes tops, you’re dead. That Eskimo woman survived because she stayed dry.”

  “And women are stronger than men,” Core said. “You’ll see how. You’ll see in eight months.”

  “We gotta move to keep warm. Those charcoal pads working in your boots?”

  “They’re working.”

  The gale diminished and they walked on minutes more along the loins of the crag to a man-width slit, a path they squeezed into, free once more from wind, free to hear their breath. They coursed through to the rift inside the oval of cliffs, and across the pan they saw the spring exhaling its steam.

  “How’d you spot this in here?” Marium said.

  “I was up on the ridge at the far side, glassing the valley. It’s an easy climb from that side. I should have taken us that way, I’m sorry.”

  They walked along against the wall of rock and Core stopped to glass the ridgeline. “There’s movement up there.”

  “What movement?”

  “I’m not sure,” Core said. “Wolves maybe.”

  “Why would wolves be up on the ridge?”

  “They can see better from there.”

  “See what better?”

  “See us better,” Core said.

  “They climbed to the ridge to see us? Are you kidding?”

  He passed the glasses to Marium. “There is no smarter hunter. Not out here. Do you see movement?”

  “Nothing now,” he said, and handed the glasses back to Core.

  “Let’s sit here until they move on.”

  “We can’t sit long. We gotta move.”

  They sat on boulders and looked across the pan at steam rising from the spring and at the ridgeline above it. Core tried to start another cigarette but the lighter would not fire.

  “It’s too cold for that lighter to work right,” Marium said. “The fluid is all gel. Take these,” and he dug into his parka for a box of wood matches. “We can’t sit long.”

  Core lifted the glasses and looked again at the ridgeline. And as he did a figure hove into view, stepped slowly at the crest, forty yards from them across the rift. A wolf for certain, he thought, and he said Marium’s name. Both men stood then. Core trained the glasses on the ridgeline and saw the figure rise now full over the crest and stand on two legs against an iron sky.

  Core instinctively reached for Marium’s arm and then focused the glasses. What he saw did not fit: a man with the face of a wolf—pointed ears and an elongated black face in front of yellow hair. His bow was already drawn and steady by the time Core could see him in focus.

  The rifle dropped into the snow at his feet. When he turned, Marium was against the rock face with the arrow through his throat, the tip poking through his nape, hands around the shaft as if he could keep it from doing more harm. The noise coming from his neck was a gurgled sigh, his teeth red and dripping. Core dove, grabbed on to Marium’s legs at the knees, and tugged him down behind a berm of fallen rock just as another arrow smashed, sparked against the crag.

  Blood pulsed from the shaft thick and almost black but in the snow made a shock of red. Core gnashed off a glove and drew the arrow from Marium’s neck, but he was already still, his chest and throat already without sound, his lids closed and the front of his jacket stained through. Core lay on him, thinking to keep him from cold, his breath plugged in his breast. How odd that the groaning wind could breach the oval of crags, but then he listened again. The groaning was his.

  XII

  Core took up the rifle from the bloodied snow near Donald Marium’s feet. From the berm of rock he aimed through the scope to where Slone had stood on the ridgeline with the bow—he knew it was Slone—but he was not there now. He lay again, low behind the berm, half the air clipped from him, looking at Marium fast turning to frost, his
cheeks and lips now an identical ash, a rivulet of red from his mouth, pebbles of blood frozen in his beard.

  Christmas was four days away and he would have this gift for Susan, the wife with child who had glared at him last night over dinner in her home. He was the invader, he knew. Messenger from the other world, taker of her husband. He wondered at the anguish of this place, all those snowed-over acres accountable to nothing.

  He retreated with the rifle back through the cleft in the rock, and from the sheltered path he emerged again into an onrush of wind and snow. The wind pushed at him, groped against him, the snow like stones on his face.

  Beneath his hood he unrolled his hat down into its face mask and pulled on goggles. Just then he heard the chorus of wolves behind the crags, their plaintive howling borne on the gale. He rushed along the talus to the level strip where the plane sat in its cherry paint behind webs of snow. This blizzard had come again quickly and he trudged through it aslant to keep the gusts from stealing his breath. Every few seconds he looked above to the ridge of the tallest crag and expected to spot Slone there with his bow drawn.

  The door of the plane flapped in the gale. When he approached he saw the left engine cowling thrust open, hoses and wires hacked through, spark plugs stolen. In the cockpit he forced the door shut against the wind and tried to breathe. He saw the knife wounds through the instrument panel and radios. Wind nudged the plane, wailed around the windows and wings. He wanted to weep from cold. Moisture froze inside his nostrils. When his left eye wouldn’t open he knew it was sealed with ice. He rubbed it frantically for fear of blindness, then cupped a wood match in his palm. He brought the flame near enough his face to inhale its heat.

  The mind is the great poem of winter. He recalled those words but could not name the poet and could only guess now at what it meant—this scape identical to the mind, in moments knowable to itself. It touches the past, foretells the future. He worried that the plates, the fault lines beneath his own mind were now starting to shift, to cause a quake he could not stop. The mind’s mountains, those cliffs to fall from. At a certain point this place obliterated all imagination. Like the sun, it refused to let you impose yourself upon it.