Out the cockpit window he tried to imagine the tundra beyond these crags, a breadth so barren now even wolves sought reprieve. Primitive man must have looked with horror upon such foreboding land. What doctrine of the soul would have saved them? They died without souls. He knew that in the earth, under this veil of snow and ice, there flourished spores of life blown here from the vacuum of space. How far below him did the earth’s lava like blood surge under crust? But we were not born to survive. Only to live. He knew his thoughts were those of a dying man.
Marium’s blood was stained like shards of glass on his jacket and gloves, droplets on his pants and in the laces of his boots. He imagined himself a mummy found in summer inside this plane, dead for two seasons, his gnarled body a warning to those who sought to trespass here. He thought of the phone call to his daughter, the news from an uncaring official, but when he summoned her face it was three years old, his daughter as a child before time took her from him.
In the cargo space behind the rear seat he found a canvas duffel bag, inside a first-aid kit, aerial map, hunting knife, rounds for the Remington rifle, a dog-eared paperback called Prepare for Fatherhood, and in a buttoned side pouch an unopened fifth of whiskey. He said Marium’s name aloud and sat on the floor of the plane, between the seats, drinking from the bottle. Snow swarmed more against the windows. The whiskey heated him from within, reached all the way to his feet. He unearthed the chocolate from inside his overalls and lit his last cigarette, the cramped space of the plane filling with a smoke hued blue in the cold.
Winter solstice, he remembered then, Marium’s words from that morning, eighteen hours of night. He could stay here, he knew. He could pass into a drunken sleep and simply stay. He could recline with this bottle and simply wait—wait for the cold to change to a deceiving warmth before the final dark.
* * *
He needed to move. A stiffness had begun spreading up his shins and into his hips, a creaking he could almost hear. A final sip from the whiskey bottle and he pocketed the hunting knife and rifle rounds, then stepped out from the plane. He made his hard way again into the gale, onto the rutted talus, around the bluff, the snow erected there in the air like walls, great windrows along the rock face. He fought through them to the spot where he and Marium had rested. The new footprints here were Slone’s. At the spur of the crag the prints doubled back and Core turned with the rifle, terrified Slone was behind him.
And as he tried to reach the chasm on the east side of the crag, he turned every few seconds, expecting to spot Slone behind him along the rock face, blurred by snow. The footpath through the chasm was obscured by new fall atop crisps of hoar and snarled with loosed rock, but it was still and silent screened from the gale. He paused here at the head of the path to look back for Slone.
At the top of this path, canopied by rock, he knelt beneath a fluted cornice of snow with the rifle ready. Into this tall oval, away from the wind, snow floated as if part of a nativity. To his right fifty yards down lay Marium’s brown boots jutting out from behind the berm.
He cross-shouldered the rifle and stepped out from the path onto boulders and flat shapes of shale, testing each foot down. At the bottom he hid behind a berm, and in the rifle’s scope he saw the entrance of the spring, steam on black. Breathing, he waited. When he moved again he stayed close to the inner face of the cliff as he crept around to the rocks spilled like a bumped tongue from the mouth of the spring.
He ascended the ramp to the level swatch of shale at the mouth and crouched there with the rifle, aiming in as far as light would go. Beneath his boots the hardened dung of lynx or Dall sheep. To his right just inside, a fire pit circular and charred, beside it the toothpick bones of a ptarmigan, others from a snowshoe hare. The warmth of the spring wet his lungs and he rolled up his face mask and hunkered into the spring with hesitant steps.
By minutes his eyes adjusted to the weakling light and he saw down the slant of stone to the pool venting steam, beyond it crevices vanishing into earth. He squatted and watched with the rifle, listened to the cavern and inched in farther, glad for this hugging heat.
Ten yards from him in a corner of partial dark, atop the incline of flat rock, he saw her feet, new mukluks of moose hide where the light stopped stretching. Beside her against stone were a stack of blankets and cans of food, a rifle and lantern. He padded in farther toward the corner, the gun trained just above her feet, an anticipation in him like liquid that felt part fatal. She angled her shoulders and head from the shadows and then he saw her face. She was sitting on a sleeping bag leaned against the wall of stone, her cheeks sucked in from hunger, her eyes heavy in a way that spoke of either exhaustion or indifference.
Core said her name. His voice in this cave was an echoed noise he had not heard before. He kept the gun on her chest, squinted to see if she held a weapon, but her hands were folded at her waist. He asked if she was injured but she leaned her head back on the stone and considered him in what seemed boredom. Sweating now, he shed his gloves, peeled off the one-piece suit of caribou, and lay the rifle across it. He went to the paraffin lamp and lit the wick, her face warmed by the sheen of light. The girlish beauty he remembered, the white-blond hair. He asked again if she was injured and moved toward her with the lamp, stood before her, on the rounded stone walls and vault his lank shadow like ink.
“Medora,” he said. “Medora Slone.”
She would not or could not speak, had seemed to arrive at some place past words, a limbo between worlds where language failed—movement or no movement but never words.
“We have to leave. He’s coming. He’s behind me. He’s coming for you.”
She would not move and Core repeated, “He’s coming.”
Then in the lamplight her face changed, twisted, and from her neck and chest came a moan, a low caw of dread. Core turned and saw him there at the mouth of the cave, the silhouetted form of Vernon Slone in the wolf mask, standing before the flurried gray-white of day.
The arrow lanced through just beneath his collar, noiseless and smooth, no slap against the body, no impact on bone. The orange vanes of the arrow against his shirt, two feet of shaft jabbing out from his back. The sound he heard now was his own gasping as he leaned against stone, as he slid several feet to his side. He lay uneven on plates of shale, his mouth flushed with saliva that drooled over dry lips. A nausea now, this fear a vexed knowing of death.
For this he had come. For this he had remained.
Sideways on the stone, he sweated and bled watching Slone stalk into the cave with the bow. Core glanced to the rifle out of reach on the caribou suit, then listened to his own damp gasp and behind him to the muted whimpers of Medora Slone. A numbness was replacing the pain now, spreading from his neck and chest, down into his left arm and his fingers tipped with blood. He understood that he would be dead soon.
Slone stepped toward Medora. He dropped the bow and stood looking at her in the lamp-lit corner of the cave. She sobbed with no sound. Core thought he could hear Slone breathing inside the mask but the wheeze was the blood bubbled within his own breast.
Slone stopped at Medora’s feet, his head tilted at her one way, then the other, as if trying to recognize her after thirteen months apart—after all she’d done. She wept and extended her arms to him, wanting end to this havoc. And he bent then with both hands clasped to her throat and hoisted her up, smashed her hard against the stone.
Core’s voice, the shouts at Slone, would not come—they were pinned in his gullet beneath the blood. She gagged in Slone’s grip, tried to kick free, then reached to lift the mask from his face. The mask dropped to the stone and she grabbed fistfuls of his hair and pulled his head to hers. When their faces hit he loosened his grip, loosened more, and found her lips. They breathed, groaned that way into one another’s mouth, haled at one another’s hair, their animal noises weaved with hurt, with the hunger born of separation.
They tore at their clothing with that hunger and Core saw them drop nude in a corner not breached by
lamplight. He glimpsed her full breast and thigh before a shadow swallowed them. Heard a rapt keening he hadn’t thought possible from a person. He almost recalled that splendor, almost remembered youth, his wife and daughter now crystal figurines in memory. He lay on stone fading, feeling himself rasp and wane and sweat, unable to summon the buried prayer he wanted.
In time a body emerged nude from the shadows and steam, into the lantern light, his blond beard stippled with dew, chin-length hair tangled and wet. He woke Core fully, startled him from his slow falling through layers of air. You would not seek me if you had not found me. He went to one knee to grab the shaft of the arrow at Core’s upper back, then drew it through, yanked it clean, quick, but the pain spiked up from the wound and through Core’s neck, into his teeth, the bones of his cheeks, reeling in ripples.
On the sleeve of Core’s shirt Slone wiped the blood from the arrow and squatted there to consider him. Core could not make sense of Slone’s face, could not ascertain the mysteries there. Behind him Medora stepped slowly from the dark, her matte flesh dappled with rash, an inch of semen slipping down her inner thigh. He shook from the cold of blood loss, the heat of this spring unable to warm him now. Medora draped the caribou suit over his torso and legs, tucked the hood around his throat, then knelt near Slone and reached for Core’s hand. She seemed willing to comprehend Core’s confusion and love. He nearly smiled.
Seeing their faces side by side, Core could notice the same dimpled chin and bumped nasal bridge, the identical ecru of their eyes. He knew his vision must be merging them, knew his mind was dying.
He looked at Slone. “The boots,” he managed, though his throat and mouth were so dry with thirst he barely heard his own words.
Slone leaned in to him, squinted to show he didn’t understand.
“The boots,” Core said again, nodding to his own feet. “They’re yours.”
Slone looked to the boots Medora had lent Core for his hunting of the wolves, then looked back to Core with a partial grin, an expression that told him to keep the boots. He rose to go, and when Medora released Core’s hand he once more felt his long falling.
They dressed and packed their provisions, packed the rifles and bow, the blankets and lantern. Core watched them between lengthy blinks. Before they left him in the dark and steam of the cave, Slone came to him once more, crouched to place a lit cigarette in Core’s lips. With his left hand numbed and gummy in blood, Core struggled to dig out the chocolate from the wide bib of his overalls and then unpeeled the foil with his teeth.
He smoked on the taste of chocolate spiced with blood, and listened to them leave the spring, descend out of earshot until he was alone in the hush and dark. Where the day’s ill gray light grazed the rock above him he saw his smoke fuse with steam, cohere into shapes whose meaning he could not divine. Such shapes: he would have liked to paint them. He remembered he’d been a painter. And he would have painted them with purpose, with the grace not given to him now.
Sorry not to be dying from an excess of whiskey and tobacco, he wished he’d allowed himself more pleasure these last thirty-five years. Other people were defective wells of pleasure. They sought pleasure of their own. They ripened or rotted away from you, left you bumbling. He was a white-haired man who’d invested in a future that forgot him. He saw distinctly now the faces of his father and mother—their youthful faces as new parents—but could not see their deaths because he was not there. Most of us get the deaths we’ve earned. Not Bailey Slone.
And then he was crawling on arms he could not feel, leaving red-brown hand marks on the ribbed ground of rock. He dragged himself to the mouth of the cave, half his body in the snow and failing light. On his elbows and belly he looked down into the pan. The Slones were crossing to the cleft in the rock. He collapsed then and rolled, first to his shoulder and flank and then to his back, his arms outstretched.
He could feel the flakes on his forehead and mouth, the chill seeping into his clothes. This cream sky had no layers, no divisions of cloud—he stared into a gauze without knowable start or finish, flakes coming from a fuzzed heaven.
The silhouettes on the ridgeline to his right were the wolves heeding him with abnormal calm, six of them waiting. How he admired their patience, their wisdom to wait. Before he dropped heavy through strata of varied black, he felt, for an instant, honored to give them this sustenance. He felt honored to lose the confines of his flesh, to let it give them life. And before he slept, he saw the boy standing behind the wolves—Bailey Slone, looking just as Core had found him in the root cellar, the strangle mark on his throat, his complexion the white of the dead, his eyes telling Core there was much to fear.
* * *
The four men who woke him wore goggled faces pressed far into the hoods of wolf-ruff parkas. They did not speak. Terrifying angels without wings. Behind their heads the padded sky had started to darken in purple casts, and it darkened more now as the men passed before it. With mittens they brushed a film of fallen snow from the top half of his body. One man propped him upright at the waist, while two others stretched and pulled the one-piece caribou suit onto him. Without the body-wide burn of cold and the pain of the arrow wound he guessed this was his death.
They wrapped him in a blanket—a shrouded corpse, he thought—and lifted him by the shoulders and feet, placed him on a pelt. They carried him down from the spring, into the pan. They had no haste—a funeral procession. As they reached the wall of rock Core could see beneath him the spot where Marium’s body had been, the teeth-torn clothes and bone, the pink mess his innards had made, paw prints of blood. Core knew the wolves had feasted, but had spared him, though being spared had not been his wish.
Two sled-dog teams rested or nipped at one another in the snow. When the men came through the gap in the crags the ready dogs stood mindful. The snow had ebbed. In the east the full yellow moon shone through a rip in clouds. The men laid him on the bed slats of a dogsled. He felt himself being encased in the pelt with a husky who lay beside him—the clean cold scent of its fur, its wet nose on his mouth and chin.
They packed him and the husky against the stanchions with more pelts, his head on the brush bow, his face in the animal’s neck, his body slowly imbued by the eighty-pound heat of the dog. Under him he felt the rough skidding of the runners on crusted snow, and then the smooth riding in fresh fall as the sleds mushed on toward moonlight.
Each time he dipped into a shallow sleep he expected the abyss, expected not to wake, not to rise. When he did, he once again felt the sled’s motion, smelled the dog, heard the canine yelps just ahead of him. Each time he woke he had to learn anew that he was not dead. A jagged passage—one hour or two, he could not be sure, time had turned into a back-and-forth slosh of sand, his memory leaping over decades. The sleds arrived in the village of Keelut.
The men carried him into a cabin and left, left him in front of the fire with a huddle of short-sleeved women who unwrapped the blanket from his body and stripped him to the waist. The arrow wound had ceased bleeding, had dried front and back in dark caps. A woman brought a basin of warm water and rags. They stripped him full and washed him there on the floor before the fire, on a blue tarpaulin, lifted his head so he could drink from a squeeze bottle, and when the wounds were clean they daubed them with a pungent ointment that chilled before it stung. He saw a blond woman take up the caribou suit. She looked it over, sniffed it for scent, and Core could not comprehend what was happening.
With car-wash sponges they rinsed his lap and legs where blood clung in clotted naps. He lay aware of the water and air on his shrunken genitals, but he was unashamed. They dried him gently and then dressed him in clothing soft and old with mothball scent. The tenderness of the female hands on his chest and limbs took him close to weeping.
When had such loving hands touched him last? He was just then willing to die, again and again, to experience such affection, such saving as this. Before apathy had claimed him how often had he gone to the barber for just that reason? Not becau
se his hair needed trimming but because those hands on his head were a confirmation that he was still here, still capable of knowing touch. No body massage ever felt as fine as a barber’s delicate fingers.
They gave him more water from the bottle and then brought a cast-iron pot warmed in the fire, an acrid broth gamy and sweet. The blond woman fed him with a birch ladle, a woman near his age, it seemed—the mother of either Medora or Vernon Slone, he was sure.
He drank the broth while others held him upright. He could not shift his eyes from this woman who fed him because he saw that her face, by some witch’s trick, was a mix of both Medora and Vernon Slone—the fine blond hair, the nose and chin, the yellow-brown eyes and oval ears. In this woman’s still-lovely face he could behold both of the Slones. She was the mother of both. He recalled the matching faces of her daughter and son as they’d knelt beside him in the steam of the cave.
And before he let sleep drag him down into a wide pasture of night, he understood that this one woman above him, this woman caring enough to save him, was not just the source of both faces, but also, perhaps, the reason for the wolves.
* * *
When he woke the following morning in a hospital in town his daughter was there, sitting beside him in a wooden chair, wearing glasses he’d never noticed, a red sweater as if to welcome the holiday. Her smile signaled only the smallest relief. In the medicated fog of waking he believed for a minute that she was his wife thirty years ago. He glanced to the blanket then and felt his hand in her own.
She’d want to know all he’d witnessed. She’d want to hear the truth of these events. But he would have for her only a story—one that seemed to have happened half in dream, rent from the regular world he knew—and that story would wear the clothes of truth. Propped up in bed, he prepared himself for this tale. He searched for the beginning, and for the will to believe it.
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