Far Cry: Absolution

by Urban Waite

  “They served their purpose, too. Just as you do, or I do. Each of us a servant.”

  “And your purpose?” Will asked. He knelt now, looking out across the field, retracing the steps of the bear, seeing it in his mind. The big loping slide and pull of its muscle as it ran, the sheen of its fur seen beneath the light of the sun and the way the dust of the pasture and earth beneath its great claws would have risen, kicked into the air.

  “I make sure The Father and the church receive their due.”

  “Is that what they are calling it now?”

  “We are a community. As you know well enough, if the church helps you, you are expected to pay that kindness back.”

  “And the Kershaws paid?”

  “Until they could not anymore.”

  “And now?”

  “They have been repurposed.”

  Will rose and walked toward where the fence had been bent. He could see in the packed dirt and the close-cropped grass, the indents and scuffle of the bear’s movements. “Were the Kershaws here when this happened?”

  “They were. But they were already at their end. They had already slaughtered many of their cows to feed the church and their time here and their hold on this place was coming to an end.”

  Will looked now to the surrounding wood. He thought of all he’d seen. He thought of the bear out there. He wondered if it was there still. If it watched them even now. “I saw The Father last night,” Will said. “I saw John. I saw the baptism in the river.”

  “It is not just the Kershaws that owe a debt to the church. Many in this community have been helped. They have had their mortgages paid. They have had their debts forgiven. They have suckled at the teat of Eden’s Gate,” Lonny said, a wicked smile now breaking from his lips. “And the church and The Father only ask their due, whether that is the slaughter of a cow, or the growing of a crop, or the giving of their soul to Eden’s Gate.”

  “Some did not give their soul as freely as the others.”

  Lonny laughed. “Some give more freely than others, but in the end they all will give.”

  Will thought of the girl’s room. He thought about the past. He thought about how one drink led to another. He thought of another life altogether. Finally, he said, “In the church there is salvation.”

  “You’re getting it now,” Lonny said. “And here I was starting to think you’d forgotten.”

  * * *

  THE BEAR PIT HAD BEEN DUG AT THE EDGE OF THE WOOD. THE roots cleanly cut and a thatch of thin pine had been woven to cover it all. At the bottom of the pit, thick, straight branches had been sharpened and then dug into the ground with their points toward the sky. Will looked it over and then, when he was satisfied, he brought the beavers out from the house and using a knife he cut away the string he’d used to tie off the castor glands.

  “Did you have help with this?” Will asked, working to get the beavers hung on a thin metal wire that would span the opening of the pit.

  “John came with a few of his men and they helped to dig the pit and then when it was done we sharpened the sticks and set them out below. He was quite impressed with your design.”

  “You told him about the tiger?”

  “I left out some parts.”

  “Like how the tiger killed anyone who tried to hunt it?”

  “Something like that,” Lonny said.

  Will walked the edge of the pit, the wire trailing behind him. He came to a broad tree trunk and tied one end of the wire there.

  “This is going to work?” Lonny asked.

  Will looked to where Lonny was standing, his eyes on the wire and the beavers that waited there in the dirt. Will brought up one of the beavers and held it tail-end toward Lonny. “What do you smell?” he asked, holding the beaver still and watching as Lonny bent slightly, then his eyes raised on Will.

  “Sweet? Almost like Christmas cookies?”

  “It’s vanilla,” Will said. “There’s a gland here that smells and even tastes just like vanilla. The old-time trappers used to sell it. Sometimes they still do. Read the label on a box of cookies next time you’re at the store. I believe they list this stuff as natural flavoring.”

  “You’re fucking with me.”

  “I wish I was.”

  “And bears like this stuff?”

  “They love this stuff.” Will tied the other end of the wire to a tree on the opposite side of the pit and pulled the wire tight, suspending the beavers up over the center of the pit. “Like a fly to shit.”

  “Or a bear to beaver ass,” Lonny said.

  * * *

  FOR AN HOUR, AFTER THEY HAD FINISHED, THEY SAT AT THE EDGE of the porch on dining room chairs they’d dragged from inside. Lonny smoked. He picked loose tobacco from his teeth and from his lips and flicked it away. He leaned forward with his forearms resting across his thighs, the cigarette dangling from his fingers. Mostly he watched the edge of the wood where the pit had been dug. He ran his eyes to the far mountains and at times he held out a hand and called for the rifle, putting the scope to his eye and searching through the deep shadows of the forest, or raising the barrel on the mountains so far away.

  “You think he’s out there?” Lonny asked, handing the rifle back to Will.

  “He’s out there,” Will answered. The forestock was warm where Lonny had held it. Will put the scope to his eye and looked through the glass, then brought the rifle back down again.

  “What makes you so confident?”

  “He has to be somewhere, doesn’t he?”

  Lonny shook his head. “I don’t know how you can do this every day, just sit here like this and wait for something to chance out from between the trees,” he said, standing now. “I found a few liquor bottles the Kershaws had tucked away. You want any to pass the time?”

  “You ever wonder what would happen if John or The Father came along and found you breaking their rules?”

  “We all have our secrets,” Lonny said. “Every one of us.”

  * * *

  WILL WAITED. HE WATCHED LONNY TAKE DRINK AFTER DRINK and then watched the man curl up on the couch mumbling to himself with the bottle still in hand. Within five minutes there was the sound of his snoring.

  Out in the field the light had started to go and the insects danced in the air, a few zigzagging in the last of the light, while others zoomed past like they had somewhere more important to be. He watched them for a time and he watched the place in the woods where the pit was, then he turned from the window and walked down the hall to the first bedroom.

  He sat on the bed and looked about the place. A woman’s nightgown hung by a hook close by the door. The material thin and white, the sleeves very short and an intricate stitching at the edges of each that ran out and down and across at the chest. For a while he sat and studied it like some sort of mystery to be solved.

  The light had gone out of the sky now and the whole room had grown dark. He ran his eyes over the place and took in the twin dressers and the mirror across the room. A single chair sat in a corner with a laundry basket on it, filled almost all the way to the brim with clothes that looked to be both female and male.

  When his eyes came back around on the nightgown he did not know that he would do it until he did. He rose from his seat on the bed, took down the nightgown and held it in his hands. His wife had had one like this once. And though he had trained himself not to think about her, or his daughter, he thought of them now.

  He brought the nightgown close to his face. He smelled lavender and dirt and something he thought maybe was sunscreen. He held the gown away from him now and he went to the bed and laid it in the place he thought that it went. Then he rounded the bed and sat for a while, telling himself this was all craziness, that if John or The Father walked in right now, they would know he had not been saved as he had said he was in that long ago time, and that what had troubled him then, still troubled him now, and no salvation by church or The Father could give him respite.

  * * *

  WHEN HE WOKE
IN THE MORNING THE GOWN LAY ON THE BED beside him. He reached out a hand toward it and felt of the material and for a moment wished there to be flesh and blood there beside him. He thought of the woman who had been his wife and he thought of the life that had been his own. He closed his eyes and that’s when he heard the soft barking of what could have been a dog pup, but what Will knew was a bear.

  Lonny was still asleep on the couch, the bottle fallen from his hand when Will came out of the room. The rifle was still where Will had laid it after coming in off the porch. He took it now, raised it on the pit at the edge of the forest, and looked through the scope. One beaver was missing from the wire and the thatch that covered the trap had been sprung.

  Quickly he took the rifle from his shoulder, fingered back the bolt until he could see the bullet in the chamber. He slid the bolt back up into place, pushed the safety forward and now he looked about the room for his pack and the ammo he knew was within. When he found the pack and had pulled it on over his shoulders, he went out onto the porch into the morning light.

  Again, he put the scope on the pit trap then ran his eye along the edge of the forest. Everything was as it had been before, except for the one beaver and the latticework covering that had hid the spikes below.

  When the barking came again to his ear he knew what they had caught was not the big boar grizzly he had seen in the rain. No, this was not that. He came down off the porch and, as quick and silent as he could, he crossed through the field and came to the place the pit had been dug and looked down.

  The bear was a female grizzly and Will knew now why the big boar had come down from the mountains, hungry and following the mother and cub. When Will looked up at the forest there was no sign of the cub he knew there to be. The silence of the place was now full and complete and the cub may be on the run, but most likely hiding. Down in the pit the mother bear lay dead. The spikes seen in places where they had punctured her body and come up through her skin. The sharpened white of the wood now tinged red with her blood.

  Will crossed now, moving around one side of the pit trap. There in the dirt at his feet was the imprint of the mother’s paw. Close by, almost erasing that of its mother, the cub’s prints could be seen where it had moved back and forth along the edge of the pit, calling for its mother and waking Will from his sleep.

  By the size of the paw print he could see the cub was no more than a few months old and that, as he followed one print after another, it had moved up and away from the field. The path moving in a somewhat direct line toward the roadway above.

  He took several steps this way and then turned back to the trap. Two beavers still hung by the wire. He reached and undid one end of the wire and brought the two carcasses down. With the beavers in hand he went back to the small paw prints he’d found and went up the hill in a careful study of the surrounding landscape, watching for movement, listening for sound.

  His movements were slow and deliberate. His watchfulness had less to do with startling the cub and more to do with what that cub might have already drawn from the forest. For Will knew it was not just him that was hunting this cub, but likely the larger, boar grizzly.

  When he came to the road he could see where the small cub had run across the gravel and Will marked the front paws and then looked for the broad back paws of each foot and the way they had pushed and swept at the gravel. He crossed, looking at each paw print then went down into the forest at the other side of the road and continued, following the prints, sometimes losing them, sometimes taking his direction from a broken twig or a tuft of hair found caught on the rough bark of a pine.

  He was two hours in his tracking and by the time he came to the thicket of elderberry the sun had risen high in the sky and the forest had begun to steam from the heat. Will stopped. He had carried the rifle in his hand for the entirety of his search. Now he set it aside and knelt, looking down at the fresh paw print the cub had left in the mud. The whole of the thicket seeming to follow the low depression of a waterway Will could not yet see.

  As he stood up, he was almost certain something had moved within the thicket. Without taking up the rifle, he inched forward. He could see now the dark muddied front paws of the cub, and farther up, just where they disappeared within the bush, he saw the brown, almost blond fur of its summer coat.

  Not wanting to take his eyes from the spot, he reached and felt for one of the beavers and then once he had the carcass in his hand, he threw it forward. Will waited and watched. The snout emerged, black and pasted with mud, as the bear cub reached with its teeth, first testing the meat, then pulling it back within the thicket, placing one paw atop the carcass to hold it in place as it began to tear at the flesh. All the while keeping an eye on Will where he squatted.

  When the cub had chewed the beaver to the white bone, Will reached again and found the second beaver. This time using his knife to quarter it, he threw one piece close to the bear, then a second a little more than a foot from the thicket. When the bear cub had finished the first quarter of it Will watched it come forward, moving low to the ground to gather the second quarter of meat and then lay eating it, still watching Will.

  “You were hungry,” Will said, his voice no more than a whisper. The bear turned toward him with its ears cupped and focused in his direction.

  He held out another quarter and waited, not putting the beaver meat down on the ground, but instead holding it outward in his hand, the way one might try to steady the nerves of a long-lost dog that had found its way to the wild. When the bear cub came forward and nipped at the meat Will did not let go, forcing the bear to inch closer. The cub a good hundred pounds and possibly more, already showing much of the muscle of an adult grizzly, and the claws that curved and dug up the earth almost like teeth. By the time it had worked up enough confidence to grab the meat from Will’s hand, Will had already begun to wonder how far the cub would be willing to follow him.

  * * *

  THERE WAS LITTLE BUT ASH AND A FEW BLACKENED PIECES OF wood remaining in the place of the fire. Will looked to the river then back down to where the slight breeze off the water turned the ash over and over again, running it now in a dusting across the land. He walked to the river’s edge and saw in the river mud where the worshippers had stood. Scanning across the water, he tried to find the place on the high rock face where he had stood watching, but there were many places and many shadows. He turned away from the river and went up again along the wash to where the fire had burned. The bear cub was there, pawing at a half-burnt piece of wood.

  When he approached the bear cub shied away, then came back little by little. A couple hours had passed and Will often lost the cub, but waiting, soon would see the small bear loping through fields, or weaving between the trunks of the pine forest at a distance no less than a hundred feet away.

  At the height of his climb up out of the depression where the church had held their bonfire he found he was disappointed not to see the bear climbing up behind him. But when he walked back a hundred feet he could see the bear running at the side of the river, playing in the shallow water, pausing to drink, and then running again. He called to the bear and soon the bear had come up out of the river.

  Two hours later when he came up the rise toward his cabin, the bear was no more than twenty feet behind him. As he came into the small clearing before his place, the bear hesitated, standing there like it had come up against a very real, but very invisible wall that surrounded the clearing and the cabin within. The animal paced back and forth and then called out to him, making that low barking sound. Will walked back to it and held out his hand, watching as the bear pushed its nose forward now, smelling his skin then pushing at his hand until Will raised it ever so and began to scratch away at the side of the bear’s face like they had done this intimate appraisal of each other a thousand times before.

  * * *

  WHEN HE WOKE THE NEXT DAY, WILL FED THE BEAR CUB AND then, as was his custom, he set out with his snares and pack, carrying his rifle while his hat shaded his
eyes against the rising sun. He walked down the rise and out along the field, the cub following, loping behind, often pausing to bite at the tender tips of grass. When Will passed on into the belt of trees that lined the stream beyond, the bear came crashing after him. The two of them now came to the edge of the stream to drink and to dip paws and hands within the moving water.

  Many of the snares had been slipped, and Will went one by one looking each over and then resetting them. Twice, in the place he had set a snare there was only the blood and hair of a rabbit left to find. The bear cub sniffing at the ground, running its nose toward the higher field.

  “Coyote is my guess,” Will said. His eyes up as he searched for clues as to where he might find his snare. Then moving in concentric circles, he widened his search until he found the place the rabbit had been carried and then eaten. The remains no more than a collection of bones and tufts of hair, but the wire snare not far off.

  By the time he had circled and reset his snares it was midafternoon and he walked back across the Junegrass field with the bear trailing, running then pausing, just as it had before.

  When he came to the rise that led toward his cabin the bear cub was still at play there in the field. The sun now ahead of him as Will walked, his shadow behind, stretching away from him down toward the field like his own dark reflection pulled long and thin across the grass.

  * * *

  THE SOUND OF THE RIFLE SHOT CUT THROUGH THE AIR. WILL dropped to his belly, his fingers gripping the roots and dirt, the smell of the grass flooding his nostrils. It had been forty years since anyone had shot at him, and it had been in another country, in what had, at the time, seemed like another world altogether. But the feeling had not changed, nor had the spike of adrenaline that went coursing down every one of his veins.

  Another shot fired but this time it was far overhead and he looked up but all he could see was the Junegrass and the tops of the pines farther on. He heard the clack of the bolt and then the dissonant sound of laughter and the talk of men. He came up on one elbow, turning to look back down into the field where the bear cub had paused, sniffing the air then standing on hind legs, looking his way.