by Jeffrey Ford
That dog, potential insanity on four legs, can be as calm as a dreamless sleeper until danger drops from the trees and then his placid, near-human smile wrinkles back into a snapping wound machine. The crafty beast learns to lunge for my brethren’s unprotected areas—wing membrane, soft belly, groin, or tail. I, myself, witnessed that hound tear off an attacking demon’s member, slip through its legs, and then shred a wing to tatters in his escape. He has an uncanny sense of certainty about him in all situations, as if in each he is like a dancer who has practiced that one dance all his days. Wood reads Cley like a book, understands his hand signals and the subtle shifting of his eyes. There is no question he will die for the hunter, and I am convinced he will go beyond death for him—a guardian angel the color of night, muscled and scarred and harder to subdue than a guilty conscience.
The hunter whistled once, moving off into the autumn forest, and the dog followed three feet behind and to the left. In the barren branches above, a coven of crows sat in silent judgment while a small furry creature with the beak of a bird scurried away into the wind-shifted sea of orange leaves. From off to the south came the sound of something dying as they proceeded into the insatiable distance of the Beyond, their only compass a frayed and faded green veil.
The contents of Cley’s pack as they were dictated to me by the Beyond: 1 ball of twine; 4 candles; 2 boxes of matches; 8 boxes of shells (1 dozen bullets per box); 1 metal pot; 1 small fry pan; 1 knife and 1 fork; thread and needle; a sack of medicinal herbs; a book, found among the charred remains of Anamasobia (the cover and first few pages of which have been singed black, obliterating its title and author); 3 pair of socks; 4 pair of underwear; 1 blanket.
The days were a waking nightmare of demon slaughter, for they came for him from everywhere, at any moment, swooping out of trees, charging along the ground on all fours with wings flapping. He felled them with the gun, and, when not quick enough with this, he reached for the stone knife, smashing it through fur, muscle, and breastbone to burst their hearts. Wild blood soaked into his clothes, and he learned to detect their scent on the breeze. Claws ripped his jacket, scarred the flesh of his chest and neck and face, and when he met them in hand-to-hand combat, he screamed in a fearsome voice as if he too had become some creature of the wilderness.
The spirit that fired his intuition so that his shots were clean and allowed him to move with thoughtless elegance when wielding the knife was a strong desire he did not fully understand and could not name. It forced him to overcome great odds and demanded with an unswerving righteousness that he survive.
Cley hid beneath a willow and aimed at a white deer drinking from a stream. Cracking branches, the prey bolted, a moment of confusion, and a demon dropped from above onto the hunter’s back. The rifle flew from his hands as he smelled the rancid breath and deep body stink now riding him, searching for a place to sink its fangs. He supported the weight of his attacker long enough to flip the beast over his head. It landed on its wings as he reached for his knife. The demon whipped at his forearm with barbed tail, and the sting weakened his grip. The knife fell and stabbed the earth. The dog was there, seizing in his jaws the demon’s tail. The creature bellowed, arched backward in agony, and this moment was all the hunter needed. He retrieved the fallen blade and, with a brutal slice, half severed the creature’s head from its body.
From that point on, no matter how many he killed in an ambush, no matter how long the process took, he decapitated each and every one. The thought of it makes me nauseous, but I see him cracking their horns from their foreheads and piercing their eyes with the points of their own weaponry. “Even these foul creatures can know fear,” he told the dog, who sat at a distance, baffled by the curious ritual.
He had learned that demons do not hunt at night. At twilight he built a fire next to a stream. Placing six or seven large stones in the flames, he would leave them until they glowed like coals. Before turning in, he would fish them from the fire with a stick and bury them in a shallow pit the length of his body. Their heat would radiate upward and keep him warm for much of the night.
Dinner was venison along with the greens he had gathered in his daily journey. Vegetation grew scarcer by the day as autumn dozed toward winter. He shared the meat in equal parts with the dog.
When the stars were shining in the great blackness above, he took the book without a name from his pack. Then he lay down by the fire, the dog next to him, and strained his sight, reading aloud in a whisper. The curious subject matter of the large volume made little sense. It dealt with the nature of the soul, but the writing was highly symbolic and the sentences spiraled in their meaning until their meaning left them like the life of a demon with a knife in its heart.
The flames subsided and he made his bed with the stones. Lying always faceup—it was his belief that one should never turn one’s back on the Beyond—he searched the universe for shooting stars. Falling branches, bat squeals, ghostly birdcalls like a woman with her hair on fire, snarls and bellows of pain were the lullaby of the wilderness. The wind wafted across his face. A star fell somewhere hundreds of miles to the north, perhaps crashing down into Paradise, and then he was there in his dreams, watching it burn.
There were trees so wide around the trunk and so insanely tall that they were more massive than towers that had once stood in the Well-Built City. The roots of these giants jutted out of the ground high enough to allow Cley passage beneath them without his bending over. Bark of a smaller species was a light fur that felt to the touch like human flesh. Another tree used its branches like hands with which to grab small birds and stuff them down into its wooden gullet. A thin blue variety rippled in the breeze; a thicket of streamers with no seemingly solid structure to keep them vertical. Most disturbing to Cley was when the wind passed through these undulating stalks—a haunting sound of laughter that expressed joy more perfectly than any word or music ever had.
The forest was teeming with herds of white deer, and even an errant shot had a chance of felling one. Flesh from this animal was sweet and very filling. Cley discovered that its liver, when stuffed with wild onions and slowly roasted, was the finest thing he had ever tasted.
Adders with rodent faces. Wildcats, the color of roses, emitted the scent of cinnamon. Small-tusked wolves covered with scales instead of fur. The wilderness was a beautiful repository of bad dreams that often rendered monsters.
Cley had lost track of how many demons he had slain, how many wounds he had dressed, how many deer livers he had devoured. He was startled from his gruesome work on the corpse of an enemy by a tiny fleck of white that moved before his eyes. Looking up, past the barren branches overhead, he watched the snow falling. “Winter,” he said to Wood, and with that one word, he felt the cold on his hands, the chill of the wind at his back. His breath came as steam, and he wondered how long he had ignored the signs of autumn’s death, so caught up, himself, in killing.
The icy presence of the new season now made itself doubly known in payment for the hunter’s previous disregard. The frigid wind stole the feeling from his hands, and he prayed he would not have to fire the rifle in defense against an attack. It seemed as if ice had seeped inside him and was forming crystals in his bones. His mind yawned with daydreams of the fireplace back at his home in Wenau.
The only shred of hope the winter brought was the disappearance of the demons. For two days following the first light snow, they were strangely absent. He wondered if they were hibernating.
He and the dog gathered dry branches with which to build a fire. They heaped them up in front of the mouth of a cave, and then he rummaged through his pack for a box of matches. Cupping his hands and using his body as a shield, he managed to ignite the barest tip of a stick. Once the tongue of flame took hold, the fire’s hunger overcame the winter’s best attempts to extinguish it. Smoke swirled upward as he carefully placed the box of matches back in his pack.
He fashioned a torch from a large branch and stuck its end in the fire till it burned brightly.
Taking the stone knife from his boot, he edged forward into the opening in the hill. The thought of discovering hibernating demons in the closed, dark place made him shudder and begin to sweat.
It was warm inside. He called out, “Hello,” in order to judge the size of the vault by the echo it produced. The sound blossomed out and returned with news of considerable space. As if his voice had lit the chamber, upon the word’s return, his vision cut through the dark. A perfectly empty rock room with a ceiling tall enough for standing. Continuing forward, he found, after twenty feet, that the opening narrowed in height and width as he proceeded into the hill. Following the shaft to where it turned sharply downward into blackness, he was satisfied that the cave was free of beasts. He turned and looked out through the mouth. There, in the gray light of day, sat Wood, head cocked to one side, staring at the hole that had devoured his companion.
Cley carried his pack inside and moved the location of the fire to just inside the cave’s entrance. He wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down on the hard floor. The dog followed him but whined and sniffed every inch of rock. To ease Wood’s uncertainty about being within the earth, Cley took the book from his pack and read a few pages out loud. As the words streamed forth, the dog stopped pacing and curled up beside his master.
Snow fell, and the wind whistled through the forest, whipping the face of the hill. The demons were asleep, and the cold could not sting him in the shelter of the rock womb. His bones began to thaw. Now that he did not have to kill, all he could think about was the killing he had done. In the wind he heard the savage war cry he had used when rushing toward demons with only his knife.
“What have I become?” he asked the dog, who was already asleep. He put the book away and searched through his belongings to find the green veil. The feel of it clutched in his fist told him he would never return from the Beyond.
Four or five armfuls of branches and kindling had to be gathered every day to feed the flame’s appetite. At times, the wind forced the smoke back into the vault instead of carrying it away, and it grew so thick that Cley and the dog would have to leave in order to draw a decent breath. Still, they tended to it scrupulously like a beloved infant. It was a marked tragedy when it died, for with each instance of its failure the store of matches was reduced.
The blankets and belongings were moved to the very back of the chamber, where it narrowed, and the shaft led down into the unknown. A warm current of air traveled up from deep in the earth. At times, Cley removed his shirt and lay about in just his overalls. Outside, the world was brutally cold. The sun barely generated enough heat even at midday to cut through the frost and bitter winds. The days were brief, and the nights seemed to last for weeks.
The store of bullets was quickly diminishing, so Cley cut a long, thick branch from which to carve a bow. When it was finished, he strung it with deer sinew. Through endless and uneventful nights, by the precious light of a candle, he perfected the craft of shaping arrows. To the backs of them, he tied feathers to balance against the barbed tips he carved from animal bone. The bow was tall and powerful, and over a week’s time, he became accurate with it. Still, it could not kill as decisively as the rifle.
This change in weaponry heralded a change in diet from venison to rabbit, squirrel, and the meat of a slow-moving amorphous blob of a furry mammal with a tapered snout and pitiful, human eyes. Cley named this slothful beast a geeble after the tavern owner from Anamasobia. Its meat was bland and fatty, but its coat made a fine pair of mittens and warm leggings.
They were returning to the cave from the eastern pond through a stand of blue, wavering trees. Cley was preoccupied with thoughts of the nameless book. The soul it had told him was that irreducible, ineradicable essence of one’s being that was both the element that defined individuality and also the very mind of God. He thought of delicate dandelion seed on the wind, of laughter, of omniscience atomized like a spray of perfume, a floating ghost egg, a fart. The concept slipped through his ear and away on the wind.
Wood barked, the clipped near-whisper sound the dog used to indicate danger. Looking up, Cley reached toward the geeble-hide quiver he wore across his back. An animal stood twenty yards in front of him next to the undulating trunk of a blue tree. The sight of it brought him up short and set his heart racing.
It was a cinnamon cat, one of those illusive red-coated lynx that Cley had only seen out of the corners of his eyes on a few occasions. He knew it better by scent than sight, because in its wake it left a sweet aroma like those he remembered emanating from the bakeries of the Well-Built City. Even in dead of winter, he smelled its disarming perfume, and it spoke more of home and safety than the presence of a predator. The cat crouching before him now was larger than any of the others he had glimpsed briefly. He raised his right hand to indicate to Wood to remain still.
Nocking an arrow in place, he pulled back on the bowstring. He was unsure how dangerous these cats could be, but he had on occasion come across the results of their hunting—corpses of deer that held the sweet scent with bellies split open and all the internal organs devoured. The arrow flew. Cley smiled until the shaft bounced off harmlessly onto the snow. The cat never moved. Another arrow traveled as true a path as the first and also dropped to the ground.
“I think it’s dead,” Cley said.
The dog barked, and together they slowly approached. He slung the bow over his shoulder and leaned down for his knife. Wood was the first to reach the lynx, and he licked the creature’s face.
“Frozen solid,” the hunter said as he stepped up and tapped the cat on the head with his blade. It was like hitting the head of a marble statue. “Winter’s trophy,” he said. The corpse was too heavy to carry back to the cave, so he marked the spot and the trail he followed home.
The following day, he returned, started a fire next to it, thawed it, and carefully removed the skin. This process took him the better part of a day, but he did not rush, hoping the pelt would make a good-sized cloak when he was finished. Back at the cave, he cured the inside of the hide with hot ash. When he was finished, he had a beautifully scented garment with a tooth-fringed hood, bearing pointed ears and empty sockets. The dog sometimes wrestled it around, unsure if it was dead since neither of them had killed it.
The deer had disappeared. All he carried was the carcass of a starved squirrel. Cley stood in a thicket of trees at sunset, listening to the wind. He marked the ever-decreasing length of the days, the relentless drop in temperature, and wondered if the wilderness was inching toward total, static darkness, like death. Then the dog barked, and he continued toward the cave, realizing that for a moment he had forgotten who he was.
On a frigid afternoon, when the sun had made a rare appearance, a black reptilian wolf dashed across the clearing where Cley had felled a rabbit and snatched it away. The hunter yelled at the injustice, and Wood gave chase. The lizard skin of the creature’s body offered a good defense against the dog’s teeth and claws. The rivals rolled in the snow, one snapping and growling, the other hissing and spitting—a confusion of black in a cloud of white powder.
Striking with the speed and cold cunning of a snake, the wolf gored Wood in the chest with one of its short, pointed tusks. The dog dropped to the snow as Cley shot an arrow into the sleek marauder’s side, sending it yelping into the underbrush. The hunter lifted his companion from the ever-growing pool of blood. Through deep snow, he trudged over a mile back to the cave, with the dog draped across his arms. By the time they reached their sanctuary, Wood was unconscious, and Cley feared that the wolf’s tusk might have held some poison.
He treated the wound with an herbal remedy he had carried from Wenau. Then he fed the fire and laid the dog down on his blanket next to it. Stroking Wood’s head, the hunter begged him not to die.
Late in the night, the dog began to shiver violently, and Cley suspected that death was very near. He removed his cat cloak and draped it over the blanket. Then, from out in the dark, as if at a great distance, came the wind-muffled s
ound of a dog barking.
“Come, boy,” Cley called, and whistled as he always did in the forest to call his companion to his side. He yelled frantically for hours. As the day came on, the barking subsided, and then suddenly was gone.
Wood survived the attack, but could do nothing but lie on the blanket near the fire and stare straight ahead. Cley felt guilty leaving him alone, but they needed food. He discovered that an integral part of the process was missing when he hunted alone. The frustration marred his aim, and he cursed out loud, scattering whatever game might be nearby. He was embarrassed to return to the cave in the evenings with only a geeble or a few crows.
Although he was weary, he fed the fire and cooked whatever pittance he had brought. Dicing the meat as small as he could, he fed the dog one piece at a time, then poured a little water into his companion’s mouth with each serving. By the time Cley had a chance to eat, it was late and he had little appetite.
Wood was most at ease when the hunter read. On the night he recited the section of the book that made the argument that thoughts were as real as rocks, the dog stirred and sat up for a few moments.
An enormous thicket of giant, gnarled trees grew so closely together that in order to pass between their trunks, the hunter had to turn sideways and wriggle through. Inside the natural structure, which arched overhead like the domed ceiling he remembered from the Ministry of Justice building in the Well-Built City, there was a huge clearing where the wind was all but forgotten. The branches tangled together forty feet overhead, and the trunks were like walls. Here, there was only a dusting of snow on the ground, whereas outside it was piled three feet deep. As little of the morning sun penetrated as did the snow, but in the dim light he saw, hanging above him from the roof of arching limbs, odd brown sacs, hundreds of them, each a man-sized fruit. He felt a tingling at the back of his neck, beads of sweat broke on his forehead, as his eyes adjusted to the shadows. They were demons, sleeping, suspended upside down and draped in their wings.