by Jeffrey Ford
Slowly, without breathing, he stepped backward and, as quietly as possible, slipped out between the trunks where he had entered. Once clear of the nest, he smiled and began to search for kindling. As he gathered fallen limbs and twigs, he wished the dog was with him.
An hour later, fifty yards from the enclosure, he had a small fire burning on a plot of ground he had cleared of snow. He thrust the end of the torch he had made into the flames until it caught. His eyes were wide, and his chest heaved with excitement. Turning, he headed back toward the natural dome. As he approached the wall of trees, he stopped and reached the torch toward them. Before the fire could lick the trunks, he hesitated. Minutes passed and he stared at the flame as if hypnotized. Then, sighing, he opened his hand and let the glowing brand fall into the snow. A thin trail of smoke curled upward, and he walked away.
The eastern pond was frozen solid, and his luckless excursions in search of game took him to its side most distant from the cave. One day, he tracked through the snow the prints of what appeared to be a type of deer he had not yet encountered—something much larger than the white variety. The promise of its size drew him farther into undiscovered territory. A few hours after noon, a storm suddenly swept down from the north. At first, he hoped the weather might pass, and he kept going since he had not killed anything. The sun receded, the storm grew in intensity, and he finally realized he would have to turn back empty-handed.
Hours flew by before he reached the edge of the pond. In order to save time, he decided to cross it. Somewhere in the middle of that frozen tract, the snow began to drive down so fiercely that he couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him. He pushed on, never knowing if he had left the pond or where he was in relation to the cave. Like a sleepwalker, he lurched along without direction, and as the snow drifted upon the drifts that had already begun to harden, walking became difficult. Fear mounted in his mind, and all he could picture was the frozen corpse of the cinnamon cat, whose pelt he wore on his back. The sky grew dark with night as he inched along, unknowingly turning in wide circles.
Thoughts became clouds as dreams and memories flew together and then melted into snow. The wind insisted that he lie down and rest. “You are tired,” it said, “and the white bed is soft and warm.” Above the howl of the gale, he heard the distant sound of a dog barking, and it frightened him, because he knew the phantom noise meant the approach of death. “You must continue,” he told himself, but the wind was right. He was tired, and the snow at his feet appeared a pure white comforter in which he might wrap himself. The bow fell from his hand, and he dropped to his knees in a deep drift that held him upright in that position.
Death came for him, blowing down from the north—a swirling swarm of darkness mixing in with the falling snow. He saw it in his mind’s eye, he heard its soothing voice above the roar of the storm. It gathered itself up before him where he knelt, becoming a statue for the Beyond. The ice on his eyelashes cracked as he opened them to see the hunter whose prey he had become.
Wood bounded forward and rammed Cley in the chest, knocking him onto his back. The dog licked his face, thawing the ice jam of his confusion. The hunter grabbed his bow and found the strength to stand. Whistling weakly, he called, “Come, boy,” but the dog was already in the lead, showing him the way to safety. The faster they traveled, the more body heat he generated, reviving the circulation to those extremities that had begun to go numb. The relentless sting in his hands and feet was a welcome sign.
No sooner, it seemed, had they begun their journey home than the wind eased and the snow diminished to the lightest flurry. Before long, the moon glared down, offering light by which to mark their way. Wood stopped for a moment in a clearing in order for Cley to rest. The Beyond was hushed with that certain calm that follows the rage of blizzards. The trees were fringed with white, and the drifts were wind-curled at their tops like ocean waves.
As they were about to push on, Cley saw something moving among the trees to his right. The figure was large and shadowy, and the only thing that gave an indication as to what it might be was the reflection of moonlight off the bone white of its antlers. “Could this be the beast I was tracking all day?” he wondered as he let his mittens drop and reached for an arrow.
His hands still had little feeling, but the bow was so familiar that he was able to place the arrow. Wood noticed what he was doing and immediately crouched in the snow. Pulling the bowstring back was difficult, and his arm shook with the exertion. The thing in the woods blew a gust of air from its nostrils, and judging from where that cloud of steam gathered in the glow from above, he figured the distance to the chest, aimed, and released. A deep, rasping squeal cut the stillness of the night.
Wood was off like a shot, circling in among the trees to drive the creature out so that Cley could get off another shot. An enormous buck broke into the clearing just as the hunter was drawing back on the bowstring. As the stag got its footing and crouched to dash off to the left, he saw his other arrow jutting from the animal’s thick neck and aimed lower. The new arrow hit the mark, directly between shoulder blade and ribs. The animal went down hard, sending up a shower of new snow. Kicking its back legs, it squealed miserably in a strange, near-human voice, and thrashed back and forth.
In an instant, Cley had the stone knife in his hand. As soon as the stag rested from its death throes, he approached it from behind. The legs of the creature gave a few more quivering kicks, and then the hunter lunged in and sliced it across the throat. The life had barely left it before Wood lapped at the blood-dyed snow.
The carcass was too heavy to carry back, and it was a certainty the wolves would devour it by morning. It was as big as a small horse, with a rack that numbered ten points on either side. Cley had no choice but to take whatever he could carry. There was no telling if the Beyond might serve them venison again until spring. He cut two enormous steaks from its flanks, enough for a week’s worth of meals, and they trudged back toward the cave.
It took all of his remaining energy to build another fire, and he heaped on their entire store of kindling and branches so that he would not have to tend it through the night. With his hunting cloak and mittens still on, he wrapped himself in the blanket and passed out by the shaft at the back of the cave. He slept hard, without dreaming, for what seemed an entire day, before waking to the sound of his own voice, shouting. Immediately, he fell back to sleep again.
He came to, late in the morning, but of which day he wasn’t sure. His leg and arm muscles ached fiercely, but he was pleased to find that all of his toes and fingers had survived exposure to the storm. Wood approached and he put his arms around the dog.
“Venison, for you,” he said, and laughed at the thought of having beaten the Beyond one more time.
Passing the cooling embers of the fire, he walked through the entrance of the cave and into the day. The sky told him that snow would fall again before night. He dropped to his knees and began digging through the ice-crusted white in order to uncover the meat he had hastily buried. The lack of tracks indicated his kill had been safe from scavengers. After digging to the frozen earth in one spot, he found it wasn’t there, and realized he had misjudged the hiding place. He set to digging in another spot a few feet away. Again, nothing was revealed. Frantically, he worked in spot after spot with twice the vigor. An hour later, the entire area of a six-yard arc in front of the cave mouth had been exhumed. Throughout the entire excavation, he found not a single drop of blood, not a single hair from the hide that would have covered one side of each steak.
Cley cursed angrily. The dog came out of the cave and stood in front of him, but turned to the side, looking out of the corner of his eye.
“Did we not kill a huge buck last night?” he asked Wood.
The dog didn’t move.
He thought back to the scene in the moonlit clearing—the shadow of the creature, its breath turned to steam, the perfect accuracy of his shots, the sound of its last breath when he cut its throat. Reaching down int
o his boot, he retrieved the stone blade and inspected it for any evidence of a recent kill. It was spotless.
From all through the forest came the sound of branches cracking beneath the newly fallen snow—the sound of the Beyond, laughing.
Wood recovered fully from his wound, though it left a jagged scar across his chest. The days came and went with a lethargic monotony—tending the fire, hunting, sitting through long hours in the cave, staring out at a perfectly white world. Wild imagination was more abundant than food, and the companions’ diet consisted of hunger occasionally punctuated by a thin rabbit haunch and snow soup or a geeble stew that when thoroughly cooked was no more than fat pudding. Now and then they dined on roots or, if luck was with them, a large crow. In addition to daydreaming and not eating, they spent their time reading the nameless book of the soul. The tome had lost all meaning for Cley, but he continued with it, as it was the closest thing he had to a human conversation. Each night, the dog took its weight in his jaws and carried it over to the hunter. Wood had grown dependent on the whispered droning of the words in order to fall asleep.
After the dog dozed off, Cley sometimes took the green veil from his pack, rolled it into a ball, and held it out in front of him in the palm of his hand. Occasionally, he was so enchanted by the tattered scrap of material that he forgot to tend the fire. These eruptions of emotion, of memory, were like tiny islands in the overwhelming sea of sun-starved boredom that was the winter. It was repetition and mundane ritual that kept them alive. They partook of these with a stoic determination that eschewed even the vaguest desire for spring.
Cley opened his eyes and looked to the cave’s mouth to catch a glimpse of the weather, but all he could make out was a dim, blue glow. The rest of the den was cast in deep shadow. A wall of ice had formed, separating them from the world. It seemed impossible that so much snow could have fallen in a six-hour period. The fire had gone out, and ice was beginning to form along the walls where the opening had been. He took his knife in hand and attacked the frozen boundary, chipping away in hopes that it was merely a thin crust, on the other side of which he would find soft snow.
After an hour of hard work, it became clear that the knife was useless. All he had to show for his effort was an indentation the size of a fist. It was obvious that the temperature outside had plummeted below anything they had yet experienced. He turned his head and put his ear to the frozen barrier. Somewhere, far away, as if in another world, he heard the fierce cry of the storm blowing through the forest.
“Buried alive,” he said to Wood as he slid the knife back into his boot. The dog walked over and stood next to him.
He considered lighting a fire in an attempt to melt the smooth blue wall but realized that if it did not melt fast enough, he and the dog would be suffocated by the smoke. He entertained the possibility of waiting until the storm ended, hoping the sun would thaw the obstruction. That could take days, though, and they had nothing to eat but a few scraps of cooked rabbit and a handful of wild sweet potatoes, already beginning to rot.
Going to his pack, he retrieved a candle and lit it. The glow of the flame pushed the dark into the corners and alleviated the grave nature of the situation for a few moments. He let a pool of wax drip onto the floor and fixed the candle in it. With legs crossed, he sat back against the rock wall and tried to concentrate while Wood paced at the entrance, growling at the ice.
He knew he did not want to wait the storm out. There were no guarantees that the sun would free them before they starved to death. Besides, he imagined that the wait would be so boring, he might be forced to shoot himself. Thoughts of the rifle brought to mind a bizarre scheme that entailed his emptying the remaining bullets of their powder and creating a bomb with which to explode a passage to freedom. There were only a dozen bullets, though, and an image of his blowing his own hand off quickly followed. Desperation began to set in. The safe haven of the cave had become a prison that would soon become a tomb. He yelled angrily at Wood to stop pacing, and the dog lifted his leg and urinated on the ice.
“Nice work,” said Cley, and Wood began pacing again.
Although the candle generated light, it offered no warmth. Dressed only in his overalls and flannel shirt, Cley moved back toward the shaft to catch more of its subtle warmth. Now that the normal egress was cut off, he began to think more keenly of that dark aperture that led down into the hill. The hole, though narrow, was still large enough to accommodate the width of his body with a few good inches on either side. He leaned toward the tunnel, trying to peer into the darkness, which revealed nothing, and wondered if it connected to another opening in the hill or a sheer drop to the center of the earth.
His decision was made when Wood carried the book over and dropped it at his feet. The dog lay down and prepared for the long wait he now somehow understood was before them.
“No thanks,” said Cley. “I’ll take the shaft.”
He got a box of matches and another candle from the pack and put them in his pocket. Then he tore the lit candle off the floor. Before crawling forward into the darkness, he looked back and emphatically told the dog to stay put. He took a few deep breaths as if about to dive under water, then inched slowly forward, the flame flickering in the warm breeze that moved up around him.
Five yards farther in and the tunnel narrowed even more. He was forced to lie on his stomach in order to proceed. The shaft pitched downward at a forty-five-degree angle, and from what little he was able to see ahead, it seemed to continue that way for quite a distance. If it didn’t open up and present a place where he could turn around, it would be difficult wriggling up that slope backward. He decided to go on a few more yards. Moving like a snake, he continued as the walls of the tunnel closed in around him.
He stopped to rest and noticed how warm it was in the shaft—a pleasant place simply to lay his head down and sleep. Then he remembered this was exactly what the winter wind had told him the night he had been lost in the storm. Before he began to move again, he heard something up ahead—water dripping or loose pebbles tumbling. Suddenly, Wood was behind him, barking. The candle guttered in a strong gust from below, and everything went black. The dog panicked and tried to scrabble past Cley, unknowingly clawing the hunter’s legs.
“Easy, easy,” he called out to Wood, and lunged forward, trying to escape the frantic dog. In doing so, he moved himself out over an unseen ledge and the two of them fell. Cley screamed, thinking he was headed for a mile-long descent, but his cry was abruptly cut off when he hit solid rock five feet below. He landed on his side, smashing his elbow, and the wind was knocked out of him. Wood came down on top of him, and then sprung off unharmed. The hunter rolled on the hard rock, working to catch his breath.
It was pitch-black, but, even in his distress, Cley noticed that the sound Wood’s nails made against the rock echoed out, indicating they had stumbled onto another large chamber. He rolled himself to a sitting position and dug the matches out of his pocket. Sparking a match to life, he lit the candle he had been able to hold on to through the misadventure. The flame revealed what he had suspected: another cave, larger than the one above, and at the far end of it a tunnel of such size that he might enter it standing upright. Cley noticed that the warm breeze, which heated his own rock apartment above, was emanating from down the corridor that led farther into the hill. He started slowly forward, holding the candle out in front at arm’s length, while Wood followed close behind.
The tunnel took a wide turn, and as they followed its curve, a blast of warm air extinguished the candle again. Cley cursed out loud, then noticed that there was another light source somewhere in front of him. Stumbling forward, using the rock wall for support, he finally stepped out of the passage and into a small chamber bathed in a yellow-green light.
At first, he thought it must be the sunlight streaming through a hole in the ceiling. The glow came not from above, though, but from below—an underground pool that generated its own fluorescence. The cave rippled with brightness from the w
ater. The swirling glow was fantastic enough, but on closer inspection he saw that the walls had been decorated with drawings done in charcoal and a thick red paint possibly made of clay. Stylized images of men and women, animals, and strange humanoid creatures with fishlike heads filled the chamber. Here and there someone had left red handprints.
“What do you say to this?” Cley asked Wood, then looked around to see where the dog had gone. He whistled in order to locate him, and a bark answered from off to the right. Moving around a low wall of rock, he stepped into yet another small chamber. The glow from the strange waters did not extend to this new area, so he used another match and relit the candle.
The gleam of the flame was reflected in Wood’s eyes. The dog was sitting upright amidst the remains of what appeared to be six or seven human bodies. There were dried flower petals and fragments of pottery scattered among these bones. It was obvious from the small, delicate nature of one skull and rib cage that an infant lay among the dead. Another of the skeletons showed evidence of a type of deformity—a vestigial fishtail protruding off the end of a perfectly preserved spinal column.
Set off a foot or two from the others were the remains of what obviously had been a woman whose long black hair had survived the ravages of time. The luxuriant tresses stretched out more than four feet from the skull, which still retained a large portion of withered flesh. She wore a necklace of white beads made from shells, and at the end there was a small leather pouch. The walls in this chamber were decorated with spiraled images of plants and vines and blossoms.