Wilderness

by Lance Weller

  Finally, the old man took a deep breath and reached for his rifle. He held it in his hand. It was old, the metal silvered by the wear of twenty years, its stock held together by baling wire. The barrel was speckled with snow, for the snow had begun to fall again. Abel let his fingers trail along it, feeling tiny grooves and nicks, the crack in the action from all the times he’d dropped it upon the beach stones. He stroked the palmsmoothed stock and looked at the places the wire had bled rust into the wood. He’d carried a weapon for a long time, his whole life it seemed. A life that had the appearance of beginning at Manassas. As though wife and child and home, all the fine times that had come before, had been a dream or something like a dream. But he could remember the cradle and the buttercups, warm sweet rolls and rain falling into the lake and the sound of his wife’s skirts whispering across the floorboards, breathless with misery.

  The old man looked up. Such remembering was hard on him. The dog lay in the snow a few feet away. Snow fell around them and the old man smelled woodsmoke on the air. “You stay out of it now,” he told the dog, who raised an eyebrow without lifting its head from its paws.

  Abel spat to the side, looked at the color of it upon the snow, and looked away again. He levered the rifle and turned it about, but his left hand was too clumsy and twisted up to hold it to the angle he wanted and his right arm was not long enough to reach the trigger. Abel swore and stood and stamped his feet in the snow and threw down his hat. When he stood, the dog stood with him, and he told it to sit down and shut up.

  He spent a few moments just standing quiet in the snow with the dog, then scowled and looked about and sniffed the air. Woodsmoke. He watched the sky uphill where it was darkening with evening and saw a faint taper of smoke rising over the trees. Cursing softly, he stood, slung the rifle over his shoulder, and retrieved his walking stick. The dog stood, its tongue hanging out the side of its mouth while its breath steamed. “You just shut up,” said Abel he started up the slope again.

  He heard it bugle, loud and shrill—a lonesome haunt ghosting through the wood, the echo of its call hung in the quiet snowfall. Abel came out onto a broad, flat plain and listened to the elk. The plain stretched before him, bordered by snow-salted trees sparkling under the risen moon. Sloping talus fields reared northward. Glittering slabs of mountain rock stood veined darkly with ice. The moon shined out from a gap in the clouds to light the world blue and silver. He thought he saw the elk across the plain—a shadow, moving slowly into the trees—and he listened until the echo of its call had finally faded and the sound of the wind whispering atop the snow came back to the fill the void so left.

  Abel stared at the snow as he walked, and the dog came along slowly behind him. It was as he was telling it what a good dog it was that he caught the scent of woodsmoke again. Squinting ahead through the falling snow, he found a light burning weakly in the window of a tiny shack near where the elk had crossed into the forest.

  Abel stood staring at the teardrop flame fluttering behind thin windowglass. For all his age, his eyes were good, and he saw the single window was warped and scalloped with ice and he saw a small pile of split wood stacked against one wall and a tin stovepipe pushing out at an angle from the steeply pitched roof. A small mound of dark snow, purple with shadow, lay near the front door, and another mound lay near the trees beyond.

  Abel sniffed and spat. He tasted sick in his mouth and looked down at the dog. “I know it,” Abel said. “I reckon I’m hungrier’n you anyway, since I’ve been carryin’ your ass. Meaner too. By a long ways.” He nodded to the shack. “We’ll go on over there and see if it’s them Chinese.”

  Abel bid the dog stay, then set out. The stars came out in their thousands around the risen moon. Brightly cold and glittering like points of ice. Abel sighed when he heard the dog stagger up and limp along behind him. The sound of them walking through the virgin snow swept past on the wind and faded against the trees where they stood dark and quiet.

  Abel heard nothing from the shack as he approached. He crouched fifty feet from the door and clucked his tongue and the dog lay down in the snow while he bent his head to listen. But for the wind blowing and chaffing the snow, there was no sound. And then came a thick, clotted cough. The heavy sound of bootsteps on the flooring within. The coughing went on hot and rattling and small and petulant. Abel heard a man’s voice rise up and the sudden, sharp, fleshy smack of skin on skin. And then the man’s voice again, lower now and speaking soothingly as one might to an injured animal—reassuring and grave and decided and sad.

  Abel stood, and behind him the dog also stood. When he moved the dog moved and together they approached the cabin then stopped when the door opened. The Haida stood slumped in the doorframe, glaring out at the night.

  He staggered through the cold toward the woodpile but stopped when he heard the dog’s low growl and spun back, slipping and falling. He fell across the threshold with his trousers caked with white and he swore mightily. The dog kept growling and the Haida fumbled about and Abel heard soft weeping from within the cabin, louder now with the door open, followed by the same weak, pitiful coughing. The Haida finally managed to stand and raise the rifle he’d been groping about for. He stood in the door, backlit by the sputtering candleflame, and pointed the gun out at the dark.

  “Here now!” shouted Abel to the dog. The dog paced back through the snow and settled near Abel’s leg, growling still. The Haida’s gun barrel dipped and came back up.

  “That you, old soldier?” called the Haida.

  “It is,” said Abel, trying to imagine, to see beforehand, the sequence of actions it would take to shoot and kill the Indian where he stood. “You go lightly now,” said Abel. “Just passin’ by and saw your light.”

  “Well, you just step on into this light so I can see you, or by God, I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

  Abel went forward with his hands open and the Haida put the gun on him as he entered the weak light spilling slantwise from the door. “Ease up now,” said Abel. “Ease up.”

  The Haida eyes were dark and recessed and they were bright with pain. His wide forehead was raked open and there was a filthy rag, spotted darkly, wound around his throat. The hands that held the gun were nicked and deeply cut, as were his arms. The Indian wore an old pair of trousers that did not fit him well and that had about them that shiny luminescence that comes to fabric only after days and weeks of constant wear. His shirt was linen-thin and shapeless, splitting at the shoulders, while his ragged sleeves fluttered and snapped in the dark wind. He looked Abel up and down, then licked his dry lips. “Where’s your bag, old soldier? You got food?”

  Abel pursed his lips and shook his head. “Not a lick,” he said. His eyes darted about, trying to see into the cabin. “Where’s your partner?” he asked.

  The Indian covered his long face with a hand and laughed into his palm. “He stopped to have him a visit with that little mud shark down yonder. I don’t claim to know how it all worked out, but I heard gunshots and he ain’t caught up with me yet so I reckon I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

  Abel breathed. His breath disappeared on the wind and he moved the twisted fingers of his left hand to try and flex the cold from them. The wind scraped against the snow, skittering loose crystals across the frozen crust. “You son of a bitch,” he finally said, stepping forward.

  The Haida’s gun came up to press against Abel’s chest, and even with his coat protecting him he could feel its cold mouth upon him. The dog stood and began barking viciously. Its front legs were braced, its head thrust forward, and its hackles stood along its back. It closed in on the Haida with short little steps. “You call it off,” snarled the Indian. “You call it off or I’ll shoot you so you ain’t killed, then make you watch me kill it.”

  Abel shouted down the dog as the Haida sniffed and winced as though with some great inner pain. “I hate a dog,” he said. “Always have. Even after everything. All that other … that was Willis’s idea.”

  “I don’t ca
re.”

  The Haida blinked and sniffed again and looked at Abel. “That dog’s sick,” he said. “You can see it. Dog like that ain’t no good to nobody. What you ought to do is shoot him.”

  “He’s all right.”

  “What are you doing up here, old man?”

  “Tracking an elk come this way.”

  “Shit. Elk don’t come upmountain in winter. ’Less they’re fixin’ on dying. Shit, wolves’ve probably got it by now anyhow.” The Haida winced and looked about, at the shadowy, snow-feathered slopes and the darker downward plunge of the slope across the plain. “There’s a wolf about, old man,” he said quietly, looking around. “The one we lost. Out there. Right now.”

  Abel shrugged. “You didn’t hear that elk hollering? He come by not a hundred feet from your door.”

  “I been sleeping. Tryin’ to sleep.” The Haida ran a hand down his long face and looked up again to the close, dark mountains. “Elk, hey?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you been trackin’ him. Just up and decided that was what you was goin’ to do.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You figure you can bring him down with that old thing?”

  Abel looked at the rifle he’d dropped and shrugged.

  The coughing inside the shack began again. The Haida scowled and said, “You stay right there,” then went into the shack and shut the door. He came back a moment later with a length of rope. Abel wondered why he had not used the opportunity of the closed door to ready his rifle but had no answer for himself.

  The Haida handed him the rope. “You tie that thing up and come inside. I want to show you something.” He leaned and spat. “And you leave the goddamn gun.”

  Abel took up the rope and made a slipknot to snug about the dog’s neck. It growled quietly. “I know it,” Abel told it. There was an old hitching post near the door, and he bent to tie the rope off.

  “You make it short enough it don’t dig up the Chinaman,” said the Haida from the door. He jerked his chin to the dark mound frozen to the floor of the snow nearby.

  Abel looked at him, and the Indian shrugged. “He wasn’t as neighborly as he could’ve been when I come up yesterday.” The Haida coughed wetly into his palm and grimaced.

  The Haida went into the cabin. Abel could see the man through the ice on the thin window as he moved, blurred and twisted as a funhouse mirror. Swearing softly to himself, Abel propped his gun against the wall, took a breath, and stepped inside.

  The Indian sat on the edge of a filthy, broken-down bed against the far wall near the stove. He held his skinning knife to the throat of a child who lay limply across his lap, her face gray with cold and drawn with hunger. On the bed behind them lay a dead woman, the girl’s mother perhaps, half covered with a thin, stained blanket. Abel closed his eyes and took a breath, receiving on his flesh like a woman’s soft touch the faint warmth of the fire rattling in the stove. He’d been cold for long enough that the sudden, thin heat set his fingers itching. Abel cleared his throat and looked at the Haida. “Don’t you do it,” he said.

  The Haida pursed his lips. The girl’s eyes were closed, but Abel could tell her life by the rise and fall of her chest. The Indian rested the blade against her bare throat and looked at Abel. “They was in quite a state when I come crost ’em,” he said. “Lord knows how long they been up here. Stuck. Just plumb stuck.” He nodded toward one wall to indicate the snow-bound plain outside. “Horse wandered off, wagon busted to shit, and them already out of food.” He sniffed and scowled.

  “What did you do to them?”

  The Haida shrugged. “Not much, really,” he said. “The man, well, he pulled on me so I was obliged to defend myself.” He flashed a smile that held within its margins not a trace of mirth. “And this one here was sickly and looked about half starved anyway,” he said, nodding to the thin gray corpse of the woman behind him. “She passed this morning. So that just leaves the little one.” He dandled the girl on his knee, and she moaned softly. “And I don’t believe she’s long for this world either.” He looked at Abel and smiled. With a quick move of his hand, he drew a thin, thin line along the girl’s cheek with the point of the blade. “But she’s sweet as a peach, ain’t she? Like a china doll.” He grinned again and chuckled. “China doll,” he said. “That’s funny.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  The Haida shrugged.

  The girl was perhaps seven years old and impossibly thin. Even through the stained folds of her tattered dress, he could see the crude angles of her limbs, the sharp points of her elbows and knees. Perhaps the first dark blush of frostbite at her fingers, toes, and ear-lobes. And he started when she opened her eyes, for they were milky as though thickening with cold.

  Abel blinked and swallowed painfully. “She got a name?” he finally asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” said the Haida. “This one”—he nudged the girl’s dead mother, and the corpse trembled stiffly in the bed while the girl moaned and squeezed shut her eyes—“this one called her all kinds of things, but I couldn’t make much sense of it.” He blinked as though concentrating. “Shit, it don’t matter none anyway.”

  Abel ignored him and slowly, painfully, crouched until he was at the girl’s eye level. “Hey there?” he called softly across the room, and the girl opened her eyes and blinked. Abel held her eyes and said, “Don’t you worry, honey. We’ll figure something out.”

  Abel stood panting, his eyes heavy and warm in their sockets. The close warmth of the shack set his throat to itching, and he steeled himself, but no cough came.

  “What are you goin’ to do?” he asked the Haida.

  The Indian pursed his lips, shifted a little, and hissed with the pain of it. Abel watched the way he held himself, the way he moved and breathed and blinked and sweated. Abel lifted his chin and said, “That Chinaman put a little metal into you.”

  The Haida scowled. “Little fucker,” he said. “Shit. I told you he wasn’t none too friendly when I came up.”

  “Gut?” asked Abel.

  The Haida’s lips drew back from his teeth.

  Abel snorted. “You’re a dead man.”

  The Haida stared reflectively into the middle distance. “Maybe so, maybe so,” he said, nodding. “But I’ll tell you what, this little peach is goin’ with me.” He settled the flat of his blade back against the girl’s throat and she whimpered softly and closed her eyes.

  Abel put his hand up, fingers spread. “Why?” he asked.

  The Haida shrugged. “’Cause I can,” he said.

  “Goddamn it!” shouted Abel. He took off his hat and threw it on the floor, then picked it up again, holding it awkwardly between his hands. “All right,” he said, taking a breath. “All right. Suppose … Suppose I get you down off this mountain. Get you back down to … that little farm. I’d do that.”

  The Haida’s eyes narrowed. “Would you?”

  Abel tucked his upper lip inside his lower and nodded. “You let me get that girl down off this hill, and I would. If your partner ain’t shown up yet, there’s no one else coming.”

  “I’m not afraid of dyin’, old man. You?”

  Abel snorted. “You got no idea, son.”

  The Haida looked him in the eye. “You’re a liar,” he said, and wrapped one fist into the girl’s hair. Abel shouted, and outside the dog began to bark. The Haida grinned and lifted his chin. “You go on and get that elk you was hunting,” he said. “Bring me back a little meat, and we’ll talk about what all else you’ll do for me.”

  “You’re crazier’n a loon if you think I’m goin’ to leave her alone here with you.”

  The Haida shrugged. The girl’s throat was stretched across his knee and he tapped the point of the blade against the hollow above her breastbone. “I’ve seen folk die all kinds of ways,” he said. “But I ain’t yet seen nobody just bleed themselves to death. That’d be something new to see.” He glanced around the cabin and shrugged again. “I burned the chairs, bu
t you go on ahead and settle down on a piece of floor. We can watch her together.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “What are you goin’ to do, old soldier?”

  Abel scowled, clenching and unclenching his good hand. His crippled arm ached to the bone, and he was tired. His chest rattled, and after a few moments he ducked his head to catch the girl’s eye. She blinked her hurt, gelid eyes, and her dry lips cracked open. “You wait here for me, honey,” Abel told her. “You wait here, I’m coming back.” He straightened and looked at the Haida. “You hear that?” he asked, turning to the door and going out again, into the night and the cold.

  The dog struggled up to meet him, and Abel nodded and spoke to it and spent a few minutes going from the woodpile to the front door, making a small pyramid of firewood there that would be easy for the Haida to reach. The Indian’s image trembled through the windowglass. Then Abel freed the dog and together they started slowly off across the plain with the wind blowing all around them, making the yet-unfrozen snow hiss like something deadly.

  Abel heard the shack door creak open as he walked into the trees where the mountain began in earnest. He heard the Haida’s voice, mixed in with the sound of the wind and the sound of the new snow that fell sizzling to the frozen crust. It was a small thing in all the world, that sound, and Abel paid it no mind.

  He slept that night propped against a massive blowdown he judged as old before the coming of Columbus. He slept with the dog in his lap and the thin, torn blanket wrapped tightly about both of them. His hands shook, nor he could not stop them. His breath came clattering from his lips as though his very lungs were ashiver. The dog lay without moving, only opening its eyes now and again to gaze upon Abel Truman’s face where his tears left thin trails of ice curling down his cheeks to pearl in his whiskers.

  The dawn they woke to was still dark. White clouds hovered silently, and the mountains stood black and close. Neither man nor dog cast a shadow. As though their shadows abandoned them in the night, they walked shadowless and pale as lost spirits on the wander.