I never intended to kill him. That’s the truth. I never intended to kill no one.
He sat up so fast, I dropped the knife. It clattered to the floor, and then he was up, a sudden surge of strength, he thought he was struggling for his life. He reached for the knife, he was holding it and I was holding him and both of us wearing his blood, we stood together and circled like dancers round the room, my back to the door, my back to the bed, my back to the wall as I gripped his wrist and he pulled my hair. The strength draining slowly out of him. The blood warm between us. I turned him, my back to the door again, then watched his eyes widen, surprise and fear twisted through him, he gripped my shoulders and threw me aside and only narrowly dodged the axe that sliced through the air and sunk its blade into the wall of the shed.
And all the nights interrupted by violence knitted themselves together, and my feet were his feet, my heart his heart slamming in his chest, his whole self one impulse, and when I looked away from Dad, his hands still wrapped round the handle of the axe, Jesse was already gone, already on the run again.
22
Outside, our breath made clouds that evaporated soon as they formed and the stars pierced the sky like holes made by the tip of a knife, and we stood, breathing. Watching the house. The silence between us like the silence after an avalanche.
I moved first. Went back inside the shed and scanned the floor, found the Goodwin knife under the bed where I had kicked it when I’d squeezed Jesse’s wrist enough to make him drop it. Then gathered what he would need, a sweater, his coat and hat. His boots. He’d run into the snow with no shoes on, bare chested.
What are you doing?
Dad, stuck in the doorway. Pinned there like a bug on display.
I pulled my own shirt over my head, the front of it wet with blood. Traded it for one of Jesse’s.
I didn’t mean to— Dad run a hand over his face. I thought he was hurting you.
I know, I told him.
He dropped into the chair at the table. A new day dawning inside him, a truth he’d always suspected, ludicrous as it was, something he’d always hid in his own dark corners and never let fully into the light.
None of this is your blood, he said. It wasn’t a question.
What happened? he asked.
So I told him the truth.
I managed all them years to keep the secrets my mother give me. I only ever told them to the one person I thought would understand what it was to stay hid. The one person I thought I was closest to.
I sat on the edge of Jesse’s cot and talked. Started with what was easy enough to explain, how I come to appreciate Jesse more and more, till appreciation grew into something else. Then Jesse’s secret, something him and me could share. Then Hatch, and what Jesse let me think I had done, and what I had aimed to do about it. I followed the path I had laid myself, explained to Dad how I knew what I knew and why I’d been so keen on hunting all my life. I seen how my words landed, how each one struck him like a fist, but I kept talking, there wasn’t no hiding anymore. Hatch hadn’t never showed up, I told Dad, I had chased everyone away from the house for no reason.
Including Helen, he said.
She was there, in his head. He carried her with him the way he carried Mom. And I thought of Mom, with all her secrets, things she’d took with her when she went walking along the highway all them years ago. She never told me in plain words to keep what I done from Dad. But she did teach me that some secrets you keep because you don’t want to hurt the people you love. He suspected, already. Another thought he wouldn’t let himself fully acknowledge. He needed me to say it plain.
So I left that last wall between us. It wouldn’t never come down.
Including Helen, I told him.
But tonight, he said. What happened?
It’s between me and Jesse, I said.
That’s not good enough, he told me but didn’t press on when I stayed silent. He slumped in the chair, his head in his hands, not looking at me. I saw him, he finally said.
I blinked. Jesse?
He shook his head. Mr. Hatch. Down in Anchorage. The ceremonial start. Spotted him in the crowd. I caught up with him before my turn in the chute. Asked after him. Said after he got patched up, he traveled around a spell, wanted to stick around long enough to see the race. Told me he’d be on a plane the next day. Dad put his face in his hands, his words was muffled. He shook my hand. Said he appreciated the help I gave him.
Funny, how after days of feeling everything, I couldn’t feel nothing right then. My whole self numb. I closed my eyes, and watched Helen fall to the ground. Watched her eyes fill with snow.
I have to go, I said, then cleared my throat. Jesse’s already been gone too long. He’ll freeze out there if I don’t go after him.
Dad stood. I’ll do it, he said. He didn’t understand that I hadn’t aimed to end things with Jesse, only to get at the truth in him.
No, I told him. It’s my mess. I’m better at tracking, too. It’ll be faster if I go. Anyway, somebody’s got to be here in case Scott wakes up.
I could see he was sorting through all his arguments for why I ought to be the one to stay behind.
Dad, I said before he could start in. Please.
He still wanted to argue. He took in the shed, the blood staining the floor. Me. Finally, he heaved a big sigh, and I took that as my answer.
Inside the house, I drug Jesse’s pack out of the closet and gathered what I thought I’d need. I tucked my hair up into my wool hat, put on an extra pair of socks. Then shouldered the bag and headed down the hall. Stopped at Scott’s room. Light from the hallway spilling across the foot of his bed. The older he got, the harder he seemed to sleep. He was even snoring lightly when I pushed his door open. I didn’t have to worry about waking him as I crossed the room, bent over him, and kissed his head.
Outside, Dad knelt next to my lead dog, he’d put Stella up front and I was glad because she could be trusted not to get distracted by sounds or movement in the trees along the trail, and the other dogs would behave, too, on account of her focus.
I buckled the waist belt of my pack and stepped on the runners. Dad come round and stood next to me. For a long minute, neither of us said nothing.
I didn’t know, Dad said.
Know what?
He swallowed. That he wasn’t a boy.
He was, though, I said. If you knew him, you knew that.
He—he could’ve told me. It wouldn’t have changed nothing between us.
My throat tight. He thought he had to hide, I said.
I never meant to make him feel that way, Dad told me.
The dogs chuffed, eager to run. No other sound between us.
I should get going, I said.
He moved away, circled the sled, rechecked the dogs’ harnesses, even give my pack a little tug.
Dad.
Okay, he said. You be careful. Especially on that lake. It’s good and froze over, but that part near the waterfall, the ice is thin there.
My eyes stung and I blinked away the tears that wanted to come. Just another run down the trail, I said. Right?
He didn’t step away or pull the snow hook for me. He was so close, I could of reached out and hugged him. He knew more than he let himself admit to, even then he understood, I think.
Right, he said and stepped aside.
I knew he would stand in that spot till I hit the trailhead, till he couldn’t see me no more, and still he’d have one hand raised.
It’ll be a fast run, I said and he nodded. I’ll be back long before morning.
That was the last lie I ever told him.
Only a sliver of moon to light up the snow, and the branches overhead clasped hands and the shadows drew round us, and only my headlamp to light the way, we glided as if through a tunnel, the darkness closing behind us as we went. The farther away we got, the quieter. I could feel Dad fade from me, the last person whose mind I would really know.
Jesse’s footprints led down the trail, then van
ished into the brush. There was a chance he would only stay away the night. He was just as resourceful as Tom Hatch, he could rub two sticks together for a fire or dig himself a hole to curl up in, keep warm till morning. It wasn’t crazy to imagine him returning to the house by daybreak.
But I knew him. He was a runner.
When we come to the lake, I took the trail round the frozen surface, though it slowed us down. I couldn’t bear to ride over the frozen water again. There was a cold front coming in, according to what the radio had said that morning, it would bring a few days of hard freeze and then they was predicting precipitation, just a few inches but enough to blanket the woods in a layer of snow. Plenty more snowfalls before May, before breakup come and everything started to melt. The ice on the lake would shrink day by day till all that was left was small floes that finally vanished, and then one day, when the sun was warm overhead and the water almost bearable enough to swim in, Helen would find the surface. Dad’s life would change again, then. More loss, another ending. I wished I could tell him I was sorry.
I took the sled as far as Fox Creek, where Dad and I had camped together only hours ago. Took all five dogs off the gangline, then undone their harnesses, too. It wasn’t likely they’d get hung up on a felled tree or in some bushes, but I didn’t want to take the chance. I stowed the harnesses in the basket, then covered the sled with some branches to protect it from the coming snow.
I knelt in front of the dogs and rubbed and petted and stroked each one in turn. Stella licked my face. When she wasn’t focused on the trail she was a real lover, and awfully loyal. When I finally stood up and said, Go on, and shooed them away with a wave, Stella was the only one who paused, waiting for me to follow.
Go on, now, I told her.
Watched her run after the other dogs. It didn’t take long for them to be swallowed up by the night.
They would find their way back easy, show up by late morning or maybe that afternoon. Dad would look up from the kitchen sink and see them coming, or else maybe he’d sleep in, exhausted from the night before. Either way, he’d find his dogs back, five of them loose and running round the yard, tired from their journey and ready for something to eat. I hoped he would feed them before he come looking for me. Scott would help with the feeding, maybe, finish it while Dad prepped another sled and got a fresh team on the line then come blazing down the trail. He’d find my sled that first day, of course. I hoped he would understand then. When he didn’t find me right away, he would keep looking, I knew. Searching, the way he done before, shouting my name only to have the sound of it absorbed by the new snow and the acres of forest and the miles between us.
When Helen’s body was found, someone would come asking about her. Maybe the VSO would remember how reluctantly I had answered his questions, and that thought would rekindle the spark of suspicion he’d felt when he laid eyes on me. Maybe he would come back, ask after me, and find I had gone missing.
Or maybe no one would come. Once the VSO heard I’d vanished, maybe he would understand my dad had been through enough, he oughtn’t be bothered with a mystery that didn’t have no good answers. It was possible he would even land on a version of the truth and decide it was me who’d killed Helen, but by then it would be too late. Either way, I hoped he would leave my dad and brother alone. That he would learn to live without ever knowing the truth. If I could talk to the VSO one last time, that’s what I would tell him: that more often than not, knowing ain’t worth it.
The first year, I grew wiry and tough, whatever extra meat I had on my bones I shed. I ate well enough, drunk my fill, but I was relying only on what I could forage and hunt and trap, and sometimes the woods are abundant, and sometimes they are not.
My hair grew long and tangled till I hacked it off with my knife, and then it seemed to stop growing altogether. My nails like claws till they broke off. My skin toughened. My shoes fell apart, so I tied the bottoms to my feet with twine, then finally stopped bothering and went barefoot all that winter and the next, and after a time I couldn’t even recall what it felt like to have a sole between the ground and my foot.
The wild was quiet. No chatter from other people’s lives inside my head. Every great once in a while, I would discover a memory inside me that wasn’t my own, glance up, and see a hiker on the trail, a hunter hiding himself in the brush. I would climb a tree till the hiker passed, reroute myself round the hunter, feeling for a time her wonder at this wilderness, his patience and focus, till the distance I put between myself and other people diminished their strange lives.
I built shelters and melted snow and climbed trees to gain my bearings. I holed up in caves during bad weather, slept like a hibernating bear. From time to time, I was lucky and stumbled upon a park service cabin. In the winter these places are often unoccupied. I opened the door and dropped my pack and looked round, bewildered by the sight of bunks and tables and benches where people like I used to be sat down to meals they’d eat with forks, out of bowls or off of plates. Once I found a pack of playing cards someone left behind, and I spread them out and spent the better part of a night by the fire just staring at the faces on the cards. Another time it was a glossy magazine that someone left. I turned the pages for hours, taking in the pictures and paragraphs, till finally I tried a sentence. Read aloud words that felt strange on my tongue. Startled myself with the scratchy, unused sound of my own voice.
At the end of the Kleinhaus book, he goes back home. Like a lot of books you read, that’s how it ends, with someone coming back to where he started from, but changed. I suppose there’s no point in reading a story where the main character don’t end up different than how they started.
But just before breakup, when the snow softens and the whole world seems made of water, on the last real day of winter, Kleinhaus scales a tree. His hands and feet scrambling up the branches as a moose charges the place he was standing just a few seconds before. The moose is skinny, he can see its ribs, and its hide hangs off its bones like a too big coat. All the trees nearby stripped of their bark, every plant chewed to nubs. Food is scarce. The moose is surly, in no mood to be startled, which is why it lowers its head and charges him.
So Kleinhaus is up in his tree with an angry moose circling the trunk, and he perches on a branch to wait it out. After a time, he looks up from the moose and out at the land around him. It goes on and on, mountains and rivers and valleys, only a handful of them he’s explored. And he thinks, you could roam that land your whole life and never know it the same way this moose knows it. Or the way the bear that nearly killed him early the previous fall knows it. There’s a wall between him and the land, and there always will be, because he’s a man and not a bear or a moose, or any other kind of animal that lives its whole life in the wild, getting its food from the ground and finding shelter in the trees and drinking from streams and rivers. And right then, he thinks he’ll never go back home. He’ll stay beyond winter, into the spring, into the next year, and the one after that, he’ll learn the land well enough to survive, and if he don’t, he’ll die out there and decompose and then he’ll finally be part of that land.
But of course eventually the moose loses interest in chewing the bark off the trunk of Kleinhaus’s tree and wanders away. Eventually Kleinhaus takes his gaze away from the miles of unknowable land and lowers himself from his branch. He pushes his way through brush and the vanishing snow to find the trail that will lead him back home, and he follows it.
I think of them as they must be now. Scott away at college, the way Dad described. Home for the holidays and summers, his camera slung round his neck. Back to help with the dogs. There’s fewer of them now, Dad give up racing, he only runs them now when he finds himself missing the back of a sled. Spends his days working in the yard, splitting wood. Alone with his thoughts, no sound but the sighs and chuffs of the few dogs left, dozing in their houses, longing after the trail.
At the end of the day, he sits down to a meal made for him by someone new. Someone he’s met, the way he met He
len, someone who laughs easily, who is open and kind and tough and honest. At night, when he wakes up from a dream he barely remembers, he turns over in his bed to find her there, and draws closer to the warmth of her, and goes back to sleep.
Or he steps outside, wanting the frozen night air on his face. He stands in the yard, the dogs stirring, wondering if there will be food. A chill runs down his spine, a shadow moves at the corner of his vision. He scans the trees at the back of his property, the empty trailhead. I freeze, make myself as still as the windless night. A face surfaces in his thoughts. But there’s nothing there. He goes back inside the house. The shadow in the trees waits a moment more. Then I step onto the trail, and begin to run.
Acknowledgments
The cool thing about publishing a book for the first time is that after years spent alone in a room, staring at a glowing screen, talking to yourself or your cats (who are fairly reticent with both criticism and advice), suddenly you have a whole army of people working to make your book the best possible version of itself. The first of those people is my agent, Michelle Brower: Thank you for your wisdom and notes and brainstorming sessions and—most of all—your belief in this book. Thank you, too, to the rest of the folks at Aevitas with whom I worked.
Thank you to my editor, Kate Nintzel, who was a dream to work with. And thank you to the rest of the team at William Morrow and HarperCollins.
I’m eternally grateful to the folks who read early versions of this novel and who gave me insightful advice and kept me from making dumb mistakes. Thank you to Ian Gill, Sara Huff, John Irving, Glenn Lester, Jeff Martin, Craig Nova, and Brooke Taylor. I was able to start this book thanks to the time and space I was afforded during my years working with John and his wife, Janet Turnbull Irving: Thanks to both of you for that experience (and to Craig, who suggested I apply for the job because—in his words—“You know how to drive in the snow”).
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