The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  “You want to know what else I’ve learned? I’ve learned that everyone has two faces. There is the outside face, the mask they wear for the world, and the inside face, the one that comes out when the blinds are down and the doors are closed.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It is. It is so. Let me give you an example. Do you know Tom Bear Claws?”

  “The Indian. The one who hates you.”

  “The very same. Did you know that he doesn’t hate me and I don’t hate him? That we’re in fact friends and business partners? Did you know that?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s because you only know the outside face.” He lifts his wine goblet and holds it up so that one of his eyes, oversize and bowled, looks through the glass at her. “Outside face, inside face.”

  “I guess.”

  She looks outside, where a cloud scuds over the sun, darkening the world. Her reflection takes form in the window. Her hair is covering most of her face, but she can see her lips and they’re red and upturned in a strange smile. She hasn’t seen this woman in a long time and barely recognizes her.

  “You look beautiful, you know.”

  She barks out a laugh.

  “What?”

  “Say that again.”

  “You look beautiful?”

  “I haven’t heard it in a long time. It’s nice to hear it.”

  In dreams, sometimes you have to run—something is chasing you—but no matter how hard you try, your body responds as if tied down by leaden weights. She felt that way a lot. She felt she was slogging through a waking dream. But nothing was chasing her. Instead she was chasing something, maybe just a feeling: buoyancy.

  She wasn’t sure what you called this. A midlife crisis. A seven-year itch that rashed out five years late. She feels bored, resentful, claustrophobic, weighed down.

  Bobby says, “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

  She smiles and tips her head—she can’t decide if he is being silly or charming. It is the sort of question a boy might have asked her, long ago, when parked on top of Pilot Butte, the stars above and the lights of the city below equally bright.

  “I don’t know.” She wants to say her son pulled from between her legs and laid between her breasts, the blood still pumping between them through a cord, but she doesn’t. Instead she picks up her glass and swirls the ice in it. “You?”

  “You.”

  “Oh, boy. You know how to lay it on thick, don’t you?”

  “Hey, I mean it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re stunning. You really are.”

  She realizes she is toying with her hair, tossing it, coiling a strand of it around a finger and letting it swing loose. “I’m married, Bobby.”

  “I don’t really believe in marriage. I’ve tried it three times, you know, so I’m kind of an expert on the matter. And in my mind, it doesn’t make sense. It’s not how we work. You want to wear the same pair of pants—or eat the same meal—your entire life? I love this ribeye, but I’d hate it if I ordered it every day.”

  “So I’m meat to you?” She isn’t sure of her tone, whether flirting or mocking.

  “We’re all meat, Karen. But I only meant it as an analogy.”

  When the check comes, she reaches for it even though she knows he will insist. Reaching for it momentarily reasserts some sense of control. And then his hand is there, on top of hers, heavy and tanned and wormed over with veins. “That’s mine,” he says.

  She concedes the check by withdrawing her hand.

  “Let’s go back to my place,” Bobby says, not asking, telling. “Get a drink?”

  She glances at her watch without even noting the time. “I don’t think so.”

  “You have something better to do?”

  “I need to go running.”

  JUSTIN

  It takes half an hour to leave the sun-lit rim of the canyon and descend the switchbacks into the cooler hollow below. The wind abates and the temperature drops. Springwater makes the ground marshy.

  Justin glances over his shoulder often, scanning the ridges, unable to shake the feeling of being watched, especially when they move through a clearing and abandon the protection afforded by the trees. He thinks about Seth returning to the camp, potentially following them, with his scope trained on their backs. It makes him feel the same way the glass eye did—itchy—as if crawled over by a prickly-legged fly.

  They approach a stretch of the South Fork where the white water roars over boulders. They hike upriver until they find a glassy tract interrupted by a humpbacked arrangement of boulders. They clamber across them, using their hands and feet, while Boo plows through the water and shakes off on the far shore and barks his encouragement.

  Justin’s father stands on a sandy mound for a time, turning in a circle, before pointing in a northeasterly direction. “I think it’s this way,” he says and Justin can only trust in him, as he has lost his bearings.

  Without any trail to follow they hike through the woods, dodging under branches, stepping over logs, banging their shins against stumps, scaring screeches out of the chipmunks that forage in the shadows. The trees and ledges mostly shelter them from the sunlight. The ground, flat at first, begins to slope upward. Horseflies buzz around their bodies and bite the blood from their skin. Justin’s father slaps a hand to his neck and curses, as if the forest were conspiring against him.

  At one point Justin turns around to see how his son is doing, to ask him if he wants a pull of water, and finds nothing except the trees and a spattering of Indian paintbrush. His mouth opens and closes as if seeking out a question, finally finding one in “Dad?”

  Twenty yards ahead his father pauses and regards Justin with raised eyebrows.

  “We lost Graham,” Justin says and in a hurry starts back the way they came, knocking into trees and calling out for his son, feeling that familiar needle jab of panic. His arms push aside branches that swing back to claw his cheeks.

  He has run only a short distance when he finds the boy sitting on a log with his elbows on his knees and his pack on the ground before him.

  Justin feels the simultaneous urge to hug him and smack him. “What the hell are you doing? Are you hurt?”

  “Kind of.”

  “What do you mean, kind of?”

  “I’m tired.”

  Justin glances back to see his father come crashing toward them with Boo bounding beside him. His belly swings when he runs and his breath comes out in a blustery pant. “What’s the problem?”

  “There’s no problem.” Justin shrugs off his pack and pulls a water bottle from a mesh side pocket and tosses it to Graham. He catches it and it sloshes in his hands when he uncaps it and takes a long drink. “Graham was just tying his shoe.”

  “Why didn’t he say something?”

  Over the rim of the water bottle, Graham is looking at Justin, who gives him a wink and hopes his son understands what he is doing, protecting him from the bite of his grandfather’s criticism. “He did,” Justin says. “We just didn’t hear him.”

  “Speak up next time.” His father swats at his forearm and leaves behind a black smear. “You get lost, you’ll be pissing your pants and crying for mama.”

  Boo goes to Graham and licks his knuckles. Graham offers the dog a scratch behind the ears and then caps the water and throws it back to Justin with a look of damp gratitude in his eyes.

  “Let’s go.” Justin slides the bottle back in its pocket and hauls up the bag again and snaps its chest and waist buckle into place and tightens the straps. “There’s a buck out there with your name on it.”

  Justin checks on Graham often, as they stagger up the hillside, sometimes slipping on the pine needles, pressing their hands to their knees with every step to give them that extra boost upward. The trees fall away as they come to a rocky embankment that reaches darkly upward and stretches to either side. It is colored with green and yellow lichen that crumbles into a chal
ky dust against Justin’s hand. Fissures run through the rock and brown grass grows in them. His father says, “If we follow this east, just a little ways farther, I’m almost certain we’ll find the meadow.”

  Coming from a man who seems certain about everything, almost carries a lot of dead weight. Justin doesn’t like to hear him say it, especially with Graham so tired and the sun so high and hot. He pulls off his hat and runs his forearm across his brow to wipe away the sweat.

  They move along a narrow corridor, with the forest to their left and the wall of vertical rock to their right. Loose rock crunches beneath their boots and makes every step sink and slide, as it does with snow. More than once Graham almost falls and each time Justin throws out an arm and affords him what security and balance he can. Water escapes a cloven section of the rock wall and trickles down an algae-ridden runnel that disappears into the forest; in their passing they pull handfuls of its icy water into their hair and onto their faces and feel revived.

  They work their way around the corner and the trees open up into a bear grass meadow with autumn-blooming bitterbrush and snarls of blackberry vines along its edges.

  “Thank Christ,” Justin says.

  His father crouches next to Boo and whispers something close to his ear before yelling, “Scent!” a command that sends the dog bounding into the meadow, the sun sliding over his slick black fur, making it appear almost metallic. Even from a distance Justin can hear the sniffs and snorts as Boo bends his snout to the grass. The dog runs erratically at first, zigzagging his way through the grass, and then his tail stiffens as he picks up on something that interests him. From there he paces out a wide circle that eventually loops in on itself. He then pauses and lifts his head and gives a throaty moan.

  They discover there a splash of blood already beginning to go brown around its edges. They follow its trail—a splatter on the ground, a smear along a trunk—through the woods and over a moraine and around the curve of the canyon, where it vanishes. In the permanent twilight of the forest, they spend the next few minutes circling, like one big huddle of dogs eager to find a scent. Sometimes deer will circle around and return to the place they came from, feeling safer in familiar territory. And sometimes they will circle into the wind so they can smell danger ahead of them during their flight. But more often they will run fifty yards, stop, look, and listen for what injured them, and then bed down if they observe no threat.

  Boo seems confused, sniffing eagerly in one direction and then another, growling and whining in a way that makes him sound almost human. He pauses at the base of a dead ponderosa and licks his chops and barks as if asking a high-pitched question.

  Justin’s gaze reaches upward, following the trunk twenty feet until it breaks off in a splintery mess that looks like a jagged set of incisors. Its top half lies downhill from them, thrown there years ago by a windstorm. The forest has since claimed it. Vines strangle its fifty-foot length. Yellow-orange conch fungi rise here and there from the rotted wood, their size and shape similar to the plates that would grow along a stegosaurus’s back, giving the log the look of a slain dinosaur. As do the gouged-out sections of wood that run its length. They appear damp and gray with piles of fresh splinters beneath them.

  Graham walks over to Boo. With his hand on the head of the dog, he studies the stunted height of the tree. What Justin dismissed at first glance as worm- and weather-riddled wood, he now recognizes as decorated by the graffiti of claws. Graham glances at Justin then. He has the look of an altar boy told to beware the devil. Justin can see the story from last night—the story of the Indian—racing through the caves of his mind.

  “Don’t worry,” Justin’s father says, as if reading the question before it is uttered. “It’s just a bear. That story was just a story some old geezer made up.” He has been studying the ground for tracks, but apparently the hard-packed dirt reveals nothing to him. Now he too approaches the torn-up tree and runs his fingers along the slashes that crisscross it. He swings an arm slowly, pretending his fingers into claws, and then reaches his hand to its limit and Justin sees that he would need another arm yet to reach the highest slashes. “Huh,” his father says as he breathes inward, as though speaking to himself.

  “Huh what?” Justin says. “What are you thinking?”

  “No bear that big around here.” He takes off his hat. It has smashed a sweaty ring into his hair. “Must have climbed up and left those scratch marks.”

  Leaning forward, heads down, they form a loose rank and circle the area until Justin’s father spots a smear of blood marking the way into a small space between leaning rock columns.

  This turns out to be the entrance to a slim chute of basalt that gradually widens as it crookedly draws them deeper into a side canyon. A thin stream trickles along its floor. It makes a gentle tinkling sound. A cold breath, the breath of a place deep underground, reaches up from the water as it pushes its way through the headstone-sized rocks that lie scattered everywhere, split at sharp angles and decorated with lichen, so that they hardly know where to put their feet. The blood—once visible in infrequent splatters—now becomes a red watercourse.

  They know they are close. After fifty yards, the chute opens up and dead-ends at a circular clearing the size of a chapel. The ground here is messy with the skeletons of so many animals, their bones knee-deep, crushed and scattered and bleached by the sun and picked at by crows until there is nothing to be got from them. Jawbones. Rib cages. Spines welded together by ragged strips of cartilage. Skulls with moss growing like hair along their bone plates. Teeth—big teeth—clattering loosely in jaws or lying scattered across the ground and reminding Justin of the pale, forked-bottom tubers his rototiller unearths every spring when he preps his garden for planting.

  Some of the bones are frail and brittle and paper white and snap beneath their approaching footsteps. Others are fresher, their color like the grayed flesh of the elderly.

  The buck is sprawled out among them, against the far wall. The blood trail leading to it is like a loose thread vital to its stitching. It doesn’t stir as they clatter their way through the carpet of bones; the pure stillness of death has seized it. Justin looks up and forty feet above him sees a round circle of sky, and at the top of the high basalt walls birds sit in black ranks, waiting.

  Art decorates the walls. From the floor—to as far as Justin’s hand can reach above him—every inch of stone has been chipped or painted. Here is a series of bear track petroglyphs climbing sideways along the wall. A pictograph of a fat-bodied snake rising up a stone column, its rattles like a bunch of grapes. Another shows a gang of Indians astride painted ponies, their faces chalked white and their long hair plaited and their hands gripping lances Justin imagines he can hear rattling across the wall, joined by the drumbeat of horses’ hooves and the low chant of a war song.

  Like the bones, the images seem staggered in their age, some of them faded, others so bright they might have been painted the week before. Here the paint is a richly hued red, made perhaps from chewed berries with fat as a binding agent. It depicts a scene similar to their own, a reflection in a stone mirror. Three men stand over a deer. They carry spears in their hands. They appear to be dancing, bent-legged, bow-backed. In a splotch of color Justin recognizes his father’s face, with his own in blurry red just beyond it.

  “I thought Fremont sent archaeologists through here,” Justin says.

  “The man pays well,” his father says.

  Justin continues to circle the room—the bones snapping beneath his steps, releasing a chalky dust that bothers his nose—as his mind circles back to that moment at City Hall when Tom Bear Claws barged in and spoke his mind with the reporter in tow. He must have known about this place, and if he did, he could have put a stop to the development, but he didn’t. Which meant he was in on it; the tribe was in on it. His presence at the meeting was a matter of theater, no different from a cowboys-and-Indians shootout on the screen. He wonders what Warm Springs has to gain and guesses it has something to do
with the long-delayed Cascade Locks Resort and Casino.

  He scans the walls and spots scenes similar to the one previously studied, where men chase and stab and eat animals, deer and bear and coyote. There is the occasional portrait of the sun. And the recurring illustration of waves meant to interpret the river. Then he detects a lone figure, off to his right, a hunch-backed, dark-colored figure whose large black silhouette could be a bear or could be a man and among all the redness makes everything else seem an artistic splattering of blood.

  They stand over the deer. Somewhere beneath it, and beneath the tangle of bones, the source of the stream gurgles unseen. The deer’s eyes are open and reflect the sky in their black gaze. Its mouth is open, too, and its tongue hangs out, almost comically, if not for the blood trickling from it. Boo comes over and sniffs at it and laps up some of the blood in a kind of kiss before Justin’s father gives him a nudge with his boot and the dog scurries off and busies himself with some bones.

  With his finger Justin’s father traces the path of the bullet as it entered the shoulder in a red starburst and traveled the length of the deer through bone and muscle to exit the rear ham on the opposite side. “Not a bad shot.”

  Justin looks at Graham, expecting to see his chest swollen with pride. Instead his head is bowed and his hands are folded before him. The deer is no longer something seen distantly through a scope, like some computer-generated image in a video game. The deer is right here and they can smell the brassy blood mixed up with the damp green hay smell of its fur. Weak-eyed and sunk-shouldered, Graham says, “Dad?”