The clouds had spread and nearly covered the entire sky, a taut gray blanket stretched from the northern horizon to the dip of Saddleback in the west; there was a long shrinking ribbon of blue sky behind him, but even the rounded top of the mountain was in shade now. Specks of snow flew in Wade’s face and struck his hands and melted at once. He shifted the rifle, slipped the stock under his right arm and moved on.
Below, along Route 29 and the side roads off it and outside of town, the last hunters were emerging from the woods, giving up for another year their need to shoot and kill a deer. There may have been a lucky two or three hunters who managed in these waning hours of the season to sight a straggler, a confused or inexplicably careless buck that had managed to survive the hunt almost to the very end and then hungry and restless had stepped too soon from its hiding place in the last light, only to hear the explosion and feel the gut heat and swiftly die. But this late in the season these killings were rare. Most of the hunters now were out-of-state, inexperienced or inept and often merely lazy, so had counted on luck, coincidence, amusing ironies, to get their deer. They hurried to their cars and quickly got the heaters blowing and their stiff hands and feet warmed and drove straight into town to Wickham’s or on to Toby’s Inn for a whiskey or two before driving home.
Wade walked more slowly now, casting his gaze to his right, downhill, into the dense hardwoods — oak and maple trees, thick yellow birches and alder — that had replaced the spruce and hemlock above. He had to squint to see through the billowing snow: it came at him like lace curtains tossed by the wind and clung to his hair and clothing, wrapping him in a thin white caul. Occasionally, he stumbled on a rock in the old road or a fallen tree branch or slipped on the wet new snow, then lurched on, unperturbed, as if it had not happened and the road were smooth and dry.
Several hundred yards beyond the first switchback in the road, he came to the second bend, and the ground beyond the road fell away precipitously and for a great distance: an old mud slide had torn open a long slash of scree, dumping uprooted trees and glacial till into the deep gully below. Wade stopped abruptly and stood at the top and looked out over the rock-strewn gash and piles of brush and tangled tree trunks that filled the gully, downhill and across the tops of the hardwood trees beyond to the north, where the land dropped away for miles. The wind had momentum up here, where the road was exposed to nothing but sky, and was cold and drove the snow at him almost horizontally.
A mile and a half away and well out of sight behind the long narrow ridge that leaned against the mountain like a low buttress, the barn continued to burn, and a dark cloud of ashy smoke rose from the woods and blew away to the south— while, unheard and unseen from the mountainside, sirens howled and a pair of fire trucks and a dozen volunteer firemen in their own trucks and cars raced out along Parker Mountain Road from town. Where he stood, looking north, Wade could see — through the dip between Saddleback and the mountain — all the way into the valley to town, and although he could not see the town itself, he could easily make out the spire of the Congregational church and the roof of the town hall and the break in the trees, a dark meandering line, where the river ran through.
He examined his rifle, wiped the snow off it and sighted down the barrel into the gully, lifted it and aimed it toward the town for a few seconds. Then he smiled — an almost beatific smile, golden and warm and filled with understanding, as if a beam of celestial wisdom had entered his brain. He lowered the rifle, slipped the stock under his arm and walked down along the road a few yards to a grove of low pines, where he stepped out of the wind, leaned the gun against a tree, buttoned his jacket and pulled the collar up and put his hands into his pockets, as if for the first time he had felt the cold.
On his left, a precipice dropped off to piles of brush and tangled knots of roots and old dead trees cast there by the mud slide; in front of him the overgrown road descended smoothly to a birch grove in the distance; there it switched back a third time, running toward Wade again, but way below him, below the cliff and the gully and brush, and nonetheless visible to him: so that a man walking uphill, laboring in the cold wind and snow and the vague late afternoon light, especially a man wearing scarlet or bright-orange hunting clothes, would be visible for a long time before he was able to see the other man, who stood waiting for him among the pine trees.
Wade drew his cigarettes from his shirt pocket, looked at the pack for a second and, as if reconsidering, slipped it back. He checked the safety on his rifle, brushed a few flecks of snow from the barrel and hefted it in his hands in a measured appraising way, then turned slightly and leaned his left shoulder and hip against the trunk of a pine tree. When Jack came into sight below — a red flash of cloth moving through the breaks between thigh-thick white birches — Wade lifted the rifle and sighted down the barrel at the bend in the road ahead of him, where Jack would have to turn and face him.
Jack had shot his deer, a huge buck, and he was dragging it out of the woods. He had tied the large gutted body of the animal onto a travois made from a pair of saplings lashed together and extending in a V over and beyond his shoulders. He hauled the deer slowly uphill, leaning forward in the blowing snow and sweating from the effort. His rifle — Evan Twombley’s Winchester — was slung across his chest, and as he trudged up the snow-covered lumber trail the gun slapped rhythmically against him, and he stared steadily down at the slippery rough ground in front of him, as if lost in thought. Behind him, the travois bumped along, causing the deer’s carcass to lurch back and forth; its head, overweighted by the large rack of horns, lolled back against the ground, bloody mouth agape, black tongue extruded, wide-open eyes opaque as onyx, and a thin broken trail of blood dribbled over the trampled snow behind.
When he rounded the bend in the trail, Jack looked up to see how far he still had to go, and he saw the man with the rifle and saw that he was aiming the rifle at the center of his chest; the man was no more than ten yards away and slightly uphill; Jack recognized him at once.
Epilogue
ALL THAT I HAVE DESCRIBED is supported by physical evidence: Wade’s footprints in the snow leading from the road down into the woods, ending thirty feet from where Jack’s body was found, then returning straightway to the road again; Pop’s truck parked there by the road and Jack’s truck gone but turning up three days later in a shopping mall parking lot in Toronto; and, of course, the utter disappearance of Wade himself. His very absence is evidence.
Was he headed for Alaska, where his friend the plumber Bob Grant had gone, run out of money for gas and food in Toronto, abandoned the truck and merged with the migrant population of the city? We do not know; we speculate in solitude; we do not speak of his disappearance to one another.
Maybe we want to believe that Wade died, died that same November, froze to death in his thin sport coat under newspapers on a bench in Harbour Front Park — unknown, unclaimed. But he could just as well have hitched a ride on a train or a truck headed west: Toronto is where the Canadian West begins, where it is very easy to become a nameless wanderer. Maybe tonight, years later, he huddles under a Trans-Canada Highway overpass in a suburb of Winnipeg.
Of course, he could have turned himself into another person altogether, a potter living under an assumed name in a commune in Vancouver. Or, more likely, somewhere along the line he drifted south at a rural border crossing into Minnesota or North Dakota and found a job pumping gas at an all-night truck stop, one of those men with long hair going gray, face masked by a full beard, gaze deflected whenever someone looks hard at them.