Sess had just waded into the middle of a three-dog fight, rearranging ribs with his moccasins and hammering the big furred heads with his balled-up fist. “You want dogs with spirit,” he said, and then they were off.
That was a rush, pure exhilaration, the air so cold it burned, your lungs on fire with it, arms pumping like a marathoner's, now on the runners, now off, feeling the surge of uncontainable power that ran like an electric jolt through the spines and churning legs of the wolf-dogs and right into the sizzling core of you. Marco had never experienced anything like it. They hurtled along the trail, too energized to feel the cold, until they came to the first set and the dogs sensed it, smelled it, and pulled up short.
The bait was gone, the trap sprung, and there were lynx tracks like mortal punctuation in the snow. Sess showed him how to reset the trap, sprinkle a couple handfuls of snow over it for concealment, then nail a rotted goose wing soaked in beaver castor three feet up the trunk of a tree just behind it. And what made the best bait? Whatever stank the most. For marten, Sess used the guts and roe of the salmon he'd caught last summer-after they'd been properly fermented in a mason jar set out in the sun for a couple weeks. “No big deal,” he said. “Little tricks. Anybody could learn them.”
They stood there, looking down at the set, the dogs curled tail to nose in their traces, the faintest breeze agitating the treetops. “Even Joe Bosky?” Marco asked. “Even Pan?”
Sess didn't bother to answer-the question was too irritating, Marco saw that immediately and wished he could take it back. To this point, he and Sess had been getting on heroically, of one mind, and as Sess saw that he could keep up, that he was hard-driven and no tourist at all, he'd given him a larger share of the responsibilities, harnessing and feeding the dogs, mushing them, building up the coffee fire at lunch.
Sess was staring down at the scatter of tracks, hands at his hips, his parka so patched-over you couldn't tell its original color, and his face was set, engraved with suppressed emotion like a wood carving of Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. The wolverine lining his hood took the breeze, and Marco watched the long dark hairs move and gather there, and suddenly he was thinking of the goats and the powerlessness he'd felt in the face of that implacable presence thrust up out of the woods. And what would they do if they encountered one today-or a bear? All they had with them was a.22, because Sess wouldn't let him bring the big rifle-too late for moose, and it was just unnecessary weight. But the bears would be hibernating by now. Not the wolves, though. And what about the legendary _cauchemar__ of the north, the winter bear, the grizzly that went into hibernation too soon and awakens desperate for the meat and fat it has to have to survive? What would a.22 do against that?
It was getting dark when they came round a switchback in the trail and the dogs slowed and began to throw quick darting looks back over their shoulders. There was a set up ahead, but something wasn't right. Something was caught there, something too big to be a marten or a fisher, and it wasn't dead and frozen like the sleeve of a fur coat hanging limp in cold storage, but alive and yellow-eyed and jerking spasmodically at the straining dun leash of its right rear leg. It was a wolf, that was what Marco thought at first, but Sess let out a low curse-it wasn't a wolf, but a coyote, all but worthless for its fur because no wrapped-up pampered matron on Park Avenue or Lake Shore Drive wanted to walk into a restaurant in a thing like that.
The dogs were crazy. They smelled the kill and they let out a furious, frustrated, caterwauling racket, jerking at their leads in a tangle of ratcheting jaws and misplaced feet. Sess tied the sled off to a tree a hundred feet away and the two of them came up to where the animal lunged and snapped at them from the radius of its trapped hind leg. There was blood in the snow. The coyote had tried to gnaw through its own fur and hide and gristle and bone to free itself, but it was too late now because there were dogs there and men and one of them had a gun and the other a stick. “Shit, I'd just as soon wade in there and knock him out and free him if I could,” Sess said, “but he's got too much pep in him yet. I don't want to risk it.”
The animal was pinned there, crippled, nothing but solaceless terror in its eyes, though it jerked and growled and threatened, and where was the peace and love in this, where the pacifism and the vegetarian ideal? It was the color of a German shepherd, smaller maybe, but with the same deep dun color and the black-tipped guard hairs. Marco felt his stomach clench. Could you live in the country without this? Could you live on fish alone? On what you made in the summer on a fire-fighting crew? On welfare, unemployment, on tuna casserole and macaroni and cheese? His breath smoked in the air. Sess handed him the.22. “Go ahead,” he said. “Put him out of his misery.”
It went dark then, or it seemed to. The coyote had stopped struggling. It crouched, panting, head hung low, the fire gone from its eyes. Marco never even brought the gun to his shoulder. “I can't,” he said, and handed it back to Sess. He turned away to go see to the dogs and a moment later the hovering silence discharged itself with a single crack of the rifle.
Later, when the clouds had cleared and the moon swung up over the horizon, they found themselves in an open meadow along the river, no more than fifteen minutes from the cabin on No Name Creek that was their destination for the night. The coyote, frozen through and stiff-legged now, was strapped to the top of the sled like so much excess baggage. (“Skin it out and take it home to your girlfriend,” Sess had said. “Nail it to the wall, make a rug out of it. Call it your first kill,” he said.) The dogs were lagging now, especially the two in front of Lester and Franklin. They jerked forward, then held back, hips twitching, legs kicking out arrhythmically. Marco was riding the runners, Sess jogging alongside him. That was when they heard the plane, a thin buzz of mechanical clatter on the air that was too cold to resonate.
They kept going. There was a cabin awaiting them, a fire, another pot of moose stew-or maybe it was potage of moose or moose fried in lard with defrosted potatoes and onions and maybe dried carrots on the side-and an airplane was nothing to them. It was probably somebody out of Eagle, headed to Boynton or maybe Fairbanks or Delta. Marco let the buzz fade away in his head. He was in a dream state almost, all his senses heightened as if he'd dropped acid, alive to every shading of the path ahead, to the taste and smell of the compacted air, to the swift whispering rush of the dogs' paws in the snow, to the great and marvelous engine of his own breathing and the unconquerable beat of his rock-steady heart. This was his moment, this was his connection, and he felt it in every cell of his body. He wasn't even cold. Not in the least.
But that thin unobtrusive buzz that might have been the drone of a mosquito in a sleeper's ear on a restless summer night became something greater, louder, a looming clattering presence, until he couldn't ignore it any longer. He looked to the straining backs of the dogs, to the dark line of the trees in the distance, and then he looked to Sess just as the plane broke out of the treetops behind them, no more than two hundred feet above the ground, buzzing them. Sess never stopped running. He shouted to the dogs, urging them on. And then to Marco, everything rushing in a fluid stream of night and snow and the wind they were generating in their flight-and that was what this was, _flight__-he shouted one word, “Bosky!”
They both watched the aircraft make the far end of the meadow, bank and come back at them, and there was nothing they could do about it, no time to wonder over the hate and recalcitrance that had brought them to this, no time for reason or even speech. They ran. And Bosky came at them. There was gunfire-of that Marco was sure, the snow leaping beside him and one of the dogs crying out and stumbling in the traces and the others carrying it along in a dark tide of necessity-and then there was the sharp explosive sound of something moving at high speed contacting a stationary object, a single dead whack, and they were in the trees and the plane was gone.