Back from the morgue now, he understood that he had waited for nothing. His daughter’s phone number and address were folded in his wallet like a invitation sent to the wrong man. There was nothing Vernon Slone wanted from him, not another fact he could feed this family’s horror.
And if Slone had asked him for an explanation? Would he have accepted the facts Core had to tell, the facts he knew of the wild? Those facts he had learned were no help here—no help to Slone and no help to himself. Awake in the night, the memory of Medora Slone’s scent strong in him, he studied starlight from the window. What Medora had done was observable in nature. He’d seen it himself among starved wolves in the north. It was a fact he knew. But a fact that could do nothing to describe this.
The stale motel room around him, and the end or start of something else now, a new direction he couldn’t gauge. Core unlatched the window, an eight-paned iron relic he had thought long extinct, ferns of frost on its glass. He swung it open into the outer black to let the cold clean this room. He knelt before the dark, his tears consumed now by a chaotic beard. He attempted his prayer but the words would not come to him, so completely had he lost them, so surely was he numbered among the damned. He stayed there at the open window until the night’s cold turned to novocaine, until he found exhaustion enough to sleep again.
Behind the hills of Keelut, Slone and Cheeon dug at the rear of a graveyard hidden in a clearing between two expanses of wood. A wolf keened from deep in the valley beyond, and from low branches of cedar, owls watched this midnight’s work. They dug sideways into the embankment of snow with shovels and pickaxes, clearing a temporary tomb. Without equipment the ground was impossible to pierce now. Their labor was illuminated by the truck’s headlights, snow swirling in the beams as if insects at a lamp in summer. The dark beyond seemed more than night, seemed a deliberate negation of day.
As boys they’d hunted here in autumn and winter, lynx and grouse, even though they’d been forbidden by their fathers to take game where the dead lay. Proper burial for the boy would have to wait till after breakup when the ground softened. For now Slone’s son belonged in this ancient earth of the village with his forebears. The boy’s grandfather, Slone’s own father, was buried just yards from here, in a hole chiseled down into the earth by these same two men. All the graves and gravestones concealed now by drifts of new fall.
They swung the pickaxes into the bank of snow. Side by side they seemed railway workers who have absorbed each other’s rhythm. They did not stop for water or smoke. Slone’s neck and shoulder wounds ached with each swing. The boy lay on the snow in his bag, in hushed witness to his father’s work.
Halfway through the thickest layer, Cheeon left the grave to Slone and went to the truck’s bed to carpenter the boy’s coffin. Three sheets of plywood, a handsaw and hammer, a tape measure and a score of tenpenny nails, pencil behind his ear, lantern perched on a toolbox giving some light. What he fashioned so quickly was just a box. But it was even and tight and all they could offer till they had more light and time, till the thaw came.
Slone stopped five feet into the bank. Out of the hole, he drank from the thermos Cheeon had taken from the cab and tossed to him.
They unzipped the boy from the bag and placed him in the box. Slone touched his face, turned away, and could not resist a second time. He then hammered on the lid, twenty-two nails. Over the coffin Cheeon grabbed for Slone’s left arm, rolled the sleeves to the elbow, and slid a pocketknife blade diagonal across his forearm. He squeezed until globs of blood pooled like wax at the head of the box, then with a naked finger inscribed a glyph that looked part wolf, part raven—a symbol taught to him by his Yup’ik mother. Slone did not ask what the marking was meant to ward off or welcome, but trusted his boy was protected beneath it.
They carried and slid the box into the cubby they’d made, then took up shovels again to conceal what lay within.
His home, the cabin he’d built, was girdled in police tape. Slone stood at the front door and looked. The boy’s sneakers by the portable heater, his tiny snow boots. Winter coat on a hook. The lightbulb above him blinked and dimmed. He stepped in, the bones of the cabin made taut by cold, by the absence of human warmth. They creaked beneath his feet. He clicked on the electric heater, pulled wood from under the tarp on the rear porch, stacked it thick and high in the hearth. Then he started kindling in the stove, blew the flame to life until he could no longer see his breath.
He stepped toward the sofa still in his coat. A whirling, a rocking on feet half numb. The black snap of the bulb above him. Then Slone was falling, asleep before he could feel the sofa catch his weight.
Awake before dawn, he poured boiling water on freeze-dried coffee. He knew that at first light the dead men behind the morgue would be found, and then he’d have scant time before police arrived here for him. Three or four hours in this weather, five tops. He stood in the root cellar to see the hole where the wolf writer had found his boy. He moved near to touch it, to smell the cold of it.
A meal of old eggs and hardened bread—he tasted nothing—and at the table he opened the folder of documents on Medora. A police report in faded ink. Photographs of his boy on the floor of the cellar. Where the Chevy Blazer might have been seen. Map of the highway between cities and east toward Yukon, a single blacktop artery with paved and unpaved roads branching off like capillaries.
On the map red dots indicating a possible direction. Many roads, he saw, were not marked, were unknown to townsfolk and cops, most no more than paths trimmed through a hide of birch and alder, unseen from the air. Both he and Medora had been on those hidden paths since childhood, since they’d first learned to ride snow machines, four-wheelers, dirt bikes. Wherever she’d fled, she’d fled, he knew, on those paths. He lit the folder at a corner, blew on the flame till it rose, then dropped it in the hearth to burn.
Aspirin for the ache in his shoulder, then more coffee. He stood at his wife’s bureau and turned over each sheet of paper, each envelope. Unwashed laundry in a wicker basket by his foot: he brought her socks and underthings to his nose and mouth and inhaled the dank scent of her. At the bottom of the basket was the boy’s T-shirt, a red race car with a bumper face that smiled—it still held his child’s smell. Slone slipped it into his jacket pocket. In the bedroom he emptied her dresser and stripped the bed. Beneath her pillow an Inuit shaman’s mask made of driftwood and pelt—the face of a wolf.
He sat on his son’s bed. He looked and looked more and did not blink. Outside, the morning moved without him.
He began filling duffel bags. Socks and gloves, thermal leggings and insulated overalls. A hunting knife, ammunition, clips, cartridges. Compound bow and quiver. Maglite and rope. Field glasses. From the bathroom: ibuprofen, antibiotics, aspirin, bandages, peroxide, razor blades, stool softener. In the hollow floor of the closet a compartment of firearms: 9mm handgun, twelve-gauge autoloader, Remington rifle that had belonged to his father. The AR-15 semiautomatic he found near the back door: what the wolf man had taken on his hunt.
Cheeon had disentombed his Bronco from snowfall, changed the battery and fluids, filled the tank, draped the engine with an electric blanket to warm it back from death. Into the back hatch Slone loaded the duffels and guns. Blankets, a pillow, two containers of gas, snow boots. Pickaxe, shovel, chain saw. A sack of nonperishables with peanut butter, crackers, chocolate. The truck turned over with the first crank of the key and Slone let the engine rev and warm, the windshield and rear defrosters droning on high. He loaded the pistol and tucked it into his belt, then the shotgun and placed it beneath the seat.