This undermanned platoon of twenty-two was from the start an errant brotherhood counting corpses and days. Half were drug and battery felons who’d been given waivers to enlist. They daily mocked those frayed others, those men in the news they heard so much about, men soothed by doctors in the States. Men who returned home cracked, only part of what they were before coming here. Ten months in now and Slone had not come close to the sunder, to the nightmares and the morning shakes. And he understood that he never would. That the eclipse in him had been there since his start. His was the nightly sleep of the exhausted sane.
His warped brethren could smell in Slone all he was capable of—a calmness masking an urge for carnage—and they feared him in a way they’d feared few before. His mere presence among these men seemed to turn them more lunatic, seemed to increase their will to ruin.
On the ground by his boot, partially hidden in rocks, lay a metallic object. A harmonica, nicked and dented. Slone blew bits of gravel from the air chambers and brought it to his lips. At the mounted .50-caliber gun behind the spotlight the gunner unloaded on the line of seized men, red-stained the wall behind them as they jolted from the impact, as women shrieked on soiled knees. Blood enough to course through dirt, holes in them to fit a fist.
Slone wanted to breathe a song into the harmonica but it made a clogged, rasping sound. He dropped it back into the yellow dirt and tried to sleep upright through the wail.
In the frozen night Slone woke to the hue of flame in the window, alight at the other end of the mining camp, something burning along the bluff. He dressed in the dark and descended the stairs by feel—the chatty woman nowhere seen or heard—and outside through the deepfreeze he made his way along the center road, huts and cabins now in arrant darkness. Some homes were no more than caves hewed into the base of the bluff, one with an oven door for a window, others with oval entrances wrapped in moose hide.
Slone saw the hunter, fifty or fifty-five years old, hardened by decades of walking and mining—he could see it in his stance. The hunter stood in the wide glow of the blaze: pallets, crates, boxes, pieces of tree. Donned wholly in gray wolf pelt, with white man’s skin and untrimmed hair still dark despite his age, he seemed a make-believe shaman. The wolf’s tail was still attached to his guise, its fanged head pulled low over his own for a hood.
When he saw Slone approach he turned to grin and welcome him to the heat. His teeth looked like stream-bottom pebbles beneath the still gallant fangs of the wolf he’d killed.
“I thought this would get your attention. Maud said we had a young traveler tonight. I knew it was you.”
“You’re not an Indian.”
“Not officially.”
“You’re not a priest.”
“In my own way I am, same as you and everyone.”
“I’m no priest.”
“Have it your way, then.”
Long laminated scars embossed his forehead and face—the admonition of a grizzly. The beast had taken a piece of his nose and upper lip as token.
“Why did she come to you?”
“Step closer here. It won’t hurt you, this fire. I like a big fire all after freeze-up. As reminder, you know. Breakup is still a long way off.”
Fixed to a vertical spit in the blaze was a haunch of lynx or wolf he rotated with a ski pole. Above, the firmament was masked by its floor of cloud. A new storm was coming by daylight. This fire augmented with dark the surrounding night. The lard of the haunch cracked in the flame and Slone’s airy gut yawned. The wind raised the bonfire and sent sparks in flight like insects aglow.
“I knew you’d be starved, traveling up from Keelut. Maud said you didn’t eat. We’re out of bread here, you know. Hank ain’t been in with the plane. But we got meat to go ’round. For now.” He paused to turn the spit. “Prey is real scarce this winter. Nothing I’ve seen before. You hungry?”
Slone looked at the meat in the blaze but said nothing.
“I got some potatoes too. I cooked them for us. You’re welcome to one.”
The roasting fatty scent of meat nearly stumbled Slone with hunger. With a hay pick the hunter unloaded the haunch onto a grease-stained square of plywood.
“Come eat,” he said.
His cave had been burrowed into the rock bluff by machine. It stayed lit with kerosene lamps that cast demonic shapes about the concave space, the air dense with the smell of wood smoke. His crude kiln was a steel drum torched open on one side, twelve feet of stovepipe snaking over to the entrance—Slone had to duck to enter—and fastened with wire and galvanized concrete nails hammered into the rock. It threw a dry sauna heat that engulfed the cave.
The hunter dwelled among the heaped and hanging bones of every beast born here, brown and black hides stacked like carpets at a market. A row of National Geographic and Playboy magazines, decades old, sat piled by a mattress gnawed on by rodents. A Ken doll in a string noose, hanging from a hook. On a wall the chasmal jaws of a bear trap. Wolf skulls by the score. Dozens of wolfish masks made of driftwood and dyed in ochre—they scowled from the wall and rounded vault. The masks were identical to what he’d found beneath Medora’s pillow.
The hunter stripped from his costume to socks and briefs, his bare body muscled and scarred. He had the torso and limbs of a swimmer, though his face proclaimed every day of five decades. Slone sweated fast in the rolling heat of the fire and removed his parka. He sat opposite the hunter, cross-legged on a grizzly skin, eating burned potato and lynx meat from an earthen plate.
There beside the bed of pelts were Medora’s boots, leather and fur, size eight, ordered from a catalog before freeze-up last season. The hunter saw Slone looking at the boots.
“I fixed her a new pair, mukluks with moose and wolf, water-proof lining, knee-high, real good ones. Those ones there are no good where she’s going.”
Slone chewed and nodded. The hunter’s two bolt-action rifles and a single-barrel shotgun poked out from a crate, hunting knives piled on a tree-stump table.
“She knows you’re coming for her. She told me that. She told me too what she did. That’s why she came to me, to answer your question. Counsel, you can call it. She had one of my masks. I don’t know how. I give them away to whoever comes through here and they seem to find who needs them. One way or another. You’re welcome to one. It releases the wolf in you, boy. The wolf we all have in us.”
They ate more in silence.
“How are you from this region, I wonder, with all that yellow hair? You look like a Nordic to me. The woman too. She has your same hair, but a whiter yellow, and she has your face too, I’d say. Ever notice how people who live together for a long while start to resemble each other? That’s why I live alone. I don’t want to look like nobody but me.”
“You let her go from here.”
“It’s not my business what she did. There’s no decree in the country. It don’t reach here. I help who comes asking me. What brings them here and where they go to is nothing to me. I’ve seen plenty of mothers kill their young. You see it out here a lot.”
He passed Slone a wooden jug of water with no handle, chill despite the warmth in the room. Slone drank it half gone and passed it back.
“I remember you, traveler. I remember your father too, when he came here with you. You were a little tyke then, maybe five or six. Don’t you remember that?”
“Why did we come here?”
“To see me. Your father wanted a wolf’s oil. He wouldn’t shoot one himself. So he came to me for the oil. It was for you, this oil. Did you know that? Your father said you were unnatural. Said you had unnatural ways about you. That was his word, unnatural. An Indian witch from your village told him a wolf’s oil could cure you, make you normal. Did it work? Are you normal now? I gave him the oil.”