“He’ll leave soon,” he said.
“He was staring at me. What does he want?”
“Just food. He’ll eat and leave.”
“He’s not eating,” she said. “He’s staring.”
At dusk they saw the shine of the vagrant’s campfire through trees. Medora stayed at the window as if held by hypnosis, summoned by the spell of a mage, her child low in her and still heeling for exit.
Hours later in bed Slone waited for her to pass over into sleep. He left soundlessly through the rear door and moved through the timber toward the vagrant’s camp. In the clearing a World War II Army tent canted sharply at the sides. The hide of a hare splayed across sticks to dry before the crackling blaze. From the black of the woods he watched for movement, steadied his breath, watched more. He crept toward the tent and for minutes listened low to the ground. He could see or hear nothing of this man.
Avoiding shadows, he peeled the back side of the tent just enough, the hunting knife cocked to spear. But the tent was empty, the rank sleeping bag thrown open. He entered on his knees. The vagrant’s rifle lay atop a blanket. Painted crudely on the inner fabric of the tent like Paleolithic cave art were horses disemboweled and eyeless. He felt the pictures with a finger and when he squinted closer saw that they had been limned in some prey’s blood.
He dumped the vagrant’s shoulder bag. Fouled socks and sweater. Jackknife, sardines, coffee. Ammunition, wooden matches, candles. Gun oil, compass, fishhooks. The mummified head of a marmot. A Mickey Mouse key chain without a single key. No paper or card telling of this man, of how he knew about Medora and their coming child. There beside the sleeping bag he found a figurine whittled expertly from driftwood—a woman gravid with child, breast-heavy and fanged. It was the fertility symbol of some predatory she-beast. It was, he somehow knew, meant to be Medora. And the nausea of dread lifted from his guts to his throat.
He sprinted then back to their cabin, bounding over fallen trees through a moonless night.
She lay half asleep, a dream mostly recollection:
The women of the village called her fortunate to be eight months at the start of winter instead of in the ninety-six degrees of last summer’s heat, an August stifle they’d never known before in Keelut—a heat whose source seemed intent to maim them. Mosquitoes came in clouds and the villagers greased themselves in oils from wolf organs or beaver fat to keep the hordes of them at bay. They stood in the shade of poplars and simply looked at one another astonished, sweating as if some blight had been unleashed upon them. They went into the hills and down into the flume beneath canopies of cottonwood and sat in the cooling streambed for refuge from the heat and bugs. They didn’t have memory, language, or myth for this heat, had never heard hint of it. The elderly whispered of curse, of punishment sent for the sins of the village.
Her eyes opened now and saw Slone’s silhouette there in the bedroom doorway. She smelled campfire on him and something else, something raw, she could not say. She wondered why he had gone out in the cold at this witching hour of night. She said his name but he did not respond. The fear started then in her upper chest. She leaned for the lamp and as sudden as gunshot its light found the vagrant there, steady there in the room.
What unlatched in her just then was not terror, but an awareness of a riddle, or of cause and effect—of how the dawn cannot possibly know the plot of day’s coming dark. Instinctively she put a hand on her belly, as if drawing his attention to two lives would rally his will to preserve them both. She questioned the protocol here, who should speak first or else if words had become altogether useless.
“There’s food,” she said. “There’s money. In a jar. By the stove. There’s fifty dollars in the jar.”
“This boy can’t live. Someone sent me to warn you.”
She heard her odd words—mere creaks in the floor beams—asking who he was, what he wanted.
“The hag sent me to warn you,” he said, his voice womanlike, almost calming. “This boy can’t live. Stop his life and go back to the place you came from.”
The questions she had for him would not find sound. Who had sent him? How did he know of them and their coming child? She looked to the window, thought of how quickly she’d have to move, to tear aside the curtains. To raise the pane and climb out. It wasn’t cold enough yet for plastic sheeting on the windows but soon it would be.
His complexion was reddish in the orange shine of lamplight. He looked part Inuit: the straight bridge of nose, eyes pinched at their ends, mane a silken black. And because he did not advance, because he held no weapon, she had the smallest understanding that he had not come to harm her.
“What do you know about us?”
“I know what I need to know to warn you,” he said.
From inside his parka he retrieved a painted object carved of driftwood. He turned it toward the lamplight for her to see—a shaman’s wolf mask painted with red ochre. He advanced by careful steps and reached the mask to her but she would not take it, would not remove her hands from her belly. He placed the mask on the bed beside her and returned to the doorway.
“That mask is yours,” he said. “Someone made it for you.”
She looked to the mask rimmed with real wolf hair. When she was a girl her father told her that to kill a wolf was to kill a messenger from the gods who protected them.
“Wear the mask,” the wastrel said, “and then you’ll know what you have to do. That’s what I was sent to tell you.”
She felt the wood of the mask, traced the teeth with a finger. When she looked again to the vagrant she saw the flash of blade rise from behind him. It spiked up beneath his chin at an angle deep into his head. His eyes strained but stayed fixed on her, stubbornly alive. Slone twisted the blade and a gout of blackish blood broke from the vagrant’s throat and mouth. It dumped onto the rug in wet clumps. His whole weight went limp on the hilt of the knife, then Slone pulled it sideways and severed his throat through to the spine.
Slone dropped him then. Medora felt the vagrant’s body thump against the floor. She looked at Slone rained-on with blood and heaving with breath from the run. She knew then that more trouble could not be stopped.
Slone and Cheeon mopped the mess. She watched from the bed. Before they drove the wastrel into the valley Slone gave her a handgun—it was the same gun he’d taught her to shoot with when they were ten years old, firing at pumpkins on a fallen tree. He instructed her to shoot the next person who came through their door. “If that person isn’t me,” he added. All the while she sat up in bed with the wolf mask in her hands, on her belly, feeling the points of its whittled teeth.
When the men left, she raised the mask to her face and tied it on.
The boy was born at noon in their cabin, Medora assisted by her mother and village midwives, one of them Yup’ik. Her given name, long and guttural, had been truncated to Lu. She ordered Slone and Cheeon and the other men outdoors, where they smoked and paced, wordless and put-upon, hours yet from celebration, heavy from the fatigue of cold and waiting.
Twenty-two below zero and Lu instructed Medora’s mother to open the windows and doors for the release of black spirits snared within these walls, to provide free passage for their ancestors, for them to enter, to bless, to aid in the arrival. In a corner, the hag rocked in a chair eating crackers, white crumbs stuck to her shawl, in one hand an amulet she’d fashioned from bone.
In front of the fire, on a woven circular rug covered with bedsheets, the six women knelt, crouched about Medora with white towels and basins of water, a sterilized straight razor and shears. They gripped her limbs. Lu knelt bare-handed at the center in the leakage, singing her language no one could sing but still seemed to comprehend. The hag said nothing through this long torment, only crunched her crackers, rubbed her amulet and rocked.