“I came that way, through that break in the hills there. But I was on the other side of these crags. I can try to get us there.”
Kicking through new snowfall on the talus, trudging over landslips and scree, they sought entrance through this rise of cliffs. They had to breathe sideways when the wind swiped from the plain. Core touched great polyps and pikes of ice on the rock walls, some clear as shellac, others opaque as bone, one like a waterfall on pause. For fifteen minutes they labored along the sloped perimeter of cliffs. Core stopped when he came to the wolf tracks stamped in the shallow felt of snow, tracks that padded from view around the bluff.
“How fresh are they?” Marium said.
“An hour or two, I’d say. Four of them. Adults. A hundred pounds apiece, give or take.”
“Four of them. Where’s the rest of the pack?” Marium unstrapped the rifle and bolted the first round, snow and beads of ice on his beard of mixed browns.
“Not far, I’d guess. Their den must be near here. Should we go back?”
“Let’s look a little farther,” Marium said.
“We don’t want to meet those wolves.”
“Let’s look a bit farther. If we see sign of anything we’ll turn back.”
More hard walking along the scree and gusts turned to gale, air of solid snow swept quick from the plain. Marium pointed to a cavity in the spur of the crag and they moved up into it. They sat on rocks free from the whited wind. They smoked, watching walls of snow blow by them.
“Can we take off in this?” Core said.
“Not in this. It’ll pass soon. This isn’t whiteout. You’ll know whiteout when it comes because you won’t believe it.”
And then: “When I was a kid my mother told me about an Eskimo woman who had to make half a day’s journey from one village to another and midway she got caught in a blizzard. A heavy, blinding whiteout. She was carrying a bearskin to bring to the other village, and she burrowed a hole down into the snow, four or five feet deep, curled up in the bearskin and went to sleep. The blizzard roared for two days straight, and when it stopped, she woke up, crawled out, and walked on to where she was going.”
“How’s that possible?”
“She stayed dry. You get wet out here, you’re dead. You ever read Last of the Breed, that book by Louis L’Amour?”
“No. But my father liked that one. It’s one of the last things I remember about him. The paperback—I remember it was a thick blue paperback.”
“Yeah, the cover shows Joe Mack running through the snow. There’s a scene where Mack swims across the river in below-zero weather in Siberia, and then just keeps going, like he was in Honolulu or some goddamn place. If you get wet like that, in that temperature, and don’t make a fire in five, six minutes tops, you’re dead. That Eskimo woman survived because she stayed dry.”
“And women are stronger than men,” Core said. “You’ll see how. You’ll see in eight months.”
“We gotta move to keep warm. Those charcoal pads working in your boots?”
“They’re working.”
The gale diminished and they walked on minutes more along the loins of the crag to a man-width slit, a path they squeezed into, free once more from wind, free to hear their breath. They coursed through to the rift inside the oval of cliffs, and across the pan they saw the spring exhaling its steam.
“How’d you spot this in here?” Marium said.
“I was up on the ridge at the far side, glassing the valley. It’s an easy climb from that side. I should have taken us that way, I’m sorry.”
They walked along against the wall of rock and Core stopped to glass the ridgeline. “There’s movement up there.”
“What movement?”
“I’m not sure,” Core said. “Wolves maybe.”
“Why would wolves be up on the ridge?”
“They can see better from there.”
“See what better?”
“See us better,” Core said.
“They climbed to the ridge to see us? Are you kidding?”
He passed the glasses to Marium. “There is no smarter hunter. Not out here. Do you see movement?”
“Nothing now,” he said, and handed the glasses back to Core.
“Let’s sit here until they move on.”
“We can’t sit long. We gotta move.”
They sat on boulders and looked across the pan at steam rising from the spring and at the ridgeline above it. Core tried to start another cigarette but the lighter would not fire.
“It’s too cold for that lighter to work right,” Marium said. “The fluid is all gel. Take these,” and he dug into his parka for a box of wood matches. “We can’t sit long.”
Core lifted the glasses and looked again at the ridgeline. And as he did a figure hove into view, stepped slowly at the crest, forty yards from them across the rift. A wolf for certain, he thought, and he said Marium’s name. Both men stood then. Core trained the glasses on the ridgeline and saw the figure rise now full over the crest and stand on two legs against an iron sky.
Core instinctively reached for Marium’s arm and then focused the glasses. What he saw did not fit: a man with the face of a wolf—pointed ears and an elongated black face in front of yellow hair. His bow was already drawn and steady by the time Core could see him in focus.
The rifle dropped into the snow at his feet. When he turned, Marium was against the rock face with the arrow through his throat, the tip poking through his nape, hands around the shaft as if he could keep it from doing more harm. The noise coming from his neck was a gurgled sigh, his teeth red and dripping. Core dove, grabbed on to Marium’s legs at the knees, and tugged him down behind a berm of fallen rock just as another arrow smashed, sparked against the crag.
Blood pulsed from the shaft thick and almost black but in the snow made a shock of red. Core gnashed off a glove and drew the arrow from Marium’s neck, but he was already still, his chest and throat already without sound, his lids closed and the front of his jacket stained through. Core lay on him, thinking to keep him from cold, his breath plugged in his breast. How odd that the groaning wind could breach the oval of crags, but then he listened again. The groaning was his.
XII
Core took up the rifle from the bloodied snow near Donald Marium’s feet. From the berm of rock he aimed through the scope to where Slone had stood on the ridgeline with the bow—he knew it was Slone—but he was not there now. He lay again, low behind the berm, half the air clipped from him, looking at Marium fast turning to frost, his cheeks and lips now an identical ash, a rivulet of red from his mouth, pebbles of blood frozen in his beard.
Christmas was four days away and he would have this gift for Susan, the wife with child who had glared at him last night over dinner in her home. He was the invader, he knew. Messenger from the other world, taker of her husband. He wondered at the anguish of this place, all those snowed-over acres accountable to nothing.
He retreated with the rifle back through the cleft in the rock, and from the sheltered path he emerged again into an onrush of wind and snow. The wind pushed at him, groped against him, the snow like stones on his face.
Beneath his hood he unrolled his hat down into its face mask and pulled on goggles. Just then he heard the chorus of wolves behind the crags, their plaintive howling borne on the gale. He rushed along the talus to the level strip where the plane sat in its cherry paint behind webs of snow. This blizzard had come again quickly and he trudged through it aslant to keep the gusts from stealing his breath. Every few seconds he looked above to the ridge of the tallest crag and expected to spot Slone there with his bow drawn.
The door of the plane flapped in the gale. When he approached he saw the left engine cowling thrust open, hoses and wires hacked through, spark plugs stolen. In the cockpit he forced the door shut against the wind and tried to breathe. He saw the knife wounds through the instrument panel and radios. Wind nudged the plane, wailed around the windows and wings. He wanted to weep from cold. Moisture froze inside his nostrils. When his left eye wouldn’t open he knew it was sealed with ice. He rubbed it frantically for fear of blindness, then cupped a wood match in his palm. He brought the flame near enough his face to inhale its heat.