Slone stepped toward Medora. He dropped the bow and stood looking at her in the lamp-lit corner of the cave. She sobbed with no sound. Core thought he could hear Slone breathing inside the mask but the wheeze was the blood bubbled within his own breast.
Slone stopped at Medora’s feet, his head tilted at her one way, then the other, as if trying to recognize her after thirteen months apart—after all she’d done. She wept and extended her arms to him, wanting end to this havoc. And he bent then with both hands clasped to her throat and hoisted her up, smashed her hard against the stone.
Core’s voice, the shouts at Slone, would not come—they were pinned in his gullet beneath the blood. She gagged in Slone’s grip, tried to kick free, then reached to lift the mask from his face. The mask dropped to the stone and she grabbed fistfuls of his hair and pulled his head to hers. When their faces hit he loosened his grip, loosened more, and found her lips. They breathed, groaned that way into one another’s mouth, haled at one another’s hair, their animal noises weaved with hurt, with the hunger born of separation.
They tore at their clothing with that hunger and Core saw them drop nude in a corner not breached by lamplight. He glimpsed her full breast and thigh before a shadow swallowed them. Heard a rapt keening he hadn’t thought possible from a person. He almost recalled that splendor, almost remembered youth, his wife and daughter now crystal figurines in memory. He lay on stone fading, feeling himself rasp and wane and sweat, unable to summon the buried prayer he wanted.
In time a body emerged nude from the shadows and steam, into the lantern light, his blond beard stippled with dew, chin-length hair tangled and wet. He woke Core fully, startled him from his slow falling through layers of air. You would not seek me if you had not found me. He went to one knee to grab the shaft of the arrow at Core’s upper back, then drew it through, yanked it clean, quick, but the pain spiked up from the wound and through Core’s neck, into his teeth, the bones of his cheeks, reeling in ripples.
On the sleeve of Core’s shirt Slone wiped the blood from the arrow and squatted there to consider him. Core could not make sense of Slone’s face, could not ascertain the mysteries there. Behind him Medora stepped slowly from the dark, her matte flesh dappled with rash, an inch of semen slipping down her inner thigh. He shook from the cold of blood loss, the heat of this spring unable to warm him now. Medora draped the caribou suit over his torso and legs, tucked the hood around his throat, then knelt near Slone and reached for Core’s hand. She seemed willing to comprehend Core’s confusion and love. He nearly smiled.
Seeing their faces side by side, Core could notice the same dimpled chin and bumped nasal bridge, the identical ecru of their eyes. He knew his vision must be merging them, knew his mind was dying.
He looked at Slone. “The boots,” he managed, though his throat and mouth were so dry with thirst he barely heard his own words.
Slone leaned in to him, squinted to show he didn’t understand.
“The boots,” Core said again, nodding to his own feet. “They’re yours.”
Slone looked to the boots Medora had lent Core for his hunting of the wolves, then looked back to Core with a partial grin, an expression that told him to keep the boots. He rose to go, and when Medora released Core’s hand he once more felt his long falling.
They dressed and packed their provisions, packed the rifles and bow, the blankets and lantern. Core watched them between lengthy blinks. Before they left him in the dark and steam of the cave, Slone came to him once more, crouched to place a lit cigarette in Core’s lips. With his left hand numbed and gummy in blood, Core struggled to dig out the chocolate from the wide bib of his overalls and then unpeeled the foil with his teeth.
He smoked on the taste of chocolate spiced with blood, and listened to them leave the spring, descend out of earshot until he was alone in the hush and dark. Where the day’s ill gray light grazed the rock above him he saw his smoke fuse with steam, cohere into shapes whose meaning he could not divine. Such shapes: he would have liked to paint them. He remembered he’d been a painter. And he would have painted them with purpose, with the grace not given to him now.
Sorry not to be dying from an excess of whiskey and tobacco, he wished he’d allowed himself more pleasure these last thirty-five years. Other people were defective wells of pleasure. They sought pleasure of their own. They ripened or rotted away from you, left you bumbling. He was a white-haired man who’d invested in a future that forgot him. He saw distinctly now the faces of his father and mother—their youthful faces as new parents—but could not see their deaths because he was not there. Most of us get the deaths we’ve earned. Not Bailey Slone.
And then he was crawling on arms he could not feel, leaving red-brown hand marks on the ribbed ground of rock. He dragged himself to the mouth of the cave, half his body in the snow and failing light. On his elbows and belly he looked down into the pan. The Slones were crossing to the cleft in the rock. He collapsed then and rolled, first to his shoulder and flank and then to his back, his arms outstretched.
He could feel the flakes on his forehead and mouth, the chill seeping into his clothes. This cream sky had no layers, no divisions of cloud—he stared into a gauze without knowable start or finish, flakes coming from a fuzzed heaven.
The silhouettes on the ridgeline to his right were the wolves heeding him with abnormal calm, six of them waiting. How he admired their patience, their wisdom to wait. Before he dropped heavy through strata of varied black, he felt, for an instant, honored to give them this sustenance. He felt honored to lose the confines of his flesh, to let it give them life. And before he slept, he saw the boy standing behind the wolves—Bailey Slone, looking just as Core had found him in the root cellar, the strangle mark on his throat, his complexion the white of the dead, his eyes telling Core there was much to fear.
The four men who woke him wore goggled faces pressed far into the hoods of wolf-ruff parkas. They did not speak. Terrifying angels without wings. Behind their heads the padded sky had started to darken in purple casts, and it darkened more now as the men passed before it. With mittens they brushed a film of fallen snow from the top half of his body. One man propped him upright at the waist, while two others stretched and pulled the one-piece caribou suit onto him. Without the body-wide burn of cold and the pain of the arrow wound he guessed this was his death.
They wrapped him in a blanket—a shrouded corpse, he thought—and lifted him by the shoulders and feet, placed him on a pelt. They carried him down from the spring, into the pan. They had no haste—a funeral procession. As they reached the wall of rock Core could see beneath him the spot where Marium’s body had been, the teeth-torn clothes and bone, the pink mess his innards had made, paw prints of blood. Core knew the wolves had feasted, but had spared him, though being spared had not been his wish.
Two sled-dog teams rested or nipped at one another in the snow. When the men came through the gap in the crags the ready dogs stood mindful. The snow had ebbed. In the east the full yellow moon shone through a rip in clouds. The men laid him on the bed slats of a dogsled. He felt himself being encased in the pelt with a husky who lay beside him—the clean cold scent of its fur, its wet nose on his mouth and chin.
They packed him and the husky against the stanchions with more pelts, his head on the brush bow, his face in the animal’s neck, his body slowly imbued by the eighty-pound heat of the dog. Under him he felt the rough skidding of the runners on crusted snow, and then the smooth riding in fresh fall as the sleds mushed on toward moonlight.