She said, “I thought you were something wicked coming my way.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I’m heading into the hills.”
She had a man’s voice, teeth missing. “To get a wolf’s tooth, I’ve been told.”
“Yes,” he said. “How do you know?”
“We’re a small village. We’ve had trouble enough here.”
“The wolves. I know, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
“Ah, you know? No, you think you do. I mean trouble since the start. Trouble before any of us was here. You would bar the door against the wolf, why not more against beasts with the souls of damned men, against men who would damn themselves to beasts? Answer that.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am?”
“I read the books they bring me. What else to do here through nights like these? I read the books. The Christians came when I was a child. The missionaries. They taught me the books. They came with books and they came with the plague.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The influenza plague.”
The flame widened in the barrel and Core could feel its broad heat from six feet away.
“Do you know the name of this village?” she asked.
“Keelut.”
“Say its meaning.”
“I don’t know its meaning.”
“Its meaning is an evil spirit disguised as a dog. Or a wolf.”
“Why would they name it that?” he asked.
Her gums glowed part orange, part pink. “Why indeed. You are the wolf expert, I hear.”
“My name is Core.”
“That girl knows this place is cursed.”
“The girl? Medora Slone?”
“Her.”
“She just lost her child. What she knows is grief.”
“Will the wolves come again for us tonight?”
“Wolves should not be coming here at all. Tonight or ever.”
“I did not say should. I said will.” She stared. “They have the spirits of the damned.”
“They’re hungry wolves, hungry animals. Nothing more.”
“I don’t mean wolves.”
“I’ll go now,” he said.
“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”
“That’s the Gospel of Matthew.”
“I told you, I can read the books. They taught me how.”
“Why did you say that?”
“Are you a Christian?”
“Ma’am, I know some things about nature and wolves. I write about them. I don’t pretend to know about anything else.”
“We all pretend. And they know about you too.”
“I’ll go now,” he said. He made to move up the trailhead. “Have a good day, ma’am.”
“You’re going the wrong way,” she said, not turning her face from the heat of the drum. “Go back the way you came,” and she pointed a bent finger to the snow-blown center of the village.
Core ignored her and continued up the path, over chokes of rock and lightning-struck spruce.
He expected to find a wolf pack in the valley on the other side of these hills, a den tucked away, hidden on a bouldered ridge above the plain. He’d meet them just after daybreak at the den, if he could find it, meet them after their long night hunting afield. If there was a famine on this land, they’d have to seek their prey at the edges of the land they knew.
He remembered telling his daughter this when she was a girclass="underline" the Apache hunted the wolf as a rite from boy to man. A wolf kill turned a teen into a leader and earned him favor with the spirits of his ancestors. He remembered being outraged when she brought home from grade school the children’s book Peter and the Wolf, how it painted the animal a hellish fiend. And now Core was hunting one for a reason and a woman he did not know.
The boy’s bones would not be in the den; it had been twelve days since he was taken. His bones were spread throughout this wilderness by scavengers, blanketed by mantles of new snowfall. There would be no burial, no coming to terms for the woman and her husband. But he would kill an already half-dead wolf if he could. He would carry it back for Medora Slone, tell her it was the monster that had seized her son. The monster she wanted to believe in, to explain this away. A wolf’s corpse meant relief to her—but only the illusion of relief, he knew. Perhaps she’d be able to quit the midnight vigils knowing that one wolf had been removed from the world. Perhaps not. Her every day was a midnight now.
He trundled through drifts to his shins despite these snowshoes. The sack of food and ammunition hung heavy on his shoulders. The snow ceased briefly beneath a clearing sky to the east. The coming dawn cast a half halo of light on the horizon, then clouds like great coats hurled in to cloak it. Year’s end at this latitude the sun rose and set in such a truncated arch it seemed it might not find the will to bring the day.
He felt again the weight in his legs. Beyond the snowed-in trees, just over these hills, lay an unknowable compass of tundra, a tapestry of whites and grays. Everywhere the living cold. Like grief, cold is an absence that takes up space. Winter wants the soul and bores into the body to get it. What were the possibilities of this place? There were patterns hidden here beneath the snow, patterns knowable but he did not know them.
He walked on from one bluff to the next, knoll to knoll, snowshoeing over nonexistent paths and seeking tracks. The horizon kept losing its line, mixing down with up. Hours into his trek over the hills he stopped under a rock face, alongside what seemed an ancient esker. A minor sun drained of color blinked on and off behind clouds. The uniform white on the land pained his eyes until he remembered the tinted goggles in his bag. While drinking from snow and eating an egg sandwich she’d made for him, he heard the first howls down in the valley, half a mile over the tallest crest in the hills. He had seen no caribou tracks, no coyotes, no lynx, not a moose or hare.
What plague had invaded these vast silences? The virid earth, his memories of fruit breathing hotly in summer fields—all obliterated by this moonscape.
He felt the food warm in him and walked onto the snow-steamed plain. The wind flogged him, rushed around his hood, pushed against the padded contours of his clothes, made chalk dust of air. He adjusted the goggles on his face and tugged his chin low into the ruff of Vernon Slone’s caribou suit. It seemed he’d have to walk a long while more. He looked to the sky but could not tell time from a sun this sick. The bluff ahead was at two hundred yards, or three hundred, or three-quarters of a mile—this land made measurement obsolete. Only a fool counted steps and yet he counted. The goggles kept clouding and he stopped to wipe them dry.
Where the plain began to rise again into an escarpment he found the first lupine tracks, a male, nearly six inches around, a three-foot stride, a hundred and twenty pounds, he guessed. He climbed the bank, over half boulders on the talus, and mounted the ridge from a narrow pass, all bluff face below him now, clouds gone north again. To his right he saw steam escaping from a copper-colored mouth in the crag, perhaps the hot spring she had told him about the night before. The sun sat low and wide; snow gave the glimmer of rattled foil. He crouched at the ridgeline and watched the valley beyond, and there he spotted the pack against the facing hills, a frenzy of ten gray wolves.
Through the field glasses he could see an infant wolf or coyote at the core of this ruck, teeth hooked into its flesh, the two largest wolves rending, angling for leverage, their hackles raised, the bounty shorn between them, snow mottled in purple and red. Core crouched there a long while looking.