He stepped sideways down the escarpment and lost his footing in the snow, then slid several meters until he stopped against a boulder. He sidestepped again the rest of the way until he again met the talus at the plain. There he crouched again and watched through the glasses as the rout of wolves consumed the last of the carcass. He checked to make certain the rifle’s magazine was full, then loaded the first round into the chamber, the safety switch still engaged. He set off slowly across the valley floor, the crimped surface hoar crunching underfoot as if it were in pain. He lost sight of the wolves for a time but knew when the wind shifted west his scent would lift and reach them. He was afraid with every step in this snow, aware of the loaded rifle on his shoulder.
On a healthy day in a healthy land the wolf will run from man, turn at first sniff or glimpse—they want nothing of men. But he’d witnessed them prey on bison and caribou, a brigade of only four grays defeating five hundred pounds of beast with a lethal rack of talons. This was what he wanted for himself, he guessed. Unmanning, dismantling. A body for a body. Why come all this way for a bereaved woman he’d never met? Why then this futile hunt? He thought of the cigarettes and chocolate, of her scent on the sofa.
He could have ended himself at home. A pistol or rope. A razor. Or pills if he lost all nerve. Or his truck running in the shut garage, garden hose duct-taped to the tailpipe. But the almost pleasant nightmare that had played through his mind the night before he received Medora Slone’s letter showed his lax body rent by wolves in an ice-blue scape he could not name. Her letter was the summons he wanted, the sentence that should have come long before. And his daughter in the city here? She was only the daylight reason. He’d never seen a daylight detail that could compete with midnight’s verity. The predawn dark never learned to lie.
He walked on and topped the last small crest in the plain. The wind lifted his scent and in minutes the pack knew he was there. From a quarter mile off the wolves stared, their snouts to the air. Core stopped to stare back. He took several steps and stopped again. They looked stymied by confusion, bereft of their instinct to flee. Still they stared, tails raised. He walked toward them.
And they began their charge then, half head-on, the other half split on each flank. They’d surround him, he knew—he’d seen them do it. He dropped to one knee, pulled off a glove with his teeth, and stayed there in wait with the rifle aimed at the alpha out front, a male no more than six, a hundred and twenty-five pounds—it should have been heavier. Take it down, he knew, and the others would lose their will.
The white dust of trampled snow rose among the pack, glittered in broad frames of sun through an open stitch of cloud. Was this the wolf that took the children of Keelut, this deep silver gray with a gloss of cinnamon and that faultless stride?
He centered the wolf’s skull in the crosshairs of the scope. In a minute or less the pack would be at him, the alpha ripping his throat, the others threshing at his limbs. Laudable teamwork. They knew his disease of spirit, his want of this. Or else in their own disease mistook him for something other than a man.
He imagined slow-motion and no sound. He knew they must be mad to charge him this way, must be only days away from starving. He unsquinted and lowered the rifle, then let them come to him. This was penance, he knew. The silence of his living room, the thought of painting another oil portrait of the female gray he’d shot, the nightly whirring of his microwave—all an anguish he could not abide, already a death. Most of him wanted this reckoning. Some of him didn’t. And he let them come.
When at the last instant he raised the rifle again and fired at the air above the alpha’s skull, the pack halted at the crack of the round and glanced to one another. They knew the sound. When they neither advanced nor retreated, another shot above their skulls scattered them west from where they had come at the far end of the valley. He watched them go. He felt nearly surprised at his lack of tears. For the last year he’d imagined this moment a tearful one.
He stood and watched until they were gone. He’d return to Keelut now. He would tell Medora Slone that the wolves were fled from here. Remind her that what was done could not be undone, that blood does not wash blood. She’d have to live on with her lot. He knew no other way.
He trekked back through the late morning and afternoon, the day stiffened and already falling toward dark. He rested when he could, a long spell on the talus after the plain. He packed snow into an aluminum thermos and slipped it inside the caribou one-piece—the clothing of Vernon Slone, he could not forget. Then he sat in a crack in a ridge, safe from the wind. He ate the mixed nuts and ribbons of dried meat Medora Slone had also prepared for him. He thought of sleep. When the snow melted in the thermos he drank it, and then he packed more.
The walking began to feel automatic after that, his legs propelled by an engine wholly apart from him. He thought not of warmth or meal, wife or daughter, only of each step and then the next until he forgot to think about even those. And he walked on like that through the scanting light of day.
When he arrived back at the cabin his lungs felt weighted with rime. Medora Slone did not answer his knock. When he entered he saw her bedroom door ajar, clothes spilling from a closet and strung along the carpet—jeans, sweaters, a negligee of green lace. A suitcase with a cracked handle lying on its side. He called her name. The cold still infused his face; fatigue moved in surges through his limbs.
Weak light knifed through from beneath the narrow door that last night he had thought was a closet. When he opened it a chill hastened up from a never-finished root cellar. The rounded steps had been fashioned from available rock, the sharply slanted ceiling so low he had to duck to clear his head—a stairwell designed for storybook dwarves. A bare lightbulb lit this cramped space. The scent of soil and rock. Crates on an earthen floor. Mason jars of dried food he could not identify. Lumber and visqueen stacked in a corner. Rodent droppings on the dirt.
His breath hung before him as he moved beneath the bulb. Stones had long ago been dislodged from this wall beside the steps. A nook had been carved into the earth with a shovel or pickaxe.
The bulb’s weak light did not reach here. He removed a glove to dig free his lighter from a pocket. He moved nearer. Inside this space he saw the boy—the frozen body of the six-year-old Bailey Slone leaning against the earth, cocooned in plastic, his open eyes iced over, mouth ajar as if exhaling—as if attempting a final word of protest.
He would rest here now for some time, sitting in the corner on an overturned Spackle bucket, his legs and back already sore from the hunt. At the airport the day before he’d read in an article that the cosmos consisted mostly of what we cannot see, energy and matter averse to light. He believed this though it sounded insane. He remembered then his hand around the throat of Medora Slone, how she had begged for a punishment, a purifying she could not grant herself.
III
Russell Core hollered down the center stretch of Keelut, his legs wasted from the day’s long trek. He pounded madly on doors at dinnertime, shouted his breath onto the frosted glass of windows. The villagers came slowly, warily from their cabins, out into the road, some with rifles, others with lanterns in hand. Some still chewing food, evening fires at their backs. Some holding toddlers who looked upon him with dull suspicion, their ochre skin lovely in the lantern light. All emerged to see this wolf-man messenger Medora Slone had hailed, to confront the sudden roar he’d brought to their night.