It wasn’t final, though, because he got right up and got in me, his ghost did, so I was done with part of it but never the ghost part. And here I am out here, dying, and I suppose the wolves are going to jump into me too, and the guys who have died, like he did, or they have already.
His ghost got good and into me, I think, because evil and worthless, I loved my father. The boy of me did, before he did what he did, to my mother. He was a black-hearted man, but before what he did, I loved him, and, I suppose I did after, and that died hard, watching eyes his eyes turning to grey, and spittle and I his last breath coming out of him. I loved him, and he did what he did. And I did what I did.
I dragged my father to the river where the deer was drinking before and used his jacket to tie the heaviest stones I could find to him, and dragged him in and lay him in a hole in the river I was sure enough wouldn’t go up dry any time of year. I found more stones to lay on, and carried them in too. I left the deer for anybody to find, I didn’t want it, and took his rifle with me. I never reported him missing, and nobody ever missed him, no sheriffs or deputies or police ever came, nobody asked, because I never talked to anybody. I walked away from the house soon after, one day, and never went back.
Out in the world, I met my wife, the one who dreamed about wolves, and she was everything living. She was life, and my son, and she saw something in me worth marrying to, and making a son with. I never told her what my father did, or what I did about it. But bit by bit, those things welled up in me, and bled out of me, and I was no good, from the inside out, to her, or our boy. I asked myself what I could give my son what wasn’t spoiled in some way, and the best I could do was ask him to remember always that I loved him, and would always love him. That was a shallow cup to give him, and he stared at me, a hurt boy, and didn’t understand what I meant, not much more than a drop of it, anyway. But I prayed he’d remember, and that one day it would matter, and he’d believe it at a time it mattered. But I was afraid he never would. I tried to tell my wife the same, and because I never told her what I’d done, or what had been done to my mother, she couldn’t know why I haunted our house like someone who died before he grew up. So she didn’t think anything, I suppose, of me telling her I’d always love her. It was no good to her, by then, from a ghost she couldn’t even remember, so fully, anymore. I looked at her eyes and I saw brightness, even then, I saw my mother who died, the sister she said she’d pretend to be, the daughter I’d never get, and our son, and I went anyway.
There was another day with my father, when I was much younger, I got out to the neighbor’s, a mile away. He had a dog meaner than my father or anybody, and I was cutting through to get up a hill I liked to go get lost on, and the dog got loose and got after me, and when my father rambled by in his truck he saw the dog had me in the dirt with its teeth at my neck and me looking up at it like a dead-baby-to-be and he was out of that truck and on that dog like lightning, he picked it up, barking mad, eighty pounds of pit-bull like it was a puppy and spun him across the yard yelping and growling. He didn’t have his gun or anything else, and he got between me and the dog and dared it to come, and I think if it came my father would have snapped its neck.
“Get in the truck,” he told me, and I ran and got in, and the owner came out and my father told him he’d kill him and his dog if he saw either one of them anywhere near me again. Never mind I was asking for it, cutting through, he'd kill them. I watched him, thinking he was going to do it right then.
Whatever happened to my father between that day and the other I don’t know, maybe it happened before I was born, like whatever made me no good to my son happened, I guess, before I got him. I was no good to my son because of what my father was and I was, and I thought too much about what my son was going to be if I had anything to do with him. I frightened him, I know, never wanting to, and I didn’t want to taint any of him with any of me. Things get in you that only grow later, and only decide you later, but they got half-decided so long ago you don’t ever even think about them, anymore, unless you’re going to die soon. Maybe you don’t ever know.
It’s funny what comes out of you that never comes out of you other times. Get close to your death, I guess you want to empty yourself out like a bucket. Be empty for the trip. Maybe there is no trip, just turning to meat, one day. Maybe I want to be empty for that. I don’t know yet.
The clearing and the dead wolves are behind us, we’re in trees again, and there’s still light in the sky. I’m confused by the light, because this day should be the shortest, or shorter than the others, but the light’s holding on. Maybe it’s waiting for something, like I am. We follow a broad bank of snow through a break in the trees and it drops down, steeper, until suddenly we’re looking down a chute, a dead stream, maybe dead trees criss-crossing it, some kind of timber-fall. From where we are it looks to be the only way forward, or the easiest, hard as it looks. I can’t seem to get air in my lungs, or in my head. I'm dizzy again, but I don’t know what from, my arm bleeding or no food or no sleep or cold. We stand looking down the chute, the trees crossing it look like they stumbled into it and died while out for a walk one day, like us.
But I see, where it bottoms out, there’s snow, and there’s a cliff-edge, past it, the snow and the trees drop off and there’s nothing past it, just air. I stare at it, figuring the way, through the broken trees, and I think I hear a river again. but it doesn’t sound like water running like before, it sounds like wind rumbling, thunder even. I stay still and listen, and I still hear it, rumbling, under ice maybe but something bigger than the last one is running, down below, off the edge.
I start clambering down through the dead trees, Henrick and Tlingit climbing down behind me. I stumble out of the bottom of it, into a rocky gully buried in snow, and I think it must have been a waterfall once, or it is in spring.
Down on the snow, I can hear water booming now, muffled still, but it’s a real river. Henrick and Tlingit make it down through the fall, and we go out, toward the ledge, toward the sound, and it gets louder and louder, and finally we see it. We all look down at it.
Even far below us we can see it’s big, twice or three times as wide maybe as the one that fooled us before, and deeper, and running like a ribbon of big ocean through the snow, part-frozen but running, is thundering over the drops, full and fast. Boulders of ice run down it smashing when they land the drops.
“That one might go somewhere,” I say.
It’s a real river, or feeds one, it must. I’m convincing myself it goes somewhere that isn’t here, away from wolves. I don’t think it’s dead-ending in a lake somewhere. Tlingit laughs.