Gladys, or her spirit, was near. A feeling overcame him that something belonging to her and the baby, to both of them, lay around here to be claimed. What thing? He believed it might be the chocolates Gladys had bought in a red box, chocolates cupped in white paper. A crazy thought, but he didn’t bother to argue with it. Once every week, she and the tyke had sucked one chocolate apiece. Suddenly he could see those white cups scattered all around him. When he looked directly at any one of them, it disappeared.
Toward dark, as Grainier lay by the river in a blanket, his eye caught on a quick thing up above, flying along the river. He looked and saw his wife Gladys’s white bonnet sailing past overhead. Just sailing past.
He stayed on for weeks in this camp, waiting, wanting many more such visions as that of the bonnet, and the chocolates — as many as wanted to come to him; and he figured as long as he saw impossible things in this place, and liked them, he might as well be in the habit of talking to himself, too. Many times each day he found himself deflating on a gigantic sigh and saying, “A pretty mean circumstance!” He thought he’d better be up and doing things so as not to sigh quite as much.
Sometimes he thought about Kate, the pretty little tyke, but not frequently. Hers was not such a sad story. She’d hardly been awake, much less alive.
He lived through the summer off dried morel mushrooms and fresh trout cooked up together in butter he bought at the store in Meadow Creek. After a while a dog came along, a little red-haired female. The dog stayed with him, and he stopped talking to himself because he was ashamed to have the animal catch him at it. He bought a canvas tarp and some rope in Meadow Creek, and later he bought a nanny goat and walked her back to his camp, the dog wary and following this newcomer at a distance. He picketed the nanny near his lean-to.
He spent several days along the creek in gorges where the burn wasn’t so bad, collecting willow whips from which he wove a crate about two yards square and half as tall. He and the dog walked to Meadow Creek and he bought four hens, also a rooster to keep them in line, and carted them home in a grain sack and cooped them up in the crate. He let them out for a day or two every now and then, penning them frequently so the hens wouldn’t lay in secret places, not that there were many places in this destruction even to hide an egg.
The little red dog lived on goat’s milk and fish heads and, Grainier supposed, whatever she could catch. She served as decent company when she cared to, but tended to wander for days at a time.
Because the ground was too bare for grazing, he raised his goat on the same laying mash he fed the chickens. This got to be expensive. Following the first frost in September he butchered the goat and jerked most of its meat.
After the second frost of the season, he started strangling and stewing the fowls one by one over the course of a couple of weeks, until he and the dog had eaten them all, the rooster, too. Then he left for Meadow Creek. He had grown no garden and built no structure other than his lean-to.
As he got ready to depart, he discussed the future with his dog. “To keep a dog in town it ain’t my nature,” he told the animal. “But you seem to me elderly, and I don’t think an elderly old dog can make the winter by your lonely up around these hills.” He told her he would pay an extra nickel to bring her aboard the train a dozen miles into Bonners Ferry. But this must not have suited her. On the day he gathered his few things to hike down to the platform at Meadow Creek, the little red dog was nowhere to be found, and he left without her.
The abbreviated job a year earlier at Robinson Gorge had given him money enough to last through the winter in Bonners Ferry, but in order to stretch it Grainier worked for twenty cents an hour for a man named Williams who’d contracted with Great Northern to sell them one thousand cords of firewood for two dollars and seventy-five cents each. The steady daylong exertions kept him and seven other men warm through the days, even as the winter turned into the coldest seen in many years. The Kootenai River froze hard enough that one day they watched, from the lot where wagons brought them logs of birch and larch to be sawn and split, a herd of two hundred cattle being driven across the river on the ice. They moved onto the blank white surface and churned up a snowy fog that first lost them in itself, then took in all the world north of the riverbank, and finally rose high enough to hide the sun and sky.
Late that March Grainier returned to his homesite in the Moyea Valley, this time hauling a wagonload of supplies.
Animals had returned to what was left of the forest. As Grainier drove along in the wagon behind a wide, slow, sand-colored mare, clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people traveled the muddy road, leaving tracks straight up and down the middle of it; later in the summer they would forage in the low patches of huckleberry he already saw coming back on the blackened hillsides.
At his old campsite by the river he raised his canvas lean-to and went about chopping down five dozen burned spruce, none of them bigger around than his own hat size, acting on the generally acknowledged theory that one man working alone could handle a house log about the circumference of his own head. With the rented horse he got the timber decked in his clearing, then had to return the outfit to the stables in Bonners Ferry and hop the train back to Meadow Creek.
It wasn’t until a couple of days later, when he got back to his old home — now his new home — that he noticed what his labors had prevented his seeing: It was full-on spring, sunny and beautiful, and the Moyea Valley showed a lot of green against the dark of the burn. The ground about was healing. Fireweed and jack pine stood up about thigh high. A mustard-tinted fog of pine pollen drifted through the valley when the wind came up. If he didn’t yank this crop of new ones, his clearing would return to forest.
He built his cabin about eighteen by eighteen, laying out lines, making a foundation of stones in a ditch knee-deep to get down below the frost line, scribing and hewing the logs to keep each one flush against the next, hacking notches, getting his back under the higher ones to lift them into place. In a month he’d raised four walls nearly eight feet in height. The windows and roof he left for later, when he could get some milled lumber. He tossed his canvas over the east end to keep the rain out. No peeling had been required, because the fire had managed that for him. He’d heard that fire-killed trees lasted best, but the cabin stank. He burned heaps of jack pine needles in the middle of the dirt floor, trying to change the odor’s character, and he felt after a while that he’d succeeded.
In early June the red dog appeared, took up residence in a corner, and whelped a brood of four pups that appeared quite wolfish.
Down at the Meadow Creek store he spoke about this development with a Kootenai Indian named Bob. Kootenai Bob was a steady man who had always refused liquor and worked frequently at jobs in town, just as Grainier did, and they’d known each other for many years. Kootenai Bob said that if the dog’s pups had come out wolfish, that would be quite strange. The Kootenais had it that only one pair in a wolf den ever made pups — that you couldn’t get any of the he-wolves to mate except one, the chief of the wolf tribe. And the she-wolf he chose to bear his litters was the only bitch in the pack who ever came in heat. “And so I tell you,” Bob said, “that therefore your wandering dog wouldn’t drop a litter of wolves.” But what if she’d encountered the wolf pack at just the moment she was coming into heat, Grainier wanted to know — might the king wolf have mounted her then, just for the newness of the experience? “Then perhaps, perhaps,” Bob said. “Might be. Might be you’ve got yourself some dog-of-wolf. Might be you’ve started your own pack, Robert.”