The Wilding (22 page)

Condone.
Concede.

What did that prefix mean anyway? With. It meant with. Or together. Or something like that. He really ought to know these things, as a teacher. There was always some smart-ass kid calling him out, waiting for him to trip up, and he needed to be ready for them.

Contradictory.

Consequence.

He hears a sudden rumble and flinches before glancing up. There, in a patch of blue sky, he sees a jet with a long white contrail following it. He imagines himself inside the jet, among all the passengers, reading their magazines and eating from their single-serving pretzel bags, all of them heading someplace civilized, safe, contained by fences and lit with bright lights.

He closes his eyes for a second and it almost seems possible. He is almost there. Then he opens them and sees the woods all around him and feels his life spiraling down as if into a cave.

They climb a steep grade and enter a wooded ravine with a stream rushing through it. It is a tight corridor—filled with shadows and jutting knobs of basalt and stunted juniper trees that somehow grow through the stone, their roots groping for leverage—and when they leave this place and enter a wider gulch, it is with the relief of a deep breath and a loosened belt.

They find a pile of shit, like a muddy wig jeweled with berries, resting nearby. The ground as Justin steps around it feels unstable as though it might break open up to his knee. So he walks tenderly, as you would when bringing your foot down on the edge of a frozen lake, depressing your weight gently, watching the cracks appear around it like sudden black creeks. Beneath the ice, the paralyzing grip of fear awaits. When he thinks of the first body and its blackened bones—when he thinks of the circle tamped around their tent like a bull’s-eye—when he thinks about the safety of his son—the cracks widen.

His father walks ahead of Justin and stops, his head lowered, his eyes searching the ground. “Do you see it?” He squats as he asks them this. Justin and Graham huddle beside him and follow his arm when he holds it out and indicates the path. “He’s running along at a good clip and then . . .”

He does not need to say anything more. The soil tells the story, still marshy here from the storm the night before, as easy to read as print on the page. The bear. Justin sees where the pads touch each other and the toes fall close together and nearly in a straight line. Far in front of the toes, impressions from the claws gouge the ground so that they look like something separate from the main print, its size equivalent to a catcher’s mitt.

His father lays his hand over it and for the first time in his life Justin thinks of him as small. A wince passes over his father’s face and a flush follows it. He draws his hand away from the print and brings it to his eyes. He pinches the bridge of his nose as if to relieve himself from a hidden pain.

“No grizzlies in Oregon,” he says under his breath.

“Keep saying that, maybe it will come true.” Justin feels his heart expanding and the blood quickening through it. He imagines he hears the ghost of a yelp still lingering in the air. He looks up the trail and tries to envision the great shape of the bear, shambling through this thin corridor of trees, with Boo trapped between its jaws, the dog flapping like a salmon pulled from the river.

At a crashing in the trees very close to them, Justin and his father both raise their rifles. Justin’s panicked thoughts flutter inside his skull like owls trapped in an attic. But nothing comes out of the dimness except a mule deer, a six-pointer, a big beautiful animal that rips through the pines and over the fallen timber and into the open trail, where it halts, watching them, swishing its tail, not ten feet away—so close Justin can smell its musk. Its rack is a big and tangled basket.

Justin has not yet processed his relief. The air is remarkably still as he stares down the length of his rifle. It feels cold in his hand. He considers firing—as much for the trophy as for the release, the explosion—but doesn’t. He doesn’t have it in his heart—and apparently neither does his father, who sighs—as if to say,
Why bother?
—and lets his rifle fall and the movement sends the deer bounding up the trail and around the corner.

His father moves forward twenty paces and then freezes. He crouches and sets down his rifle and lifts something from the ground. There follows a tinkling noise, such as would come from a tiny bell. He holds in his hand a nylon collar. Boo’s. Torn in half, into a long red strip. The tinkling comes from its tags, knocked together by the wind. His father holds it out, not for Justin to take, but for him to look at. For a long time they stare at it. It is torn in places and its color, naturally red, is made redder by the blood that rubs off on his hand when he holds it.

After a long purposeful silence, he casts his eyes on Justin without looking at him, looking through him. His eyes are red and watering, from smoke or from sadness. Justin notices a small patch of white on his beard that looks like a tiny egg nested in it. “My dog.” His voice is thick and watery. He twists and squeezes the collar, as if to wring the blood from it. His face fills with lines of pain and a vein worms across his forehead. A minute passes before he picks up his rifle, his finger curls around the trigger, his voice wild and fast when he says, “I’m going to . . .”

But he doesn’t know what he is going to do.

He looks at Justin through a fog of shock and anger and fear and confusion, finally saying, “What now, Justin? What are we going to do now?” He speaks slowly, each syllable occupying its own time and space.

Up to this point, Justin felt small and vulnerable on this dark game trail, a piece of meat among the shadowy trees. Now the sensation worsens. His father, who always knows what to do, doesn’t know what to do. He needs his son to think for him, and Justin admits to feeling something like paralysis then, as his mind determines the miles they have to travel before the sun sinks from the sky.

“You don’t want to say it,” his father says, “but you’re thinking it.”

A tense silence follows his words, broken by a branch cracking somewhere in the distance. Both of them flinch.

When he finally speaks again it sounds like a reply. “What you’re thinking is we’re going to die.” He smiles without humor. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” He laughs harshly at this.

Justin first glances at Graham—who stands a few feet away, his eyes scrunched closed, seemingly deaf to their conversation—and then to the collar. In its blood-soaked fibers he thinks he can see the oily sheen of unreality, shimmering in the same way the mirror shimmers just before Alice steps through the looking glass. Nothing seems possible and everything seems possible. Life seems possible. Death, too.

Justin says, “Maybe you’re the one who—”

“You’re wrong for thinking that!” He laughs like someone who never shows emotion, explosively, wretchedly, so Justin knows it comes from somewhere deep inside. His laughter goes on and on until it finishes with a sob.

Justin has seen him at funerals—has seen him break a leg after falling from a tree stand—but this is the first time Justin has seen him cry. Before he knows what he is doing, he puts an arm around his father’s shoulder and draws him close—and his father is utterly overcome.

Justin thumps him on the back. It is a strange sensation, comforting his father, just as it is strange to look back upon yesterday—it lies so distant, so irrevocable. “I’ll be glad when we get out of this canyon,” Justin says.

His father lets go of his grasp and wipes at his eyes with the insides of his wrists. “Tell me about it.” He does not gift Justin with a smile, but his voice has some forced measure of humor in it.

Graham still has his eyes shut. He is chewing at his thumbnail, pulling at slivers of it hungrily. Justin gives him a squeeze on the shoulder. The boy’s eyes snap open to reveal his curiosity and fear.

“We’re not going to die?” Graham says. He touches his fingers to his belly, just below his breastbone, something he always seems to do before he cries.

“We’re not,” his grandfather says, though his expression carries darkness.

“All right,” Justin says. “Let’s go.”

His father remains footed in his shadow. “We’re not going to die because we’re going to kill that bear. We’re going to find it and we’re going to kill it good and dead.” He then takes a deep, quivering breath that helps steel him against whatever he will face. “Come on, Graham.” He continues up the trail and Justin stops him by beginning a series of broken sentences—but each thought loses its grip in the empty air. He becomes very aware of his father staring at him.

“Are you done?” his father says, and when Justin doesn’t say anything, he resumes tracking, now following the bear and not the dog. “Come on, Graham,” he calls over his shoulder. “It won’t be much longer. We’ll kill it and we’ll cut off its cock and cut out its heart and we’ll be back in camp by nightfall.” He stops and again says, “Come on, boy.” Not even looking at Justin but holding out his hand to Graham. His hand, roughed over with calluses from gripping hammers and levels and saws, from shaping the world. “Come on.”

Justin knows that this moment—when his son will or will not respond to that hand’s charge—means something. His family hangs in the balance. The family he came from and the family he has constructed. Justin readies to make a grab for the boy, but there isn’t any need: Graham is stepping back, retreating, ducking behind Justin.

Justin’s father drops his hand and balls it into a fist. “Just look at the two of you.” His voice has hate in it then, but also the hardest kind of love. “Go then.”

Nothing else occurs to Justin to say. Not good-bye or good luck or be safe. He is entirely out of conversation. He can only watch as his father departs them, growing smaller as he moves away, until they can’t see him anymore.

“What else did that book of yours say?”

In a whisper, Graham says, “Book?” He seems not to know who Justin is, let alone what he is talking about. His chin is quivering and he is looking over his shoulder as if the trail will at any minute pull out from under him and roll up into a secret closet and leave them stranded there in the middle of the forest.

Justin says, “Let’s head back to camp, okay?”

Graham nods and they return the way they came. They hurry through the trees, a place where shadow is interrupted by columns of light, as it is at the bottom of the ocean. With every step, they seem to move a pace faster—the forest blurring by—even as Justin’s muscles ache and his legs feel as though heavy weights hang from them. They duck their heads to avoid tree limbs, like thick arms swatting at them. They sweat and their sweat streams in muddy paths down their cheeks. Even the birds seem hushed as the two of them hurry along and speak only in whispers and peer now and again over their shoulders.

Justin’s mental switchboard plugs in to its many fearful circuits. He fears for his son and his father. He fears for himself, for his lack of judgment in putting Graham in harm’s way. The short-breathed alarm he feels grows with the steadily slanting light. He feels played with. He feels that soon, any moment now, when they are on the very verge of safety, some
thing
will rise from the forest and strike them down.

The river surprises him. One moment he is surrounded by woods, the next he teeters on the bank of the South Fork’s fast-moving waters. He had not heard it, his mind noisy with so many fears and doubts, all of them black-clawed and draped in fur. He puts one boot in the water and then withdraws it, as if testing a bath whose water proves too hot. “I don’t know if I can make it across again.”

“You don’t have to carry me,” Graham says, his voice and his face cast in doubt. “I can do it on my own.”

“No, you can’t. The river’s too strong. We’ll have to go upstream until we find a calm stretch.”

“Okay.”

“It might be another mile.”

“Okay.”

Another mile when the other side of the river beckons only twenty yards away. Justin heaves a sigh and begins to walk upriver, his boots crunching over pebbles.

“I remember something,” Graham says.

“What’s that?”

“From the book.”

“Okay.”

“For their dens, they dig a tunnel beneath a tree or beneath a rock face. The tunnel leads to a chamber where they sleep.” Up to this point, he sounds unthinking and emotionless, almost academic—but when he says, “I’m scared,” he becomes twelve again and picks up a spear-sized stick and examines it, as if unsure whether he ought to consider it a toy—something to clack against tree trunks—or a weapon.

PAUL

Paul follows the bear. Steadily the trail rises up an incline, and ahead, in scattered glimpses seen through the treetops, he sees a sheer canyon wall. The trail is messy with tracks and piles of lumpy excrement—decorated with berry skins—evidence of the bear’s frequent passage, and Paul tramps through them both. The thorns of prickly ash carry clumps of fur in them. Here and there a stump or a log appears to have gone through a shredding machine, torn apart by claws in search of grubs. He kneels next to one and stares into the woods as if they were a mirror and listens for a time, waiting for a grunt, a snap, some noise that will indicate he is not alone. Nothing. In the log, in a hole burrowed by a woodpecker, he spots a cache, some pine nuts, a highbush cranberry. He digs out the cranberry and pops it in his mouth, a little sweetness on his tongue, before spitting out the seed and moving on.

On a rise, the ground flattens out and the pines give way to a twenty-foot wash of broken basalt that has come loose from the cliff side in big and small pieces like some vast gray puzzle shaken from its board. Beyond it lies the cave—in a half-moon shape—as tall as Paul and twice again as wide. Blood leads into it, like the tacky trail left by some enormous red slug. He searches for movement but discerns only a short expanse of cave wall that slopes sharply downward before darkness overcomes it.

The smell—a heavy, oily smell—hangs in the air like a shambling presence. He brings a hand to his nose to guard against it. He stands there, his eyes fast on the cave, waiting for a decision to come to him. A chill wind blows through the gulch, momentarily dragging the smell away from him and making the pines send out a roaring whistle. Just as quickly, it stops, as if the forest has taken a deep breath.

He lifts his right arm over his head and stretches it out and lets it back down, and then does the same with his left. He snaps his neck sideways and it makes an audible pop. Readying for a fight.

It won’t be his first. When he was a teenager—at the Deschutes County Fair—among the shooting galleries and dunk tanks and horse stalls and pigpens, there was a ring of sawdust with a sign next to it that read
Bear Wrestling.
In the middle of the ring prowled a big black bear with a leather muzzle. The bear was chained to a stake. For a dollar, you could wrestle it. If you pinned it for ten seconds, you won a stuffed animal, a sack of caramel corn. Paul watched several men—thick-necked ranch hands—try to grapple the bear down, all of them reduced to screams, some to tears, as the bear overcame them. He had a plan. He would walk out there and punch the bear as hard as he could in the snout, as if it were a dog or a bull, something that he could teach to submit. He remembers the crowd of people surrounding the ring, laughing, hollering him on, as he approached the bear at a sprint. It rose on its haunches to greet him. He swung and struck the bear in the nose. Which served only to piss it off. It loosed a pained roar and wrapped its shaggy arms around him and dropped him flat with six hundred pounds of hair and muscle and stink pinning him. The muzzle pressed against his face. It was laced leather and he could see the teeth snapping on the other side of it, less than an inch from his nose.

He laughs at the memory and feels a little braver. From his pocket he pulls a book of matches and studies it in the palm of his hand. The Pine Tavern, it reads in green lettering. He imagines the whine of his son’s voice next to him. “What are you going to do?” he would say.

“I’m going to smoke it out,” Paul would say to his son, to no one.

“You’re crazy. And then what? What are we going to—”

“We’re going to kill it. That’s what we’re going to do.”

There is no response. Because he is alone. He retreats down the trail, swinging his head left, then right, until he spots what he is looking for, a rotten pine whose branches sag and whose bark hangs grayly off it like an ill-fitting coat. A woodpecker flies from a cavity in the tree when he approaches it. He grabs at a low-hanging branch and it sheds many browned needles when he yanks at it and finally tears it from the trunk. The
crack
makes him startle and he clicks off his safety and lifts his rifle and holds his breath, certain the bear will come lumbering from the cave and curl a clawed paw around him and drag him down into a darkness that carries the thunderous aroma of wet fur and animal shit and blood both old and new. It is the smell of something wild—and right now, in his mind, it fills the world and becomes the only smell.

But the darkness of the cave remains uninterrupted. Still, the idea lingers—and seems even to intensify—when he moves slowly forward, his steps uneven over the rocky surface. One hand grips his rifle, the other the branch. His head feels hot and his hands feel cold and stiff and doomed to a slow response when he needs their action.

Ten feet from the cave he kneels and lays down both the rifle and the branch. He removes a match and scratches it into a flame. The flame gutters, growing blue and then vanishing in a black puff as the wind drags it from the matchstick. He strikes another and cups a hand around it. The flame dances as he lowers it, but, shielded from the wind, it hugs the match and then the branch when he touches it to the tuft of needles where it flares and makes a noise like torn fabric. A blue-yellow color sputters and crawls along the branch.

He snatches up his rifle and then the flaming branch and rises from his crouch and charges the cave entrance. At the last minute he hurls the branch inside and turns to run unsteadily along the cliff wall before circling back to where he first stood, observing the cave.

His heart is like a hot hammer in his throat. The cave glows orange. Shadows play across its walls. It is the kind of place witches would gather, stirring their cauldron, speaking the darkest prophecies. He is glad Graham is not here to see the stuff of nightmares. All the rest of the world falls away, his attention singular, so that when a flock of geese passes closely overhead, he notices them only vaguely, their honks sounding like music from another realm, the way the distant ring of a buoy no doubt sounds to an exhausted swimmer pulled far from shore by the riptide.

At any moment he expects the bear to explode from the den, the smoke swirling around it like a wreath. He is ready to fire. But he is ready to run, too.

A minute passes. Then another. And still the bear does not come. The flames have died out. Smoke still billows from the cave but weakly, like steam pluming from a gray-lipped mouth on a winter’s day. He sighs and starts forward, this time with the intention of entering the cave.

He no longer moves with the caution he exhibited earlier, his rifle in his hand but gripped carelessly, an umbrella on a sunny day. At the cave entrance, he pauses and looks back over his shoulder. Then he descends into the smoky dimness.

He gropes around in the smoke, the embers offering some light but not enough. His feet clatter against rocks and his hands claw at the ground until they discover something damp, a collection of bones and blood, the remains of Boo. He scoops up what he can. He has by this time held his breath to the limit. His lungs demand air and he breathes in a great gasp of smoke and begins to cough, at first hesitantly and then miserably as the burn overtakes his throat and lungs.

He staggers from the cave, hacking, clutching to his chest a skull with some spine still attached to it, a gruesome sculpture upholstered with patches of hair. He pets the remains and they smear away against his hand. He is crying again. There is nothing violent and shuddery about it, not like that embarrassing moment with his son. Tears are simply leaking down his cheeks.

Boo listened to him, never rolled his eyes or whined at commands, always greeted him with slobbery kisses and a wagging tail. His loyalty was unconditional. If only humans were more like dogs, Paul is certain he would have loved more of them in his life.