the trees, and still watch the wolves, or whatever we’re looking at. Maybe they’re rocks or clumps of twisted wood, or dead caribou, we’re hoping. But we keep edging along, watching them, and finally when we get close enough I see they’re wolves, and they’re dead, dried in the cold.
We stop again, staring at them, long-dead as they look we’re afraid they’re going to get up and start running at us, or just as afraid of dead wolves as live ones. They’re bits of cold, tattered hide hanging off cold bones, moving in the wind, haunting us from there. We’re still hiding from them when we know they’re dead. They aren’t our wolves, anyway.
“It’s another pack,” I say.
Henrick and Tlingit nod. We stare at the carcasses, and see ourselves, lying there, another bunch of dumb animals who went to somewhere they shouldn’t have. I look around, and farther across the clearing. There are other carcasses too, some caribou after all, antlers sticking up out of the snow, meat stripped, part-bone, part dried-out hide. I’d thought the further-away ones maybe were just rocks or dead wood, but I see what they are now, and it feels like a dead place, and there’s more wind or a front is coming or I’m getting even weaker but it feels colder, much colder, bitter down to more bitter.
I keep staring at the wolves, all they fought and hunted and played and mated, lying there. They don’t look like animals to me, anymore. If the pack hunting us are what hunted these down, I’m sorry for them. Anything dead I feel sorry for, now.
One of them is lying half on his side, away from the others, his head turned back face half in the snow, and my mind is wandering, again. This far away, walking into death, and my mind’s running where it isn’t wanted. You go through your time, you’ll gather places you never want to go to again, but your head will go there, without asking, just to gall you, I guess, or I don’t know why. It is biting colder, again.
11
The last hunt I went on with my father was cold like this, almost as cold. He had a pint-bottle he kept passing to me, then cursing me to get it back to him faster. I remember taking sips for me then pouring sips into the snow when he wasn’t looking to mess his day up without his knowing, leave him short for the way back.
“You piss me off,” he said, waiting for the bottle. He might not have said that, might have been something else, but that’s what I heard, I think. He said he was after this wolf he was convinced was there, again. He’d been after him all his life, he’d shot at it, tried to trap it. Why he said he was going to find him that day I don’t know, because I knew it was just a thing he said, but he was full of going-to-get-him-today and he sounded final like he knew he was going to get something that day even if he didn’t know what. It was all air, something he said, for all I know there never was any ghost wolf, probably it meant something else, or it was a story of his father’s, or some legend he liked to pretend for himself, and he lost the difference.
But there was a black-tailed deer, which is what we were really out after, dinners. Not huge, a good size though, down a slope, trotting to the left, after I don’t know what then stopping, and trotting the other way, to the river that was there, to drink.
“Well, there’s some dinners,” he said. He went to take his gun up, and stopped.
“You want it?” he said.
I shrugged. No I didn’t. He shrugged too, like I made no sense to him, then suspicious, because that’s what you are over anything that doesn’t make instant sense, like he looked standing at the bottom of my bed in the hospital when I was little. But he took his rifle up the rest of the way. He didn’t take much time sighting, he just raised the gun and fired, like he did to my mother and me, and the deer dropped without much fight and my father was already walking, then trotting down the slope, excited, I guess, to see his work.
I trailed him down, watching his back go down the hill, through the snow, cradling my rifle and judging, because he was not that far at all, if somebody was to stop walking and take a shot at the base of my father’s neck where the collar of his jacket sat, about, it would be hard to miss, even on the trot.
I stopped walking, watched him trotting away, closer to the deer, then I raised my gun and I sighted it and I shot him, though his collar. He dropped down very quick, quicker than the deer, like a string pulled him to the ground, and rolled and lay on his side, face half in the snow. When I got to him his eyes were going, already, he looked up at me, breathing a half-buried snort, confused, but not at all confused. He was fighting for breath, a little, like Lewenden did on the plane, and like Lewenden I put my hand on him. ‘
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
