The police and paramedics had long since left. They already suspected Bill died of a heart attack. Daryl told the police that Conner had rented the cabin and clearly couldn’t get their deposit back now, and besides, they had no transportation yet. The police agreed Jonathan and the Braddick brothers could remain at the cabin for now, happy to leave and be done with it. Daryl left saying he would deliver Conner’s Suburban in two days. By that time they hoped to be able to pack their things and leave forever.
They dressed in their gloves and hats, and donned their backpacks. All told, they probably carried an extra eighty pounds in gear and clothing. They felt bad already.
Conner opened the rear door of the cabin, and they walked out into a pale light and biting cold. Coombs’ Gulch fell away before them, a vast and dark expanse of black spruce trees born out of acidic soil. The twin ridges of mountain peaks glinted in the sun, catching the first direct rays. Jonathan stood for a moment looking out at the Gulch and felt his fear and history wash away: none of it mattered now. There was only the long walk ahead; there was only the job to be done. Conner was right. This was their hell to walk through. It was mountains and dirt and trees. The weight of the gear sagged his shoulders. He hefted up the rifle and pack, pulled them tight against his body.
The sun was not yet over the eastern ridge. They took shovels and a pickaxe from Bill’s shed. They would dig the site, leave the tools, and retrieve them upon their return. The three of them walked to the edge of the woods where the tree line stood sentry before the Gulch. It was a solid wall of thin, dark conifers pointing to the sky like fingers from the earth. Half of them appeared dead. Spikes of broken limbs jutted from their trunks, flat and sharp. It wasn’t until the very highest reaches that the black spruce would suddenly sprout living branches and dark needles, which sagged like cloaks draped over old women. Dead pine needles covered the ground that was riddled with exposed roots and fallen limbs; blankets of moss covered wet rocks. The trees formed layer after layer upon each other until it resembled a three-dimensional picture on a sheet of paper; there was no depth, merely the illusion of it, a false world.
“I don’t remember it being this thick,” Michael said.
“No wonder everyone says it’s gone dry up here. It’s absolute shit.”
“Wasn’t there a trail before?”
“I can’t see anything.”
They walked the edge of the forest until they reached the corner of the cabin grounds, just past the supply barn and the firepit where Bill’s body had sat upright staring into the trees, and then paced back again. The forest had retaken everything, covered every previous step and trail, twisted and rearranged the landscape like a puzzle put together all wrong.
A slight entrance into the trees appeared to open to them, and they could see fifty feet into the dark woods. They plunged inside like returning to the womb. The sun glimpsed over the mountains and was then hidden from them.
The gear slowed them. Dead branches pulled at their packs, trashy shrubs grasped at their coverall sleeves. They maneuvered the long, wooden handles of the shovels and pickaxe between the trees and branches. The barrel of Jonathan’s rifle caught on brush. The ground was still soft and damp, not yet frozen for the winter. The pine needles made their footsteps nearly silent. The only sounds were their breath and the morning breeze through the Druid-cloaked canopy.
“You hear that?” Michael said.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly. Nothing.” There were no birds. It was silent as a grave, and they were the only living creatures walking among the tombstones.
Jonathan followed behind Conner and Michael. He couldn’t say if they were heading in the right direction. They had not traveled very far into the darkness that night ten years ago, just to a hillock overlooking the creek bed. But they had been drunk, intoxicated with bravado, trying to face childhood fears of the forest at night, and they pushed out – boys dressed as men. It had never been a serious attempt at hunting. Looking back, he wondered if they had ever taken anything truly seriously. But that night, beneath the booze, they had been afraid – afraid of what, Jonathan couldn’t be sure. Perhaps it was the sense of dread that lingers in the back of everyone’s mind, the thing that drives men and women to engage in all sorts of activities meant to stave off death or, at the very least, distract them from the coming silence. Everyone rages against it in some way, trying to keep it suppressed so it doesn’t explode. It drives them like an engine. He thought of joggers bouncing up and down the side of his neighborhood road at all hours of morning and night, mere inches from the certain death of passing cars; he thought of writers, composing books so their thoughts and words will somehow live on after they die; of industrious men and women who build companies to outlast their tiny lives; of politicians who craft pointless laws so they can look into the abyss and tell themselves they accomplished something – anything – to make the world and humanity a little better. They all lie to themselves.
And
