I should have followed that car. I should have overtaken it and slowed it to a stop and walked over to it and tapped on the window. If I had, Hobbes might be alive today. But what did I know then? He was not dead then. It was just a car behind me.
Was that the person who brought a shotgun to these woods a few days ago, the day Hobbes went for his walk? Given what happened as a result, others would be along, no doubt. I opened my eyes and looked into the forest, gripped the rifle and swung at the dark trees.
No men tonight. But they’d be back, yes, those shooters, they would. Some people will not go away, they are too fastened to their habits, they arrive over their own tracks, observe in the same manner, speak the same words, always their undoing. I would meet that driver again. But when I looked down under my feet I did see men: I counted them in the hole with my dog when I looked down to where he was under me, a foot under me as I stood on the slope of absent flowers, I counted as many men packed around him as might have killed him, however many that was or might turn out to be. It was an illusion, a fancy of the brain, since to be accurate those hunters were spread under the forest behind me, but more men were coming out of that forest for me tomorrow, skilled and resourceful men like the ones before, or better this time. The bullet that took his life went through Hobbes and killed a number of them, and there was room in that hole for more. That bullet was not done with its flight yet. Maybe I had not killed them enough.
There was time to fix that. The clearing around me was what the French soldiers called the space between trenches in the Great War: nomensland, what the English called no man’s land, the place you dare not go, because once you cross it you will not come back, not the same man who left.
The night froze me like a stick and shook me at the world, I was that stick being shook at the world. I looked at my hand holding the gun stock. I was the rifle. I was the bullet, the aim, what a word means when it stands on its own. That is what revenge means even if you write it down.
29
THE SNOW WAS THICK AND SAILING ON THE BREEZES. I went back to the bedroom and pulled the blankets above me, sank into them and curled up as much as I could, and the circle made its own heat, enough that soon I was able to straighten out again. The plastic I had sealed the panes with still let in enough wind to bend the candle flame and drive shadows along the wall of the bedroom, or else the light was shaking itself. But I felt so numb, as if parts of me had gone away and that I had shriveled to what could survive, and so I moved where I remembered my hands were and felt them on my chest where I had folded them.
Long past midnight, as I lay warm and still, drifting into the dark, I saw something come for me out of it.
The wolves who jumped from the bus were running silently at me through the trees, their clear eyes fixed on the cabin, these two white drops of fur with blue sights aiming their leaps and strides, how they glided through the stripped rich birch so fast I would only know they passed if my ear were trained to the ground or I saw the snow move at their paws. They flitted through the entire early winter towards me, running in a pair or splitting around trees and fields to gather again into one pace and with one aim. They had covered miles already, loosed from their life in the bus, that last tattered outpost they sojourned in before the wilderness, and as they approached they trained upon me those blue, unwavering eyes.
They knew me now.
PART THREE
November 3rd–5th
30
I WOKE SLOWLY, UNSURE OF THE DAY OR TIME OR WHERE I was until I saw objects I recognized and knew myself to be in the bedroom. The light looked different, the way some days are different right from the start: it must have been the snow reflected into the window from outside, the space around me luminous and hardly made of objects at all.
I heard a voice beside me, a human voice formed around words other than my own thoughts, and I turned my head to the shortwave radio, still warmed up to a Canada station from the night before. I lay under the blankets and listened. True enough, snow showers for today, but later something ominous, a story told in numbers from Quebec and north of there, the temperatures ahead of and behind a much colder front, a hard line drifting south with wind and steadier snow and then a numbing cold.
The announcer stated that it was Friday, the morning of the third, the first weekend then of what was to be the real winter—a day, two at most until the weather came upon these woods with its wide brush of paint, in a single pass the season of coats.
I rose and made for the cold shirt hanging on the doorknob, pulled the pants up my legs and wended my way to the fire, shoving logs together over paper and setting a shaking match to it. The icy fog of breath rose also, wrung out of me like a spirit. As a child I’d often wondered if I was losing myself into the air on such mornings as these. I was slow today, as if catching up with myself or waiting for my senses to come along, and I felt pain where I went to sleep with none.
I pierced a slice of bread with the long fork and held it against the flames, and afterwards wandered around the house sipping mouthfuls of hot tea around the toast. My mind was as blank as the land outside, though I had thoughts of the writing on the poster and of how far things had come in a few days after a lifetime of relatively nothing. I thought of Hobbes, my first weekend without him.
With little to place my eyes on while I drank, I picked out the Shakespeare list from between the books and went down to D. Strange, I could remember writing these particular words, the smell in the room when I wrote them, what I saw when I wrote them, the feeling in my hand as I scratched out the letters, what I was wearing and how small and safe the world was, the warm fire, my father’s gentle assurance that books mattered, that reading them mattered more. Now that the world had gone to hell and was never coming back, that memory seemed all the more important. Everything was in the books, look at all the books, a life’s worth, those living walls around me.
There were four words, though the list might have been compiled over two days and not one because of the different inks, blue and black, for the first one and last three: Disponge, to squeeze out, and after a space, the next three in black: distraction, a troop of isolated soldiers; discase, to undress; declined, meaning fallen. It was nothing but a coincidence that the words from that section seemed to fall happily on the subject of the day, that the morning seemed intent on disponging all the available snow from the sky and sprinkling it upon the yard, the barn, the flowerbeds, the woodpile, and the porch around the door of the cabin, as if I had been writing for times ahead and not practicing a language long dead.
Claire was still on my mind, lay there freshly upon my other thoughts now that I had seen her yesterday, and twice for that matter, or three times if my thoughts counted, and I wondered if she lived in Fort Kent now. Strange that you can sleep with someone and a few months later not know the first thing about them, never mind years.