In the end, he finds himself upon a golden plain, the rise of yellow grasses in the late morning sunlight, the cold blowing in through a gap in the window glass. There is an animal atop a hill, a creature that reminds him of an elk but which, of course, is no elk and which stares down at him impassively, black-eyed. He knows he has dreamed of this animal, of this moment. He fishes a book from the backseat and on its cover is the same wheat-colored creature, the same grassy hill. Then he stands and steps out of the car. His hands are empty. He expects the animal to flee but the animal continues to watch him, without moving, without even seeming to be afraid. And then he knows that it is waiting for him. It has been waiting for them all. He steps forward, up the slope, through grasses the color of summer sunlight. The animal calls him Majer and when the man moves to correct her, his throat seizes and he sees that his pink hands have become furred claws and that in his mind there are no words at all. What he holds to in that final moment is the sense that the man he would call his friend has come to him at last and he pulls that feeling around him like a coat of fur as a scent as wild and free and clear as any he could have ever imagined wells up inside and pulls him away at last.
PART IV. THE ANIMALS
16
HE CAME TO THE GATE WITH THE THROTTLE FULL OPEN, THE flat yellow of the headlights arcing across the blurred snowfield before him and the tracks spinning a long rooster tail out behind. He could already see the cut padlock, its bent shape hanging from the spotlit gate latch, and the sound he made was a howl of panic and rage as he leaped from the sled, flinging the goggles off his face and flailing up through the snow.
The enclosures were dark and what details were held within were rendered grainy and insubstantial, shapes without color or depth, an occasional stone or tree trunk rising through the continuous fade of the onrushing snow. He called to Cinder, his fingers lacing through the fence wires, called her and called her and called her until at last a low groan rose from the muffled silence. He could just make out the snow-covered shape of her body fading up from the static, her body on its side, panting, tongue out and single eye staring up into the constantly descending snow. She growled now, low and deep, and when he tried to speak to her again the only sound he could make was a high keening whine. Still she did not rise.
He was running then, floundering uphill toward the top of the loop, the dark silent cages passing him on either side, his boots following the path that Rick had made, the line of which curved toward each enclosure and then moved on, uphill or down, the path mostly covered in snow now and the whole compound appearing as if it were some dark jail or prison: cages everywhere with hills of snow between them. The sight of it made him shudder. And that was when he saw Majer, the great hulk of the animal’s back fading out of the granular and shifting darkness, unmoving in the center of his enclosure as if he had fallen asleep by the frozen pond, Bill flailing toward the gate through the high drifts between the fence lines in silence but for his heaving breath.
When he reached the front of the cage at last, he wrapped his fingers through the wire, sucking air and watching the silent unmoving shape within and then his hands had curled into fists and he was banging the fencing and scrambling sideways through the drifts, stripping off his gloves and fishing the keys from his pants pocket and unlocking the door, his heart gone wild, hands shaking, the door coming open now and the night clamping around him, everything hushed and muffled so that his rasping breath was the only possible sound.
His first steps postholed directly into the snow so that he fell forward into the drift, frantic now, scrambling up and through that rise until Majer’s body lay there before him, the bear on its side, its great head covered with snow, mouth open, tongue lolling against the ice. He laid his hand on the bear’s mouth, felt the flesh there, not yet frozen but cooling. Above the long snout, the eyes remained open, pale and faintly blue and holding, somewhere deep within, a darkness like black night covered with the translucent but impervious film of his blindness.
And he knew that Majer was dead.
He tried to speak but there were no words and after a time he leaned forward, his knees crunching the snow, one arm reaching up to lie upon that furred back, a back still carrying a hint of the animal’s warmth. He lay upon that great carcass and wept, his face pressed to Majer’s thick brown fur, one hand stroking, so slowly, the long snout. He tried again to speak but what came was only a long howl that rose up from the center of him and would not stop, his heart unspooling all around him, a red ribbon that turned and looped and fell everywhere, into the sky, into the snow, around the two of them, the man who lay upon the body of the bear in a cage at the center of a white and frozen forest, and in the falling snow it was unclear where the man ended and the bear began, for both had begun to shift into white, the man sinking into the body of the bear, the bear rising into the body of the man, both of them dissolving into a blowing whirl of snow that seemed, in that moment, to come from all directions at once, the rush of it upon their bodies like an avalanche.
THE ANIMALS had been killed in their cages. The bald eagles both dead on their sides on the floor and in the adjacent enclosure the turkey vulture was also dead. Tommy and Betty and Chester. The porcupines were quietly in motion but both the martens were dead, side by side, in a kind of tortured embrace, their mouths open and tiny teeth shining out in the darkness. The raccoons — Perry, Tony, and Barley — all huddled at the back of their enclosure, alive, although they would not come forward no matter how long Bill stood there. Baker the badger was dead and Goldie the bobcat and Katy the red fox, all of them frozen in attitudes of fear and agony. And then Zeke. The wolf lay in his customary location at the back of the fence line, panting and growling at him, not moving away even when Bill came right up the chain link, only staring back at him with eyes yellow and rolling and Bill’s voice offering that same wordless keening in response.