After years in New York City it was difficult for Gray to imagine that at nineteen, when he joined the Marine Corps, he had never been outside the Sawtooth Range except for several trips to Boise, eighty miles southwest. His father had told him that if he wanted a journey he could go deeper into the mountains. Until he left for boot camp, Gray's horizon had always been the next jagged mountain range, and he knew all there was to know between himself and that horizon. He had learned since that it was only a short distance to those peaks.
Carrying the axe, Gray left the cabin through the kitchen door. The screen slammed behind him. Behind the house were two smaller one-room cabins for hunters, and behind them a small barn and corral. Attached to the barn was a tack shed. These outbuildings were made of clapboard weathered to a dull gray and curled. He crossed the packed ground to the woodshed, a firebreak distance of fifty feet from the house. Hidden by a wall of chokecherry and mountain maple and down a small ravine, Black Bear Creek gurgled and ran. Pink and purple mountains rose above him in all directions.
The woodshed was a peaked and shingled roof on four posts. Two-by-fours crisscrossed on three sides for lateral support. He walked around several horseweeds and a musk thistle, then stepped into the shed. Almost three cords of wood were under the roof. His father had cut the wood, which lasted years in the high elevations before beginning to rot. The splitting block was a two-foot-high wedge of Douglas fir.
Gray picked up a length of wood and put it on the block. The axe swung in a practiced arc, and the blade sank into the wood. Gray lifted the axe, the wood clinging to the blade, and brought it down again. The halves toppled to the ground. These pieces should have been a good size for the fireplace, but he picked up one, returned it to the block, and halved it again. Then he lifted the smallest piece and split it with a well-aimed swing. Now he had kindling.
But he swung again, this time at the sticks on the ground. The blade bit through them and dug into the earth, the shattered halves flipping into the air. Gray grunted as he brought the axe around again. This time the whistling blade missed wood entirely, and shot into the soft ground, sending chips skittering away. Then again and again and again. The blade chewed up the ground.
The axe changed course, slamming into one of the shed's support posts. Splinters shot away. The axe slashed at it again, and the ancient wood fractured and grasped the steel blade. Gray ferociously ripped the blade out of the wood and sent it soaring again into the post. A hollow cry escaped him. He chopped maniacally at the post, and the top portion of the post began to sag under the roof's weight.
He swung again at the toppling beam, a blind blow. The blade bounced off the wood and cut deeply into Gray's calf. The front quarter of the shed drooped slowly to the ground, braces and posts and crosspieces cracking loudly. Still he swung, into the post, into the shingles, into the ground, into the post again. A tear almost made it down to his chin, but his frantic motion flicked it off to the ground. He brought the blade around again and again, and chips burst from the wreckage. Blood flowed down his leg and filled his shoe. His brow was damp from sweat and his cheeks shiny from tears. He swung savagely, the mad hiss-and-chop cadence filling the canyon. The old shed slumped further as the axe slashed into it again and again.
Five minutes or an hour might have passed. When he finally dropped the axe his hands were bleeding from open blisters and his right pant leg was damp and sticking to his calf. His breath ragged, he stumbled away from the wreckage. He left red footprints.
Gray collapsed on the front porch. He gazed without seeing at the distant pinnacles. The lowering sun coppered his face. He wet his salty lips. And again, for the thousandth time in two days, his mind produced the image of Mrs. Orlando.
And with it came the black cloud, the unshakable agony of grief and guilt. This cabin, his family home, had always been his refuge and his cure. This time it had not been enough.
Gray leaned against the trunk of a black cottonwood, his legs out in front and his feet dangling above the water of Black Bear Creek. He was sitting on a mat of blooming buttercups. The stream gurgled by, pooling and bubbling, idle at some spots and swift at others. A fine mist hung over the creek, softening the boulders that lined it and wetting the serviceberry and nettles that grew along the stream. The water's white hiss calmed him. Blisters on his hands were raw, blood showing at the surface. He was a quarter mile north of the house. The Weatherby rifle and a backpack also leaned against the tree. Bog orchids and ladies' tresses grew near the cottonwood's trunk.
He brought out a length of beef jerky, bit some off — not without a struggle — and began chewing. This wasn't minimart jerky made of leather a cobbler would reject, but beef jerked by Rose Schwartz down in Ketchum, beef with flavor that filled the head and then rushed down into the chest to seize the innards, a sensation so strong that anything else eaten the remainder of the day had no taste whatsoever. Gray chewed and chewed. He kept his fingers apart and his hands upturned on his lap. His palms and fingers stung.
A sniper was taught that when pinned down he had to move or die. Resting against the tree, Owen Gray was trying to move, to push his thoughts along quickly rather than let them rest, for when his mind halted it was on the horrific image of Mrs. Orlando, bound and gagged on the roof, dead by Gray's hand. He hoped he might be able to work the awful moment through, to leap from one rationalization to the next until he found one that alleviated his pain, and so he needed to keep his thoughts rushing forward. Move or die. A sniper also learned never to exit a hide by the same route he entered it. Maybe this lesson could also help, keeping Gray's thoughts from returning by the same route to the same grief. If he could just go through new doors, roll along to new territory.
His chin came up. He listened intently and searched the stream banks without moving his head. His father had taught Gray that it was possible to sense if someone were watching you, saying that you could feel a slight warp in the air, an eerie dissonance in the day. Gray felt it then. Still chewing, he slowly turned his head right. His hand inched toward the rifle. His gaze swept the banks and the underbrush and trees beyond.
Pale blue eyes were locked on Gray. They peered out from the shadows of a small dogwood, partially hidden behind the dark green leaves of an alpine laurel. Gray saw pink below the eyes. A tongue.
"A coyote," Gray said to nobody. "That's all I need."
The animal slipped out from under the tree and walked in a tight slink several feet closer to Gray. The coyote was on the other side of the creek, emboldened by the intervening water. It stepped into a dish of light that had made it through the overhead bough canopy. The animal was forty feet away, and its eyes never left Gray. Its coat was a dusty gray except for the buff belly. The fur on its legs was urine yellow. Its tail was bushy and handsome. The tongue hung out rudely.
"Beat it. I don't like carnivores staring at me for any length of time."
Gray lifted a small stone and chucked it at the coyote, a halfhearted toss that barely cleared the stream. The animal didn't move. Gray's hand stung from the effort.
"If you had any idea how many coyotes the Gray family has killed over the years, you wouldn't sit there so complacently."