Girl by Christian Kiefer
The night the girl came, there had been nothing to kill. Not even a songbird atwitter upon the frozen air. And so cold that he could feel his hands creaking in his gloves. He followed the tracks of a hare into a thicket, the shotgun heavy in his grip, but the tracks faded to unbroken snow. His gaze searched for the black marbles of rabbit eyes in the white, trying to bring himself to earth in the way of all true hunters, to meld the human with the animal in such a way that the predatory instinct in a man’s heart was reawakened and the old ways of seeing, long dormant, were made present again. He wished Carol could somehow feel it the way he did but although she had come hunting with him many times, he knew her experience was not the same.
“Super quiet out there,” he told her as they ate their dinner that
night.
“Maybe a storm coming,” she said. “The barometer’s been moving around some.” She picked at her meal.
“Not hungry?” he said.
“I guess not as much as I thought.”
There was a knock then, faint, like something small and round hit-ting the door. They both stopped and listened. Then another: a hard, sharp clack. This time they could hear, both of them, the object hit the snow with a muffled thump.
“Bird?” Carol said, her voice quiet.
Another small clattering impact.
This time he rose, they both did, reaching out of habit for the shot-gun and she for the flashlight. “I’m armed,” he said to the door and then pulled it open.
The figure caught in the flashlight’s beam was so startling, so pale and white, that he very nearly pulled the shotgun’s trigger. Carol gasped beside him and then she was hustling outside into the snow, her feet shod only in woolen socks, her thin shirt insufficient for the blast of freezing air. “Are you all right?” she was saying. “Oh honey. You’re so cold. Mark? Mark? Get some blankets.” The flashlight swung everywhere so it was difficult for him to find any purchase, the forest becoming a place of tilting shadows, but within that vertiginous space he could still find his wife and the diminutive figure of the girl, naked in the turning light.
***
The girl did not speak. They thought at first that this might be merely temporary – the shock of whatever she had been through making her mute – but it did not pass. She was a thin, dark creature and peered back at them from under the great blanket Carol had wrapped her in, eyes luminous even in the oil flame light. Those eyes seemed to peer directly into him and each time he found her watching he could not help but look away.
“Here’s our little thief,” he said.
“What?”
“All that stuff’s been missing,” he said. “She’s been taking it.”
“Stop,” Carol said.
“It’s gotta be her.”
“Just stop.”
That first night they fed her and she ate ravenously and then bedded down on the floor by the woodstove, her tiny shape wrapped in blankets. Carol fell asleep next to her, on purpose or accident, he did not know. They were not quite touching on that first night, but were in curved parallel, his wife a great pale shape in flannel, and the girl still wrapped in the blanket, and he was reminded of one of the few visitors they had ever had on the ridge and how his wife clung to their 22 small children, offering to take them for a walk in the woods, trying to play with them, trying to engage them in talk and games and ideas. He was embarrassed by her behavior and it did not surprise him when weeks and months passed and those distant neighbors did not return and did not invite them to visit their more distant ridge. “Oh those children were so sweet,” she said to him that night after they had gone home. All he could do in response was nod in the darkness. He could feel her mind working beside him in the bed, thinking of those small faces, those small hands, the way their eyes shone in the light, curious and needful. She did not know what he had done, that he had gone, in secret, many months before they moved out to the wilderness, to have the procedure completed that would render him infertile. He did not revel in the deception nor in the idea of them cutting into parts which felt tender even in his thoughts, but he knew that he did not want children, not ever, that they did not feature in any vision of the future he could imagine and that, even beyond such concerns, to bring a child into a world so fallen as this was to commit a kind of atrocity. Both of them, he and Carol, were capable of surviving in the forest even in the most grim and dire of circumstances, but a child would need them, would need them with a level of desperation that he simply could not abide. What he told himself he believed was that he wanted to remain wild. Before they had left the town for the ridge, she had asked him if they could see a fertility specialist and he told her that he did not trust doctors and she did not ask him again.
***
“I guess I’ll take her out to the lodge,” he said in the morning. “Get the word out. I’m sure someone’s looking for her.”
“She can stay here with us,” Carol said.
“What does that mean?”
She did not answer immediately, the pause lingering all around them, lingering so long it asked to be named. But then she said, “While you’re out to the lodge. There’s no reason to take her out there when you might just be bringing her back.”
“Well, I’d just leave her with Flo,” he said. “She can be in touch
with the authorities if need be.”
He watched the girl. She ate muesli from a chipped bowl but her use of the spoon was untrained and awkward. This child is a wild thing, he thought. Carol had dressed her in a heavy shirt which ran down past her knees like a strange and ill-fitting gown.
“She’ll stay here,” Carol said now.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
“She’ll stay here. If someone wants her they can come here and
pick her up.”
That night, when the darkness was complete and they had eaten and cleaned up, she once more bedded down next to the girl near the woodstove.
“You’re gonna sleep down here again?” he asked her.
“I think that’d be best,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“I guess so,” he said. He waited there for a moment, unsure
of what to do.
“You can go on up,” she said.
Still he stood there waiting, as if she might do something to help him understand what was happening. As if she might give him some kind of sign.
***
A day passed. Another. He told her he was going out hunting again and she merely nodded. The girl was playing with sticks outside in the cold winter sun. There were moments when she seemed vaguely familiar to him and he wondered if she reminded him of some child-hood friend deep in the hidden recesses of his memory. And yet she was also decidedly alien, her movements so strange that he some-times found himself chilled while watching her, an odd awkwardness to her upright motion as if she had just learned how to stand, how to walk. When she ran, which he saw only once, it was with a kind of staggering gait that did not seem normal for a healthy child. He won-dered if she had been malformed in her skeleton or musculature or perhaps had suffered from polio or some other such illness. He won-dered too where her family was, how she had come to find them upon their ridge, and why she could not speak.
When he reached the lodge he found Flo there eating a bag of pea-nuts. “Lookie what the cat dragged in,” she said, her voice the same dry rasp he remembered.
He asked her, in faltering tones, if she had seen his wife earlier that week and Flo told him what he already knew, that she had not seen Carol in a long while. “You lose your wife somewhere, Mark?” she asked him.
“No, no,” he said, “not that. Just checking up on something.”
He told her then of the girl. She sat passively and listened. She had once told him that she had lived in the depths of that forest for all her life, back when there was a kind of settlement upon the banks of the lake, now gone but for the lodge she continued to run and which provided a point of contact for individuals and families and occasional backcountry guides and hunters and backpackers throughout the mountains. For these reasons he expected her to ex-press little reaction to the news of the girl’s presence but instead she seemed to stiffen the longer he spoke.
“She got a name?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “Can’t get a word out of her.”
“You mean she don’t speak?”
“Not so far,” he said.
She nodded as if this news were not unexpected. “I wondered,”
she said.
“At what?”
But she did not answer this question. As if on cue, the windows darkened, the sunlight snuffed out by clouds. “Strange times,” is all she said.
“I guess. Any news to report? You seen the Locklins at all?”
“You don’t know? Locklins left.”
“When’d that happen?”
“Two months maybe.”
“Jeez, I didn’t know. I thought Carol’d kept in touch with them.
I guess not.”
“Like I said: strange times.” She nodded and then said: “You’d
best get moving, Mark. Storm’s coming.”
“What am I supposed to do with the girl?”
“Ask your wife.”
“What?”
But the room had gone dark and the great log building creaked
under its force.
***
He took the machine westward, not toward his own ridge but toward the ridge the Locklins had vacated. That Carol had lied to him con-tinued to ride upon his heart, understanding only that it did not bode well for any future he could imagine, his wife’s need to keep the girl child with her at the cabin apparently overriding any other concern, the mere presence of the girl blowing apart, in one moment, all the years they had been together, all their history. That she would lie to him about such a thing seemed impossible and yet that was what she had done. But why?
Tree shadows the color of clear blue sky and then darkening as that same sky darkened, the clouds flooding across its surface until that dark woolen shape lay low and dense over forested ridges that he could feel more than see, his progress obscured by trees and stones and the snow that lay upon everything, the surety of that surface an illusion hiding meltwater pockets and hollows, his route chosen with slow care.
Household detritus on the path, half-buried everywhere. Rac-coons? Bears? And something else: great angular cuts upon the trees, as if some great beast or beasts had sharpened their claws there. Bears, he thought again, although even in thinking such a thing he felt a tingle of fear.
The cabin itself was intact although it appeared as if all its con-tents had been thrown out into the snow – furniture, books, clothing, pots and pans, various utensils, tools, a chainsaw – and stranger still was the presence of their snowmobile, partially buried in the snow, seat shredded, engine shroud torn asunder. He supposed they might have left any number of things behind as they departed for what-ever new life lay ahead of them but even at a glance there were ob-jects here that he did not think anyone would have left. The saw. The snowmobiles. The stock of a rifle or shotgun poked out of the snow near the door.
The experience of entering the front room was like entering the den of an animal. Fur on the floorboard, on the broken shelves, fur on every surface as if many animals had romped through that small, dark room, tearing it to pieces, although not as an animal might but in a systematic way, as if something had been conscious enough to destroy every aspect of the place that might have been useful to a human being. Books shredded. The remains of a tattered quilt lay on the floor, its batting in tufts. Shelves broken. Pots and pans and shat-tered glass. He stepped carefully through that wreckage. On the floor near the wash basin, its metal tub filled with shards of glass and splin-ters of broken wood, lay a crumpled photograph and he lifted it in the shadowy room, held it to the open door for its feeble, failing light. A vacation photo. The Locklins stood in some desert before a land-scape of Joshua trees and the girl stood with them. He had no ques-tion now that it was she and no other. She was, even in the image, a tremulous thing, her eyes darkly shrouded, peering out at the camera as if untrusting of what it might do to have her photograph taken from her. She had been to his and Carol’s cabin before, had visited with her parents and sibling, but he could hardly remember her but as a kind of presence that dragged away his wife’s attention. This was she. He was sure of it. But what could that mean? Where was her family? They had disappeared from radio contact nearly six months before and Flo at the lodge had told him that they had gone, although he did not question her as to where or why. Had they remained after all? And this darker thought: that the wilderness itself claimed them, that some bear or beast had come to slaughter them as in some tale of old.
He tucked the photograph into his jacket pocket and stepped out-side into the snow once more. The sky was bleak although no snow yet spiraled down from its darkness. From the edge of the clearing where he had pulled the snowmobile to a stop, he stood and surveyed the wreckage. He knew he needed to get moving toward home. The threat of snow heavy upon the air. And yet he could not leave just yet. Instead he picked his way around the side of the little log build-ing, the snow littered everywhere with the debris of their lived lives.
His own cabin had been built with a root cellar beneath and it was possible that this had served the same purpose once. Now the word that came to him was den. Some animal had bedded down here. The smell was unmistakable even from where he stood at the lip of the entrance in the chill, frozen, darkening air. And in the shadows under the cabin, in the areas where the snow fell away to bare dirt and stone: cedar boughs lay piled amidst refuse that he at first could not identify in the dim light. Trash and wrappers and broken open cans, the rocks there spattered with their contents. But something else too that gave his heart a terrible lurching chill: a rack of rib bones attached to a skull that could only be human. “My God,” he whispered into that darkness. Then he was running.
***
The sky went black before he was even halfway back to the cabin, the whole of the forest disappearing around him. The snow began soon thereafter, first a single flake that seemed to push forward in the faint glow of his headlight and then a great heavy silence came from the sky, huge crystalline flakes in such quantities as if poured from a huge bucket somewhere in the black beyond the trees. He had no idea now if he was traveling in the correct direction at all, the whole of the world seeming a static drift so that he felt he was rising ever into the air. Trees of no shape or texture, cut from a darkness so com-plete that it had neither scale nor distance, and he tunneling ever into its inky emptiness, all the while trying, failing, to set the map of his thoughts to rights, marking his path with a moving dotted line like something out of an old cartoon: the store, his path to the Locklins’ and then back across how many ridges? Had he miscounted? Had he been drifting away from his home all the while? In the pocket of the gear bag, among loose shotgun shells, he found his old compass and held it flat upon his gloved palm. The arrow pointed more or less in the direction he thought it would. He followed those thin lines north-west, the red arrow pointing off to his right, stopping the machine to lean forward and hold the compass in the headlight’s glow, then setting off again, stopping, looking, continuing, over and over. At several points he thought he could see movement on the edges of the lamp’s glow – shapes and shadows – he was sure of it, but then less sure, sitting upon the idling machine, watching the snow rake across his vision.
Had he stopped again? He could not recall stopping and yet he was not moving. I should get moving, he thought. He looked down at his own gloved hands upon the handlebars and could barely see them. The headlight’s glow suddenly very dim, yellow, its illumina-tion like that of a guttering candle. He had been so cold but now he felt like he would be fine, that he would make it, if only he could rest for a few moments before moving out again. Already small ridges of snow on the curled fingers of his gloved hands. Maybe I’ll just stay here a bit longer, he thought. Out in the storm, the shadows shifted and moved. Sometimes one or another seemed to separate and ap-proach him out of that static haze but each time it dissipated just as he thought he could define its shape. Then the night was so black and the snow so heavy that he could see nothing at all.
And yet then there was something there. He shook his head at the sight of it for surely it was his imagination. But then no, no, there she was. “Girl,” he said weakly. Then her last name: “Locklin.”
She came toward him upon the surface of the snow, not punching down through it but creeping upon its surface, lizardlike, spiderlike, hands scrabbling forward, knees out, head turned toward his at an angle impossible for a human being, a little girl. I’m imagining this, he thought. I’m hallucinating. Got to get moving again. Got to get moving. Can’t rest. Just move.
But he could not move. Did not. The girl came on and when she was there at his side she leaned in and sniffed at him, her features wild, feral, seeming, in that moment, not the face of a little girl at all but rather that of a beast, small, pointed, sharp, and covered, he saw now, with a thin layer of downy fur the color of the forest shadows. She bared her teeth at him. Sharp and paler than the snow.
He had almost forgotten that the snowmobile under him was still idling, for when he thumbed the throttle and the machine leapt forward he very nearly toppled over backwards into the snow. The girl sprung away like a cat, her voice raised in a yowl, but she was already behind him, the throttle open full wide and the machine streaming out across the ridge. He turned it through the trees, barely missing the branches and then swung around another great trunk, this time the lowest branches whipping just overhead, the throttle still whining and the machine careening downhill.
He would not know what the machine hit until well after the snows had stopped. What he remembered was that long flight down the slope and then the whole of the snowed-over world exploded, the machine smashing into something unseen in the drifts and then his body was in the air.
ody was in the air. He opened his eyes upon the smoking wreck. His back was an agony but his mind felt strangely clear. Around him the forest was so dark and the snow so heavy. He looked for the girl again but there were only shadows and emptiness. He felt he was falling through that blizzard. Or rising. Before him, out in the swirl of the storm, shadows moved and shifted and then coalesced into some dark shape that lumbered toward him. A kind of beast, thick and low to the ground, moving through the haze of snow to where he lay staring across at the ruins of the machine. She is coming to kill me, he thought. And he closed his eyes.
A sound now. The thing was there at his side. Its great claw came out and brushed at the snow upon his face. Eyes open again. She leaned down and said his name. Shook him. And then there she was. “Carol?” he said.
***
He would not recall how many days and nights he was lost in the fever dream that came after. Later he would try to pull together the bare facts of what had happened, that she had heard the distant approach of his snowmobile, the throttle clearly wide-open even in the storm, and then heard its abrupt silence. She knew something had gone terribly wrong and had donned her snowshoes and had been lucky enough to find him less than a hundred yards from the cabin and had dragged him home on the sled. He did not know how she managed to get him into the cabin or how he got up the ladder and into the sleeping loft but that was where he lay when he fluttered in and out of consciousness in the days and nights to follow, wracked by pain and by the fever.
Sometimes he woke to see the girl crouched at the end of the bed, her position, her pose, not that of a child but more like a seated dog, knees flung out and hands and feet in a tight group before her. When she growled and bared her sharp, pale teeth at him he tried to call for his wife but his voice had turned to ash and soon he fell back into the black well of his unconsciousness. When he was lucid he knew he must have dreamed such things. Surely the law would have come by now, even in the storm. But then Carol was there, pressing a wet cloth to his forehead. “The girl,” he whispered.
“Don’t worry,” she said.
“The girl.”
There were long hours in which the cabin was totally silent but for his own breath. At first he thought Carol was downstairs being very quiet but then he began to realize that she was not in the house at all, that she had gone outside, although with the blizzard still raging he could not imagine where or why. There were dreams but were they products of his fever and pain or the truth of his situation? He did not know.
He would only half recall crawling to the window, shaking and sweating and freezing from fever, climbing the sill to find that the world outside the glass was still enraptured by the storm, the whole forest streaming with snow. He called Carol’s name but there was only silence in the cabin and he was just leaning back to return to the sweat-soaked and stinking nest of his bed when a brief arc of movement caught his attention from the base of the trees.
It was, he saw, the girl. At first he thought she was clothed in something the color of tree bark for he could hardly see her against the shadows of the forest and would not have noticed her at all were it not for the contrast of the snow, but then with a shock he realized that she wore no clothing at all, that she was completely naked, her very flesh the color of the wood, her hair a shock of lank matted fur that seemed, as he watched, to cover her shoulders as well as her head. He made a sound at the sight of her, a kind of gasp, and although the cabin was full chinked logs and the window a slab of thick glass, she must have heard or sensed him because she stopped in the snow and peered up at him in the window. Her entire body was poised there like an animal, nose raised to sniff the air.
And then another motion drew his vision and for a trembling moment he could not reconcile what he saw with what he knew, what was possible. His wife, his Carol, had come out from the edge of the forest and squatted next to the girl in the snow. She too was completely naked, her skin not the deep brown of the girl’s but pale and blotched with pink from the cold. Her bare feet seemed to clutch the snow and, like the girl, she pressed her head into the air as if to take his scent. Her eyes peered toward his but he did not feel that she saw him although he also knew it was impossible that she did not. He came scrambling backwards, away from the window, wanting only to somehow unsee what he had seen, his body flailing hard against the floor, the rail, the edge of the bed, a sound rising in the air of the cabin, a kind of wail which he realized was his own voice now and he came stumbling to the ladder, lifting his feet over the edge and reaching for the rung somewhere below him. His fall felt like a kind of loosening, as if he were swimming in the wood-fired heat. Then only a kind of darkness shattered distantly by a raw arc of pain.
***
“Christ you scared me,” she said. “You are so pigheaded,” she said. “Couldn’t just stay in bed like a reasonable man. No. You had to try to come down.”
“The girl,” he said again.
“That’s what you’re worried about?” she said. “Rangers came day after you got back in the storm. She’s been gone near a week.”
“A week?” he said. There were memories of her somewhere but they felt like trout in the fast current of cold clear mountain stream. She had sat at the foot of his bed, thin, wraith-like, and her teeth had been sharp and yellow. And something else too. Outside. What was it? He felt so tired. So very tired.
“You go back to sleep,” she said. “Just get some rest.”
“No,” he whispered. He struggled to rise then but his back seared in pain and he collapsed to the sagging sofa once more, his teeth gnashing together.
“Careful,” she said. “You did a number on yourself.”
“Hurts.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Do you want another pill?”
He wanted to ask her what she had already given him from the stash they had amassed in the medicine chest, wanted to remind her, too, that the pills there – painkillers and antibiotics and the like – were for emergencies only, but when he shifted his weight again the wave of pain that shot through him pulled the air from his lungs. “Shit shit shit,” he said.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said to him, already reaching across
him for the pills.
“She’s gone?” he said through his teeth.
“She’s gone,” his wife said.
“Something happened to them.”
“To who?”
“The Locklins. Something terrible.”
Carol sat looking at him, the amber pill bottle in one hand. “We can talk all about that when you’re not high on Oxy,” she said. She shook a pill out and set it on his tongue and then tilted the metal water cup against his lip.
He swallowed. Lay back. Waited for the long drift to begin again.
***
Two full weeks passed before he was able to stand for more than a few minutes at a time. Carol was busy around the property and while she insisted that she was always nearby there were many instances in which he called for her and she did not come. “I guess I didn’t hear you,” she would tell him when he questioned her.
“Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere,” she said. “Just around here.”
He managed to get outside a week later and a whole day passed in which he managed, with care, to remain upright. But then the next day he turned toward a sound in the forest and his lower back clenched in agony and he went down to the mud and needles as if he had been felled by a shot. Carol was there and with her help he man-aged to crawl back into the cabin.
“Did you hear that?” he said to her once he was once more situated upon the sofa.
“Hear what?” she asked him.
“That sound. It was like a bird but – I don’t know – like someone
trying to make the sound of a bird.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” she said.
And in truth, neither did he.
That day had set a kind of pattern. He would be up and out of the cabin after breakfast, moving slowly but managing, nonetheless, to get around. Some days he would make it through until dinner time, as long as he was careful, but others the slightest wrong motion would send his back muscles into a clench of fury. In such moments he would be unable to move at all, his body crumbling to earth, every part of him feeling vulnerable and weak and alone. Most times he could yell his wife’s name and would hear an answering call from somewhere and then she would be there to help him to his feet and then back to the sagging sofa where he would take a pain pill and wait and wait and wait for that impossible sharp knot of pain to subside. Carol had found the volume of medical anatomy from the small library of books they had brought with them into the wilderness and he sometimes studied the image of the flayed-open back muscles as he lay on the sofa in recovery. Thoracolumbar fascia. Erector spinae. Serratus an-terior. Long words that ultimately held no meaning whatsoever. For the first time in his adult life he wondered if he should try to get to a doctor to see if there was any remedy for what he had done to himself but then reminded himself anew that doctors were businessmen first and that all he would get from the visit was a bill and prescriptions for more medications he could not afford.
One afternoon he fell to the dirt a few dozen yards from the cab-in’s front door and yelled his wife’s name until his voice was hoarse but she did not appear. He had not seen her when he had exited the cabin and where she had gone he did not know. For much of the time that followed, he looked longingly toward the door, thinking that he might somehow be able to crawl there and get to the gun rack, that if he could do that much he could fire a signal shot and that, surely, Carol would hear. But every time he moved at all, even to shift his weight, the pain was simply unbearable and at last he lay back in the pine needles and mud and closed his eyes and hoped to God his wife would return from wherever she had gone.
He did not know how long he lay there but at several points he felt as if he were being watched from the dark shadows of the forest all around, thoughts that reminded him just how vulnerable he was and which brought the grim fate of the Locklins back to his mind. What had happened there he still did not know and never would. When he told Carol what he had witnessed there she had burst into tears. When he tried to continue she had waved him off. Later he could hear her weeping outside under the great hulking shapes of the cedars.
Bears. Mountain lions. Coyotes. He had heard wolves howling from the distant ridges. Were a bear to walk out of the woods, freshly awake and ravenous after its long winter of slumber, he would be able to do nothing more than lie there, wide awake, as the animal tore him to pieces. Twice he thought he caught a glimpse of movement from the forest and once he thought there was the shape of a human figure moving through the trunks of the cedars but when he called out there was no response and he did not know if he had seen anything at all. Those hallucinations he had experienced while on the painkillers had felt so real, so tangible, and yet how could such visions be real?
When Carol arrived she held a string of trout in one hand, al-though she carried no pole that he could see. Later, when he told her of this observation, she just laughed and told him that she had indeed brought her pole and had fished Kastmasters all afternoon in the big bend where the water ran to riffles and the fish teemed in the spring. He was back on the sofa again, where he would spend the next few days, bored and alone and worried about all the tasks he knew he needed to complete. “You just rest up,” she told him when he ex-pressed his concerns. “Can’t do much if you’re not healed.”
The winter had seemingly come to end during the long period of his convalescence, the final snowfall of the season being the bliz-zard in which he had nearly been lost. Now the forest was wet and bright and glowing with life, the pines bursting with the pale green of new needles and wildflowers sprouting here and there in patches of sunlight. He longed to walk out under those trees, to see the streams overflowing with snowmelt, to taste the wondrous cold of that water, and to see what game would be out, like him, sniffing the warming spring air. Moose in the swampy field near the beaver dam. Elk cross-ing on its way to the higher reaches of the mountains. He was excited by the sunlight and yet Carol’s mood seemed to darken in inverse proportion to the rising season. She talked little. When he tried to draw her out she merely looked at him as if he were an object rather than her husband and in the end he determined to leave her to her thoughts. She would come out of it, he thought. She always had. For long stretches of time she disappeared entirely, out into the forest, he knew not where and when he asked her she would tell him she was hunting or fishing or gathering although she carried neither fishing pole nor firearm and most often returned with nothing.
He had been housebound for the better part of two months but his back seemed fully healed now. Once again he could swing the big splitting maul over his head, could watch the cedar blow apart under the force of his own power. One afternoon he took the Winchester and told Carol he was going to walk out in the direction of the lake. She nodded at him as he passed her, saying nothing, her eyes dark. What was in her mind he did not know, could not even guess. Per-haps he had never known her at all. He paused for a moment in case she would turn toward him and when she did not he finally walked off under the cedar shadows, eastward, in the direction he had told her he would go.
But he did not continue on that path, instead turning a long loop uphill so that he came back past the cabin from a vantage point many dozen feet higher, looking down at the small ragged log box they had built. Then he moved westward, the rifle held out before him, his eyes catching occasional glimpses of the area where the faint, worn path ran across the lower angle of the ridge, the breeze pushing up from that same direction so that he knew his own scent blew out behind him somewhere, away from the path, away, too, from the cabin. He did not know what he was doing or why, governed by a sense that was and was not fear, a kind of faint stirring in his gut.
The stream had become a white torrent, its cold frothing roar de-scending through stones and exposed roots and fallen trunks with a fury that he had not seen before. He followed the wet bank down-hill. It was a warm day but in the shadows and in the mists of that snowmelt-swollen stream, he felt a shiver run through him, at one point stopping and looking around through the forest, suddenly aware that while he knew his own progress was silenced by the static roar of the stream, that it was just as true that he could hear nothing but its constant grind of white noise. The forest around him was dark and shaded and the thrill that ran through him was not excitement but fear. How many times had he followed this same route down to where he might spy the meadow? He had shot elk and deer and even moose there, had seen bears lumbering through the tall grasses and wildflowers. And yet the whole forest seemed a strange and alien thing now, a place where he was not welcome, where some other ter-ror lurked in hiding for him. Who was he to come here to this place with his rifle and think he could somehow survive? Were it not for the industry he had brought with him into the forest – the medicine, the firearms, the chainsaw – he would have perished inside of a few days. Were it not for Carol he would have been lost in the storm and then, later, would have starved on the floor of the cabin, his back in agony. She had saved him twice, an understanding which was fol-lowed hard by another, that he could, in no way, take care of himself.
The meadow was below him somewhere, although it felt at times, creeping down from the higher edge of the ridge, that he might never find it, the downward slope seeming to go on and on into some infini-tude of vertiginous cedar-choked woodlands, the shadows deepen-ing, cooling, the whole forest seeming to shift around him. He looked up toward the ridge from which he had descended and he could see only trees stretching uphill as if they had crowded together to block any possibility of his returning to that higher, sunlit world above.
And yet, at last, there came, at some distance, a flicker of sunlight through the heavy darkness of the trees, the sight of which ignited something deep inside him. He kept his eyes forward on that shift-ing light, shivering now with cold and fatigue, stumbling downhill, his motion a kind of desperate flailing that he understood to be a ter-rible mistake even as he began to fall, his feet slipping forward and his back striking the stones and roots and loose muddy earth even as he continued to move, his body tumbling across the stones.
When he stopped at last it was to the understanding that his back was ruined, not simply in pain now but seeming to have come away from him entirely, to have separated from his body as if a piece of pipe had been removed and tossed aside and what remained was no structure at all, the connective tissue gone, his limbs waving against the cool earth without force, almost without thought, his breath, hold-ing and holding, and then released all at once in a long, rattling ex-hale that was part sob. What had he done? God now what had he done? As long as he kept still, absolutely still, there was not even any pain, just a weird floating numbness that seemed to pulse everywhere around him.
He could hear the stream’s hiss somewhere off to his left but through it he could now hear some other sound, a kind of high yowl-ing that at first he assumed to be that of an animal, not a yowl of pain but of pleasure. Coyotes or foxes, he thought, and listened again for that yowling, yipping sound, listened and caught it at last, a sound almost but not quite human. The hum of a bee close to his face, drift-ing off and away from him.
He had come to rest sideways upon the slope and when he let gravity turn his head downhill he could see the meadow, its bright field awash with wildflowers like great swipes of paint in purple and white and pink. And then, just a few dozen yards away, he saw them at last.
The girl at first, nut brown, leaping through those wildflowers with the total reckless abandon of the child she was, although her movements were not entirely those of any human child he had ever seen, keeping mostly to all fours, jumping and turning and snapping her tiny teeth at bees, and what he at first had taken to be some kind of garment he realized now was a thin glossy coat of fur covering her otherwise naked body.
Carol appeared just behind her, also naked, her breasts swinging as she leapt and jumped and yipped and yowled. Could there have been a sheen of fur running down her sides from armpit to thigh? And another down the center of her back when she turned?
He said her name, croaked it out into the air, a thin, gruff sound. Then he said it again, louder, and finally sucked in a breath and shouted it.
The whole forest seemed, for a moment, to shiver on the edge of ruin: bees in mid-air, the plunge of the swollen creek frozen, its drop-lets suspended and glistening, the wind pausing in its gentle gusts. She stopped and looked at him – they both did – their eyes wide and brown and wet, her body shifting through the grasses and flowers, nose thrust forward to sniff the air. “Carol,” he said, but already he understood that she who crouched before him in the spring flowers could be called by no name but her own.
Christian Kiefer is the author of four novels: The Infinite Tides (Bloomsbury USA, 2012), The Animals (Liveright, 2015), Phantoms (Liveright, 2019), and The Heart of It All (Melville House, 2023); and the novella One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place Left to Hide (Nouvella, 2016)