HOLLOW by William Weitzel
When we came up the road it was covered in sunlight, and he was loping far behind, still nursing injuries from the northern Blue Ridge. I’d borrowed a cell phone a month earlier and called Aunt Hallie and told her I was coming. Sure enough, her dogs sounded the alarm when I broke over the crest that gave a view of the lake and the wide outflow of Tired Creek, along with hills to the north that hid the Powell River. Hallie stepped out and looked up the steep incline and shook her head, calling “Land, Land,” waving all the time then pointing for the benefit of the dogs, all four, who’d already tilted their muzzles, and were howling to raise the dead.
I slowed down to take it in, Hallie and her riot- making dogs and the green lake and the starting mountains. All of it shone with that crazed triumph of summer. Drained as I was, I made an effort to bear up, even out my shoulders under my pack.
“A sight,” Hallie was calling up the drive. “If you’re not just ever a sight, Land.”
“You haven’t seen the other half yet,” I called back down the grade. Truth was I didn’t know what she’d say when she saw him. She, of all people, would never hurt him, but still I’d told her nothing. Instinctively, I’d taken up the habit of hiding him from humans straight out of the gate. He was too big, and too alone except for me, not to be memorable. And I’d seen enough with animals, especially his kind, to know what happened when the wrong set of eyes caught them cutting through a field. Just a week and a half back, the sight of his spoor close to private land had forced us to cross a thin branch of Douglas Lake then travel a night and day beyond Flat Gap. Odds weren’t with us. But the coyote was wary, mindful. We’d been at this – long- range traveling – a while. And there were still plenty of folks out there who wanted to save animals, working at it harder than ever. Like the wild lands, though, they were losing ground.
“Land, you look near dead. Even by your standards. Don’t try that on me.”
I collapsed with the dogs while they barked then wriggled and gave out high- pitched squeals of welcome, and for a minute I forgot most everything. Through that whole reunion on the asphalt, though, I kept stealing glances while I played on my back and they piled over me. Until, after it died down and there came the hush of the wind once more, then the sight of a red tail hawk, who are like dragons over those shores, he was standing, silent and stoic at the top of the rise.
The dogs hadn’t scented him because of that wind but they followed my gaze and, one by one, got real still, hackled, then started up howling all over again. Three of the four backed up all the way to the house door, but one, parts pointer and black lab, who went just above my knees, held her ground. She shut right up after the first few seconds and let the others chorus behind her. She stared him down while he looked out over the house toward the lake and then, it seemed, toward us, and I think at her. We were still watching when he eased his shoulders to one side like they were made of water, then slipped downslope into the woods, his hitch a ghost of the Blue Ridge.
* * *
“Honey, you know the drill. Make yourself at home. What we’ve got here’s yours.”
Hallie still talked the same way four years after Uncle Tank died. I don’t think she was referring just to herself and the dogs. He’d been a small man who took up space with his heart and his temper. He’d walked around with a “Grumpy” hat and a faded New York University hoodie some vagabond had left him as thanks for the day loan of his truck. And he sure could be grumpy. But he had the shining eyes of a sailor who’d traveled the world. Nothing got past him before the day he died. He never tired of asking questions and making faces at the answers as though they were terrific puzzles. Then, after a grumpy spell, he’d come back and quote verbatim four things Hallie or I had said and tell us he’d discovered our meanings only after a period of contemplation. It all came down to the truth that, along with the old couple who taught me mixed woods around Black Brook, New York, where I’m from – how to tell mushrooms and find sawwhet owls in white pines – he was the deepest thinking, most charismatic person I’d known. Hallie, after keeping him alive extra years in those steep lands of northeast Tennessee, with ATVs for transport, and with her home cooking and busy love, had waded into mourning so deep she made darn sure it stayed invisible. But it betrayed her, hiding out in her voice, so the sing- song always got thin at one end.
“We get coyotes,” she said apologetically while we were still out on her drive. “Time to time. So, like you know, we’re careful about these dogs.”
“That one’s ranged far,” I told her. She jerked her head a little, stared at me. “Not a local animal there.”
Aunt Hallie felt my pack, half- lifted it with her fierce strength of an older woman living on her own, then let it come to rest outside her door. She reached up and touched me. Felt first one shoulder, real slow and gentle, real careful. Then went over to the other.
“Come on in now, Land. We’re full up with dogs here. Not people.” She took a long look at the blank place at the top of the rise. “And I don’t know what I should call you. Something right in between.”
That night, we sat out on her deck. Tank had been a deck legend. If he was in a mood, and he caught you in a chair looking at the lake, you were in for some deep thinking. Just being out with Hallie now, her talk of real estate, with fireflies flaring through the trees, a lonely whip-poor-will and candles, brought him back entire. Like he was sitting right with us, working a plate of Hallie’s warm, home- baked chocolate chip cookies.
“All right, fine, so that’s me. Now for the interesting part. Once in your life, you do the talking.”
“I’m banged up, Hal. You can see that, I know. I’m thin. My rib’s gotten worse as I walked. The collarbone didn’t set even. So that’s a problem now getting more full- time.”
“And you’re sitting out with me for two hours plus. Hearing about prices of houses on this lake.”
“That doesn’t make a difference.”
Hallie didn’t ask about the coyote that night. Which was like her. She knew it was a lot already for me just to be talking, even though we’d talked pretty often, off and on, the past fifteen years. Truth was I’d been so long on the hearing end of my own silent speeches, in hill lands, fossil rivers, the steeps, I wasn’t adjusting very fast to regular, back- and- forth talk. It made me worry I’d say what I had to say wrong because it wasn’t turned out for another person. Let alone for somebody, like Aunt Hallie, whom I loved.
* * *
When I woke up that first morning it was already late. I walked out from the house and climbed the tall hill and looked down through the woods toward the little inlet of Tired Creek. It was difficult seeing with so much leaf flush. But there was the water, just after it flowed from the main body of the lake and stirred into the creek, then slowed to eddy around Hallie’s dock. It carried a pollen load of yellow and gray with stranded logs from black gum and hickory snags. The water glinted down there through the drift lines of the trees that melted in and out of stillness with the little breeze that ran between the hills.
I descended along the thin clearcut they’d made in the forest toward the roped-together docks, then stopped. He lay at the far end of a wing of rotting boards jutting around the little outboard Hallie kept floating. He didn’t raise his wide head or budge the long muzzle but bore the look of sleepy watchfulness that fixed on my legs and stayed far below eye level. I stopped at the top of wooden steps Tank put in years back before his hips got replaced. There was a quiver to the air and the water close by bore shifting patches of light. Far off at the bend, the lake had a fog layer that smoked up toward the hills. The coyote blended in just above surface shimmer. There was a way he’d found to play dead – in mountains, forests, and littoral swamps – so he came off as a leafed- over hump of ground, or half- flayed shards of stone, something gray and splotchy and broken. But then, when you looked harder, he was whole, full- breathing and alive.
I took a few paces back up the hill toward a little plateau where there was a patch of sphagnum and sedge by an old stump, then lay down. When I looked up, sometime later, the sun was crashing in the tops of the oblong hills. Back at the house, Hallie had put water in the kettle and set out honey from a neighbor’s hives two hollows over where, she told me, a graybeard tended them and swore they accounted for why, ten years after his wife – who was the love of his= life – had passed on, he’d stayed above ground, limber and hale.
“Deer crossing just half hour back,” she told me from her high desk that fronted the lake. “White- tail in the water far out center.”
“How often you see that?”
“Two, three times a summer. Few more in November when they’re fleeing those guns.”
We went out the slider and stood together on the narrow deck flanking the house that gave a jaw- dropping view of the winding body of the lake as it leaked out toward a comb of summer hills. Hallie was so small, coming not quite to my shoulders, and she could barely stay still. Standing beside me, she kept weighting and unweighting each leg. I felt any moment she might fill a hummingbird feeder with boiled, then cooled, sugar water or sweep the stained deck of mockernuts or straighten her glass table – yet never lose concentration on the distant sheen of water.
“Still out there,” she said. “Matter of fact, now coming about. Must have changed her mind.”
Hallie had great eyes. She had to be seventy- two, seventy- four, but with teenage eyes. Together, we admired the sight of the far- off animal. Something wild and moving in that still water greened by a sun stretch of tulip poplars hanging their shade over its copper banks, and by black oak steeps climbing toward broken forests and the last surviving spruce-fir stands strung high through the Smokies.
“That’s not a her,” I said quietly after we’d watched the triangular wake on the broken mirror of water until it was a smooth wedge traveling for the shores.
“You got a rack?”
“Nope.”
“Then how do you claim – .”
Hallie turned toward me and for the second time she flinched. Then stepped a little away. I’d never seen that in her before. From the beginning, lost as I’d been, she and Tank had welcomed me each time I came through, like some kid next door who played with their dogs, or college material on spring break. Like, all that time, I was hiding some future inside me so obvious to anybody looking it wasn’t ever a thing to mention.
“Because I don’t believe that’s a deer there, Hal.”
* * *
She got used to it somehow as the weeks rolled over and we headed toward the end of summer. I was hoping those weeks wouldn’t end. Her house; its semi- remoteness; woods and lake curled around that shale slip of land; hills just wild enough – all together made a still point. But on large bodies of water that gather the wind, autumn’s never far off. You can hear its big, pushed air from miles away. Until, with a growing tremor, the whole season comes alive in the trees right around you.
We’d go out, two of us, into the forest each day on the far, north side of the lake, because I didn’t want him to think he was all alone. Sometime near the start of August, Hallie began putting a cow bone – usually a shank she’d bought for marrow – into the cooler I’d load in the bottom of her green wooden canoe. I’d already let her know I didn’t feed him. But the sore chamber in her heart since Tank died, I guess, nudged her to keep ministering to others, even when she was the one who could have used some looking after. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the bones wound up in the lake.
By this point, Hallie had fixed me up so we could climb steep ridges that flanked the hollows all around the lake. She had olive leaf tincture set out before breakfast. There were solutions of arnica, with a base of coconut and sunflower oils. She slathered it on my neck and shoulder before we went off and tightened my sling when we got home, so the collarbone would set. I had some of my own herb pouches I’d kept around from the Cascades. I used them now for deep chafes the sling left on my shoulders and under my arms. Even with that pulling on me, when I was a one- winged sparrow hawk, the coyote and I were up in the woods past sunset sometimes, following whatever was out there.
Nights, he slept on the dock, far as I could tell. Or at least parts of those nights. Then, most mornings, I’d put in at the base of the slope that ran down from her fire pit and paddle out to the center of the lake. He’d wait a good while after I set out. Somewhere around the middle of that wide stretch of water, I’d look around and there his head would be, cutting the surface not far from shore. Followed by the arched band of dorsal fur and fluffed- out tail that jogged up and down only slightly, like a wide rudder. Out behind him, his wake would grow and grow under the slanting sun or glide out in the fog and, on clear, still late-summer mornings, reach the green banks where the lake touched the roots of the poplars.
Over weekends, I wouldn’t go, for fear of bass boats that, starting before sunrise, raced by with fly- fishermen to their tournaments, and of tubers and water skiers and pleasure boaters who’d start out later on. But weekdays, they seemed to go home. Mainly to Cincinnati, I guess. As far as Cleveland. A few south to Atlanta. And on those days, the lake would settle back to its latent wildness that worked together privately with weather and the trees.
One day, near the middle of August, I moored the canoe and we explored a forested ridge down along the northern shore. On the flattop peninsula, it was quiet, and a winding dirt road, rutted and overgrown, wound up and down the crest line of the ridge. We stretched out our time, with him staying far off but mostly just in view. Together, we descended into the few hollows. Chunked, copper- colored soil grew damp and caved down to the water where the lake rise made undercuts in the shoreline and hid rockfish and bluegill in their shadows. At some point, climbing back up to hit the road about a mile onto the plateau, we came upon a shack standing in a clearing on the high flat ground.
Two dogs were chained to it. They lay in the dirt, ribs pressed close to the foundations for the cool of that thin band of cinderblock shade. They were rife with mange. Hardly more than sacks of skin, crossed with blood lines crusting their backs and haunches. Their shoulders bladed forward above slim, crudded forepaws.
“If those two are still there tomorrow in that condition,” I told Aunt Hallie out on her deck that night at dinner, “then I’m freeing them. If they follow me here, I’ll bring them to the shelter.”
“Tell you be careful,” said Hallie. “If dogs are chained, they belong to somebody or other. They may be no good for hunting, which is why they’re left. But someone’s got claims.”
“Had claims. You saw them there, Hal, I know you wouldn’t leave them any more than I would.”
The next afternoon, the coyote and I went back. Again, we took our time, tramping through alders and the thick, sweet- poison smell of summer shadbush. I collected left over pignuts, molded over from another season and soft with early decay. We moved up and down the creases in the land that bent off the plateau, laboring again into its couple of steep hollows that ended lakeside or in peat stench and mossy lake seeps and prickly sharp devil. There were long rodent hunts off the escarpment where I’d lay up in leaf duff amid dry, rickety blackjack oaks then glimpse him down in the distance chasing red squirrels without luck in that flat light. Sharp, tearing barks echoed from the drains of the hollows and worried me with their racket on private land. Sometimes, far off, I’d see his furious tail or a broken outline of the risen head, ears pointing and tense. Then, after one long hunt, when he crested out at the scarp line, we headed though trickling light of sweetgum, my feet rolling over their old, spiky seeds, and I led us toward the shack.
We found the two same mongrels half in the sun. Nothing had altered. Whoever it was, wasn’t regular. A water or food bowl still lay overturned. The dogs were in their same places, crammed up against greened- over cinderblocks, conforming to the shade. Their tongues were out, long but without the pink glisten of a dog who has a recent body memory of water. I approached them carefully, waiting for them to rise up or snarl or defend. But when one whimpered and the other just backed farther away, I leaned down and unhitched them both.
As I figured they might, they followed me, despite or because of the scent of the coyote. One of the two – a squat, exhausted brown lab – led the larger dun terrier. I didn’t have the heart to make them swim far. So I left the canoe for the time being and walked to where the lake narrowed into rips before cutting back, while the coyote stayed out of sight.
“They came on after me, first overland then across the narrows,” I explained to Hallie. “Just about four miles. I’ll get them off your hands tomorrow.”
Hallie eyed the dogs who lay outside the screen door, one about on top of the other. They didn’t have the courage just then to enter the house, but they directed their bodies to be arrows pointing in. Now and again, when she opened the door to lay out water and food, they rose unsteadily and staggered off. Once, she bent low and whispered to them through the screen – whispers caught by the breeze – and I got closer, trying to decipher her words. Because Hallie was a special one with dogs. But she grew quiet, sensing me, then rose up and walked back to her kitchen.
When the coyote stepped onto the deck, just at dusk, the dogs began first to growl then to whine, pressing their weight against the screen. I believe this was the first time Hallie had a close view of him. He was healing also, changing. More muscular through the flanks and grown larger in the chassis, so now his shoulders looked rounder and blended with the ruff that was burred up and muddied. His thick mountain shag had lightened with the season, leaving swatches of white to vary the pelage. He was nothing like the leaner, rust- shaded local coyotes you saw, nose tipped down along the road, legs a blur, at dusk or after a rain.
Now he approached the dogs in a slow, silent arc, angling the sharp pan of his face in their direction. They grew furious, panicked. Hallie, just then, was watching from up in her open office where she made real estate calls. She flurried down the stairs, hustling toward the screen door.
“I won’t do this,” she whispered. “I don’t care.”
But the coyote kept himself tightly along the outer rail of the deck, as if the dogs held some power within the scabbed bags that carried their bones. He didn’t hackle or raise his tail. He looked bulky and powerful next to their wasted forms, towering over them as he passed. He paused just a moment to smell and listen to their fear, then moved by it. Down at the far end of the deck, he glanced briefly through the screen window and past us into the wide- open room: its kitchen, or maybe the dark fireplace, or perhaps at Hallie’s paneling that held a bright varnish. Or at deep cushions of Tank’s TV chair. The large, wooden carving of a reared-up black bear.
Hallie opened the door once he’d gone on, far enough down the deck, and the dogs fell over the threshold into the room.
“He won’t hurt ’em, Hal.”
Hallie stared down at the lab and the terrier collapsed around her feet. They were trembling. In another instant, the coyote had eased himself off the edge of the deck into the litter of two old, hollowedout sycamore trees and disappeared. There was a long quiet where he’d been.
“I know you go on believing things like that,” she said.
* * *
Our dinners had contained much stillness while we listened to the nights falling, slowly then all at once, until, with the arrival of stars, darkness changed course and seemed to grow from the deep green cat- pawed surface of the lake. I’d asked Hallie over the course of the summer everything I knew to ask about real estate. We’d talked about the funny way the new dogs would look at us, at each other, then start to bark falteringly, upward at the trees or the sky, before they sidled away if we got too close. Hallie would light candles in the cooling nights, and sometimes our laughter, if it came, would stir her own dogs wrapped around our feet and bring them sluggishly out from their dreams.
“So, seriously, Land.” Hallie looked hard at me one evening toward the tail end of August. “What are you going to do with that animal waiting out in these woods for you to get done here?”
There was a far, gibbous moon out traveling, and a shiver to the air after ten o’clock, so Hallie had gone in for a sweater. We’d stayed talking while the candles made fantasy shapes, like they were melting into curves of some different life. The dogs had lost interest when we’d cleared the plates, then become sloped mats of darkness. Earlier, we’d heard a pair of barred owls calling, first across the lake then over the near hollow. But they’d gone silent, or glided off all ghost- like into more distant tracts of hardwoods.
“We’ll head north,” I said after a long time. “Toward the snows.”
“Well, he’s getting hunted sure then. Even if he’s not their first target they set out for. Fall’s coming. You’ll find plenty of trouble.”
“I know that, Hal.”
Hallie shook her head over her wine. I wanted to change the subject to Uncle Tank because I already knew my plan and he’s who I thought she might be talking about – all her old grief that seemed to come back sometimes, involving other beings but feeling related, like it also bore the nature of water, made out of rivers, part of the currentknowing sameness of loss.
Tank had been the ghost of that summer, picking his way through his tools in rusting, disordered piles in the garage. Or standing behind the wheel of their pontoon boat with a dog in one arm and that expression of tired, accustomed responsibility he wore as captain. He was the sound of the lake at night, and its beauty, and a thousand sadnesses that took up with the wind or sheltered in the cavities of hickory boles or tracked with the opossum, or like any night animal, flared in the lights of his truck that I drove so they’re only just eyes, crossing the fogged- over up- and- down land while otherwise it’s sleeping.
“North then. And where exactly do you intend on going?”
“I wanted someplace I know.” I hesitated. “To overwinter. After that, assuming we make it so far north, I’ll push toward Canada. Early March now the snows mainly leave off. And I’ve been to Algonquin before. High lake country there, mixed forest. Some big wild still left that far upcountry.”
As soon as I started into my plan, Hallie woke up, like she’d snuck gulps of black coffee between glasses of wine. She pushed out her chair and brought her socked feet onto it, then hugged her knees so she was all crammed together.
“Meaning what precisely, Land? You mean now you’re pointed toward Black Brook, NY?”
“Meaning those High Peaks.”
Hallie laughed hoarsely. She threw her head back for effect, because she’d been doing that all night. But this time it came off wrong. We could both tell. Hours before, the last whip- poor- wills of summer had sent out what to my human ears sounded just like sorrow. But now the night sunk down to a rich chorus of stillness without so much as a brown trout rising to breach, or the secret step of a mink on shale.
“We get her emails, Land. You should know. About how they’re faring. Even still.” Right about then, we heard the coyote. First time since we’d made it to Tennessee. The long, silver crisis of his call caroming through the hills. Shattering the quiet world of the lake and echoing off the chipped shores and timber far across the night. Until it broke in a thousand pieces.
We walked into the kitchen together then, like we both sought to leave her dark table to fend for itself. The dogs roused themselves as a unified crew and stumbled in drowsily behind us.
“Well that’s sure something,” said Hallie in the stark, unforgiving light of the kitchen. “Choosing now, after all this time, to go back up there.”
She looked smaller than usual. It was obvious we’d been making the whole thing up, that summer, out of Hallie’s generosity. Paying for me. Never asking any questions. Healing me with her cooking and medicine. Her endless store of kindness. Now, moving the dishes around, she looked like an old woman who’d been through things and hardly come out the other side. More like the wreck of a few lives put together than a single living person.
“Let me do this for once, Hal,” I said, pointing to the dishes.
“Please go on sit down.”
I stayed there beside her, staring at the moths crashing into the bright pane of her kitchen.
“Thought we’d lay up for the snows,” I continued above the sounds of her busy sink. “Places there I know we can hide. Enough terrain he’ll find whitetail carcasses. ‘Course there’s red squirrels still active. Mule deer less often. Other carrion.” Hallie cut the faucet flow and turned toward me.
“You’ve been hiding one awful long time, Land. If I’m allowed to say that now straight to your face.”
Frankness had changed her own face, giving it the quality of lonesome age, with lines pressed into it like cracks in paint on a portrait. But she came over and reached up carefully above the level of my ribs, wrapping her small arms half- way around, and gave me a long, tight hug.
“She’s sent me pictures of your daughter, you should know. Pretty as they come. This same dark, long hair as yours, I can say. And just like you, every last photo’s off on some mountain. In the woods. I believe she tracks animals like somebody here I know real well.”
“All right.”
Hallie paused, like she was listening for something out on the ridgelines. “You’ll work out,” she whispered. “Your Uncle Tank said that, all those years ago. Defending you from what somebody or other around here said. We’d mentioned something about your long mornings in bed to our neighbors. All your sitting down on our dock staring at just water or trees. Or whatever it was you were doing those months when you came down here after Black Brook. People in their boats saw it for themselves. You sitting on the planks all still. Just about the place that coyote lies now. And I guess they heard us talking about how you’d left your girl who was pregnant all alone without any help. And all you did here was stay quiet and stare off at our wildlife. Then read every magazine on birds or trees you could find in Tank’s garage. And that’s all night every night, what I could tell.”
Hallie looked so tired I thought she’d fall over once she’d stepped away from that hug to steal another quick look up at me.
“But your Uncle Tank defended you. ‘I was worse, his age.’ That’s what he said to me and a couple others right behind where you’re standing. Out on our deck in full sun. ‘No you weren’t,’ I told him then and there. ‘That’s a love lie, you know it. You never left anybody high and dry your whole darn life.’ ‘No I haven’t,’ he said. ‘Guilty as charged.’ Then he smiled at me. ‘Not yet anyway.’ And he laughed a good minute, real hard, your Uncle Tank. Had himself the better part of his beer. Then his face went back serious so we all had to listen to him again. ‘Even so,’ he said. ‘He’s not full-on dead yet. He’ll work out in the end.’ ”
Hallie turned away and shuffled out the screen door onto the deck, then walked a few paces into the night.
“That was years ago now,” she called back in. “But I remember just like yesterday. That old sonofabitch, your Uncle Tank Bear.” Then she let out a sob I thought sure was going to kill her straight off and bring the house down.
* * *
The coyote and I drifted into September and headed out for long swims when we got back from the woods, during the weekdays, when there weren’t many boats and the sun was mowing the hilltops into an even crop of shadow. He’d swim far off, as though we were at the same outdoor party but flowing through opposite parts of the property. Hallie’s lab mutt came after us one early evening, splitting our distance, and the three of us swam out to the bend in the lake as a loose squadron. It was log season. Early, chill fall rains had taken hold and, before it would drop for winter, the lake climbed in the space of two nights above full pool. Fallen trees half- decomposed slid off the banks all over. Now they were ghosting in our slowest currents and eddies, host to lichens and black- bodied wasps. Fluorescent mosses and mating blue dragonflies colored the moist tops of those logs, their jutting branches, and turned them into worlds.
I lost the other two in the near darkness. Hallie said later she could see their heads from the high deck, making straight wakes apart from each other, then slowly, like little boats, coming around. After that, =sunset became a ritual if it wasn’t thundering too badly. Hallie would bring her other three dogs to watch and bark from the dock. I’d dive in alone and the coyote would enter after a lag from the coulee down Tired Creek. Then at some point, Hallie’s lab would wade into the lake from the muddy shore of her property, and we’d be out into the wide, blackening expanse. I could see only her dark, determined head. But with him, it was the whole bowed back and brindled tail mat weaving between the logs.
Not many nights later, the two dogs from the shack stepped off the bank and got in right behind me, one after the other, like we were still playing follow- the- leader through the woods. Hallie’s laughter rang out. She had seemed in no hurry to send them on their way. They’d been around by then almost five weeks, living outside down the far side of the deck. From that night on, Hallie followed us in her canoe and now and then called out over the water with a young, unhurried voice back from Tank’s time. Almost like, watching those dogs get rounder, more confident, she might be surging back to life.
Around when the sun was clipping the ridge after a week of those nights, when there was just a gray, sunken light to go by, a fishing boat, older, in bad shape, that had been dawdling over in a small western cove, puttered through the dusk to where I was swimming out toward the center of the lake.
“Noticed you got your entourage along,” said the lone man in the boat. He was medium- sized, sitting there, but with a big, full- bloom beard that gathered in the twilight.
“That a coyote I’m seeing out there?”
“We’ve got dogs.”
“Well those ones swam past me look damn familiar.” I was treading water, and he’d left his motor on, so we were talking above the noise and stench of its unsteady cough.
“Familiar.”
“They’re mine.”
The man reached over and cut the motor, then leaned back on his gunwale like we were going to share a smoke.
“So how ’bout I come by and pick up my dogs then?” He peered down at me. “Unless you were planning to return those yourself to right where you found them.”
“They were in sorry shape, friend.”
The man looked far out over the lake and squinted into the dusk, like he’d strayed into contemplation.
“Tell you truth now, I think that’s a coyote we got ourselves out there.” He looked down at me and spat in the water beside my face. “Now that’s what I believe.”
Hallie had been straining at the paddle and was breathing hard to catch up. But on still nights like that on the lake, you could hear conversations from the far shore, much less from a short space on the water. As she drew close, I saw she’d hauled both new dogs into the canoe behind her.
“We intend on taking those dogs to a shelter,” she told the man. “And they can do what they want with them.”
“Is that the way it is? So now who the hell are you?”
At that point, I reached up and grabbed hold of his low gunwale and lifted both my shoulders onto it. The light boat listed sharply and he stumbled a little, trying to catch his balance. For a moment, we were face to face.
“Why don’t I stop over sometime,” I said. “Sounds like. So you can treat me to your whole story then.”
“Not unless you bring me my own dogs, you won’t.”
He pulled a green Salem pack from the chest pocket of an open shirt that fell out lazily to the sides of his roundish belly. He banged it hard on the seat beside him, but nothing spilled out.
“I’m Hallie Bear,” came the crystal- clear voice behind me. “And you can find those dogs over at the shelter. So why don’t you go on now back to your fishing?”
“Good idea,” I said and took a look around his boat. He had a shotgun in there and a hook box flung open but nearly empty. He was baiting with insects, cellar spiders it looked like, that milled in three glass jars rolling on his cut boards in the near dark. He’d unsheathed a knife that was not a fishing knife. With a thicker haft, and a wide, uncleft blade. Two trucker’s caps dunked in oil and lake water lay wilting around his feet.
The man leaned far down so his face was again near mine. I could smell his body then, the oil and the smoking and the long- ago perch.
“Go on get off my boat, Mister,” he whispered.
The man reached awkwardly for the pull cord on his motor, but got it to start right up. He made a big whirlpool of noise and smoke in neutral, then sputtered out away from us.
“Careful, Hallie Bear,” he called over his shoulder, standing, legs splayed, in his boat. “I know you now.”
Then he eased out the throttle and we watched him travel into the east run of the lake. Far out, he circled something twice, hard to see now the sun had died so low. But we both knew what it was.
* * *
Once that boat turned off toward the dam, since it had no bow light, we lost it quickly. And though it was a poor ruse, we didn’t head straight for the house. We started, instead, toward the eastern shore in case he pulled back around to track us. Whether he did or not, we didn’t keep it up for long. From down in the water, I helped Hallie pull her tired lab up into the canoe and we made our way back to her dark dock. Once we’d eaten, inside, more quiet than usual, then said goodnight, I loaded my old shotgun and crawled out from the upstairs bedroom onto a sloped, neatly shingled roof facing the lake.
Next morning, I asked Hallie if I should return his dogs.
“Heck no,” she said. “I’m going to bring them over to the shelter like I said and talk over our full history.”
“They may not take them if you do that.”
“I’ve got four dogs from that shelter, Land. And I know Betsy and Carl. Believe me, they’ll take them.”
* * *
I could tell she was hurting about it. Those two dogs had changed over the weeks and for some time they’d watched every one of her movements. When Hallie went outside, they dragged around after her like small, four- legged shadows. Now she put the two dogs in the front seat with her and, as I closed the door, they climbed straight onto her lap and crowded the wheel.
“Good luck driving,” I told her.
But she was already crying a little and looking smaller, more hunched over than ever.
I was sure Hallie wouldn’t approve, but I fetched my shotgun and loaded the canoe as soon as she crested over the grade. I carried as nearly always a short, broad- hafted hunting knife, and before coming up on the shack perched on that narrow plateau, unsnapped the sheath at my belt. From far off, the coyote stood watching, then drifted down through a small, blighted stand of sycamores off the ridge.
“Anybody home?” I called out, and when there was no response, squinted through the one, cracked window.
“Coming in now.”
Nothing stirred, so I pushed on the door and it gave, then scraped across an uneven dirt floor. Everything was dark and mildewed, old, like the air hadn’t moved in weeks.
“You all right in here now?”
At 10:30 in the morning, the place was just as thick in darkness as a grave and smelled awfully. Not only musty but like a raft of air in wet country from an animal kill. Sure enough, there were blood- tinged, vole- eaten pelts stacked by the far wall, and one by one, I hauled them out into the blinding sunlight. The pawless, headless dorsal pelage of a black bear. A mature badger with the faded stripe. I was sad to see an old bobcat whose bobbed tail was still thick and ringed and whose guard hairs ran dark above the plush underfur. Beneath them all, mixed with dried-up, crumbly, sloughed skins of corn snakes, I found the full- body pelt of a southern coyote, fulvous and beautiful. Young, the animal must have been. And the fur was far newer than the others. She’d been female. Her pelt was small, even for a local animal, and included the slim- jawed cut out of the head. Her skull had been taxidermied in an awkward way. But the smell was clean, like pine woods above the shale cliffs high over the lake. Far from peat and bedded stones. It didn’t make any sense, but I draped it over me a minute and stood there from some dumb, simmering kind of anger. Out of resentment for her taking. It felt like, in a small way, that might almost bring her back.
Then I folded up the pelt softly, like she was still fragile, barely alive. And loaded it into my pack, making sure it was well below the cinch line. The other furs I stacked back in their place against the dark wall and shut the creaky door. It was a good mile back along the parched dirt path before I started off that high scarp with its beech gaps and burnt prairies of mountain laurel and late summer grass. Not until I was all the way down to water level, mired in dense alder and witch hazel, off the steeper slopes, did the coyote turn up, cutting low and easy across the glade.
Together, we made off into the lake, he far behind. Out over the water sailed the torn threads of spider webs, sent loose by the night breeze and rains from foliage along the shore. Glinting vertical now, swept a few feet above the green surface by the wind.
* * *
Large male coyotes will weigh in around thirty- five, thirty- eight pounds in Tennessee. But this one taken up with me was from far north and west and much bigger. He was still changing even now, gaining into September. I could tell he was harvesting the time, had it leveraged against whatever could come. His body was thick now all the way to the ground. The spindly, careful legs I’d known when we first came across each other on the northwest slopes of the Blue Ridge were long gone. We were both injured then, me from a night raid on a predator refuge where I worked the dark shift alone as security, and he from a migrant cougar trap, set in a low saddle of the mountains by a stream outflow and a ragged stand of box elders. I sat twelve feet off two days then freed him, backing in, throwing a blanket over his head, neck, and shoulders. Having studied that coil spring and base plate, the swivel so long they’d turned to arteries and valves in the picture of a heart.
Now, the hesitation in his gait, its broken quality on steeps, had eroded away over these months by the lake. He typically stayed out in the water well after I’d climbed onto the bank. And as our air grew cooler, he seemed to spread out. Though his ruff hadn’t grown in full like it would once we started north and snows set in, the underfur was shading darker already, brindled and plush. Even his head – narrow and vulnerable as recently as the Smokies, where we’d spent three weeks of June – had become a heavy wedge, bearing the same still face and wary eyes as always, over shoulders grown heavy, newly ready for crossing terrain.
If I’d known I could kill him with my hands, my teeth, with legs and boots when we met, that kind of knowing was past. Now there was an uncertainty about our relative strength which gave me new confidence. I watched behind me out in the woods, like I’ve always done, but not toward ground he was covering. Because it was covered.
Even so, that feeling applied mainly to animals, to some instinct for bodies simple and alone, while rifles haunted my dreams. As autumn drew close, the aimed barrel I’d seen in my peripherals since we’d met grew smaller, more quiet, until it shrunk to a still point. In those shortening days, I saw it hidden inside the growing span of darkness and the knots of trees, in branch scars and first forays of pileated woodpeckers on old shortleaf pines.
When they’d come at the refuge near South Mountain, up north, they’d chosen the snow moon lighting their way. We had gray wolf rescues, a mated pair of bobcats, eastern mountain coyotes like this one, a black bear sow with her two yearling cubs. The aim was reintroduction though our chances were slimming. Habitat loss. Migration corridors cut off. Hope lay in this chain of mountains strung through the Smokies to Georgia, up through the Adirondacks of New York. Those nights, I carried a black, old- school iron pry bar but no gun because I didn’t want to encourage anybody shooting up animals. There had been threats from some with livestock interests who didn’t want to hear how we’d eaten the range of these animals away, diminished prey populations, spurred vegetation die- off, hunted them almost to nothing in their native grounds.
I’d heard the truck weight the re- frozen drifts. An engine cut off down the unmetaled drive. There were three of them. I came down on the one with a rifle from the low roof of the coyote building, then hurt the man working the door, broke his wrist because I could hear it on the cement base outside the pen. But the third guy caught my low shoulder from behind with something hard, a wrench or the valved, rough end of a pipe. I kicked the rifle behind me before a gut hook blade I hadn’t seen, swung without knowledge, came past my face then cut at my ribs. You remember the feel of your shoulder gone cold. The look of a person when you’ve gotten hold of his rifle. You go on hearing threats they yell out from the road that get mixed up with the wounds you find later. How those animals may sleep another night. But not for long now. Sometimes I don’t think you decide who you are. Somebody else does.
Now I badly wanted to get that coyote far north by mud season when, April at the outside, mated pairs would start scouring for overhangs and root masses, glacial berms or hollow trees, for denning purposes. Just now, though, along shores of that darkening fall lake, every black gum branch hung out in the wind was a long gun coming round to its aim.
“He’ll come looking for him, not for you,” said Hallie, one of the first nights it got real cold. She’d pulled on her fleece jacket and the moon was bright and glossy. “Trust me, honey. He’s got you two figured out.”
“All right.”
* * *
Nothing happened for a couple days. Aunt Hallie and I kept on making a semblance of the same old life. But down two dogs, we didn’t swim, and dinners were open tombs of starlit quiet, with us sitting like mummies out on her deck. Hallie, I think, was too broken-hearted to care much about anything by that point. She hadn’t let on she’d gotten that connected to those hurting dogs. Then again, no surprise there. Hallie saved whoever needed it, never asking anything, and brought them straight to health.
On the third morning after my trip out to the shack on the high ridge, just past dawn, there came the wing clatter and follow-on squawk of a great blue heron down by the shore beneath the level of the house. It could have meant eagle. Or two red tails. Who knows, something else. I climbed off the roof where I’d been spending nights, stepped into Tank’s garage. Then slipped on the coyote pelt I kept there in the corner and retrieved my shotgun from his tool closet. I moved down the grade through the dim light of chinkapins, scanning the dock for the familiar outline of his wide- set ears and a set of gray- white forepaws. To my relief, the coyote was no place in sight.
I’d barely started, on all fours, the climb back up to the drive, easing through a chirr of new leaf litter, when the weight of boots came on gravel out front of the house and he fired.
The shot scored red soil, bringing a fine line and chinking off shale alongside my shoulder, burning off behind me into a thick outcrop of shadbush that darkened the drive. In the time it took to crawl another pace toward him, he fired again and I heard him curse as the bullet thunked next to my head in dammed-up earth around the heavy root mass of two old blackjack oaks. I’d kept on toward him from there, up the grade, sliding tree by tree, when a voice pitched into the smoke of that dawn, real clear- like, filling up spaces all around me in the woods.
“Slow there now. You bring it down.”
By then I’d closed in near enough to catch a view. His dark shoulders and the round splotch of the head. He’d walked into a patch of dawn. Searching for his aim down into my thicket.
“Said bring it right down,” rang the voice again. “That’s not an animal.”
I locked onto him as I started up from sharp, blooding bramble at the edge of the drive. He was wide- eyed, staring, and I could see now, this close, the fear in all his body, quivering at the look of me.
“There go,” came the voice. “Now you got the drill.”
By then I was under twenty feet, moving in with shotgun pointed between his eyes. Hallie was back on the other side, at an angle, sitting in the wide bed of Uncle Tank’s pickup. Tank’s hefty camo parka hung up over her shoulders. She had a big old orange hunting cap on backwards, and the bent brim was visible behind one of her small, hunched shoulders. Her rifle was raised up steady on the other shoulder. And when I shot her a glance, I could see her squinting down through its tall sights.
“Now what say turn it around,” she called, clear as all hell. “ I told you once already. I’m Hallie Bear.”
* * *
While I’d laid out on her roof facing the lake, Hallie had been overnighting in the back of Tank’s truck with his old torn tarp spread out over her. But she’d never whispered a word about it. The rest of that day she spent preparing things for my pack and checking my shoulder and ribs as usual. Looking out, every now and again, for a sign of the coyote that I knew she was worried sick about. We had our last supper that night with a big yellow moon staring through her bank trees and spilling its glow off over the lake. There was the old joy back lighting her again. And, in my eyes, she’d grown massive.
* * *
“Land,” she told me, in cold darkness before dawn on the next morning while I knelt down to her drowsy dogs and lifted each one by turn into my arms. Then held onto her old black lab, part pointer. “You do good for someone now other than that darn coyote.”
“All right.”
When I left Hallie Bear, I was too sad to look back down the rise toward her small figure. I had lake sorrow in me the size of summer. Uncle Tank lived in water and trees now, and like badgers he was strong and beautiful, and like owls he found quiet hollows in the wind. Then Aunt Hallie: though I knew her body was laid up nights in that big bed, she walked the hills with her soul. For about four miles, I cut through first frost on the floor of the woods alone. Then the coyote came up out of the small tributary of Tired Creek and together we turned toward the north.
William Weitzel’s stories have appeared in Conjunctions, EPOCH, Kenyon Review, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.