Hold the Dark: A Novel Read online

  They sat across from one another—she on a sofa whose cushions were worn to the foam, he sunk low in an armchair—and they sipped tea in the quiet welcomed by their exhaustion. She offered him the food that others from the village had been bringing to her since her son’s disappearance—caribou soup, fry bread, moose stew, wheat berries, pie baked with canned peaches. But he had no appetite now. The tea warmed his limbs, a lone orange coal or glowing hive pulsing from the center of him. He rolled the sleeves of his flannel shirt. On the pine arm of the chair were the ring stains of a coffee mug—an Olympic logo warped and brown.

  “Canis lupus,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Apex predator.” She moved his book to the coffee table between them. “Ice age survivor from the Late Pleistocene. What’s that mean?”

  “It means they’ve been around a long time and know how to hunt better than we do.”

  “You sound . . . happy by that.”

  “I’m sorry about your son, Mrs. Slone.”

  “You’ve come to kill it, then? To kill that animal that took him?”

  He looked but did not answer.

  “So why’d you come, then? I was a little surprised you replied to the letter I sent.”

  The crushing quiet of his house.

  “I came to help if I can,” he said. “To explain this if I can.”

  “The explanation is that we’re cursed here. The only help is to kill it.”

  “You know, ma’am, I’m just a writer.”

  “You’ve hunted and killed one of them before. I read that in your book.”

  “Where’d you find the book?”

  “It found me. I don’t know how. It was just here one day.”

  She looked to the room around them, trying to recognize it, trying to remember.

  “You mentioned getting the boy’s bones, but . . . I don’t know.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was thinking that his bones would show during breakup.”

  “Breakup?”

  “You know, in spring. After the thaw.”

  He did not tell her this was impossible. The boy’s yellow snow boots stood like sentinels on the mat near the door, his pillowed coat on a hook, but there was no framed school photo grinning at Core gap-toothed from the mantel, no plastic trucks or toy guns on a carpet. If not for the boots and coat, this woman before him was just another story among the many he’d been told. Sixty years old, he was half sure he’d heard every tale worth hearing. That morning at the airport, sitting at a window in a boulevard of sunlight, in spring’s cruel tease, he tried to remember his parents’ faces and could not.

  “I would have killed the thing myself,” she said. “If I could have found it. I tried to find it. I tried to do it.”

  “No, their territory could be up to two hundred square kilometers. It’s good you didn’t find it. The pack is probably eight or ten members. No more than twelve, I’d guess. You don’t want to find that.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question, Mr. Core?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you have a child?”

  “Yes, a daughter, but she’s grown now. In Anchorage, she teaches at the university. I’ll see her when I leave here.”

  “A teacher like her father.”

  “I’m no teacher. I maybe could have been, but . . . She’s good at it, I hear. She wanted to be an Alaskan.”

  “That city’s not Alaska. Where you are right now, Alaska starts here. We’re on the edge of the interior here.”

  He said nothing.

  “Mr. Core, do you have any idea what’s out those windows? Just how deep it goes? How black it gets? How that black gets into you. Let me tell you, Mr. Core, you’re not on Earth here.” She looked into the steam of her mug, then paused as if to drink. “None of us ever have been.”

  He watched her drink. “I’ve felt that in certain places over the years.”

  “Certain places. I mean what you feel here won’t be the same as anything you’ve ever felt before.”

  He waited for an explanation.

  She gave him none.

  “But this is your home,” he finally said.

  “I’m not from here originally. I was brought here when I was a child, and that makes me not from here.”

  “Brought here from where?”

  “I don’t remember that. I’ve never been told where and I never asked. But I know this place is different.”

  He imagined her in the snow standing naked, almost translucent, a vision caught for only a second before blinking her gone. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Her eyes flicked about the room in anxiety, in expectation. She lifted his book from the table and fanned through the pages. “I don’t understand what they’re doing here,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Wolves.”

  “They’ve been here for half a million years, Mrs. Slone. They walked over the Bering land bridge. They live here.”

  They live here. And Core knew they helped rule this continent until four hundred years ago. Inuit hunters learned to encircle caribou by watching wolves. Hunting-man revered another hunter. Farming-man wanted its existence purged. Some set live wolves ablaze and cheered as they burned. Wolf and man are so alike we’ve mistaken one for the other: Lupus est homo homini. This land has hosted horrors most don’t care to count. Wolfsbane. But we are the hemlock, the bane of the wolf. Core said nothing.

  “I don’t understand what they’re doing here,” and she gestured feebly in front of her, at the very space on the rug where her son had no doubt pieced together a puzzle of the solar system. Or else scribbled a drawing of the very monster that would one day come for him, stick-figure mother and father looking on, unable to help.

  “Why is this happening to me, Mr. Core? What myth has come true in my house?”

  “They’re just hungry wolves, Mrs. Slone. It’s no myth. It’s just hunger. No one’s cursed. Wolves will take kids if they need to. This is simple biology here. Simple nature.”

  He wanted to say: All myths are true. Every one is the only truth we have.

  She laughed then, laughed with her tear-wet face pressed into her hands. He saw her fingernails were gnawed down to nubs. He knew she was laughing at him, at his outsized task here before her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and looked at his boots. “I don’t know why this is happening to you, Mrs. Slone.”

  He could name no comfort for this. His face warmed with the foolishness of his being here.

  More quiet. And then: “Does your husband know?”

  She seemed startled by the word, unready to recall her husband. “Men were supposed to call him there, to call the ones who could tell him. But I said I would do it, that I should be the one to do it. I never did, though. I can’t tell him while he’s there. He’ll see for himself.” She paused and considered her gnawed fingertips. “He’ll see what has happened. What we’ve done. What no one here was able to stop.”

  “They’re hungry and desperate,” he said. “They don’t leave for the fringes of their territory unless they’re desperate. They avoid contact with humans if they can. If we’ll let them. The wolves that came to this village must be rabid. Only a rabid or starved wolf does what happened here.”

  He looked beyond her, looked for the language but it was not there. “The caribou must have left early,” he said. “For some reason.”

  He could have told her more. That wolves have a social sophistication to make many an American town look lagging. That the earliest human tribes were identical to wolf packs. That a healthy gray wolf’s yearly requirement of meat can reach two tons, that they’ll cannibalize each other, kill their own if the hunger hones to a tip. He’d seen this in the wild. A six-year-old boy would have shredded like paper in the teeth of any adult male. It killed the boy at his throat and then rent through the clothing to get at the belly, its muzzle up beneath the ribs to eat the organs it wanted.

  “If I can ask,” he said, “why wouldn’t anyone he
re hunt the wolves after what happened?”

  “They’re afraid. And the ones who don’t have fear have respect. They respect the thing. They probably think we deserve it, we deserve what happened here.”

  “I don’t understand, Mrs. Slone.”

  “Stay here long enough and you might. Can I refill your tea?”

  He indicated no. His tea was finished now and he felt the first shadows of sleep drop across his shoulders. Somewhere in the village a brace of sled dogs barked up at constellations stretched across a bowl of black. Both he and Medora Slone turned to look at the sheeted window. Where were the sled dogs when the wolves came? He remembered a Russian proverb: Do not call the dogs to help you against the wolves.

  He remembered a story he’d been told and could never say if it was parable or fact but he told it to her anyway: “In Russia, during a winter of the Second World War, a food shortage was on. No meat, no grain. The fighting decimated the land. The wolves rampaged into villages and mauled at random. Like they were their own invading army. They killed hundreds of people that winter, and not just women and children. Drunk old men or crippled men too weak to defend themselves. Even dogs. There was nobody left to hunt the wolves. All the able men were at the war or dead. Somehow aware of that imbalance, the wolves came and left scenes of carnage almost as bad as the bombs. Doctors said they were rabid, but the villagers said they were possessed by demons hell-bent on revenge. Their howls, they said, sounded like hurt demons. It was revenge, the old people thought. Revenge for something, for their past, maybe, I don’t know.”

  She stared at him—she didn’t understand. She looked insulted.

  “I mean you’re not alone,” he said.

  “Yes, I am. What’s done can’t be undone, can it? Just look what we’re capable of, Mr. Core,” and she held up her palm for him to see. But he did not know why and was too frightened to ask.

  She lowered her hand and said, “Come, I’ll show you outside where the children were taken. Are those your boots?”

  He looked at his feet. “These are my boots.”

  “You’ll need better boots.”

  * * *

  This stolid village remained gripped in snow and stillness, and over the hills lay a breadth without end, an echoing cold with a mind that won’t be known. Yellow-orange squares burned in the sides of log and frame homes, stone spires exhaling wood smoke. From the hook on a cabin hung a fish chain with two silver salmon. Core saw overturned dogsleds and toboggans, canoes and aluminum boats, ricks of exposed wood, pickup trucks with tire chains. Adjacent to some cabins were plywood kennels for sled dogs. Unlabeled fifty-five-gallon drums, rust-colored, most with tops torched off. Shovels and chain saws and snow machines, Coleman lanterns dented and broken. Gas-powered auger to drill lake ice. Blue tarp bungeed around a truck’s engine on sawhorses. Vehicles mugged by snow and stranded. The church an unpainted A-frame beside the schoolhouse. And all around, those hills with howls hidden within.

  He’d been deep into the reaches of Montana, Minnesota, Wyoming, Saskatchewan, but no place he could remember matched the oddness, the otherness he felt in this place. A settlement at the edge of the wild that both welcomed and resisted the wild.

  “It’s beautiful here,” he said, his words in a cloud. It was a lie, and he knew she heard it as a lie.

  She looked to him. “You don’t understand.”

  “What don’t I understand, Mrs. Slone?”

  She neither tensed against the cold nor appeared to feel the freeze on her naked face and hands.

  “This wildness here is inside us,” she said. “Inside everything.”

  She pointed out beyond the hills at an expanse vaster than either of them knew.

  “You’re happy here?” he asked.

  “Happy? That’s not a question I ask myself. I see pictures in magazines, vacation pictures of islands, such green water and sand, girls in bathing suits, and I wonder about it. Seems so strange to me, being there. There’s a hot spring not so far from here, a three-hour walk, a special place for me, hidden at the far end of the valley. That’s as close as I get to warmth and water.”

  “A hot spring sounds good right now,” he said.

  “Good to get clean,” she said, and he did not ask what she meant by that.

  “I’ve come to help you if I can, Mrs. Slone. Nothing’s a novelty to me here.”

  She wouldn’t look at him now. “Mr. Core, my husband left me alone here with a sick child.”

  “You met in this village?”

  “We never met anywhere. I knew him my whole life. Since before my life. I don’t have a memory he isn’t in. And he left me here.”

  “But the war.”

  “I heard on the radio it’s not a real war. Someone said that.”

  “It’s real enough, Mrs. Slone. People are dying real deaths. On both sides.”

  “He said he’d never leave me. That’s what men say. Words can’t be worthless, just thrown away like some trash. There’s punishment for the wrong words.”

  “But I’ve found that sometimes life interferes with words. Or changes what you meant by them.”

  She turned from him and walked on. He followed. From a copse of birch a Yup’ik man and his boy, both with rifles, dragged a lank moose calf, barely meat enough for a family’s meal. Medora Slone and Core watched them pull it through the snow to their cabin beyond the copse.

  They walked again in silence.

  “That’s the pond where the first was taken.” She pointed.

  He wiped his wet nostrils with a glove.

  “Didn’t you bring some warmer clothes?”

  “I didn’t expect this kind of cold,” he said.

  “It’s not even cold yet, Mr. Core. I have some warmer clothes for you. And Vernon’s good boots.”

  “You said before your son was sick.”

  “He wasn’t the right one.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “He stopped going to school after his father left.”

  “That’s normal enough, I think. Children usually don’t like school at first. My daughter went through that.”

  His daughter was of course grown, very much alive, a lifetime of school in her past. He wanted to blame his exhaustion, this ungodly cold for his carelessness, his stumbling words.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I only meant—”

  “Stop apologizing to me.” She pointed again. “The wolf came from that dip in the hill, at the far side of the pond there. I found its tracks. I followed them. And there was nothing normal about our son.”

  He saw at the pond the snow-covered rectangle he guessed was a dock. Children leapt from that dock in summer, but imagining the sounds of their splashes was not possible now. This village tableau repelled every thought of summer and light. He wanted to understand what warmth, what newness and growth was possible here, but he could not.

  “The second was taken over here. The girl,” she said, and they moved around the pond, behind a row of cabins to where the low front hills split to form an icy alcove. “The children sled in here, down that hill there.”

  He remembered: Take warning hence, ye children fair; of wolves’ insidious arts beware.

  “Bailey too?”

  “Bailey didn’t sled.” She paused here, hand on her womb as if the womb held memory the hand could feel. “He just wasn’t the right one.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by that, ma’am.”

  “He didn’t sled.”

  They stood staring into the alcove; he tried to imagine the animal charging down the slope. A startled child’s visage of terror. A gust lifted from their left, carried blurs of snow and yanked at their clothes. Medora Slone moved through wind and snow as others move through sun.

  “How did it feel to shoot that female wolf?” she asked.

  “I was there to study them.”

  “And you really believe what you wrote? That a wolf taking a child is part of the order of things out there?” She gestured to the hills, past th
e hills.

  “Yes, I do, Mrs. Slone.”

  “How did it feel to shoot it?”

  “I didn’t have much of a choice that day. It felt bad.”

  “But not so rare?”

  “Very rare,” he said. “They aren’t what you think, Mrs. Slone. What happened here does not happen.”

  She stared—her eyeballs looked frozen. “What happened here happened to me.”

  He closed his eyes and kept them closed in the cold, loathing the words that might come from him. He said nothing.

  “I suppose you’re hungry now,” she said. “I have some soup for you.”

  When they arrived back at the Slones’ front door, he asked, “Where was your son taken?”

  “Around back,” she said, and gestured feebly with her chin at the corner of the cabin.

  “May I see?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t now,” she said, and took his gloved hand to lead him inside, a lover’s gesture he could not make sense of.

  She heated caribou soup in a small dented pot on the burner. In the armchair he ate from the pot and let the broth transform him, quash his ability to fend off this insistent sleep. She traded him a mug of black coffee for the pot. He saw on a shelf a half-gone bottle of whiskey and asked if she might add some to his coffee. She poured into his mug and when he drank the heat of it filled the hollowness in him.

  He asked then if she might have a cigarette and chocolate. From a cupboard she retrieved them, an unopened bag of chocolate he knew must have belonged to the boy, and a brand of filterless cigarettes he did not recognize. They sat and smoked together but they did not speak. His chest and lungs felt aflame at first, but after several pulls they remembered. He smoked smoothly with the chocolate smeared to the roof of his mouth and was thankful for this pleasure among so much sting.