Hold the Dark: A Novel

For Aiden Xavier, may your dark always be on hold
.

O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth.

—
Gerard Manley Hopkins

We fear the cold and the things we do not understand. But most of all we fear the doings of the heedless ones among ourselves.

—
Eskimo shaman to explorer Knud Rasmussen

T
he wolves came down from the hills and took the children of Keelut. First one child was stolen as he tugged his sled at the rim of the village, another the following week as she skirted the cabins near the ice-choked pond. Now, in the rolling snow whorls of the new winter, a third was dragged from their village, this one from his own doorstep. Noiseless—not a scream, not a howl to give witness.

The women were frantic, those who had lost their children inconsolable. Police arrived from town one afternoon. They scratched sentences into notepads. They looked helpful but never returned to the village. Both women and men patrolled the hills and borders with rifles. Even the elderly, armed with pistols, escorted children home from the schoolhouse and church. But no one would send a party past the valleys to hunt the wolves.

The six-year-old son of Medora Slone was the third to be taken. She told her fellow villagers how she had trekked over the hills and across the vale all that evening and night and into the blush of dawn with the rifle across her back and a ten-inch knife strapped to her thigh. The revenge she wanted tasted metallic. The tracks of the wolves became scattered and vague, then vanished in the flakes falling like feathers. Several times she sank in snow to her knees and imagined her tears turning to pellets of ice that clinked on the hoar and the rocks of the crag.

In her letter to Russell Core just three days after her boy was taken, she wrote that she did not expect to find him alive. A jagged trail of the boy’s blood had led from their back porch and through the patchy woods into the hills above. Still, she needed his body, or whatever remained, if only his bones. That’s the reason she was writing Core, she said. She needed him to get her boy’s bones and maybe slaughter the wolf that took him. No one in the village would hunt the wolves.

“My husband is due back from the war very soon,” she wrote in her letter to him. “I must have something to show him. I can’t do without Bailey’s bones. I can’t have just nothing.”

* * *

Core was not a man who easily frightened. He’d begun as a nature writer, and in search of a project went north where the gray wolves found him one fall, watched him for a week as he camped and fished there. They trailed him along the river, wanted something from him, though it was not his death, he knew. He imagined they wanted a story woven of truth, not myth, one not tilted by dread. The following winter he journeyed to Yellowstone. His second book chronicled that year of living among the grays—a narrative written in an alien era of youth, so long ago that Core scarcely believed in its reality.

For the afterword he offered an essay on the only recorded wolf attack on a human in the park. A female gray had crept into a campsite and stolen a toddler while the parents slept off champagne. He explained this killing as the result of food shortages, migrating herds of caribou confused by a late winter, heedless human invasion into the domain of the wolf: roads and campsites and oil-starved engines, all of it an affront to the majesty of what once had been. Even his own presence among them was an indignity. He felt that daily. This girl’s death was no mystery, no myth. Only elemental. Only hunger.

He was asked to help in the stabbing cold of that morning—the nature writer who had been tent-living among the clan of this killer. He could not say no. His daughter was the same age as the taken girl and his love for her then felt already like loss. The guilt of a father whose work takes him from home. He and the others, the rangers and biologists and camouflaged men, tracked the wolf across twenty square miles over the Northern Range, through Lamar Valley. He rode on a borrowed four-wheeler and was in radio contact with the sniping copters he hated. He sent them false information so they would not find her. Then he rode across the line into Montana where, alone and sickened, he found her and shot her from forty yards on a cattle farmer’s ranch. The rifle they’d given him had no kick—it was nothing like the guns he’d fired as a boy, at the range with his father before his father slumped from life.

That morning Core thought his own land-borne bullet more respectful than those from rangers impersonating gods. Through the scope he could see the wolf’s white muzzle still sprayed pink with the child’s innards. Pieces of yellow pajamas were glued to the dried purple blood just over her flews. Her eyes were golden. Not the glow of red or green as in picture-book terror-wolves, but a dullish, perversely dignified human gold.

You don’t see yourself full, Core knew, until you see yourself reflected in the eye of a beast. This task was a test of human dignity, and he had failed.

No one can deceive the eyes of a wolf. They always know.
And in this way he came to know her too. He left just after he killed her. This was his book. It began in tribute and ended in slaughter. He’d studied that female gray for a year. He’d named her the name of his daughter.

Examiners found much of the girl mashed inside the digestive tract. “A goddamn murderer,” the dead child’s parents said of the wolf that robbed her. “A goddamn demon.” But Core knew otherwise. The raider, this marauder, thief in the night—she dared to intrude not because it was her wish but because it was her need. Who was the transgressor here? He wanted to scold these parents, insist on a fine for their wanton camping in a restricted dale, for the plastic trash dumped beside their tent, but he could not.

Then he watched over the next decade as the gray wolf was hunted to near-extinction. Those cowards sniping from their copters. He recoiled each time he remembered squeezing the trigger on that adult female with the strands of cloth stuck to the hinge of her mouth. He became a help to Yellowstone reintroduction, penned newspaper editorials about man’s hubris, spoke at college symposiums where khaki-clad alumni nodded in agreement, asked him to sign his book and then quickly forgot.

In her letter Medora Slone wrote of Core’s book: “You have sympathy for this animal. Please don’t. Come and kill it to help me. My son’s bones are in the snow.”

* * *

He had Medora Slone’s letter folded into the pocket of his denim jacket when he arrived at the nursing home, a sprawling one-level building that used to be an elementary school, classrooms converted into bedrooms but the hallways still school-like. A column of lockers still at one end, the fire alarms plate-sized red bells he remembered from his own youth. His wife of thirty-five years lay sleeping where she’d lain for the past thirteen months, only part lucid in a bed after a stroke had cleaved one half of her head. He stood looking at this woman who needed a power no man or god was able to give.

He went to the sink and drank. In the mirror he saw his white mane spilling to his shoulders from beneath a baseball cap, the ruff of white sprouting from his jawline, a chin that seemed elongated. He could not guess when he had gone so wintry, so wolfish. Thirteen months ago, perhaps. Microwave meals twice a day. The uneven sleep of the sick, all the hours of quiet he counted. The wind in winter an almost dulcet guest for the wail it made. Boredom daily morphed to despair and back. Sixty years old this year and he knew he looked eighty. Unable to summon the will even to see a barber.

How many more paintings could he produce of the wolf he’d slain? The walls of his library were already covered with such creations. Always, it seemed, of the same wolf. Always the yellow strands of cloth pasted into her bloodied mouth. He could not paint her back to the living. He could not will his own living back.

Thousands of titles stood in his library, gathered and read over a lifetime. Each morning he’d stand in that space, bracketed by books. Touching, fanning through volumes, smelling the poems in their pages, but without the urge anymore to read. A random stanza or paragraph was all he could manage. That pine desk, where he’d written his own books, had once belonged to his father. The chestnut leather armchair was a gift from his wife after they were married. In the foyer of their house an undusted crucifix kept watch upon galoshes and gloves, a parka and cowl hooked where she had hooked them a winter ago. A
WELCOME
mat worn down to
COME
. His painting studio in the attic, once so organized, was now a havoc of canvases and paint tubes, of brushes and easels and drop cloths. The washing machine broke last winter and he left it that way.

Through the cotton blanket he felt for his wife’s foot and grasped it in some unsure gesture of goodbye. He thought of his estranged daughter, far off in Anchorage, a college history professor, what she would say when she saw him, when he arrived unbidden. He took his duffel bag and went. In the hallway a female attendant in a red sweater wished him a merry Christmas, handed him a candy cane broken at its curve. Core looked at his watch: Christmas was still three weeks away. He’d forgotten about Thanksgiving. In the parking lot of the nursing home, in the day’s gaunt sun, sat idling the same white cab that had delivered him.

* * *

Outside the desert city an urgent wind whisked up sand. Dark mustard gusts passed before a buffed sun and looked like blots of insects sent to swarm. Their vehicle made plumes of tawny dust as they sped after a pickup rusted red and packed with men. Perched at the .50-caliber gun, Vernon Slone heard the sand pepper his face mask. This late in the day and the temperature stayed fixed at one hundred.

Back home he knew it was snowing—a winter he would not see. Behind him the city smoldered. If he turned he could behold the smoke and flames of this Gomorrah they’d made. But before him he could see just the windswept sand and the twirling dust of the truck fifty yards ahead. No one was shooting now. No one could see. Every few seconds, between horizontal gusts of sand, Slone spotted the truck’s tailgate.

He watched the truck catch the gulley and overturn four times in near silence, in a storm of sand and dust. He’d seen pickups and snow machines flip in fluffed snow the same way: no sound. The men—what faction were they from? what region?—were tossed from the truck’s bed like bags of leaves. The truck slid, smashed to a halt on top of them. Some limped from the tinfoil wreck and shot at Slone’s vehicle. The lead dinged against the armor.

When the .50-caliber rounds hit them they tore off limbs or else left dark blue holes the size of plums. He fired into those on the fuel-damp sand and those still crammed inside the truck’s flattened cab. Their blood burst in the wind as wisps of orange and red. Curious how orange, how radiant blood looks beneath a desert noon, in the dull even tinge of its light.

The truck ignited but did not explode. They let it burn there for fifteen, twenty minutes and then finally approached with extinguishers.

The boy inside was Bailey’s age. The unburned skin of his face shone of caramel. Shirtless, without shoes, his feet so singed they seemed melted and remolded—feet fashioned from candle wax. Spalls of rock made piercings in his neck and chin, the jugular ripped unevenly by broken glass, below it a gown of blood to his kneecaps. Slone looked into the liquid gray eyes of the man beside him—a man whose simple name, Phil, did not seem to fit the darkness Slone knew he had within.

Who issues orders here? What foul game’s pieces are we?
They sat smoking on their vehicle. Slone watched the others search pockets and packs. Some clicked shots of the wreck, showed each other, and laughed. Phil bent to knife out the eyes and tongues of the dead—these would be his keepsake.

* * *

Core arrived in Alaska in the faint hold of early dusk. He’d slept on the flight, was winched down deep into the vagueness of dreams where he saw the bleared faces of his wife and daughter, and of someone else in shadows, someone he suspected was his mother. At the airport he asked a man the way to the rental car counter and the man simply pointed to the sign directly in front of them, the company’s name shouting inside a yellow arrow. In a shop he stood before a magazine rack, made-up faces grinning on covers but he could not name a single one. Alaska papers proclaiming weather. He bought a candy bar.