Hold the Dark: A Novel (2 page)

He rented a four-wheel-drive truck to go the one hundred miles inland to the village of Keelut. The truck had a GPS suctioned to the windshield but he’d never used one before, and the attendant told him that where he was going could not be found on GPS. He gave Core a road map, “one of the more accurate ones,” he said, and in red marker traced Core’s path from the airport to Keelut. But Core was lost immediately upon leaving the terminal, on a road that brought him to the hub of this odd city. He saw bungalows hunkered beside towers, Cessna seaplanes parked in driveways, cordwood piled in front of a computer store. Filthy vagrants loping along with backpacks, groomed suits on cell phones.

When he found the right road the city shrank behind him, the December-scape unseen beyond the green glow of the dashboard. He saw old and new snow plowed into half-rounded wharves along the roadside. The red and white pinpricks of light that passed overhead were either airplanes or space vessels. He felt the possibility of a close encounter with discoid airships, with gunmetal trolls from a far-off realm descending to ask him questions he’d not be able to answer. Half an hour of careful driving and the snow came quick in two coned lanes the headlamps carved from darkness. What would he tell Medora Slone about the wolf that had stolen her child? That hunger is no enigma? That the natural order did not warrant revenge?

He’d seen his daughter only once in the last three years, when she came home the morning after her mother’s stroke. Three crawling years. Life was not short, as people insisted on saying. He’d quit cigarettes and whiskey just before she was born. He wanted to be in health for her and knew then that ten years clipped from his life by drink and smoke were ten years too many. Now he knew those were the worthless years anyway, the silver decade of life, a once-wide vista shrunk to a keyhole. Not all silver shines. As of this morning he had plans to return to cigarettes and whiskey both. He regretted not buying them at the airport.

Highways to roads to paths, towns to wilderness, the wider and wider dispersion of man-made light. One lost hour in the opposite direction, in a deepening dark of forest that seemed eager to ingest him. Then a trucker at a fuel station who gave him a better map, who pointed the way, although he wasn’t certain, he said. An eagle was tattooed in black above his eye. “I’m just looking for the easiest roads,” Core told him, and the trucker said, “Roads? This place doesn’t have roads.” He laughed then, only three teeth in a mouth obscured by an unruly beard. Core could not understand what he meant. The snow stopped and he drove on.

Hours later, Core made it to an unpaved pass without a mark to name it. This was the pass to Keelut, a right turn where the hills began to rise close to the road, just past a rotted shanty the trucker had told him to watch for. In four-wheel drive he bumped along this pass until he came to the village. He could count the cabins, arranged in two distinct rows. Most were one-level with only a single room. Some were two-level with sharply slanted roofs and radio antennae stretching into the cold. The hills beyond loomed in protection or else threatened to clamp.

He parked and walked in drifts to his shins. Sled dogs lay leashed beside cabins, huskies huddled together and harnessed, white-gray and cinnamon in sudden moonlight, the snow about them flattened, blotched pink and bestrewn with the bones of their supper. Muscled and wolfish, indifferent to this cold, uncaring of him. He was surprised by a child standing alone in the dark. He stopped to look, unsure if she was real, then asked her for the way to the Slones’ cabin. This child’s cordate face was part Yup’ik, lovely in its unwelcome look. She simply pointed to the cabin before turning, before fleeing into snow-heavy spruce squat in the shadowed dark. He watched her disappear between branches, wondered where she could be going in such chill of night. Why was she not fearful of wolves, of being taken as the others had been taken?

The moon on the snow tricked the eye into seeing the snow itself emanate light. To his left, silhouetted against a sky almost neon blue, stood a totem pole keeping sinister watch at the rim of the village—twenty feet high, it bore the multicolored faces of bears, of wolves, of humanoid creatures he could not name, at the top a monstrous owl with reaching wings and massive beak. He turned to look down the center stretch of the village—not a road but a plowed and shoveled path between two banks of cabins, at the end what seemed a town square with a circular stone structure, half hidden now in hillocks of snow. To his right a wooden water tower with a red-brick base, useless in winter. Behind it a grumbling generator shack giving power to this place. In the orange glow of cabin windows he could spot round faces peering out at him. The air now nearly too cold to breathe.

He walked on to the Slones’ cabin. A set of caribou antlers jabbed out from above the door—in welcome or warning, he could not be sure.

* * *

Medora Slone had tea ready when he finally entered. He was surprised by her white-blond youth. He’d expected the dark raiment of mourning and messed black hair. Her face did not fit, seemed not of this place at all. Hers was the pale unmarked face of a plump teenage softball player, not a woman with a dead boy and a husband at war. Her eyes were pale too. In a certain angle of lamplight they looked the sparest sheen of maize, almost gold.

Her cabin at the edge of the village was built better than most. Two rooms, tight at the edges, moss chinking between logs. Half a kitchen squeezed into a corner, a cord of wood stacked by the rear door, fireplace and granite hearth at one end, cast-iron stove at the other. Bucket of kindling near the stove, radio suspended from a nail in a log. He could brush the ceiling with a fingertip. Easier to heat with low ceilings, he knew. Plastic sheeting stapled and duct-taped over windows to keep out cold. A rifle in the umbrella stand, a child’s BB gun in a corner. Compound bow and quiver of arrows hung above the hearth. His book on wolves was partially stuffed between two cushions of the sofa, pages folded over and under, the cover torn. He asked to use her bathroom and ignored himself in the glass.

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 here 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.”