The Animals: A Novel

Macie

THE ANIMALS

PART I

ECOLOGY

1

1996

WHAT YOU HAVE COME FOR IS DEATH. YOU MIGHT TRY TO
convince yourself otherwise but you know in your heart that to do so would be to set one falsehood upon another. In the end there is no denying what is true and what is only some thin wisp of hope that clings to you like hoarfrost on a strand of wire. At least you have learned that much, although you are loath to admit it just as you are loath to come down the mountain, down from the animals, to confirm what you already know you will find. All the while you can feel their shining eyes upon you, their noses pulling at your scent, their bodies pressed tight against the interlaced fencing of their enclosures. The world in its bubble and you holding fast to its slick interior as if to the blood-pumped safety of a womb. You and the animals. And yet after everything you have done, everything you have tried to do, everything you promised yourself, today you know you will have to put on the old clothes of the killer once again.

It was not his own voice, or rather he did not think of it as his own. After all the years and all the conversations he had shared with Majer, he had come to think of that voice, the voice of his own conscience, as coming not from him but from the bear, a sharp reckoning that now, as he descended the dirt path between the enclosures, seemed to drift down upon him like fresh snow. He could feel the animals watching but he did not return their collected gaze, focusing instead on the weight of the black case slung over his shoulder and then on the heavy thump of his boots as he continued toward the parking lot that hung below him beyond the fence wire. There, a jagged line of conifer shadows bifurcated a flat patch of colorless gravel at the edge of which was parked his pickup.

He managed to avoid the rest of the animals but he knew he could not avoid Majer. When he reached that enclosure the great bear cocked his head at an angle as if waiting for him to approach the front fence but Bill only kept walking, his steps taking him past the cage and toward the gravel parking lot below, toward the truck and the drive south to Ponderay. The other animals still watched him, he could feel their eyes upon him everywhere, but it was the bear’s sightless gaze that cut him most of all and finally he stopped in the center of the path, near the door to the blocklike construction trailer he used as an office, and turned to face the rising ridgeline, the enclosures spread out in their circle, the animals all moving against their separate fences.

There stood the bear. He had risen onto his hind legs and towered now near the front of the cage, the clear surface of the little pool blocked by his bulk, the size and shape of him staggering, enormous, a creature of fur and claw and, in some universe not so far from this one, of killing, balancing there with a grace that seemed impossible and staring through the fence at Bill with eyes like small milky stones, the depths of which revealed only a surface of cataracts as pale and featureless as a frozen lake.

What? Bill said. He stood there for a long moment, as if waiting for the bear’s response. Then he said, Don’t. Don’t you even start.

The bear seemed to shift momentarily from one foot to the other but he continued to stand, his face, peppered gray with age, watching Bill as he stood in the path. If there was judgment in those pale, sightless eyes it was without expression, the bear’s gaze only holding within them the same acceptance that Bill had always seen there, as if nothing would be asked of him, not ever, as if the only thing Bill could ever do wrong was not return.

I gotta go, Bill said. I’ll be back in an hour.

There was no response, no grunt or huff, no tilt of head, and yet as he turned toward the path again he could not help but feel that all their eyes, Majer’s among them, held the foreknowledge of what he was likely going to do, of what he was likely moving toward.

When he reached the parking lot he locked the gate behind him and started the truck and turned out off the gravel, tipping down onto a road that tunneled through a verdant shadowland of bull pine and lodgepole and red cedar, and then on along the river, its surface, in the fading light, the color of dead fish, and at last lurched out onto the highway.

All the while he could feel their eyes upon him, even now, even as he downshifted, turning through a forest going slowly dark, the stand before him faintly blurred and drifting with low strips of tattered white clouds, like a forest out of some fairy tale where bears and men and wolves sometimes swapped bodies to fool women and children into trust and sometimes committed acts of murder, these images encircling him as they sometimes did on the birch path from the trailer to the big gate, even though he knew, of course, that such bleak thoughts would do nothing for him in the hours to come. Yet there was little to brighten them. Such calls as he had received over the years had most often ended in death. The doe he had called Ginny had been the first, if it had indeed been her in the road, broken-spined and crying. The image of her came to him as he drove, not of her in the agony of her final moments, but as a small frantic creature hanging nose-down from a fence, the day he and his uncle had rescued her. But the highway was an abattoir, and with an animal of this size—a full-grown moose—it was likely there would be nothing he or anyone else could do except what had to be done. He had brought the rifle in response to such odds but despite this, despite everything he knew, he still held out some hope that he would not have to use it, that somehow the animal would have suffered some superficial injury and he would not need to remove the rifle from where it lay with the dart gun in the zippered case beside him. When his voice spoke into the engine hum of the cab it was to this falsehood: You know there is no truth in it at all. Every scrap a lie.

And indeed when he pulled the truck to the side and stepped out onto the street at last, the scene was much as he knew it would be. The pickup that had struck the moose sat in the center of the road at the edge of a scant collection of battered businesses cut into the surrounding forestland, its hood crushed nearly to the windshield, the animal a few dozen yards before it, one rear leg clearly broken, swinging and dragging from its new hingepoint, its hip likely shattered as well, its faltering motion like that of a crab or an insect, or like some newborn of its own species, unsure of its footing, head swinging back and forth as if on a pendulum and chocolate brown eyes rolling in their sockets. And then its sound, the sound of an animal of blood and bone that seemed to call out to him and to him alone
—Come! Come to me!—
a call not unlike the honk of a goose or the weird blast of a tuneless horn, each note short and rising in volume and then cut off as the lungs were emptied, and each loud enough that Bill nearly brought his hands up to shield his ears.

The sheriff said his name and Bill glanced at him briefly and then returned his attention to the moose. A young male, a bull, not more than a year old. Bill walked sideways around it, toward its head, the sheriff following his motion. The moose’s eyes rolled, brown and wet, watching him, watching them all. How long? he said.

I think they called you right after, the sheriff said. So half an hour maybe. What do you wanna do here?

As if in response, the animal started its terrible bleating honk again, mouth open, body once again lurching forward, slowly, as if possessed of some awful errand, down the street and toward the town. Bill moved as close to it as he could, squatting before it on the asphalt, voice calm even as his heart beat wild in his chest, his own blood pulling toward the animal all at once as if magnetized by the agony. Shhh, he said. It’s gonna be all right. We’re here to help. It’s gonna be all right.

The moose quieted again and he stood slowly and stepped backward to the sheriff. Who ran into him?

Some mechanic from Sandpoint, the sheriff said.

He OK?

In the hospital. Broke his ribs up and slammed his face into the wheel. There anything you can do here? I’m supposed to call the new Fish and Game guy.

You haven’t called them yet?

Not yet. You want me to?

Not very much.

Then it’s slipped my mind.

Bill glanced back at the smashed truck and then to the moose again. A half hour ago it had come down from the mountains, perhaps following a line of fragrant moss in the trunks of trees that lined a muddy creek bottom, and now it stumbled along that scant black road among men and women and children gathered for no reason other than to watch it go to ground.

He breathed out, slowly. There was a tightness in his chest and a feeling that he was caught up in something of which he could not let go.

When he looked to the street beyond, he caught sight of her pickup as it trundled between the buildings and then came to a stop. She leaped down from the cab in her purple coat and came to the moose, kneeling directly before the animal much as he had a few moments before, her voice the same quiet hush as his own, the moose’s head moving, the breath coming in bursts of hot steam.

He turned away now, returning to his pickup, opening the door to pull the canvas gun case toward him and unzipping its front pocket. Two or three loose shells spilled out onto the seat and he scooped them into his hand and then, from the pocket, extracted a small black box, inside of which rested a hypodermic needle and two vials of clear fluid, and a plastic tube containing a thin dart with a brilliant red tail. The shells he returned to the pocket, zipping it closed. Then he set to filling the dart, first sucking the fluid from one of the vials and then holding the syringe up to the light and squeezing a small quantity into the air before slipping the needle into the larger bore of the dart and pressing home the plunger.

When he looked up from his work, Grace was there, her eyes wide.

I was loading point eight carfentanil, he said. Is that what you want?

She sighed, her breath outspiraling into steam. He’s got a broken hip.

You sure?

Well, yeah. Aren’t you? When he did not respond, she put her hand on his shoulder. It would be better to just do it, she said. Get it over with.

Can we just check him first? Just to make sure there’s nothing we can do?

Baby, he’s not going to make it. He’s in pain.

I know that, he said.

It’s not humane.

I just need you to tell me that there’s nothing we can do for him. I mean one hundred percent sure. Can you do that?

She stared at him. Shit. You really know how to put me over a barrel, you know that?

He said nothing, his hands hovering over the tranquilizer gun, hovering in the grim cold air.

Well, she said at last, you got anything else besides the carfentanil?

Ketamine, he said, but I don’t think I have enough to put down a moose.

She exhaled. All right, so let’s go a full milligram of the carfentanil and hope that knocks him out the first time.

He nodded and returned to the vial and then to the dart, the small bottle from which he had extracted the medication nearly empty now, and then unzipped the larger compartment on the case. He knew that she saw the rifle there but she did not comment and he shifted the firearm to the side and pulled the tranquilizer gun from the case, opened the bolt, and slid the dart into the breech.

The moose had started up its sound again, its sharp terrible bleating. Grace’s forehead wrinkled as she glanced behind her and then returned to Bill. You want me to do it? she said.

No, I’ll do it. He lifted the gun to his chest and pumped it, three times, four, five, and then wrapped the strap once around his forearm and stood by the door of the truck. You should ask Earl if he can get someone to bring a flatbed tow truck out here.