The Animals: A Novel (35 page)

Then he was taken to the place where he would live all the rest of his days and he was fed berries and carrots and lettuce heads and sometimes elk or moose or beef and there were others too: raccoons and a coyote and an opossum but never, ever, another bear.

He had felt alone until the summer the boy first arrived. Even now he can remember his scent, not so different than it would be tonight were the wind to blow it to him through the trees. Were the bear not blind, he might have formed the image of the man’s face as a boy, a cub, staring back at him through the wire that first time, but in the blurred and milky darkness there is only the face of the man as he is now and when he sees that face in his mind he does not see a man at all but rather a bear.

There comes a time when there is no cloud-choked sky above him; there is only desert and the flat sagebrush plain. There runs the long straight line of the highway. And there lies the town. For a long time, there is only the anonymity of quiet movement: paint-stripped cars adrift on dusty streets, a few sweating figures on the sidewalks in front of the casinos. And then he can see the boy, a thin hot shape come racing through the afternoon light, his path an undulating swoop between lines of boxlike homes, the fences of which guard patches of yellow grass. He sits on the handlebars of a bicycle piloted by someone the bear does not recognize but he recognizes the smile on the boy’s face as the boy’s life, the life of the man he knows, runs out before him like the oxbow curves of some thin cold river, the whole of it running backward and forward at once, the sky shivering with snow, the sky the floor of the desert, the road between the places: a boy riding on his brother’s handlebars through a desert town, and everything to come after, the whole of it spread out across the sky, the bear staring up into the great depths of that dead ocean, no longer aware if his eyes are open or closed but knowing now that everything he has seen and will see has led to this moment and that no matter what happens next he cannot help the man, the thought of which brings a long warm bloom of raw desire shaking through him. Again he tries to call out to the man he knows but there is nothing but his breath and then there is not even that anymore. He can smell the snowed ridges pouring away from him in all directions. He can smell the slick silver shapes of fish pressing out across the sage, over mountains, across towns. He smells a city made of light and his friend moving through it and he smells the stranger too, the one who had brought that black jagged scent up the mountain, smells him laughing and talking and smoking cigarettes on the street, smells him screaming in pain and anger and frustration and then smells him as he is locked away. Then there is the long stretch of the desert back to Battle Mountain again, his eyes blurring with tears, and the hands that hold the wheel he knows are his own for he has become a man as surely as his friend has become a bear.

In the end, he finds himself upon a golden plain, the rise of yellow grasses in the late morning sunlight, the cold blowing in through a gap in the window glass. There is an animal atop a hill, a creature that reminds him of an elk but which, of course, is no elk and which stares down at him impassively, black-eyed. He knows he has dreamed of this animal, of this moment. He fishes a book from the backseat and on its cover is the same wheat-colored creature, the same grassy hill. Then he stands and steps out of the car. His hands are empty. He expects the animal to flee but the animal continues to watch him, without moving, without even seeming to be afraid. And then he knows that it is waiting for him. It has been waiting for them all. He steps forward, up the slope, through grasses the color of summer sunlight. The animal calls him Majer and when the man moves to correct her, his throat seizes and he sees that his pink hands have become furred claws and that in his mind there are no words at all. What he holds to in that final moment is the sense that the man he would call his friend has come to him at last and he pulls that feeling around him like a coat of fur as a scent as wild and free and clear as any he could have ever imagined wells up inside and pulls him away at last.

PART IV

THE ANIMALS

16

HE CAME TO THE GATE WITH THE THROTTLE FULL OPEN, THE
flat yellow of the headlights arcing across the blurred snowfield before him and the tracks spinning a long rooster tail out behind. He could already see the cut padlock, its bent shape hanging from the spotlit gate latch, and the sound he made was a howl of panic and rage as he leaped from the sled, flinging the goggles off his face and flailing up through the snow.

The enclosures were dark and what details were held within were rendered grainy and insubstantial, shapes without color or depth, an occasional stone or tree trunk rising through the continuous fade of the onrushing snow. He called to Cinder, his fingers lacing through the fence wires, called her and called her and called her until at last a low groan rose from the muffled silence. He could just make out the snow-covered shape of her body fading up from the static, her body on its side, panting, tongue out and single eye staring up into the constantly descending snow. She growled now, low and deep, and when he tried to speak to her again the only sound he could make was a high keening whine. Still she did not rise.

He was running then, floundering uphill toward the top of the loop, the dark silent cages passing him on either side, his boots following the path that Rick had made, the line of which curved toward each enclosure and then moved on, uphill or down, the path mostly covered in snow now and the whole compound appearing as if it were some dark jail or prison: cages everywhere with hills of snow between them. The sight of it made him shudder. And that was when he saw Majer, the great hulk of the animal’s back fading out of the granular and shifting darkness, unmoving in the center of his enclosure as if he had fallen asleep by the frozen pond, Bill flailing toward the gate through the high drifts between the fence lines in silence but for his heaving breath.

When he reached the front of the cage at last, he wrapped his fingers through the wire, sucking air and watching the silent unmoving shape within and then his hands had curled into fists and he was banging the fencing and scrambling sideways through the drifts, stripping off his gloves and fishing the keys from his pants pocket and unlocking the door, his heart gone wild, hands shaking, the door coming open now and the night clamping around him, everything hushed and muffled so that his rasping breath was the only possible sound.

His first steps postholed directly into the snow so that he fell forward into the drift, frantic now, scrambling up and through that rise until Majer’s body lay there before him, the bear on its side, its great head covered with snow, mouth open, tongue lolling against the ice. He laid his hand on the bear’s mouth, felt the flesh there, not yet frozen but cooling. Above the long snout, the eyes remained open, pale and faintly blue and holding, somewhere deep within, a darkness like black night covered with the translucent but impervious film of his blindness.

And he knew that Majer was dead.

He tried to speak but there were no words and after a time he leaned forward, his knees crunching the snow, one arm reaching up to lie upon that furred back, a back still carrying a hint of the animal’s warmth. He lay upon that great carcass and wept, his face pressed to Majer’s thick brown fur, one hand stroking, so slowly, the long snout. He tried again to speak but what came was only a long howl that rose up from the center of him and would not stop, his heart unspooling all around him, a red ribbon that turned and looped and fell everywhere, into the sky, into the snow, around the two of them, the man who lay upon the body of the bear in a cage at the center of a white and frozen forest, and in the falling snow it was unclear where the man ended and the bear began, for both had begun to shift into white, the man sinking into the body of the bear, the bear rising into the body of the man, both of them dissolving into a blowing whirl of snow that seemed, in that moment, to come from all directions at once, the rush of it upon their bodies like an avalanche.

THE ANIMALS
had been killed in their cages. The bald eagles both dead on their sides on the floor and in the adjacent enclosure the turkey vulture was also dead. Tommy and Betty and Chester. The porcupines were quietly in motion but both the martens were dead, side by side, in a kind of tortured embrace, their mouths open and tiny teeth shining out in the darkness. The raccoons—Perry, Tony, and Barley—all huddled at the back of their enclosure, alive, although they would not come forward no matter how long Bill stood there. Baker the badger was dead and Goldie the bobcat and Katy the red fox, all of them frozen in attitudes of fear and agony. And then Zeke. The wolf lay in his customary location at the back of the fence line, panting and growling at him, not moving away even when Bill came right up the chain link, only staring back at him with eyes yellow and rolling and Bill’s voice offering that same wordless keening in response.

Of the raptors, only Elsie, their great gray owl, was alive, her bright yellow eyes peering back at him from within her partially snow-buried cage. He came to the fence and looked back at her, his voice a kind of cooing like the sound of a dove. On the floor, not far from the edge of the wire where he stood, lay a strip of meat, cold and partially frozen, beef or venison or something else. He came around to the zookeeper door and unlocked it and entered the enclosure and knelt there before the frozen strip, the owl hopping on its perch and looking down at him with her huge pie-shaped face. Bill knelt and took the meat into his hand and remained there, looking at it, smelling it, staring at its color, at its shape, but such an examination revealed nothing and at last he slipped it into his coat pocket.

He stepped into the office briefly to confirm what he already knew—that the phone was out—and in the moment of holding that cold plastic to his ear, of listening to the silence it brought, he knew that the night would likely end with his death, and then he understood what he would do next, what he had to do. He returned to the bottom of the loop and opened the doors to Cinder’s enclosure and stood watching for her in the falling snow, in the wind, the panic he had felt replaced now by a kind of rage. The place where he had first seen her was vacant now, the area covered over with fresh snow so that there was no evidence she had been there at all, as if everything about her had been a hallucination, a fantasy. But then her head came up out of the far side of the enclosure and a moment later her body seemed to fade into being, not quickly, not the sleek moving river he had watched for so many hours, but instead a slow laboring creature climbing up out of the rocks of her cage toward whatever freedom lay beyond. Go on, Bill said. The lion was panting but she moved past him and then through the open door, not even glancing at him with her one good eye as she did so, her walk unhurried as she moved on through the thick falling curls of winter snow and disappeared into the dark heavy trees all around them.

He opened all the enclosures, even for the animals that were dead, even for Majer, and when he turned back from the top of the loop, it was to watch the porcupines, already out in the path, walking downhill slowly through the blizzard as if they knew where they were headed. Of the animals that had been poisoned, he did not know if any of them would survive but he knew that he had to give them the chance, even though he had told himself, for all his years at the rescue, that they would die in the wild, that they were simply not capable of living without him. But perhaps even that had been a lie. Perhaps he was the one who needed them, keeping them in their cages, not a savior but a prison warden. That was what the Fish and Game officer had told him—that he did not get to decide who could be put in a cage and who could not—and maybe this much had been true all along. In the end, maybe his entire life as Bill Reed had been only an atonement for failing his best friend so many years before. And yet that life had led them all to slaughter. Majer and Tommy and Chester and Baker and Goldie and Katy and the Twins. Perhaps Zeke and Cinder as well. Because of what he had done. Because of what he had failed to reconcile. At least beyond the enclosures they had a chance. At least he could give them that much after so many years.

Zeke’s was last, the door opening upon an enclosure that appeared completely empty. No print. No sign of fur. No sense of the animal hiding from him. Nothing. As if the creature had simply dissolved into the storm altogether.

Then he was scrambling back down the hill through the snow, his hands numb, the gloves somewhere behind him where he had pulled them off and dropped them, his face frozen but his body moving, returning through the cut-locked gate to where the snowmobile sat already partially covered with fresh snow, panting and coughing and gasping for air even as he grasped the pull cord and began to heave at it, three times before even remembering to turn the key, and then once more and the machine burst into sound, its engine rattling, clouds of dark exhaust pooling out behind it in the frozen air and its headlights illuminating the swirl of snow that seemed to descend upon him from everywhere at once.