The Dogs of Winter (28 page)

By mid-morning the fog had thinned somewhat and they came to a long, narrow stretch of beach at the foot of tall cliffs and found
here a strange sight, for there were perhaps a dozen deer in this place that seemed to have fallen from the cliff and now lay dead on the sand. They looked to have been that way even on a higher tide for several of the deer had seaweed draped over them, but there were no other marks on them and they lay in various attitudes of repose with their eyes unseeing and open to a distant sun.

They went by the deer without speaking, as if in the sight of these dead animals some portent was contained which none cared to name. Even Drew had nothing to say, though Fletcher did see him stop long enough to make a note in his black book, and after that they went on.

In another cove where the sand was steep and black and flecked with shards of shell and rock made golden in the sun, they came upon the body of a small whale that had been attacked and killed by sharks. Huge bites had been taken from the whale’s body, and these were now black with congealed blood and covered in flies, and the stench was terrible so that they went quickly and in silence once more. Nor did Drew stop to write anything in his book. Though later, when they had stopped for something to eat and were seated on a series of rocks that ran for some ways into the ocean, the older surfer took out the book once more and commenced to write.

Fletcher asked him if he was making a note about the whale, and Drew said that he was.

“What else is in there?” Fletcher asked.

Drew flipped back a page and read from his book. “November the fifteenth, 1995. Pelicans. It was surfed on a plus-five-foot tide, on a northwest swell. The waves were a consistent six feet with an occasional eight-foot set. I had two companions with me, Robbie Jones and Jack Fletcher.” He looked up from the book. “You’d have to cross-reference this entry with one of my earlier logs in order to get more information on Pelicans. But everything’s been laid out. I’ve drawn maps, noted trails . . .”

“Shit,” Robbie said. “You could blow this part of the coast wide open, you let those get out.”

Drew Harmon looked at Fletcher. “Smart boy,” he said.

“What did you say there about the whale?”

“Just that it was taken by a shark. I make notes of any shark activity I find.”

“You find much?”

Drew laughed. “They don’t call it the red triangle for nothing. You paddle out up here, you’re part of the food chain.” He paused, looking back in the direction from which they had come. “Those deer were something else. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“You put that in the book too?” Robbie asked him.

Drew just looked at him. “You know your Bible?” he asked.

“I know it, some.”

“So what did it make you think of, all those dead animals at the foot of the cliffs?”

Robbie was sitting some ways off, wrapped in a plaid sweatshirt with a gray hood covering his shaved head. Fletcher watched as the gray hood bobbed in the gray light. “Jesus putting the demons into the swine,” Robbie said at length.

“Exactly so,” Harmon said. “The mad man among the tombs. That’s what I put in the book. The Gospel of Mark, chapter five.” At which point the big man looked out to sea, and when he spoke again it was to quote scripture and this is what he said: “Ofttimes he had been bound with fetters and chains, but the chains were snapped apart and the fetters were smashed and nobody had the strength to subdue him, and continually, night and day, he was crying out in the tombs and in the mountains and slashing himself with stones.”

Robbie Jones had half turned on the rock to regard the older surfer. His shaved skull sticking part way out of the hood was awash in light, and he did not, Fletcher thought, appear altogether sane himself.

“The grace of God is available to everyone,” Robbie told him.

“You don’t believe in unforgivable sin?”

“Apostasy.”

“Nothing else?”

“Murders, adulterers, thieves, liars. This is what some of you were. You have been washed clean in the blood of the lamb. Everything,” Robbie Jones said, “can be forgiven, if one seeks forgiveness. Except for the sin of apostasy, for speaking against the blood of the Christ.”

Drew Harmon was some time perched upon his stone. He had
closed his book once more. “What does the law say?” he asked. “The law says, spill no blood.”

“What’s that?” Robbie Jones asked him.

“Bela Lugosi.
Island of Lost Souls.
”

“Shit, man. I’m talkin’ to you about the Bible. You’re tellin’ me about some movie.”

“Maybe that’s all it is, eh, bro? It’s all a movie. A seduction of light.”

Robbie Jones shook his head in disgust. Drew Harmon turned to Fletcher and winked. He had a Pop-Tart in one hand and there were crumbs on his beard. It seemed as if he was about to say something else when suddenly he held up a hand and told them to listen. What they heard was a deep, distant boom echoing across the water, and Drew Harmon did not have to tell them what it was.

“Is that it?” Robbie Jones asked.

“Is that what?”

“Heart Attacks.”

Drew Harmon shrugged. “You think this place is easy to find?” he asked.

“I just asked if that was it.”

“Yeah, well, lots of people been askin’ that one for a long time. This it? This it?”

Unhappy with finding himself mimicked, Robbie Jones moved away to sit by himself at the edge of a tide pool.

Drew Harmon took no notice but continued to talk. “It’s sacred land there,” he said. “The Indians knew it. Like the Hawaiians knew it about Waimea. The wave’s as big as Waimea, but longer, deeper, way more sections. You can ride this wave for half a mile. More, maybe.”

Fletcher looked at Robbie Jones hunkered there in the cold light, a lone buzzard dressed in plaid, perched upon a barren rock before a barren sea. If he was following what Drew said, it didn’t show. If Drew cared, that didn’t show either. He appeared to be talking as much to himself as to either of his companions.

“You’ve never seen a wave like this,” Drew told himself. “Like J-Bay, only the size of Waimea.” He took a large bite from a Pop-Tart, gazing thoughtfully upon a milk white horizon. “Why you need the longer board, the extra weight, carry you through those sections.”

As Drew talked, Fletcher sought to hold once more, in his mind’s eye, the maps he had studied in the course of the trip. What he remembered were colors, the green of national park and the pink of Indian land running in a patchwork quilt over a field of white, running north from Sweet Home and encountering no other road or town but running right on across the border—a fifty-mile stretch into the state of Oregon. Drew had called it a day hike, but already they had hiked for the better part of two, and as Fletcher sat listening to the big man talk, he was struck by the uncomfortable feeling that what the man was describing was something he had hoped to find, rather than something he had found. This thought was followed in quick succession by another—the absence of photographic evidence, the insistence on the part of some who had been here that Heart Attacks was no more than a rumor—like the photograph of the rogue wave Miklos Dora was said to carry in his wallet. He had till now taken Drew for, if nothing else, a knowledgeable guide. Still, his newfound paranoia would not leave as bidden, and he looked once more at the big man at his side, hoping perhaps for some assurance. What he saw was a kind of gargoyle shrouded in fog, his great shoulders hunched, his eyes narrowed, his red beak of a nose pointing toward a lost horizon, his hair combed back wet above a high and bony brow.

It was not, Fletcher decided, a pretty sight, and he turned from it. Still, he thought, his fears were absurd. Surely the man would not have dragged a photographer and two pros this far north, made promises he would be unable to keep, risked having himself portrayed as a fool, without having seen this place somewhere outside his own head. At which point, Fletcher was made aware of a sound and thought at first it some product of the sea, so high and keening and random did it seem to him, and he looked about for its source, only to discover that it came from Drew Harmon himself, that the man, lost in thought, oblivious to those around him, his eye on the reckless sea, had, in fact, begun to make a kind of humming sound, a song to himself.

T
he men came to her with the dawn. The fog and drizzle came with them but she concluded she had been right about the change in their mood. They appeared more solemn in this light, and more haggard, as if this were an ordeal they not only had inflicted but had come to share in as well, though none would ever say it in just that way. It was possible, of course, that she misread them. They were a day’s hike from their kill and maybe it was this that made them different. Blood, after all, being the star around which their world had been made to move. But she did not believe it.

There were no attempts to make sport with her or even to look her in the eye, save for the big man, the one who had abstained, and his eyes were as dark and dead as some creature of the sea from whose sight the light has been forever hidden. She was given beef jerky and water and told to get it down and keep it there because there was a long way to walk, and this she did.

They drove just a short ways after that, to the far end of the reservation and the trails leading south. They parked in a turnout before a trail head. The morning was still gray and cold, and theirs was the only car.

The trail head was marked by a pair of signs. One read: “Caution. Unmaintained Trails. Hazardous Cliffs.” The second was quite large. It contained the line drawing of a shark and read: “Use Caution. Dangerous Beaches. Strong Undertow. Rip Tides. Sleeper Waves.” As if this were not enough to discourage the average bather, the sign contained as well the listing of at least half a dozen shark attacks dating back to 1975.

Kendra studied the signs, recalling the first time she had seen them, here with Drew, and how she had found in them cause for concern. But Drew had only laughed them off, telling her it was his kind of place. And so it had proved to be. She remembered her sense of awe at the conditions he would paddle into, of how he would be lost to her for hours at a time. In the beginning, there had been no exploring for her. She had stuck it out right there on the beach, straining for the occasional image of her husband, gliding down the face of some huge wave far from shore, as if by so doing, she could insure his safe return. With the passage of time, however, she grew to accept his prowess with the waves, his return as a given. It was then that she would set off on adventures of her own, returning to the beach at some agreed-upon hour, sure to find him there as well, jogging along the sand to meet her, chilled to the bone, eyes flushed with a wild light she had taken as evidence of that secret thing he took congress with in a world she could only dimly imagine. And perhaps this was so, though she was inclined here and now, on the morning in question, to believe that what she had glimpsed there was more than the thrill of the hunt. It was darker than that, she thought. It was the image of the other she had seen, burning through—the light, perhaps, to which Amanda Jaffey had been treated in her final moments. It was an aspect, she concluded, of the fate to which she had been consigned, that she should see it so.

•  •  •

When the Hupa and his two companions had selected what gear they meant to take they started out. In time they arrived at the grassy bluffs which ran finally to the cliffs of the Devil’s Hoof. The trails turned here, veering now toward the beaches of Big Sandy, following the outline of the hoof. It was a barren, windy place. And
though they were still too far away to see it, they could hear the sound of the waves upon the rocks and smell the salt in the misty air.

They came several times upon the bones of animals, entire skeletons, some still showing patches of fur, others bleached white or decomposing in the sea air. Kendra went in the clothes she had been taken in, the blouse and pantaloons that had belonged to a dead girl before her. She still had her hiking boots but the jacket she had worn into the woods seemed to have been appropriated and she had not seen it since. For a time she was bothered by the cold. She was bothered too by the nettles which grew here, woven among the stands of grass, for the pantaloons were thin and had been badly torn in a number of places. The nettles, she discovered, had the effect of making her legs itch and then go numb, but eventually, fatigue brought her to a place where the walking was as sleep-walking. Twice she fell and received for her troubles a kick to her side or hip. Both times, William Longtree helped her to her feet. At length, she began to talk. She would say anything that came into her head. She told them of the evil principle. He was called the king of darkness, she said, and he dwelt in the land of darkness surrounded by his five eons, the eons of smoke, fire, wind, water, and darkness . . .

Her captors would only shake their heads at this talk and make lame jokes but were, she believed, troubled by her as well, and so she walked and spoke her gibberish, this when she spoke at all, although the gibberish seemed to play in her head constantly, in rhythm to how she walked, along a gradually descending trail, through the long stretches of grass and wind and the bones of animals. And all through this long hike, the big man went always in front, his rifle unsheathed now, its large scope mounted, and from time to time during the day he would stop and sight through the scope, occasionally leading some seabird as if he meant to bring it down. At such times, the other men would stop and watch, but the big man never fired the gun. He would sight for a moment, as if satisfying himself about something, then sling it over his shoulder once more and go on, and the others would follow and Kendra would go on as well, with her numb legs, and with her gibberish, which in time did not seem like gibberish at all but the truth as she knew it.

T
ravis had spent the better part of the night packing. At one point, he had paused long enough to call each of his ex-wives, telling them that the children should be kept away from the river just now, nor should any outings be planned that would take any of them very far into the woods. When they had assured him that his wishes would be honored, he’d returned to his packing, where, after some consideration, he’d added a .45 automatic and a pair of clips. The stuff would supply unwelcome weight but he did not doubt that the men from upriver would come armed, and including the gun had seemed a good idea to him at the time.