The Dogs of Winter (33 page)

When he returned, she saw that he carried the packs from their first camp. He set these by the remains of Kendra’s fire from which a few embers still glowed and from which some thin yellow flame would now and then lift itself to lick at the night. The man set about stoking coals, adding wood. In time, a second fire burned above the
ashes of the first. Kendra could feel him watching her through the flames. At length, he got up and walked over to where she lay, propped on her elbows. He carried one of the packs. He set it down next to her foot and squatted before her.

She was still quite naked, covered in dust and bruises. For all she knew, she was about to die. It seemed the logical next step. The man reached into the pack and came out with a bottle of water. He took her ankle in his hand and he began to wash the cut. He held the cut open with one hand, pouring water into it from the bottle. He did this for some time. He squeezed it as well, making it bleed. When he had done this for a while, he rested her ankle on his knee and took a lime from the pack. He took a knife from his pocket and he cut the lime in half. He picked up her ankle once more. Again he used his fingers to spread the wound, this time washing it with the juice of the lime.

Kendra made no sound, although her leg jerked as the juice hit the cut. The man’s hand was steady as a vice. She watched him as he went about his work. His eyes were as steady as his hand, intent on what he was about.

When he had finished with the lime, he took a small, wrapped object from the pack. He pushed the pack under her leg, using it to hold her heel off the ground. He rose and walked to the fire, picking up a stick as he went, then holding that to the flame until he had ignited one end of it, at which point he came back to where she lay, carrying the burning stick as one might a torch.

He squatted before her as he had done before, and she could see that the object he’d taken from the pack was a bar of wax. He returned her leg to his knee, turning it to an uncomfortable angle.

“Hold it there,” he said.

Kendra did as she was told.

He held the wax to the flaming stick. As the wax began to melt, he allowed it to dribble into the cut. It was all she could do to hold the leg in place and yet it seemed to her there was something at stake in being able to do so. When he was finished, she felt herself bathed in sweat and she saw that the wound was sealed in wax.

When the man had finished, he put his things into his pack and returned to the fire where he took something from one of the other
packs which had been left there. She saw that it was a blanket. He tossed this to her and she covered herself with it. He watched as she did this, then came and squatted before her once more. He looked at her heel, as if to make sure of his work, and he looked into her face.

“I can’t tell,” he said, at length. “I can’t tell if you’re lucky, or if you have put something on me.”

Kendra only looked at him.

The man looked away. He looked toward the cliff from which William Longtree had fallen. “We’ll go in the morning,” he said. “We’ll see Rose Hudson. We’ll see if you’ve done what you say. She will know what to do if you have. I will know what to do if you haven’t.” He stood then, nodding toward the cliff. “There will still be time for them,” he said. “They’re a long way from home.”

When he had said these things he went back to the fire. Kendra watched him. She watched as he took a bottle from his pack and sat with it before the flames. He did not look at her again but she could remember his face. She had studied it closely for the first time as he’d worked on her wound. Though he was a heavily built man, his features were drawn in fine straight lines. He was well-muscled, and the thought occurred to her that, in some other place and time, some other universe, perhaps, she might have found him handsome. Though how this could be, in light of what had transpired, she could not say.

Man looked to the stars, she thought, dreaming of worlds he might one day bridge. And yet each man was a world unto himself, and no two worlds, though bound by different stars, were any more lost, one to the other, than she and this man before her. And there was nothing in heaven or on earth which could alter this, or make it other than what it was.

T
ravis spent the night on the rocks and that was where the surfers found him, wedged into a crevice, his day pack set before him to shield him from the wind. He heard them long before he saw them, and though he could not rightly identify them as the men he’d come to find, he could not imagine who else it would be, in such a place, on such a morning. And so he had gone with his hunch and called out, hoping that it would indeed be the surfers and not the compadres of the man who had fallen.

But they called back to him, and he to them, and in time, he saw them coming, climbing through the fog, small, bent figures moving crab-wise along veins of stone, their surfboards sheathed in nylon bags slung from their shoulders like the shields of some ancient race. He was not sure he could move from his crevice, so long and cold had the night been. He felt locked in place, as if the darkness had turned his bones to stone in its passing.

He watched as Drew Harmon led the way, climbing quickly up
through the rocks. He watched as the man came face-to-face with the body, even more ghastly in the morning light. Or so Travis supposed, for he had yet to look at it closely himself. Drew Harmon scarcely batted an eye. Nor did he contort himself in any fashion so as to get past the obstacle without touching it as Travis had done. Drew simply put out one hand, grabbed the body by the belt which circled its waist and, in one powerful motion, hurled it from the cliff.

Even in his groggy state, Travis found himself shocked by the act, so defiant did it seem. As if the body were no more than a bundle of rags. As if there were no law, neither God’s or man’s, that would dictate such an item be viewed in some other light, or handled in a different fashion.

The body so disposed of, the big man stood upon the ledge. He removed his pack and board bag, bracing them among the rocks, then walked to where Travis lay. A second surfer followed him.

“Friend of yours?” Drew asked. He nodded toward the fog into which the broken body had fallen, a strange grin on his face.

Travis deemed it the kind of greeting one might expect from Drew Harmon. But he knew that he was the bearer of bad news and thought it best to come directly to the point, and he told them why he had come. He told him about the men from upriver. He told him about the fire, and he told him that he’d hoped to see Kendra with him.

The smile passed from Harmon’s face as Travis spoke. When he stopped, the man looked down on him with an expression Travis found impossible to read. “This fire,” Drew asked at length. “They burned the shaping room? They burned my wood?”

Travis was a moment in responding, for he had expected the man to ask about his wife. “Most of it,” Travis said. “The fire department saved some.”

Drew squatted beside him then, his back against the cliff. He looked out upon the fog, in the direction of the sea. The second surfer continued to stand upon the ledge, some ways back. He wore a hooded sweatshirt and Travis could not tell if it was the photographer or the man who had hit him with a rock.

“I was hoping,” Travis said once more, “that your wife would be
with you.” Perhaps, he thought, the man had not heard him. But Drew only looked at him, as if this were a thing he could not quite comprehend.

“What?” he asked.

“Your wife, I thought maybe she had come with you.”

“I sent her to town.”

Travis told him that her truck was still at the landing. He told him about what he’d found in the woods, the clippings dropped along the deer path. He had the man’s attention now and as he said these things, it seemed to him as if something more than the smile drained from the big man’s face. What he witnessed there now was the loss of something essential.

“Did you look in town?” Drew asked him. “Did you call Pam?”

“No.”

“Then she could be there.”

Travis said nothing.

“And you think this was one of them?” Drew asked, “one of these men from upriver?” He got to his feet, nodding at the blood-spattered rocks as if what had been split there was the man himself.

“He was one of them,” Travis said.

The muscles tightened along Drew’s jaw and he looked toward the upper reaches of the cliff, as if he meant to start climbing at once, leaving everything behind, Travis included. It was then that the other man spoke. He had moved closer and dropped to one knee for a better look at Travis’s leg. He’d pushed back his hood, revealing a naked skull, and Travis saw it was indeed the kid who had nearly killed him with a rock.

“You seen this?” the kid asked.

Drew turned from the cliff. He squatted on his haunches, reaching out to touch the leg. He pushed down on the sock, then twisted the foot slightly for a better look.

Travis turned his head to vomit. It was not much more than a thin trail of greenish bile.

Drew Harmon stood up. When he spoke, it was to the other surfer. “Can you get up this cliff with both packs and both board bags?”

The kid just looked at him. “Why?” he asked.

“Because somebody’s gonna have to carry him,” Drew said.

The kid shook his head, as if the entire proceeding was in some way beneath him, but he set about loading himself down with equipment. He did this perched upon the narrow ledge as if it were nothing more than a sidewalk set above a city street.

“Okay,” Drew said. He was looking at Travis now. “We’re going piggyback. Least till we get on top. I’m not sure what we’ll do with you after that.”

“I might be able to walk, you could find me something to use as crutches.”

Drew Harmon just laughed at him. “You looked at your leg lately?” he asked.

Travis could not say that he had, nor was he of a mind to just now.

“You’re dead weight, all the motherfucking way,” Harmon told him. “Only thing that’s gonna slow us down is if we run into the assholes burned my place. We find them, I’m gonna stop long enough to rip their lungs out.”

It was at about this point, as they were preparing to start out, that Travis noted there were only two surfers here, that clearly no one else was going to emerge from the fog.

When he asked about this, both men turned to look at him.

“He’s gone,” the kid said at length.

“What do you mean, gone?” Travis asked.

“Bailed,” the bald surfer said. Travis saw that he was wearing an earring, a delicate golden cross.

“That what you were doing, trying to find him?”

“Fuck, no,” Drew said. “We were trying to make that outside reef break north of the point before the tide came up.”

“You have any idea of where he went?” In part, he was curious. In part, he was stalling for time, bracing himself for what was to come.

“I know right where he ran to,” Drew Harmon said. But he seemed to take none of the pleasure in this knowledge that Travis would have anticipated. His eyes, in fact, seemed weary beyond measure. “He’s gone back to that old logging road runs along the Temple.”

“Christ. Why?”

Harmon shook his head, as if the whole thing saddened him in
some profound way. “ ’Cause he read this book and he thinks it will get him back to the Heads.”

“It might have once.”

“Uh huh. What the poor dumb shit doesn’t know is that the trails from the Heads run out along the Hoof now. The ones he’s looking for got washed away in the winter of ‘83. That old logging road just runs up the Temple River, clear to Oregon, as far as I know.”

The bald surfer laughed. “I told him,” he said. “That guy’s one sorry fuck-up.”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t used to be.”

“He’ll get himself killed up there,” Travis told them. It was the last he would say for some time. He had begun to shake and he felt himself bathed in a cold sweat.

Drew Harmon studied him for a moment, then shook his head. “He doesn’t starve first,” he said.

T
he Tolowa cabins of Neah Heads were perched on a hillside. The sea one saw from their secondhand, single-paned windows was what lay north of the Devil’s Hoof, and there were numerous trails which led down to these northern beaches. If one wanted to visit the Hoof itself, however, there was really only one trail. It was long and winding. It began in the shade of redwoods but came, in time, to the grasslands which capped the Hoof. As the trail neared its end, there were three paths to the beaches below. Two of these led to Big Sandy and were relatively tame descents. The third ended at the cliffs from which the Tolowan had fallen, and if one wanted to get to the rocky coves below, one was faced with an arduous task, for the cliffs were treacherous and steep and had, over the years, claimed the life of more than one unfortunate.

Kendra and her captors had, of course, come to this place. But when the light broke above the mountains, she and the Hupa set
off for the first of the spurs, retracing the steps they had taken on the previous day, for Kendra had named this as the quickest path to the beach and therefore the most direct route to the home of Rose Hudson.

As they rose that morning, the sky was clear and struck with color, but below lay a vast fogbank. The thickness of this low-hanging cloudbank was such that it corresponded exactly to the height of the cliffs, thus appearing as a kind of vaporous extension of the land, a great churning plain upon whose aqueous surface the sunrise found reflection. It was, Kendra thought, as if sometime during the night the world had been broken into halves, and she was surprised they had not been awakened by the commotion.

And so it was that as she and the Hupa set off for the first and easiest trail to the beach, they did so without ever knowing that a scant two hundred yards away, beneath the great layer of fog, the men the Hupa had come to kill toiled upon the cliffs. Nor could Drew Harmon know that his wife was within shouting distance of where he labored, for he could see little more than the rocks before him, and even they were blurred by the great white cocoon of emptiness in which he found himself contained.