The Wolf Road (3 page)

Big and black and breathing. I didn’t even see the butt of the shotgun.

Woke up in the trapper’s hut with a sore head wrapped in a bandage. He sat on a chair by the door, staring at me with eyes like the devil. Shotgun rested against his leg, his hat on his knee. He must a’ fallen too, his face was all covered in streaks of black dirt.

“Where’d you come from?” he said. His voice had a breath of kindness to it.

Nana told me not to speak to strangers, and this man, living far out in the woods all by himself, was the strangest I’d met.

“Where you going to?” he said. Didn’t seem all that surprised I weren’t talking. “You got a momma and daddy? Where they at?”

I blinked then, shook my head. “Just my nana.”

He smiled, showed off a row of flat white teeth.

“Now we gettin’ somewhere,” he said. “Where you and your nana live? Dalston? Ridgeway?”

Something in my face must a’ gave me away.

“Ridgeway then,” he said. He rubbed his cheek but none of the mud came off. “You a long way from home, girl.”

He put his hand on the shotgun barrel and relaxed in his chair.

“You can just point me the right way,” I said, “and I’ll be gone afore you know it.”

“There are beasts in these woods would eat you up quicker’n you can scream. Couldn’t let you do that.”

I shuffled a bit on the bed, felt my cheeks get hot and red. I couldn’t tell much about the trapper, other than he wore old denims like me and his shirt was ripped like mine. A coat made of fur and skins hung next to the door with a pair of snowshoes propped up under. His shirt, once white, had spots and smears of something dark brown on it, maybe dried blood from the animals. He stared at me long and hard and my belly started growling again.

“I ain’t got no real way of telling if you’re speaking true or false,” he said. “You could be a troublemaker on the run from the law. You could be a thief and stolen worse than a bite of jerky. You could be anyone.”

My nana would a’ said I was a troublemaker, but I weren’t telling him that.

“I’m headin’ down to Ridgeway in the morning to trade some pelts—two-day round-trip, mind.” He stopped, rubbed his face again, mud stayed put, and by then I weren’t sure if it was really mud.

“Your business is your own, girlie, but I’ll do some asking and see if I can find your nana. If I do and she wants you back, I’ll take you to her.”

“I’ll help you find her quicker,” I said, scooting off the edge of the bed. I got dizzy then and fell down, landed hard on my hands and knees.

The trapper didn’t move to help me, just said, “You couldn’t walk more’n a mile in that state. You’re just a baby, no more than a few winters on you. You’re dead weight until you can carry a rifle.

“Go to sleep,” he said, and picked up his hat. “I’ll be gone when you wake up. Keep the fire lit and don’t touch nothing.”

He put his hat over his face and leant his head back against the door.

I climbed back onto the bed and pulled up the blanket. “You got a name?” I asked.

“I got a few,” he said without moving his hat.

Something in the way he said that put a seed of fear in me. I pulled the blanket up close to my chin and hunkered down. There was no chance of me sleeping that night. I didn’t take my eyes off him. He didn’t make a sound all night. Not a snore. Not a sniff. Didn’t move, didn’t even let go of the shotgun. Even my nana slept louder than that. He was like one of them statues carved out of stone. Nana took me down to Couver City to see them last summer. She said I needed
culturing
, whatever that meant. Couver was hit hard in the Damn Stupid, says Nana, and only a few of them statues are left in the ruins. Three-day ride up and down that was. After six days in the saddle, sitting awkward ’tween Nana and the horse’s neck, I told her I didn’t care for culturing.

I must’ve slept because one moment I was fixing my eyes on the trapper and the next it was dawn and the chair was empty. Shotgun and him were gone. Keep the fire lit, he’d said, and don’t touch nothing. I never been much good at following the say-so of grown-ups, not even now I’m grown-up myself.

First thing I did was get another strip of jerky from the rack outside. Then I stoked up the fire and roasted up that meat so it was crispy and charred at the edges, and I had me a fine breakfast. Then I went through the trapper’s things. Found a few coins no one uses no more, bowls carved out a’ cherrywood, a little wooden box locked up tight, and a knife sharp enough to skin a boar in three seconds flat. It had a long bone handle, probably deer or moose leg, and the blade was longer’n my forearm. Beautiful thing, I remember thinking, and I sliced up my jerky just to feel it in action. I told myself then that I would have a knife like this. Maybe I could get the trapper to make me one.

I got bored quick. Two-day trip to Ridgeway and back he said. Meant I was further from home than I’d ever been and I didn’t know north or south or up or down or which way would take me back to Nana. Shit, by then, that knife in my hands and no grown-up telling me what-for, I weren’t even sure I wanted to go back.

Trapper didn’t have much of anything and once I had a full belly, I didn’t have nothing to occupy me. I went outside, kicked dirt, climbed trees, watched the sun reach noon and start falling into dusk. I wondered if he’d reached Ridgeway yet. If he’d asked around about me. Strange that he didn’t ask for my name. Strange that he didn’t ask where ’bouts in Ridgeway I lived. Because, strictly, I didn’t live in Ridgeway. Nana’s shack was up the valley. Enough people in town knew about us that I thought he wouldn’t have no problem finding her.

I kept the fire hot and twirled that bone-handle knife in my little hands. Thinking of all the things I could do with it. How thin I could slice jerky, how neat and quick I could kill a rabbit. Night came fast with those thoughts swimming inside me and I fell asleep on the floor by the fire.

Woke up to spring dawn singing through the trees and spent that day much as I had the last—exploring the land, finding rabbit runs. I even reset one a’ the trapper’s squirrel poles what must a’ fallen in the thunderhead.

Sun was dipping and I was sucking on another piece of meat, knife in hand, when the trapper came back. He came in the door with a sack over his shoulder. He stared at me, jerky hanging out my mouth and blade in my hands and he didn’t say nothing. Something in his head ticked over and he stopped a beat, then dropped the sack with a sound like logs tumbling off a pile.

“Found your nana,” he said, and hung up his coat.

Felt a sting in me, like my fun was cut short and I’d be back to beatings and her schooling tomorrow. I set down the knife on the floor and I stared at that blade like I was giving up my favorite toy.

“You takin’ me back tomorrow?” I said. Part a’ me wanted to see my nana, but I knew soon as she saw me she’d have me hauling planks to fix the shack or learning letters at that whiteboard a’ hers.

Then he said, “Your nana got caught out in the thunderhead, tree fell on her.”

“She dead?”

Trapper nodded once and kept his eyes on me.

Shame on me that my first thinking was: Hot-damn, I don’t got to go back to schooling. Shame on me twice that my second was: Serves her right for treating me rough. Then came the aching like my insides was full a’ river mud, thick and sucking me down, a deep place a’ sorrow I didn’t want no part of. I weren’t all that sure how to feel in them moments. Should I be crying? But I didn’t feel nothing like crying. Should I be whooping for joy? But I didn’t feel like doing that neither. I stared at that knife, chewing on that jerky, quietlike for an age. Trapper didn’t say nothing, he just watched me, waiting to see what I’d do, what kind a’ person I was.

He shifted his foot, floorboard creaked. My eyes was locked on that blade and my head and my heart came together and told me how to feel. I reached for the knife.

Soon as I touched that white bone handle I realized quick I chose right. I didn’t much want to go back to Nana’s shack; she never let me eat jerky and play with knives. Her ways were learning letters and sums, clean hands and clean clothes. Them ways weren’t mine and much as she’d tried to force it, they never were.

The trapper nodded at the meat ’tween my teeth.

“You like that?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You know how to use that knife?”

I weren’t quite sure what he meant, but I nodded again.

“You ever skinned a hare?”

I flinched then. I had, year or two ago, but when Nana caught me she whipped my back bloody. Second time she caught me she broke my arm.

“You ever skinned a hare, girl?” he asked again, something raw in his voice.

“Yes, sir, I have.”

“If you can skin a hare you can ’bout skin anything,” he said, and pointed to the sack. “Traded my furs for a pig. I already jointed it for easy carryin’. Take off the skin and fat, take off the meat, and cut it thin for smokin’. Got it?”

I nodded and stepped forward. The trapper lifted up the sack and poured out the chunks of pig. Pink skin and pale flesh, it would work fine with applewood; I could almost taste it already. Even though I was just seven, I always knew I was born to work a knife. Took me most of the night but I did it, and all while the trapper watched over me, sipping on a flask. He didn’t once tell me to be careful. Didn’t say much ’cept “other way,” when I got to separating the knuckle.

Come dawn we both laid the strips on racks and hung them up in the tiny smokehouse outside.

The trapper put a hand on my shoulder then and said, “You got a gift with a blade, girlie, I’ll teach you to use it right. Names don’t mean nothing in these woods, but I got to call you something.”

Then he looked at me, pulled at my scruffy hair.

“Rougher’n elk’s fur, this,” he said.

So he called me Elka, ’stead of Elk, on account of me being a girl. I stopped asking for his name after a few weeks and just called him Trapper in my head. He taught me to tie a snare, taught me to set a deadfall trap and shoot a squirrel from fifty yards. All I had to do was help him clean the kills, prep the traps, stretch and scrape the furs, and tend to the hut. I slept on the floor by the fire and him in his bed. Though, thinking about it, I don’t think he slept much. He hunted a lot at night, said the wolves come out at night but he never brought back a wolf pelt.

That was my life then and damn if it weren’t fun. I was a new person, I forgot my old name quick, and I was Elka from then on. I could make a bow and arrow from sticks and shoot me a marten. I forgot my sums and my letters. I forgot my nana and near forgot my folks, though them words in the letter never went out my head. All them skills Trapper taught me I remember to this day, but there are big ol’ patches a’ them years that are fuzzy and dark, whole months a’ winter what went in a blink. Much as I tried, I couldn’t fill up them gaps.

But hell, I was an idiot kid. Trapper was my family even though I didn’t know a sure thing about him, but I figured quick I didn’t know much more ’bout my parents and they was kin. Trapper was the kind a’ family you choose for yourself, the kind that gets closer’n blood. He was my daddy from then, I just needed to find myself a momma.

Three winters I spent with Trapper afore I found her. Ten years old and my skinny arms and back was strong with hard living. Trapper weren’t the friendly sort, but him and me quick found our rhythms. Shit, I think he even started to like me.

We had rules a’ living but thinking on ’em now, they was mostly for me to follow. Don’t ask no questions. Don’t wander out a’ sight a’ the hut. Don’t talk to no people ’bout him. Last one weren’t no trouble; I hadn’t seen another face ’cept Trapper’s in three years. The rage I had in me when I was with my nana, what made me scream and shout and tantrum, weren’t there no more. Trapper saw the wild in me and didn’t try to tame it and cage it like my nana done. I didn’t have no bars to rage ’gainst no more. You trap a wolf and he’s going to snarl and rip you up till he can get free, but once he’s out there, treading his own path in the snow, you ain’t got much to fear ’less you provoke him. Trapper knew that and I saw that same fierce in him.

We was closing in to winter, just a few weeks we figured till the white blanket would come smothering. Winters were eight months a’ harsh. Snow up to your eyebrows, winds what’ll rip your skin right off your bones, trees hunkered over with the weight a’ the season, like crooked old men at a whisky parlor. Trapper said since the Damn Stupid, winters got colder, snow deeper, and ice thicker; summers got sweltering like them tropics far down south. Any animal or man what could survive the whiteout would come out the other side fiercer and that much harder to kill. Made living long a rare thing indeed. Folks now are wrinkled up and wizened where the same years would a’ looked fresh-faced afore the Damn Stupid. People round here get killed by hailstorms and drought, ’stead a’ invisible diseases and bombings. Nature ain’t friendly no more, but least nowadays it’s honest ’bout it.

Trapper had me chopping logs to kindling in the rain, stocking up for the freeze. Chopping wood weren’t no fun and our ax was blunter’n a river rock.

“Shit,” I said when the rain made my hands slip and the ax stuck hard in the wood. I threw the whole thing, log and ax, into the woodpile. “I might as well chop down an oak with a dead rabbit all the good that blade is.”