Sarah Hall - The Wolf Border

It’s more of a note, really, he says. I wonder if it mightn’t be better to send it on to you.

No. Please just read it.

I’m sure your mother would have wanted you to know how much she loved you, he says. She talked about you all the time. About how proud she was.

Rachel baulks. His words are excruciating to hear, ludicrous. The comment so blatantly twee and false, it is almost as bad as his breaking the news of the death. This man knew Binny; he knew her proclivities, her disposition. Rachel sits rigidly, waits for it all to be over. The manager clears his throat, then reads.

Dear Rachel. We all choose. You can come back home now. Binny .

*

A polar vortex over North America. The heaviest snow for fifty years, structures locked in ice. January is all drifts; the forest disappears under white cataracts. Bannisters of ice form along the stacked roadside timber. The sky is iron-grey and unforgiving. Idaho exists in a delirium of cold, the number of old people dying soars. The neighbouring states, too, report record snowfalls. The Snoqualmie and Lolo passes remain closed. Avalanches in the Cascades.

Rachel misses the funeral. She does not send a wreath. She does not supply words of remembrance for the service. Communication has ceased between her and Lawrence, that is to say, between her and Emily, who has assumed control of the proceedings, and after a huge argument on the phone about duty and emotional incapacity, excludes her. She is now fully a criminal in exile. Another hard layer forms around her heart against her brother’s wife. The end ceremony is irrelevant, she tells herself. It is meaningless. What matters is the relationship through life. Would Binny care if she attended? She would not. She tells herself this, pours a drink, opens the cabin window, and leaves it wide until the cold is unbearable.

The centre winds along at its winter speed. In the evenings the workers play cards, watch DVDs, are sequestered in their cabins reading. Rachel tries to continue with her book chapter, but cannot concentrate. Her mind drifts back to her mother, and New Year’s Eve. Bereavement has displaced any initial awkwardness with Kyle that might have occurred. He is kind to her, gives her space, does not raise the subject. She tries to write a letter to her brother, but she hasn’t the skills, emotional or linguistic, and she is full of bile. Something massive and primary feels as if it has broken. Their connection always seemed pinioned by their mother. So what, she tells herself. Let it go.

The snow keeps coming, blanking everything. When she walks out in it she can barely see. Days pass, weeks. Thoughts of her childhood: high-stakes weather in the Lowther valley, almost legendary in her imagination, helicopters flying over Lakeland carrying new electricity pylons after storms had brought the others down. She and Lawrence, clad in woollens and wet boots, watching them cut the cables and lay the poles down on the moors, like a game of matchsticks. In the mornings she feels sick and tired, viral; her body knows the wrongness of what has occurred even if her mind won’t metabolise it.

When the thaw comes, she and Kyle venture out to reposition the cameras by the den site. They drive into the Reservation and then hike seven miles, sharing water, saying little. The ground is turgid, swamp-like. The hardwoods are scarred by black frost, their bark sodden, their deepest membranes still rigid with ice. They labour over the winter debris. There are small new lakes in the forest, melt-water runoff. In the brush a loon stumbles about, lost, directionless. It eyes them, panics, flaps and trips over twigs. Kyle steps away, quietly. Rachel watches the bird for a moment, then follows after him.

And still, they have not talked about what happened. She is grateful not to have to. It’s her call, she knows; he will wait, perhaps indefinitely, he will not push, and she does not have to think about the meaning of what happened. She could tell herself it was a dream, an altered state, brought on by the moonshine brandy. Nor has Kyle criticised her for not attending the funeral. The only assistance he offered:

I can get you over to Spokane on the old silver road, if you want to go.

As if it were simply the snow preventing her. No doubt he would have found a way to the airport, but when she said no, he nodded and left the subject alone, intuiting, perhaps, the difficult navigation of families. His brother has written to him, asking for money to support his girlfriend and baby while he is incarcerated.

Will you give it? Rachel asks.

She’s still dealing from the house, he says. Yeah, I’ll give it.

The Clearwater River is in spate, hauling debris down from the Bitterroot Mountains, rolling dead branches up along the banks, and ferrying the carcasses of mammals, half-submersed and unrecognisable in the water. There are high reefs of silt. They walk uphill, away from the flood zone, and arrive at the abandoned den. One of the cameras is lurching from its mooring in the tree. There’s no guarantee the dugout will be reused but it has been occupied for three consecutive years, so the chances are good. The root system is sturdy. It is in good repair, even after the hardest of seasons. Kyle reroofs the camera’s shelter. The branches drip and twitch. It is still cold, but the world has softened and will soon bud.

Rachel sits and watches Kyle hammering the bolts.

You alright? he asks, without turning.

Yes.

But there is a strange heaviness in her, like the beginning of flu. Not sadness exactly. She is not sad about losing Binny. Nor regretful about the nature of their relationship — things couldn’t have been different. Nothing would have changed the dynamic, no more than the elliptical orbit of planets can be altered by human hand. She had the only version of her mother she could have had; Binny had the only daughter. In some ways they were motherless, daughterless. It feels more like an existential malaise of some kind. Sorrow for time, for its auspices, its signification. She feels, for the first time in her life, weary, and old. But that isn’t really it, either. She doesn’t know what’s wrong.

I think that’ll hold, Kyle says.

Great.

Ready to head back?

Yes.

Sure you’re OK?

I’m fine. Tired. Think I need some sun.

She stands, tries to shake it off. They begin back through the great, dank arboretum.

The following day Kyle makes an appointment to visit the executives of the tribal council — a courtesy call. The arrangement is not under threat. Hikers will be steered away where possible and the territorial section of land will remain undeveloped. The Nez Perce have sponsored the project since its inception, before hunting bans and their reversals. It is a relatively small affair for the elders to consider — the Reservation’s campaigns and lawsuits are wide and more complicated than species, involving ideologies, citizens versus sovereign nations, and Supreme Court interpretation. The Chief Joseph pack is safe, if only on host land. Meanwhile, photographs have been posted on an Idaho hunting site, of a wolf in a steel foot trap. Not one of theirs, but disheartening nevertheless. The circumference of pink, limped-over snow is sickening. They study the shot. Kyle shakes his head.

Ah, buddy, he says.

Rachel cannot help feeling depressed. Just for a moment she wonders about putting her head against his shoulder. Would it be such a terrible thing? It would, she knows. She feels unusually low, vulnerable. She wishes the bug in her system would just materialise and lay her out fully. The memory of that night is like a fever; it is passing, but there are vivid flashes. His grip across her neck. The rawness. She attempts a joke, about whose turn it is to refill the office coffee pot — who is the wife? He does not respond to the banter as he ordinarily would, but fixes her with a look, patient, undefended. And it is this that convinces her there is something more, something very real underneath the silence. The unspeakable is always louder than declaration.