Christian Kiefer - The Animals

You guys wanna start the check-ins?

Will do, boss, Bobby said. You want us to blow the paths out?

If it’ll work, Bill said. This is some thick glop coming down.

The two boys walked up between the enclosures through the snow, pushing each other from side to side as they moved, laughing. He had once had a friend like that, had tried for more than a decade to forget, but how can one forget such a thing. All his past resident forever in his heart.

Hey Cinder, he said to the enclosure. His voice quiet. You like the snow?

The animal kept moving, her body rippling between the dark trunks of the big trees.

THE SNOW continued all morning. The four of them worked at configuring the enclosures for the winter, checking and rechecking the heating systems, covering the areas that that been previously uncovered for the summer season, ensuring, the best they could, that the animals would have some shelter from the winter to come. They locked each animal in its smaller holding cell as they worked, dropping the heavy steel guillotine doors Bill had installed years earlier, the animals watching them from their snowed-over landscapes, the fences seeming to disappear in the swirl so that it seemed, at a glance, as if they were, each of them, free of the wire, of the need to be fed and watered, free indeed of their dependence. But of course it was only an illusion.

The four of them talked to the animals as they worked: Bess in her high singsong as if speaking with a very small child; the boys — Chuck and Bobby — each as if talking to a peer. Hey there, girl. Looking good in the snow, Chuck would say. And Bobby: For sure. Total owl babe. And they would both laugh, the owl watching them without expression.

He stood under the dark boughs of the pines and firs in the muffled silence of the snowstorm, Bess in the shelter of the wolf enclosure, switching out the feeding trays and making sure the heater was working, the two boys clambering across the tilted roof of the mountain lion’s enclosure, tacking down a piece of corrugated steel that had come loose in the wind. After a time he went on to Majer’s enclosure and stood watching the great bear where he sat on the rock above the pool, sniffing at the air. The animal’s head pulled down briefly to stare at him with those sightless, milky eyes and then rose once more.

Hey old man, Bill said. What’s out there? Moose?

The bear scratched its claws against the stone briefly and yawned.

Long night? he said. Me too. I can tell you one thing: you’re lucky to be in there. Life’s a lot more complicated out here in the wilderness.

The bear looked at him again and then turned his great bulk slowly and headed into the shadowed inner reaches of his den.

Hey, don’t mind me, Bill said to that retreating shape. I’m not talking or anything.

But the bear was gone from view now. All at once Bill was gripped with the sudden and impossibly strong desire to call out to him, to pull him back to the fence wire, but instead he simply stood there watching the rock-strewn space that was the grizzly’s home, his voice talking into the emptiness that remained.

THE SNOW kept on and the power finally failed just before noon, an event heralded only by the electric drill going silent and Bobby calling, There goes the power. He again listened for the ring of the phone but the sound did not come and did not come. At one point he checked for a dial tone and was relieved to hear that familiar buzzing and he hung up the receiver and waited, his mind wandering over the possibilities with a rapacity that made it hard to focus on any of the myriad tasks at hand.

It was Tuesday and he was scheduled to take the truck back out to Bonners Ferry to collect the expired produce from the two grocery stores there, both the Safeway downtown and the new grocery on the South Hill. He knew that he should send one of the boys as soon as possible, but when he saw the parking lot he wondered instead if he should tell the boys and Bess to leave for their own homes. At least six inches of snow covered the gravel road down to the highway. He would need to get the studded tires onto the truck if anyone was going to get all the way to Bonners and back up the mountain again and there was still so much work to do clearing and cleaning and getting all the enclosures ready for the winter months. He had taken to salting the fence lines to keep them clear of snow and had dug drains to channel the runoff but every year they needed to be cleaned and redug and he had not even done that yet. And then there was supposed to be a run to Sandpoint later in the week to pick up expired meat. Each trip would take a half-day to complete and all while the snow continued to fall.

Nonetheless, he dismissed Bess and the two boys shortly after one and stood at the end of the path by the mountain lion enclosure watching them spin and slide out of the parking lot and into a haze of snow so thick that it had become like watching a television station fade into and out of range. Then he turned and walked back up the path, first to the office, where the phone was still silent, and then up through the birches to the trailer, no path now but a scattering of black and white trunks jutting up everywhere from the snow, no other vegetation visible at all. Everything white, blank, and empty.

When he reached the trailer he was shivering with cold. He turned the gas heater on full blast and stood before it shaking and holding his hands out before its feeble blowing heat. His pants were soaked through and after a few moments he sat on the edge of the bed and peeled them off and then stood again before the heater, turning slowly, his hands cold and the flesh of his legs pink and blotchy like chicken flesh, his entire body trembling. At some point he reached into a drawer and removed his long underwear and a dry pair of jeans and pulled them both on.

The shivering slowed and finally stopped and in the stillness he turned on the radio and broke two eggs into a pan and scrambled them and then sat at the foldout table and ate, listening to the news broadcast and flipping through a day-old paper. The weather report in the paper said nothing of an impending storm but on the radio it was the only news, a dark and endless swirl of clouds spinning down from Alaska and over Washington and on across the North Idaho panhandle. Get ready folks , the radioman said. It’s a big one . From the tiny window the open field behind the trailer was a haze of white through which he could occasionally see a glimpse of the granite boulders a few dozen yards away and from which, on a clear day, he could have seen the ridgelines extending out through the trees to the north and east.

There had been moments during the day when he convinced himself that everything would be fine, that Rick would simply dissolve back into his memory, that the Fish and Game would change their minds about the rescue, that he and Grace and Jude would form a family in the forest with Majer and the animals all around them and that they would be happy in their lives. But this was not such a moment. In the snow he saw only terror: his own and that of the people and the animals he loved.

He told Majer all of this when he returned to the rescue after lunch, talking to him softly and asking him to present various body parts to the gap they had welded into the cage door. A paw. An ear. His grizzled mouth. Each time Bill told him, Good job, buddy, and passed a marshmallow through the bars to his waiting lips. He told the bear about Grace, about how she had found him, how she had been the one to ask him out on that first date and how he had been so surprised that he had coughed out a fine spray of coffee against the snow.