Christian Kiefer - The Animals

His first steps postholed directly into the snow so that he fell forward into the drift, frantic now, scrambling up and through that rise until Majer’s body lay there before him, the bear on its side, its great head covered with snow, mouth open, tongue lolling against the ice. He laid his hand on the bear’s mouth, felt the flesh there, not yet frozen but cooling. Above the long snout, the eyes remained open, pale and faintly blue and holding, somewhere deep within, a darkness like black night covered with the translucent but impervious film of his blindness.

And he knew that Majer was dead.

He tried to speak but there were no words and after a time he leaned forward, his knees crunching the snow, one arm reaching up to lie upon that furred back, a back still carrying a hint of the animal’s warmth. He lay upon that great carcass and wept, his face pressed to Majer’s thick brown fur, one hand stroking, so slowly, the long snout. He tried again to speak but what came was only a long howl that rose up from the center of him and would not stop, his heart unspooling all around him, a red ribbon that turned and looped and fell everywhere, into the sky, into the snow, around the two of them, the man who lay upon the body of the bear in a cage at the center of a white and frozen forest, and in the falling snow it was unclear where the man ended and the bear began, for both had begun to shift into white, the man sinking into the body of the bear, the bear rising into the body of the man, both of them dissolving into a blowing whirl of snow that seemed, in that moment, to come from all directions at once, the rush of it upon their bodies like an avalanche.

THE ANIMALS had been killed in their cages. The bald eagles both dead on their sides on the floor and in the adjacent enclosure the turkey vulture was also dead. Tommy and Betty and Chester. The porcupines were quietly in motion but both the martens were dead, side by side, in a kind of tortured embrace, their mouths open and tiny teeth shining out in the darkness. The raccoons — Perry, Tony, and Barley — all huddled at the back of their enclosure, alive, although they would not come forward no matter how long Bill stood there. Baker the badger was dead and Goldie the bobcat and Katy the red fox, all of them frozen in attitudes of fear and agony. And then Zeke. The wolf lay in his customary location at the back of the fence line, panting and growling at him, not moving away even when Bill came right up the chain link, only staring back at him with eyes yellow and rolling and Bill’s voice offering that same wordless keening in response.

Of the raptors, only Elsie, their great gray owl, was alive, her bright yellow eyes peering back at him from within her partially snow-buried cage. He came to the fence and looked back at her, his voice a kind of cooing like the sound of a dove. On the floor, not far from the edge of the wire where he stood, lay a strip of meat, cold and partially frozen, beef or venison or something else. He came around to the zookeeper door and unlocked it and entered the enclosure and knelt there before the frozen strip, the owl hopping on its perch and looking down at him with her huge pie-shaped face. Bill knelt and took the meat into his hand and remained there, looking at it, smelling it, staring at its color, at its shape, but such an examination revealed nothing and at last he slipped it into his coat pocket.

He stepped into the office briefly to confirm what he already knew — that the phone was out — and in the moment of holding that cold plastic to his ear, of listening to the silence it brought, he knew that the night would likely end with his death, and then he understood what he would do next, what he had to do. He returned to the bottom of the loop and opened the doors to Cinder’s enclosure and stood watching for her in the falling snow, in the wind, the panic he had felt replaced now by a kind of rage. The place where he had first seen her was vacant now, the area covered over with fresh snow so that there was no evidence she had been there at all, as if everything about her had been a hallucination, a fantasy. But then her head came up out of the far side of the enclosure and a moment later her body seemed to fade into being, not quickly, not the sleek moving river he had watched for so many hours, but instead a slow laboring creature climbing up out of the rocks of her cage toward whatever freedom lay beyond. Go on, Bill said. The lion was panting but she moved past him and then through the open door, not even glancing at him with her one good eye as she did so, her walk unhurried as she moved on through the thick falling curls of winter snow and disappeared into the dark heavy trees all around them.

He opened all the enclosures, even for the animals that were dead, even for Majer, and when he turned back from the top of the loop, it was to watch the porcupines, already out in the path, walking downhill slowly through the blizzard as if they knew where they were headed. Of the animals that had been poisoned, he did not know if any of them would survive but he knew that he had to give them the chance, even though he had told himself, for all his years at the rescue, that they would die in the wild, that they were simply not capable of living without him. But perhaps even that had been a lie. Perhaps he was the one who needed them, keeping them in their cages, not a savior but a prison warden. That was what the Fish and Game officer had told him — that he did not get to decide who could be put in a cage and who could not — and maybe this much had been true all along. In the end, maybe his entire life as Bill Reed had been only an atonement for failing his best friend so many years before. And yet that life had led them all to slaughter. Majer and Tommy and Chester and Baker and Goldie and Katy and the Twins. Perhaps Zeke and Cinder as well. Because of what he had done. Because of what he had failed to reconcile. At least beyond the enclosures they had a chance. At least he could give them that much after so many years.

Zeke’s was last, the door opening upon an enclosure that appeared completely empty. No print. No sign of fur. No sense of the animal hiding from him. Nothing. As if the creature had simply dissolved into the storm altogether.

Then he was scrambling back down the hill through the snow, his hands numb, the gloves somewhere behind him where he had pulled them off and dropped them, his face frozen but his body moving, returning through the cut-locked gate to where the snowmobile sat already partially covered with fresh snow, panting and coughing and gasping for air even as he grasped the pull cord and began to heave at it, three times before even remembering to turn the key, and then once more and the machine burst into sound, its engine rattling, clouds of dark exhaust pooling out behind it in the frozen air and its headlights illuminating the swirl of snow that seemed to descend upon him from everywhere at once.

He came down the road at full speed, following his own track with the storm blowing straight up in his face from the creek below, his eyes tight and squinting into the blast. When he came to the point where Rick’s footsteps veered off into the trees he pulled into the same track marks he had made on his way up the mountain and turned the machine off, stowing the keys in his jacket pocket and stepping off into the thigh-deep drift beside the road. The roadway suddenly dark and silent. He could see Rick’s tracks leading off into the black shadows of the forest and he followed them to the edge of the trees, each step jerking and stumbling against the surface, but there was no seeing past the first big pines. If Rick rose all at once, in that moment, from those dark trees, he did not know what he would do at all. Rick had a pistol — he had seen it — and Bill stood there in the snow at the edge of the forest holding the empty air in his hands. What a fool you are. Again and again. What a fool.