Christian Kiefer - The Animals

The trees around him had begun to shake and hiss and the snow blew sideways against his face. He stood with his back to a tree again, the rifle spattered with ice, his hands red and burning. The gun case was still hanging from his shoulder and he unslung it and pressed his crabbed hand into the pocket and came up with a single shell. Certainly the last. He loaded it into the rifle and closed the breech and stood panting.

Then the tree next to his head exploded, a burst of wood chips spattering his face. He jerked back, the rifle fumbling in his grip as the flat pop of the pistol repeated, the bullet whizzing past him and into the forest. He spun around the tree and the rifle cracked, the flash arresting each flake so that the storm held, for the briefest moment, in the air all around him. His breath came fast now and the shot still rang in his ears. Goddammit! he screamed. He crouched and ran forward, his breath a wheeze, his motion jerking, spastic, the rifle barrel warm against his freezing hands, stumbling from one tree to the next, the snow blasting, all the while, into his squinting eyes.

The slope upon which he moved rose to a bulbous ridge where only the tops of the trees protruded from the snow, short and twisted shapes that provided no shelter from wind or gunfire and beyond which the slope ran down at an angle precipitous and blind. He staggered out along its edge, his hands shaking, heart trembling in his chest. Across the line of the ridge, exposed rocks stood everywhere like black skulls in the blizzarding night. His breath ragged and his head light and dizzy. He had to stop once when a fit of coughing racked his body and he thought he might vomit but he did not vomit and he stood again and went on in his staggering slow-motion run, expecting at any moment that the killing shot would come to claim him. When he turned again, he could see Rick’s ghost-shape: a bleak shadow lunging from behind a dark tree and then disappearing and reappearing again, moving up the slope toward him in stuttering cuts and edits like some strip of damaged film. And so he ran, his feet heavy, clambering and sliding until he had achieved the top of the ridge.

He could not see the surface beyond but there were trees rising from somewhere below and so he rolled himself forward and tumbled over the frozen lip. On the opposite side the wind was yet stronger. He lay in a scant forest of dwarf and twisted trees, the empty rifle still held between his numb hands. Already he was so exhausted he could barely get to his feet and yet he managed to do so and to move back along the edge of the ridge, back toward where he had seen Rick struggling up the mountain and then he knelt in the snow, listening and staring into the swirling darkness for so long that when the first close footstep crunched the snow he was momentarily confused as to what it could be. Then there was another. And another. So close.

What thoughts he had were simple and desperate and his body moved as if controlled by instinct alone. He lunged forward off the ridge without sight or plan or idea. For a moment he was nearly airborne, such was the curl of the cornice upon which he had launched himself, but then Rick flew to him from the grainy frozen night and their collision was with the full force of Nat’s weight and then both of them were falling. He had wrapped one hand into Rick’s coat but he released it now and the figure next to him flailed in the snow as he too flailed, their twin bodies rocketing all at once down the mountain, powder and frozen chunks of snow following them, and the inarticulate sirenlike wailing was his own scream as he fell. Everything the downward arrow. As if the entire forest had become liquid. Blurred ghosts of dwarf trees. White ribbons of crystalline snow in a night that had become so utterly dark as to achieve a kind of vacancy or emptiness. When he looked to the side he could no longer see Rick at all.

For the briefest instant he found himself suspended in a geography broken loose of the world: the dark boughs of pines and firs, the

curvature of rocks and stones, the swirling cyclonic curl of blowing snow all around him, all adrift in that white blurred night sea, his hands paddling the frozen air before plunging at last, backward, into the freezing water of the swollen creek below.

For a moment he was blind. The cold was everything. Coming into his skin, into his blood. His brain. Like burning. His nerves exploding with it.

His hands came up. Then his head burst again into freezing air and he groped in desperation and delirium for anything solid in the world and his hand fell upon a black tree root jutting from the icy bank and he grabbed it and stopped himself, the current pressing against him so that his legs came out sideways in the flow. Already he was pulling himself from the water, his teeth chattering in his head and his voice coming in a staccato hum he could not control.

He did not know how he managed to climb the bank but he scrambled upward until he lay upon the steep broken surface above the rushing water. The cold was like nothing he had ever experienced: an agonized numbing that seemed to enter him directly through the heart and radiated outward into every part of his being. His clothes were wet through to bare skin and his beard already freezing into a solid block in the wind. The rifle was gone but the case remained slung across his back.

He clawed himself to hands and knees and then raised himself again to his feet, bent over and choking with cold. The creek poured out below him, a waterway only a dozen feet deep but blasting black against the white mountainside and disappearing under the snow and reappearing again before curling on through the trees. At its frozen edge, a few dozen yards away, lay a dark shape that, as he watched, seemed to uncoil itself, rising and staggering to its feet and then falling again to the snow and rising once more. Rick. He too from the river, freezing, a bleak shape against a plane of grainy fuzz like a static-smeared television screen. The figure seemed to peer at him from its position on the opposite bank and Bill raised a hand to him weakly. It was an odd gesture but he could think of no other to perform. If the figure made some gesture in response, Bill did not see it in the shadowed and swirling darkness of the storm.

He was shaking with a force so profound that it seemed to pull his skeleton from his body, the cold occupying his chest like some great bird come to roost there, in his bones, his limbs, in the frozen center of his being, so that it felt as if his blood had turned to slush and the snow drifted right through the insubstantial film of his skin, curling briefly inside him before swirling away through the trees. Three times he fell before reaching an area where the angle lessened enough for him to scale the ridge, turning only once to see if he was being pursued and finding no one. His footsteps were slow and labored and although he knew he was freezing to death he could not stop moving, what connection of body or of mind he did not know but his feet continued to move and his heart continued to beat in his chest. He felt as if he were drifting up through the cold shocked air.

Then there was a shape in his mind, a flowing gray and aquiline shape that appeared and disappeared and reappeared once more. A wolf, its body moving through the black in utter and complete silence, not moving toward him or away but simply moving. He did not know if his eyes were open or closed now. All around him the same dark trees and endless snow and he drifted toward some warm dry distance he could not identify. But then there was a voice, somewhere, faint, and it pulled him back into the snow again. He lifted his head, expecting to see the wolf, but there was no wolf. Perhaps there never had been.

He had assumed he would die. That was why he had released the animals. But now that the moment was upon him he wondered what else he could have done. He thought of himself as the boy who would go down to the black bridge in Battle Mountain with his older brother in days of heat and sunlight. And perhaps he still was that boy, even after everything that had happened. If there were any rules left to dictate his life, only one remained, and that was to take care of his own. But of course he had not even done that much: not for the animals, not for the bear, and certainly not for the friend he had left behind.