Christian Kiefer - The Animals

His eyes slipped closed for a moment and then flashed open again. He could feel a strange warmth entering his body. It came in through his fingers and toes first and hung there for what seemed an eternity before drifting slowly into his forearms, into his lower legs. He remembered that Rick’s shape had been coming up the ridge toward him but it felt as if he had seen that shape many days ago and what sounds there were seemed to come to him now as if from that time, as if filtered out from some universe similar to this one but ultimately obeying different rules, where objects came untethered from earth and flowed of their own agency, each animate and distilled of a purpose and function as clear and sharp as a diamond.

The world felt soft and blue and warm and he knew what he felt was death itself. The voice he heard was calling his name, his true name, and he lifted his head to meet it.

And there stood the wolf at his feet, a gray shape in the night, its forepaw held up out of the snow.

Zeke, Bill said. His voice was a quiet whispering croak.

The wolf stood there before him as if in answer and then it came forward, passing him so closely that he might have reached out a hand to touch its fur and moving up the ridge in the darkness, its motion slow and silent and so ethereal that Bill was not sure if what he was seeing was real or was simply part of his death. Zeke, he croaked again. And the wolf stopped and looked back over its shoulder at him, as if waiting for him to rise.

And he did rise, coming to his feet and stumbling forward through the thick snow, his body racked with shaking, teeth chattering in his head, limbs jerking as if they had come loose of his brain, and yet still he came forward, up to the base of the short granite cliffs that rose from the darkness at the top of the ridge. In the storm they were lumbering shadows. Colorless. When he reached them he fell forward and crawled on his hands and knees through the snow and into a break in the cliff wall, crawled without thought, his body only wanting to get out of the storm, and when he collapsed at last his breath screamed in his ears and the rush of wind through the trees was distant and terrible. His face like a block of ice and when he touched his hair crusts of frost broke free and fell to the frozen rocks upon which he lay. His clothes freezing solid around him like an encasement of stone.

He had come into a dark place and he lay within it for a long time without even being conscious of whether his eyes were open or closed. His teeth had ceased their chattering now and were locked tight together, his limbs curled against themselves as if they could somehow be willed back into living. Then a few small details began to fade in from the black: stones, rock shadows, a pile of broken branches and leaves like flotsam from an incoming wave. Whether such materials had been collected by man or animal or by nature itself, he could not tell.

He was in a recess, a small space not quite a cave, formed by the apex of overhanging cliffs and huge blocks of talus. He dragged himself to the pile, his hands shaking so badly that the leaves he pulled from the debris were crushed in his grip. Still, he managed to amass a small pile of them in the center of the area and reached in his pocket for the lighter and could not at first recall what else was held there, could not imagine what it was until he had extracted it with his shaking and unmovable hands: Wildlife of the Intermountain West , still contained in its clear plastic bag. He pulled it free and began tearing the pages out, one after another, plants and animals into a crushed pile: raccoon and shrew and bat and black bear, weasel and skunk and fox and coyote. He found his lighter and beat it, upside down, against his leg, and then turned the thumbwheel against its tiny flint again and again, his entire body shaking in its seizure of freezing. When the flint would not spark he turned to the stone wall behind him and ran the wheel repeatedly against its surface, back and forth, back and forth, thirty, forty times, until finally he could see the bright star of the spark and then held down the lever to release the gas, continuing to roll the wheel against the stone. At last a slow, miraculous flame appeared, sputtering and choking against the damp and the cold. He held it to those torn pages and they blackened and twisted and finally began to burn, curling into bright flames.

He could not feel the heat even when he let the flames flow across the bottom of his palm but he knew it must be there and so he leaned over and pulled some of the loose and dry tree branches from the back of the tiny cave and found a few small twigs there and chips of wood and bark and he placed them carefully over the burning pages and leaves.

The fire was small and for a long while seemed on the verge of failing, but after a time a bright orange glow appeared and he pulled more branches over to it and placed them above those embers and waited for them to come into flame. His actions were automatic, and at times, staring at those flames, he did not even remember why he was building a fire or what he was doing out there in that cold world. He remembered a long collection of paired yellow eyes staring at him from the darkness but beyond that only a haze of strange and echoing voices and people he did not even remember or care about anymore. And if he had followed someone out into this wasteland he could not recall to what purpose he had pursued or had been pursued.

He piled all the wood he had over the fire and after a time the front of the tiny cave was filled with orange light and he lay with the granite wall against his back and his beard grew soft and slushy and at last began to dry. The false warmth that had entered his body fled from him now and the quaking reentered him completely, his skeleton seeming to gather its own intelligence and struggling to break from his flesh. It rattled inside that skin sack to the rhythm of his freezing.

After a time he lay on his side, the glowing coals inches from his face, and he felt there, in that single location, the first true warmth return to him and then realized that the burning pain he felt was the sensation of his skin coming back to life. He closed his eyes, breathed the warm and smoke-filled air, so slowly, into his body. For a long time he thought his clawed hand was curled around the black velvet box that held the engagement ring he had purchased for Grace, and as he lay there he thought of what might have been, sitting at the dining room table with Jude hopping up and down with excitement as Bill produced the ring and she opened it and Grace’s smile lit up the room around them like a flame, but when he managed at last to uncurl those fingers, he saw that they held nothing but cold vacant air.

THE FIRE roared and he lay half awake, propped once more against the rock wall at the back of the alcove. He had remembered now that Rick was out there somewhere and that he could probably see the orange glow even through the falling snow and so he remained as alert as his body would allow. A semblance of warmth had returned to him even though his clothing was soaked through. His boots were frozen solid and he could not have taken them off even if he had wanted to. Instead they lay as dead weight at the edge of the coals, steaming slowly.

He had opened the canvas case and filled a dart with fluid from the only vial that remained in the zippered pocket and now he loaded the dart into the gun and sat with it held across his lap.

The night was still black and the snowfall had not lessened. When Rick’s voice came, it was as if from a dream and he thought that he must have fallen asleep, if only for a moment. But then it came again and he lifted his head from his chest and peered out into the darkness. The world beyond the firelight seemed another universe entire. As if there was nothing out there but an endless void.