Gerard Donovan - Julius Winsome

Long past midnight, as I lay warm and still, drifting into the dark, I saw something come for me out of it.

The wolves who jumped from the bus were running silently at me through the trees, their clear eyes fixed on the cabin, these two white drops of fur with blue sights aiming their leaps and strides, how they glided through the stripped rich birch so fast I would only know they passed if my ear were trained to the ground or I saw the snow move at their paws. They flitted through the entire early winter towards me, running in a pair or splitting around trees and fields to gather again into one pace and with one aim. They had covered miles already, loosed from their life in the bus, that last tattered outpost they sojourned in before the wilderness, and as they approached they trained upon me those blue, unwavering eyes.

They knew me now.

I WOKE SLOWLY, UNSURE OF THE DAY OR TIME OR WHERE I was until I saw objects I recognized and knew myself to be in the bedroom. The light looked different, the way some days are different right from the start: it must have been the snow reflected into the window from outside, the space around me luminous and hardly made of objects at all.

I heard a voice beside me, a human voice formed around words other than my own thoughts, and I turned my head to the shortwave radio, still warmed up to a Canada station from the night before. I lay under the blankets and listened. True enough, snow showers for today, but later something ominous, a story told in numbers from Quebec and north of there, the temperatures ahead of and behind a much colder front, a hard line drifting south with wind and steadier snow and then a numbing cold.

The announcer stated that it was Friday, the morning of the third, the first weekend then of what was to be the real winter—a day, two at most until the weather came upon these woods with its wide brush of paint, in a single pass the season of coats.

I rose and made for the cold shirt hanging on the doorknob, pulled the pants up my legs and wended my way to the fire, shoving logs together over paper and setting a shaking match to it. The icy fog of breath rose also, wrung out of me like a spirit. As a child I’d often wondered if I was losing myself into the air on such mornings as these. I was slow today, as if catching up with myself or waiting for my senses to come along, and I felt pain where I went to sleep with none.

I pierced a slice of bread with the long fork and held it against the flames, and afterwards wandered around the house sipping mouthfuls of hot tea around the toast. My mind was as blank as the land outside, though I had thoughts of the writing on the poster and of how far things had come in a few days after a lifetime of relatively nothing. I thought of Hobbes, my first weekend without him.

With little to place my eyes on while I drank, I picked out the Shakespeare list from between the books and went down to D. Strange, I could remember writing these particular words, the smell in the room when I wrote them, what I saw when I wrote them, the feeling in my hand as I scratched out the letters, what I was wearing and how small and safe the world was, the warm fire, my father’s gentle assurance that books mattered, that reading them mattered more. Now that the world had gone to hell and was never coming back, that memory seemed all the more important. Everything was in the books, look at all the books, a life’s worth, those living walls around me.

There were four words, though the list might have been compiled over two days and not one because of the different inks, blue and black, for the first one and last three: Disponge , to squeeze out, and after a space, the next three in black: distraction , a troop of isolated soldiers; discase , to undress; declined , meaning fallen. It was nothing but a coincidence that the words from that section seemed to fall happily on the subject of the day, that the morning seemed intent on disponging all the available snow from the sky and sprinkling it upon the yard, the barn, the flowerbeds, the woodpile, and the porch around the door of the cabin, as if I had been writing for times ahead and not practicing a language long dead.

Claire was still on my mind, lay there freshly upon my other thoughts now that I had seen her yesterday, and twice for that matter, or three times if my thoughts counted, and I wondered if she lived in Fort Kent now. Strange that you can sleep with someone and a few months later not know the first thing about them, never mind years.

Whatever my intention, it was as yet a haze, but I warmed up the truck, poured hot tea into a thermos, and with a book of verse, a list slipped inside it, along with the rifle and the telescopic sight, I headed along a set of tracks on the road east that would eventually bring me to her town if I kept driving, and soon was, churning my way easily through the thin white linen of a countryside featureless except where birds poked out pools of water. I was unsure of my plans for the day, why I was driving with a rifle and to what end, and felt much less sure when I saw a man standing solitary in the middle of nowhere, a man who appeared to raise his arm is if ordering back a tide.

HE STOOD ON THE ROAD ABOUT A MILE AHEAD, A DOT in the glazed powder. I watched him through the glass and slowed, but it was still only a matter of seconds before I reached him and whatever he had to say to me.

This is no flat country, except in one place where the paved road to Fort Kent evens out over a couple of miles, and in the normal course of events if you are out on a journey and happen to see someone walking you have time to prepare a conversation if you have a mind for one, or a salute if it is to be a passing without words. Any questions are proper and thoughtful and answered in kind.

Yes, closer now, and there he was for definite. He appeared to face in my direction as he saw my truck approach. I lowered the window with my left hand as I slowed, wondering what sort of conversation was to be had today, but I did not really have time to come to terms with what he might be doing out here in the middle of nowhere. My decision to take a drive was sudden, and even a random talk might demonstrate that, why I was driving, where I was going. Now in the last fifty yards the windshield wipers pushed aside the spray of washer fluid and he stood clearer, a man in a police jacket, his free hand on a waist holster, a revolver. I saw the other hand rise again and unfurl to an arm: this fellow wanted me to stop.

HE STEPPED ASIDE AFTER I PULLED UP AND THE BRAKES squealed in the thin air, appeared to be someone ill at ease in himself or annoyed in general: even his skin looked like a large raincoat thrown hastily across him. The evidence suggested he did not like doing this, being here, and his voice rang on the sharp side of friendly:

You haven’t seen anything up there, have you?

I fingered the key, and as the engine died the silence crowded around my first words to him:

Seen what then?

I wrapped my forearms around the steering wheel and leaned down to the window at the same time as he leaned in. His face was a cloud of breath.

Shots, suspicious activity, he said. A few miles around you up there. Anything?

I said, Plenty of hunters wandering about, so you get the shots coming across the woods.

He nodded when I said that, as if he had expected an answer such as I gave.

But nothing else, I said, apart from the winter coming in general. It’s mostly quiet.

His hand still rested on the holster, though he made a show of draping the fingers over his belt in a relaxed manner. I did not know specifically what he was looking for because I had no television and no way of knowing what they knew and if any of what they knew had pointed them here.