“Yeah?” Jack feigned nonchalance, but he was sitting up. There was nothing he loved more than a good dark story.
“A whole string of murders in the twenties. This gaunt pale giant spirit haunted the village and possessed people and turned them into cannibals. It was called the Windigo. So what happened is, whenever the elders thought a villager was possessed by the Windigo they shot or strangled him so he couldn’t eat his friends and family. Kind of a preemptive strike.”
“How many?”
Wynn turned farther away from the fire so the light fell on the text. “Nine. In a village of maybe two hundred.”
“Damn.”
“I know.”
“Maybe it was a starving polar bear.”
“Maybe.” Jack sounded to Wynn a little like a kid desperate for an explanation.
“One of those that likes to walk on two legs.”
“Huh.”
“Could’ve been a bad seal year for some reason,” Jack suggested.
“Could’ve been. Says the village felt doubly cursed because warm currents made the fishing bad two years in a row.”
Jack felt goosebumps for the second time that day. “Well, what the hell do you think it was?”
“A hungry ghost.”
“Fuck you.”
The campfire quieted to embers and they could not smell the conflagration in the northwest at all; it was as if it no longer existed. The breeze must have backed around. They didn’t talk about it but now and then each turned his face sideways to the lake and flared nostrils exactly like an elk or deer would, scenting for a predator.
An hour after full dark they turned in and left the door of the tent unzipped and tied back so that they could see the stars, and the northern lights if they sang silently later on. They closed the mesh screen so it would collect the frost. Later Jack moved his pad and bag out onto the cobbles of the beach and slept under the throbbing arch of the Milky Way. He didn’t care about the frost, it would feather on his bag and he could shake it off in the morning. Last night’s freeze had taken care of the mosquitoes. Wynn heard the knock of stone as Jack moved outside, and he also heard the slow creek making the faintest ripple. He thought of the Merwin poem about dusk that he loved so much. Merwin describes the sun going down believing in nothing, and how he hears the stream running after it: It has brought its flute it is a long way.
It killed him. The one and only sun without belief in anything and the little stream believing so hard, believing in music even. What he loved about poetry: it could do in a few seconds what a novel did in days. A painting could be like that, too, and a sculpture. But sometimes you wanted something to take days and days.
Jack lay awake for a long time and when he slept he dreamed of his mother and the morning on the Encampment. He had the same dream a few times a year. They camped in Horseshoe Park, the meadow beneath the little bridge, just as they had in real life. There were just the three of them—his father, he, and his mom—just as it had been, and when they broke camp his father rode Dandy, his favorite hunting horse, and led BJ, the strawberry roan mare who was half Arab and who they always used as a packhorse because she was too twitchy to ride. She could rear at a chipmunk or leap over a low deadfall stick as if it were a two-rail jump.
The trail ran into the spruce along the right bank of the river. The river still rushed with snowmelt in late June. It was really just a big creek and it dropped fast into a constricted shaded canyon densely wooded with spruce and pine. The trail climbed away from the thundering rapids. His mother rode ahead of him on Mindy, a sweet, big-boned quarter-horse mare, and he followed on Duke, his young gray. In the dream, and as it had been that morning, he insisted on taking up the rear, it made him feel more grown-up. As in real life they took their time. The trail was narrow and rocky and it hugged the side of the steep slope. His father sang as he rode. Fifty feet below, the river cliffed out into a narrow rock-walled gorge and vanished in a sharp right bend. The whitewater roared up like a jet engine and sent mist into the trees. His heart hammered and he loved this. His father in the lead got to a short sloping slab of bedrock and clucked Dandy across it. Jack heard the grating strike of the steel shoes, saw BJ toss her head, put her nose down and cross, he heard the bit rings jangle and the dainty click of her steps, and then his mother urged the slow-gaited Mindy, Good girl, what a sweet girl. As in real life something spooked BJ just ahead and she balked back and tautened the lead and his father, who held the line, called, “Whoa, girl! Easy!” and Mindy bunched back, she was on the slick slab and her rear hoof slid. The rear left foot, Jack saw it right there beneath him, the shod hoof slipped and scrambled for purchase, his mother yelling, “Hey, girl!”—the butt of the horse sliding and now the fore hooves scrabbled at the mossy bank above the trail and—he saw it all as if in slow motion, the horse, and his mother still reining and leaning forward over her mane trying to save the mare, and she lost all traction, flailing the back legs now and the mare screamed as she went over. Not his mother, the mare. A scream like a terrified human. He saw them hit a large spruce and get knocked sideways and out and they separated in air, his mother still clutching the reins, her hat knocked into space and tumbling like a shot bird, that moment frozen before it wasn’t and they hit the white torrent together. For a moment, miraculously, they were swimming, she was grabbing for the saddle, then they went over what must have once been a ledge but was now the hump of a breaking wave that rolled down into the trench of a thundering backward-breaking hydraulic, they vanished, came up once, first the mare’s dark head, then his mother’s arm before they slammed into the wall and were tugged around the bend. His father when he could speak shouted, “Stay!” and he looked wildly back and yelled, “Can you hold him? Can you?” and Jack nodded, mute, and his father let go the lead line of his packhorse and spurred Dandy into a crazy lunge down the trail. He was gone. In real life they both were gone. BJ loped after his father, trailing the rope. Jack stayed. He reined tight the quivering gelding and they were both shaking and he stayed. He would do what his father demanded. He loved her more than anything on earth. He was eleven.
But in the dream her hat caught itself and took wing and flew up to the other side of the canyon and caught the sunlight like a turning hawk, and she and Mindy did not hit the white rush but floated a moment in air and he knew they would figure out how to fly, too, he knew it, and when he woke up under the late stars a loon was calling pitched and lonely somewhere far out and the pillow of his jacket was wet and he knew he’d been crying again.
* * *