Chapter
SIXTEEN
The weather warmed and he started to run the next day.
Not literally—it was all he could do to walk fast in the snowshoes—but in the sense that wolves run.
He decided to see more, be more and not spend all his time in the shelter just living between kills and looking out the door now and then.
He wanted more, and the snowshoes and some new confidence made him free. He took his war bow and lance, a deerskin quiver of arrows over his back, a propane lighter and enough meat for the day wrapped in a hanging pouch of deer hide, and ran the way wolves ran, coursed just to see what he could see.
He moved out from the shelter in gradual circles, discovering the land. The first few days he did not go far, had a slight concern about becoming lost, and then decided it didn’t matter. He would always find his way back by the snowshoe tracks and even if they filled in and it took him some time to find his way home to the shelter in a very real sense he was always home now in the woods; with the bow and hatchet at his belt and the lighter to start a fire and snowshoes to keep him above the snow he had become a creature of winter. Home was where he stopped to have a fire and by the end of a week—the warm weather held, rising to thirty above during the day—he actually stayed out away from the shelter for a night and sat by a fire in his clothes, listening to wolves howling, seeing a thousand diamond eyes from the firelight glittering in the snow around the fire pit.
The next day it grew warmer still and he was working a ridge about four miles from camp hunting a moose. He had no intention of killing the moose but was hunting like a wolf—not always to kill, but to know, to see. He had seen the moose, a large bull with both antlers gone, earlier in the day and had locked onto his tracks and followed a quarter mile back, watching the moose through the trees as the moose nibbled on the same willow shoots Brian had seen the deer eating. They made it look so good he tried them but they tasted like wood to him and he spit them out.
The moose didn’t know Brian was there and Brian studied him carefully, watching him eat and move. The moose was huge, enormous, twice as big as the cow Brian had killed or maybe larger still, and Brian doubted that even with a full draw and very sharp arrow he could get a shaft deep enough to kill him. Perhaps with the lance and a good solid lunge or by having the bull run on the spear as the cow had done . . .
He was thinking this way, watching the bull from beneath an overhanging pine branch about a hundred yards away, imagining how it would be and what he would have to do to get the moose if he ever wanted to try it, when he saw the wolf kill.
At first he didn’t recognize what was coming. He saw the moose stiffen and turn his head, his huge ears alert and forward, and then in a shadow he saw a flash of gray, just a touch, moving across the rear of the moose.
Wolf. He just had time to think the word when he saw another gray shape swipe through the trees, again across the rear of the bull, and then two more as they came in to cut and dodge and it looked like seven or eight of them but he thought probably only four.
It was enough. The bull tried to fight. He slashed with his front hooves and kicked with his back, swinging and swiveling to meet the attackers, but they kept coming from the side in slashing attacks aimed at the bull’s back legs and rear end. They pulled at the hamstrings, cut at the back legs until the bull couldn’t stand and as he caved in and settled on his rear the wolves became frantic and started tearing at his rear end, opening the bull while he was still alive, ripping at the rear leg muscles and the anus, each bite opening the wound more until blood was all over the snow and the wolves were covered with it.
And they ate him that way. Pulling at his rear while he still lived, pulling his insides out while he tried to pull himself away with his front legs until he was at last too weak and fell forward. Still alive, still living while they ate him.
Brian wanted to not see it. He had thought killing with the arrows slow and bad but this—it was nothing like this. The wolves were crazy with it, with the smell of blood and from the hot intestines they pulled from the living moose, and the bull took forever to die, never died but just kept sinking down and down while the wolves ate him alive.
Brian shuddered. He had seen the wolves before and had never felt fear. He had not thought they would ever attack him but if they did—if they came in like that and pulled him down.
He looked away, shook his head. They would not attack. They hadn’t yet and they had had plenty of opportunities. They ate deer and moose and hopefully not boys.
But still, as Brian left them eating and moved quietly away, still he kept an arrow in the bow and his fingers on the string and kept looking over his shoulder back at them pulling at the bull and gorging on the warm meat and later that night in the shelter he sat by the fire and wondered how it could be so horrible—how nature could let an animal suffer the way the moose had suffered.
The wolves were just being natural and he understood the need to kill—he would himself die if he did not kill.
But so slowly . . .
He stared into the flames for a long time thinking of it and thought he would dream of it when he slept, but he didn’t. Instead he dreamed of home, of sitting watching television with his mother and father, and when he awakened it was well past daylight—the latest he had slept in some time.
He went outside to the bathroom and the weather was so soft and warm he didn’t need his parka—a warm day in December—and he turned back to build a fire and boil meat when he heard two trees explode, some distance off, one pop and after a short pause another one.
Pop . . . pop.
And he had the fire going and the pot on with snow and meat set to boil when he realized what he had heard, or what he hadn’t heard.
It was too warm for trees to explode.