He was running then, floundering uphill toward the top of the loop, the dark silent cages passing him on either side, his boots following the path that Rick had made, the line of which curved toward each enclosure and then moved on, uphill or down, the path mostly covered in snow now and the whole compound appearing as if it were some dark jail or prison: cages everywhere with hills of snow between them. The sight of it made him shudder. And that was when he saw Majer, the great hulk of the animal’s back fading out of the granular and shifting darkness, unmoving in the center of his enclosure as if he had fallen asleep by the frozen pond, Bill flailing toward the gate through the high drifts between the fence lines in silence but for his heaving breath.
When he reached the front of the cage at last, he wrapped his fingers through the wire, sucking air and watching the silent unmoving shape within and then his hands had curled into fists and he was banging the fencing and scrambling sideways through the drifts, stripping off his gloves and fishing the keys from his pants pocket and unlocking the door, his heart gone wild, hands shaking, the door coming open now and the night clamping around him, everything hushed and muffled so that his rasping breath was the only possible sound.
His first steps postholed directly into the snow so that he fell forward into the drift, frantic now, scrambling up and through that rise until Majer’s body lay there before him, the bear on its side, its great head covered with snow, mouth open, tongue lolling against the ice. He laid his hand on the bear’s mouth, felt the flesh there, not yet frozen but cooling. Above the long snout, the eyes remained open, pale and faintly blue and holding, somewhere deep within, a darkness like black night covered with the translucent but impervious film of his blindness.
And he knew that Majer was dead.
He tried to speak but there were no words and after a time he leaned forward, his knees crunching the snow, one arm reaching up to lie upon that furred back, a back still carrying a hint of the animal’s warmth. He lay upon that great carcass and wept, his face pressed to Majer’s thick brown fur, one hand stroking, so slowly, the long snout. He tried again to speak but what came was only a long howl that rose up from the center of him and would not stop, his heart unspooling all around him, a red ribbon that turned and looped and fell everywhere, into the sky, into the snow, around the two of them, the man who lay upon the body of the bear in a cage at the center of a white and frozen forest, and in the falling snow it was unclear where the man ended and the bear began, for both had begun to shift into white, the man sinking into the body of the bear, the bear rising into the body of the man, both of them dissolving into a blowing whirl of snow that seemed, in that moment, to come from all directions at once, the rush of it upon their bodies like an avalanche.
THE ANIMALS had been killed in their cages. The bald eagles both dead on their sides on the floor and in the adjacent enclosure the turkey vulture was also dead. Tommy and Betty and Chester. The porcupines were quietly in motion but both the martens were dead, side by side, in a kind of tortured embrace, their mouths open and tiny teeth shining out in the darkness. The raccoons—Perry, Tony, and Barley—all huddled at the back of their enclosure, alive, although they would not come forward no matter how long Bill stood there. Baker the badger was dead and Goldie the bobcat and Katy the red fox, all of them frozen in attitudes of fear and agony. And then Zeke. The wolf lay in his customary location at the back of the fence line, panting and growling at him, not moving away even when Bill came right up the chain link, only staring back at him with eyes yellow and rolling and Bill’s voice offering that same wordless keening in response.
Of the raptors, only Elsie, their great gray owl, was alive, her bright yellow eyes peering back at him from within her partially snow-buried cage. He came to the fence and looked back at her, his voice a kind of cooing like the sound of a dove. On the floor, not far from the edge of the wire where he stood, lay a strip of meat, cold and partially frozen, beef or venison or something else. He came around to the zookeeper door and unlocked it and entered the enclosure and knelt there before the frozen strip, the owl hopping on its perch and looking down at him with her huge pie-shaped face. Bill knelt and took the meat into his hand and remained there, looking at it, smelling it, staring at its color, at its shape, but such an examination revealed nothing and at last he slipped it into his coat pocket.