His hands came up. Then his head burst again into freezing air and he groped in desperation and delirium for anything solid in the world and his hand fell upon a black tree root jutting from the icy bank and he grabbed it and stopped himself, the current pressing against him so that his legs came out sideways in the flow. Already he was pulling himself from the water, his teeth chattering in his head and his voice coming in a staccato hum he could not control.
He did not know how he managed to climb the bank but he scrambled upward until he lay upon the steep broken surface above the rushing water. The cold was like nothing he had ever experienced: an agonized numbing that seemed to enter him directly through the heart and radiated outward into every part of his being. His clothes were wet through to bare skin and his beard already freezing into a solid block in the wind. The rifle was gone but the case remained slung across his back.
He clawed himself to hands and knees and then raised himself again to his feet, bent over and choking with cold. The creek poured out below him, a waterway only a dozen feet deep but blasting black against the white mountainside and disappearing under the snow and reappearing again before curling on through the trees. At its frozen edge, a few dozen yards away, lay a dark shape that, as he watched, seemed to uncoil itself, rising and staggering to its feet and then falling again to the snow and rising once more. Rick. He too from the river, freezing, a bleak shape against a plane of grainy fuzz like a static-smeared television screen. The figure seemed to peer at him from its position on the opposite bank and Bill raised a hand to him weakly. It was an odd gesture but he could think of no other to perform. If the figure made some gesture in response, Bill did not see it in the shadowed and swirling darkness of the storm.
He was shaking with a force so profound that it seemed to pull his skeleton from his body, the cold occupying his chest like some great bird come to roost there, in his bones, his limbs, in the frozen center of his being, so that it felt as if his blood had turned to slush and the snow drifted right through the insubstantial film of his skin, curling briefly inside him before swirling away through the trees. Three times he fell before reaching an area where the angle lessened enough for him to scale the ridge, turning only once to see if he was being pursued and finding no one. His footsteps were slow and labored and although he knew he was freezing to death he could not stop moving, what connection of body or of mind he did not know but his feet continued to move and his heart continued to beat in his chest. He felt as if he were drifting up through the cold shocked air.
Then there was a shape in his mind, a flowing gray and aquiline shape that appeared and disappeared and reappeared once more. A wolf, its body moving through the black in utter and complete silence, not moving toward him or away but simply moving. He did not know if his eyes were open or closed now. All around him the same dark trees and endless snow and he drifted toward some warm dry distance he could not identify. But then there was a voice, somewhere, faint, and it pulled him back into the snow again. He lifted his head, expecting to see the wolf, but there was no wolf. Perhaps there never had been.
He had assumed he would die. That was why he had released the animals. But now that the moment was upon him he wondered what else he could have done. He thought of himself as the boy who would go down to the black bridge in Battle Mountain with his older brother in days of heat and sunlight. And perhaps he still was that boy, even after everything that had happened. If there were any rules left to dictate his life, only one remained, and that was to take care of his own. But of course he had not even done that much: not for the animals, not for the bear, and certainly not for the friend he had left behind.
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.