But then he looked again and saw that the animal was not the pronghorn antelope but the moose of the evening before, its head partially blown apart and its leg twisting behind it on that awful hingepoint of broken bone, his own heart sinking in his chest even as his skin blew into pinpoints and the landscape everywhere flew away into thin blue darkness.
When he woke his throat was dry and seemed coated with the same floury dust that had lain upon every surface of the car he had returned to in the dream. He sat up in the trailer on the stiff mattress and coughed and then rose and drank from the sink and stood there in his long underwear, alone in the dark, beer gut pressed to the edge of the counter, staring into the scant black rectangle of the window, into the reflection of his own wild eyes and scraggly beard. Beyond that visage lay a vacancy of empty space.
He returned to the mattress but his eyes would not close and he lay there, awake, watching, for what seemed like hours, as a blue square of moonlight slanted across the cracked vinyl paneling of the adjacent wall. After the clock had passed two in the morning, he rose to his feet once again, dressed and lit a cigarette before lacing up his boots and stepping outside. The night was cold, well below freezing, and the forest around him glowed under the blue light of stars and a sliver of waxing crescent moon. The birches faintly radiant, their bases pooled in black shadow, and the path he followed invisible in the darkness. And yet he followed it nonetheless, arriving at the gate and turning his key in the padlock and stepping through into the rescue.
He stood there for a time, puffing at the cigarette, a habit he had quit many times but could not master. Before him, the enclosures lay arrayed in their wide curving loop on the slope of the mountain. From the gate he could see nearly all of it: the cages shining with silver light, the jagged silhouettes of giant pines and furs rising everywhere against a night sky in which the Milky Way appeared as a clear bright spillage of clustering stars. Across from him stood the office trailer, inside which he had slept for many years before his uncle moved in with his girlfriend and left him the travel trailer, and uphill, on his right, he could just make out the edge of the big shed that housed the refrigerators and freezers, the tools, the snowmobile.
It was Majer he wanted to see most of all but the bear was asleep in his den at the center of that great loop of cages, as he knew he would be, and so he snuffed the cigarette and dropped the butt into his coat pocket and then walked a slow circuit among the other enclosures, pausing to look in on each animal as he passed: Napoleon and Foster, their quilled bodies trundling slowly across the expanse of their cage, noses sniffing the air at his approach; Baker in his den, napping, only the raked claws of one forepaw visible; the twin martens swirling along the branches that crisscrossed their enclosure. The remainder of the animals asleep or awake, depending on their species and activity level, but all safe and secure. The two bald eagles silent. The turkey vulture as well. Of the raptors, only Elsie was awake. She hooted from her enclosure, swiveling her head as he approached, her great round eyes examining him with some mixture of interest and boredom, waiting until he passed before starting up her call once more.
These he had saved, had brought back from whatever deprivations had been enacted upon them, most often, like the moose he had lost, the result of collision with the various blunt and sharpened instruments of the human world—vehicles, firearms, fences, traps, poisons—and whatever sense of unease he had carried back from Ponderay, back from Muletown Road and that single rifle shot, back from the dream, dissolved slowly in their presence, his feet moving along the fence lines and those animals nocturnal and active running their noses along the wire in investigation of his scent. He stood by each and spoke in low, quiet tones, telling himself what he already knew: that the promise he made was a false one. There are times when you must become the instrument, when you must deliver a living, breathing thing to whatever heaven exists for such a creature. To the heaven of the moose. And the fox and the badger and the bobcat all watching him with their eyes bright and shining under the shadows of the black trees, watching him without comprehension, but he did not ask for such a thing. He only needed them to be there, and there they were.
When he came to Zeke’s enclosure, he stood at its edge, watching the darkness for a long time until the wolf appeared, drifting forth from the shadows of the trees like a silver ghost and pausing only to squat and urinate and then to sniff the sticks that lay strewn upon the ground, rocks and dry pine needles, after which the animal dissolved again into the shadows from which it had come, its three-legged motion like the flow of some hobbled ghost.
He spoke now into the absence that the wolf had left behind, telling him that he knew which side of the fence he was supposed to stay on and thanking him for the reminder. The palm of his hand against the chain link. He told him that they were still looking for a companion wolf, a female, but that they had been unable to find one suitable. Then he told him that he would not give up, that they would find a mate, a partner, that he would no longer be alone. Words into a vacancy, the wolf somewhere much deeper in the enclosure, perhaps watching him; perhaps not.
He did not know how long he stood there, but after a time he unzipped his jeans and urinated a long, steaming stripe a few inches from the outer edge of the fence. Then he turned and walked back up the path through the birches to the trailer and, at last, to sleep.
HE RETURNED to the rescue just past dawn. Majer had not been out of his den when Bill first walked the enclosures but the bear was awake now and stood upon the big rock over his swimming pool, staring down at the water as if a fish might materialize from its depths.
Hey there, Bill said. I came down to see you last night but you were snoozing.