He stepped into the office briefly to confirm what he already knew—that the phone was out—and in the moment of holding that cold plastic to his ear, of listening to the silence it brought, he knew that the night would likely end with his death, and then he understood what he would do next, what he had to do. He returned to the bottom of the loop and opened the doors to Cinder’s enclosure and stood watching for her in the falling snow, in the wind, the panic he had felt replaced now by a kind of rage. The place where he had first seen her was vacant now, the area covered over with fresh snow so that there was no evidence she had been there at all, as if everything about her had been a hallucination, a fantasy. But then her head came up out of the far side of the enclosure and a moment later her body seemed to fade into being, not quickly, not the sleek moving river he had watched for so many hours, but instead a slow laboring creature climbing up out of the rocks of her cage toward whatever freedom lay beyond. Go on, Bill said. The lion was panting but she moved past him and then through the open door, not even glancing at him with her one good eye as she did so, her walk unhurried as she moved on through the thick falling curls of winter snow and disappeared into the dark heavy trees all around them.
He opened all the enclosures, even for the animals that were dead, even for Majer, and when he turned back from the top of the loop, it was to watch the porcupines, already out in the path, walking downhill slowly through the blizzard as if they knew where they were headed. Of the animals that had been poisoned, he did not know if any of them would survive but he knew that he had to give them the chance, even though he had told himself, for all his years at the rescue, that they would die in the wild, that they were simply not capable of living without him. But perhaps even that had been a lie. Perhaps he was the one who needed them, keeping them in their cages, not a savior but a prison warden. That was what the Fish and Game officer had told him—that he did not get to decide who could be put in a cage and who could not—and maybe this much had been true all along. In the end, maybe his entire life as Bill Reed had been only an atonement for failing his best friend so many years before. And yet that life had led them all to slaughter. Majer and Tommy and Chester and Baker and Goldie and Katy and the Twins. Perhaps Zeke and Cinder as well. Because of what he had done. Because of what he had failed to reconcile. At least beyond the enclosures they had a chance. At least he could give them that much after so many years.
Zeke’s was last, the door opening upon an enclosure that appeared completely empty. No print. No sign of fur. No sense of the animal hiding from him. Nothing. As if the creature had simply dissolved into the storm altogether.
Then he was scrambling back down the hill through the snow, his hands numb, the gloves somewhere behind him where he had pulled them off and dropped them, his face frozen but his body moving, returning through the cut-locked gate to where the snowmobile sat already partially covered with fresh snow, panting and coughing and gasping for air even as he grasped the pull cord and began to heave at it, three times before even remembering to turn the key, and then once more and the machine burst into sound, its engine rattling, clouds of dark exhaust pooling out behind it in the frozen air and its headlights illuminating the swirl of snow that seemed to descend upon him from everywhere at once.
He came down the road at full speed, following his own track with the storm blowing straight up in his face from the creek below, his eyes tight and squinting into the blast. When he came to the point where Rick’s footsteps veered off into the trees he pulled into the same track marks he had made on his way up the mountain and turned the machine off, stowing the keys in his jacket pocket and stepping off into the thigh-deep drift beside the road. The roadway suddenly dark and silent. He could see Rick’s tracks leading off into the black shadows of the forest and he followed them to the edge of the trees, each step jerking and stumbling against the surface, but there was no seeing past the first big pines. If Rick rose all at once, in that moment, from those dark trees, he did not know what he would do at all. Rick had a pistol—he had seen it—and Bill stood there in the snow at the edge of the forest holding the empty air in his hands. What a fool you are. Again and again. What a fool.
He climbed back onto the machine and returned the key to the ignition and pulled the cord again. The snowmobile rumbled to life and he clicked it into gear and continued down the mountain, the headlights blasting out before him like a flame, his eyes watching the side of the road where the unblemished surface of the snow descended, flat and clear and perfect. And then Rick’s footprints returned from the forest, the path intersecting with the tracks the sled had made on its ascent, and Bill pulled off to the side, not stopping but slowing for a long moment, watching the tracks as they led downhill, then opening the throttle again, watching for the path to swing away into the forest again, but the track went on and he followed it to where the road bent along the creek, to where that dark surface stretched off beside the road and where, in warmer months, he would sometimes see moose standing in the cool slow water, their mouths dripping with wet sedge and pond weed.
It seemed impossible that Rick would have made it even this far on foot in the storm and yet the tracks continued and he followed them, a grim, dark trough cut in the lit snow before him, all the while the wind blowing into his face, the sound of it a constant hiss against his jacket, eyes screwed down to slits and his bare hands in frozen agony. The snow everywhere like a veil that had fallen over him, over everything, sticking to his face, to the goggles, the headlights dimming under the accumulated pack of particulate ice that seemed to rise from the road and fall from the sky in equal measure.
The tracks led to the highway and then disappeared. What he saw before him was a ghost town. Not another human being visible and no lights on the highway but his own. He turned off the machine and clicked the headlamp off and then sat listening in the muffled silence. The buildings before him had become white boxes in the night. Across from him ran the road that led into the center of town, to the Northwoods and the general store and the empty lot where he had parked the truck.
He was shaking now, trembling everywhere from the cold and from the increasing understanding that he had lost Rick’s trail, that Rick was gone. His pants had soaked through where his flesh had warmed the ice enough to melt it, his face a solid mask of frozen mustache and beard and his breath hard and fast and steaming the black air.