He thought of Majer then, of Majer and the animals, and all he could muster for them was an apology for their collective deaths and for his own and a question he could not answer: What good had he been to them? The bear had stared out at him from his cage with eyes that clearly knew him, that recognized him, but what circled through the bear’s mind he would never know. But did he even know what circled through his own? Everything he had done seemed utterly foolish, running out into the storm like a madman. He should have gone with Grace and Jude. He knew that now, and he also knew that he should have understood that from the start.
But it was too late and maybe it had been too late since the beginning. Everything beyond his sight mere abstraction—memory, history, perhaps even love—and the time for such things had ended. Instead there was only his motion as he turned around the trunk and stared into the storm. This time he could see Rick once again, his figure limping and struggling through the snow, not away from him but toward, some fetch or wraith or grim doppelg?nger come to end him, and the fear that clutched at his heart held him there, watching in terror for a long, trembling moment until, at last, he turned and began an erratic, panicked stumble uphill, each step postholing up to his thighs, his feet numb but his body pressing forward in desperation. He could not remember how many shells remained in the case but knew that there were not many.
The trees around him had begun to shake and hiss and the snow blew sideways against his face. He stood with his back to a tree again, the rifle spattered with ice, his hands red and burning. The gun case was still hanging from his shoulder and he unslung it and pressed his crabbed hand into the pocket and came up with a single shell. Certainly the last. He loaded it into the rifle and closed the breech and stood panting.
Then the tree next to his head exploded, a burst of wood chips spattering his face. He jerked back, the rifle fumbling in his grip as the flat pop of the pistol repeated, the bullet whizzing past him and into the forest. He spun around the tree and the rifle cracked, the flash arresting each flake so that the storm held, for the briefest moment, in the air all around him. His breath came fast now and the shot still rang in his ears. Goddammit! he screamed. He crouched and ran forward, his breath a wheeze, his motion jerking, spastic, the rifle barrel warm against his freezing hands, stumbling from one tree to the next, the snow blasting, all the while, into his squinting eyes.
The slope upon which he moved rose to a bulbous ridge where only the tops of the trees protruded from the snow, short and twisted shapes that provided no shelter from wind or gunfire and beyond which the slope ran down at an angle precipitous and blind. He staggered out along its edge, his hands shaking, heart trembling in his chest. Across the line of the ridge, exposed rocks stood everywhere like black skulls in the blizzarding night. His breath ragged and his head light and dizzy. He had to stop once when a fit of coughing racked his body and he thought he might vomit but he did not vomit and he stood again and went on in his staggering slow-motion run, expecting at any moment that the killing shot would come to claim him. When he turned again, he could see Rick’s ghost-shape: a bleak shadow lunging from behind a dark tree and then disappearing and reappearing again, moving up the slope toward him in stuttering cuts and edits like some strip of damaged film. And so he ran, his feet heavy, clambering and sliding until he had achieved the top of the ridge.
He could not see the surface beyond but there were trees rising from somewhere below and so he rolled himself forward and tumbled over the frozen lip. On the opposite side the wind was yet stronger. He lay in a scant forest of dwarf and twisted trees, the empty rifle still held between his numb hands. Already he was so exhausted he could barely get to his feet and yet he managed to do so and to move back along the edge of the ridge, back toward where he had seen Rick struggling up the mountain and then he knelt in the snow, listening and staring into the swirling darkness for so long that when the first close footstep crunched the snow he was momentarily confused as to what it could be. Then there was another. And another. So close.
What thoughts he had were simple and desperate and his body moved as if controlled by instinct alone. He lunged forward off the ridge without sight or plan or idea. For a moment he was nearly airborne, such was the curl of the cornice upon which he had launched himself, but then Rick flew to him from the grainy frozen night and their collision was with the full force of Nat’s weight and then both of them were falling. He had wrapped one hand into Rick’s coat but he released it now and the figure next to him flailed in the snow as he too flailed, their twin bodies rocketing all at once down the mountain, powder and frozen chunks of snow following them, and the inarticulate sirenlike wailing was his own scream as he fell. Everything the downward arrow. As if the entire forest had become liquid. Blurred ghosts of dwarf trees. White ribbons of crystalline snow in a night that had become so utterly dark as to achieve a kind of vacancy or emptiness. When he looked to the side he could no longer see Rick at all.
For the briefest instant he found himself suspended in a geography broken loose of the world: the dark boughs of pines and firs, the
curvature of rocks and stones, the swirling cyclonic curl of blowing snow all around him, all adrift in that white blurred night sea, his hands paddling the frozen air before plunging at last, backward, into the freezing water of the swollen creek below.
For a moment he was blind. The cold was everything. Coming into his skin, into his blood. His brain. Like burning. His nerves exploding with it.