Hold the Dark: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

elastic but strong. And then the trapeze artists were gone, the tent’s top blew off, dispensed in smoke, and the boy’s face turned an iced-over blue, mouthing slow words to Slone he could neither hear nor lip-read. But he imagined his son saying Remember me and he tried to reach out for the boy but could not.
    Some time later—he couldn’t tell how long, each minute a grain of sand dropping in an hourglass—he awoke on a gurney, worked on by others, rough hands mending his shoulder and neck, a corporal grinning down, “You lucky fucker, you’re going home.” His said his son’s name and the corporal told him, “Soon, you lucky fucker, you’ll see him soon.” The small-caliber round had missed both his pharynx and spine.
    “Nothing but a hickey, man,” someone said, and he felt the pinch of a syringe and sleep then lowered him into a grateful dark where he could not dream.
    * * *
    Core woke in this winter dark before a belated dawn, Medora Slone still asleep and nude beside him on the sofa, the electric heater and their bodies an able source of warmth, the quilt a caul he wanted to remain in. Soon he built a fire, started the woodstove. She dressed and cooked and watched him depart with the AR-15 rifle and a pack of provisions and snowshoes. He wore her husband’s boots and one-piece of caribou hide—a winter suit she’d crafted herself for the unholiest cold. She covered the end of the rifle barrel with masking tape. Core asked her why.
    “To keep snow out of the gun,” she said.
    “I won’t get snow in the gun.”
    “You will when you fall.”
    “I’m not planning to fall.”
    “Everyone falls in the snow, Mr. Core. If you feel yourself starting to sweat, rest until you’re dry.”
    “What’s wrong with sweat?”
    “Nothing till you’re wet through. Wet and it freezes to your skin when you stop moving.”
    “I’ve been in the cold before,” Core said.
    “Not like the cold that’s coming here.”
    She opened the door for him and he stepped outside, his face angled up into the flakes falling slant the size of quarters. She remained against the doorframe and tied her robe closed.
    “I thought it might be too cold to snow,” he said.
    “What’s that mean?” she asked.
    “Too cold to snow. I’ve heard that. Though I’ve never understood it.”
    “Maybe where you come from. But here it’s never too cold to snow. There’s something off, something wrong with the sky here.”
    Core looked up into the dark, looked for whatever it was she might have meant.
    “Do you know if the snow is coming heavy today?”
    “I don’t tell the weather, Mr. Core. It will tell me.”
    Core thanked her, left her framed in a soft glow at the door of her cabin.
    He saw the lightening sky through a splayed reach of trees. At the perimeter of the village, in the copse near the hill where the path wound up and around, he suddenly spotted a back-bent Yup’ik woman with a circular face burning items in a rusted drum.
    He glimpsed her through the spiderweb of tree limbs and twigs. He stopped on the path to see if she would notice him. When she did she waved him over to the fire. He saw the red-orange radiance on her jowls, her creature garment thick and soiled, pungent-looking in the firelight, an anorak a century old. Her feet and shins were sheathed in moose-hide mukluks. He could not tell what blazed in the drum. He guessed she was burning household trash, but why at this dead hour? Seniors the world over woke before first light as if to win some contest with the sun.
    She said, “I thought you were something wicked coming my way.”
    “No, ma’am,” he said. “I’m heading into the hills.”
    She had a man’s voice, teeth missing. “To get a wolf’s tooth, I’ve been told.”
    “Yes,” he said. “How do you know?”
    “We’re a small village. We’ve had trouble enough here.”
    “The wolves. I know, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
    “Ah, you know? No, you think you do. I mean trouble since the