Hold the Dark: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

start. Trouble before any of us was here. You would bar the door against the wolf, why not more against beasts with the souls of damned men, against men who would damn themselves to beasts? Answer that.”
    “I’m sorry, ma’am?”
    “I read the books they bring me. What else to do here through nights like these? I read the books. The Christians came when I was a child. The missionaries. They taught me the books. They came with books and they came with the plague.”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “The influenza plague.”
    The flame widened in the barrel and Core could feel its broad heat from six feet away.
    “Do you know the name of this village?” she asked.
    “Keelut.”
    “Say its meaning.”
    “I don’t know its meaning.”
    “Its meaning is an evil spirit disguised as a dog. Or a wolf.”
    “Why would they name it that?” he asked.
    Her gums glowed part orange, part pink. “Why indeed. You are the wolf expert, I hear.”
    “My name is Core.”
    “That girl knows this place is cursed.”
    “The girl? Medora Slone?”
    “Her.”
    “She just lost her child. What she knows is grief.”
    “Will the wolves come again for us tonight?”
    “Wolves should not be coming here at all. Tonight or ever.”
    “I did not say should . I said will .” She stared. “They have the spirits of the damned.”
    “They’re hungry wolves, hungry animals. Nothing more.”
    “I don’t mean wolves.”
    “I’ll go now,” he said.
    “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”
    “That’s the Gospel of Matthew.”
    “I told you, I can read the books. They taught me how.”
    “Why did you say that?”
    “Are you a Christian?”
    “Ma’am, I know some things about nature and wolves. I write about them. I don’t pretend to know about anything else.”
    “We all pretend. And they know about you too.”
    “I’ll go now,” he said. He made to move up the trailhead. “Have a good day, ma’am.”
    “You’re going the wrong way,” she said, not turning her face from the heat of the drum. “Go back the way you came,” and she pointed a bent finger to the snow-blown center of the village.
    Core ignored her and continued up the path, over chokes of rock and lightning-struck spruce.
    * * *
    He expected to find a wolf pack in the valley on the other side of these hills, a den tucked away, hidden on a bouldered ridge above the plain. He’d meet them just after daybreak at the den, if he could find it, meet them after their long night hunting afield. If there was a famine on this land, they’d have to seek their prey at the edges of the land they knew.
    He remembered telling his daughter this when she was a girl: the Apache hunted the wolf as a rite from boy to man. A wolf kill turned a teen into a leader and earned him favor with the spirits of his ancestors. He remembered being outraged when she brought home from grade school the children’s book Peter and the Wolf , how it painted the animal a hellish fiend. And now Core was hunting one for a reason and a woman he did not know.
    The boy’s bones would not be in the den; it had been twelve days since he was taken. His bones were spread throughout this wilderness by scavengers, blanketed by mantles of new snowfall. There would be no burial, no coming to terms for the woman and her husband. But he would kill an already half-dead wolf if he could. He would carry it back for Medora Slone, tell her it was the monster that had seized her son. The monster she wanted to believe in, to explain this away. A wolf’s corpse meant relief to her—but only the illusion of relief, he knew. Perhaps she’d be able to quit the midnight vigils knowing that one wolf had been removed from the world. Perhaps not. Her every day was a midnight now.
    He trundled through drifts to his shins despite these snowshoes. The sack of food and ammunition hung heavy on his shoulders. The snow ceased briefly beneath a clearing sky to the