The Wilding Read Online Free PDF Page B

domed forehead and silver hair and wears a white lab coat with an assortment of pens in the breast pocket. He withdraws one of them now and holds it like a weapon. “How do you feel?”
    “I feel great.” Paul claps his hands together. “Ready to go home.”
    “That won’t be happening anytime soon, I’m afraid.”
    “Says who?”
    “Me. You’ll need to spend the next few days with us.”
    “But I need to get back to work.”
    “You’ll have to take some time off.”
    “Quiet.” He says it like a curse. “I’ll do no such thing.”
    “You will.”
    A conflict plays across his features and he heaves a great sigh.
    An hour later Justin’s mother arrives, crying out from the doorway and knocking over his IV as she rushes to his bedside. “I’m fine,” he says. “The doctor said I’m fine. He said I’ll be up and out of here in no time.”
    Justin says, “Let’s hope anyway.”
    His father holds up his hand, its index and middle fingers twined, and then the hand continues upward to his forehead, touching the bandage. For the next three weeks the bruises will linger there, eventually shriveling into a red pucker that he will often finger and remark that he can feel his heart beating along it.

BRIAN
    Brian haunts this stretch of the river to learn the passages the beavers travel between their lodge and seed caches. He places the trap in a black, glassy section where the water runs deep and where the bank is slick from their bellies and tails slithering along it and where the beavers heap little piles of mud with castor secretion beneath them. The trap—a double long spring jumper—looks like some metallic species of moth. He baits it with willow twigs basted with musk sacs that smell of a vinegary unwashed groin. He places the trap a foot beneath the water and attaches it to a drowning line.
    Normally he is patient. He knows he should wait until late winter, early spring. He knows their pelts are glossiest and thickest then. But he has a project—a sewing project—he is working on that cannot wait.
    This morning a cool wind blows steadily and shakes the pines and looses from the birch trees golden leaves that scatter across the surface of the river and glitter like coins on their way downstream. The sky is ghost-gray, thick with clouds that carry rain in them. From where he stands along the bank, his boots sinking slowly into the mud, he can see the trapped beaver, a black shadow the size and shape of an oversized football. A twenty-five-pounder, he guesses, its hind leg seized by the trap, its body floating in line with the current. The water bulges over it, making a small rapid.
    His father taught him how to trap, how to skin and gut the animal, how to cook its meat and boil its tail, how to prepare its pelt and sell it at auction. Every winter they woke together before dawn and pulled on their insulated coveralls and trudged through the snow and chipped through the ice to check or set their traps. He remembers the chimneys of steam rising from the holes in the river, the hot coffee splashed from a thermos, the blood looking so bright in the snow.
    In his pocket his cell phone chirps to life, its ringtone the song of a chickadee. He digs it out and studies its screen and sees there a number he does not recognize. He has not spoken to anyone yet this morning and the coffee he drank earlier has not fully crawled through his system, so he takes a moment to clear his throat, orienting himself in the human world, which feels so far from this choke of woods and rush of water.
    “This is Brian at Pop-a-Lock Locksmith.”
    He stands only five feet three inches but his combat boots cheat him some height. He wears black jeans and a matching denim jacket. His face is squarish, his eyes large and ghostly turquoise, his mouth regularly downturned in a construction of seeming gloom or discomfort. He keeps his hair in a high-and-tight buzz—a habit maintained from his time in the service—that draws attention