Wilderness Read Online Free PDF Page B

twinning him upon the water as though he faced there some pale, wavering alternate self. A doppelgänger with a history, perhaps, separate from his own but that had been fetched, after all, to the very same place, the very same ending. With all the same hurts and sorrows and ill-healed wounds. “And this is what you get,” said Abel, panting and struggling with the cold. “This is what you get.”
    He breathed deeply, shudderingly. The sharp stones beneath his naked feet made him wish he had worn his boots. The old bits of metal still within him cooled further still in the cold water and set ice points of pain through the meat of his muscles, along the curved piping of his bones. Setting his lips together, he started forward once more with purpose and determination as though he had become, one last time, the soldier of his youth. But no bands played and no banners waved and no comrades marched beside him, for all had died long ago. The only thing to urge him onward was, perhaps, a wolf watching from the deep of the forest behind him. Abel walked until he was a head upon the waves and the waves broke over him. He spat salt and his eyes stung and streamed but he did not weep.
    And then he floated. His feet no longer touched stone or sand and his head was no longer exposed to the moon and the night. The oldsoldier closed his eyes and floated between earth and air with the cold water touching every part of him. He shut his eyes, tasted the sharp flavor of ocean salt and imagined it seeping into him, claiming him back—his poor, ragged flesh—to leave behind bleached and knuckled bones, bits of rusted metal, forever knocking along the floor of the sea.
    Beside the fire, the dog raised its head. It stood slowly, stretching and yawning and twisting about to bite after its own haunches where the fur was matted and tangled. Wandering down to the water, it climbed stiffly over the driftwood to sniff the old man’s tracks in the sand. And then it smelled another thing—a wild dog-shaped scent beside the river—and whined and paced and turned about a moment with indecision before continuing down toward the sea. And when it came upon the old man where he lay, the dog whined again and licked his face. A wave surged up around them and pushed the old man’s body through the sand and the dog danced up out of the cold water, then came sniffing back after it had receded. It nuzzled the old man’s neck and licked his ear and the old man began to cough. He sputtered and coughed and sat up with his eyes red and his nose running. After a moment, he leaned to vomit. The saltwater left the back of his throat raw and he sneezed a thick clot of bloody snot into his palm that he wiped off on the sand.
    Abel Truman sat staring at the water, trying to will warmth back into his limbs while the dog licked salt from his crooked arm. He looked at it, and then stood. “You just shut up,” he said. “Bet if you was to try it, it’d throw you back too.” Then he turned to make his slow way back to the shack, where the fire still burned up out of its little stone ring while, for its part, the dog paused beside the little river to stare across it at a dark patch of disturbed sand and the tracks that led from it into the forest. It bristled and growled softly until Abel called to it from beside the fire, “Get over here, you old cuss,”he said. “Don’t you know there’s a wolf about?” The dog huffed its indignation twice, then turned to join the old man in his shack.
    That night the old man dreamed a dream terrifying and strange. Buried without a coffin, he clawed the suffocating earth and broke to air with his mouth full of dirt. Around him, campfires burned on a vast and featureless plain. The feminine curve of hills in dark silhouette marked the horizon and there were fires there too, and stars in the sky. The very air was dark as though the dark had become a part of it and it was cold. White flames that shed no heat flapped on twisted