Max’s barking roused him from his black-coffee reverie, staring at its smooth steaming surface, waiting for it to cool, reflecting on Clara’s failing memory even though she was hardly an old woman, two years his junior, in fact—a point she enjoyed ribbing him about, especially on his birthdays. The sound rolled on the wind, and the blowing snow gave the shepherd’s canine voice an almost human quality. For a moment it sounded like a person imitating the frenzied barking, almost baying, of a large dog.
He blew on the coffee’s surface, took a careful sip, then went to the kitchen window above the basin. The storm remained steady and the pure white dazzled his eyes. Still, he could pick out the black dog in the white-on-white monochrome of sky and snow-covered earth. Even at this distance he could tell from Max’s movements he was doing what God had planted in his nature: he was herding, probably the sheep, whose pen was in that part of the farm. Damn.
He took another sip and spoke toward Clara, who was resting in the dayroom. Looks like the sheep are loose, storm must’ve blew open the gate. There was no response.
He pulled on his morning-chores coat and his boots and left through the kitchen door. There should have been three steps down from the back porch but there was only one. The snow was deeper than he realized. Maximus’s barking came to him more distinctly now. He pulled his watchman’s cap nearly to his eyes and made his way toward the sheep pen, shoulders hunched against the wind. Snow struck his face at a severe angle.
Partway to the pen, looking down to save his eyes from the icy pellets, he saw the stripe of blood in the snow where one of his sheep was dragged away from the flock, probably by a coyote. Max must’ve found the blood too, which inspired a mad edge to his herding, an anxious urgency that belied his normally calm canine exterior.
By the time he reached the pen’s fencing, Max had maneuvered the sheep back inside the enclosure and was sitting on his haunches at the open gate. Max was a pure black shepherd, long of leg and large of ear, and, he speculated, possibly smarter than many schoolchildren.
Good boy, Maxie. The dog moved out of the way as he wrestled the gate shut, pulling hard against the deepening snow.
The man retrieved some braided rope from the odds-and-ends shed, and made the gate more secure. Meanwhile Max had turned his attention to the bloody patch, which was quickly disappearing under the snow. The man suspected it was one of the young ewes, barely more than a lamb.
Max alternated between burying his muzzle in the snow and peering at the man or the horizon, his eyes almost as black as his coat, now thoroughly salted with snow.
We’ll have to do something about that, said the man, then finished the thought to himself: coyote has the taste now, he’ll be back, band won’t be shy to follow.
Go, he said, I’ll be along.
The big shepherd sprang into the snow following the scent or a sense that was a mystery to the man.
He returned to the house long enough to change into his heavy black coat and take a rifle from the cabinet, a Savage ’95, along with a handful of cartridges. He put the rifle’s strap over his head to carry its weight on his back. He took the snowshoes from the mudroom and set off. The final item was an old sled which he pulled via a rope tied around his waist. He wanted to bring the coyote home and mount its head and pelt on a stake near the sheep pen, hoping the scent of death and the symbolism would repel the animal’s brethren.
Before leaving the house he’d thought of saying something to Clara but she was still quiet in the dayroom. The story of the sheep and the coyote could only confuse her. Now she would likely awake and attribute his absence to some task in the barn. She would go about fixing their supper—a familiar activity which her hands knew as well as her head, and their recollection was more reliable. Sometimes she would make enough for a family of five, even though it’d been just the two of them for years. He would try to be back by suppertime. Besides, with the snowstorm and the temperatures which would drop along with the daylight, the sooner he returned the better.
Max had headed due east, toward Whittle’s farm, and beyond that Hollis Woods. The band usually stayed in the vicinity of the woods, unless the search for prey led them farther afield. There used to be wolves but one hadn’t been seen for twenty or more years. There was a gray mounted in a glass case in Crawford, in the lobby of the courthouse, the last wolf in the county, said a plaque on the wall, 1875—but there’d been wolves after that. He’d seen one at a distance, when the children were still around the place, must’ve been ’81 or ’82, and one night he and Clara lay in their bed listening to a lone animal, maybe truly the last of his pack, howling at the waning moon, a pane-shape of weak light fell across their quilt. They were curled together, bare skin touching so closely they were like a single-souled creature. They were perfectly quiet, knowing each other was listening, as the last wolf lifted his voice for a final time. That is how he remembered it.
The wolves faded away, one by one.
Then the children.
Now Clara’s memory.
The farm remained, and its many needs—enough to keep him from thinking like this very often. For that he was thankful.
The coyotes, with their band half full of half-breed coydogs, rose in number to replace the wolves, so it was said. But the farmers’ vigilance and the animals’ inborn wariness usually kept the motley band confined to remoter places, to less-traveled tracks.
For a while he’d been able to follow Max’s path but it was too erratic and the snow was falling too steadily. He lost the trail and decided to keep heading east. The sky was no help. It was as featureless as the snow-covered ground. He thought perhaps he should’ve taken the field-glasses and the old brass compass—but it was no matter. They would just be things to carry. He’d been walking these fields for almost fifty years and knew every rise and fall . . . or so he thought. In spite of the familiarity, the snow painted everything in a pall of strangeness. His memory knew the place but his eyes, bewitched by the ceaseless white, beheld an alien landscape.
He felt a tiny stirring of trepidation, a cold spark of concern at the idea of being lost. It was foolish, a trick of the storm, maybe something like a desert mirage, a phenomenon he’d only read about in his geographic magazines. He wondered if Clara’s whole world was being assaulted by a kind of creeping strangeness, darkness coming one gray degree at a time. Maybe there were doctors in Crawford who could help, or some other place, larger and farther away—but taking Clara from her home would likely terrify her. He imagined she would never be the same after that. The trip itself would accelerate the advancing strangeness into a rushing storm, one that would sweep clean her memory, of their home, of their children. Of him.
Movement caught his attention, a black something at the top of the rise, crested and gone in an instant. Max? He climbed the brief hill, having to angle a bit in the snowshoes and pulling the sled, which carried only the weight of the modest incline. There was nothing in the unbroken white, except a pattern of tracks, oddly shaped, perhaps distorted by the hill’s angle and the force of the wind: canine-like but elongated, with an almost human heel. It must be a hoax of the conditions, or of his wind-bitten eyes, half blinded by the white. He rubbed them with the back of his mitten, but the prints shed none of their oddness.
He thought of the Shawnee, still part of the world when he was a boy, though even then only a remnant of their former nation. The more superstitious believed the Shawnee left behind their heathen gods to haunt those who claimed their land, to punish the usurpers—their wolf-god and their bear-god and, worst of all, their crow-god.
He didn’t count himself superstitious but he was interested in the history and the legends, and read about them. The strange prints in the snow recalled to him the strange gods.
He kept walking in an easterly direction, he believed. There was no sun to confirm it. He watched for the Whittle farmhouse or their barn or sheds. Mainly to gain his bearings. Also, there was a pond on the property. This early in the season it wasn’t frozen solid, and he wouldn’t want to discover it by falling through the ice. There was a stand of poplars near one end of the pond, northwest, but he saw no such landmark in the white sky. He saw nothing.
The blankness gave way to a memory: Clara and the children frolicking on Whittle’s pond, sliding, taking turns skating, there was only one pair of skates, borrowed from Imogene Whittle, the blades dull and rusted but it didn’t matter, didn’t dampen their fun. Who knew that day would become a priceless diamond of a memory?
He walked on, holding the day for a time before laying it aside. He’d totally lost Max’s trail and therefore the coyote’s who’d taken his ewe. There must be a price, a payment for the animal’s thieving. Even as he thought it he knew it wasn’t true: many thefts go unpaid, uncompensated. That was the real nature of things.
Something stirred in the white, at the edge of his vision. He turned and squinted into the snow. A dark mass barely moving. He untied the rope at his waist, and the sled quietly slid a few feet due to the slope of the ground. Meanwhile he lifted the strap of the Savage over his head and held the rifle in a businesslike way, though his hands still wore their deerhide mittens. He took a cautious step toward the dark thing that moved so mysteriously, then another. His snowshoes made their unique airy thump but there was no help for it. His already burning eyes strained harder to make out the thing. With two more graceless steps it took a recognizable shape: the sheep’s hollowed out carcass, only its blood-covered head and fleecy skeletal shape remained, but perched on its broken form was a black crow picking a carrion meal in the cold.
Shoo, he said to the bird out of reflex, for in reality there was no reason it shouldn’t go about its business. It was no matter: his voice was muted almost to silence by the storm, and the crow paid him no heed.
Even from a few feet away he could see the chaotic network of tracks in the snow. No doubt dependable Max had found the carcass straight away and continued on the coyote’s scent, rich in the ewe’s blood.
He left the crow to its pickings and followed paw prints as far as he was able in the blowing and shifting snow. It wasn’t far—then he was on his own again to stay to an easterly course toward Hollis Woods, the name everyone called them now. Maps were printed with it. When he was a boy they were more often than not simply the woods. The name Hollis still seemed temporary and maybe a touch disrespectful. It hadn’t been so many years before that the Hollis children had disappeared in those woods, one after another, as the story went, five in all. Their widower father, Hephaestus, searched for them but they were gone, and Hephaestus, too, left soon after, moved to Crawford to remarry. Folks were dubious of the way everything came to pass. Tongues wagged. The Hollis place, abandoned, little more than a shack, burned down after a lightning strike, and folks said that was God telling them to drop the matter, let the past be the past.
He hadn’t thought of the story of Hephaestus Hollis and his lost children for years. When the man’s children were small, he’d tell them the tale, on long nights, a fire snapping. One time Jenny woke crying from a bad dream—the other Jenny, Jenny Hollis, about her age, had come into her room and begged her to look for her in the woods, to search one final time. His Jenny described the dream between sobs while Clara comforted her, and gave him the look for telling the story, and for adding more dramatic flair than necessary.
His children were lost now too—not lost like the Hollis children but effectively gone for good just the same, grown and moved away. He always thought Jenny may be the one to stay—she would be such a help now with Clara, and more soon enough—but she married that seed salesman and moved to Fort Wayne, practically another planet, had three of her own. Cards arrived once or twice a year, sometimes a brief letter.
As he walked, the snow pellets were cold against his left cheek in spite of the beard he’d begun to grow for winter. It was heavily flecked with white. The face in the privy mirror reminded him of his father and his father’s father, both long dead, but both had their wives at the end, peninsulas on which to rest before being swept out to sea—an image the minister offered at his father’s funeral, and the metaphor stayed with him.
He wouldn’t have that blessing. Clara seemed to grow worse by the week. Could he allow her to reach the end he knew was coming? Forgetting everyone and everything, including the mechanics of eating and drinking, so that she would waste away among strangers, terrified. He’d seen it happen to others, a great aunt, two neighbors. His chest heaved with a single suppressed sob. There was only one way to save Clara from that terrible fate.
He realized the question had been on his mind for a while, but the farm could always offer a distraction. Out here, wandering the snowfields, pulling an empty sled, there were no such distractions, and he felt the full weight of Clara’s condition, and of the decision he would have to make.
The sled felt heavier, he realized, yet he didn’t seem to be trudging uphill. If anything he was beginning the slow slope which led down to the woods and the creek that serpentined through them. A giggle startled him. He stopped and turned around, so fast the sled bumped him in the shins. For an instant, a transparent slice of a second, there was someone there, sitting in the sled, but now she was gone. Yes, she . . . the giggle was that of a girl.
He let a mitten dangle from his coat sleeve while he rubbed his eyes, weak from the wind and the white. The sled was indeed unoccupied. He used his hand to shield his eyes from the snow and the light as he surveyed the featureless landscape. Nothing, as far as he could see in every direction.
He reached down to put on the mitten and noticed the tracks in the snow, directly in front of him: boot prints, small, like a child’s. They cut across the slope of the hill, then stopped and turned, maybe to survey the surroundings as he just had. The small boot prints faced him, toe to toe. They must have been quite fresh, they were so distinct.
For a time he could follow the tracks of the child—a girl, he imagined, like Jenny, the Jenny of twenty-some years ago. Though a grown woman, he usually thought of her as the little girl Jenny. Not the mother-of-three Jenny, nor the teenage Jenny, the cliché Jenny, the farmer’s daughter who ran off with the traveling salesman, possibly, likely already with child.
The tracks vanished on a slope directly exposed to the snow-laden wind. The girl’s tracks disappeared but they intersected with large paw prints, freshly made, almost certainly Max’s. Was his shepherd following the coyote or the girl, or both?
While he stood, considering, he heard a faint whimper, like that of an injured dog. He turned and looked at his empty sled, and at the white: the white crest of hill running almost invisibly along the seam of empty white sky.
He attributed the sound to the wind swirling against the slope, and returned his gaze to the paw prints, already being obscured by the snow.
He continued, with the sled following. He had to keep a good pace to prevent the sled from running into him, and it was difficult in the snowshoes. He felt clumsy, like a large awkward bird whose feet were intended for another purpose, something besides walking on fresh-fallen snow. In spite of its freshness he could feel a hardening of the snow through the catgut and wooden frames of the shoes, an increasing firmness which meant the temperature was dropping—and he should probably turn for home. Max would eventually return too. He had a shepherd’s uncanny sense of geography.
But then he thought of the coyote’s band skulking their way to his farm, of their savaging the sheep and the swine, perhaps even taking a cow or two, and in the spring helping themselves to calves or foals, to whatever they had a taste for.
The images were enough to push him onward, even as his legs grew leaden.
His mind returned to Clara and wondering if she’d noticed his absence, if she was beginning to worry. A few weeks before she tied herself in knots over Jenny’s fever, which wouldn’t break in spite of the pine-needle tea and the compresses that made the house smell of camphor and clover. But that was nine-year-old Jenny. Clara spent half the morning fretting and frustrated because she couldn’t find the ingredients for the tea and the compresses, her anger growing because he’d let them run out just when she needed them most, and Jenny was upstairs burning to a cinder in her bed.
Then Clara suddenly dropped the subject, perhaps remembering or perhaps forgetting the episode entirely.
He thought of the boot prints in the snow as Jenny’s, and for a moment it was she he was trying to find—that was why he couldn’t stop and rest, couldn’t turn for home—but he recalled the truth, seeing again the sheep’s blood staining the white and the crow plucking at the carcass and the paw prints too large to be a coyote’s, so that they must be Max’s. Wolves hadn’t returned, had they? He recalled the final howl of the last wolf.
He heard again the howling, and stopped.
It was only the wind. The unending white was affecting him, making him confuse the real and the unreal.
He tried to clear his head, organize his thoughts by recalling all the things that needed to be done around the farm, and a timetable for doing them, as many had to be done in the proper order to do them at all. Soon it seemed an impossible list, yet it was fundamentally the same year upon year, and he always managed. Today, in the storm, weary, far from home, the list was daunting, nearly crushing. He thought of the broken latch on the sheep pen, and it touched off a chain of images that brought him back here . . . standing still, silent, examining strange tracks in the snow: overlarge for human feet, almost avian in shape.
His mind went to the Indians’ crow-god—Plague, the First Families named him, believing it was he who ravaged them, brutalized them, intent especially on claiming the children.
He followed the weird prints for a few paces; then, losing his balance, he stepped directly into one. It was a match to his snowshoe. The tracks were his, somewhat distorted from the wind and the quick freezing in the falling temperature.
Squinting and shielding his eyes, he could also make out the sled’s thin runners, a pair of parallel lines all but vanished beneath the new snow. He’d been walking in a circle, or some other useless geometric configuration. He felt foolish. The silver lining may be that he wasn’t as far from home as he believed. But which direction was the farm?
He searched all around for his bearings. The white seemed perfect, until he spotted a single dark figure, at a distance that was difficult to gauge . . . a hundred yards, two? The figure was motionless, as still as a thing of the landscape. Again he thought of Plague, the black-feathered crow-god. The figure was facing him, presumably watching him, but featureless due to the blowing snow and the distance.
He began to walk toward it. He had the irrational urge to take his rifle in hand. He felt a subtle, nagging dread, another deception of the ceaseless storm and of being disoriented—of being lost.
As he neared the figure it became not a man-size crow but a man-size boy. Still standing motionless, definitely eyeing him, gloved fists at his sides.
Hello, he called to the boy, a few yards from him.
The boy didn’t reply, until he stopped directly before him. He said, Have you saw a girl? A fur cap was pulled down to his eyes, which were gray and haunted, from the icy wind and bitter whiteness. His cheeks were clean but scarlet with windburn. Otherwise a cadaverous pallor engulfed his eyes. He resembled the handiwork of Mr. Michaels, the undertaker, who was artless with his face-powder and rouge. For their final appearance on earth the dead often seemed macabre traveling-show players.
The boy persisted, A little girl, by herself, my sister?
The man hesitated, a touch spellbound by the boy’s appearance, by someone’s appearance at all. No, haven’t seen anyone I’m afraid. He paused, remembering. There were boot prints, small, maybe a little girl’s.
Where? Snot ran from one of the boy’s nostrils, past his chafed lips and hairless chin, gathering on a heavy woolen scarf. He didn’t seem to notice, his face likely numb from the cold.
The man partially turned and motioned in a direction. Maybe that way, can’t say for certain. He wanted to ask if the girl’s name was Jenny. Things from the past and things from the future had gathered among the snow-shrouded fields, swept there by the swirling wind which blew from oblivion. I’ve lost my way, confessed the man, but even as he said it he noticed the half-frozen manure just beyond where the boy stood, fists still at his sides, and he saw the horse hooves in the snow and the grooves of wagon-wheels. What road is this?
The boy didn’t seem to understand at first, then: Whittle Road, the fork to their place is just up there. He finally moved an arm, to point to a spot as if it was near enough to see in the storm.
It wasn’t but nevertheless the man recovered his bearings of a sudden. He knew precisely where he was, even if precisely when remained a mystery.
The boy buried his gloved hands in his pockets and set off through the deep snow in search of his sister.
The man now knew the way home, the path back to Clara and the farm and the sheep pen with its broken latch; and he knew the way to Hollis Woods, warren of coyotes and coydogs and all manner of unknowable shadow-casting things, where his black shepherd awaited him, patient.
He adjusted the rifle strap on his shoulder:
the Savage’s weight was beginning to wear;
he must hurry;
darkness was coming.
