6

THE SILENCE DESCENDED AROUND THEM AND EACH day it grew deeper. By the second week of October, everything was perfectly still. It seemed that the loons had ceased their yelping, that the last string of geese, moaning and nattering as they flew overhead, had passed many days ago. Then, in the night, the howling began, icy, stony silence racked by cries.

William and Emily both knew it must be wolves. Neither had heard a wolf before, but there was no mistaking the sound. It was a howl blending hunger, sorrow, desolation, and ardor, not plaintively, but ravenously. It was terrifying. William told Emily, “We’re on the island. They’re on the other side of the water,” but wondered, in his own heart, what would happen when the lake iced over, as it must in a month or so.

William and Emily were hemmed in by their own sentimentality about wolves, which was a little different from the sentimentality about wolves that prevails today. For Emily and for William the crucial thing about wolves is that they are carnivores of a special kind: that they do not merely eat humans—and human children in particular—but eat them up, this last intensifying adverb serving to underline the wolf’s relish in this act, his lusty capering as he tears his dinner limb from limb, greedily masticates it, and, yes, wolfs it down.

Both William and Emily took in this notion of the wolf almost with their mother’s milk, in fairy tales and songs; and in recordings of Peter and the Wolf, chiefly that narrated by Arthur Godfrey, whose own rather folksy but unmistakably lupine voice—normally employed in pitching Chesterfields and Oxydol—carried a special frisson. So the howling, which was both attenuated and reechoed as it passed over the water to their ears, was not merely disconcerting, but, as it went on for hours each night, buttressed before and after by devastated silence, unbearable. It ripped through the black night sky and sawed through their teeth and bones, cleaved them skull to toenail, flayed them alive; left them wishing to be dead rather than have it go on.

On the morning after the third night, William conceded that they had to go. They would not leave Lac La Cache, not yet, as Emily hoped, but William agreed that they could take refuge in the summer cottage they had explored the previous week. Maybe then, after a while, they could go to California, although William would rather winter here.

Emily did not like this compromise: She would have liked to get clean away, and did not like the idea of trespassing, even if there was no one to catch them, even if, as William insisted, they would treat the cottage as their own and leave it clean and tidy. This was the best William could do. He was afraid of losing Emily, but he was also afraid of losing what they had made here together; losing what they had become; losing what the north and the woods and the lake had made of them.

They broke camp. The lean-to had to be partially demolished to remove the tarps on its floor and roof. The dozens of empty tin cans went in the fire pit together with fish bones and the other trash. It made a smoky, mean-spirited, halfhearted fire. They spent the morning at those tasks and at loading the canoe. When it was filled and they climbed in, it was very low in the water, and piloting it to the cottage was like rolling a boulder across uneven ground. They worked at their paddles without comment, having become inured to the canoe’s sluggishness, which seemed just another part of the world’s cooling, of the onset of deep winter. In fact, on account of the canoe’s loose riveting, the front and rear flotation compartments contained as much water as they did air. In complaining of the trouble it took him to hoist the canoe’s bow when they landed a few weeks earlier, Arnie Nelson had for once not been prevaricating.