Lynx on the shore of Loon Lake, near Lake Wanapitei, Ontario, Canada, July 1902.
George Shiras, National Geographic Image Collection.
When they heard the uncle’s tires in the gravel driveway the brothers abandoned their cereal and crept into the living room, where their mother and her boyfriend were asleep on the couch. The older brother climbed onto a chair, lifted their father’s rifles off the pegs above the TV, and handed the younger boy the smaller of the two. Its name was Angel and it was a Winchester .308 with iron sights and an old lusterless stock. For himself he kept Matilda, a .264 Magnum, same company, 4x4 scope. They were eleven and thirteen years old. The weatherman on TV said it was going to be warm today, mid-fifties, sunny. But what I recommend, ladies and gentlemen of the North Country, is that you skip school, skip work, and finish your leaf raking, because come eight this evening it’ll be too late. Their mother stirred. A grimace, a cough. She patted amongst the coffee table’s cans and ashtrays for her watch but it wasn’t there. Shit, she said. Do you want breakfast? As if in answer the uncle outside laid into his horn.
Draped in gear and weaponry the boys tumbled across the frosted lawn. The uncle was leaning against his truck with his ankles crossed, taking powerful drags off his cigarette and regarding the boys with a drill sergeant’s stylized doubt. They grew fidgety under his gaze. Their father, the uncle’s brother, had been a feller of trees for the old McIntyre Paper Company until he was himself felled by one. Like the uncle, the boys wore hunter-orange ball caps, jeans, sweatshirts. The younger boy, admiring the silent feet of TV Indians, wore a soft pair of old sneakers. The older boy wore his father’s Kodiak work boots, ancient and too large. The boys were just four and two years old when it happened, and their father’s memory was a point of contention between them. The younger boy said he remembered, among other things, his father’s smell, a friendly stew of sap and wood dust, but the older boy said his brother was just remembering what he’d told him. Some years later, the uncle had stepped into their existence, bringing with him slingshots and the smell of axle grease and tales of bars and wildernesses that he promised would someday resemble their lives. The uncle forced smoke through his crenellated grin and produced from his back pockets two cardboard boxes, bullets for Angel and Matilda, which he slapped onto the hood. Let’s go slay some deer, he said.
They rode shoulder to shoulder in the pickup’s cab. At Rick’s they got coffee, sandwiches, and a twelver of Labatt to keep me awake, the uncle said, on the drive home tonight. Sixteen miles south of town on the state highway they turned west onto a two-lane dirt road, hammering over the washboard, rear wheels drifting wide on the corners. When Van Halen disappeared into radio static, the younger brother, seated bitch, began turning the knob, each twist unearthing a different strain of chaos. The uncle let the boy search for a few minutes before waving at the low forested hills. Nothing comes in out here, he said. Then to fill the silence he began dispensing advice. The thing is don’t trust your eyes. You see a pair of horns what you do is you look away. Take a breath. If the cocksucker’s still got a pair when you look again, waste him.
Six miles down the access road they turned onto a smaller private road with a grass strip down the center and a locked chain-link gate across the entrance. A rotten wooden sign identified this as the McIntyre Preserve. There were NO TRESPASSING signs nailed to the trees. The boys’ hearts quickened. They grinned. Seeing this, the uncle pretended to forget the key and made the boys start looking for it. It has to be in here somewhere. They opened the glove box. They checked beneath them on the seats. Eventually the uncle sighed and lit a cigarette and said, At least we got beer. The younger boy’s chin began to wobble. The older boy gazed at the gate. Do we have time to go back for it? The uncle laughed. Who do you think I am? he asked. Then he isolated the gate key from the ring of others on his belt and handed it to older boy, who grinned, opened the passenger door, stepped down from the truck, and handed the key back up to his younger brother. You’re already out, the younger boy protested. Yeah, but you’re already the bitch, the older boy said. The younger boy looked for arbitration but the uncle just grinned and lit another cigarette. This is between you fuckers, he said. The key sat in the older boy’s raised palm, black grease in its brass teeth and rivets. The usual violence ticked behind the calm front of the older boy’s eyes. Someday, the younger boy said, some fucking day. He clambered out over the rifles, took the key, jogged to the gate, and stood aside while the pickup drove through. He was swinging the gate shut when, in the cab, the uncle turned to the older boy and asked if they should leave him. What? You know, drive ahead. The older boy was delighted. Yeah, he said, teach the fucker a lesson. The uncle knocked the truck out of gear and let it roll away down the gentle grade. In the rearview mirror the younger boy was pretending to laugh, bending at the hips and slapping his knees. You’re the boss, the uncle said, how far? I say we go a mile, the boy replied. What happens in a mile? We park and hunt. And your brother? Dipshit back there can walk. The uncle, laughing in his disappointed way, stopped the truck and threw it in reverse. Your father was better than that, he said.
There were no mountains, no valleys, no grand sights. The road wound through lowland tamarack and black spruce. They passed a ghastly bog of grass and moss, the bones of trees, beaver houses reflected in the glassy black water, and then climbed into hills of maple and yellow birch. Seven miles, eight, nine. The uncle drank the first of his Labatts. Then he stopped to inspect a beaver-clogged culvert, kneeling on one side, then the other. A job for spring, he said, and drove on, very slowly, whistling. The older boy knew not to voice his sense of urgency, but the younger couldn’t help it. How could they be sure Lorena wasn’t there? But then was there any chance they’d be caught? Why had the paper company moved out west, weren’t there still plenty of trees here? The more fidgety the younger brother was, the slower the grinning uncle drove. The older brother told the younger to shut the fuck up and look for deer. Oh let’s just mosey, the uncle said. Plenty of day left. Finally they entered a clearing beside a varnished lake and the boys saw the largest wooden building they had ever seen. The uncle turned down a white driveway of imported shells that wound between outbuildings and withered autumn gardens. He stopped the truck in front of the mansion. That’s a body of water, he said, that’s never felt a motorboat.
The lake, the mansion, and the fifty-six square miles of surrounding land were owned by the uncle’s employer, Lorena McIntyre. She was the aging daughter of paper tycoon Connor McIntyre, who, though he made his fortune by dismantling the northern wilderness, had loved it here, journeying north by train in the gilded long ago to hunt and fish and drink on the porch and treat fellow millionaires to an authentic outdoor experience. The mansion, one of the fabled Great Camps, was actually a pair of colossal buildings linked by a covered breezeway. The clearing’s other structures were old stables and barns, sheds with tar roofs and angled floors, a series of gray scaffolds where deer and bear used to cure. The property had teemed with staff back in the days of Connor McIntyre, the uncle told the boys, but now it was just him and a criminally worthless house cleaner. He was the handyman. He came out and mowed the lawn, replaced broken shingles, ran the water to keep the pipes clean, and killed the mice that kept stealing hair from the taxidermy—all against the rare event that Lorena McIntyre, aging, riddled with illnesses, decided to visit that year. It was against every rule for the boys to be here but the uncle had decided fuck it. When Lorena died all this would change. Word was she had deeded all her lands to the state. He wanted the boys to see the place first. I ain’t seen that cleaner woman in three years, he said.
The uncle had some work to do before deer time so they entered through the old servants’ dining room, which was dusty and full of greenish northern light. Take your shoes off, the uncle said. The boys did. The uncle knocked his own boots twice against the doorjamb but left them on. It was several degrees colder inside than outside and they could see their breath. They entered a vast dim quasi-industrial kitchen where pots hung from the beams. The uncle gestured at one of the sinks. That water comes clean from the lake, he said, unfiltered, and there’s no one ever got sick from drinking it. He gestured to the kerosene lamps hanging in brackets around the room. The world spun along just fine without electricity, he said. While the uncle was in the basement draining the water from the tanks and pipes so they wouldn’t burst in the coming cold, the boys sat wide eyed in ornate chairs in a swanky dining room. The walls were papered with cedar bark and the table, set with silver forks and crystal glasses, awaited ten more guests. Then they all three went around opening the taps and dumping antifreeze into sinks and tubs and toilets to protect the U-bends. The servants’ side alone had four bathrooms. They left through the dining room’s second door and walked across the breezeway. A mercury thermometer nailed to one of the posts said it was fifty-two degrees. When they reached the door at the breezeway’s end, the uncle told them to close their eyes. Each boy stood with one hand over his face, the other over his balls. They heard the lock click. They heard the house gasp as the door opened and felt cool air slithering past their knees. You never seen anything like this, the uncle said.
They saw dead animals, hundreds of them, on walls, on tables, on little stands, deer heads and moose heads, the heads of elk and caribou and bison, a half dozen antelopes, a zebra, a water buffalo, the long neck and head of a giraffe. Standing on the big beams between swooping owls and eagles were bobcats and minks, porcupines with disheveled quills, coyotes gazing through the dust on their green marble eyes. A polar bear roared silently, arms raised, cobwebs strung between its teeth. Curled like a dog at the foot of the couch was a wolf wearing a sign around its neck that said it was the second-to-last confirmed member of its species shot in the State of New York. There was a crocodile closing its mouth on a mangy long-beaked seabird. There was a wooden tracing of a twenty-eight-pound lake trout that had been taken from the lake, a plaque said, by young Dalton Finley, son of Judge Warren Finley, both guests in August 1917. The boys turned in circles while the floor groaned underfoot, awed by this flesh-and-bone evidence of the tales they’d been raised on—tales of an older time, a time of surplus and extremity, romantic passions, big logs, big bucks, a time when American titans came here to do the things that they themselves, the fatherless sons of a logger, had grown up aspiring to do. The fireplace was so large you could step inside without ducking.
They moved down a hallway walled with antlers and tufty foreheads, past a library and some first-floor bedrooms and two sets of stairs that rose toward higher floors, and finally into a second living room where the walls were hung with trophies of another kind: the visages of famous-looking men, in oil, striking various huntsman poses. McIntyre had paid an artist to be here every summer to paint his guests, the uncle said. Them were painted right here. His studio is in the old icehouse in the servants’ side, still full of weird shit. That’s McIntyre right there. That’s Teddy fucking Roosevelt.
They turned the water off in the camp’s living side, draining the pipes, adding the antifreeze, and then the uncle taught the boys to light the old oil lamps. He showed them the gigantic bed that had been custom-made in anticipation of President Taft’s three-week stay in 1920. He showed them the garage, where there was a horsedrawn buggy and a rusty collection of logging tools. They stood on the front porch, hands on the aged spruce railing. Listen, the uncle held up his hand. Stop shuffling around. Just listen. They listened. Literally nothing, the uncle whispered. Hear that? They heard only the ringing sound of their own listening ears.
While the uncle stood pissing in the mossy lawn, the boys circled the house toward the truck and encountered, just waiting for them, four deer. The boys froze. All four were strong and autumn plump, ears erect and turning. Two were does. One was a yearling, still spotted. The fourth, sniffing the truck’s very fender, was a lanky spikehorn. Holy shit! Horns! They couldn’t get to the truck where the guns were without spooking the deer so the older boy drew his knife and the younger boy did the same. They crouched and began stepping slowly through the grass. Behind them the uncle began to laugh. Them are my deer, he called. The boys straightened. The deer stood chewing. Susie, Lauren, Stanley, and Twerp, the uncle said. I feed them behind the shed there. Apples and molasses and grain, twice a week. Greedy bastards hear the truck and they come right in. He made a sucking sound with his mouth, and the young buck stilted over to him. The uncle offered it a cigarette filter. Go pretend to be a wild deer, you fucker, he said.
The road beyond the mansion was rougher, and somehow frailer, subscribing to the contours of the land it penetrated. There were washouts and precipitous turns and encroaching trees, saplings that leaned out to slap at the windshield. It balanced on low causeways endangered on either side by beaver meadows. Here and there it sprouted a lesser road that set off on its own wobbling journey into the wilderness. There used to be things out there, the uncle explained. Hunting camps, logging camps, even a full-on town on the old railway. Saloons, churches, schools, stores, brothels. All gone. Wilderness again. Seventy years ago this exact spot was a field of stumps. They drove for about fifty minutes, very slowly. The older brother had his rifle pointed out of the window. Look for deer, the uncle said. They looked. You’re not looking, the uncle said. Then, without warning, he stopped the truck.
The boys’ stomachs lurched and they scanned the woods for light brown, for swishing tails. The ferns and ground pine, the spruce and hemlocks, the moss on the shady sides of trees—these withheld some blighted measure of summer green, but everything else in the woods was winter drab and leafless. That scrape there, the uncle whispered. He pointed to a yellow birch sapling with a section of bark rubbed away. That’s a four-inch-diameter tree. What does that tell us? The boys didn’t know. Tells us it was a big motherfucker who did that. They shut the doors quietly, their feet loud in the gravel. See the flies in the wound? They’re feeding on the sap. Why is that important? The uncle turned a slow circle, veined eyes inching about. When the boys didn’t answer he continued, It takes time for a tree to bleed, right? Especially when it gets below freezing at night. That’s a good deal of sap so I’d say this happened yesterday morning or the night before. You see that there? He pointed to a bath-mat-sized swath of scraped brown loam. Neither boy had noticed it. Paw bed. He pisses in it so a doe when she’s hot will know he’s been here. The uncle knelt with his nose to the earth and then made a face. Hooey! he yelled in a whisper.
The uncle’s plan was for the boys to sit in the woods several football fields apart while he walked a mile up the road, cut in, and looped back around. If they were lucky he’d jump the buck and push it toward his nephews, otherwise he’d be back to the truck in an hour or so and they’d have lunch from the cooler then go cut for more sign. The boys loaded their rifles. They had killed before, both of them. They had killed trout with rocks and knives, with wooden boppers, had marooned them on stream banks and in the gunnels of fiberglass boats, watching as they flopped in panic, drowning, coating their sticky skin with spruce needles and dirt, mouthing at the useless air. As younger boys they had killed mice and chipmunks with slingshots, killed robin redbreasts arriving in the still-snowy spring. You eat what you kill was the rule the uncle had handed down, but the boys didn’t think it quite applied to life so small. No one ate black flies. No one ate the mice their uncle said he trapped by the dozen in buckets of oil. There wasn’t anything worth eating on a redbreast or a chipmunk. But killing them was good practice, the boys thought, for the time when they could kill larger things. When the uncle bought them pump-action .22s for their eighth birthdays, they shot squirrels in the pine forest behind their house, aiming for the head and missing a lot at first. They did eat these. For years they cooked them on little hard-won fires in the woods, gnawing at the half-charred meat until one day their mother caught them at it and repossessed what was left and with the help of some carrots and potatoes whipped them up a nice little stew. Neither boy had hunted big game before this season, which had only just begun. They’d been raised eating venison, mostly chuck and bottom rounds donated by the uncle and various neighbors, an occasional heart sliced thin like pastrami and flash fried with oil, and it was their goal now, as self-envisioned young men, to bring the finer cuts home to their mother. Safety on? the uncle whispered. The boys nodded. He offered the older boy his almost-finished cigarette. Rather than looking appalled, the older boy reached for it. The uncle laughed and rescinded the offer. Oh and one last thing, he said, leering down at the boys and stamping out his last cigarette. Take a good look at me. What don’t I have? The boys looked. He wore jeans, work boots, a red flannel shirt, an orange cap. There was a buck grunt hanging around his neck. I don’t have antlers, the uncle said.
The boys infiltrated the woods. The older boy moved fast, crunching through leaves, breaking twigs, and within ten minutes he had found a berm with lengthy shooting lanes and forty, fifty, in some places sixty yards of broken woodland vision. The younger boy moved in a bent-kneed stalking posture. He took a step. He scanned the forest. He took another step. His old sneakers nuzzled down through leaves and twigs and made little sound and little forward progress. He felt very proud when a flight of chickadees passed above him, oblivious and singing.
They tried to clear their minds, enter total vigilance, exist only in their ears and eyes. Mostly nothing happened. They strained for sounds that did not exist. But occasionally something seemed to be moving through the leaves. A few steps, a pause, a few steps. The older lay on his stomach and scanned the forest through Matilda’s scope. Antlers swam across his vision. Trophies emerged from the woods snorting. He didn’t breathe. His feral pulse unsteadied Matilda’s crosshairs. Breathe. Relax. Aim. Squeeze. He repeated to himself the army acronym their uncle had taught them. B.R.A.S. As in the bra’s coming off, he’d said. When nothing appeared in the older boy’s sights he climbed slowly to his knees to increase his range of vision. Then he saw it: a little pine squirrel making a racket disproportionate to her size. He looked around to be sure no one had seen him. The exact scenario replayed itself with the younger boy sitting on a stump several hundred yards away. He flicked his safety off, then on, then off, then on, damp hands dissolving the salt on Angel’s checkered grip. When he saw the squirrel he fixed the heedless creature in his sights. He flipped his safety off and repeated the same acronym. Bang, he said.
The sound of the uncle’s rifle moved through the still air like a physical thing and struck each boy in the chest and passed on through swaying trees, tugging a curtain of absolute silence behind it. The boys’ hearts were unloosed in their chests, romping, yammering, catching in their throats, swallowing their vision. They tried to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Long, slow hunter breaths. They waited with their ears poised, listening for a second shot or the uncle’s distant shout of triumph, but heard only the shot banging around in their memories. Then a crow somewhere began its racket. A squirrel gave a chittering sigh. A new breeze gently woke the branches above them. There was nothing else. Their adrenaline waned. The hour passed.
The younger boy stood and pissed on a tree because it made less sound than peeing in leaves. He looked at the sky but the November sun hugged the low southern horizon and didn’t really tell hourly time—not to him, not without east-west landmarks. Surely the uncle should have been back by now. Unless he’d hit what he shot at. Tracking, gutting, dragging—they took time. And if he’d only wounded the buck, he could be gone until dark, or beyond. Men in the old stories chased bloody leaves and hoof scuffs for days. The younger boy sat on his stump with Angel propped across his legs. The breeze was strong now and had a chill to it and was dragging a cold, white haze across the sky. He wondered if it was coming from the northeast, a grim and storied direction, but he couldn’t tell. The uncle was probably just fucking with them. He’d fired and looped back to the truck. He was drinking his beers and laughing at them, aware for reasons that they were not that this was no time or place or task at which to persevere. The younger boy considered going back to check but decided against it. The uncle was testing their fortitude, or their patience, or their willingness to put in the time. Unlike the older brother’s, the uncle’s cruelty was rarely without some purpose or moral. Eventually the younger boy remembered to put Angel back on safe. Her metal click was a strange invasion of the woodland quiet.
When the haze crossed before the sun, the sky at first retained its light and warmth, but soon the tree shadows that had swayed on the forest floor began to pale away, thinning until they were gone, and the air grew steadily colder. The older boy stood and brushed leaves off himself. His watch said it was a full two hours after rendezvous time and he felt another stab of anger toward the uncle. He’d been feeling these off and on since the reprimand at the gate. How else had he been supposed to react? He held Matilda by barrel and stock and did jumping jacks until his mind was blank and he was warm. He told himself in his uncle’s voice to be patient. Standing with Matilda in the crook of his arm he counted to a thousand. Then he did jumping jacks until he was sweating. Finally he let himself walk in his brother’s direction. He moved quietly in his boots, taking a step, sweeping the forest with his eyes, taking another step. He imagined a buck, injured and ragged eyed. He imagined his uncle. The forest seemed to have been woken by the breeze. Leaves tumbling. Ferns bent. Branches clacking. After about fifty yards it occurred to him that creeping up on his armed brother was not a great idea. Fuck it. He stomped back through the leaves toward the truck. He wanted lunch. He wanted to see the uncle sitting on the tailgate, laughing at him, replacing the strange dread he now felt with more shame, more anger, anything. The truck sat empty and forlorn in the grassy road. Its doors were unlocked. He unloaded his rifle but kept a bullet ready in his palm. He pulled his windbreaker over his sweatshirt and looked briefly for the keys, wanting to turn the truck’s heat on, but the uncle seemed to have taken them. Slamming the door, he went around to the truck’s bed where the cooler was. He was unwrapping his sandwich when he heard his younger brother trying to move silently through the leaves.
They dangled their legs off the tailgate, eating pastrami and mayonnaise on Wonder Bread. You hear the shot? the younger brother asked. Actually I’m fucking deaf. You think he got something? I think he shot Connor McIntyre’s ghost and now he’s chasing after it apologizing. The younger boy grinned uncertainly. The older boy said, You remember to unload Angel? Safety’s on. If you’re not in the woods, dipshit, then she shouldn’t be fucking loaded. The younger brother waited, feet swinging, until he’d finished his sandwich. Then he jumped down and circled to where his rifle was leaned up against the truck.
The wind’s bite soon drove them into the cab. They donned gloves and hats but kept the passenger door open so they’d hear the uncle’s shout or rifle. He can’t be lost, the younger brother said. Why not? Do you think he is? The older brother’s watch said 3:15. He slid a Labatt from the torn cardboard behind the seat and opened it. He’s not lost, repeated the younger brother, he knows this place, he’s just testing us. The older brother laughed. That would be a huge waste of a day. For a few minutes he drank, ignoring the younger boy, whose face was a cold grimace, rosy nosed, tight jawed. OK, fine, the older brother finally said. What I think is he wounded a buck. Shot it in the ass or something. Now he’s tracking it down.
The haze wasn’t haze anymore, it was full-on cloud, thick and cold, and there was very little color left in the world. The younger boy got out and walked up the road. The grass between the wheel ruts bent and whirled. Stubborn beech leaves came whipping from the treetops. When he returned he found his brother sitting with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, imitating the sleep of the unconcerned. The younger brother reached over and pounded on the truck’s horn.
They honked the horn at intervals, taking turns, one boy pacing up and down the bed of the truck, listening for yells or rifle shots with his hands cupped around his ears, the other in the cab, doors closed for warmth, banging on the horn, counting to sixty, banging on the horn. The truck trembled in the gusts. More than once the boy in the back pounded on the cab’s roof and the other spilled out and they stood frozen, hearing something or not, hearing what they yearned to hear and learning to distrust it. Listen! What? It’s him! What is? They yelled the uncle’s name. They shifted foot to foot, rubbing their gloves together. They made loon calls, hoping the different pitch would cut through the wind. But the wind was many pitched itself now, howling, lashing, stealing whatever sounds they made. Should we go look for him? the younger boy asked. If he’s not back soon, the older boy said. Neither looked at the other. The older boy climbed into the truck and sat there, silent. The younger boy ran in place for warmth. The older boy smashed two quick bursts onto the horn. Then an endless, keening third.
They took a northwest compass bearing and entered the woods sixty yards apart, walking fast, ducking, scanning, drifting closer together the farther they moved from the road. They were still hunting. They kept their rifles loaded, stocks to their shoulders, fingers on the guards. The older brother said that they weren’t looking for their lost uncle—they were going to help him drag his deer. But it was different now. There was no need to be quiet. The woods were a living maelstrom and they could barely make themselves heard when they tried. Watch out for widow-makers, called the younger boy.
They entered a boggy spruce thicket. It was dark in there under the sky of needles, and moving through it was like hacking through the walls of a gigantic nest. After a while the older brother yelled that it was useless. They fought their way together, crawling through tunnels beneath the trees. Both had scratched faces and hands and needles all over their clothes. He wouldn’t be in here, the older boy said. He would if the deer crawled in here to die. It’s too close to the road, you’d hear the truck’s horn from here, he’d have come gotten us. The younger boy said nothing. The older boy knew that you didn’t find people in woods this big, not without a last known location or a specially trained dog. He’s probably back waiting for us, he said, flattening his compass, studying the needle. When he began crawling in the direction of the truck, the younger boy said, Wait, didn’t we come from over there? No, the older boy said.
The snow began as a thickening of the wind, a dealer of heft and bite. The truck was empty, its seats dusty with snow from the open windows. They walked up and down the road, sheltering their faces. Didn’t the forecast say late night? the younger boy protested. Go complain to the weatherman, dipshit, said his brother. They went a mile in one direction, returned to the truck, went a half mile in the other. In situations like this the hunters in the old stories sometimes repurposed their weapons as guides, beacons, calling their lost friend home. So the boys fired their rifles at the sky. And both felt—alongside their fear—oddly reinforced by this action: happy almost to find themselves in such a storied role. But the heavy weapons bruised their shoulders. And against the noise of the storm the guns sounded feeble. Instead of hitting their chests and ringing in their ears, each shot was more of a thump, like something dropped on a rug in another part of the house. What if he doesn’t come? the younger brother said. We get help. From where? From town. We drive? Sure, said the older brother. Then his face darkened and he shot one of the chickadees. It was a little furry ball perched stoically on a branch until it disintegrated. The younger boy held his hands out in disbelief. He gaped at his older brother, then at the snowy woods, and then he knelt by the red stain in the snow and with his fingers stroked the few remaining downy feathers, the sole reptilian foot. The snow meanwhile couldn’t make up its mind: it drifted thick and peacefully, like it does in snow domes, then it pelted sideways, sharp and small grained, the kind of snow you can’t see through, even when it’s light. But suddenly it was not light. Night fell in the snow like a hammer. The world was shadow blue. Then it was gone. Fuck! the older boy cried. Fuck!
It was time to look for the keys. They flicked the truck’s lights on, headlights and cab lights, and looked on the dashboard, in the glove box, the gas cap. They looked under the floor mats, in the coffee holders, in the tailpipe, the cooler. They swept their hands through the snow on the hood, thinking maybe the uncle had left the keys as their mother did in the cupped space above the windshield wipers. Nothing. No keys. The only things they found were things they wished they hadn’t: the uncle’s cigarettes and lighter, his compass and gloves, his Carhartt coat and heavy rubber poncho. The older brother wanted to know how far they had traveled beyond the McIntyre mansion. Eight miles? Ten? We go there and call for help. Is there a phone? the younger brother said. The older brother didn’t answer at first. Then he said, If not we’ll keep going. We’ll go all the way back to the road. The younger brother looked doubtful and gestured at his own thin clothes. Jeans. Damp sneakers. We can’t do it like this. He has the keys, right? said the older brother. I hope so. And the truck has heat? If you have the keys. The older brother, cold, did an unconscious dance-jog in place. What I’m saying, he said, is he can warm himself if he gets back here.
They divided the uncle’s spare clothes. The older brother took the Carhartt jacket and advised the younger boy to cut sections off the poncho’s too-long hem and use them to waterproof his socks. They’re already wet. It’ll still insulate them. They each took an extra glove. The younger boy got the extra winter hat. What about his lunch? the older boy said. It’s his. He doesn’t need it. He will when he gets back. He’ll have the truck, he can have a beer and drive to McDonald’s. We’re not eating his fucking lunch. Calm down, dipshit. I am fucking calm! The younger boy pushed at the older boy, who staggered back a foot and then grinned. Looking at his little brother, the older boy saw a child, tense shouldered and helpless in the curling snow, weak, enraging. His face glowed in the truck’s light with snot and tears. No, the little brother said, backing slowly away, I’m sorry.
The older boy struck him twice, once in the ear, once in the chin, and then the younger boy went sprawling. They weren’t hard blows, not for them, and such fights were themselves a common enough occurrence at home, in an environment with laws, and there the younger boy, smaller, weaker, biding his time, might not have reacted. But they weren’t at home. Home didn’t exist in their minds anymore. They were way out here in the wind and the snow, hundreds of years reverted from the civil concepts with which they’d begun the day. The younger brother dabbed at his ear and looked at his hand. The older brother stood over him. You want some more, scumbag? The younger brother shook his head. He rose slowly, eyes thin with rage, his back and elbows caked in snow. You don’t need to eat, the older brother said, but you’ll be really dragging ass come midnight when we’re still walking. He pried the cooler’s snowy lid open and removed a sandwich in waxed paper and a carton of chocolate milk. When he straightened he found himself staring down Angel’s barrel.
For a moment he said nothing. Then he said his brother’s name. Put it back, the younger brother said. Is that fucking loaded? Put it back or start fucking praying. Psycho. Do it. You going to shoot me over a sandwich, psycho? All of this was shouted, but heard as one hears whispers: hoarse, faint, threatened by other sounds. The younger brother’s thumb clicked the safety forward, a noiseless gesture in the howl. They stood in the refracted glow of the truck’s headlights, a tiny world of yellow light and rushing snowflake shadows. The younger brother’s wet cheek was distorted against the rifle’s stock. The older brother raised his hands, in one hand the sandwich, in the other the milk. Fine, he said carefully. He gave a fake laugh. You want me to leave them on the seat so he sees we thought of him? The younger boy did.
They left the headlights on, one last beacon for the uncle, and set off down the trackless woods road, carrying their rifles for confidence. The darkness was absolute. They had no flashlight and there was no moon, no stars. Already some four inches of snow had fallen. Stretches of road had been raked almost bare, but the drifts were sometimes a foot deep. The younger boy used his soft sneakers to feel the road’s grassy center through the snow, and this, the awareness of his feet, was their only guide, their only assurance that they had not strayed. He went first, holding the barrels of their guns, and the older boy followed holding the stocks, and this was how they kept track of one another, walking through blackness, minutes, hours, no idea where they were or how long they’d been there, counting their steps to a thousand, losing count, stumbling, cursing, hating the other when he slipped and the rifle yanked him off-balance, pausing to listen, pausing because there was a light, it was there, right there! The truck’s headlights breaking apart the darkness behind them! But it wasn’t there. Just darkness unbroken. They hollered oaths that scraped their throats dry yet barely registered against the whistling night. They realized, separately but quickly, that setting off on foot was maybe a mistake. The older brother pulled his younger brother to him, joining their bodies at the hip and shoulder to block the wind, and removed his glove to light the uncle’s lighter. In the bent and fraying glow, they looked at each other. Shadowy faces. Angry red skin. Mucus frozen on their chins and lips. You want to go back? the older brother hollered. If we go back, he’s dead. So you’re OK? Are you? Fucking dandy. It wasn’t loaded. The older brother said nothing. It wasn’t! I promise. I’m still going to beat your ass when we get home.
Every minute for what seemed hours they thought they’d reached the mansion, but it was never there. They walked side by side, holding Matilda between them, the younger boy in the road’s grassy middle, the older boy in his boots walking its uneven edge. His goal was to find the hard, flat driveway and to somehow distinguish it from one of the nowhere-bound roads it would kill them to take. He tripped often on stumps and into ditches. Several times he fell altogether, losing hold of the rifle and following his little brother’s fragile voice until they were together again. They huddled over the lighter, not speaking, memorizing each other’s faces. Neither boy wanted to think about what all this empty darkness meant to the uncle, lost in it alone. The older brother held the lighter to the sky as if to light their way but the wind blew it out. He put the lighter in his pocket, tapped his brother’s shoulder, and stepped forward into a beaver pond.
At first he was just waist-deep and gasping. That was it. He’d tugged Matilda from his brother’s hands and felt it sink past his leg. He didn’t reach after it. He tried to lean back toward the bank but the pond’s flooring was slimy sticks and his feet went skidding out and he sloughed farther into the pond, dunking his whole right side, his shoulder and chest, his head, foul grainy water spilling into his ears and mouth, a taste like dirt and bark and frog, very cold. He struggled to stand. Hey! he yelled. He was chest-deep, turning slowly, no idea where the shore was. The wind sounded like a furnace bellows. He tried to make himself stand still, stop sobbing, listen, and after a moment he managed to. Then he heard it: his own faint name. When he reached the bank the snow clung heavily to his sodden clothes. The air felt colder than the water and for a second he fancied going back in again. Then the younger brother was tugging him by the shoulder. The older brother felt the extra hat forced down onto his head. He felt his brother remove his wet gloves and thrust his numbing hands into the dry pair. Go! the younger brother was yelling. Let’s go!
They ran holding hands, linking arms, holding either end of Angel. They could feel themselves panting, but could not hear it. Their lungs burned. Their legs were heavy. Their open eyes saw nothing. There was no lighter. The lighter was wet. It was dead. And so was their backup plan: the final desperate fire under the skirt of a spruce tree. The younger brother’s attention was on the grass. If they lost the road even by a few feet they would be lost forever. But his feet in sneakers were losing feeling fast. They stopped to reorient, to reaffirm, to breathe, listen, holler encouragement, then they ran again. They began hearing things calling to them, voices in the wind. They began to see things in the blackness that were not there to be seen. Christmas lights. A lantern dangling under an upraised arm. Someone hollered their names in the way a search party might: a dividing into syllables, a pause, another dividing. But the boys ran on. They no longer trusted the appearance of anything they might want. When the grade increased and they could not run they walked fast, assisting their thighs with their hands. For a while they tried to sing but they didn’t like how the wind stole their voices. When the younger boy began to cramp, they stopped running. When the older boy couldn’t stop shivering, they started up again.
Then something clanging. A songlike metal on metal. They knew instantly that this was a real sound and that all those other sounds truly had been imagined. What is it? the younger brother said. They waited. Walked slowly on. Waited again. The sound brought no light with it. It clanged, then it didn’t, then it clanged. I think it’s a wind chime, the older brother finally said.
They left the road in pursuit, climbing over a smooth embankment and then shuffling across something level but soft. A lawn! The lawn? But since the chimes were played by the wind, its song seemed to echo off things, a chorus everywhere at once. It danced to the side and they veered to follow it. It began to fade and they backtracked. It came loud again but from a whole new direction. They jogged in pursuit, blindfolded kids chasing taunts in a pool, until the wind suddenly died and there were no taunts to follow. The boys stood listening to more distant winds. The older boy took the lighter from his pocket and tried and tried until it fell from his sharply numb fingers. They stood there, breathless, nowhere at all. Then chimes started up again. Loud. Right in front of them. The younger brother stepped forward and touched the edge of a porch.
They felt along its perimeter until they found a set of steps. On the porch they collided with a hillock of tarped furniture. They patted their way around the furniture until they reached a wall, then patted along the wall until they found a window to break. The older boy was deliriously hoping that, electricity or no, the McIntyres had thought to install one piece of modern equipment to protect their valuable things: an alarm that when the window shattered would hurl through buried phone lines a plea to the outside world. But when Angel smashed the window nothing happened. No cry, no tinkle of outgoing dismay. The younger brother used the rifle to clear the leftover glass from the frame but when the older brother climbed through he still cut numb gashes into his hands. He found himself a desk or table that had been pushed up against the window. Its surface was covered with oblong shards of glass and wooden lengths of sash bar and also with paper and books. He could see absolutely nothing. Had no idea which room they’d found. Swinging his legs around, he smashed a lamp to the floor, a tremendous porcelain crash. It was warm inside, warmer than he’d remembered, and hushed. He used his frozen sleeve to clear the desk of glass and then helped the younger brother through. They groped along walls, colliding with furniture, opening whatever drawers they found and feeling through the contents. In doorways they felt for light switches though they knew that there were none. When he found a drawer full of what seemed like tablecloths, the older brother tried to strip off his frozen clothes but couldn’t. His buttons were frozen in their holes and his clothes were sheathed in ice everywhere except the joints. He whispered for help, his voice eerily loud in the dark room, and the younger brother carefully, blindly, cut him free, sliding his hunting knife down the older brother’s jacket neck and sawing outward down his chest through the fabric. Hold still, he said. I’m trying. But the older brother couldn’t stop shivering. His teeth were hammering at each other. His thighs and knees felt like stilts. He hadn’t realized he’d been so cold. When his jacket and pants had been cut away, the older brother threw off his soaked underclothes and wrapped himself in a tablecloth.
The rooms and halls went on and on. They found lamps and candles but nothing to light them with, no way to orient themselves. They blundered into a set of stairs and climbed them. The animal room was nowhere to be found. The storm outside sounded like an interstate highway and the house kept moaning and flinching in its winds. On a small landing where the stair took its mid-ascent turn, the younger brother’s fingers found a wool blanket draped over a spindly wood chair. Come here, he said. No, over here. He wrapped his shivering older brother in the blanket and then began rubbing him, arms, back, chest, rubbing his brother like you rub your hands together or kick your feet warm in a cold sleeping bag. Wh-wh-where are we exactly? the older brother slurred. The blanket smelled of mothballs and dust and a woman’s antique perfume. I think the servants’ side, the younger brother said.
In a tiny bathroom on a wooden toilet tank the younger brother found a box of strike-anywhere matches. He stood blinking in the yellow light, watching the match burn toward his fingers, mesmerized by the flames, by the rediscovered mystery of his own eyesight. The matchstick glowed, thinning, turning black, curling in brittle segments. He dropped the dying match into the sink and in a panic lit a second. The bathroom had walls of waxy beaded board. A faded purple towel hung on the doorknob. There was pink antifreeze in the toilet bowl. He turned the sink’s taps but of course they were already turned. The mirror above the sink was splattered with dried toothpaste. He inspected his wind-seared face in it, his shoulders and hat still covered in snow.
Match by match the younger boy proceeded across the second floor until he found his brother in a large bunkroom with unmade metal beds in the narrow dormers. The older brother was sitting on one of the beds, shivering violently. I found matches, the younger brother said, but the older boy barely looked at him. We need to call Mom, the older brother said. His words were loose, slurring together. How about we go light a fire? the younger brother said. Mom’ll be worried by now, said the older brother. Is there a phone? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the older brother said, fuck off. The match seared at the younger boy’s fingers and he blew it out and hastily lit another. The older brother brightened with delight. You found matches! The younger boy threw up an arm and turned a quick confounded circle. Jesus Christ, he told the room. Then he added, He’s just cold. You’re just cold, right? He knelt again and lit up his brother’s face. He was blue lipped and pale. The ice that had formed in his hair hadn’t melted. In the leather steamer trunk at the end of the bed the younger boy found a down comforter. Then, in darkness again, he wrapped his brother in it. OK, he said, let’s get a fire going. He’s dying, the older brother said. The younger boy froze, hands in the lift position below his brother’s shoulders. I close my eyes I can see him out there, the older brother continued. He’s walking in circles. He’s waiting for his body to figure out it’s dead. No, the younger brother said, no, he’s in the truck, he’s on his way here. A gust outside and the windows rattled in their sashes. You want me to say something to him? replied the older boy.
The younger boy half dragged half carried his quivering brother down the stairs. At the bottom the older boy said he was OK. He could walk on his own, thanks, so the younger brother let him go and lit a match. Their breath rose in great steamy shudders. The darkness at the edge of the match’s light was like the red and shifty shadow of a glass. The clock above one of the ovens read 10:45. The older brother’s bare feet left clammy footprints on the cold tile. They pushed through the chef doors to the dining room, where the shudder of their feet registered in the table’s fine dinnerware: a gentle applause of glass and silver. The younger boy lit one of the thin ivory candlesticks and unbolted the door. Ready? I’m really cold. Stay with me. When the wind blew out the candle, a slush of hot wax fell onto the younger boy’s wrist. He pushed his brother across the breezeway in the dark, huddling against the roar and the snow, encountering drifts and stretches of bare planking. The older boy began thrashing confusedly, trying to turn around, but the younger boy held him firmly by the shoulders.
The door to the great room was locked, so the younger boy put his brother’s bare hand on its handle and told him to stay put. I’ll be back. The older brother stood in darkness. He let go of the handle and sank in his blankets, face tucked downwind. He was confused and tired. He kept coming in and out of the present tense. A slurred voice in his head was telling him to get up and run. And suddenly he knew that the voice was his father’s voice. That his father, like his brother and his uncle and himself, was likewise astray in this darkness: each man trying to fare for himself and faring poorly. Next thing he knew he was staggering blanketless through thin snow. Dad! he heard himself holler. Dad! Then, somewhere in the blizzard, a window shattered. He stopped. One of his hands was holding a railing. You’re a fucking idiot, he told himself, and he sat down where he was. He felt the ground with his fingers, the cracked paint, the snow-dusted boards, the nails with their square heads. You’re on the porch, he said. Take care of your brother, he said. He heard Angel’s butt clearing shards from the window frame.
When the match flared, a hundred glass eyes snapped awake. Fuck you, the younger brother told the eyes, terrified. You’re dead. Moving fast he lit several of the tall candles arrayed in sconces along a wall and then opened the door. His brother had wandered halfway across the breezeway. The comforter had fallen off him and he was sitting naked in the snow, barefoot. You’re all right, the younger brother said, lifting him. Here we go. Next to the gigantic fireplace stood an iron hoop stacked full of white birch rounds, ornamental but real. A copper basket held panes of brittle newspaper and a palisade of fatwood. The older brother sank onto the rug before the fireplace. The younger brother wrapped him in yet another blanket, this one made of scratchy mouse-gnawed wool, and then laid a hasty fire. The birch was so dry it weighed almost nothing. Even so he uncorked one of the glass lamps and doused the fire with its kerosene. Then he knelt, holding a match ready against the stone floor, and regarded his brother. He wasn’t shaking anymore. He seemed tired, sluggish. I’m the boss from now on, the younger brother said. The older brother looked at him. Say it, the younger brother said, say I’m the boss. You’re the boss, boss. But the younger brother did not light the fire. Say it again, he said, but mean it this time.
The blaze was gigantic, explosive, scattering embers across the floor until the younger brother put up the screen. He paraded around the room, lighting oil lamps as his uncle had taught him. He felt elevated, proud. A part of him was even thankful for what was happening to them. This was a day plucked from the stories and delivered to him—it was a bedrock day upon which all his life’s future uncertainties could rest. There would always be this. His name and deeds would be forever connected with this place: he would be the boy who saved his brother at the McIntyre Preserve. The lamps burned an amber color, rich and smoky. The golden titles of the books on the shelves joined the eyes of the animals in wakefulness. The room seemed different to the younger boy now, the animals timid, cowering in shadows, the whole idea of the place at once more ambitious and shabbier, sadder, less successful than it had been. This was the house of a man who’d never proven himself in a brave and simple way. It was dust and shoddy taxidermy. It was a setting for other, realer deeds.
It wasn’t long before the flies began to thaw. They fell spasming from unseen perches, landing amongst the dead of their kind below the windows, twitching, buzzing, half alive. The warming camp shifted and ticked, groaning awake. Weather systems battled each other, warm air and cold air, their thrusts and parries geologized in the billowing candle wax. The warmth hurt both boys. They sat together on pillows, grimacing, squeezing their feet. To remove his shoes the younger boy had to cut his frozen laces off. His toes were the same pale as the candles. His brother’s toes were even paler, shrunken and hard. The younger boy leaned his shoes up against the inside walls of the fireplace and soon they began to steam. He cut strips from a couch cover and wrapped his brother’s bloody palms. When he was done, the older brother said he was too hot and tried to scoot away from the fire. You’re just cold. My feet. If they hurt it’s a good thing, it means you aren’t gonna lose the toes. The older brother was dazed. He knew where he was, but had lost the causes, the whens and whys that led to here. He could feel hot blood toiling with the cold inside him, ribbons of chill slithering up his arms and thighs. He began to cry. To disguise this from his brother he began to yell.
The younger boy, feeling watched as if by a movie camera, set off in search of the phone. His voyage was lit by a glass lamp, which he balanced on his palm. Its light shone downward through the bowl of pink kerosene and threw a sloshing bloody circlet at his feet. He studied every wall, every surface. He saw ancient dusty spiderwebs and walls covered in gigantic hand-drawn topographical maps. He opened drawers, not sure what he hoped to find, and found pens, half-cent stamps, a napkin ring. He found an ancient military flashlight without batteries. In an otherwise empty closet he found a posh fur coat, foul smelling, ratty, powdered with dead moths. He found batteries in a fishing creel but the wrong kind for the flashlight. He moved messily and fast, leaving doors open, strewing contents across the floor, startling at vaguely humanoid pillows and hatstands, lighting every lamp and candle he came by.
In the room of portraits there were no phones on the desks or mounted on the walls, just men in costumes with traveling eyes, men in coon hats and spectacles, kings of industry posing with flintlocks in romantically hued terrain. The camp sighed and creaked. He lit more lamps. Maybe a window was open or there was a hole in the eaves, because the wind was moaning somewhere above him. He found a portable candle sconce, lit the candle it held, and followed Angel’s candlelit barrel through the house. No one here, dipshit, he told himself. But he kept the safety off, and his finger on the trigger guard. Wallpaper in the hallways. Ancient calendars on the bedroom walls. Children’s readers on the windowsills. Everything on this end of the house was cold and blue and dormant. President Taft’s gigantic bed wore a blanket of dead flies. On the bedside table a book lay open, a gold-rimmed monocle keeping its bleached-out page. Next to the book was a little round clock, somehow still ticking, giving the time as 10:13. In an otherwise empty dresser he found three wool socks of different colors and thicknesses. He stood in the portrait room and threatened the portraits with his rifle. Where’s the phone? he asked them.
The older boy woke to his younger brother shaking him. Everything was blurry. What the fuck are you doing over here? the younger brother said. The older brother was sitting on a stuffed chair as far from the fire as the room allowed. A blanket lay on his lap. The younger boy pulled him to his feet, led him back to the fire, and wrapped a ratty fur coat around his shoulders. Then the younger brother disappeared out the door. The older brother lay there. The fire purred and snapped. Its warmth felt good now but he was worried about his vision. To him the lights looked like lights at the bottom of a pool, double and triple edged, alive with currents. God he was tired. His chin fell to his chest and eventually he just lay back, head on his pillow, and found himself standing in a kinder version of the night outside. The darkness was penetrable and blue. There were spruce trees rimed in snow. There was no wind, no cold, nothing awful at all until suddenly the uncle—panting, haggard, covered in snow and spruce needles, a slash of blood on his cheek—trudged into his field of vision, rifle slung dutifully over his shoulder. Thigh-deep in snow, using his sleeved hands like paddles, the uncle plowed around spruces, stumbled once, and then disappeared into a small thicket of bent white birch, slapping their brittle understory out of his face. The boy stood there, in his mind, in the forest. It grew peaceful again. The snow fell vertically. The trees gathered it on their long fingers. It was beautiful. Then, from a different direction, the uncle came slogging back. His breath sounded like an unhealthy engine, catching and grinding, interspersed with moans, pleas, clung-to disbelief. He passed through his own trail in the snow without noticing it.
Crossing the breezeway to the servants’ side, the younger brother felt that the wind was, if anything, fiercer and colder than before, and he knew that if there was no phone he’d have to head back out into it. The stories said so. His brother had hypothermia. His uncle was out there dying. It was fittingly up to him, the smallest, the weakest, to save them both. The younger brother checked the thermometer on the breezeway’s post. Sixteen degrees. Warmer than he’d thought but that was without the wind. Inside, shivering, he studied the kitchen’s walls, beams, countertops. There were dead animals on the walls here too, though he’d not noticed them earlier, scraggly little servant bucks wearing colorful bandannas, their poorly glued lips sagging and misshapen. He lit a few lamps and a candle and searched the maids’ dining room, then the maids’ living room, consciously inspecting every section of wall. When he didn’t know where else to look, he began checking closets, bathrooms, storage rooms full of draped furniture. He entered the pantry and found bare shelves, four refrigerators, two freezers. He was bewildered. Electricity was one thing, you could use propane for the appliances, kerosene for the lamps, but who the hell didn’t have a phone? He opened a heavy metal-lined door and found himself in a room full of human beings.
He pedaled backward, hollering, and dropped his lamp, which went out but did not break, did not erupt into flames. He stood in the darkness. The storm raged quietly beyond the thick walls. A tarp was fluttering somewhere. He shut his eyes, lit another match, then found and lit a candle in a holder on the wall. The room was full of statues. Or mannequins. Nine or ten of them. Human likenesses fashioned from driftwood and shoe putty and strips of old tire rubber. The boy was crying, gasping. Their faces and hands resembled 3-D medical drawings, a skinless display of bones and muscle, and their attire was that of old-time guides: ratty corduroys, flannels with rolled sleeves, bandannas around their necks, leather boots, brimmed hats, one or two wearing spectacles. One held a lantern in a raised hand. Another wore rawhide snowshoes and had a rusty double-barrel shotgun slung over his shoulder. One had eyes of freckled songbird eggs, a set of decayed animal jaws for teeth. The boy picked up the lamp he’d dropped and studied its glass bowl for fractures. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if it had broken. A whoosh of kerosene and flame. When he saw no fractures he lit it again and then kicked the closest of the guides. It smashed to the floor and its ribs caved in and one arm clattered off at the shoulder. He knelt and stole the boots it wore. He knocked over the guide with the snowshoes. He stole a scarf, a heavy flannel shirt that smelled of turpentine, a pair of woolen britches. He made three trips between the artist’s studio and the great room where his brother slept. Then, aware now of what he had to do and how hard it would be, he visited the pantry.
When the older boy woke, his brother was kneeling by the fire, pouring melted snow from a pot into a crystal rocks glass. A cast-iron skillet and a second pot of bubbling water were nestled in the seething coals. The skillet held a few chunks of half-frozen meat. On the floor by the fire were a few rusty and unlabeled cans, a mouse-chewed box of spaghetti, a jar of mayonnaise, a jar of capers, some cocktail olives afloat in mold. On a sheet of damp butcher paper the older boy saw the words Doe Fillet in barely legible cursive and a date fifteen years elapsed. He looked at his watch but it wasn’t ticking. What time is it? he asked. The younger brother shrugged and said the clocks disagreed with each other. The older boy surveyed the rug by the fire. Two pairs of ancient leather boots, a pair of snowshoes, two scratchy flannels, a leather slicker, a pair of fashionable second-skin gloves. They’ll send help, the older brother said, Mom will call. They won’t get here, his younger brother said, there’s three feet of snow. They’ll snowmobile. They won’t get here in time. The older boy nodded. Not for him, he said. They sat for a while. The older boy realized now that he had never believed that the brutal events described so attractively in the uncle’s tales might have been true, and terrible to experience, and that the tales when lived must have had many possible endings in the minds of their protagonists. He felt betrayed by this—the reality of stories. The younger brother poked at the hearth with a bronze fire stick. We have to decide who goes back, he said, and who goes for help. I’m not going fucking anywhere. We have to, we’ve got the gear. A bunch of ancient summer clothes didn’t qualify in the older brother’s mind as gear. Give me some of that water, he said. His whole body ached, his head more than anything. The younger brother watched as he drank, sipping from his own glass now and then. I let you sleep a bit, he said, you hungry? The meat didn’t look good. Each piece was a shriveled little disk, green and blue and maroon, its flesh ridged like a walnut. I’m not eating a steak that’s older than I am. To this the younger brother merely shook his head.
The pasta more or less disintegrated as it boiled, and the steaks cooked into hard little pucks, and the boys smothered everything with mayonnaise and ate more than they thought they would. It was not unpleasant to sit there full bellied by the fire, drowsy, listening to the blizzard smashing blindly at the windows while the warmly lit animals kept watch. I got a question, the younger boy eventually said. The older brother could barely keep his eyes open. The younger boy poured them each a last glass of murky pasta water. Did I hear you calling for Dad out there? The older boy drank, squinting at the fire. He didn’t answer. Is that a no? I was calling for you. That’s not what I heard. The older boy shrugged. His eyes fell shut again. You can hear whatever you want, he said. The younger boy stared at his brother for a moment. Then he took the empty pot outside, filled it with tamped snow, and came back and put it on the fire. Snowflakes melted brightly on his eyelashes and shoulders. Do you remember telling me I’m the boss? The older boy opened his eyes and half smiled in his dangerous way. You aren’t going out there. He’ll die if we don’t. All he was wearing was a fucking flannel shirt, he’s dead already. The younger brother gestured at the lantern, the gloves, and gear. Look, we have all this, we’ll be warm, we have light, don’t be a pussy. The snow sizzled and shrank from the pot’s hot walls. What are you going to do that we haven’t tried? the older boy asked, wander around calling his name? No, I’m going back to town, or to the main road, to get help. The older brother took a long, musing pull of starchy water. It’s, what, sixteen miles? He yanked a dusty fistful of mink fur from the jacket he wore and threw it into the fire, where it shivered and glowed. You hear that? he said, gesturing to the windows and the noise of the storm. They aren’t going to find his body till spring.
The younger boy rolled to his knees and began surveying the gear. There’s only enough for one of us anyway, he said, pulling on the mismatched wool socks. When the older boy’s eyes slid open he found the younger brother looking at him challengingly. He closed his eyes once more. The younger boy donned both flannels. He cut a head hole in a wool blanket and pulled the slicker on over it. He took one of the oil lamps and messily filled the storm lantern with its kerosene. The older boy saw several options, but no good ending. He could let his brother go or make him stay. He could fill one of the pack baskets on the wall with the supplies his brother would need to survive, with matches and spare kerosene and yet more blankets, or he could disarm him, maybe break his legs with the fire iron, keep him here. Their mother would eventually realize they were missing. Tomorrow morning. Tomorrow night. Rescuers would come. But nothing the older brother could do would make it any less late for the uncle. He was out there. Lost in dark and wind and snow. Sitting with his back to a tree. His rifle out of bullets. He probably didn’t even know where he was anymore. His mind would have turned inward, shrinking like his blood toward his core, going through one last rendition of those old stories, or through other stories, through private warmths that he’d not seen fit to share. It was too late. It had been too late when the snow started.
The older boy stood with his big fur coat swaying halfway down his pale thighs. For a moment he held to the polar bear. His legs quivered and ached. No, he said. The younger boy, ignoring him, slid his feet into the mannequin guide’s huge boots, slid the boots into the snowshoes, and began trying to make sense of the desiccated leather straps. You think you’re hot shit now, don’t you? the older brother said. You’re a big boy now. His eyes had the same troubled gleam as the eyes of the animals. Blood dripped from his bandaged hand to the floor. The younger boy, pretending not to notice, cinched the straps tight, lit the lantern, and lifted Angel off the couch. He smiled. How do I look? he said. As he waddled toward the door, the snowshoes skated and clacked on the floorboards. The older brother stepped trembling into his path. Get out of my way, the younger boy said. When the older boy did not, the younger boy casually unslung Angel. You think that’ll work twice? the older boy said. Angel’s safety clicked forward. Yes, said his younger brother.
The younger boy’s cheeks were windburned, his nose chapped and crusty with snot. He did not point Angel at his brother. There was no need. His brother was a semblance, a memory of power who, as the younger boy watched, sank to the floor beside the lonely wolf. The younger brother stepped past him and stood in the open door, looking back. Snow spun through the screen onto the floor and the fire seethed and the animals in the room seemed enlivened by the cold air, their aged hackles shivering once again, their tails playing in the breeze. The older brother was wrapped tightly in his coat, and his feet were drawn up under its hem. The wolf’s teeth were yellow, and it was forever panting with its painted rubber tongue. The younger brother raised the lantern and stepped outside. I’ll send someone for you, he called back. They’ll be here in the morning. After the door swung shut, the older boy heard his brother’s wooden footsteps on the porch, then he didn’t, and though he strained with his ears, he heard only winter, roaring unabated. Winter and the awakening of flies.