The Wild

Page 8

Jim nodded. “On that we can agree. Big damn thing, too.”

“Eventually we reckoned we had to check it out,” Merritt went on. “I took the rifle, and we went over to the spot in the trees where it had been standing for hours, only when we got there, the wolf wasn’t there—”

“Vanished deeper into the woods,” Jim interrupted.

Merritt glanced away, as if to say there might be more to the story.

“So you followed it?” Jack asked. His fingers were still stiff and painful, and his feet still felt like slabs of frozen beef. The cold had gotten down deep inside of him, and no matter how hot the fire, he felt like he would never get warm.

“We followed it,” Jim echoed.

“We did nothing of the sort,” Merritt grumbled. He gave a murmur of dissatisfaction and stared at Jack. “When I say the wolf wasn’t there, that’s precisely what I mean. There were no tracks. No sign of the wolf at all, as if…”

He trailed off.

Jim wouldn’t look at either of them. He’d set about cleaning his glasses with the edge of his sleeve.

“Then how did you find me?” Jack asked, inching closer to the stove even as he stared at the flecks of gold and green in Merritt’s eyes.

“A shadow in the forest, that’s all,” the big man replied. “Jim will tell you it was the wolf, but I didn’t see anything but its eyes and its shadow. It kept ahead of us, pausing to wait when we fell behind. It wasn’t long before it led us right to you. When we saw all that blood, and the rabbits and such all torn up, we were sure you’d been mauled by a bear.”

Jim got up and dusted off the seat of his pants. “There’d been new snow. It covered the tracks. The wolf led us to you.” He turned his back and walked away.

Jack and Merritt exchanged a glance, but they didn’t talk any more about it. Neither of them had any desire to do so.

The weeks passed, and Jack’s rescue seemed to mark a turning point in their fortunes. Their supplies still dwindled to almost nothing, but hunting trips were more often successful than not. And several times when they’d gone days without fresh meat, one of the men found a wounded rabbit or squirrel somewhere close to the cabin, leaving a bloody trail in the snow as it crawled away from whatever had wounded it. As soon as Jack felt well enough, and the cold no longer felt as though it ate at his bones, he resumed his daily walk. This time, however, he did not wander from camp in an attempt to make contact with his observer. To his great confusion, and a mixture of relief and strange sadness, the feeling of being watched had significantly abated, existing on the periphery of his mind. If the wolf—the creature he had come to think of as his spirit guide—was still with him, it did not deign to show itself or to make itself known in any other way. From time to time he would hear distant howls, but he felt no shiver of recognition. They were ordinary wolves trying to survive the white silence, no different from Jack, Merritt, and Jim.

Some days he walked up to the spot where his friends had discovered him—the patch of snow-covered earth where Jack felt certain he had actually died, if only for a handful of minutes. Yet no trace remained of the event itself. New snow had long since blanked out the bright crimson of the blood, and though he tried several times to dredge up a dead rabbit, hare, or wolverine by dragging his boots through the snow, he never came up with even a bone. Merritt and Jim had been far too superstitious to eat any of the meat on those animals, so Jack knew that his companions had not removed the carcasses. Yet the spot seemed untouched, somehow cleansed. If the others had not discovered him there and seen the dead animals for themselves, he would have thought the long winter had taken a terrible toll on his mind.

When first weeks and then months had elapsed since that day, his routine had become little more than exercise. He made his body work to keep himself limber, though as their supplies had decreased, they had all grown weaker. Now, on the day they had gauged as the first of April, he could move his teeth, loosened by scurvy, around in his mouth. They had no mirror, and for that he was glad. He wouldn’t have liked to see his own reflection if his features were as gaunt and his gums as black as those of his companions.

Spring must not be far, although the white silence still reigned and the snow and ice made it impossible for him to imagine the earth ever flowering, the sun ever shining brightly, the river ever flowing again. The past few weeks had brought visitors to the cabin, drawn by the smoke and willing to travel far afield from their own camps now that the cold did not bite as deeply and their own supplies had run low. Trappers and prospectors and even Indians paid visits, hoping for a bit of anything they had run out of themselves. The best Jack and his friends could offer was a cup of weak tea and good conversation, but surprisingly that seemed to be enough. These veterans of the Yukon, of the gold fever and the wilderness life, came full of stories, and when Jack regaled them with his tales of life as an oyster pirate and vagabond, they repaid him in kind. He squirreled these stories away as a miser would pennies, hoarding them only to take them out and examine them later.

Stories were in Jack London’s blood. Tales of adventure fed him when other sustenance became meager at best. And now he had one hell of a story of his own, and wanted only to survive to live the next one.

Such were the thoughts that lingered in his mind when he trod the by-now-familiar path back toward the cabin that morning. The daylight hours lasted longer and longer, and he felt reinvigorated every time the sun appeared. As he reached a turn in the path and came in sight of the clearing where the cabin stood, he heard Merritt bellowing.

“Jack!” the big man shouted. “Jack, where are you?”

The excitement in his voice was unmistakable and contagious. Something had happened, some piece of good news, and Jack could think of only one thing that would give Merritt Sloper such happiness. Jack picked up his pace, tromping along the path as swiftly as he could manage.

“Merritt?” he called, bursting from the trees into the clearing. He glanced around, confounded for a moment by the absence of anyone in the clearing. “Merritt, what is it?”

Then the door opened and Jim Goodman stepped out wrapped in one of the furs they had sewn over the long winter.

“What’s all the shouting?” Jim asked as Jack hurried toward him.

“Not a clue. I heard Merritt, but—”

“I’m here!” Merritt called, and they both turned to see him ambling around the side of the cabin. The winter had been hard on all of them, but Merritt remained a big, burly man in spite of the weight he’d lost. He gave them a good-natured grin.

“Let’s have the last of the good coffee,” Merritt told them. “The bit we’ve been saving to celebrate.”