Far Cry: Absolution

I

ONE WEEK BEFORE…

THE BEAR WAS A BIG BOAR GRIZZLY DOWN OUT OF CANADA. Thunder had woken Will Boyd and he had come out into the night and looked to the north where the silhouette of the Northern Rockies stood like dark sentries amid the lighter gray of cloud and moon. The storm was somewhere to the north. He had felt it building all through the day as he worked, the air growing thick and that damp heavy feel that built with it. Erased in a second as the rain came down and the sky lit and cracked open like shattered lake ice soon subsumed by the pool of water it had grown from.

Six or seven miles away on the slope of the mountain he could see how the rain had started to fall in sheets, pushed forward on the wind. He stood and watched it from his place on the hill. The forest all around him, lodgepole pine and white spruce, and farther down in the hummock between foothills and forests he could see how the lightning lit and expanded across the field of Junegrass below.

He had crossed that same field many times in the past twelve years or so. He knew what it looked like in full spring bloom, filled with purple harebell and blue flax. In the summer, much of it gone to golden green and then brown all through the fall, until it sat scraped to a flat land of white for six months of the year. He crossed this field in bitter cold and deep fetid summer, moving down from the cabin he’d been given, across land the church had charged him with watching over, carrying with him the two plastic buckets he used to collect his water. Often, he would see elk or deer, sometimes a hawk or eagle circling high above.

Now he stood above this field, wrapped in the same wool blanket he had taken from his bed and he watched the far rain being pushed from ridge to ridge as if the wind were a thing to be seen and touched. The first rumble of thunder had woken him from his sleep and he had walked out into the blue night and waited, watching the far mountain. The lightning crashed a second time and the thunder followed a few moments later. The surrounding hills and mountains lit anew in that electric light of blue and white. Will pulled the blanket closer around his shoulders, moving forward a little, watching the pulse of light fade away and letting his eyes adjust again. The lightning had forked and branched and when he closed his eyes he could still see it there captured in the blackness beneath his lids.

What he saw first was the deer, a full-grown buck, just beginning to grow its antlers for the year. When the lightning struck again it had come halfway across the field in the darkness. Caught moving, frozen in time by the bolt of lightning from above, one of its front legs outstretched and the two powerful back legs caught mid-bound as the animal appeared to float across the field. Will saw this animal and then saw it disappear again, the lightning fading from the sky and the boom of the thunder soon following, the storm now grown closer and the foothills far out beginning to disappear within the rain.

He took several steps farther into the grass and sedge in search of the buck, but in the spare seconds it had shown itself it was gone again, rushed across the field as if in flight.

The big grizzly then came into the field. A shape of humped muscle moving in that greater darkness just before the storm, all upper body and lean moving muscle beneath that coat of fur. Ears pushed back along its head as it moved in great haste and speed. The lightning sparking high above and the bear pictured there like something seen standing within the depths of some great museum hall—large and fierce.

But when the lightning faded away, followed by the boom, the bear was still there, drawn up short, halfway across the field. The first few droplets of rain were coming now, pushed forward on the wind ahead of the storm. The bear seemed to test the air, raising its snout toward the far trees and the coming sheet of rain. When it stood on its two back legs and turned to face the rain, Will could not believe the size of the animal. He saw in it some primordial being that was half man and half beast, which might in days of yesteryear have ruled them all.

The bear stayed just that way, standing on hind legs to face the rain, as the sheet of water broke from the trees and moved in a wall across the field. The water enveloping all it passed across, so thick with droplets that everything behind—mountain, foothill, forest—had all but disappeared. When the rain hit the bear, it was like the bear had never been there at all and Will stood for a second longer, watching as the sheet of water climbed the hill toward him and soon was all around. Wind and water, crashing branches twenty or thirty feet above—no field or forest to be seen and Will turning now, as the water began to soak the blanket, and he went back toward his small cabin, opened the door, and threw himself within.

After an hour of listening to the rain pelt the thin tin of his roof above and the wind rattle the glass within the wood casements of his windows, Will opened the door and stood looking out at the night from within the frame. The moon had appeared again and small silver droplets of rainwater could be seen in places where they hung and then fell from blades of grass and the needles of the pines. Far overhead the blinking navigation lights of a jetliner crossed in the starry darkness like some visitor from another world.

It would take him three days before he caught sign of the bear again.

THE FIRST SIGN HE FOUND OF THE BIG GRIZZLY WAS A PRINT IN the loose mud of a stream a mile east of his place. Will stood looking down at it for a long while before he brought his eyes up and considered the dense growth of underbrush that lined the far side of the stream. Lush and green and nearly impenetrable.

He had come down toward the stream on a game trail and until this point he had seen no sign of the bear in the surrounding country. Mostly he tracked game and ran a series of trap lines for the church, his time divided between church and remote wilderness. Three weeks of every month spent tracking and hunting, then one week spent at Eden’s Gate. In the three days that had passed since he’d seen the bear he had thought he would chance across some sign—find a tuft of hair, scat, or claw mark in the earth or up high on one of the pine trunks—but he never did.

At sixty-two, Will could not remember seeing a bear of this size ever in his life, and he wondered now what had drawn the big boar down out of the north into this valley. Many of the animals had moved on years before, hunted or chased away as the valley succumbed to farming and herding. Will needed to go farther and farther afield to catch his own game—deer and elk, turkey, beaver, and rabbit.

Wearing the old wide-brimmed hat, stained with his own salt, he was square-jawed beneath his beard. The muscles beneath his shirt still strong from hauling his ass up one hill and down the other on a daily basis. Now, he scanned the surroundings, his eyes roaming over the forest behind and then the underbrush across the stream. Will looked again to the print in the mud. He knelt, feeling the weight of his pack fall across his back as he spread his fingers and placed them atop the print. With his other hand, he held tight to the rifle strap, not wanting the old Remington to swing from his shoulder.

The shape of the print was larger than his spread hand by at least an inch on all sides. Will guessed he was likely looking at the front right paw. The long claw marks visible atop each toe, where they had further punctured the mud a couple inches farther on.

He rose and followed the stream in the direction the paw mark had suggested. When he came to the beaver dam about a quarter mile upstream he knelt out of sight and watched the fat little mammals swimming in the pond beyond.

Not quite in the center of the pond was the lodge they had built for themselves. He watched as one of the beavers emerged from the water and then, using teeth and squat front arms, began to fit a branch over what looked to be a fresh hole dug into the side of the lodge. Many of the old logs showing the telltale claw marks of the bear where it had dug into the meat of the wood.

He saw no more sign of the bear as he went on, following the little stream that flowed down out of the mountains and made its way through the foothills. He set rabbit snares and then circled back around to a separate string he had placed the day before and found three out of six held white-tailed jackrabbits.

He broke their necks quickly with a practiced efficiency that had come from years of experience. Skills and knowledge his own father and grandfather before him had handed down to him. When he had checked and reset all six of the snares he carried the rabbits off to the stream and then gutted them, running the carcasses through the cool water at a place he favored, where bare rock ran flat and wide into the stream.

Many times Will had bathed here, washing his clothes in the stream and then leaving them to dry in the sun while he swam naked in the long, deep pool beyond. His hands and face tanned dark and brown from the spring and summer and the rest of his body—except for a patch of scar tissue across his chest where a tattoo had once been—was white and almost luminescent in the clear glacial melt.

Now he knelt at the water’s edge. He worked the innards from the rabbits until the carcasses were clean. The last trail of blood wafted like smoke in the slow-moving pool, the current pulling the blood along before blending this last strand of red into the greater flow.

When he looked up again the bear was watching him from out of the opposite edge of the forest. Will saw the hump of muscle across the shoulder and the broad powerful forelegs gripping the edge of the bank as it watched him, its dull black eyes and the scooped front barrel of its face turned on him. The nose wet, bits of dirt and grass visible in places from whatever the bear had been scavenging nearby. Will did not move. His rifle, a twenty-year-old bolt-action Remington 700, lay five feet up the rock with his pack and what remained of his snares. He stayed crouched over the water with the rabbit carcasses beside him on the rock, his hunting knife in one hand.

He watched the bear test the air once before it turned, moving down the opposite side of the stream to where the pool ran out into shallow water. Will was up now, holding the rabbits and knife, backing toward the pack and rifle. The bear turned and rose, letting out a growl and then came back down onto its front paws. It came down the opposite side of the stream toward him and then tested the depth of the water with one paw, but finding no bottom it brought the paw back again and Will saw the big front claws and how they dug at the soil, then the animal reversed again, coming even with him. Only the depth of the pool and a hesitancy on the bear’s part kept the big grizzly from Will.

He had the pack now and he brought it up, slipped one arm after the other through the straps. He bent and lifted the rifle. The bear still had not moved, except to raise its nose some more, tasting the air. Even the sight of the rifle did not seem to deter it. It growled again and showed its yellow teeth, strings of saliva now seen suspended from its upper jaw as it held open a mouth that could easily swallow Will’s head whole.

Will bent again, never taking his eyes from the bear, and gathered the rabbits to him. He cleaned the blade of the knife on their fur and then replaced it in the scabbard he kept on his belt. When he was done he came forward to the edge of the water and, still wary of the bear, he separated one of the jackrabbit carcasses and tossed it, spinning end over end, across the pool where it landed in the brush just a few feet from the grizzly.

By the time the bear found the rabbit, Will was already backing up the rock and into the underbrush that lined the stream on all sides. Only when the branches closed around him did he turn and begin to walk up and away from the stream. No sound except that of the water rolling farther down, and even when he had gone another hundred yards or so and turned back, focusing again on the stream and the woods surrounding him, he could hear nothing but the water farther on. For a minute, he kept his eyes fixed on the path he had taken. The far cry of a loggerhead shrike sounded to his right, the bird launched from its perch and dipped through the trees until it broke into open grasslands beyond.

Will followed the bird out, soon moving fast through the grass, pausing to glance back at the belt of wood that followed the stream before he went on again. Not until he had arrived at the small cabin, set the rabbits down, taken the pack from his back and then gone back out to the overlook that faced to the north and the mountains there, did he give himself a little time to pause.

He carried with him the Remington, and looking over the country now, he gathered the strap in his hands, flipped up the scope cover, and brought the rifle to his shoulder, the lens to his eye. He ran the scope along the far edge of the forest to where he knew the stream ran another half mile on. The wind was in the tops of the trees and it worked through the field of Junegrass below, appearing to Will like waves on a great golden lake.

He dropped the rifle from his shoulder and stood looking over the forest and hills, the mountain farther on. He said to himself, “Just ’cause you don’t see him don’t mean he’s not out there.”

Will thought of the big buck he had seen in the lightning storm, he thought of the beaver lodge and the hole dug in the side. He knew what the bear was doing down here. He knew why the bear had come.

THREE HOURS LATER, AFTER HE HAD FINISHED SKINNING THE rabbits and packing the meat in salt, he came up out of the root cellar and looked toward the distant beating stars above, the waning moon behind the trees. He had eaten and then gone about his work. He would give the rabbits, along with several other critters he had snared or shot in the weeks past, to the people they were owed to, the people he worked for and who in some way had set him up in this life when he’d thought his life had been over.

The skins they would sell, too. Most of the money went to the church, but some of it came back to Will. Money for supplies like snare wire, .308 rifle cartridges, butter, flour, and other supplies Will could not readily take from the woods. He was careful with everything, knowing each and every item, and their exact measure, within his cabin and down in the root cellar, as if each were recorded on a piece of paper and not just stored away in his head.

He looked now around the small camp he kept and the house he had been made ward of in those first years of Eden’s Gate. The fire he had made earlier to cook his meal of biscuits still showed the small red glow of coals at its center. The night now fully upon him as he walked the short distance to the fire, blew the gray ash from atop the beating coals and then piled fresh kindling atop.

For an hour, he sat by the fire and thought about the bear. He thought about how easily the bear could have killed him that day.

TWO DAYS LATER HE FOUND THE WHITE CHURCH TRUCK WAITING for him when he came up the hill. Will carried behind him a field-dressed buck on a travois he had constructed himself. He stood sweating in place under the gambrel he used for skinning deer and elk. The travois he’d made from two long poles he’d cut from within an aspen growth, lashed crossways with smaller branches and then tied all together with paracord. It had made it easier to bring his kill the two miles from where he’d shot the buck, but it had not made it easy.

He stood watching the truck and looking around at the little clearing his cabin sat within, but he saw nothing other than the truck to suggest anyone else was here. Tired from his efforts he coughed and set down the buck, then he walked to the cold ash of the firepit and spit down among the dead coals. Looking now on the buck behind him, the antlers like a crown of thorns and those black, mirrorlike eyes looking back at him, he was unsure whether he should begin his skinning or go out in search of the owner of the truck.

By the time Will had taken the rifle from his shoulder and placed the pack on the ground, Lonny had come up out of the root cellar with the rabbits. He was beside the truck, lifting the lid on a cooler and then dropping the rabbits inside with the rest of the meat when he saw Will standing there.

“I see you’ve kept busy the last three weeks,” Lonny said, looking down at the coolers and then back up at Will. Lonny wore a trucker’s cap on his head. He was bearded like all members of the church were and his two snake tattoos emerged from the sleeves of his T-shirt and coiled down his forearms to the backs of each hand.

“I thought you’d be here tomorrow,” Will said, glancing around the clearing, wondering if Lonny was alone.

“Something came up.”

“What kind of something?”

“The kind that made me think of you.” Lonny smiled and then walked the ten or so paces from where the truck sat to where Will was standing. “I got you a little job you can do for us.”

“I like the job I got now.”

Lonny circled and looked at the buck. He made a low whistling sound and then clucked his tongue. “He’s a beaut.”

“Should be about seventy-five pounds of usable meat once I get him skinned and bone him out.”

“You going to keep the head?”

“I was thinking about putting it up inside.”

Lonny stared at him. He ran the tip of his tongue across his upper lip and then inside over his gums. He picked something from his teeth and flicked it away. “That rack would make a nice present for John or The Father.”

“I shot him through the heart. Meat should be good still. Just have to get him up on the hook and get to work.”

Lonny smiled. “You have a pretty nice thing going on out here. Don’t go thinking we haven’t forgotten that.”

Will looked Lonny over. The man was six foot, nearly as tall as Will, but skinny and lean. Those two forearms with the snake tattoos were all muscle and sinew and not much else. Will had heard Lonny could use them, too. Though he’d never seen the man hurt anyone, he had heard stories. A few saying how Lonny could strike out with each fist fast as any rattlesnake might bite.

“It’ll take me about twenty minutes to skin and bone out the deer. Then another hour to clean up the sinew and separate the muscle groups. You got that time?”

“Just skin it and throw it in the back of the truck. There’s plenty at Eden’s Gate who can help with the meat. And keep the head on.”

Will brought up his empty canteen and crossed to the house, dipped the canteen into the bucket of water, watching the bubbles come up until it was full. He stood drinking from the canteen and then dipped it again. When he walked back over to Lonny and the buck, Lonny was looking the rifle over.

“You shoot a .308?”

“Yes.”

“That big enough for a grizzly?”

Will waited. He didn’t like the way this was heading.

Lonny took a small pouch from his pocket, pinched some tobacco and started to roll a cigarette with papers he’d taken from the same pouch. “We got us a problem and I think you’re the guy to solve it for us.” He finished the cigarette and placed it between his lips. “You want one?”

Will declined and then walked around to the deer to undo the paracord from where he had tied it to secure the buck. He heard the flick of the lighter, then the exhale of the smoke and by the time the paracord had been taken from the haunches and underbelly of the deer, Will was smelling cigarette smoke and not much else.

“You know the Kershaw place out on two twenty-four?”

“I know the Kershaws. Their place is about twenty miles from here.” He knelt and, taking the knife from his belt, made a small hole between each of the deer’s knees and rear tendons. Next he got the hook from the gambrel and hoisted the deer up so that it was swinging, spraddle-legged, in front of him. “They still raise cattle?”

“You’d likely know this if you came to The Father’s Sunday sermons. Being there as little as you are, you think no one notices when you miss one. But I notice. And I guess now I’ll be the one to tell you the church took over the operation a few weeks ago.”

“Took over?”

“Made some improvements.” Lonny smoked. He walked off a way and looked down at the field below. When he came back, he said, “I’d like you to hunt and kill a big grizzly that took down a heifer there yesterday.”

Will stopped the careful job he was doing with the skin, working with the knife to bring it down off the haunches. He looked over at Lonny. “You’re asking me to look past a heap of laws and regulations.”

“That’s what you do, isn’t it? You think we have you set up here on church land so you can pick and choose?”

Will didn’t like being talked to that way. It was true, maybe he did have it good out here. Fighting with Lonny wasn’t going to do him any favors. “You have a plan?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Grizzlies are scavengers,” Will said. “They’re opportunistic. You’ll never know how to read them, how to understand them. They’ll hunt and kill their own young if they have to. They’re survivors. This bear you want me to kill, he may have just been passing through. He might just have seen the heifer and gone for it. He might be miles away by now.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“We could go to jail for this. You understand that, right?”

“What happens on our land is our business.”

Will sucked at the inside of his cheeks. The bloody knife hung in his hand and he let his eyes roll across the clearing in which his cabin sat. He could see no way out of this. “When I was over in Vietnam there was a tiger that used to hunt and kill the men stationed at my base. They tried damn near everything they could to kill it. But it always came back. No one ever saw it. The animal might as well have been a ghost. We found paw prints, we found blood trails, but we never saw it.”

“And you killed it?”

“No,” Will said. “How do you kill something you cannot see?”

Lonny finished the cigarette and flicked it away toward the firepit. “You think this bear is supernatural? You think this bear is some heavenly retribution? The Father would love that. That would be scripture to the man.”

“No,” Will said. “I’m saying I don’t know a goddamn thing. I’m saying I can’t help you.”

“Now, Will. You know that’s not something you can say.” Lonny took a small flask from his pocket, worked the top off and then drank. He never took his eyes from Will. “You need a little liquid encouragement?”

“No,” Will said.

Lonny took another swig of the flask and then he sat on one of the cut logs by the firepit and looked up at Will. “Things could be a lot worse for you,” Lonny said. “Being out here as much as you are you haven’t seen the things that I’ve seen. You don’t know what they have us doing these days.”

“The Father chose to put me here,” Will said.

“The Father says the time is approaching.”

“Is that right?”

“He tells us to read the signs. Plain as day, he says. All hell is breaking loose out East. And it’s coming, all the goddamn way across the country. I see you, Will. I see how you are. You’re not a believer like the new blood we have now, but you will be. You will be one of these days and you’re going to need to be saved like all the rest of us.”

“I see you over there keeping the faith,” Will said, looking at the flask and the man that held it.

“Old habits die hard.”

“Yes, they do.”

Lonny took another drink. He ran his eyes out to the clearing and the view of the mountains farther on. Insects were dancing in the last lowering rays of sun. “What happened to the tiger?”

“The powers that be went and talked to the local villagers. A pit was suggested. The enemy used to use them on us. Just slaughter us all to hell. Maybe you’ve heard about it? Lines of sharpened sticks, covered over by a latticework of twigs and then concealed. Gravity did the rest.” Will worked the knife across the skin again, yanking the hide down until he reached the front legs, then he worked the blade down along the backs of each, cutting and pulling.

“That’s how you got the tiger?”

“No, the tiger waited. He took one man out at a time. He waited in that jungle and he watched and he knew without a doubt that we were there to kill him and we never did.”

“What the fuck.” Lonny took another drink. “Why the fuck did you tell me that story in the first place?”

“Sometimes it’s important to understand you don’t always get what you want.”

“That goes both ways,” Lonny said. He looked Will’s work over and then he got up to leave. “You better throw that fucker in the back of the truck for me. I’ve got a lot to do before I start digging us a hole out by the Kershaw place.”

“You’re not going to catch him,” Will said.

“Yeah, well, I’m going to do everything I goddamn can. And you’re going to help me.”

WILL STOPPED AND STOOD IN THE SAME SPOT HE’D SEEN THE bear stand to meet the coming thunderstorm. He turned and looked up on his place. The slant of the roof, the tin cap of the stovepipe, the whole cabin almost part of the forest itself, so small and nondescript atop the little hill.

A day had passed since Lonny had come and Will now carried three beavers on a string. He had shot them from the shore that morning and then watched them bob to the surface. Stripping down naked, he’d gone wading into the pond until his feet lost the bottom. For a little while, after he’d gathered them up and come back to the shore, he glanced back at the lodge there and the hole in it that the bear had torn a few days before. Blood and water now dripped down his naked forearm and fell in a splatter to the mud below. He gutted each animal to preserve the meat longer and then tied the castor glands shut.

The Kershaw place was twenty miles away, but it was half that if he cut through the forest and made his way through the fields. It was getting on in the afternoon, and as he stood in the place the bear had stood he tried to think the bear’s thoughts, see the bear’s path, and know the bear’s world.

HE DREAMT AND HIS MIND WANDERED IN TIME AND HIS UNCONscious thoughts were of old stories he’d heard as a kid, passed down through his family all the way back to the pioneer days. Bears twice the height of a man, miners and loggers hunting them near to extinction. Ranch owners shooting any they saw. These bears simply hungry, simply doing what they could to survive, and doing it the only way they knew how.

He woke in the night and sat up, looked about the clearing he had chosen to make his camp. The Kershaw place was another five miles or so. The camp made when he had come up the ridge and moved into the high country gave him a vantage over the land. And while the setting sunlight spread like an orange dye through the darkening blue water of the sky, he ate mountain blueberries he’d gathered and chewed bits of smoked jerky he’d made from past kills. Fifty yards away the beavers hung from a branch on a tree and while he took his meal he watched the way the coming night breeze turned the carcasses. The flat, broad tails like some sort of sail catching the wind.

It was to this string that he looked now, fresh from his dreams, watching the dark shapes of the beavers turn in the blue starlight. He coughed and spit away mucus and in the silence that followed, his eyes roamed the clearing considering each tree and blade of grass as if each harbored some unknown threat to his person.

In the east a pale red light shone like that of the sun in primordial dawn, but he knew it was not. He stood now, folding his wool blanket away, then pulling one boot on after the other. He reached for the rifle and then set out across the clearing, moving through grass that came to his kneecaps.

When he reached the far wood, he could smell the smoke. And by the time he’d gone a hundred yards farther in, passing through dappled shadows and pools of moonlight beneath the overhead evergreen thatch, he had begun to hear the chanting and the calls of the worshippers below. After another hundred yards, he came to a broad rock face that ran for a quarter mile to either side of him and outlined the river valley below. A river ran at the bottom of the rock face, the water black and ink-like but the light of the fire shining in places where it caught on the surface. Farther on he could see the great bonfire. The pile of wood was ten feet high and the fire burning another twenty or thirty feet in the air. He could feel the thermals working out over the river and then rise, a vortex of warmth and cool river air swirling like a whirlpool before him.

The bonfire cast its light all around in the circle that formed at its base and in this Will saw the shapes of those who had come to worship its destruction. The sound of their chanting heard as they prayed and worshipped, their heads bent in a chaotic dance of their own making. The words, at this distance, not clear to him as they bounced off the rock face and were lost in the thermal wind. But Will had heard them before and knew much of what was being said, though he liked not to think of it. They were part of the Eden’s Gate Church, and like Lonny had said, they did what they pleased and worshipped in ways of their own choosing. For this was their land and whether Will liked it or not he had come to them twelve years before looking for salvation, and they in turn had given it to him, making him what he was now, game warden, poacher, killer of beasts large and small.

Keeping back from the ledge a little he found a shadowed bit of rock and, putting the rifle on the forty or so people that danced and circled below, he flipped up the scope cover and began to roam his eye across those below. Many wore the white robes of the church. He ran the scope from the bearded faces of men to the unkempt, flowing hair of the women. He watched not just them but the elongated shadows of their movements, the shadows of legs and arms cast across the fiery ground like some sort of transmogrified creature, half beast and half man.

By the time he had run the scope all the way around the circle they were forming into a line that stretched from the burning pile of wood down toward the river. Taking his eye from the scope, he moved forward on his elbows until he was at the edge of the cliff. He reached back, brought up the rifle and, careful not to let the light catch on the glass lens, he looked down on the figure of The Father there in the river. Fifty-some years old, he wore the same unmoving face that could be terror or salvation to any who looked upon it. The man stood knee-deep in the water in his own robe. The water clung to the material and climbed its way to his chest where it hung from him and showed the strong musculature of his body. He chanted and looked to the heavens and one at a time he invited each worshipper to come to him as he dipped them into the river and held them there, watching as their arms flailed for some sort of purchase.

After all had been baptized a new group was gathered. Some in robes but many in their own clothes, brought huddled together from out of the shadows, some shivering, some visibly frightened. All of them led by men carrying guns and several with machetes. As they walked, the rest of the willing in their baptismal robes closed in behind them, encircling them there on the shore. Out of this group, holding a large revolver, was John Seed, the younger brother of The Father, slighter in build, but cut from the same cloth. Both bearded and tattooed, and both with those all-seeing eyes that seemed to search through the dark with a kind of nocturnal prowess.

With the revolver John went into the water and stopped no more than a few feet from The Father. They waited, the two of them, as men bearing rifles and machetes brought these new worshippers out to them. Each, as had been done with the willing, were baptized in turn and then led back to shore by their guards. And though Will had seen baptisms before, he had not seen anything like this, where men and women were forcibly dipped. Lonny had told him of the shift, and had Will not skipped so many sermons in the past—his own faith waning little by little—Will might not have been as surprised at what he saw down below.

Many on shore were crying and he could see the visible shaking of their shoulders and the terror of the night in their faces. He watched them as if seeing them from out of some bubble that no sound could escape. Their distance and the rush of the water sucking away at the cries they made and the protests they had for this forced ceremony.

For a time he kept the scope on them, watching as they came to the water, tried to fight, to break free from their captors, but none made it far and each met the same fate that had awaited those baptized before them.

Years had gone by since Will had been a part of this. And none of it had been as it was now, watching those down there who were unwilling. In those times, years before, he had seen the giving of a soul and the baptizing of many. He had stood in a robe on the side of a river like this one and he had done his part to be one of them, giving his soul to the church. But that even seemed like another life, another time, a past that had grown distant from the man he was now and the role he’d been given.

Having seen enough, he pulled back from the edge. He stood and moved away toward the forest and then from out of the depths he heard the crack of a shotgun. He rushed to the edge and looked down. He could see many among them had cowered, the guards standing above them. Still farther back stood many of the first of the willing and in the water waited The Father, and John. Will could not tell who had fired the shot and he ran his eyes down the river, wondering if he might see a body pulled toward the rapids and then out of sight where the river curved away farther on.

But he saw no body and when he brought his eyes back to The Father, the man was already calling for the next to be baptized. And Will, as witness in all of this, looked again to the empty place in the river where the rapids turned the water to white, and he was unsure of what he had seen. He let his eyes linger there and he watched how the water ran below him. He thought about the meaning of the baptism and the washing of the sins.

When all had dipped their heads beneath the water, Will moved away from the edge. He did not need to know what The Father would say to them now. He did not need to watch anymore. For he knew this part well, he had heard it twelve years before when he had come willing to the church and he repeated it to himself as he walked back to his camp. “We stand on the edge of a great chasm. Below us is the fate of mankind. Humanity has grown numb to the machine of strife that it has created, but we cannot. We and we alone have been chosen to survive this calamity and rebuild. We are all angels, and we few are set on a path back to the garden. We are a Family. I am your Father. You are my Children. And together we will march to Eden’s Gate.”

THE MORNING MIST WAS IN THE FIELDS BEYOND WHEN WILL came to the top of the small rise and looked down upon the Kershaw house. The grassy fecal odor of the cattle lingered in the air. He ran his eyes out along the cattle wire until it dropped away over the edge of the rounded field. A slim line of wood smoke escaped the chimney top and this too he watched.

Moving now, following the gravel road that ran the top of the hill, he came down through stands of pine and could see the barn below. One of the broad doors stood open, its lowermost corner resting in the dirt. Dark shadows seen within. And though he could smell the cows in the air he had not seen one and he stepped closer, wondering now what had happened and whether the bear had come again and would now emerge from within that greater shadow, covered in the fresh blood of some new slaughter.

He found nothing of the sort, simply hay and the chipped paint of the stalls. The heady aroma of forgotten animals, long vacated from this place. When he came out again he saw the white church truck parked off the road, closer to the pine forest than to the house. A shovel and pick had been leaned against the side of the bed with two yellow cowhide gloves resting atop each pole, like the coxcomb beginnings of some makeshift pair of scarecrows.

Fifty yards away the opening of the screen door startled Will. He turned and looked toward the porch where Lonny now waited, dragging his fingers through his beard and looking across the grass and gravel to Will.

When Will walked up, Lonny had already taken his pouch from one of his pockets and had begun to roll a cigarette. He stood atop the porch. He wore a thin cotton tank that clung tight around his ribcage all the way to the waist of his pants. His hair was mussed and on the skin of his face were the visible imprints of sleep. He spat and then wet his lips and he watched Will where he stood with the beavers on a string over one shoulder and the rifle on the other.

“You sleeping here?” Will asked.

“Sometimes.”

Will watched him rummage through his pocket and then bring up the lighter. Lonny cupped the lighter and brought the flame to his lips, the cigarette flared and the first draught of smoke was taken down within his lungs. All of it seen in a kind of deliberate and slow catharsis, smoke and air, the shift of a breeze, the washing of the smoke across his skin. The smell of the smoke commingled with the smell of the cows now made their absence from this place more apparent. “What happened to the cattle?”

“Eaten,” Lonny said.

Will looked past him to where the door stood open, as if the cows might somehow be within. “And the Kershaws?”

“Gone.”

“Gone?”

Lonny was smiling a little, watching Will, and then he leaned and spat again, not even bothering to get the spittle off the porch.

WILL LEFT THE BEAVERS ON THE KITCHEN COUNTER AND WENT to use the bathroom. When he was done he came back into the small hallway that ran out from the living room. His hands were wet from washing them in the sink and he ran his palms down his shirtfront then flipped them over and ran the backs against the material, drying them one side at a time like the stropping of a razor across the leather of a belt.

Across the hallway was a partially closed bedroom door and he pushed it open and looked within. A queen-sized bed, the sheets pulled back on each side. Two pillows and the indents of two heads, as if whoever had been here had simply risen minutes before and now was out walking the field or waiting on the coffee to finish percolating.

He turned and went farther down the hallway, moving away from the kitchen and living room. He came to two more bedrooms, pushed each door open in turn and glanced inside. In one, blue walls and the hanging models of airplanes built from some kit. In the other, pink walls and a dresser lined along its top with stuffed animals and small plastic toy horses, many toppled over, but some still standing in various poses of action like a frozen moment captured by a child’s diorama.

“I heard you had a daughter.” Lonny stood at the head of the hallway, thirty paces away.

“You heard?”

“That’s what they told me. That’s what they said when they gave me the job of watching over you.”

Will took in the pink color of the walls, the diffuse curtains across the single window. He’d had a daughter. He’d had a wife. A family. Will had had a whole life before this one and it was his fault his wife and daughter were not with him anymore, that they were not part of this world anymore. And though he had come to The Father and to Eden’s Gate for some kind of forgiveness, he knew now that forgiveness was not what he’d found.

He closed his eyes a moment. He smelled dust and something beneath it all that was sweet and almost recognizable. When he opened his eyes again, he turned and looked toward Lonny. “What happened here?” Will asked.

“YOU’RE PART OF US, WILL. BUT WHEN YOU, OR JOHN, OR THE Father, or even I look at the same thing it does not mean we see the same thing.” They walked the field. The blood could still be seen in the grass where the cow had died, where the bear had come and eaten its fill and then moved on again. “Every one of us has our purpose. You have lived out there and you have served the purposes of the church and they are grateful for it.”

“And the Kershaws?” Will asked, still thinking of the empty rooms and what had been said to him. The answer Lonny had given that was not an answer.

“They served their purpose, too. Just as you do, or I do. Each of us a servant.”

“And your purpose?” Will asked. He knelt now, looking out across the field, retracing the steps of the bear, seeing it in his mind. The big loping slide and pull of its muscle as it ran, the sheen of its fur seen beneath the light of the sun and the way the dust of the pasture and earth beneath its great claws would have risen, kicked into the air.

“I make sure The Father and the church receive their due.”

“Is that what they are calling it now?”

“We are a community. As you know well enough, if the church helps you, you are expected to pay that kindness back.”

“And the Kershaws paid?”

“Until they could not anymore.”

“And now?”

“They have been repurposed.”

Will rose and walked toward where the fence had been bent. He could see in the packed dirt and the close-cropped grass, the indents and scuffle of the bear’s movements. “Were the Kershaws here when this happened?”

“They were. But they were already at their end. They had already slaughtered many of their cows to feed the church and their time here and their hold on this place was coming to an end.”

Will looked now to the surrounding wood. He thought of all he’d seen. He thought of the bear out there. He wondered if it was there still. If it watched them even now. “I saw The Father last night,” Will said. “I saw John. I saw the baptism in the river.”

“It is not just the Kershaws that owe a debt to the church. Many in this community have been helped. They have had their mortgages paid. They have had their debts forgiven. They have suckled at the teat of Eden’s Gate,” Lonny said, a wicked smile now breaking from his lips. “And the church and The Father only ask their due, whether that is the slaughter of a cow, or the growing of a crop, or the giving of their soul to Eden’s Gate.”

“Some did not give their soul as freely as the others.”

Lonny laughed. “Some give more freely than others, but in the end they all will give.”

Will thought of the girl’s room. He thought about the past. He thought about how one drink led to another. He thought of another life altogether. Finally, he said, “In the church there is salvation.”

“You’re getting it now,” Lonny said. “And here I was starting to think you’d forgotten.”

THE BEAR PIT HAD BEEN DUG AT THE EDGE OF THE WOOD. THE roots cleanly cut and a thatch of thin pine had been woven to cover it all. At the bottom of the pit, thick, straight branches had been sharpened and then dug into the ground with their points toward the sky. Will looked it over and then, when he was satisfied, he brought the beavers out from the house and using a knife he cut away the string he’d used to tie off the castor glands.

“Did you have help with this?” Will asked, working to get the beavers hung on a thin metal wire that would span the opening of the pit.

“John came with a few of his men and they helped to dig the pit and then when it was done we sharpened the sticks and set them out below. He was quite impressed with your design.”

“You told him about the tiger?”

“I left out some parts.”

“Like how the tiger killed anyone who tried to hunt it?”

“Something like that,” Lonny said.

Will walked the edge of the pit, the wire trailing behind him. He came to a broad tree trunk and tied one end of the wire there.

“This is going to work?” Lonny asked.

Will looked to where Lonny was standing, his eyes on the wire and the beavers that waited there in the dirt. Will brought up one of the beavers and held it tail-end toward Lonny. “What do you smell?” he asked, holding the beaver still and watching as Lonny bent slightly, then his eyes raised on Will.

“Sweet? Almost like Christmas cookies?”

“It’s vanilla,” Will said. “There’s a gland here that smells and even tastes just like vanilla. The old-time trappers used to sell it. Sometimes they still do. Read the label on a box of cookies next time you’re at the store. I believe they list this stuff as natural flavoring.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“I wish I was.”

“And bears like this stuff?”

“They love this stuff.” Will tied the other end of the wire to a tree on the opposite side of the pit and pulled the wire tight, suspending the beavers up over the center of the pit. “Like a fly to shit.”

“Or a bear to beaver ass,” Lonny said.

FOR AN HOUR, AFTER THEY HAD FINISHED, THEY SAT AT THE EDGE of the porch on dining room chairs they’d dragged from inside. Lonny smoked. He picked loose tobacco from his teeth and from his lips and flicked it away. He leaned forward with his forearms resting across his thighs, the cigarette dangling from his fingers. Mostly he watched the edge of the wood where the pit had been dug. He ran his eyes to the far mountains and at times he held out a hand and called for the rifle, putting the scope to his eye and searching through the deep shadows of the forest, or raising the barrel on the mountains so far away.

“You think he’s out there?” Lonny asked, handing the rifle back to Will.

“He’s out there,” Will answered. The forestock was warm where Lonny had held it. Will put the scope to his eye and looked through the glass, then brought the rifle back down again.

“What makes you so confident?”

“He has to be somewhere, doesn’t he?”

Lonny shook his head. “I don’t know how you can do this every day, just sit here like this and wait for something to chance out from between the trees,” he said, standing now. “I found a few liquor bottles the Kershaws had tucked away. You want any to pass the time?”

“You ever wonder what would happen if John or The Father came along and found you breaking their rules?”

“We all have our secrets,” Lonny said. “Every one of us.”

WILL WAITED. HE WATCHED LONNY TAKE DRINK AFTER DRINK and then watched the man curl up on the couch mumbling to himself with the bottle still in hand. Within five minutes there was the sound of his snoring.

Out in the field the light had started to go and the insects danced in the air, a few zigzagging in the last of the light, while others zoomed past like they had somewhere more important to be. He watched them for a time and he watched the place in the woods where the pit was, then he turned from the window and walked down the hall to the first bedroom.

He sat on the bed and looked about the place. A woman’s nightgown hung by a hook close by the door. The material thin and white, the sleeves very short and an intricate stitching at the edges of each that ran out and down and across at the chest. For a while he sat and studied it like some sort of mystery to be solved.

The light had gone out of the sky now and the whole room had grown dark. He ran his eyes over the place and took in the twin dressers and the mirror across the room. A single chair sat in a corner with a laundry basket on it, filled almost all the way to the brim with clothes that looked to be both female and male.

When his eyes came back around on the nightgown he did not know that he would do it until he did. He rose from his seat on the bed, took down the nightgown and held it in his hands. His wife had had one like this once. And though he had trained himself not to think about her, or his daughter, he thought of them now.

He brought the nightgown close to his face. He smelled lavender and dirt and something he thought maybe was sunscreen. He held the gown away from him now and he went to the bed and laid it in the place he thought that it went. Then he rounded the bed and sat for a while, telling himself this was all craziness, that if John or The Father walked in right now, they would know he had not been saved as he had said he was in that long ago time, and that what had troubled him then, still troubled him now, and no salvation by church or The Father could give him respite.

WHEN HE WOKE IN THE MORNING THE GOWN LAY ON THE BED beside him. He reached out a hand toward it and felt of the material and for a moment wished there to be flesh and blood there beside him. He thought of the woman who had been his wife and he thought of the life that had been his own. He closed his eyes and that’s when he heard the soft barking of what could have been a dog pup, but what Will knew was a bear.

Lonny was still asleep on the couch, the bottle fallen from his hand when Will came out of the room. The rifle was still where Will had laid it after coming in off the porch. He took it now, raised it on the pit at the edge of the forest, and looked through the scope. One beaver was missing from the wire and the thatch that covered the trap had been sprung.

Quickly he took the rifle from his shoulder, fingered back the bolt until he could see the bullet in the chamber. He slid the bolt back up into place, pushed the safety forward and now he looked about the room for his pack and the ammo he knew was within. When he found the pack and had pulled it on over his shoulders, he went out onto the porch into the morning light.

Again, he put the scope on the pit trap then ran his eye along the edge of the forest. Everything was as it had been before, except for the one beaver and the latticework covering that had hid the spikes below.

When the barking came again to his ear he knew what they had caught was not the big boar grizzly he had seen in the rain. No, this was not that. He came down off the porch and, as quick and silent as he could, he crossed through the field and came to the place the pit had been dug and looked down.

The bear was a female grizzly and Will knew now why the big boar had come down from the mountains, hungry and following the mother and cub. When Will looked up at the forest there was no sign of the cub he knew there to be. The silence of the place was now full and complete and the cub may be on the run, but most likely hiding. Down in the pit the mother bear lay dead. The spikes seen in places where they had punctured her body and come up through her skin. The sharpened white of the wood now tinged red with her blood.

Will crossed now, moving around one side of the pit trap. There in the dirt at his feet was the imprint of the mother’s paw. Close by, almost erasing that of its mother, the cub’s prints could be seen where it had moved back and forth along the edge of the pit, calling for its mother and waking Will from his sleep.

By the size of the paw print he could see the cub was no more than a few months old and that, as he followed one print after another, it had moved up and away from the field. The path moving in a somewhat direct line toward the roadway above.

He took several steps this way and then turned back to the trap. Two beavers still hung by the wire. He reached and undid one end of the wire and brought the two carcasses down. With the beavers in hand he went back to the small paw prints he’d found and went up the hill in a careful study of the surrounding landscape, watching for movement, listening for sound.

His movements were slow and deliberate. His watchfulness had less to do with startling the cub and more to do with what that cub might have already drawn from the forest. For Will knew it was not just him that was hunting this cub, but likely the larger, boar grizzly.

When he came to the road he could see where the small cub had run across the gravel and Will marked the front paws and then looked for the broad back paws of each foot and the way they had pushed and swept at the gravel. He crossed, looking at each paw print then went down into the forest at the other side of the road and continued, following the prints, sometimes losing them, sometimes taking his direction from a broken twig or a tuft of hair found caught on the rough bark of a pine.

He was two hours in his tracking and by the time he came to the thicket of elderberry the sun had risen high in the sky and the forest had begun to steam from the heat. Will stopped. He had carried the rifle in his hand for the entirety of his search. Now he set it aside and knelt, looking down at the fresh paw print the cub had left in the mud. The whole of the thicket seeming to follow the low depression of a waterway Will could not yet see.

As he stood up, he was almost certain something had moved within the thicket. Without taking up the rifle, he inched forward. He could see now the dark muddied front paws of the cub, and farther up, just where they disappeared within the bush, he saw the brown, almost blond fur of its summer coat.

Not wanting to take his eyes from the spot, he reached and felt for one of the beavers and then once he had the carcass in his hand, he threw it forward. Will waited and watched. The snout emerged, black and pasted with mud, as the bear cub reached with its teeth, first testing the meat, then pulling it back within the thicket, placing one paw atop the carcass to hold it in place as it began to tear at the flesh. All the while keeping an eye on Will where he squatted.

When the cub had chewed the beaver to the white bone, Will reached again and found the second beaver. This time using his knife to quarter it, he threw one piece close to the bear, then a second a little more than a foot from the thicket. When the bear cub had finished the first quarter of it Will watched it come forward, moving low to the ground to gather the second quarter of meat and then lay eating it, still watching Will.

“You were hungry,” Will said, his voice no more than a whisper. The bear turned toward him with its ears cupped and focused in his direction.

He held out another quarter and waited, not putting the beaver meat down on the ground, but instead holding it outward in his hand, the way one might try to steady the nerves of a long-lost dog that had found its way to the wild. When the bear cub came forward and nipped at the meat Will did not let go, forcing the bear to inch closer. The cub a good hundred pounds and possibly more, already showing much of the muscle of an adult grizzly, and the claws that curved and dug up the earth almost like teeth. By the time it had worked up enough confidence to grab the meat from Will’s hand, Will had already begun to wonder how far the cub would be willing to follow him.

THERE WAS LITTLE BUT ASH AND A FEW BLACKENED PIECES OF wood remaining in the place of the fire. Will looked to the river then back down to where the slight breeze off the water turned the ash over and over again, running it now in a dusting across the land. He walked to the river’s edge and saw in the river mud where the worshippers had stood. Scanning across the water, he tried to find the place on the high rock face where he had stood watching, but there were many places and many shadows. He turned away from the river and went up again along the wash to where the fire had burned. The bear cub was there, pawing at a half-burnt piece of wood.

When he approached the bear cub shied away, then came back little by little. A couple hours had passed and Will often lost the cub, but waiting, soon would see the small bear loping through fields, or weaving between the trunks of the pine forest at a distance no less than a hundred feet away.

At the height of his climb up out of the depression where the church had held their bonfire he found he was disappointed not to see the bear climbing up behind him. But when he walked back a hundred feet he could see the bear running at the side of the river, playing in the shallow water, pausing to drink, and then running again. He called to the bear and soon the bear had come up out of the river.

Two hours later when he came up the rise toward his cabin, the bear was no more than twenty feet behind him. As he came into the small clearing before his place, the bear hesitated, standing there like it had come up against a very real, but very invisible wall that surrounded the clearing and the cabin within. The animal paced back and forth and then called out to him, making that low barking sound. Will walked back to it and held out his hand, watching as the bear pushed its nose forward now, smelling his skin then pushing at his hand until Will raised it ever so and began to scratch away at the side of the bear’s face like they had done this intimate appraisal of each other a thousand times before.

WHEN HE WOKE THE NEXT DAY, WILL FED THE BEAR CUB AND then, as was his custom, he set out with his snares and pack, carrying his rifle while his hat shaded his eyes against the rising sun. He walked down the rise and out along the field, the cub following, loping behind, often pausing to bite at the tender tips of grass. When Will passed on into the belt of trees that lined the stream beyond, the bear came crashing after him. The two of them now came to the edge of the stream to drink and to dip paws and hands within the moving water.

Many of the snares had been slipped, and Will went one by one looking each over and then resetting them. Twice, in the place he had set a snare there was only the blood and hair of a rabbit left to find. The bear cub sniffing at the ground, running its nose toward the higher field.

“Coyote is my guess,” Will said. His eyes up as he searched for clues as to where he might find his snare. Then moving in concentric circles, he widened his search until he found the place the rabbit had been carried and then eaten. The remains no more than a collection of bones and tufts of hair, but the wire snare not far off.

By the time he had circled and reset his snares it was midafternoon and he walked back across the Junegrass field with the bear trailing, running then pausing, just as it had before.

When he came to the rise that led toward his cabin the bear cub was still at play there in the field. The sun now ahead of him as Will walked, his shadow behind, stretching away from him down toward the field like his own dark reflection pulled long and thin across the grass.

THE SOUND OF THE RIFLE SHOT CUT THROUGH THE AIR. WILL dropped to his belly, his fingers gripping the roots and dirt, the smell of the grass flooding his nostrils. It had been forty years since anyone had shot at him, and it had been in another country, in what had, at the time, seemed like another world altogether. But the feeling had not changed, nor had the spike of adrenaline that went coursing down every one of his veins.

Another shot fired but this time it was far overhead and he looked up but all he could see was the Junegrass and the tops of the pines farther on. He heard the clack of the bolt and then the dissonant sound of laughter and the talk of men. He came up on one elbow, turning to look back down into the field where the bear cub had paused, sniffing the air then standing on hind legs, looking his way.

The rifle sounded again and Will heard the cut of the bullet as it tore through the air and then he saw the puff of the dirt appear on the ground just to the side of the bear. He heard a man curse then he heard the clack of the bolt again and Will looked to the bear who now was smelling the place the bullet had struck, as if this were some new game Will had set up for him to play.

Will turned over again, he could not see the men up on the hill but he could hear them and he knew almost without any doubt that they were firing on the bear and they were trying to kill it. Will looked one last time to his cabin, but the sun had grown lower and the rays that flooded down were blinding.

He sat now, knowing in some way he was not the target and he took the rifle from his shoulder and pushed forward the safety then raised the scope to his eyes. The first shot he took sprayed rock and dirt up over the snout of the bear. And the bear, as if knowing Will had betrayed him, now turned to regard Will where he sat on the lowermost part of the hill. Will ejected the casing then loaded another. There were men talking now as they came down the hill, laughing and calling to each other and now calling to Will, but Will did not hear them, and he raised the rifle again, set the sight on the bear, putting crosshairs right over the ear before pulling the trigger. The bullet, as far as he could tell, buzzed right by the ear and set the bear to running.

Just as the bear came to the far belt of trees at the other edge of the meadow it paused and looked back. Will watched it through the scope. He watched the bear taste the air. He watched the eyes roam and settle on Will and the men that now approached from up on the hill. When the next rifle shot sounded, Will could not tell if the bullet had struck home. He saw only that the bear jumped and then, like it had never been there at all, it was gone, passed away from the visible world into the dark thicket of trees that lined the stream farther on.

Will turned and saw John Seed moving down through the grass, a rifle in his hand with a wood stock and bolt-action lever, the gray smoke that came from the barrel curving up and over his shoulder like some sort of serpent. His men, including Lonny, all followed behind. All of them carrying weapons and all spreading outward as they came on Will and now circled him where he sat in the grass, his own Remington rifle held close in his lap.

“You’re a man who likes to play at dangerous games,” John said as he came up. “I remember how you used to drink. I remember what state you were in when you came and asked us to help you. Are you still that man, Will?”

“No.”

“That’s good to hear, Will. That’s very good to hear. It looked for a moment there like you might have forgotten.”

“How did it look?”

“Like maybe you were trying to make friends with the set of fangs that might kill you one day.”

Will ran his eyes from John over to Lonny. When he looked back at John he asked if they had found the bear in the pit.

“That’s why we came here,” John said. “Lonny suggested it. He said you can track just about anything. That true?”

Will moved his eyes to Lonny again. “Since you all set me up at this place, I’ve hunted nearly everything that walks or crawls on four legs. What is it you’re looking for here?”

“We got us a bit of a situation and we’d like you to solve it. You think you could find someone for us?”

“Someone?”

“A girl has gone missing.”

“I’m not any kind of detective, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I’m not asking you to be. I’m asking can you track her through these woods and bring her back in for us?”

“You’re asking me to hunt down a human being?”

John smiled. “I’m not really asking.”