Skeletons (48 page)

"At an angle, right?"

I yanked the stake out, angled it away from the tent then pounded it down.

Jack let me finish the work. _

"Want to try it out?" I said, standing back. I waited for him to try to knock the stakes loose.

Instead, he went to the flap of the tent, nudged it aside, and went in.

"Crazy wolf," I said, shaking my head. I laughed and followed Jack into the tent.

When he objected to my lighting the heater, I complied. Instead, I took it outside, cooked a meal for both of us, then stored it in the snowmobile. The blanket floor Jack let me keep. He didn't object when I lit the Coleman lamp for a little while, just to stave off the darkness. When I finally turned it out and lay down to sleep, Jack once again edged in close.

That night, out of the wind completely, with the animal's warm body next to me, I slept soundly, and the next morning I was so comfortable I didn't want to get up.

The next day the flurries intensified. By midmorning gray clouds had darkened, fat with snow, and the wind picked up.

Jack made me stop before the brunt of the storm hit. I was praying there was a town nearby. I thought Jack had found one when he went well ahead on one of his scouting missions. But when I caught up with him, he merely refused to get into the snowmobile and made me halt.

"Come on, boy, we'll keep going, maybe there's shelter up ahead.

He looked at me with his calm eyes.

"All right, dammit."

I gunned the snowmobile's engine and followed slowly as Jack turned and trotted off into the foggy whiteness.

There was barely enough time to set the tent up in the hollow of a rock outcropping before the storm hit with full force. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. The very air turned white. Snow fell in sheets, inches at a time.

I crawled into the tent. Jack followed. I threw back my parka hood, began to pull my gloves off to open a can of beans. But Jack closed his mouth over my glove, preventing me.

"What, no food?"

He waited until I had put the hood back on, then nudged me down into a curled sleeping position. "Is this it, Jack? We sleep until it's over?"

In answer I felt his heavy, strong body snuggle close to mind, heard him give a heavy sigh of relaxation. Soon he was asleep.

Though I was weary, sleep did not come so easily to me. I lay staring at the side of the tent, hearing the swishing wash of heavy snowflakes against the fabric. By the shadow of outside light I could see the snow piling up against it. The world held a soft, hissing sound.

I tried to remember what had happened to me. Beyond being cold, I could remember little.
Reesa's
face rose into my mind. For a moment I saw her smile distinctly, felt the curve of her body against me. But already she was fading into memory. It frightened me that she was so easily gone.

"Am I really
Kral
Kishkin
?" I asked myself. The name Peter Sun, and all the other names, didn't seem to mean anything.

Yes, you are
Kral
Kishkin
.

And then suddenly I was asleep, and just on the cusp of consciousness, as I drifted down, the dream of the young girl with brown skin came, so real I could almost touch her, could almost smell the flowers in the meadow around her. Behind her, outlined against the sky, was a huge ship tilted at an angle, and around her as she opened her mouth to speak were the cries of animals and birds . . .

Through the dim changes of light sky against dark, by which I calculated the passing of day to night and back again, the storm lasted three days.

The first day Jack would not let me rise. It was not hard to refuse him. I had an acute physical awareness of the cold. I knew that if I left the warm cocoon the wolf and I had made, even for an instant, the cold would get into me and never leave again. When the first hunger pangs passed, it was easy to stay where I was. I watched the movement of light across the top of the wall of the tent. Everything else became as a living dream. Time seemed suspended. I discovered that my mind could mold time, if I willed it to, make the day seem to pass faster, suspend itself in the continuum. Night came after day, and then day came again, and it all seemed like minutes to my numb consciousness.

But toward the end of the second day hunger became something that could not be ignored. The wolf let me sit up. Immediately I wanted to lie down again, find that spot of warmth. My shivering gloved hands grasped a can of beans, sought to open its top.

It took a long time. But finally, shaking with cold, I scooped some of the cold beans out in front of Jack and sat hunched and trembling to eat the rest myself. The vision of tea rose into my mind and would not leave. Ready to bear Jack's wrath, I fired up the heater to low, relishing its glow of warmth, and melted some snow. To my surprise the wolf ignored my actions and accepted a plate of steaming water when I placed it in front of him. For myself I brewed a mug of tea, and sat cross-legged, sipping it furiously, rocking to and fro, muttering to myself.

When his water had cooled, Jack drank it, then stared at me until I had turned off the heater.

"You're a h-h-h-hard master, J-j-jack," I stuttered. He only regarded me calmly, and curled back down to sleep again.

I followed him.

The next morning the storm broke. I was so attuned to the swishing sound of snow brushing the tent that when it was gone, I was instantly aware.

I tried to get up. But the wolf growled, low in his throat, and made me stay.

In midafternoon Jack let me rise. The top of the tent was ringed in brilliant light. By the rise of snow on the tent nearly two feet had fallen.

More than two feet. Our little hollow had protected us from all but the hard swirl of snow that made its way in. Without this protection the snowmobile would have been buried. As it was, I spent an hour and a half digging it out.

Beyond our hollow half the world had disappeared. There was not a cloud in the blue sky. The ground was a plain of whiteness. Even the ruts and hills we had passed on our journey here had been all but obliterated by the all-covering snow. To the east our path looked like a stretch of colorless eternity, with no break in the landscape, no refuge from the whiteness.

Jack trotted off a short distance, stopped, and relieved himself. Then he returned, nudged me toward the snowmobile.

He made off east until he was but a dot on the landscape.

"You're the boss," I muttered, and broke camp.

Over flat nothingness we covered two hundred more miles.

The snow, where the line of the storm had cut north, finally began to thin. The world was still blindingly white. But now the tops of hillocks and trees became visible. Mountains rose to our left, disappeared as we left them behind. This country was rugged but not as fierce. I began to have thoughts of humanity again.

Once, and only once, did we see a sign of other intelligent life. A lone balloon, bright red and green, passed high overhead, its shape a dreamlike intrusion on the blue and white that had come to be my world. It was soundless, too high to make out anyone in the basket. Jack made sure we hid ourselves in the shadow of a conifer, until the apparition had moved in a silent line down the sky's horizon.

For the rest of the day I thought about the balloon, wished that it would rise back into my sight, bringing a connection, colorful if tenuous, to the rest of the world. As for Jack, he, too, seemed aware of the apparition, and kept us near covering and shelter.

Four days passed. The weather warmed perceptibly, from bone-numbing cold to a bearable chill. The wind also had died. At night, sleep was almost peaceful.

Jack, though, seemed restless. His scouting trips became more lengthy.

Once, when he didn't return after nearly a day, I thought I had lost him. It was then that a true despair entered into me. The thought of navigating this white wasteland by myself was abhorrent. I had come to rely on the animal as more than a guide. I feared that without him, without that connection to the world of the living, I might go mad.

But he did return. I had never seen him so excited. Though night was falling, he growled and pushed at me until I agreed to repack camp and ride.

Our headlight cut a beam through the falling darkness. Jack made me turn it out. We drove by the light of a near-full moon.

"I don't understand why this can't wait till morning," I said. There was anything but scolding in my voice, though. At that moment, happy as I was to see Jack again, I would have attempted to follow him up to the moon.

We rode for hours. If Jack had done this on his own, he was truly a remarkable creature. But apparently he had. When I sought to stray from the path he wanted me to ride, he would growl and nudge me right or left. There, inevitably, would be Jack's paw tracks in the snow, picked out by the headlight, to guide us.

After half the night and fifty miles had passed, a city rose in front of us like a majestic vision.

Jack sat back on his haunches and howled.

It was a beautiful sight, and became more beautiful as we approached. Minarets rose from the floor of a plain as flat and wide as the eye could see. Snow swirled through the streets, untrammeled save for Jack's paw prints. The dreamy colors in the moonlight—orange, red, blue—were breathtaking. Every building was topped by a swirling, colorful tower. Windows sparkled with gem-like glass cut into intricate patterns. The city was a page out of the Arabian Nights.

We followed Jack's footprint trail up the main street. There was some damage to the buildings. Mostly there was silence. Shop doors stood open. A breeze whistled through the open crack of a bejeweled church window.

Jack threw back his head and howled again.

In answer there was the hint of a cry, which echoed past us, whispering along the streets and into the alleys.

Again Jack howled.

Again he was answered by that ghostly cry.

Jack regarded me solemnly.

"What is it?" I asked. "Who is calling?"

Jack nudged me ahead.

Down the silent street we rode, our track churning into the snow like an interloper. The shops thinned, transmogrified into rows of brightly painted houses. Windows were hexagonal, diamond-shaped, octagonal, painted in enameled borders, filled with rose-and-yellow glass.

I stopped, idled the engine.

Jack howled again.

The cry came, very close to our left.

I turned the engine off.

Jack jumped from the snowmobile, trotted ahead of me.

I followed, taking the Coleman lantern and a rifle. The door of the second-to-last row house on the left stood ajar. From inside came the unearthly cry. Jack seemed unconcerned, nosed the door open, trotted in. I turned the lantern up.

Inside was a storybook room, with carved furniture neatly arranged. One curious-looking chair was pulled out to the center of the room. It held ropes. One of the ropes was tied in a knot around the trigger of a hunter's rife.

In one corner of the room, woven of strong twigs, was a large basket.

Jack howled, an unearthly sound in the little room. I approached the basket. In it, barely alive, was a wolf.

I bent down and examined it.

It was a female. It was frighteningly thin, its ribs hollow bellows. It looked up at me with the same calm stare as Jack did, its tongue lolling out.

I went back to the snowmobile. In a little while I had heated water, and was spooning the warm liquid into the wolf's mouth while Jack sat by, watching closely.

I tried to feed the wolf, but the animal would not keep beans down.

In the wood stove I built a small fire. Soon we were warm and snug.

"How did this happen, Jack?"

The wolf regarded me solemnly, then padded to the table next to the roped chair. There was a notebook on the table. I picked it up.

I could find nothing with the man's name on it. But he must have been remarkable. In the notebook was a record of the day he had been hunting in the surrounding hills and discovered the remains of a massacre. Other hunters, it seemed, had come across a wolf pack and nearly killed them all. The only two alive were two young ones, Jack, whom the man had named
Chee-na
, and a female, whom he named Ra-see. The words meant "light" and "clouds." Both animals had been wounded.

The man took them home, nursed them to health. At first his neighbors thought him crazy. There had even been a movement to make him give up the beasts. But after
Chee-na
had saved a local girl from being killed by a mountain lion, the opinion of the locals changed.
Chee-na
and Ra-see became local celebrities, pampered and respected.

The notebook was filled with stories about
Chee-na
. and Ra-see.

Then its tone became dark when the time of the skeletons came.

The man, and most of the town, held off the invaders for days. The skeletons were isolated, and most they were able to kill. Then a local man, who was superstitious, got it into his head that the skeletons must not be stopped, committed suicide, becoming skeleton, and opened the town to attack.