Whispers of Old Winds (4 page)

I feel something digging on my chest, open my eyes and know that Digger is still working to get my shirt open.

“That’s about all I can get,” Digger says.

“Okay. Good,” I say, actually feeling the exposed warmth from his body. I swirl the ski pole, now almost an automatic movement not requiring any thought or intent—it just happens.
We need to breathe
.

“I feel like I’m cramping up,” Digger says as he manages to slightly move his legs.

“Yeah, me too.” I try to move my legs and I can’t. I can’t feel my toes. My legs, yes, but I can’t feel my toes.

“When will they get here?” Digger says.

“Who?”

“Jim. The others.”

“Oh….” I don’t really know how long we’ve been here. I know Jim Harris will wonder where we are. But when? How long will it take him or Mary to think something might have happened to us? “I don’t know. They’ll be coming, though. Soon.” Do I believe this? Of course I do. I have to.

“You and Michael?” Digger says.

“Yes?”

“You’re good together. I mean… I don’t have anyone. Yet. And I just thought that it would be nice to have someone… care right now.”

“Oh, Digger, we all care. Everybody thinks you’re….” What do I say?
You’re a sweet kid, a kind soul who’s got a lovely ass, and, yes, you’re not the brightest bulb—maybe just naive, not dumb—and we all…
“You’re a good man, Digger. We all care.”

“Yeah, but….”

This is bullshit! We’ve got to get out of here!
I won’t have this conversation with Digger. What the hell are we doing? Commiserating about our feelings? Wishing things were different because, well, by golly, we’re going to die here and a little kumbaya is just the thing to send us off into….

“Digger!” I say a little too forcefully. “I want you to really concentrate on trying to move yourself. I can’t because you’re right on top of me. Move your legs, your arms.”

“Oh, Sheriff—”

“I mean it. You’ve got to try.”

“Okay.”

“Try to move to your left, my right. There’s space to my right that seems to be a void or something where the snow isn’t packed as hard. I think you can push yourself up too. Something up above is… shielding us from the snowpack.”

Digger’s movements are agonizingly slow, but I feel him make progress. His left arm or hand actually moves the ski pole.

“Good,” I say. “Keep moving.”

“Trying to,” he says. “Hard work.”

“I know. But, we need to do something.”

He continues to inch himself to my right. His mouth is now directly over mine, his breaths coming fast and warm. “Gotta rest,” he huffs.

“Okay.”

He turns his head and rests the side of his face on mine, his ear now on my mouth.

I turn my head to the left while again moving the ski pole with my right hand. I hear….

“I don’t know if—”

“Be quiet. I think I hear something.”

And I do hear something. Someone is yelling, and there’s the unmistakable sound of a diesel engine clanking in the distance.

“You hear that?”

“Yeah,” Digger says. “A truck.”

I adjust my hold on the ski pole, moving my hand as far down on it as I can. I then shove it up as far as I can and twirl it, and I keep twirling it. I hear more shouting, and the diesel revs. There’s a metal-on-metal sound too. “Someone is here, Digger. Reach out with your left arm and grab the ski pole.”

He grunts with the effort to stretch his arm out. “Where is it?”

“I think you’re too far up. Bring your arm back a little toward your feet.”

He grunts some more, and I almost lose my grip on the pole when he finally grabs it. “I got it,” he says.

“Okay. You’ve got to raise it up. Get a good hold of it and raise it up. Twirl it around.” I can’t see the hole above anymore as his head is over mine. I feel his movement, though, and more light seeps into the space around me. “Good deal, Digger.”

“Yeah. You hear that?”

The sound of the diesel is now a constant rev, the shouting continues. “Yes, I do,” I say, seeing only Michael’s smile as if he’s here, right now, right here.

M
ICHAEL
IS
here. He’s not crying, but I think he’s close to it. “I saw you,” he says, his eyes meeting mine, his expression so sad.

I’m lying on a stretcher, and someone tells Michael they’ve got to go. I’m lifted into a boxy ambulance, and the last thing I see is Michael standing there, his hand to his chest, where he clutches my dog tags. “I’ll follow you down the mountain,” he says. It appears as though he wants to say something more, but someone closes the ambulance door

Merle Hogan, a volunteer fireman with the Pine County Fire District, sits beside me as Bob somebody—I can’t remember his last name—stretches my arm out and says, “You’ll feel a small prick.” He carefully inserts the IV needle, and I think, well, small pricks are okay if they’re sleepers.

I sense the ambulance begin to move. “How’s Digger?” I ask, turning to Merle.

“He’s as good as you. They took him in the other ambulance.”

“Good. That was Skip’s tow truck. Right?”

“Sure was,” Merle says. “Deputy Jim came up with the idea, and it was a good one.”

“I know they pulled me up with his cable, but how’d somebody get down to us without causing a slide?”

“Deputy Jim again. He got those two twenty-foot ladders old man Landon paints with and just kept sliding one in front of the other as he made his way down to you guys. One of you kept waving that pole around, and he zeroed in on that.”

“Digger okay?”

“You already asked that, Sheriff, and, yeah, he’s doing good. I’m going to get your boots off.”

“Okay.”

“You hurting anywhere?”

“Just my head.”

“Yeah. You and Digger both got some ugly on your foreheads. What happened?”

“I think we hit each other when we fell.”

“You feeling woozy?”

“A little.”

“Look at my light,” Bob says, and he shines his tiny flashlight into my eyes. “Might have a concussion.”

“Great,” I say. “Do you know who finally decided that Digger and I might be in trouble?”

“Oh yeah. Mary said Michael came into the station a while ago and said something was wrong. Then Henry Tall Horse came in almost right behind Michael and said the same thing. He told Mary exactly where you were. Deputy Jim got the ladders and pulled Skip outta the bar and told him to get his ass up here.”

Michael
. “Michael, you say?”

“Yup. Don’t know how he knew, but he was right.”

“There was something on top of us. A frozen body maybe?”

“Strangest thing I ever saw. It was a black bear, but it wasn’t. It had long legs and arms. Spread-eagle. Frozen stiff. Had mostly a bear’s face and all, but there was more bare flesh on it than a bear usually has, and those arms and legs…. I think Deputy Jim is gonna have the forest service take a look at it.”

I feel as though my eyelids have become too heavy to stay open. And they don’t. My mind, too, becomes heavy. Dark and heavy.

I
AWAKE
.
I don’t know where I’m at. I see the tube in my arm and then turn my head and see Michael is curled up on a chair to my right. He is asleep, using his coat as a cover. It is dark except for the dim lighting I see through the glass pane in the door. Yes, I’m in the small hospital thirty miles from Gunderson Junction.

“How you feeling?”

The voice is old, ancient. I turn my head to the left and see Henry Tall Horse, his face bathed in shadows. “Hank,” I say.

“Yes.”

I try to remember. It had all started with Hank. I went to see him, then I went back with Digger. And then…. “It was a bear.”

“No, that was John Spotted Elk. He was a skinwalker. He lived over the mountain a ways. But he was a skinwalker.”

I see PFC Joe Hill pointing at the blurry specter of an owl that became the shadow of a man. “That’s…. No, that was….” I shake my head.

“Yeah,” Hank says. “He came up to my cabin lots of times. Wanted to come in. Skinwalkers don’t like juniper berries, so I kept him out by putting them around my door and windows. I saw a black bear when I was cutting Christmas trees. It was on the other side of the bowl. But it was walking funny, like it didn’t really know how to walk like a bear. Then I knew it was John Spotted Elk. He was skinwalking.”

“You said you hollered at it,” I say, remembering what he had told me in his parlor.

“Yeah. Only way to kill a skinwalker. I yelled, ‘John Spotted Elk, you are a skinwalker!’ and he spread out his arms and legs and fell dead into the bowl.”

“You told Digger you saw a body.”

“Yeah. I was having some fun with your helluva deputy.”

“Jesus, Hank.”

“Yeah. I watched you and your helluva deputy go up the mountain. Went up there myself a little later. Heard you call out to Michael….”

I hear rustling to my right. I turn my head and Michael is standing there.

He grabs my hand. “Sam,” he says, “you’re awake. Are you okay?”

I see his eyes, his beautiful face. “I’m fine. Head hurts, but I’m fine.”

“You were talking,” Michael says.

“Yeah.” As I turn my head to the left, I say, “Hank was telling me….”

And Hank isn’t there. I look around the room. No Hank.

“Yes,” Michael says when I turn back to him.

“No…. Guess I’m just… dreaming.”

“Doctor said you have a mild concussion.”

“That would explain a lot.”

“He said you could go home tomorr—”

“Michael, you said you saw me. When they were putting me in the ambulance, you said you saw me.”

“I did.”

“When?”

He squeezes my hand and shakes his head. “I’d closed up the shop and was backing out of my parking space and I saw you. Heard you first. You told me not to go to the cabin. You told me to come up the mountain to the bowl. Then I saw you. Just a flash, but I saw you in a cold, dark place. I knew something was wrong, so I went to the Sherrif’s Office. Told them where you were, that you were in trouble.”

“And Hank showed up too?”

“Yes. He came in right behind me.”

“Wow.” I’m not sure what to think at this point, but I imagine the unknowable multitude of magic on this earth is born in places that defy any understanding of it. “Wow,” I say again, knowing that I had just spoken to Hank.
He was right here, for Christ’s sake!

“We’re saving the party for when you get out of here,” Michael says.

“Oh. The party… I’m sorry, I….”

“It was a skinwalker, wasn’t it?”

“What?”

“I saw it, Sam. It wasn’t a normal bear.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I….”

“You’re here now,” Michael says, and I see his eyes begin to well up. “That’s all that matters.”

“I spoke to you,” I say. “I kept remembering… us.”

“I know.”

“Every moment I was there, you were there with me.”

“I know.”

My own eyes are blurry with wetness, and I draw my fingers across them.

I
INVITED
Digger to our delayed Christmas party because—and I told Michael this—Digger and I had been as intimate as two men can be with each other without having sex. Besides that, I knew Digger was alone up here, his family somewhere in Kansas, and he lived by himself in the little trailer park just outside the Junction. It was a dismal place to live because it had been constructed on cheap land with a view of the highway and little else. So, it was three couples—James and Carl, Melissa and Audra, Michael and me—and Digger.

Digger and I had both come out of the hospital within forty-eight hours, both with ugly bruises on the left side of our foreheads. Two fingers on Digger’s right hand were watched closely for frostbite. The color came back in those fingers, and except for the trauma of the experience itself, he and I were fine, though we both continued to have headaches of decreasing intensity.

I think Digger was somewhat intimidated at first by the casualness with which we all interacted with one another. I don’t know if he’d ever experienced same-sex couples just being themselves, but he soon eased into the situation, even telling us about his frustrated sex life, admitting, “You know, a trailer park is not the best place to meet women.”

We had a nice time. Michael had made gifts, all wood-sculpted figures, each different—a bear, elk, mule deer, owl. He’d not had time to make one for Digger and instead gave him an acrylic painting on tile of a naked boy riding a horse.

“Wow,” Digger had said when he saw it.

Michael then told me my gift would come later.

I
STOKE
the fire with Douglas fir logs cut from our property and now dried for two seasons; it burns well, bright and hot.

Michael brings two glasses and a bottle of wine from the kitchen, and sits on the rug as I pull the grate across the fire and join him. “It was a nice party,” Michael says as he pours the wine. “Digger was fun. He’s so… naive, I guess is the right word.”

I take the glass Michael holds out to me. “Yes, he is. And it was a great party. Your gifts were perfect. I’ve never seen the painting you gave Digger.”

“I did it last year.”

“Any symbolism to it?”

He smiles. “Oh, innocence, I guess.”

I nod. “Naive, innocent…. That’s Digger for sure.”

Michael smiles, then sips his wine. “Do you want your present?”

I shake my head. “Not necessary. I’ve got all the gifts I need. Right here. Right now.”

“I know. But,” he says, standing, “it means something. What I made means something.”

I watch his face as he says this, and I see in his expression sadness, or maybe confusion. “Sure,” I say as he turns and walks to the bedroom.

He returns with what is clearly a painting, larger than the ones he usually creates. He keeps the back of it turned toward me as he sits, resting the bottom of the painting on the rug. He sighs and turns the front of the painting toward me.

It depicts two men from a viewpoint below them. One man lies on his back, his head turned to the right. The other man lies facedown atop the other, his head turned to his right. Above the men is what looks like a black cross hovering over them, but it is not a cross, as it is thicker, more rounded on the edges. At the top left, there is a small figure standing a distance from the men, looking directly at them. His hair is long and gray and is obviously being blown by a fierce wind.