Free Hold the Dark: A Novel by William Giraldi Page B

would be found, and then he’d have scant time before police arrived here for him. Three or four hours in this weather, five tops. He stood in the root cellar to see the hole where the wolf writer had found his boy. He moved near to touch it, to smell the cold of it.
    A meal of old eggs and hardened bread—he tasted nothing—and at the table he opened the folder of documents on Medora. A police report in faded ink. Photographs of his boy on the floor of the cellar. Where the Chevy Blazer might have been seen. Map of the highway between cities and east toward Yukon, a single blacktop artery with paved and unpaved roads branching off like capillaries.
    On the map red dots indicating a possible direction. Many roads, he saw, were not marked, were unknown to townsfolk and cops, most no more than paths trimmed through a hide of birch and alder, unseen from the air. Both he and Medora had been on those hidden paths since childhood, since they’d first learned to ride snow machines, four-wheelers, dirt bikes. Wherever she’d fled, she’d fled, he knew, on those paths. He lit the folder at a corner, blew on the flame till it rose, then dropped it in the hearth to burn.
    Aspirin for the ache in his shoulder, then more coffee. He stood at his wife’s bureau and turned over each sheet of paper, each envelope. Unwashed laundry in a wicker basket by his foot: he brought her socks and underthings to his nose and mouth and inhaled the dank scent of her. At the bottom of the basket was the boy’s T-shirt, a red race car with a bumper face that smiled—it still held his child’s smell. Slone slipped it into his jacket pocket. In the bedroom he emptied her dresser and stripped the bed. Beneath her pillow an Inuit shaman’s mask made of driftwood and pelt—the face of a wolf.
    He sat on his son’s bed. He looked and looked more and did not blink. Outside, the morning moved without him.
    He began filling duffel bags. Socks and gloves, thermal leggings and insulated overalls. A hunting knife, ammunition, clips, cartridges. Compound bow and quiver. Maglite and rope. Field glasses. From the bathroom: ibuprofen, antibiotics, aspirin, bandages, peroxide, razor blades, stool softener. In the hollow floor of the closet a compartment of firearms: 9mm handgun, twelve-gauge autoloader, Remington rifle that had belonged to his father. The AR-15 semiautomatic he found near the back door: what the wolf man had taken on his hunt.
    Cheeon had disentombed his Bronco from snowfall, changed the battery and fluids, filled the tank, draped the engine with an electric blanket to warm it back from death. Into the back hatch Slone loaded the duffels and guns. Blankets, a pillow, two containers of gas, snow boots. Pickaxe, shovel, chain saw. A sack of nonperishables with peanut butter, crackers, chocolate. The truck turned over with the first crank of the key and Slone let the engine rev and warm, the windshield and rear defrosters droning on high. He loaded the pistol and tucked it into his belt, then the shotgun and placed it beneath the seat.
    Then he made for the old woman.
    * * *
    The village’s main road was vacant this soon after dawn. In the year he’d been gone nothing he could see had changed here. The men and boys had left already for hunting, or to check their lines in the holes they’d drilled at the lake. Women tended to children and chores inside their cabins. A team of sled dogs staked beside a home stood in silence when they saw him and lay down again as he passed. The old woman’s hut sloped beside the generator shack. It had been there since long before he was a boy, behind the well house—a place they’d all avoided as children.
    When he entered she was upright in a chair at the mouth of the fire, rocking among distaff and debris, among cordwood, pelts, stacks of leather-bound books arrayed as furniture. In this single-room hut the heavy stench of wood smoke, of boiled moose, unwashed flesh. On the back wall an old wrinkled poster