Free Wilderness by Lance Weller

never-ending. Abel walked the day long and in the evening, when there was still yet light, made his camp on a narrow shelf of land that was protected on three sides by huge, wind-scarred boulders and on the fourth by the ocean itself. For a time, he squatted to watch the sun sink and set long fingers of cloud orange and red against the sparking dark.
    It was warm with no rain and little wind, and he knew this place well enough not to have need or want of fire. Exploring a little around the stones in the fading light, Abel found small petroglyphscarved here and there upon their ancient surfaces. Old, old fashionings of whales stretched leaping from waves of granite. Crude human faces with mouths yawning in terror, shock, outrage, grief, and joy. Countless luck-bringing clamshells scratched into the stones, and little manlike figures crouched and ran and hunted through the cold, gray rock. All of it quiet evidence of long-dead tribes who in ages past whaled these waters, hunted these forests, carved these stones, and who were now as lost as the individual stories told by these cold, flat scratchings.
    The wind rose with the tide and came moaning over the rocks to fill with sound the pauses between the ceaseless slap of waves on sea stacks and the quiet, bubbling rush of tidal pools filling and emptying and filling again. The wind set the old man’s sleeves to flapping. He put his good palm against the cold rock face and traced with his forefinger the chiseled grooves of a leaping orca, wondering what strength the act of carving had imparted to the whaler. Abel squatted beside the stone as the sun went down, wondering what he might carve had he time and strength. What fortune such creation might bring. Would he trust his heart’s own desire to cold rock? Or some other thing whose shape would remain unclear until the carving was complete and that would endure until the breaking of the earth? Finally Abel stood and picked his way back down to his campsite.
    The sun sank beyond the quivering rim of the ocean. Sheets of coppery light trembled up the sky to fix the sea stacks to their silhouettes like lonesome picket guards beyond the pale of the camp-fire. Abel settled down with his back against a stone and wrapped his blanket around his legs. He breathed the good, tart scent of India rubber. After a time, the dog came up the beach like a flake of shadow split from the darker night that gathered in the forest behind them. It stood in the sand downwind of him and swung its head this way and that to collect his scent, then, finding it, came up onto the shelf and sat nearby. Abel smelled the dog’s supper on its breath—the thickscent of heat and blood. “What did you get?” he asked it. “You get yourself a little gull?”
    The dog lay down by taking short little steps with its forelegs, and Abel sneered. “Now I suppose you’re just going to go on to sleep, ain’t you? Never even crossed your mind to bring me nothing.” He sighed dramatically and, as the dog watched, reached a twist of venison from his pocket. The dog pricked up its ears as he chewed and Abel shook his head. “Don’t even think about it,” he said. The dog barked softly, cocked its head, and pawed the ground. The old man took another bite and tossed the remainder to it. “You’re pitiful, you know that?” he said as the dog gulped down the dried meat.
    Abel settled down and lay on his back to look at the stars. The moon was a silver coin and Mars, just there, a small dot pale as a freckle in the western night. He studied the stars, how their rarefied light glistened. Raising his arm, he traced Orion’s belt and outflung arms and touched the dippers as his father had shown him when he was a boy. Abel moved his shoulder so he could reach to touch some few other constellations, but such movement sent ripples of pain through his left arm and he swore softly and settled down again.
    The tide rolled slowly in, attended by the rush and clatter of the