Free Wilderness by Lance Weller Page A

seabed, but the forest behind was still and quiet. The occasional call of a far-off owl and the creak of the trees in a high, soft wind. Out on the water, algae glowed weirdly green under the moon and stars, the faint band of the Milky Way.
    The light that night was such that when Abel looked he could see the shadows individual trees cast along the beach and out onto the water and upon the carved stones at the headland. The solid black shadow of the forest itself, as though the forest was a single thing and not composed of many and much. Abel raised his arm again and his hand seemed strangely aglow, insubstantial so that he wondered was he man or ghost. Wondered for a moment if he, indeed, had fallendead in the Wilderness and had all these long, blue years since been nothing but a form of dream or dreaming.
    Abel lay back. He closed his eyes against the brightness of the night and listened to the constant sound of the ocean at its labors. Underbrush crackled softly as deer explored the slopes above the beach. Abel closed his eyes and tried hard not to see her, to keep seeing her. He tried not to see either of them, but it came back, like it always did, in the fall when the air grew crisp and the leaves began to turn, then die and fall.
    His child was dead, his wife followed soon after, and that happy portion of his life in a house beside a lake with a family ended that morning well before the war came because he had to bury his daughter in a grave too small and commit the wife to a sanitarium in up-state New York where her grief was such it finally killed her. Abel locked the house—for all he knew it still stood—and left that place because he could no longer take being there. His own grief was nothing but suffering, then passing through sorrow, rage. A black gall. Nights steeped in drink. Days of hungry wandering. Begging, petty thievery, and a single wretched night of a full moon passed out facedown in some churchyard’s grass. And when war did come, Abel Truman found himself in North Carolina with a regiment of Tar Heels for no other reason than that was where he had happened to be. And then all the rest had happened, and finally, ten and twenty years in a one-room shack on the shore of the cold, gray Pacific, and his life was blown. Passed him by like a slow, tannic river easing out to sea. He’d eked out a meager life beside the waters and when he felt he’d finally had enough he’d walked into the ocean and the ocean had cast him back.
    The old man woke to the sound of the dog growling softly. It was still dark, and the tide was up like a dreamlike and unsteady floor. Ragged chains of waves curved southward down the beach. The dog was beside him, hackles raised, its growl low, deep in its chest.Its battered ears stood cocked, and Abel could feel it tense with straining excitement.
    “What?” he asked. “What’re you—” And then it came again. Far off, miles away and inland, a long, choked howling as of a single wolf in the low country where wolves did not often visit. The old man sat up against the rocks, frowning but with a curious thrill prickling his skin. This was not singing. Even though the moon had risen to hang silver and bright in the cold sky, this was not singing. This was longing and fear and pain such as Abel had never heard from an animal before. It howled again, and the moon fled behind a cloud as though chased. The howl stretched out over the vast, rolling wilderness, echoed along the inland waterways, and fell softly on the dark tide, leaving in its wake a sudden silence slowly filled by ocean sounds and wind. The dog whined and paced round about the old man’s sleeping place as though it had heard something that much disturbed it.
    Abel sniffed and licked his lips then and suddenly fell into a harsh coughing that went on and on. He swore softly, and when it was over his throat was raw. He listened hard for any other distant sound the wolf might make or for others to answer, but there was