Archangel (10 page)

Deep in the night, an old black bear came to the place where James Pfeiffer had died. It was following the scent of blood. The bear did
not walk up the long dirt road from town, or across the wreckage of the clear-cut ground beyond the road. It arrived through the forest. The long pine branches slipped against its fur.

The northern lights glimmered like abalone shell. There was no moon. All the stars were clear. When it reached the clearing, the bear crouched down. With its black bayonet claws, it dug into the earth and sawdust where Pfeiffer had fallen. It sniffed the bloodstained dirt, then swung its head away and snorted and breathed in clean air.

After a minute, the bear slipped back into the woods. Meshed branches cut out the stars and the sky until there was nothing but blackness. The bear groped its way past trees, claws brushing through the combs of pine needles, feeling the dark the way the blind feel the absence of light.

Gabriel crawled out of his tent. It was six-thirty in the morning. He had been dreaming of the Gulf again. He kept waiting for the dream to lose its sharpness and take on the blurred edges of every other repeating dream he had experienced. But the oil fields were like nothing he had ever seen before. He was thankful that the rising sun had snuffed out his sleep, dappling the shadows of birch leaves on his tent.

In the mornings, he always felt hope. There was something about starting out that made him believe all he had set out to do was possible. The rain and the darkness made him cynical, but today there was none of that and, as he looked up through the trees, Gabriel could see only the vault of blue sky. Days like this, he felt the preciousness of his solitude.

He dropped the tent and packed it. Then he sat on his rucksack and ate the blueberries he had saved from the day before. They were cold, and the cold took their sweetness away. He had almost a cupful of the birch sap in his tin mug. He made a wooden peg from some deadfall birch and stuck it into the hole he had cut the night before. The peg fit tightly and stopped the flow. He pulled on his boots, feeling pain in the curve of his spine as he hunched over.

Gabriel poured the birch sap into a mess tin and set it on his hand-sized Trioxane stove. The sap was only a little thicker than water. He lit one of the Trioxane cubes and set it on the stove. Soon it was wrapped in a salty blue flame and the bitter smoke made Gabriel go
and sit down a few paces away. After twenty minutes, when the Trioxane cube had burned out, Gabriel lifted the mess tin from the stove and waved his hand through the steam above the liquid in the mug. The sap had darkened and the level had dropped by two-thirds. He took a handful of blueberries and stirred them into the syrup. Then from his pocket he took another handful of pale, spaghettilike strands and stirred them in, too. The strands were cambium, the soft inner bark of a birch tree that he had found the day before. The tree had grown on rocky ground and the wind had recently tipped it over. The leaves on its branches were still green. From another pocket, he pulled the black crumbs of some rock tripe that he had scraped off a boulder at the top of the last mountain and stirred it all together in the mess tin. The rock tripe turned the stew into a kind of jelly and gave it a bitter taste, which the sap just barely covered. The sap was sweet and spicy, like maple syrup with a small amount of licorice thrown in.

Until now, all Gabriel had eaten for three days was blueberries and raspberries. His daydreams of food had grown so intense that they seemed to appear in front of him. He would be walking along and see a plate of roast potatoes set out on the path, or a glass of milk perched on a branch above his head. His hunger had become more than an annoyance. He began to feel his strength fade after only an hour of walking. From the crests of mountains he had seen lakes where he could have fished and maybe pulled a few landlocked salmon or trout, but the lakes were not on his route. The amount of energy he would have spent getting to them was more than the journey was worth.

Gabriel didn’t know how many days he had been walking. Five. Maybe six. The leather and canvas with which he surrounded himself had drunk up so much of his sweat that it was as if they had become a part of him. The trappings of his other life became clumsy ornaments of comfort. He had been worried about returning to this other world, afraid of having lost the instincts that he needed to survive there, but the longer he spent in the wilderness, the less he wanted to return to that other place. He felt as if he were metamorphosing. Soon the change would be complete.

When Gabriel had finished his meal, he heaved on his pack. The arches of his feet were bars of pain. He stood still for a minute, waiting
for some sign or thought to shove him into motion. But no sign came, and his thoughts were fluttering like moths inside his head from lack of food. He forced himself to start moving. Ahead on the path, a strangely luminous image of a Granny Smith apple was resting against the tree trunk. “Go away,” he said, and walked through the image as it disappeared.

After three hours, he came to the base of a mountain. The slope was steep and he had to ease the pack straps off his shoulders one at a time as he walked, holding them away from the skin around his collarbone because they had rubbed his flesh raw. One more day of this and his shoulders would start to bleed. Already the toes of his socks were red from blisters that had burst. He took them off every night and threw them to the other side of the tent because he did not want to look at them.

There would be blueberries on the top of the mountain, he told himself. There had been some on every other mountaintop, and the raspberries grew in the valleys. He knew where to look for them, was able to spot the exact lush green of raspberry leaves and the smaller, more brittle, brown-tinged blueberry bushes that grew in crevices in the rock.

He looked around for water. He had an instinct for that, too, now. He could smell the dampness in the air whenever he came close to a spring. But there was nothing for him here. The air was thin and empty. The clouds were like rippled sand. Stratocumulus. He knew it might rain tonight. He was thinking how gloomy it would be to set up a tent alone and in the rain, when he heard a sound come from beyond the mountain. It was a wail, a huge mournful noise that echoed through the trees. At first it startled him. Then he knew what it was. The train. The only train to run through these woods. The Canadian Atlantic express. Then he knew that this was Seneca Mountain he had been climbing. Abenaki Junction lay only two miles beyond the other side.

He used his last reserves of energy to climb the rest of the way, hand over hand up the steep slope, until he reached the bald, rocky outcrop of the summit. He scrambled past the clots of blueberries bubbling up out of each hollow in the stone until he could see across the valley of the Algonquin Wilderness. Far below was Pogansett Lake, and there was the train, trailing the sound of its thunder, crossing
the bridge, the whistle blowing again as it slowed to pass through Abenaki Junction. He could see the white church tower and faded-shingle rooftops and the road that looped down from Canada. Gabriel had not risked taking that road because of the border guards there. The sound of the whistle faded. The murmur of the wind returned.

Until now, his eye had been following the train, but now he saw the clear-cut everywhere, patching the wilderness like a checkerboard. Here and there, one pine tree stood alone in the middle of the emptied ground, left by the loggers to seed the area with pine cones. The dirt tracks of new logging roads unzipped the forest. Gabriel’s thoughts began to jumble as the endless destruction piled up in his head. He thought of the animals who would no longer be able to move through the forest because they could not cross open ground. He thought of birds and animals and plants that depended on the types of trees that would not be resown by the loggers. He thought of the soil, which would dry up and be washed into the streams, killing the fish and the eggs they laid. The infinitely complicated balance of life that man had not yet understood, or had chosen to ignore. He thought about what Swain had said, how some people would not comprehend why he might put himself at risk to stop this damage. He didn’t own the land. No invading army had come to take control. They would see it simply as business. Jobs. The making of money. Even his old self might have questioned why he would fight for an ideal that he did not fully understand. But the way Gabriel thought now, that was the best reason of all.

As he stared at the ruined landscape, a familiar anger spread like wings inside him, but this time it was worse. He started running down the mountain.

“It’s blood money, Jonah.” Alicia Mackenzie sat on the couch in the living room. She picked at the fuzz balls on her sweater. She glanced at her husband and thought, Does this town have to become a slaughterhouse before you realize what you have just done? But she kept silent. There were ways to argue with him, and this was not one of them. As soon as he felt threatened, he would go down into the bunkers of his stubbornness and refuse to be budged. It was some
vicious instinct left over from the time of his ancestors, when the solution to all threats was violence.

“What?” Mackenzie held a newspaper in front of his face. It was the latest copy of the
Forest Sentinel
. He found he couldn’t concentrate on the headline about Pfeiffer’s death. I know what it says anyway, he thought. He refused to lower the paper, not wanting to catch Alicia’s eye and have her beauty muddle his thoughts. She was younger than Mackenzie by five years, but looked more like ten years younger. She wore thick glasses and people rarely noticed her eyes. Growing older had not worried her. She seemed more curious about it than afraid.

“Is it wise to have offered so much money for the information about whoever nailed the tree? It will make people crazy. People will kill for it.”

“Dodge said something like that.”

“Well, maybe you should listen to him. He’s no fool.”

“If they find who did it, the money will be well spent.” He wheezed at her in exasperation.

“Blood money brings blood.”

He wished she would not use that word. Blood. Alicia knew him better than anyone. Mackenzie sipped at his coffee. He had tried to quit drinking it, because it gave him headaches at the base of his skull. But Mackenzie had been drinking coffee for too long to think of how he might live any other way. He liked the ceremony—the daily measuring of beans, the way the coffee grinder motored across the counter as if it meant to hurl itself off the edge.

“With that much cash at stake,” he said, “at least they’ll know I cared enough to make the offer.”

Alicia looked away, not agreeing but not wanting to fight, either. “I still can’t quite believe that James Pfeiffer has passed away. To think that’s he’s already been gone several days.”

“How time flies when you’re dead.” Mackenzie rustled the paper, turning the pages, still unable to focus.

“Why say a thing like that? I hope to God no one overhears you when you get into one of your moods.”

Mackenzie grunted. Just then he felt angry at Pfeiffer for dying. He didn’t care how little sense that made. He was angry the same way he had been angry with himself when the tree fell on him. It was clumsy
to die. Clumsiness had cost him his leg. In his heart, Mackenzie had no sympathy for Pfeiffer, just as he had none for himself. And he was angry to be keeping yet another secret from Alicia. It was never so simple as just being able to forget them. Hoarding these secrets required concentration. If he let his attention slip, even for a moment, the secrets might reappear into the light of day and there would be no way to answer for them. It wouldn’t matter if she agreed that spiking the tree was the best thing to do. It was simply wrong.

Mackenzie had never heard a bad word spoken about Alicia. People trusted her to bank their money, look after their pets when they were in the hospital and check in on their houses. Mackenzie could hardly believe the number and assortment of keys on Alicia’s key ring. She had keys to half the homes in Abenaki Junction. It seemed to Mackenzie that Alicia had spent her entire life in the service of other people. She was their confidante and caretaker. She knew almost every secret in the town. Few changes occurred without Alicia’s being consulted. The town had forged an emotional dependence on Alicia that Mackenzie felt sure could never be replaced by someone else.