The Outlander (34 page)

“Can we get on with this? I don't have all week.”

The Indian turned and drew his horse around by the reins and the two of
them headed slowly away to the north, the animal's tail swishing through the
flowers and the Indian's
hat hung down his back on a string.
Indeed, he did not look like a wealthy man. He wore breeches too short for him and a
collarless shirt, and these were weathered and drab, and he seemed to have nothing else
to his name but his horse. Perhaps he had a camp somewhere, perhaps he just travelled
light. His sour competitor stood, hands on hips, watching the horse go.

“Well isn't that just . . .
Fuck!
” he said.
The rest of the men ignored him and the fury of negotiation resumed.

Most horses sold for money, and quite a bit of it. But a few buyers would
pay for their horses by barter, bringing the Reverend meat, fur, medicine, ammunition.
These were not just Indians either, but backwoodsmen, loners, solitaries living in the
mountains. The widow had seen their instalments. The gifts might come for years, the
Reverend had said, regularly and without salutation. A frozen side of deer stacked up
beside the door in winter. A small amount of tincture swilling around the bottom of an
old crockery bottle — medicine, but who knew what for. Footsteps in a straight
line through the snow up to the door and away again. Only one or two would even linger
long enough to smoke a pipe or chew tobacco. Indians didn't spend too much time in
Frank. The common wisdom was that they were superstitious about the mountain and
believed it was alive — a view that was much ridiculed in Frank. In Frank, there
was ridicule of pretty much everything.

By mid-afternoon, half the horses had been sold and the rest were in the
paddock, silent and tranquil, the strings on their hackamores dangling. A defeated calm
had come over them; or perhaps they were stunned by how quickly the group had broken and
left them divided, mere individuals
again. The dust had settled and
the noise abated, and the Cregans now clambered out of the paddock with stiff loops of
rope over their shoulders. Two horses had been hobbled and let loose to graze among the
Cregans' own horses, and it was assumed these now belonged to the brothers unless
pretty good money could be found. A fire was set up down-wind from the paddock where
stragglers sat and sipped coffee and conversed about the weather. The Cregans'
tents were erected as a kind of windbreak for the fire; but as the late afternoon came
and the mountain's shadow crept, the tents began to flap in a cold wind. The widow
sat close to the heat and endured the pangs of an empty stomach, a veil of nausea laid
over the world. The Reverend came and sat by her, putting his hat on his knee, and he
spoke merrily to the other men, joking and yawning.

Near nightfall they headed home, a loose string of human figures wandering
toward town, the black-clad figure of the Reverend among them. They made their unlighted
way over the mountain meadows among mile-long shadows, attended by a hunting grey owl.
One by one they stopped to watch it, looking up unguarded, as children watch stars. The
widow's dark pants riffled in the breeze.

The great owl descended the mountain face and passed soundlessly over
them. It rode a thermal down, floating with its wings outstretched, its eerie face
turned to watch something hidden in the grass until finally it cut left and flared wide,
its incredible talons held forward, and dropped out of sight into the long grass. It did
not rise again, and there was no sound, no cry before the kill. After a long moment, the
audience went on, quieter now.

A FIRE CRACKLED
merrily in the dark. The tracker gobbled
his dinner while his two customers hung over their food in silent anger. It was a
stomach-churning meal of smoked venison jerky, thrice-boiled coffee grounds, and for
each hand a little soggy sourdough. As good a tracker as he was, the old coot was a
horrendous cook, and he mostly pleased himself. As well, he had informed the brothers
that their quarry was most likely long gone by now, spirited away by whichever lucky
woodsman had found her and kept her. It was a lost cause, he told them.

“No,” was the reply. “We hired you to find this woman.
Do your job.”

The old man spread his hands out wide, not remotely disturbed by their
anger and evincing not a breath of apology.

“Listen. This fella knows exactly what he's doing. I can
follow a trail all right. But he leaves nothing to follow. It's over, boys.
She's gone.”

Something in his complacency said he could have followed their quarry if
he had wanted to, pressing on across the mountain ranges, finding the meagre evidence
this couple left behind. No one moves over the land, hunts, eats, sleeps without leaving
a single sign. There is always something to follow. All this other woodsman could do was
to conceal the obvious. But an Easter egg is easily found, because one knows to look.
The old tracker could have kept going, but he was growing weary of his companions, and
they sensed it. But what could they do?

“You can go and look for yourselves,” he joked. “But I
don't guess you boys know where you are. Do you?”

He had let them storm and rage, demand obedience at first, then reason
with him; he watched as they stood together in hushed debate and glared murderously at
him. There was nothing for it, and they began to understand that. He told them he would
take them on to the next town, the mining town of Frank, and from there they could stock
up, settle in, or take a train . . . do whatever they wanted.

So here they were, hung over their wretched meal in the firelight, their
red beards grown long and thick, their faces closed and gaunt, piqued by the old
man's smacking and gustatory delight. They fixed him with sorrowing, heartsick
eyes.

“We told you what she's done?” said one.

The tracker glanced quickly — the hind twin had spoken first.

“Yup,” he said.

“Does it make no difference to you at all?”

The old man didn't look up, but he became thoughtful. He tossed his
cold coffee across a carpet of soft moss and was about to reply.

At that moment, there came a crack. It came out of the dark, from the
north. A clean explosion like the sound of a cannon. They might have thought it was a
large rifle, perhaps someone hunting close by. But the sound was far too loud, too
distant; it rolled up the range and came back down, like thunder riding the air.

A second later they felt the impact in their feet. Like a heavy footfall,
close by. The tracker squinted into the dark. The far range stood angled before him,
washed in moonlight. Something pale moved on it . . . The whole thing was moving.

He stood up and walked into the dark, to put the fire at his back so he
could see more clearly. He blinked his eyes
once and stared hard.
The brothers wandered up behind him like curious dogs. In this way, they became the only
living souls to witness the landslide in its entirety. The north face of the mountain
was flowing downward, much the way a curtain waves in a gentle breeze. This was no mere
avalanche; the entire cap of the mountain was coming down toward the town of Frank. The
old man cried out in helpless anxiety.

For a full minute, the mountain seemed to billow, then slowly collapse,
floating downward, lit palely from within. It luminesced from pure friction, so the
shadows of individual boulders, incredible in size, could be seen hopping and bouncing.
And then it hit the treeline. In streaks and lines the dark stubble of the forest was
sheared away, the avalanche coming down in long, pale fingers, while the wide mass of a
palm followed, erasing everything. As the longest finger reached the railway track and
crossed it and entered the moonlit line of the river and spread across it, the landslide
simply stopped. Down in the valley an immense wave of thick dust rose over the river,
crested, and hung there, slowly rolling. A long moment later, well after everything had
stopped moving, the roaring ended.

The old man could see no movement across the now concave mountain face.
Only the moon hanging high and white over this terrible new landscape. And the river
like a pinched vein slowly bulging. He still stood in simian pose, hands on his head,
panting. Slowly, his hands sank to his sides.

There was no going to Frank now. Frank was gone.

IT HAD BEEN
a dream full of noise, a voiceless, howling
wind. But now all was quiet. The widow opened her eyes and after a moment sat up. There
was a tree directly in front of her. Seams of fine moss ran along the bark's nap.
She leaned over and saw another tree, several more, and then nothing but night.
Protruding from her forearm was a cedar twig, complete with needle tufts. None of this
interested her, so she lay her head back down on the ground, hearing a faraway hiss and
rattle coming through the dense earth, a sound like pebbles shaken in a metal pan. Her
brain was ringing.

A little later, perhaps a long time later, the widow found herself in the
process of standing up. With great difficulty, she staggered into an upright position.
At her feet were smashed branches and twigs. She looked up at the tree that stood in her
way. In the weak morning light she saw the broken top of it leaning into a grey sky. She
understood somehow the immense height from which she had fallen. She could see where she
had hit the tree, and where her body had barrel-rolled downward. The twig in her arm
ached, and so she pulled at it, extracting an inch of swollen wood from the hole, while
her fingers cramped and danced, and then went limp. She looked vacantly at the thing for
a
moment, the fibres of wood waterlogged with blood, then she
dropped it and staggered forward on bare feet, heading for home, though she didn't
know where she was or which direction she was going.

At first it appeared as if someone had rolled white rocks here and there
to mark something out. Small boulders lay among the trees like dead comets at the end of
their trajectories, each one with a tail of destruction behind it, all of them aligned
in the same direction. These the widow stepped around, limping.

It was unearthly still. No wind. No sounds of animals. She could hear her
own breathing, dull and hollow. On the air, a faint taste of dust. She passed a boulder
the size of an out-house, trees strewn under it like a straw bed, and she went on
without amazement. It was simply in her way.

Something funny about the air — she stopped and listened; the trees
above moved soundlessly. She shuffled her bare feet, to no effect.
So
, she
thought,
I'm deaf again
, though she could not remember when she had lost
her hearing before. At her feet, an old, scorched pot, lying upturned. No lid. She poked
it with her naked toe and it rolled over. Ancient volcanic residue all around its sides,
as individual as a face — it was her own pot or, rather, the Reverend's. She
leaned down to touch it, and everything went black.

She woke again walking, looking for him. She tried calling his name but
the effort made her sob, and so she went on in silence.

The smell of smoke. Here was a little lean-to, crouched against a shallow
rock drop. A half-tent, with some ash-grey timber set vertically as a wall, and at its
mouth a bent old
coot in long johns and a hat, tending his fire.
His cheek was pale as new porcelain, the grey-blue undercoat of shock.

“Queer, isn't it?” he said, but she could barely hear
him. His voice was muffled, as if she were eavesdropping through a thick door.

“What?” she said, swallowing.

“You mean you ain't seen it?”

“I don't know . . .”

“All of that. Out there.” His gesture was meant to take in
much of the world.

Then the man shifted on his little stool and looked at her, the fire
crackling merrily before him. He saw her bare feet, the blood running down her arm and
thickening into viscid strings at her fingertips. He looked at the shreds of dark cloth,
exposing her legs and much of her right hip, the half-buttoned bodice.

“D'ye think ye could sit down?”

She didn't answer. Didn't seem to have heard. Her eyes were
strangely unfocused. So he looked away in a sudden spasm of embarrassment, shamed by the
intimacy of injury.

“I was here,” he said quietly, apologetically. “Just
sleeping. All I was doing was sleeping.” When he looked up again, she was
gone.

THE WIDOW MOVED
amid the trimmings of a nightmare
forest. Blown debris was piled up everywhere. Branches and stones. Trees leaned
drunkenly, many broken halfway up their tall shafts, heavy heads tilted crazily. On
everything was a pale dust, giving the dark green vegetation a leprous air. Small,
colourful bodies were strewn on the ground like
Easter eggs, bright
fallen birds, killed by the first blast of hot wind. Finches, chickadees, grey jays with
their velvet breasts exposed. Farther on, a young lynx lay bloodied on its side, eyes
still moist, open mouth still moist, and on its motionless fur a growing dusting of
chalk. She weaved away from it. Now there were bits of cloth and torn chunks of mattress
and a kettle and crushed chairs. A door stood bizarrely upright, having spun through the
darkness like a playing card to land there. A hat was dangling from a high branch.
Through the curtain of bent trees she could see that she was approaching something wide
and pale.

When she reached the verge of the trees and stepped out onto the moonscape
itself, the widow finally stopped to gape. She sought a landmark, something to tell her
where she was. Nothing was familiar, even the mountain was a different shape — an
ashen, treeless concavity, strewn with rubble, some of it still moving, everything
shrouded in strange clouds. The widow registered this the way one would in a dream. It
was information, nothing more. She simply struggled on across the rock in bare feet,
driven by her one thought: to go home.