Along the River
Western Montana, 1917
At the very end of a rutted track that wound from the valley into the foothills lived a man named John Bunting. He was bent and arthritic from years in timber camps. In those days, few white men lived above the valley. The Indians had been lied to and murdered and driven away by other, earlier men much like him, and so he rode along the old hunting trails unbothered and considered them his. He staked a claim on a flat bench that overlooked the river far below, cleared a lot for a small pasture, and built a cabin. He erected his chimney with stones scavenged from old fire rings, already darkened with soot.
Over time, the fresh logs aged and settled into the soil. The small house slumped—shaped by the land, like John himself. He felt the land was his birthright—granted by God and the labor of his own hands. After his years of sweat and backache, he thought the basic nature of the world to be chaos, from which a gruff order was hewn by men.
He had long lived amid the loud bravado and musk of the camps, and now wanted a quiet life in a quiet place. His only companions were a small flock of sheep that he butchered each summer and sold in town. He lived in near silence. Sometimes he muttered to the sheep, or hummed songs from his childhood—the words of which he’d forgotten. He didn’t think of himself as lonely, but he often thought of his mother, who had died when he was very young. Once, in one of his only memories of her, they picked yellow flowers from a rocky wash on a hillside. She had beckoned to him, and he had run to her, and he remembered he felt that he was running back home. Back to the steady branches of the old cottonwoods that he climbed and looked down on their small house, nestled in the forest as if it had grown there. She had threaded one of the bright flowers into his thick brown hair and laughed.
One late summer morning, he watched flames consume a nearby mountainside, a few drainages away. The fire grew from a wisping smolder close to the valley floor to a raging cataclysm that climbed a ravine and engulfed the entire mountain in thick black smoke and the live red of wildfire. John sat outside the cabin and watched, holding a tin mug of coffee in both hands. He was interested, but not concerned–the wind was at his back. He thought the fire could be a sign from God, clearing the land for ranches. The sheep bleated and whimpered. John drew buckets of water from the well and soaked the dry pine logs and boards of his home as a precaution in case the wind shifted. He could smell the smoke and the air grew hazy and warm. He wondered if there were other cabins in the hellish wreck of the mountain. Hours passed. The wind died and the mountain smoldered.
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Across the valley, a woman screamed beneath the great rush and roar of the fire. The ravine behind the blazing remnants of her home was choked and swallowed by flame. Her husband, who had run to the corral when the fire swept upon them with its hideous speed, was ash and bone, along with the horses. Charred logs swirled in the gray water of the ash-clotted creek, yet the steep rock of the ravine kept the wildfire from the riverbank. There the woman lay with her daughter. The woman was sprawled half in and half out of the water, the current tugging at her hair–a strangely gentle caress in the burning hellscape that raged around them. Her legs were burned beyond recognition, the skin bubbled and melted to the bone, and her flight to the riverbank had been a stumbling, sliding tumble down the gravel.
In between her screams, she gritted and bared her teeth. Her face was covered with ash and streaked with tears and spray from the river. Her daughter, although just old enough to speak a few words, was silent, sitting with her feet in the water, her sharp blue eyes fixed on the pistol in her mother’s ruined hands.
The woman screamed one last time, the desperate shriek disappearing into the otherworldly whoosh of the flames and the thunderclaps of exploding trees. Just downstream, a fiery pine cracked and smashed down the ravine, splashing into the water with a monstrous burst of steam and a spray of flaming twigs. She met her daughter’s gaze and her hands shook as she raised the pistol. The cruel iron sight on the end of the barrel rested between the child’s wide eyes. But here, at the end of all she knew, shattered into madness by the flames, she couldn’t bring herself to enact such terrible mercy. She left the girl to the flames and turned the gun on herself.
The shot rang out and the woman slumped into the river. The girl watched her mother’s body. It swept along with the dark ash and mud until it vanished among blackened wood. All headed downriver, all flowing to larger rivers gliding through wide, unburned green valleys and unfurling far below into the sea.
The fire raved. It feasted around and above her. She sat and looked downriver. In the clouded shock of her young mind, she resigned herself to burn.
After some time, a pack of wolves trotted down from the high country in the shallows. Their fur and the tips of their tails were singed. They were fewer than they were that morning. They left stinking, smoking corpses behind them in their panic. When they reached the girl they recoiled, snarling and showing their teeth and stamping their front legs. But the flames prevented escape up the sides of the ravine, and they already knew that upstream was an inferno of fallen trees that bridged the river. So they moved toward the girl. They circled and snarled. She sat and stared at them, still in shock or simply unscared. In the red dancing glow of the flaming sky on the dirtied water, a large she-wolf darted forward and snapped her jaws down on the tattered remains of the girl’s dress.
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Maybe it was her unflinching stare amid the furious wreckage of the forest, maybe it was the loss of the pack’s pups in the flames the night before they met, or maybe it was just one of those things; things like the unerring ability of salmon to find their birthplaces after a life at sea, like paired loons weaving eerie harmonies over lonely lakes, like the phantasmal shimmers of the northern lights. Whatever it was, the wolves raised the girl among them.
The pack escaped the fire and settled in the thick-timbered slopes above a green valley, far downstream. The she-wolf brought the girl to a den beneath a fallen ponderosa. It was warm and smelled of earth and rotting flesh. The night cooled, and the girl curled against the she-wolf’s fur to sleep.
The pack moved down through the fir and larch and pine like wraiths. They killed deer and elk and sometimes raided the pastures in the bottomlands for fat, slow calves and sheep. The girl was young enough to forget all that had been. The she-wolf fed the girl regurgitated meat and she grew to love it.
The girl changed. The other pups nipped at her and she learned their rough play and language of yips and barks. Her limbs lengthened and her body became lean and spry, her feet and hands grew calloused and strong, her hair snarled. The forest revealed its secrets to her—she heard the trickle of water from far off and caught the sweet musk of elk in the air. She ran on all fours in great leaps and though she couldn’t keep up with the wolves when they really ran, she was fast enough to catch elk calves and sick or injured deer. She felt joy in the strength of her body and a deadly hunger when she hunted. A deep, consuming love for the she-wolf coursed through her as she ran and hunted and nestled into the den to sleep. She watched ranchers tend to their stock from the shadows and didn’t recognize herself in them. Whatever seed of humanity had existed in her, it never germinated. It may be that it never existed at all, that all life is the same at the beginning.
On clear nights she ran with the pack to high, remote places and screamed at the stars.
She ripped flesh from fresh kills with her teeth and sat back on her haunches to eat with the pack, blood running down her chin beneath her blue eyes.
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Over the years, the farms expanded beyond the bottomlands, roads scythed through the forested foothills and brought sweetly stupid pigs and sheep and cows into the mountains, into the pack’s hunting grounds. Stories spread among settlers of a strange pale monster that ran with a pack of wolves, a white demon in the dark.
Calves and lambs stared at her, confused by this thing that looked like those that fed them but smelled like those they knew to fear. She tore their throats out with ragged fingernails and chipped teeth.
Women stayed in their homes after nightfall. Children dreamed of glowing eyes and sharp teeth in the shadows between the trees. Vaguely, some envied her wild life in the forest, as they envied the wolves. Men clutched rifles and peered into the dark with eyes dulled by firelight.
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One night, John Bunting awoke to squeals and murmurs from the sheep. The fire years before was a buried thought, a non-memory amid the quiet rhythms of his solitary life. His thoughts were nothing but a blur of murderous, proprietary righteousness as he grabbed his shotgun from beside the bed. He nudged the front door ajar. It was a clear night and the pasture glowed in soft silver moonlight. The sheep were huddled against the wall of the cabin, and across the pasture, some twenty yards away, two lambs lay with fresh blood soaking their wool. Three wolves bent over the lambs, tearing the still-twitching flesh from the bone. Their fur was silver and black, like mottled starlight on deep water. With them fed a monster with skin that shone white under the moon.
John fired. The first blast ripped into one of the wolves and it screeched and danced and fell and lay still. The other wolves bolted, sprinting and weaving through the maze of pines that surrounded the pasture. The monster was slower, looking up from the lamb as John swung the shotgun over after the first shot. As he squeezed the trigger a second time, he looked across the barrel and stared into the face of the monster. Her eyes widened and she fell back.
The blast echoed over the sudden quiet of the pasture. The sheep moaned and whined softly. John ran to the girl. She was still breathing. Her naked chest was lurid and terrible with wounds from the heavy buckshot. Blood oozed with each ragged gasp. Her bloodied hands tore the soil at the end of inhumanly long forearms. Her eyes stared into John’s, and her breath slowed and stopped.
“My god,” John whispered, “my god.”
She smelled of blood and rotting meat and pine. Her hands were twisted and heavily calloused. John thought she was horrible and beautiful in the soft, low light. He cradled her broken body and laid her on the wooden boards of his porch. Her blood thickened and clotted in the dust. John was crying—heavy tears wound through the thick hair of his beard. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried—he supposed he had when his mother died, but he didn’t remember, not really.
There had perhaps been one other time. One morning, on a logging crew as a young man, he came across a king of trees. A lone larch, towering above the Montana ponderosa forest like a titanic pillar holding up the sky. It was autumn, and the ancient crown caught the morning sun and shone gold against the green of the pines. He remembered how it had made him feel—the recognition of the pinprick of his life in the fabric of time. Like he was a tiny needle, sprung from some great eternal tree existing beneath and beyond all reckoning. His was a single season among the tree’s infinite—he would sprout, lengthen, golden briefly in the autumn sun, and finally wither and fall. The tree would go on. He remembered an awful fear rising in his chest, and tears brimming in his eyes. The foreman had shouted BUNTING! GET GOING! And when he swung the axe he found that the fear lessened, and was replaced by a vindictive bloodlust. Then, Bunting was strong and his axe bit deep. He hacked away, joined by the other men, frenzied to see the old giant fall. When it finally did it shook the earth and its crown snapped and cracked and shattered on its final descent. John cheered with the other men and climbed to stand atop the immense twisted corpse. It was only later, on his cot with his back turned to the other men, that he recalled the fear and the tears that had almost stopped him in his tracks as he stood beneath the tree.
John thought that killing the girl felt something like that day so long ago. He didn’t sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw her bent over the lamb, felt the concussion of the gun against his shoulder, stood over her bleeding body. Just as he sensed that night after the larch’s fall, awake with the sour smell and snoring of the sleeping men, he knew that in his fear he had destroyed something good and beautiful and maybe, eternal. Something beyond his capacity to understand.
At one point in the night, he thought he heard a low, canine whining outside his door. He pulled the blanket over his head and shuddered and wept like a child.
In the morning, John dug a grave and lowered her into the earth. As he shoveled dirt into the grave, snarls and howls erupted from the forest and didn’t stop until he finished.
John never told anyone what happened. Stories of a pale monster that ran with wolves continued to flow among the drunks, hunters and hermits of the valley.
In the months and years that followed, John walked the mountains. His sheep were killed or run off one by one, and the pasture was reclaimed by seedlings. John just watched. His walks grew longer until his cabin became just a place to re-supply. He looked for tracks. Over time, they grew scarce. One year he stopped finding them altogether. Closer to the valley bottom, he often found cruel traps baited with strychnine-laced meat. At night, he stole down and destroyed them without fully understanding why.
The years fled along the river to the sea, and roads cut higher into the forest, and ranches spread along the valley floor. He grew older, and the pain in his back sometimes overwhelmed him. The girl’s bones lay in the earth. She often came to him in his dreams—staring at him over the barrel of his shotgun. He would feel his finger tighten on the trigger and would wake with the blast echoing in his head. After waking from these dreams, he often wandered outside in the dark of early morning, limping up into the mountains on his old trails. He listened for howls, but he never heard them anymore. When it was clear and cold and the moon illuminated the pasture just like the night he killed her, he shivered and wished for things to be different. He wished to know what it would be to run with the pack. To catch the scent of blood on the wind and feel the tug of the moon. For life’s mad ecstasy to overwhelm him and rip the ancient wolf-song from the depths of his chest.
One night, John lay wrapped in his bedroll, high in the mountains and far from the cabin under stars that seemed to sing into the endless darkness between. His bones grated and ached inside his leathered skin. He felt old and tired, and was surprised to feel tears filling his eyes and blurring the night sky into a wash of shining silver.
If only we would hear them, John thought. They sing and we’re too afraid to hear them.
He slept, and dreamed of the girl, his usual dream. But this time, before he pulled the trigger, she beckoned to him. Like his mother once had. He dropped the gun and went to her. Silent, she offered him a hunk of flesh from the sheep, bloody and raw. It tasted rich and wild. In the dream, he found that his body no longer pained him. He felt fast and lithe, powerful and young. He followed her into the trees and was gone.
As he took his last breath, still asleep with a small smile on his face, his legs twitched once, as if to run, and faint howls filled the sky beneath the stars.
Lars Chinburg is a New Hampshire–born writer currently living in Missoula, Montana. He likes scary stories and banana cream pie.