Hold the Dark: A Novel by William Giraldi Page A

valley that night. We hurried and melted ice for my father as he told us. He stayed with this woman. He stayed until morning, giving her the water. He told us the water would save her. If she kept drinking it would save her. But she slept finally at the dawn and didn’t wake. She never woke. My father stacked her on the dogsled with the other dead and brought them to the igloos behind the hill.”
    Slone, still intent on the old woman’s face, passed the blade slowly back and forth in callused hands.
    “The next morning my father and others found what happened in the snow igloos. The wolves got in, they tore apart the bodies of the dead in the night. They feasted in gore on those many corpses, a hundred bodies. Their frozen blood and bones were all over the hillside, strewn. Scattered everywhere. Not a single body was spared by the animals. From the tracks my father saw the size of this pack. Over twenty wolves had come, had feasted that night. It seemed a fate worse than the influenza. Everybody then gathered the bones, all the bones they could find, gathered them in baskets for proper burial when breakup came. But there is no proper burial after such a thing.”
    She took up the doll again and caressed its head as if it had life.
    “That is the history here, our history, Vernon Slone. You cannot blame an old woman for that.”
    Minutes later, his wrist and hand gluey with the old woman’s blood, Slone walked back into the brimming day. He stood breathing in the cold. If the villagers knew he was back they did not come from their cabins, neither to welcome nor damn him. Across the road he saw curtains part and close. He returned to his truck and looked over his home a final time.
    Then he was gone from that place, fled down icy passageways that could not be called roads—paths through a wilderness forged long before his birth.

V
    A t this December dawn behind the town morgue Donald Marium saw ice crystals shine atop the newest snowfall, drifts rolling to a dun-hued horizon. He took in the men’s faces as they gazed upon the killed—shot dead, they lay frozen and twisted by the wheel of their truck. Snow had been dusted from their corpses to reveal splashes, rivulets of glassy blood. Across the open compass behind town, north toward the range, he saw snow-burdened trees bowed like penitents. The morning seemed made of muslin, the sun less than a smudge. The wind came in soughs and shook free a pine scent from trees, then sent snow aloft as mist.
    Every one of these cops had seen deer and caribou and wolves like this, marten and muskrat, Dall sheep turned from white to red. A few had witnessed men dead of cold and wet in swollen rivers, or of long plunges from headwalls. Some had tried to rescue children yanked underwater, lost beneath capsized canoes, yoked to the bottom. But Marium understood that most here had never witnessed fellow men like this. He himself had seen such a mess only once before, and not in this town.
    He spoke to the cop standing behind him. “What’s in the building?”
    “Another one dead. Frank the coroner, we think.”
    “You think?”
    “Shit, Don, we can’t get near enough him to see. He’s in a whole lake of blood, in his office.”
    “Dead how?”
    “Dead all the way through, it looks to me.”
    “You find the casings here?” he asked.
    “The what?”
    “Shell casings. How do you think these men were killed? With some tickling? Dig up that spot for the casings, please.”
    “How do you know it’s this spot?”
    “Those wounds are nearly point-blank. You see the faint star pattern of that wound? On that man’s face there? You’re standing on the shell casings.”
    “Something from here did this?”
    “I’d say a someone did it. Dig up the casings, please.”
    “Feels like a something to me. First that village kid, and now this. What a goddamn shitty way to end the year. That kid’s gone, you know.”
    “Gone how?”
    “His body, it’s gone. They took the kid’s