He watches the dark before the fireplace until his eyelids grow heavy, and though the wind doesn’t find him at the back of the hearth it swells inside the foundation as the sea swells in a shell, and the sound returns him to sleep despite anxious fears. The forest rustles and stirs with comings and goings on four legs and six legs and eight, and in the treetops sleeping birds twitter as bats squeak and wheel, aloft and prowling for insects. An opossum inches along a branch overhead, its eyes wide and bright, then scuttles away on silent feet.
There’s no reason for us to wait here while he sleeps, so let’s weave our way through the woods to his trailer where the door still stands open. It isn’t as far away as he thinks; if he only knew how close he is to his home, that his wandering has traced a circular path almost back to where he began, then he might get there before us and claim the bed for himself. He could have followed the wall—lines so deliberately drawn always lead somewhere, whether it’s stone walls or wires or roads. They aren’t as meandering as stories and echoes—or dreams—shaped and reshaped and veering in all directions. Passed from teller to teller and place to place, as arbitrary as those new humming waves in these woods or the seeds that cling to fur and sock alike to plant themselves in new fields.
Martin could follow that wall, but in his mind he’s lost in the forest so his body believes. Which is all the better for us—we may be wearing these nocturnal shapes, but we’ve been following Martin all day and I suspect you’re as tired as that borrowed body. So we’ll creep to his trailer, climb into his bed, and make his life our own for a while.
THE SQUARE SHOULDERS OF GIL’S BLACK-AND-WHITE CHECKERED jacket plow through scrub pines near the top of a mountain. The hunter charges ahead without ducking low branches, without shoving saplings aside. It’s as if he expects the forest to step out of his way and the forest seems to oblige. Martin hurries behind, dodging those branches as they whip back into place from Gil’s passing. Again and again his clothes snare on brambles and twigs and he has to stop, pluck them free, and rush to catch up.
It’s a dream, of course it’s a dream, and what else would it be? Dreams bring you closer to the world the rest of us live in than anything else, and in this dream Gil has three rifles slung on his back and a fourth in hand at his side. The arsenal seems excessive to Martin, but as if Gil is reading his thoughts he calls back, “Different calibers, Marty. Never know what you’ll run into or what size hole it’ll need.”
“What are we hunting for?”
“You tell me. It’s your dream.” Gil laughs, and adjusts the cap on his head, a fixture in waking life and dreams, too. There are smudged fingerprints all over the brim where he’s gripped it over the years, as there are on the real thing.
A hawk circles above them without moving its wings, and Martin tries to watch as he walks. With his eyes on the bird, he stumbles over a half-buried point of dark granite.
“Look where you’re going there, Marty,” Gil scolds without turning around.
Martin apologizes though he’s not sure he needs to, then walks with his eyes on the trail for a mile or so. But when he looks up again there are more hawks, seven or eight of them now, hard to count as their paths cross and re-cross, wheeling in spirals high overhead.
“Have you noticed those hawks, Gil?” he asks.
“Don’t mind ‘em. They’re after smaller meals than you.”
Each time Martin squints up at the silver haze of the sky, the group of hawks—Flock? he tries to remember, or is it a murder, like crows?—has swung lower, and now he can see individual feathers in the dense mail of their chests. “They’re flying pretty low,” he says, but gets no reply.
Gil steams forward as the scrub thickens on either side of the trail. The forest still avoids him even as more and more branches strike Martin’s chest, arms, and face. The back of Gil’s neck is creased as an old leather boot and as wide as the head it supports.
Martin hurries, trying not to look up, trying to keep up with Gil, and all of a sudden there’s a stabbing pain in his foot.
“Ow!” he hollers. “Shit!” Gil doesn’t turn. For some reason Martin is barefoot, the boots and socks he’s sure he was wearing a few steps ago gone, and a long, crimson thorn has punctured his sole. Cursing, he leans against the trunk of a tree. He plucks out the thorn and a bead of blood blooms. He wants to rest, to let the cut scab, but already he’s losing sight of Gil out ahead so he walks, wincing with each tentative step.
It all seems familiar, he thinks, like he’s been here before, though Martin isn’t quite sure what “here” means. It might be the woods, or the moment, or perhaps the dream because it, too, is familiar—tidier than his usual dreams, too tightly tied to his life, because I’ve tied it there.
“Probably not,” answers Gil, listening in again on Martin’s head. Suddenly the checkered shoulders are still and Gil swings the gun up from his hip to level it at something ahead. The three barrels still slung on his back rattle together with the inertia of stopping.
“What is it?” Martin asks, stepping close behind his neighbor, who grunts, or maybe growls, in reply. Martin looks up the trail but doesn’t see anything. Gil’s hands are steady, liver-spotted stone on the gun.
Then a loud crack echoes out of the woods and movement catches Martin’s eye on his left. He turns toward the trees and shouts, “Gil, over there!”
The green curtain shakes as a tall, dark shape passes behind thin trunks. Gil sets the rifle butt against his shoulder and squints along the barrel into the woods as Martin holds his breath, waiting.
“Scratch,” Gil says, without looking away from the gun.
“Scratch what?”
The hunter hisses at him to be quiet.
There’s another loud crack in the shadows, then a long shaft of pine with needles and branches still hanging from it hurtles through the air toward the men. Gil roars and squeezes a round off at nothing before the trunk crashes into his chest and knocks him down.
“Gil!” Martin shouts, but the other man doesn’t answer. He’s pinned beneath the log and isn’t moving. His eyes are closed and the gun has been knocked from his hands. The other three weapons are trapped by the trunk and his body.
Martin turns toward the trees, not sure what to do, and the figure he saw in the shadows comes charging out of the woods. He barely sees the bottle-green eyes and the curve of white teeth before he pivots and runs up the trail the way he and Gil came. Each step on rough ground slashes his feet, but Martin runs as fast as he can without looking back.
The hawks are circling so low now that when they pass overhead the air displaced by their wings is as loud as a river.
A cramp burns in his side but he runs on, afraid the heat on his back is his pursuer’s breath. He’s sure the snarl behind him is getting louder the longer he runs, but he doesn’t hear the thundering steps he expects there to be if he is being chased.
Then he trips on a tree root curving up from the ground, and his face and his chest slam hard against the packed earth of the trail. A strong hand—a strong paw—grips his arm and slings his body over, and Martin is face to face with a bear. Its lips are peeled back from pink gums, and its tongue squirms in the enormous dark space of its mouth as it roars. A sticky drop of saliva plops between Martin’s eyes and he squeezes them closed, turning his head and puckering his face as he waits to be killed.
The bear isn’t as big as he would have expected.
Then pain jerks him awake and he’s stretched on his back in the burnt-out foundation. He’s been dragged feet-first from his fireplace bed by a bear, a real bear, and now it rises to its full height and crashes down hard with its paws on his chest.
Martin lets out a sound that would be a yell if he could gather