The passing of a mid-July’s night left no trace on the floor of the forest. The spits of rain had gone, and the cool wind through the spruces and evergreens had gone, and now there was only the clamor of crickets and other nightling insects, myriad and without distinction on the cool mountainous air.

The she-wolf in that predawn dark came down a rockslide, silent and with lethal dexterity, to stalk the young raccoon. It was laboriously threading its way among flaring grass to the course of a swollen creek. The she-wolf had marked it down, yellow eyes narrowed in primordial pursuit. She crept up to the raccoon from where it drank idly at the creek edge, phantom-like on crouched legs, her belly hugging the ground. She slunk around the bole of a tree like taffy. She leapt after it, swift and deft as a serpent’s strike, her canine grin shone milk-blue in the moonlight. In a single graceful motion, the she-wolf hooked her claws into the raccoon’s ribs, cocked her skull and sank her teeth into its neck. It never heard her; never even caught scent of her. The raccoon went limp in her jaw-clasp. The she-wolf rose and went on, the little skull of the raccoon lolling with her progress.

In the first grainy wash of light, the she-wolf came out onto a high meadow in a valley in the mountains. She began to waller down in the shelter of a windfall trunk for rest from her hunt. She paused suddenly, as if something had caught her attention, rising now cautiously to nudge her bloody nose about the air. Her ears lay back on her head. She had seen him before he had. The first shot from the rifle thocked in the mud by her forepaws. Tall spray of grass and clots of dirt. Now she was in desperate motion.

The hunter was laying prostrate upon loose shale and weeds, the forearm of his rifle propped on his wrist. He dug the rifle stock into his shoulder, sighted in, jacked the crosshairs frantically up the back of the animal fleeing broadside to him, and fired. The bullet cracked and rolled across the valley, sounding back in attenuating reiteration. She dropped in an anguished squall, kicked her hind legs about, scrabbled up, was making off again. Shit, the hunter said. It was a high shot, he knew that. But one thing he knew for certain: there would be blood. He glassed down the meadow with his binoculars, saw dark fingers of blood plastered down the fur of her hindquarters. He watched her go out of sight, dissolving into the woods. The meadow stood windless and silent and slightly coruscant with dew. He climbed to his knees and picked up the rifle, ejected the spent casing and closed the bolt. Then he rose to his feet and slipped the rifle over his shoulder and set out from his position after her.

He located blood tracks dotted erratically among spruce bark and thatchings of pine needles or pinecones and tracked them until he altogether lost sign of the wounded animal. He turned and went up a long slope of second growth spruce and aspens and followed the crest of the ridge northeast to an overlook above the rolling series of ridges. Twenty miles away the bald summit of the Sierra Blanca range shining under the clouds in the ribboned light of the sun. He swept across the folds of valleys with the binoculars for some sign of her. Somewhere down there, she had simply vanished. He scanned the country very slowly. Just downhill from a gaunt service road sat a pickup truck. Slightly obscured by trees. The front of it made a V around the trunk of a canted spruce. He squatted and propped his elbows on his knees and adjusted the focus. The truck was a late thirties or early forties Chevy half-ton pickup. He thought he could see someone inside. Some pinecones, bits of broken glass on the accordioned hood. Nothing moved. He glassed up to the road. It looked like soiled wash gathered there. Then he realized without question that it was absolutely a body. He lowered the binoculars. It was quiet. Not even a bird flew. He glanced up at the sky to measure the progress of the sun. If he hiked out to the wreck, it would be late evening before he got back to his truck, to home. He didn’t want to worry his wife, worry the child incubating inside her. But then, he thought, wouldn’t you want someone to come save your skinny ass?

At the end of the overlook was a steep slope, a game trail winding down it. Stones scuted with lichens like some curious uranic fur; some in whose faces bore fossils Mesozoic in aspect. He hiked along, his back already wet through with sweat. It was a good hard climb to the wrecked truck, stopping from time to time to get his breath and to mop sweat from his forehead with a kerchief. It was close to noon by the time he got there.

When he approached the pickup, he heard a veritable drone of flies. He hallooed and waited. The air smelled awful. He held the kerchief to his mouth and nose, went forward and opened the driver door. Behind the wheel was sat a man dead, his head fallen back, mouth agape. His eyes were open, crescents of matter like cured grout in the cups of them. He looked like he was studying the ceiling with great surprise. Blood dried to black everywhere. A small caliber revolver lay in his palsied grip beside him. A fly danced up his cheek, walked a circle across an eyeball. The hunter shut the door and stepped back. He looked up the slope to where the service road was. He stood there for a long time. He looked back at the truck. Flies, so many of them. It could have happened last night. It could have even happened two days ago.

Walking along the road with his thumb hooked through the shoulder strap of the rifle, he could see the body from which he’d spotted at the overlook. As he drew closer, he saw two black pumps. It was a woman lying face down. She had been shot too. He stood in the road with the sun boiling the nape of his neck. Then he heard it: a wail not much louder than a kitten. He went up to the woman and squat down on one knee, stood the rifle in the gravel. He eased her over onto her side. Black hair all down her face, blankets in her arms. Small writhing movements within. He scanned the landscape. He fished the blankets open with one hand. A newborn. Skin red and mottled and its little legs pedaling weakly, squalling red-gummed at its beleaguered nativity. He stood up then, numb and afflicted. His eyes whited. The rack of his breast plate rising and falling, rising and falling rapidly. He swallowed hard. Then he scooped it up in the bloody blankets. He could feel it moving against his breast. He hushed it and said that it would be okay, that it was safe. That it would remain so, and that he wouldn’t let anything happen to it. They had to have come from some place. Maybe there’s a house down the road. Maybe in that house, a phone. He took his bearings by the sun and set off back along the road, and so into the direction from which they had come …

… From time to time stopping to speak to and console the child. He sat on a boulder off the road and spoke to the child about his life. But that did not seem to abate its lamentations.

After a while he sang to it.

 

By dusk, the cries had paled and paled. And after a while the child quit making any noise altogether, and it died in his arms. He let go the rifle and crashed to his knees, clutching the little child tightly to his chest, holding what cannot be held. The pieces shattered and out of which could not be righted nor made whole again. He sat in the earth, looking down at the child in his arms. The little glassy eyes gave back to him a story that would not be told. He pulled the lids down with his thumb. He held a tiny hand and closed his own eyes. What flesh and blood are made of but can themselves not be forged on any anvil nor shaped upon the mason’s stone in all the worlds turnings, yet it can be lost between the fingers like a finely seething dust. Just like that. And we may well discover that those for whom death had decreed premature be forever consigned to your heart much like a terminal disease, much like a wound of war. And we shall never forget it.

Night. Dark fell like a shroud, black and formless to the world, such as to its origins. He hadn’t seen any sign of civilization. It had begun to rain, and rained hard it did, now falling sheetwise and cutting channels along the shouldering slopes, running irate as an arterial wound. By now he was simply lost. But he slogged on. A half mile further, he could see the lights of a crude church standing in a yellow nimbus among the pines—the light bisected by trees, forming two slurred coronas, like the parthenogenesis of light itself. He went toward it.

The church was composed wholly of mud and shingled up in roofing tin. Sagging windows. There was an addition off in the back, but it was hard spying. He stood in the high grass for a long time looking the place over. Pools of water building in the dooryard there. But when he’d turned to go, light opened out upon him and a voice hailed him from the doorway, inquisitive. He looked. There a figure stood, limned by the interior, lantern oscillating before him, light playing out across the rainy darkness. The voice called to him first in Spanish and then in English, and waved him in.

The place was dimly lit with tallow torch light. Galvanized buckets about the clay floor to catch the leaks through the mud and kindling-wood latilla ceiling. He let the door clap shut behind him. There were isles of pews vacated of any follower. At the altar, a few candles of various size burned, and in that runagate light knelt an old woman bent at prayer. A dim oil lamp burned at her side. Tenemos visita, the old man called to her. The woman rose stiffly and turned to face the man. Her face worn hard as leather, two ropes of slack skin running down her throat to her bosom. Qué tiene ahí, en sus brazos? She asked the old man, her fist to her mouth.

A baby, the hunter interjected.

A baby? Said the old man, squinting hard at the dark shape nestled within the coat.

Yes.

Qué dijo? The woman asked the old man.

Dijo que un bebe, he told her.

Dios mío, she said. Está vivo?

The hunter shook his head grimly that it was not alive. The woman gasped, held a fragile palm to her mouth. Their Rorschach shadows swinging across the far wall.

What were you doing when you found the baby? The old man wanted to know.

 

You were hunting.

Yes.

I see. Come. Come. Follow me. He looked at the woman. Haznos café, por favor.

Necesito hablar con este hombre. The woman said okay, and then went away into a small room. The old man went behind her, ducking through the coffin sized doorway, saying for the hunter to again follow.

The room was composed of limestone entire. The windows draped in elk hide. There sat against the south wall a soapstone stove with the stovepipe running through a crude hole in the wall that had been hacked with a pick to quit the room of smoke. Upon the stove where the old woman now set about percolating coffee, were cairns of crockery and pans blackened with cook. A table and two chairs stood before it. A small cot with ticking in the corner. The room smelled very good. Earthy redolence of juniper. Smells of herbs, of dried meat. A tinge of caustic. The old man set the oil lamp on the varnished table of some old wood, nothing more than a refectory table, and eased himself into one of the tall-backed chairs. Sit, he told the hunter.

What do you want me to do with the baby?

Sit with it.

The hunter sunk into the chair, the child cradled, the blanket dripping and pooling water blackly upon the floor. The old man sat sideways to the table and crossed his legs in a manner the elderly favor. It was quiet a long time. Their faces in that globe of orange lantern light like vapid jackolanterns. The old man watched the woman until she turned and nodded her head and went out, closing the door behind her.

I am a Mennonite, he said. Or was—I was born Mennonite. They came to Chihuahua, Mexico during the early twenties. From Manitoba, Canada. Myself included. I was a Mennonite, and then converted to Catholicism. I don’t know what I am now. I suppose now I am just me.

And what is it that you do here?

I take care of this place with my wife.

You live here?

Yes.

For how long?’

The old man chuckled. For long enough. Probably I’d say ten years, going on. He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a pack of readymade cigarettes and held it out toward the hunter.

Thanks. I gave it up.

The old man nodded and shook one out and tapped the end of it on the table and stuck it between his lips. Then he fished out a lighter from the same pocket and lit it and dropped it back into his shirt pocket again. Tell me about this child, he said, gesturing with his chin. Is it yours?

No. He ain’t mine.

You found him.

Yes.

Where did you find him at?

Out on this utility road. I was tracking this wolf I’d shot. I hiked up this mountain and glassed the terrain below and seen a wreck down there just off the side of the road. So I made my way up to it. But it wasn’t no wreck. Something had gone bad. Real bad. And there he was, this little baby, laying with his mother in the middle of the road, curled up in this blanket.

The old man smoked thoughtfully, very thoughtfully. You said what you’d come upon was bad. But it was not a wreck.

No.

What was it?

Something gone wrong. I don’t know. But the boy’s mother and father had been killed.

Shot. I think the father killed the mother and then turned the gun on hisself.

Did you locate any authorities?

I’d gotten lost. You’re the first soul I’ve seen.

Was the baby alive when you found him?

Yes. But he died not very long after.

I see. Very unfortunate. He folded his arms. You said you were tracking a wolf.

Those are rather scarce to come by these days. Up here that is. Why were you tracking a wolf?

She was killing my calves.

A she. How could you tell?

You could tell by how she did her thing.

Ah. The old man combed his thin hair with his fingers. What are your views on God?

What about Him?

Do you get along with Him?

Naw. And I ain’t much convinced that He’d get along with me.

And why is that?

Because I’ve seen far too much meanness in this world to justify his being here.

Military?

Pardon?

You were in the Military?

I was, yes. 45th Infantry Division. I was there the day we liberated Dachau.

Dachau? I believe I’d fairly recently read about that in the papers. Refresh my memory.

What was Dachau?

A concentration camp. A terrible, awful place. I looked for God all over that place. I wanted to find him and wring his neck for what he allowed to happen to those poor people. To the children. I looked for him today too. And guess what. I couldn’t even smell him.

The old man drummed his fingers on the table. A smile beginning in the folds of loose skin, this curious hierophant. He said to suggest such a thing as to see through the eyes of God, you would then cease to see anything at all. He said that God is indistinguishable from the white noise and that if God were to separate himself from that, then in turn it would make him an integer of something separate from all else; that ultimately it would render him void from the matrix of humanity. He said for then there would be no judgement, and without judgement, the world is aught it knows to do with itself; hell would be vacated, and every thrall would be here.

Among us. He said it is not that the cries of God’s creations fall upon deaf ears, but rather that within all the complexities of the universe—through its genesis and unto its ultimate destruction—that God tends to creation with an inscrutable purpose. Lastly, he said that we could never understand God’s ways fully, and that if we could, would we not then cease to be mortal? The old man stubbed out the cigarette on a china plate on the table and rose from the chair stiffly and gimped to the stove.

What brought you here? Said the hunter. To New Mexico.

I came here as a refugee, the old man said. He got two clay cups down from a cupboard. By a means of escape from my former life. He poured coffee into the cups and brought them to the table. The old man pushed one of the cups to the hunter and sat and crossed his legs.

What were you running from?

The old man sipped the coffee. I was on the run because of atrocity. Because of destruction.

The Revolution?

Yes. Many will tell you that it was over. But it was not over for a long time. The old man studied the ceiling intently. Perhaps as if his thoughts were there. I had come to be indignant of God. I believed him to be wrathful. So I sought out evidence of his kindness, of his benevolence in this world.

Did you ever find it? The evidence.

I found that man had not seriously considered the marvel of atrocity. God and the Devil are at war and the war front is man’s pulsebeat. Do you see? Darkness is part of the world and for everything necessary to it. That is what I found.

The hunter looked down at the child in the lantern light. Delicate face in eternal sleep. Then he looked up at the old man. The old man said, It is simple to see that naught save that of great sorrow could drive man to have woeful views of God. But sorrow without belief is a fool’s sorrow. Drink your coffee.

The hunter drank. After a while, he said, How do I get to a hospital from here? Maybe they can find out who this boy is and bury him proper.

The old man cleared his throat and rose up out of the chair. I will take him,’ he said, swiping the seat of his pants with his hands. We will take him outside, at this moment. To my truck. I will drive him to the hospital and report the crime scene. Could you navigate to where his parents are?

Yes. But not from here. I could take you, take you or whoever I need to, from the base of the mountain.

Is that where you are parked?

Yes. The cattle guard off West Side Road.

I will meet you there tomorrow. We will get there early. Early as in six o’clock, and we will lead the authorities there. We will source out the location. Everything will be all right.

I hope you’re right.

The old man took up the lantern and adjusted the wick. Okay. Vamos a mi vehículo.

Crossing through the nave the old woman took the hunter by his hand. My husband is curandero. Some says he is. You know what is curandero?

Yes ma’am. I do.

The old woman stared fixedly into his eyes. He saw worlds, universes.

Vaya con Dios, she said.

They were going in the rain, the two of them, the old man leading the way with the lantern in one hand and cradling the child in the other. The man followed close behind, his shoulders pulled up for the rain. By a pineboard smokehouse sat the old man’s truck. The old man called out over the ripping rain for the hunter to open the door. He did. He overtook the old man, opened the door whining on its livid hinges, like a rusty wing, and watched the old man carefully place the child on the center of the bench seat. The old man pushed the blanket away from the child’s face and said a quick blessing. A jagged chain of lightning, blue as cobalt, listed across the sky and delivered the hunter a simian’s first chasmic vision of the world, and— occurring almost instantaneously and back to dark again—a final view of the porcelain face that he took for some cognate of his heart’s ultimate dread.

The old man got in and fired up the truck. Get in, he said. You aren’t going to walk in this. I won’t allow it.

I wouldn’t know how to direct you, sir.

There’s only one road up this way, you know. You came from the west. I watched you.

Now get in before you drown in this mess.

When they got to his truck by the cattle guard in the foothills, the rain had stopped and now there was only lightning pulsating in electric relay, distant, silent. A small milky moon hung between darker folds of cloud like a hole in the sky. He thanked the old man and opened the door, but the old man stopped him. Let me ask you something, he said. Before you go.

Okay.

Where do you think one might hear the voice of God?

Tell me.

The voice of God speaks in highest volume through such things that do not speak at all.

The man speculated him to mean trees or stones—things like that—but the old man, studying, said, When that voice stops, only then will you realize that you’ve been hearing it the whole of your life. And sometimes, he said. It’s the most unlikely of creatures from which he speaks.

The hunter nodded, thanked him again and climbed out into the road. He turned and lifted a hand in farewell. He couldn’t see whether the old man had done the same or not. He watched the old man swing the truck around, the atavistic vehicle chugging, clots of blue smoke coughing from the pipe, and very soon the truck was altogether lost among the dark woods. The man walked to his truck and stuck his key in the door, unlocked it, and climbed under the steering wheel. He just sat there. He couldn’t put a name to the feeling. It was sorrow, but it was something else besides. Something he’d felt many times in a country far from this one. And it was that feeling that had him sitting there instead of starting the truck. He blew air out of his cheeks and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and looked at the night into which the old man had returned. Then he started the truck.

When he got back to the house, he parked and walked up the porch steps and into the house to the kitchen. He dropped the keys on the counter. Beside the keys lay a 45th infantry division zippo lighter. He lifted the zippo from the countertop and ran his thumb across the face of it. Thunderbird, he muttered. He adjusted the rifle on his shoulder and turned and crossed through the roseate glow from the hearth in the living room and stopped short of the bedroom door. A platinum band of candlelight underneath of it.

He eased the bedroom door open. His wife was sitting in the bed, leaned against the iron headboard reading a book. He went on in slowly and gave a conflicted smile.

Thought you done took off on me, she said.

That was the plan, said the hunter, lowering himself down onto the edge of the bed. His wife marked a spot on the page with her finger and closed the book over it, and said, You were gone a awful long time. Did you get that wolf?

No.

That doggone thing. We can talk to that old boy out by Three Rivers. The one you said you was going to talk to.

Yeah.

Well. You look starved. They’s food on the warmer.

I ain’t hungry.

What’s the matter? You’ve got that look on your face.

The hunter looked about at the dusty slat-board floor, elbows on the thin worn knees of his britches. Wind moaned in the roof.

Darling, she said, reaching a hand onto his lap. You can talk to me. You can talk to me about anything in the world. What happened?

I ain’t real sure I’d know how to tell it.

The beginning is where I’d start. Sorry.

I’m going to be out early tomorrow.

Where are you going?

Out. Got to handle some things.

There’s something that you ain’t telling me.

I told it all to you.

Fine. I guess it’s just best I ought not know.

That sounds good.

Please tell me what’s the matter, would you?

He opened his palm, mud dried to dust falling from the lines. Well. You ever have dreams, and when you wake up, you ain’t quite sure that you know what they mean? And then maybe something happens later on, and you’re liable to make sense of it?

I don’t think I’m following, sweetheart. So you had some dreams last night?

Well, a dream—I know it, you’re fixing to think I’m crazy.

I already done thought you was crazy.

I’m being serious.

All right. I’ll be courteous, I promise. So tell me about this dream.

The hunter looked at the ceiling as if across which were writ meaning, substance. It was strange, not much to it, he said. Anyways, I was in country I’d never been, country all flat-like; each direction I looked there was nothing Just grass as far as I could see. I was lost out there and I knew I couldn’t turn back because ain’t nothing that was there. I was afraid because the sun was going dark, and it was very cold. He paused. Then I saw the sun coming up again, and it was growing bigger. Then I seen all this life coming up from the horizon; cattle, horses, birds, all running or flying toward me wild-eyed and terrified. And then I realized that it wasn’t no sun rising. It was a prairie fire. And I was standing there trembling, afraid to the bone. And you would think you would turn and run away with the animals, but something told me to walk toward it, to the fire. And only when I made that first step, did I lose my fear. I wasn’t afraid anymore, I think, because I knew that when I got there, that I would be warm.

 

In the night, he dreamt no dreams and slept poorly and awoke sometime during those hours in which no two hands intersect, and lay staring at the ceiling in the dark. He thought about the child in the road. The mother. The father. The cries, oh God, the cries. How long had you been laying there in all that heat, crying into the cold flesh that bore you into this world, this world that would not have you? It was quiet in the house, quiet outside. And it was guilt that he couldn’t route from his heart. And it would not be until the night of his death that he would wield the child with him, abridging the ultimate dark, with the light of a hundred suns. He climbed out of the bed and ambled into the kitchen and fetched a jar of milk from the icebox and stood drinking. He looked out the kitchen window upon that sleep-drawn darkland. A lone tractor truck and trailer laboring along the highway two miles distant. Far off, the gypsum sea in its ancient spread. And occurring just then in that pseudo dawn, the rim of the desert seemed to be rising up into the well of firmament, clearing away the constellations like a demonic lycoperdon, making a violet day out of the desert nightcountry, whereafter no bird flew and man stood trembling, not at God, but at man unto himself in its afterimage for a millennia to come.