Fox Creek: A Novel by William Kent Krueger

Author:William Kent Krueger [Krueger, William Kent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense
ISBN: 9781982128715
Google: a7V9EAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B09JPJF3PN
Goodreads: 59366108
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2022-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

- PART THIRTEEN - THE WOLF

CHAPTER 26

LeLoup wakes in the dark, sitting with his back to the rocks. The fire is nothing but embers and ash. He checks his watch. Still a couple of hours before sunrise. He has slept fitfully, but not just because of the cold and his awkward position. He has dreamed again.

For LeLoup, dreams are a dangerous territory. In dreams, the past is not the past. The terrors of his childhood in the residential school still plague him. A lifetime of trespass haunts him. Nameless faces loom before him. The voices of dead men speak.

In dreams, LeLoup sees things he cannot explain.

In the dream that awakened him, he saw a man in the clearing of a forest transform into a huge beast and begin a battle with another beast that was its twin. In this dream, he not only stood watching the battle; he was the transformed man, and he was deep in the fight, claws ripping, teeth gnashing. Even when he wakes, the fury of the dream still unsettles him.

His dreams have sometimes proven to be premonitions. Once, in a dream that came to him while he was working under Kimball as a private military contractor hired by the government to help secure the diamond district of Sierra Leone, he saw a swarm of ants engulf a hyena and devour it, only to be swallowed themselves by another hyena. The next day he was scheduled to be part of a team assigned to help with the search of a village suspected of harboring RUF insurgents. The dream had greatly disturbed him, and he found an excuse to be released from the mission. The team, when it entered the village, was set upon by the villagers en masse and suffered devastating casualties. LeLoup, along with Kimball, was part of the large force sent the following day to secure the area. When they’d finished their mission, not one villager was left alive nor any building left standing.

He makes no excuses for his past. But in his sleep, he has no control over his conscience and his dreams sometimes punish him.

He rises and steps away from the rocks to relieve himself. As he stands pissing onto the snow, he gazes up at the stars. He has read that the Dakota people believe stars reside in the branches of cottonwood trees and when the spirits of the night sky require more, they shake the stars loose with a fierce wind. He has looked at the inside of a cottonwood branch and has seen the star there. The part of him shaped by his urban upbringing in the residential school tells him what nonsense it all is. But there is a deeper part of him that is more than willing to embrace the beauty of the story.

“God damn this night,” Kimball says from behind. “Can’t sleep. Can’t go after them. And since you killed our communications, we’ve got no idea what’s going on out there. We’re blind.”

When LeLoup has finished

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