The Wilding: A Novel by Benjamin Percy

Author:Benjamin Percy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Fathers and Sons, Oregon, Fiction, Psychological, Wilderness Survival, General, Hunting Stories
ISBN: 9781555975692
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

They set off with their rifles strapped to their backs. They hike along the South Fork—past where it tears along in white rapids, groping at the boulders and logs, trying to carry them downstream—until it widens and calms and goes glassy with eddies in which pine needles pool.

Boo climbs out onto a scarred jawbone of a rock and drinks messily from the river before sniffing at its muddy banks where the tracks of a toad shorten and then vanish, surrounded by the fern-like impression of wings, where an owl swooped down to make its breakfast. They pause here to drink from their Nalgene bottles and while Graham studies the tracks in the mud Justin says to his father, “I don’t know how I feel about leaving our camp unattended.”

“Even if he did come back, which he won’t, what’s he going to do? Break one of our pots? Piss on our sleeping bags? Big deal.”

“You pointed a gun at him.”

“Ah,” he says. “That kind of shit happens all the time out here. It’s no worse offense than giving somebody the finger.”

They step over roots and rocks and through the bright shards of sunlight lying like jigsaw pieces all over the ground. Every now and then a cloud passes over the sun at the very moment Justin steps into one of these jigsaw pieces so that its light goes out suddenly. One moment he is stepping into a square of brightness; the next he is pausing in a sudden dark. Camp-robber birds hop and flutter through the woods around them, unseen, like something pacing them.

Justin’s father stops before a tree with a jagged black vein running down its middle. “You know the Indians used to douse their arrowheads with rattlesnake blood and charcoal taken from a tree struck by lightning.” He licks his thumb and runs it across the trunk. It comes away black. He traces it along the lip of his rifle, as if it were a crystal he wants to bring a sound from. Then he faces Graham and stabs his thumb against his forehead, pushing him back a step and leaving behind an inky smudge. “Now we’re ready.”

They continue forward, stepping over fallen pinecones and branches, the litter of last night’s storm. Chipmunks dart forward to investigate their presence, then scatter into the underbrush. Every now and then his father pauses to study some tracks on the trail, rain-blurred but recent. They see the places where the deer have peeled away strips of bark from the river willows, where they have left their stool, where they have bedded down.

Justin catches Graham looking off into the woods, as if sensing something, maybe worrying over the man with the crowbar or the story his grandfather shared with them last night.

The basalt walls are pitted with holes from wind erosion or from the bubbling of gases long ago. These holes catch the shadows and look like the eye sockets of the earth. They follow a zigzagging series of switchbacks toward the top

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