The Spirit

An owl hooted in a tree, then glided away across the moon. The dog cheerfully followed him around the clearing as he searched for prints.

“I don’t get it. Go find him. Tell him I’m awake.”

You don’t understand, the dog barked, wagging its tail. Listen.

The Indian realized that a song had been playing for some moments. It came out of the sky and through the trees and up from the ground. The song faded to a distant smattering of applause, punctuated by an amplified voice congratulating skiers.

The Indian pushed away foliage from bushes and caught his breath. The forest plunged downward to a valley, where it became flat meadow. A mile away, the land washed up again, like a frozen explosion, to another mountain. Midway up the mountain was a cluster of buildings with lighted windows and spotlights, like a luxurious ocean liner plunked down in the wilderness.

Two separate groups of flickering colored lights descended ski trails that flanked the large central building. They crossed and intertwined, red over yellow, blue over green, in intricate patterns, a coiling jeweled necklace writhing in the velvet night.

On the Indian’s side of the valley, a river cut through a deep canyon. A high steel-­braced bridge spanned a deep gorge that channeled the water into boiling foam. The road ribboned along the meadow, then ascended to the buildings.

The colored ski torches congealed at the bottom of the slope to another ripple of applause. The stentorian voice boomed, “Aren’t they something, ladies and gentlemen?” His words were drowned out by whistles and shouted appreciation. “. . . back for the second show in one hour.”

Journey’s end. The Indian rubbed the dog’s fur and played with its ears. “He has to let his foot get well. Will we spend the winter here?”

No, we will just rest. The spirit led you here. He cares about you. There are soft beds and lights and music in those buildings. You can rest here, too, and sleep. See how warm it is over there?

Again the Indian wondered how the dog spoke to him, as he had often wondered over the past months. His snout did not move, words did not come from his mouth, yet the Indian heard these replies in his own head. The voice sounded exactly like his own. “Hallucination,” the Army doctors would have called it. The Indian wished he could forget the words of the doctors and remember his grandfather’s instead.

Gently the Indian grasped the dog’s muzzle in his hand. It was his friend, his bond to the spirit. He was not sick, as the doctors said; he was not imagining this. “Let’s go down,” he said to the dog.

He led it down the slope into the meadow. He talked aloud to himself, getting his voice back in shape and practicing words. He would need many more words than he had used with this animal to speak to human beings.

The valley road connected to the side of Colby Lodge, where passengers were unloaded. It widened into a parking lot behind the main building, where the service entrance was located.

Lester Cole, who was working overtime that night, finished his dishes at eleven, climbed into his pickup truck with the jackrabbit racing suspension and hood blister under which was housed a supercharger, tuned into a country-­music station, and hurried down the road to his poker game.

He rattled over the bridge and honked at the Volks­wagen van going up. The van was emblazoned with a cartoon of a bear on skis, wearing a peaked cap and scarf, under which were the words COLBY LODGE. Skis and luggage were tied to the roof rack. Lester thought it was high time Jack Helder, Colby’s owner, bought a proper bus for the place.

The radio hissed when the woods closed around him. He watched the white road dividers slide from the headlight beams under his truck like thrown spears. He was changing stations when a man stepped out of an old logging road near the bridge, right in the middle of a white line.

“Jesus!”

Lester hit the horn and brake. The man was covered with hair from head to foot. He flung up an arm to ward off the light.

Lester swerved to a stop on the road shoulder in a shower of gravel. He slipped the rifle from the rack behind him and climbed out of the truck.

His ragged breath made crystalline little puffs in the frosty air. His father had told him about a Bigfoot that came up to his camp one night while he slept. His biggest mistake was in not shooting it and bringing home a hunk of the body to sell.

Lester heard leaves stir in the trees. He selected a black square of forest and fired four shots into it. The shot echoes rolled around the hills like billiard balls.

A rock flew out with such speed that its trajectory was perfectly flat for a hundred feet and punched a dent in the truck fender. The second and third rocks smashed respectively the side mirror and the windshield. The fourth rock nearly hit him in the head.

Lester’s nerve broke, as it always did when he was challenged. He jumped into his truck and roared hell for leather down the road toward the Augusta County Ranger Station.

OBJECTIVE

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