The Annual Migration of Clouds Page 9

  “Yeah. I haven’t seen him for a long time.” He pushes the envelope back into his jacket. “He came a couple of months after the funeral.”

  I remember him now: tall, rangy, slow-moving, slow to speak, with a silver-shot black beard, no Cad. When we were introduced, he had shaken my hand with extraordinary delicacy, as if he were handling a sparrow’s egg. An awkward stranger, grieving dutifully, friendly enough but obviously relieved that Hen wanted to stay here instead of leaving with him, his only surviving family. “How is he doing?”

  “Good. He wants to know if I . . . if I want to come up and work with him.”

  A startled, silver flash of pre-emptive horror and loneliness before I remember that I am leaving too; either way, we are leaving one another, and I had let myself forget it in my eagerness to be gone. Selfish. Be happy for him, goddammit. He’s happy for me, after all. I swallow, hard. “Work doing what?”

  “He partnered up with a couple of Chip friends, and they have a tree farm and a big hothouse. He says they could use a body on the business end of things, and planting trees and looking after them till they’re delivered. Says it’s wetter up there. Cooler. Quiet. There’s hunting, real good fishing.”

  “Mm. You gonna go?”

  “I wrote back yesterday to say I would go check it out.”

  “If it doesn’t work, you can always come back down.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I said. But I’m excited to go.” He stares out into the fog, still untenanted. Five minutes to six. “I’ve never been anywhere.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it’s, it’s like . . . it’s kind of like what you’re doing. I mean much less, what’s the word — prestigious, obviously,” he says all in a rush, not looking at me; his hair hangs over his eyes, dripping. “But it feels right. Both of us trying to work with the — with the land. It’s like, we can just live in this, or we can try to make things better. You know? It’s not all about, it can’t be all about just — walking along with your head down because that’s what everybody else is doing. Everything in the whole world is waiting to be picked up and fixed. Not starting over. Starting from new.”

  “Hen, I think you’re doing something even better than that. Because yeah, there are people working on what was left behind. But you, you’re going to be making things that fix themselves — that fix more than just themselves too. Those baby trees won’t fix things from Back Then, and that’s good. Maybe . . . maybe none of that deserves to be fixed. Look at what it did to the people who made it. They broke the whole world with it.”

  “Yeah.” He looks up at last, eyes glowing, pleased. His skin still has the greenish cast of fear. “Cool, right?”

  “It’ll be amazing. An adventure. Bigger and better than mine, because I’ll be at school again.”

  “Two adventures. Yeah.” Shadows begin to coalesce out of the mist, prickly, like me, with spears but also clubs and far more esoteric weapons, swathed in scarves and coats. “I mean. If we survive today and don’t get eaten by a pig.”

  “I’ll give a real good speech at your funeral, buddy.”

  “Me too.”

  “There might not be anything to bury.”

  “I know. I read they can crunch bones and everything. Their teeth can eat our teeth.”

  “Great.” I want to turn and run; or I want to run towards the others and tell them I’ve changed my mind. Instead as the clock strikes its tinny tones, six on the dot, I stand, straighten up, walk.

  There’s Koda, swathed in pale leather; McKinnon, like a building moving through the fog, holding a spear I could not even get my hand around. I suppose they have planned it so that if a killing blow must be delivered, it will be by him. Good. We already know he is unmindful of pain, fear, and death.

  The Dufresne twins have also been invited, Rene delineated with Cad like the black lines on a globe, Emil’s skin flawless, gold-brown as the polished wood of the library, their neatly braided hair tied back so that not even one thin dark rope can move. Carefully looping his lasso, Rene nods only at me; Emil does not, instead slowly blinking, like a cat saying hello. They both carry their weight on the balls of their feet, light and confident.

  Another face looks familiar, and I stare unabashedly until I can place it: Aldous Wong, who was a few grades ahead of Henryk and me, track star, poet, coveted by many romantic dreamers (in silence, fearful of his disdain), whose hair used to fall in a silky black curtain to the middle of his back. Now, it is cut so short I can see his scalp. He takes the same amount of time to recognize me, and lifts his chin in a gesture of greeting.

  We all live on campus, I assume, but the circles people move in don’t always intersect. And the other three I don’t know at all. A foxy-looking man, a big blonde woman in light furs, a tall thin boy perhaps my age, wearing an ostentatious spiral-woven leather necklace with a single boar tusk dangling from it. Koda won’t like that. Make him stick it under his shirt. You shouldn’t have anything that could tangle or clink or catch, and not for vanity’s sake especially. Wait a minute, do I know his face? Yes . . . the boy that came into the store a few days ago. The one with rabbit jerky to trade.

  Koda says, “All right, here’s the plan —” and glares when the foxy man cuts her off.

  “Who’re these two?”

  “Extra eyes and beaters.” She folds her broad arms across her chest in a gesture akin to a rooster fluffing up before a rival, though her tone is mild. “Problem with that, Kavanagh?”

  “No’m,” he says at once, though his darting eyes are still narrowed, the irises a pale, bilious green under gingery brows. He has no spears or knives, only a thick black PVC bow and a quiver. “No problem. Only, I didn’t sign up to be no babysitter.”

  “Me either,” says the tall boy, petulantly. “Hey, you two. You ever been on a boar hunt?”

  “Pig hunt,” I say. “No.”

  Henryk remains silent at my side, though there is a kind of shivery expectancy to him.

  “Didn’t think so. Fucking useless,” the boy says. “Why’d you bring them?”

  I want to scream at them. I need this! You don’t need this like I need this! You’re just doing this for the . . . for the bragging rights, to show off to your friends!

  If they say I can’t go, I’ll . . . But the important thing is to hide my desperation, so I simply watch them, unmoving.

  “I said I’d arrange for a hunt, and I arranged for it.” Koda’s voice remains level, emotionless; both Tusk Necklace and Kavanagh step back all the same. The blonde woman says nothing, though her face is lightly twisted with distaste. “I’ll vouch for them both, Gabriel.”

  “I don’t care. We don’t need ’em and I don’t want ’em.”

  Aldous startles me by speaking up, gliding forward so that his shoulder touches the boy Gabriel’s. “I’ll vouch for Reid. She was a fighter in school.”

  “No I wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t say a good one,” he says placidly. “But she’s not afraid to step in.”

  Emil lifts his lip to expose one canine, and spits onto the dust near my boot, kicking up an impressive little crater. “She’s sick. She won’t do what needs doing.”

  I’m startled by this too, and instinctively glance at Rene, who has worn a sleeveless fox-fur vest in what you might think was a deliberate choice to expose his own disease: thick ropes of colour flowing under his skin, tumorous in the darkness of rib-shadow. A single flicker of hate, even despair, passes across his face so rapidly that at first I believe I have imagined it. They have fought about this before, I suspect. Rene is here on his brother’s suffering and imagined no other sufferers would be allowed to come. Now, we are two liabilities instead of one, and Emil is scared. And my fear worsens, seeing his.

  But I’m scared of not being allowed to come with them too. Of forever thinking about the one in a million opportunity I would give up if I could not
leave something behind in my place. Please, please. I don’t have the time for anything else. I just don’t.

  “Beaters don’t step in,” Koda says. “It’ll be fine.”

  “What about this one? Weedy boy. Look at him. Who will vouch for him?”

  No one does. Even I cannot, under the unspoken rules of this engagement now begun. They seethe in silence when even Aldous does not speak. After a moment, Koda says, “Let’s go. We’re burning away the dawn.”

  “No!” Kavanagh strides too close to Koda; he is shorter than she, but is humming with anger now, righteously, it seems. “This is no game! Listen, we signed on for this with the understanding that you knew what you were doing, and if you’re bringing on a couple of kids so young they’re still shitting in their nappies, then that ain’t the case, and you don’t. You can count us out. Right? Gabe? Elle?”

  The boy nods eagerly, the tusk jerking on his chest; the blonde woman — Elle — shrugs.

  Kavanagh says, “Them or us.”

  Koda glances at me, at Henryk. Well, that’s an easy choice, I think gloomily. Koda asked me out of pity, knowing that I needed this, and never expected Henryk to tag along. We are not needed here. They’re right.

  “All right,” Koda says, and hefts her spear, already turning away. “Go organize your own hunt then. Everyone else: to me.”

  “Wait!”

  11.

  Oh no, say my knees as we take the Drop stairs down into the valley, but their worry is for nothing — I guess the rapid ascent the other day wasn’t as dire as they thought it was. We move in silence, with exaggerated care to not slide or stumble. A few feet in front of me, Elle gives off a pleasant, musky smell, like the secret inner bark of a pine tree. I wonder what a pig would think of it. Something good, I decide; she is covered in furs, and if she is wearing those on a hunt she must have dozens more, so she’s good at this, she knows how animals think, smell, move, die.

  Kavanagh, stomping as we left campus, has pushed the anger out of his muscles now, and moves with soundless ease; even the tall boy, Gabriel, who looked so gangly and clumsy, seems to float. McKinnon is our loudest member, but there’s nothing we can do about that. The Dufresnes and Aldous stick together, and I walk with Henryk and Koda. Uneasily, I feel the need, at least at the moment, for her protection, even though nothing has gone wrong, nothing has happened, we have not even yet reached the valley floor.

  When we do, it is like stepping into muddy water; the mist is stagnant, multiple degrees colder than campus level. I can see perhaps ten paces in front of me. My stomach tightens as we pass the place where the dogs came and harried our rabbit, and behind me Henryk sharply inhales — but nothing remains of the dog’s carcass, only a dark smudge under fresh green grass. Spring is not here but spring is coming.

  The twins, Koda explains softly as we go, have scouted out a likely trail; once on it, the plan is simple enough. But everyone needs to know their place. If you are where you are not supposed to be, you will be subject to friendly fire, and there will be no quarter, because there will be no time. The pigs are big but quick, far quicker than you would expect if you have never encountered them in a tight spot, and of course Henryk and I have not. We will need them to be in a tight spot and us not to be, and the slope and the underbrush are no help to us; the only way we fence them in is with our bodies. And that is what Henryk and I have been brought along to do.

  Aldous whispers: “Bait. Wait. Aggravate.” I laugh nervously under my breath, and appreciate the minimal turn of his head, the edge of his smile. One dimple. I am terrified, but I can remember three words. How many of these hunts has he been on? You hardly ever hear about them. Or, that is to say, you hear about them when people return with carcasses. Maybe the ones that fail we just never hear about.

  I think of Bashir climbing his stepladder, writing my name, Henryk’s name, on the board in the store. All those names. Columns and columns and columns, every week. And nothing in births. Hardly ever. The opposite, I think resentfully, of the pigs, who have piglets every year and hardly ever die; why, those who have never seen a hunt must think they’re nigh immortal. Unfair.

  (But nothing is fair. Nothing is fair.)

  By the time we reach the scouted spot in the thick of the valley, the mist has mostly burned away; scraps remain at ankle-level, golden in the early sun. My fear too has mostly burned off. Nothing will happen, it says. It surges back with an almost audible yell when we see the tracks in the mud, instantly recognizable, far bigger than I had expected, even with Koda’s warnings. Oh God. Oh God. And farther up the path: bigger still. A mixed group with some real monsters in it.

  Pack of demons. Sulphur breath. Cloven as the devil. Calm down, quick: the invader in me cannot see what is happening, it only knows to respond to my fear. Can’t risk it acting up. We haven’t even glimpsed a pig yet.

  I take several deep breaths, and help the others heap the bait. Don’t want it too spread out. Cooked potatoes, raw turnips and rutabagas, a few mealy apples that Emil, unnecessarily, stomps to release their juices. Pigs like the night, Koda said on the way down. So now they should be on their way back to sleep. That will be our chance.

  This is how we kill, I think, as we move into position. We wait until things are weak and tired, and we pick off the garbage, skinny, glaze-eyed unlucky beasts. How different from Back Then, when everyone was as strong and splendid as gods. Meat and milk and sugar every day. Replete with iron and calcium, shiny-eyed, clean-skinned, and Cad still sleeping wherever it was it slept. (But did it sleep? What were you before you could control us? Did you live in the earth, listening, waiting for a day? Did you swim in the wine-dark sea?)

  We kill with shame now, because we have to. And then we are humiliated even as we bring back our prizes. Not trophies, like the old days, mounted on the walls in the Agriculture building — sawdust-stuffed, crawling with bugs, ancient horns. We eat the head. No sense wasting the meat and the brawn.

  I have to get out of this place.

  (I can’t)

  (I know)

  Koda places me upslope between Rene and Henryk, then arranges Aldous, Gabriel, and Emil into a not-quite-closed circle; she stands at the open end with the others. When the pigs arrive, we must herd them by whatever means necessary into a tight group to send them straight towards the hunters, no detours. The hunters will deliver a minimum number of killer blows with support from Emil’s lasso to tangle and create obstructions with fallen giants. “If all goes well,” Koda whispers, “everything will be over in a minute or two.”

  We just have to keep the circle intact. Move as one. Watch where the others are, and do not let the circle be broken.

  The long spear is unfamiliar but light in my trembling grip. I loosen the straps on the two short ones so I can quickly grab them if I use

  (drop)

  this one. Shut up! I tell my fear. You’re not helping.

  I think of old illustrations in our books: bullfighters in colourful capes, the big animal bristling with small insults just sharp enough to stick in its skin. If you stabbed me, I’d burst into tears and curl into a ball, I think; not run at you with my horns. Different strokes, I guess. They teach you these things from history and say, Maybe you can apply this to your everyday life, and we just scoff, don’t we? Nothing from Back Then applies, till suddenly it does. Anyway, my blade is sharp, and more importantly is metal rather than glass, so it will not break. And if I get in a good stab, I suppose even if I don’t kill the pig, it’ll get tetanus later. Take that.

  I hold down a giggle and glance at Henryk, who is paler than I’ve ever seen him, as if he might vomit, that peculiar colour of grey with two red dots right underneath his eyes. Even his hair seems leached of colour: like old straw instead of its usual brown. Aldous looks a lot better, alert and erect, a short spear lying along either forearm. He catches my eye and raises an eyebrow, not quite a smile but a “You all right?” s
horthand. I don’t think so, but I raise mine back.

  Koda has chosen well. It’s barely a half hour before the first pigs arrive, walking slowly and without fear in their own footsteps. I am as stunned as if I’d seen dinosaurs. Be casual, I tell myself, but I have only ever seen them in drawings and photographs, and most of those have been of domestic pigs before they began to interbreed with the imported wild boar. Clean and pink in their pens, or smug, half-submerged in mud in kids’ books. Piggies going to market, jiggety-jig.

  These are not those pigs. They are wolfish, they strut and sneer; their hair is like the barbed wire of the palisades, forest camouflage of grey, black, and brown. They don’t have tusks, it seems at first, and I almost let myself relax: you can still get run down, of course, but you won’t get gored to death or —

  — oh. No. Because here come the big boars, and they do have tusks, and they shout directly at my lizard brain, telling me to run, a predator is too near, there are only two of them but I am staring at their tusks, as long as my bent arms, with broken edges sharper than a surgeon’s chisel, virulently dirty. Their shoulders are the same height as mine.

  I had pictured them shrunken and winter-wan, like the hare we caught. In no pocket of my imagination existed these monsters. At their feet run the only things that you might be able, I feel, to kill: piglets of numerous ages, busy under the protective shadows of their elders.

  As one, they see the bait. There is a clumsy but urgent stampede; I freeze, try to push some blood into my frozen legs, and see Koda shaking her head minutely: Not yet. All right. Let them get stuck in. We are far enough up the slope that they would have to crane their necks to look at us, and that seems to be a motion that they cannot do. What they will do, though, is hear us if we move, so we must wait. Concentrate, I tell myself, on not producing any smells.

  The pigs are bunched together, the two big boars on opposite sides. I think of old men glaring at one another in the Dining Hall over grudges hatched sixty years ago, refusing to share a table. Choice morsels drop from the pigs’ rapidly moving jaws, the piglets beneath darting in and out to scavenge. Silence. Wind moving through branches, the slightest swelling of buds. You have to trust that they will burst into green soon. You have to trust that the dark dead will bloom into life. Because right now your eyes tell you that nothing is coming. And the pigs think: We wait on leaves, and now, here is food. Strange.