Let The Wild Ones Pass Through

By NGF Clark

Alpine Fellowship 2020 Writing Prize Winner

I crane my neck back and squint, marking out a circle of blue, an icy calm. As I open my eyes wider the edges begin to fray, and the haze takes over. It congeals on the horizon like oil in water, like guilt on a conscience.

“I had two young Brits in my store this morning,” Eric tells me. “Think they were from around your way – Lincoln-shire?”

“That’s right,” I lie.

“They were dead set on going to Whistler; told them no point, unless you want to knock a few years off your life. And there’s a coachload of Koreans with nowhere to go – they’re still stuck up at Tall Pines whilst some suit in Seattle gets them all ferry tickets.” Eric grins, slides a pack of cigarettes over the counter, before tapping a warning on the glass. “Want to watch where you light up – hope you been following them forestry regs.”

I shrug, taking the pack. “Not much of a summer when you can’t light a barbeque.”

“Careful what you wish for. Speaking of...“ Eric ducks behind the counter and returns with a plastic face mask dangling from his fingers.

“Think my lungs are coated enough already, I’ll be alright.”
“Suit yourself.” He cocks his head. “How long you been with us now?” “Two years.”

“It’s the worst I’ve seen it, you know,” Eric spreads his hands over the counter, nodding at the map laid out below the glass, the old paper as dry and brown as the country it depicts. “Last year was bad but not round here. This year you can really feel it, like it’s finally coming, you know? Like time’s running out.”

He says it with a toothy grin and I’m confronted by a tideline of tobacco stains.

“And what about those folks of yours back home? Think they might be worrying? This has made news all over.”

I want to reply with my usual easy lie, but this time something in my throat sticks. “Sure,” I say, eventually, but Eric’s attention is on the car pulling up outside. It’s piled high with luggage.

“Well, whatever you decide to do, best to embrace it wholeheartedly. As for me, it’ll take more than the end of the world to shift this old-timer.”

On my way out, Eric calls over, tosses me something. I catch it – a dog treat. “Suspect Max isn’t taking to being shut up too kindly.”

“Should he be? Shut up, I mean.”

“Forestry department is asking everyone to keep their animals inside after sundown. It’s to let the wild ones pass through. You might want to leave some water out. Hayley’s idea – gives them a chance to refuel.”

I pocket the treat, cigarette hanging from my mouth already. “Wild ones? You mean like moose, bears?”

Eric shrugs. “They’ve lost their homes. Anything helps.” I nod, wave, leave.

It’s been two years since my backpacking came to an end and I decided I’d rather not end up where I started. Two years since I cancelled my last flight and picked up work with hostels in Vancouver, before eventually heading north, once the shine of that city turned dull.

Funny how the hold of this small town is harder to escape. And the more people that leave here, the more it seems to tighten.

I walk on past the piled-up car, scrunched-up faces of kids peering towards the sky like they’re searching for UFOs.

In my back yard I light another cigarette and breathe in the desiccated air. The bleached grass rustles like old sandpaper. Max barks; I look down. “You knew.” I remove the treat from its wrapper and toss it to him.

The horizon is a grease-smeared glass, a soiled canvas. It’s coming, you know? Eric had said, like time’s running out.

I feel a clenching in my stomach, and drop my gaze to the parched yard. I think of the reasons why I’d left in the first place, the reasons why I decided not to go back.

“Max!” I call. The dog has his paws up against the loose slat in the fence, barking at the beyond as if the forest itself was on the move.

“Max, come away from there!” A breeze descends from the troubled horizon and down through the forest. It carries with it the sharp scent of woodsmoke. Stronger now. I carefully stub out my cigarette and take the dog back inside.

I spend the rest of the morning loading up my stuff into boxes and cases. I don’t have a plan, but keeping pace with the neighbours seems about right. I listen out for updates on the radio, but its repetitive warnings grow tiresome, and eventually I turn it off. In a box, I find my mobile phone. An old muscle memory kicks in, and my heart freezes as I press the power button – but the battery is long dead. I hold it for a moment, feeling strangely disappointed, then toss it back in its box.

It’s mid-afternoon. The haze has quietly swallowed the sky like an unnoticed cataract. I load up my truck with essentials before I realise I’m the only one on my street doing so. Each drive is empty.

I find myself abandoning the packing and wander back into town instead. There are a few people still hurrying here and there, a cheerfully restrained panic that becomes more pronounced the emptier the streets become.

Beyond the wooded ridge, a plume extends from the haze like the hoary arm of God. I try to work out its size and distance, fail. Where the horizon used to be, a dark heart now bleeds.

"You see the glowing in the distance," said Eric, stepping up behind me. It wasn’t a question, though he gives me space to consider it.

"When the wind keeps blowing, the glowing gets brighter - and then you start to see the flames." He chuckles, “that’s the point you got to ask – where you going to run to?”

We watch the sky turn to dust.

“You know Pompeii?” said Eric; “I wonder if this is what it was like, slowed down a thousand or more times. Did you know the heat was so bad it turned people’s brains to glass? Everything you just thought, caught like so many flies in amber.”

“Did the Koreans get out?” I ask.

“They left two hours ago.”

“And the Brits?”

“I told them to come back if they couldn’t thumb a lift, and I’ve not seen them since. Were you listening to the radio?”

“I switched it off in the end.”

“Shouldn’t have. They’re saying it will be here before midnight, depending on the wind. And with things as they are...” he holds up a damp forefinger to the air, like some cultish salute, “...they may well be right.”

There’s a stirring in the distance, a ripple through the treetops like leopards stalking the savannah. I think of the phone in its box, still grimy with fingerprints from a different me.

“What do they look like?” I wonder out loud. “Those thoughts trapped in glass. Friends, family, religion? Love? Death?”

Eric gives me a clap on the back, chuckling as if I’d said something embarrassing. “You’re not as old as you think you are, you know. Maybe you need to give yourself a chance to make things right.”

He leaves me standing in the middle of the road. I wonder what you’d say. I wonder what you’d all say.

Everyone else has gone now. Just me and Eric in this old town. Nothing more than a hamlet, as they’d call it back home. Home. I unload my truck accompanied by the silence, savouring the staggered moment. Afterwards, my face glistening with sweat in the afternoon gloom, I feel more alive that I have done in months.

There’s an old collapsible chair under the porch that hasn’t moved since the previous tenant stashed it there. I take it out now, dust it down, and set it up on the slope of my tinderbox yard, where I can see the sharp rise of conifers against the warped horizon.

Max barks from beside me, and his voice grates against the heaviness of the day. The quiet that’s grown across this town is as dense as ivy. Sitting here, in this rusty old chair, I’m seized by a sense of serenity so complete it’s as if I’m alone in the deepest darkest cavern, my thoughts the endless flicker of glow worms – present, not too bright.

The treeline stirs in the wind, and the worry of their foliage sounds clear as a bell. I shiver in delight. Was this what I was looking for? Was this the apex of that decision? Here and now: a rust-scored, cobwebbed chair in the back of an overgrown yard with exclusive access to the end of the world. No more running.

The thought brings a contentment – this is the place, I know it, up here in my Gethsemane. The sky threatens with stains of oil and wine. There’s a coll in the firmament that pours darkness onto the

land – I think of the vessels of wrath spilling from Heaven. What angel looks on beyond this filthy mass? Is that you? Is it your wings that shade this marked earth?

I take a breath and summon back that day, feeling the details crowd me, that waiting room with its pastel mosaic of heather and bluebells, the applause for patients leaving for the last time, that I knew you would never hear. And your face as you processed the news that day, the face that is always waiting for me. Calmly I rise and cross to the fence and worry the loose slat until the wood chews itself free from the screw.

Eric has left a note on the windscreen of my truck. I wonder why he didn’t call, before realising I would have done the same. We are each on our own now. A sacred hush has befallen what remains of the town and an ancient taboo locks it in place.

The note says: “Change to NNW.” There is no instruction, no recommendation – their absence is telling. Fragments of radio reports restructure in my mind, but the meaning fails to register. I imagine the fuel tank in my truck catching light, the violent battering of its explosion.

As Max slobbers furiously in his food bowl I watch my handprint on the window pane glow in this strange light. Beyond it I see a spiral of eagles rising above the hill crest. I realise there are steps that must be taken, things observed. It demands a vigil.

I ransack my cupboards searching for all the vessels I can lay my hands on – bowls, buckets, plastic trays, a cracked wide-brimmed jar, a steel basin, a fish tank green at the edges. The more I find, the more my mind exults, and a tremulous excitement permeates the house. Max watches me from the settee in bemusement.

Each vessel I place evenly around the yard, like I’m setting a table for a banquet, until each of the bowls, basins and tanks have been set, each one a dish for a king.

Then I open the hose and fill every pot, bowl, and tank, filling each to the brim, as the sky withers to the colour of desert sand. Max drinks his fill – a feudal privilege – before we both head inside, and I lock the door behind us. Pressing my face against the glass like a kid at a sweetshop, I watch the slow suffocation of the daylight, the sun reduced to a pale disc – a single chocolate coin.

I find that box once again, take out my phone, fumble the charger and connect it to the wall socket in my bedroom. I leave before the inevitable torrent begins.

I set out a roll mat by the sitting room window and look out at the tar-streaked clouds, cardiac violet bleeding the edges. I lean back and watch as the day dies.

Abruptly I wake in a sweaty heap and curse my idleness. A discreet note of instinct warns me from sudden movement and I turn carefully to adjust my view outside. A malignant red night stretches taut overhead. Though I cannot see the flames, I can sense their flickering. They are here.

I watch, breathless, as the wild ones stop and stoop, stamp and snort, drinking deeply from the wells I have filled. The raging sky cuts their silhouettes into sinuous necks and darting snouts, a scrapbook menagerie of ears, horns, antlers and tails paraded in shadowplay.

Their performance is as stark as the Lascaux cave paintings, primal silhouettes against the sky’s red ochre backdrop. Every now and then a glimmer of tapetum eyes reflect the wildfire’s glow, and their sparks burn deep into my soul.

There I am, numb, genuflect, not daring to move lest I break the spell that webs us together. So I continue this worship as my kingly guests pass by, dark and nameless, each one taking what they will of my beautifully-wreaked heart and leaving in return an imprint of their fleeting grace.

These streets are newborn, blanketed by a level fall of ash. Animal prints are everywhere – their hooves, paws and claws reawaken ancient pathways long overlaid by asphalt and concrete. I add my own humble track to the tapestry of lays, side-by-side, as if we had walked together.

Eric is outside his store cleaning the windows of ash. The day feels outside lived experience, a ghost time several miles beneath the ocean.

“So you didn’t run after all? Looks like we had a close call - fires didn’t get beyond the ridge. I don’t suppose –”

He turns and looks at me, takes in my singed eyes, wrung face and haunted soul. For a long while he appraises me, then nods, and returns to his work.

Back in my house there are phone calls waiting to be returned, answers to hoarded questions – they have waited for a long time, but they will wait a while more. For now, I follow the trails as they criss- cross the town, tracing their passing out into this new world, finding their way home.