Wild Sorrow by SANDI AULT Read Free Book Online Page B

When the power went out at my cabin, that meant I lost kitchen and bathroom facilities because my water was drawn from a cistern by an electric pump. During the previous power outages, I had told myself that the situation was temporary, used an area in the woods behind my house as an open-air latrine, roughed it until the electricity came back on. I had hauled water in buckets for washing up and for cooking from La Petaca, the shallow, icy stream above my cabin, about an eighth of a mile away in the forest. I can cope better than most with inconveniences of this nature. But this was getting old.
    Since I had not been home for two days, my cabin was so cold that it was probably a good thing there was no water in the pipes. I cleaned the ash out of the woodstove, laid a new fire, and tended it until it got going. Then I grabbed the big plastic bucket, a tube to siphon, and a little ax to break the ice, and headed up the slope toward the woods and La Petaca. Mountain ran ahead of me, eager for an outing after spending so much of the day snoozing in the back of my Jeep.
    I chose a good place on one side of the stream where there was solid, high ground next to a fairly deep little pocket that trout liked to frequent during the spring and summer flows. These little recesses might have been the reason for the name of this seasonal stream. La Petaca meant “tobacco pouch,” probably named for the brownish water that pooled in tiny coves on the edges of the current at the center. I squatted on the cold ground and began chipping at the ice with my ax. I could hear Mountain sniffing and snorting and snapping twigs as he explored around me. As I struck the ice with my ax, I felt a throbbing ache in my shoulder where it had slammed into the gate. My head hurt both from lack of sleep and the welt from the stirrup. I pounded the ice again and again, creating a rhythmic sound with the impact: chank, chank, chank, chank. The cadence seemed to offer momentum to my thrusts, so that all I had to think about was keeping the beat—not how the blade was barely scoring the ice, how the ice was so thick that it wasn’t breaking, how it might be that the shallow stream was frozen completely through, or even how much it hurt to strike each blow. It was only the tempo that mattered, keeping time, every crack ringing out in the night in the silent woods.
    And then I stopped. The woods were silent. I rose to my feet. “Mountain? Mountain? Mountain!” My voice echoed against the ice. Then, stillness.
    I dropped the ax on the ground and started for the last place I’d noticed the wolf rooting through the undergrowth. I called again, “Mountain? Mountain!”
    Instead of the usual crashing of brush as the wolf responded to my call when he had wandered a little far, there was not a sound beyond my own breathing, and the pounding of my heart in my ears. “Mountain!”
    I searched and called for the wolf for two hours. This had never happened before. Mountain might jog off after some critter, but he always returned within minutes, and never went far. There was not a sign of him anywhere. I returned to my cabin feeling like my gut had twisted over something as hard and cold as the ice over La Petaca. Fear and worry crowded my chest until I could barely breathe. With anxiety coursing through me, I forgot my fatigue and paced the floor of the one big room of my cabin, unable to sit or lie down.
    It crossed my mind that the experience of spending such a cold and miserable night with a dead body may have upset Mountain almost as much as it had me. But this was so uncharacteristic of the wolf—wolves lived and traveled in packs, and I was Mountain’s pack! He had never left me before, and he never wanted me to leave him, for any reason. I had lost a lot of my personal belongings to his abandonment anxiety-driven rampages in my cabin when I’d tried leaving him for short periods of time. And now he had suddenly run