I
1.
The year Ruthie Fear was born, her father shot the last wolf in the Bitterroot Valley. He strung it up by the hind feet from the peak of his shed. Nearly pure white, it was so big its snout grazed the dirt. It twisted slightly, front paws dragging, in the hot, still afternoons. Ranchers and tourists came from as far away as Ennis to see. They stood in clusters around the Fears’ trailer, laughing and spitting and toeing the dirt. They paid a dollar to pose for pictures. Some put their arm around the wolf and grinned. Others stared silently into the camera. All were shorter than the wolf was long.
When the interest waned, Rutherford cut the wolf down, skinned it, and turned it into a rug. He replaced its eyes with pieces of colored glass. He folded its ears back and shaped its jaws into a perpetual snarl. He laid the rug down to fill the trailer’s narrow living-room floor. It looked enraged and confused there, claws still fixed to the ends of its flattened legs, as if wondering where its spirit had gone. Ruthie’s mother left soon after, and the only place Ruthie would fall asleep was on the wolfskin rug. With her cheek on its shoulder and her small fingers wound through the white fur on its back. It looked less angry then. She screamed uncontrollably when lifted away, and slept there until she was four years old. Rutherford claimed, for the rest of her short life, that this was what had made her so stubborn and wild.
Ruthie knew it was simply having to live in the world of men.
2.
The first time Ruthie Fear went hunting with her father, she saw a huge winged skeleton flying in from the north. It approached over the dawn-lit mountains, wings stretched across the horizon, undulating on currents of air. Each bone rose and fell discretely, hinged together like vertebra and marked by shafts of light. The skull pointed toward her. Its shadow slid over the earth. An alien, Ruthie was sure, some creature that glided from world to world on gravitational tides and had died in between, the heat of a thousand suns slowly stripping away its flesh.
Only five, she felt the vastness of the universe. Saw herself as a single dot. Imagined skimming through the cosmos beside this hunter, without fear or hunger, passing strange worlds and towering nebulae of green and purple gas millions of miles across.
Her father’s Auto-5 shotgun broke her reverie, and shattered the skeleton into a mass of flapping, twisting parts. One tumbled down to the ice-covered pond before them. It landed silently in a puff of snow. The rest of the flock reassembled, carried on, and were lost in the shadow of the Sapphire Mountains. Her father cursed and lowered the gun. White frost clung to his red beard. “Pulled too early,” he said. His orange cap was the brightest piece of the morning world. Ruthie struggled to understand: one moment the skeleton, the next a dying goose. Smoke threaded up from the gun barrel in a mirror of her father’s breath. The goose dragged itself across the ice with a broken wing, making not for the shore but the center as though it would be met there in safety by a healing force.
The cold air stung Ruthie’s throat. Sudden warmth ached behind her eyes. She mourned the loss of the winged skeleton much more than the goose dying in front of her. The impossible distances it had crossed. The freedom to move from galaxy to galaxy, feeding on light, while her own life was confined to the trailer she shared with her father, and the valley that surrounded them. The goose collapsed. Only its unbroken wing continued to beat weakly against the ice in steady, desperate cadence. Her father cursed again. He breached the stock and emptied the spent shells into the snow. Gunpowder’s acrid ammonia smell wafted out. “Point away,” he said, handing Ruthie the shotgun. “Not at me, not at you.” Ruthie gripped the warm barrel to her chest. She wished the skeleton had passed overhead. That it had streamed on to Las Vegas or Cancún or one of the other exotic places, populated by bikini-clad women, on the posters on her father’s bedroom wall. He was only twenty-four, not much more than a child himself.
Together they stood before the world.
He turned and picked his way down through the brush to the edge of the pond. He paused on the shore, his eyes narrowed against the cold, his eyebrows drawn together in determination. “Never do this,” he said.
He lay down on his stomach and spread his arms. Paused there for a moment, a supplicant flattened with his chin to the snow, then pushed off the snowy bank with his legs and slowly pulled himself over the creaking surface by the elbows. His arms in a crooked V above his head, his body flat, one ear cocked to the shifting sounds beneath. Heat seemed to ribbon off him, an invader on the blank white void, only the goose also moving within it. Willow forest on three sides, and the snowy roof of former country star Wiley King’s unfinished mansion—on which Rutherford had found temporary work after the closing of the mill—a white slope in the distance.
The wing beat like a heart, whomp, whomp . . . whomp, slowing, failing, a bloody motor running down. A trickle of red reached out to meet her father, to guide him, as a serpent to its lair. Ruthie wanted to scream, but she was afraid even that sound would crack the ice. She held her breath. Her father inched farther out. Ten feet from the shore, twenty. His gloved hand reached for the bird’s black foot. Nearly touched it, when a sound like another gunshot split the morning and two white walls tipped up to form a canyon, sluicing both man and bird into the dark water below. Then flopping back to horizontal, only the jagged vein between the sheets revealing the break.
For a moment, Ruthie did not move nor scream. She was trapped between reality and her imagination. What had been real? Her father on the ice or lost in the dark water below? The flying skeleton or the flock of geese? Her booted feet in snow or skimming along beside a huge winged creature in the black of space?
The ice violently upended into a mountain and her father’s orange hat burst forth. Icy water gushed off his cheeks. He howled. His arm thrashed free from the water holding the struggling bird by the feet. He flung it toward Ruthie. It skidded into the snowbank on the shore. It looked oddly unharmed there, only dazed, with all the blood washed from its feathers and its wound temporarily frozen shut. Rutherford brought his elbows down onto the ice, breaking it again. He twisted his shoulders like a bear and lurched toward Ruthie. She stood frozen in terror holding the shotgun. His approach was relentless, smashing through the ice in the waist-high water, his face contorted. Monstrous, beastly, a killer who would kill again. For an instant, she was so afraid that she thought to level the barrel to her father’s chest, pull the trigger, and send him back beneath the ice. Seal it above his head; the massive skeleton once again winging south across the sky.
3.
Ruthie Fear felt the nearness of unseen beings. On fall trips into the national forest to poach firewood with her father, she searched for them in the bushes between the trees. Patches of larch flamed ocher in the midst of the evergreen forest. The smell of butterscotch wafted from ponderosa bark. Ruthie walked carefully, avoiding fallen branches. Like the winged skeleton, the beings seemed to follow her; only their shadows remained by the time she whirled around.
“All this land used to be free,” her father said, stopping to appraise the trunks surrounding a small clearing. “Free game, free wood.” He’d been a stacker at the mill and now worked whatever construction jobs he could find. He tapped the head of his ax against a young ponderosa, and nodded at the dull tock. He stepped back. “Now the government thinks they get to decide who uses it.” Ruthie watched him brace his feet and shake loose his shoulders. The tree he’d chosen was twice his height, with a straight, reddish trunk and thin branches growing thinner to the needles at its top. The ax’s haft doubled the length of his arm. The blade’s concave head gleamed. A maul. Ruthie couldn’t remember where she’d heard that name, but it seemed fitting. What her father was about to do to the tree was what a bear would to him.