Page 3 of The Shape of Silence

She went to where the man lay, where he’d gone to sleep last night but had not risen this morning, and lowered onto her haunches. His face was turned slightly toward the wall, one hand loose against the fur. She waited, staring at him, thinking about how she would address this, what needed to be done. She touched his hand again, sought out the pulse in his wrist, but still there was no answer, confirming what she already knew. Then she withdrew her hand and straightened.

She banked the fire. She covered the man’s face with the fur. She gathered the tools and paused only a moment before deciding to take the man’s tall, smooth walking stick and not her smaller one. The ground beyond the door was soft with late spring, the earth kinder now. She walked quite far, choosing a clearing where she was unlikely to encounter thick roots, where a gentle slope would carry water away, where animals passed but didn’t often linger.

The digging took time. She worked steadily, resting when her arms protested, then going on. Many hours passed before the hole was deep enough, and she went back for him.

He was heavier than expected, though she’d grown taller than him in the last few years. She managed it in stages, pulling and adjusting, careful not to let him slide from the travois that had stood unused against the side of the house for so long. When she reached the place she had opened in the earth, she could not bring herself to simply dump him into the hole. Instead, she braced her feet and worked him down inch by inch, her arms shaking before she was done, until she could lay him there without letting him fall. She crossed his arms over his chest and climbed out of the hole, and then stood over him for a moment and considered his clothes—he never liked to see anything wasted—but she could not, would not, leave him undressed in the cold ground.

When she was done, she gathered the tools and the man’s walking stick and returned to the house.

Inside, she set everything where it belonged and stared at the empty space in his bed. The silence didn’t seem to close the way it used to, but rather it seemed to stretch.

That night, she slept near the fire, wrapped in the same furs, her body curled tight against the cold, and thought it was indeed quieter now, and certainly colder.

***

She woke before the light reached the trees. The fire had burned down to a dull red seam beneath the ash. She uncovered it with a careful hand and coaxed it back with a twist of bark. When the flame caught, she fed it slowly, waiting until the crackle settled into something even.

The kettle went on before she put on her boots.

Outside, frost still held the ground. The air carried the smell of night—damp earth, leaf mold, the clean edge of cold that meant clear weather. She stood for a moment at the threshold, listening, then stepped out and barred the door behind her.

Since last spring when the man had died, she thought that she ought to find her way back to the other life she sometimes remembered. Not today, and probably not tomorrow, but someday, when the work eased or the weather turned, or when some small, remembered thing told her where to go.

And yet, she went no farther into the forest than the man had gone, and no farther out of it than he ever had either. The paths she walked were the paths he had made first, pressed into the ground by years of use and return. Beyond them lay more trees, more land, more world, but she wasn’t brave enough to explore. Everything that was familiar was safe.

She checked the eastern line first. One snare lay empty, sprung by nothing. Another held a rabbit, already cold. She reset the wire before lifting the body free, wiping her hands on the grass instead of her pants.

At the stream she broke the skin of ice with a stone and filled the jug, then knelt and rinsed her hands and wrists. Later, she would return and wash her clothes, working them against the small rocks as she did once every week or so, when smoke was not the only thing she smelled in her garments. She did this more often in summer when the work left more sweat in the cloth. She dreaded laundry in the winter, but never delayed or ignored the task, her patterns constant as the man’s had been.

The rabbit was skinned on the low table outside. She worked cleanly, setting aside what would be used later and hanging the rest beneath the eaves. A strip of meat went into the pot with dried roots and a handful of greens she’d foraged on her route. She let it boil for a long time, because tough meat did better that way, then set it back to simmer while she finished her other work.

She ate standing, the bowl cradled in one hand, her back to the wall. She missed bread most on mornings like this, when the air was cold and her hands were slow to warm. Bread only came in summer, when the small patch of grain behind the house could be cut and threshed and ground. The man had shown her how to save seed, and she had done it carefully, year after year. This spring, she meant to break more ground and make the plot wider, so that there was more grain and she could make bread longer into the winter months.

When she finished, she rinsed the bowl and set it upside down to dry.

The middle of the day was for wood. She chose fallen branches rather than cutting live growth, tested each piece before splitting it, and stacked the pile so it would not shift when snow came again. When her shoulders began to ache, she carried the smaller pieces inside and set them near the hearth.

When the light changed, she mended a tear in her sleeve with a strip of darker cloth that had once been something else. The bone needle slid easily through the worn fabric. She tied the knot small and bit off the end.

She checked the door, the latch, and the shelf where the salt was kept. She'd never been told and had never learned where the salt had come from and feared using up the small supply until she could figure out how to replenish it.

Before evening, she walked as far as the last familiar tree and no farther, looking out between the trunks. The forest beyond was possibly no different than the forest she knew, but she went no further.

By the time she returned, the air had cooled again. She banked the fire for the night and hung the kettle where it would not tip. She brought in the clothes she’d washed and laid them near the warmth to finish drying. She’d since taken ownership of the man’s bed, many months after he was gone, and laid out the furs neatly as he’d done, and had added her old coat-pillow at the head.

She sat for a while after that, hands resting on her knees, listening for the sounds that told her all was as it should be. When she lay down, the bare firelight cast the front of her in shades of gold.

***

She first noticed the dog near the eastern line, along the path she took toward the rising sun, where the ground dipped and the brush grew thick enough to hide more than it showed. At first, and from a distance, he was small enough to be mistaken for something else—a scrap of moving fur, any other forest creature that she sometimes had to fight with for her food. He stood where one of her snares had been, his head lowered, his ribs showing through a coat that was thin and uneven. She would remember later that there had been something in the way he held himself that made her stop and look twice.

She waited, squinting. It wasn’t a wolf pup. She and the man had seen those before. The man had warned her about the wolves, that they were to be avoided, all wolves, big and small.

This was clearly a dog—a very young, lanky dog.

When the dog didn’t run, she took another step, and then another, watching the way his weight shifted as if he were ready to bolt. She made a small motion with her hand and told him to go, her voice not nearly as firm as it should have been in an effort to protect her next meal. He looked at her hand, then at her face, then at the empty place in the snare where possibly a rabbit had been, but now only scattered fur remained, and finally he slipped back into the brush and made no more noise than soft wind moving through bare trees.

Frowning, she reset the snare and moved on.