Beasts of Unburden

It snowed until the body was covered good and proper. I saw the bloody trail arrowed towards the forest and tried to convince myself not to go after it. Yes, I had a shotgun, and no, I didn’t know how to use it well. I was made to reload, clean, and aim it at some coke cans a few weeks before, but been given no opportunity to release its thunder since.

I couldn’t be sure what had killed the fox. My feet ached to go outside and after the mystery, so instead I got up to make a cup of tea to keep myself occupied. I distrusted the momentum the brisk walk to the kitchen charged up in my body, so I held onto the edge of the counter and tuned into the electric boil, bubbling with rising urgency.

By the time I got back to my spot by the window, the dune over the inert little body had grown marginally thicker. I would investigate after the tea, I decided. It was going to get dark and silly to walk off into the woods, so I could count on common sense some more.

‘Never leave the cabin out of sight past twilight unless you want to freeze to death,’ Nate told me to the jingling of the house keys in his manicured hand.

‘Roger,’ I said. Most of his advice was awful useful but I still found it patronising. He suffered from the curse of a wealthy person — can’t ever say nothing without sounding like they’re speaking from a fine Italian leather saddle.

‘And don’t whistle in the woods. You never know what might come running.’ He winked, and I wasn’t sure whether he was joking, but I noted the comment.

I repeated the phrase to myself many times over in the cabin, tasting its eeriness and shivering. Nate had all of a fruit fly penchant for poetry, but he loved the arts in principle, attended ‘numerous shows, darling’ as a child, and had a knack for expressing the subliminal when least expected. Even a blind hen, I guess. Ever since college, he observed my toiling over papers from the sidelines and badgered his parents to sponsor my sweaty efforts. I suspect he wanted me to succeed to claim patronage to all his other camp friends. I judged him even in his selflessness, but kept myself around like a pet all the same. His entitled innocence pissed me off, but his taste in alcohol was impeccable.

When he heard I was working on a mystery novel, he immediately offered the cabin up.

‘Just think of you, hunkered down and away in the frost, working out whodunnit.’

I couldn’t say no. And now I was here and drinking my steaming tea and the body outside must have cooled down completely.

To get outside involved a whole routine. Long johns. Cotton socks. Woolen socks. Waterproof boots. Skiing jacket. Balaclava. Plus a limp scarf to bring back a little flair into this outfit otherwise totally subservient to nature. But this time, I just threw the heavy jacket on my pyjamas, grabbed a flashlight, and broke into the almost perfect silence of the forest. Occasionally, a branch would lose its wrestling contest with the snow and crack. I could also swear I heard the bigger flakes land with a gentle twinkle.

There are three stages to twilight: civil, nautical, and astronomical, before the night truly takes over. Each is the sun falling multiples of 6 degrees below the line of the horizon. This was the civil kind, untouched by civilisation. I often lay in bed at night and felt unwanted when wind howled and the last of the logs sighed in a heap in the fireplace.

I walked over to the fox and brushed snow off the carcass. A glassy, terrified eye jumped out as I looked at the contorted horror show. The animal’s neck had been snapped and its tongue stuck out as if in jest. I followed the paling trail for a few steps, remembering the character I had murdered the previous night. Also by neck break. It was Nate, though with his neanderthal ability for metaphor and a bit of luck he would never realise.

I stopped where the bush thickened abruptly into a wall, and turned. The melody from Looney Tunes suddenly rang in my mind both gently and forcefully, as those things do, and I put my lips together to whistle it out, but looked back at the fox, playful almost in his rigor mortis, and decided against it. I walked back to the cabin and snapped the torch on. I liked to scan the ground in the darkness, bringing forth a childish excitement for what the light might illuminate.

I ran the harsh beam over and over the thicket. Creepy, creepy. The skin on my legs was burning from the cold. Nothing, nothing. Then a sparkle, perhaps of snow, perhaps of eyes, as I liked to imagine. I went back inside, bolted the door, and sat down to write.

The next morning, the body had become a barely visible mound, and all thoughts of moving it away from the backyard dispersed. I won’t be here long enough to see it melt and rot. I got up to the typewriter. The clacking bothered nobody, especially now, pre-dawn, when things slept at their most stubborn. I didn’t murder anyone, not this time, but unsettled the plot, like receiving a postcard from someone you don’t know. I, the first reader, was disturbed. Signs began appearing to the main character, and he felt surrounded by bizarre and illogical situations that stalked ever closer to home.

One thing I never thought to bring with me on this expedition was sunglasses, and that morning was one I regretted tearfully. I went outside and was immediately forced to shield my eyes. A million suns sparkled in the sky, the branches, even the ground, aggressively trying for a way to damage my cornea. Photokeratitis awaited in every snowflake, and I capitulated. I could stroll in the afternoon.

From the armchair, the nature felt like an idyllic oil painting, not a scream. I looked down the snowy road; now, there was really no way out into civilisation until a good big melt, and even then, a comically large 4x4 would be required.

‘Do you suffer from claustrophobia?’ Nate said when we first discussed my overwintering at the cabin.

‘No… why? Is it very small in there?’

He shook his head. ‘Ain’t that, my lad. When the road is blocked by three feet of white concrete, you might see what I mean.’

But I felt only relief. No way out, but no way in. No messages, no missed phone calls. No sobbing apologies, no papers to sign, no rings to sell to the jeweller with a magic Victorian eye on a golden chain. All I felt was the forest breathing in almost perfect hibernation, dotted only by faint dreams of birds, bats, and dead foxes.

I dozed off in front of the fire and woke up to thunderous footsteps on the porch. I jumped and grabbed the shotgun off its wall cradle, crept up to the window, and looked out. No car out, no man. No beast I could see. The twilight had begun to work in the shadows, deepening and pouring them out further by the minute.

Finally, I decided to peek outside. Nobody I could see. I surveyed the porch for evidence, but all I could see was a flurry of boot prints from my own comings and goings. Perhaps two birds had a fight, or the cabin settled funny under the weight of the snow, or a thousand other things, none of which I could name right then but took a vague comfort in telling myself.

It was only when I turned to go back in when I saw. At the very edge of the porch, a footprint so large it could have easily swallowed one of my own. Confident and vivid like a signature. I couldn’t understand how there was just one unless the creature leapt off awkwardly, but it wasn’t smudged, either. It looked deliberate, a stamp on an empty letter sent anonymously.

I bolted the door and made myself a cup of tea. Nate had listed some of the wood’s natives for me, and added never to leave the house without a shotgun. He said bears particularly liked messing with the cabin, desperate and emaciated if awoken prematurely from their sleep.

This didn’t look to me like a bear print, and I fleetingly regretted not being able to take a picture and cross-check it with the outside world. Here was me, all flesh and blood held together by a fragile barrier of skin, in a cabin all wood and fabric with eyes of breakable glass.

I heated up a tin of baked beans for dinner. A lot of my meals came out of tins. I had also brought three dozen eggs, but needed to float them in a glass of water now to check for freshness. Mounds of bread sat in the freezer. Some chicken breasts. Pasta, sauces. I took immense pleasure in eating out of cupboards and the freezer without having to go shopping. Long life milk. Frozen peas, frozen broccoli. Red wine. I had carrots in the fridge that kept surprisingly well but were beginning to limp.

I thought through my routine of eating, shitting, and writing what was potentially complete bullshit, all to distract myself from the vision of the paw print. I felt a silly urge to stomp it out like a fire, as if destroying the evidence was going to erase the event itself. It had stopped snowing altogether, so the stamp was there to stay and remind me of how dominated I was here. I drank wine and looked out of the window until I could see nothing but the reflection of the cabin on the glass. Then I closed the curtains thoroughly and breathed easier. Alone, at last. I gulped at the ease I suddenly felt. As if the woods had been observing me.

That night and the next, I couldn’t tell if I slept or fell into some kind of red-wine-induced stupor. I drank much each night. Ever since the breakup, sleep treated me like Em’s cat used to: coming unannounced, unreliable, and for a short and tentative snuggle. I didn’t toss or turn, immobilised by the alcohol and a sense of compression in the vice of my temporary little abode.

When I hauled the wine out of the trunk and into the cabin, I couldn’t escape Nate’s raised eyebrows. 60 days, 75 bottles of red. I told him it was a process, a method act of creation — my main character became an alcoholic as soon as I started fleshing the plot out. Nate’s eyebrows traveled down a notch, but didn’t settle at base camp again.

Over the next days, I wrote slowly, the clacks of the keyboard distant from one another like echoes. There was no way to check whether I had fever, no thermometer at hand, but I shivered at night and going outside felt like assault. I heard no noise, the thicket perfectly still now in the dead landscape. It was like looking out at a stage, and I could swear not a single branch moved out of arrangement. I couldn’t point to where the fox lay any longer. Perhaps the prop had been removed.

I drank and ate on time, and then drank out of time, too. The plot thickened. The electricity hummed and the forest stood still apart from hungry little growls deep in his belly. The main character had begun to slip now, unable to hold reality in firm grip, and the ceasefire on mysterious events around him only heightened the paranoid alertness. He wanted to shine a torch into the shadows, but they scuttled beyond his reach. I heard distant howls in the night as I lay unmoving. One morning, I came to the page and discovered my character was caught in a snowstorm in the woods. Something scratched at the front door. I couldn’t remember how he got there; I was almost certain the plot was taking place on a sunny coast with gilded sands.

Then finally, the fog lifted just as it came, suddenly and lighting a path of clarity so straight I could as well be delirious. I left the sweaty bed, put my unruly pages together, and had a long shower. I took turns to think about Nate, my novel, Em. Something had ended between me and them a long time ago, I decided, a nexus of honesty and respect and connection. At one point, I suspected every single one of my friends of sleeping with Em. Even Nate with his moon face and camp manner, sweet and kind and unbearable.

I looked out of the window, but still couldn’t locate the rigid fox. I put on all my clothes methodically, like getting ready for battle, zipping, buttoning, making myself weatherproof. I almost took the shotgun off its cradle, but then I let it lie asleep and stepped into the dawn. I trudged through the undergrowth blanketed by a heavy layer of snow, stumbling until I came to a clearing.

Then I whistled the Looney Tunes theme. I tried to hit every note which slowed the melody down and distorted the original cheeriness. The woods leaned in to listen and tightened, bouncing the echo around the white meadow. I lay down and waited. The sky projected the same blinding hue as the snow beneath me.

It snowed until the body was covered good and proper.