Read Online Hunger of the Wolf by Stephen Marche - Free Book Online

buffalo or moose. Ripping apart a rabbit or a fox was just practice, playing with killing and squabbling over the bloody snow. Then when the wind rose up, we hid together under the blankets of low pines where we could find them, or burrowed under the mossy stink of aspen leaves, our breaths heaving together. The first scent in the morning was a taste of life or death. It was pure. Our hunger began in the dark. We searched for a trace of weakness, any weakness, a whimper in the middle of silence.
    We always ate until our guts sagged. Then we slept dimly under a pine tree, the nine of us, in the fullness of our bellies. And that was happiness.
    We almost died several times that winter. We almost ate each other. Mostly we survived on the corpses of buffalo calves that had frozen, and we ran into a herd and that kept us through the worst of January and February. We ate disguised ptarmigan, we ate dangerous bobcat. We ate voles by the hundreds. We ate what we could eat.We ran together until the spring, when we cracked up like everything in that country cracks up in the spring, when the faint new warmth is the world trying on mercy for a lark.
    The winter cored the Wylie brothers. Alberta hollowed them out. At the end of all their agonies, their stake was wilderness. They left their claim for Grande Prairie, where the sale of the tools paid for the train that carried them back to the station in Champlain where they had initially applied for the grant, which brought the business back to where it started, a neat round zero.
    Stepping onto the platform, dragging their worn bodies back home, Dale and Max peered at once-familiar scenes, store owners fondling easy fruit on their counters, schoolgirls sharing lemon sherbets, oldtimers rattling uselessly to one another on the street, all as if through a green-glass aquarium. If you forget, even for a moment, why people do what they do, it can be hard to remember. On Flora Avenue, the boarders wouldn’t allow them into the house, no matter who they claimed to be, so for an afternoon, the boys sat on the blue trunk while their old friends and neighbors crossed them without a glimmer of recognition. Even Marie Wylie, bundling loads of laundry into the house, had to squint through the raggedy grime to identify her defeated sons.
    She walked them to their old room and then, arm in arm, up to the cemetery, to the small plot with its small slab where their father, who had been a small man, lay dead and buried.
    â€œFlu carried him away. He was one of the first. Sudden. That was more than a small mercy.”
    She inspected the grave and its marker the way she might a bolt of gray flannel brought home from the fabric merchant. Had she overpaid?Had she received quality for money? Max and Dale squirmed in their frayed outfits. They weren’t dressed right. Max in khakis. Dale in gunmetal gray. Neither with a scrap of black.
    â€œWhat happened to the barbershop?” Dale asked.
    â€œSold it.”
    â€œWhat happened to the money?” Max asked.
    â€œThe mortgage.”
    That was all the eulogy Bob Wylie ever received.
    *  *  *
    Kitty Donclaire was very much alive. Her dark eyes were still peering from the dinner table, always by Marie’s side. She no longer worked at the brick factory, though no one ever saw her working in the house. She would sit beside Marie at the laundry or over the pot scrubbing, and every now and then Marie might whisper into Kitty’s ear. Nobody asked the reasons, the nature of their arrangement, least of all Max and Dale. They slunk from her gaze with a primitive unease.
    Mother’s law had not altered: If you stayed in the house, you helped on the mortgage. Dale needed his old job back. He had to stoop to enter the back room of MacCormack and Sons, that shrine where the Scottish prophet of fiduciary responsibility lorded over the huddled scrutineers of the ledgers, the holy books. John MacCormack was pleased. The return of Dale