The Rifles

Review of Contemporary Fiction, The, Summer, 1993 by William T. Vollmann

On trips either with the natives or without them we acclimatized more and more to a certain level of comfort, in terms of food and sleeping arrangements, and by late September we were eating raw meat quite often.

In the evening (7:20), the sun was low, so that it could almost have been sunset, and the white west wall of the gorge was tainted with blue shadow. Everything he saw was zebra-striped. The black-on-white of the river rocks reminded him of a French mousse dessert. The lines of bare earth between ridges were as rich as chocolate eclairs. Even the tussocks had lined up on their ridges like dear goblins going to school. Now as he staggered southward the river was silver and the grass was gold. Snow crunched hard and firm under his step. A mild freezing-point breeze blew, and his shadow went long and narrow and east beside him, halfway up the ridge.

The same muddy ground that the officers had traversed less than a week ago was now pale hard cement, with musk-ox, wolf and rabbitprints embedded in it most prettily. In the sand, an ivory button. He went south. In the middle of that day the low sun dazzled him heatlessly from the edge of a cloud; a bird chirped like squeaking metal, and the dull silver river wound back and forth among drift-rows. The mud-ridges, crinkled like accordions, had not yet frozen completely: they still gave under his boot. To the south and east, the ridges were white-packed -

He saw black blocky shapes on the mud enclosed by a river curve. Musk-oxen. He followed them, swinging westward onto the ridge to approach them downwind, sinking almost to his waist in the snow. They lined up in a row, snorting. He counted almost two dozen of them. They were ivory-black in hue, with almost leonine faces, their horns downcurving like mustaches. Their hair was like a thick black rug doubled and thrown sideways across their backs. As he approached, they growled like lions. He could smell them now, smell the meaty sweat of them. They faced him in a line. On the ridge to the right, a solitary musk-ox roared, waggling his head, and at once the others gathered into a circle facing outward, so that they were a wheel of hornspikes. They watched him; the black bull growled, and the herd galloped back a hundred yards and reformed. They were very shaggy and black. Blond manes streamed down their necks. Now. He raised the rifle, whose barrel wobbled unaccountably; something is coming loose, he said to himsell Now. A fat bull's khoulder danced in his sights. Now. Now. Now. At last they ran away, and the ground echoed under them. A banner of snow and dust flared out behind them.

He pointed the rifle straight up, at a cloud like a bull, and drew in the trigger once again, very very gently. Again there was no report. Had the cartridge jammed? He took the lever of the bolt in his hand and tried to draw it back, but could not. It had frozen or rusted shut.

Really he should abandon the rifle as he had everything else. It could not help him anymore. He knew that. But he also knew that if he let it fall and walked away he would begin to feel alone at last. The twin and the triplet were dead. He could not walk all the way to Fort Resolution without eating. As long as he kept the rifle there was always a chance that the sun might thaw it out, or perhaps today or tomorrow when he felt stronger he might fix it. But it was very heavy. If he let it fall he would be able to walk a little faster, a little farther. He would be so light then that he could surely leap farther in the stretches of soft, soft sand. Once he found food he could always come back for it. - Well, let me think about this, he said to himself very seriously, still walking. It won't do to be premature. - He went on walking; the weight of the rifle on his back held him lovingly down to earth.

Then one day a blue hole in the sky blew overhead and it was thirty-five degrees. He could feel the sunshine warming his knees. The toes of his snowy boots began to steam a little as he walked. Down the black and snowy creek was a wall of fog, but it slowly lifted, and presently he could see a lake end-on like a gleaming metal ribbon broken in three places, and the river beneath it was a long gleaming line; it had never gleamed like that before when he looked at it. The hole in the clouds was soft and thick, like a puncture in an eiderdown pillow, and through it the sky seemed as blue and friendly as an English summer. He tramped down across sand-covered ice-dunes and presently saw the fjord as blue as a Sunday bay, and - his heart almost stopped - there were two white yachts at anchor near the first little cape. But in a moment he knew again that they were only icebergs.

He was following another man's footprints which wavered extravagantly. The footprints led south. He accompanied them up an earth-colored ridge topped by two white clouds, and suddenly he was enclosed in a pale broad rainbow arch, with the blue sky all around - better than any church. He followed the rainbow and found the place where the footprints stopped. The corpse lay on its side, with drawn up knees. The man had died shivering. Who was it? Subzero, maybe? He looked into the face for a long time. (Old people are darker, they say, from having been on the ice.) The purple-grey lips stretched like an ellipse of rubber hose around the perimeter of the mouth, in whose crimson depths the yellow teeth were suspended. Blood had frozen on the man's gums. Frost glittered among the stubble on his chin. Ice shone splendidly on the black tussock of his hair. His eyes were half open, but in an unusual way. The upper lids had fallen and frozen to armor his dying sight against everything, but then the lower lids had shrunk away. The grey eyeballs had withered and wrinkled like autumn berries. Taken as a whole, his face seemed to express a drunken and bemused disgust. - You're going to eat my flesh, he seemed to say. I know it and you know it. There's nothing I can do about it, and the thought makes me want to vomit, but all the same it's funny. You never thought you'd be doing this, did you?