Matt's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

Matt left the motel at dawn with a pack of water and jerky. The road out of town thinned to gravel, then to a footpath through weeds. He walked past the last building on the edge of Malpais, an old factory with broken windows and vines pulling down the siding. Trees grew through the roof. Beyond it, the land climbed. He had two weeks of diner grease and motel soap on his skin, and every step carried that smell of the town uphill with him. He found the trail marker an hour in. A tall trunk stood alone at a bend in the path, split top to bottom by an old lightning strike, the wood inside still black. Boot prints crossed each other in the dust at its base. People had been walking between the town and the ridge for a long time. He rested his hand on the burned wood and understood he was being watched already. He had felt it since the factory. Higher up, the path passed under a low branch hung with bones. A skull, jaws wired open, ribs and long bones tied beneath it with sinew. The bones were old, cleaned by weather. He stopped under them. This was the line. Past this, he was on someone else's ground, wearing the wrong smell, carrying the wrong week on his clothes. He thought about the diner woman calling him a hunter. To the animals ahead of him he would smell exactly like the people who had told her to send him away. He stepped off the trail and stripped down by a runoff creek. He scrubbed his shirt and jeans against a rock with cold water and gravel until the fabric burned his hands. He rinsed his hair, his arms, the back of his neck. He rubbed handfuls of wet pine needles across his skin. He dressed in the wet clothes and kept climbing. Halfway up the next rise, a wolf stepped out of the brush ten yards ahead. Lean, gray and brown, ears forward. It did not growl. It stood in the path and watched him breathe. He stopped and let it look. He kept his hands open at his sides. After a long moment it turned and walked uphill, slow enough that he understood he was meant to follow. He followed. His clothes dried stiff on him as he climbed. The wolf never looked back, but it never went out of sight. When the trees opened onto a shelf of rock near the ridgeline, the wolf stopped and sat. Below, Malpais was a scatter of roofs by the river. Ahead, woodsmoke rose from somewhere he could not yet see. Matt had made it past the bone line. He had shed the town off his skin, and something on the ridge had chosen to let him keep walking.