47 A NIGHT WATCH OF WOLVES

47

A NIGHT WATCH OF WOLVES

At all times, the forest is simultaneously dreamlike and real. In daylight, it is a wondrous exhibition of green architecture, as pleasing as anything in a sleeper's best illusions. At night, Vida has often thought of it as a shadowy stage where moonlight pools like mist in places and starlight drips and magical beings—sprites, fairies, elves—seem to hide everywhere behind masks of leaves and cone-laden boughs, waiting to step forward and perform in an amusing midsummer night's dream. Now, however, this realm has no qualities fit for a tale by a master of light fantasy, but is instead eerie, alien, as if another universe wheeled through Vida's, the particles of one seething through the empty spaces between the particles of the other, with no catastrophic collision, but leaving behind strange matter and unknowable presences.

The eeriness arises from her awareness of the kind of men with whom she'll have to contend in this vastness, her beloved wildwood having become a battleground, changed as she had never imagined that it could be.

Without either urgency or tedium, one hour folds into another. Now guided by a Tac Light when needed, she ascends at a measured pace through timeless woods and arrives at a crest beyond which a shelf of flat, open ground reveals shallow beds of bunchberry.

Already at an elevation so cool that snakes are unlikely to be on the move, she unstraps her backpack to use it as a pillow. She lies down in the whorls of green leaves and tiny white flowers for what bedding the bunchberry might provide.

Vida intends to get two hours of rest and be awakened when the first light breaks over her. Her sense is that, with morning, she won't just be fleeing from her enemies. She will also be advancing toward revelations that will elevate José's death from accident to murder and martyrdom in the eyes of those who thus far remain blind to that truth.

Her dreamless sleep is like a tide on which she floats, gently rising and falling between the world and the world not. Sometimes, as the tide lifts her toward the world, perhaps she hears sighs and soft panting, seems to feel other sleepers shifting around her as they react to their dreams. Her eyelids are so heavy they cannot be raised. She chooses to believe that Lupo and the pack have bedded in the bunchberry to look after her as she lies helpless, a pleasant conviction as the tide carries her down into a swale of deeper sleep.