Excerpts

The bear, driven wild by that reaction, rose up on his hind legs in the effort to free himself from the jaws that were wounding him and, growling fearsomely, threw himself forepaws-first, with all the weight of his body, onto the downed wolf.

The ice, already riddled with cracks, gave way all at once, plunging them both into the water.

Beneath the ice, the temperature of the lake hovered near zero. They felt at once the physical shock of the difference in temperature. In those conditions it was impossible to survive soaked for more than a few minutes.

In short order hypothermia numbed the extremities, circulation was quickly confined to the core of the body, and after only a few minutes an irreversible freezing of the limbs set in.

They both came up flailing, struggling to climb back onto the hard but safe crust of the ice, the chase forgotten, intent on surviving this new situation.

The current of the outlet, still weak at that point, began slowly to press on the submerged part of their bodies, bearing it toward the river, so that they found themselves clinging by their forepaws to the edge of the breach through which they had plunged, side by side, in close contact, touching each other without meaning to in their desperate struggle to climb out.

The bear’s great mass was the first to be overwhelmed by the slow but powerful push of the water. Unable to find a hold that could bear his weight, the animal shattered the ice each time he pressed down to lift himself.

He found himself underwater, his whole body stretched out parallel to the surface. He hung there like a trapeze artist who, having slipped, clings to the rope by his armpits, straining with his arms. Only his long muzzle still rose above the water, letting him breathe. But it could not last. Soon a small wave cleared the obstacle and flooded his nostrils.

The water rushed down his throat, forcing from him a violent fit of coughing. The power of his diaphragm’s contraction sent a shudder through all his muscles, and the animal drew even his forepaws in to his body.

An area of about a square meter around the bear broke and went to pieces, costing him his grip and sending him under completely.

In that instant, as he sank, the animal saw the wolf, who, being lighter, had managed to climb back onto the surface of the lake, and, with one last desperate gesture, the bear bit the long tail that still hung in the water, holding it tight in his teeth.

Together they were dragged off by the current, which beneath the sheet of ice ran fast and irresistible.

They traveled dozens of meters beneath the ice, separated now, jaws shut tight, eyes desperately open.

It was like being sunk in pitch. The water looked black, and the light that came down through the ice was muted, frighteningly reassuring.

Borne along, they sank a couple of meters, gathering speed as they neared the point where the lake gave itself over to the outflowing river.

Some thirty seconds after they had gone under, they reached the river.

There the water was thirty centimeters deep and so swift that the ice had never managed to form.

Jan, thanks to his small size, swam out into the open, snorting and sneezing in the effort to expel the water drawn into his lungs. Limping on his left leg, he made for the bank, where he collapsed, racked by retching and shivering with cold.

These two thoughts made him linger. He turned his gaze back to the doe and caught a strange expression there. It was not fear; the animal had come to, and clearly the fracture allowed her to attempt nothing. Her kids bleated weakly, filled with the dismay that comes before death, unable to move.

She lay still, staring at a point on the scree gully some fifty meters above her.

He did not understand at first.

She was about to die, she and her little ones—what could be drawing her attention? He strained his eyes and recognized that look. It was the guilty grief of a mother who had failed to protect her young. He turned and saw the male. He was a majestic ibex, with immensely long horns curving back like two scimitars carved by time.

The hair of his belly was pure white, and his coat was grizzled. An old animal in the autumn of a life lived dangerously. The family at the foot of the precipice was surely his, and at his age there would be no more seasons of love for him. He was watching, powerless, as his offspring died. His children going before him.

The male’s unreadable expression dissolved into the tears that slid slowly down his chin. Jan had never seen so much compassion condensed into one gaze. In those eyes one could also read despair, resentment, anger, desolation—but above all there was an infinite sadness. It was as if, together with the landslide, his reasons for living had fallen from the precipice, swept away by a grim fate, the fruit of unforeseeable, dramatic chance.

He listened to the death of his loved ones—the chilling sounds of bones crushed by powerful jaws. He stayed motionless until the death rattles died away into the deafening silence of the forest that witnessed the tragedy. He did not move even when life regained the upper hand, when the birds began to sing again and even the river seemed to flow once more.

Then he raised his eyes to the sky, and bleated.

It was a long, unending sound. A call and a farewell in one. A moan of suffering.

Then he leaped, deliberately, into the empty air.

Time seemed to slow, and many wolves in the pack raised their heads in astonishment.

The lifeless body bounced again and again down the mountainside, landing right in their midst.

The wolves sniffed at it warily; then, sated perhaps by their rich meal, they lost interest.

He was at peace with himself and with nature. He wished he could prolong that feeling of well-being forever.

In ecstasy, he rolled over and over, sipping the moment like an elixir. All the dark thoughts, the inner tensions, the anger—everything had vanished into the distance, immeasurably far away.

He closed his eyes and found himself adrift in the air, floating over the valley like an airship. He soared above those whitened summits without feeling the chill of the snow or the breath of the wind. Like an astronaut he followed routes unknown before, seeing the world from new points of view.

He sped up toward the plain and saw a great river stretching away to the horizon. He followed that jade serpent as if in a trance, watching forests and plains slide past below, until he came to strange tracts of land laid out in geometric patterns. He came upon enormous anthills perfectly carved out of the rock and built one atop another, inhabited by beings he had never seen before, creatures that moved on two legs, like the bear, but smaller and nimbler, their coats bare of fur. He saw hundreds of them gathered in grassless open spaces among gigantic columns of finely chiseled stone.

He followed the river on until at last he reached a point where the land disappeared into water. All the land between him and the horizon lay drowned, as if an endless lake had declared the dominion of the land at an end. He moved out over that flat expanse, furrowed by curious rolling movements. Then he saw dry land again—small islands first, and then, all at once, the land seized back the horizon, rising up out of abyssal depths of sea.

He saw those strange beings again, and their constructions, which seemed to people those lands in great numbers. He made the acquaintance of new animals and new trees. He flew over deserts of sand scoured by burning winds, and white mountains tormented by snowstorms.

The powerful shriek of an eagle brought him back to reality.

He rose from an unexpected depth, watching the surface draw slowly nearer.

He opened his eyes.

The intense light forced him to shut them again at once. He opened them a crack, letting his pupils adjust; he was still belly-up, back arched, legs hanging limp. He peered more intently at the sky the sound had come from, and then he saw her.

She was a golden eagle: a regal head, golden as wheat, and a powerful yellow hooked beak; her ocher feet, curved and gnarled, ending in claws twisted and sharp as knives, gave an impression of great strength.

Her wingspan must have been close to three meters, and it was so perfect that the muscles of her back could move certain flight feathers one by one.

She seemed motionless, yet she was cleaving the sky at more than seventy kilometers an hour. Not one wingbeat, not one turn of the head. Only her eyes swept the valley, methodically. Her gaze was hard, cold, pitiless—but also majestic, free, absolute. Wholly fascinated, he admired this bird he had watched so many times from afar without ever truly seeing. The eagle cried out again, and her call rang through the whole valley in echoes that faded away into the distance.

He stayed on that rock for many hours, until he had to climb down, unable to hold so awkward a position any longer. His mind was alert, and though he moved only his eyes, he kept looking around him. He was struck by the blue of the sky. It was ten in the morning on a beautiful spring day. Nature was brimming over with the joy of living.

The scent of flowers awakened something in him.

A strangely familiar sound made him raise his head again: a dry, drawn-out screech.

In that sliver of sky, he saw an eagle pass slowly over.

A kaleidoscope of images began to whirl before his mind’s eye. He thought back to the meaning he had given the eagle’s flight, to what it represented for him.

It was a symbol; it was his symbol.

It said: “I am free; I always have been, and I always will be. Until death.”

And in that marvelous word Jan rediscovered the only way to be free: to fight.

There was no other way, no shortcut: he had to fight.

Whether death came sooner or later mattered little, but if he wanted to be free he had to fight and survive. He would not let himself be caught in his sleep. He would not allow death to come and take him without a battle.

Then he felt a cold determination flood him to the depths of his soul; he felt an ancestral instinct for survival he had never known before. It was no longer a question of principle; it was not moral or unjust, reasonable or senseless, honest or dishonest: it was a command that brooked no negotiation. It was not a creation of the mind, and therefore open to debate and objection, but a primal instinct—powerful, unreasoning, involuntary.

He moved off in search of water. After all the misfortunes that had befallen him, he had a bit of good luck. Just to his right, a runnel came down the wall and, before it seeped away into the earth, was caught in a rock shaped like a basin.

He came to the water desperate to drink, but before satisfying himself he stopped, and saw his own image reflected in its mirror.

There, before it, he made a promise: “Never again. Never again in my life will I sink so low. Or let myself go like that. From this day on I will fight until the day I die, and never again will I be unhappy.”

While he was busy thinking out how he might fight Gray Wolf and his pack, something extraordinary happened.

He happened to pass through a rather narrow valley, three days’ walk from his pack’s. He found the landscape strangely familiar. He was used to running for months through unknown places.

“How strange!” he thought. The place reminded him of something. Then, all at once, it came to him. It was where he had watched the ibex family die. The very place that had come back to him so many times. He had often wondered why that episode had struck him so deeply.

The animals’ death had certainly been tragic, but there was more. At times he had even convinced himself it was because of that pack. He had liked it from the very first. A kind of deep harmony seemed to reign among them. That same harmony which perhaps was his “remedy.”

Then he saw them. It was a pack of about twenty wolves—precisely “that one.”

By instinct he crouched down to avoid being seen. But then, slowly, he stretched his neck above the bush that hid him, to see better. Many of the wolves were in splendid condition, but some looked old, and two pups were even following the pack on the hunt.

This struck him deeply. It was rare for aging animals to travel with the group. The death of the old wolf of his own pack was still vivid in his memory.

And then the pups. It was almost unacceptable. Yet they followed behind in silence, with no useless racket.

He was drawn to one wolf in the midst of the pack. It was a female, about two years old. Of ordinary size, she had a white belly like Layla’s, and shadings in her coat of the same almond color as Sara’s, but veined with gray. Her muzzle was keen and sly, her ears short but watchful, her legs very long and graceful. Her tail, white as well, ended in a black tuft.

He found himself staring at her without knowing why. At first he had been watching the whole group move; but once he had seen her, he could not take his eyes off her.

He felt hot all over. He was standing still, and not even a long run could have made him sweat like that.

Then, in an inexplicable, groundless crescendo, he felt his heart hammering wildly in his chest, as if he had thrown himself into the void of a bottomless chasm and were plunging down at great speed.

He felt a new tumult, as unknown as it was unreasoning.

He who had sounded the boundaries of thought, sought the roots of explanations; who had climbed from the sea to the summits and come back; who had spent three months in the heights, awaited deliverance from his hermitage for six months, and run for a year and a half.

He who knew rancor and hatred as he knew forgiveness and affection.

He, of all wolves, felt himself swept away, for the first time, by love.