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This is the version where the hero doesn’t die. But he doesn’t win either. The villain lives, for now, all the innocent die and the story goes on.
They were four at first: Loco, William, Charlie and Silence, three bounty hunters and their hostage. They kept Silence’s hands tied behind his back all day and he wore a thick and sturdy leather collar around his neck. Loco had taken it from a guard dog he’d shot when they left Snow Hill and he’d tightened it around Silence’s neck while Wiliam’s gun caressed his temples. And so he walked behind them, tethered to Loco’s horse by a heavy chain, and his burned hand oozed stinking liquid into his yellowed bandages, the wound in his shoulder throbbed but he was not dead and he would not die.
At night, at the fire, Loco offered him drink and food, like a generous host, his gestures exaggerated and phony. Silence felt like Jesus in the desert. The devil smiled knowingly. Silence didn’t want to eat, he didn’t want to drink.
By the second day he drank from a bucket that he shared with the horses. By the third he ate. Loco had shot them a rabbit, a little brown dot in the white landscape so far away, so tiny, that it seemed impossible he’d hit it, but he did, and then he cut Silence a piece from the still warm body and threw it in the snow at his feet, wordlessly.
On his knees like a dog, his hands tied on his back and bent low, Silence dug his teeth into the fresh piece of meat. It was tiny and lean, tasting of nothing but blood, yet at this moment it was the sweetest ambrosia, filling his mouth and his stomach with the most wonderful warmth.
Loco watched him eat. “Not even a thank you? Manners like a dog,” he said. The other men laughed. “But a dog would at least lick my hand in gratitude.”
Silence looked up at him with hate in his eyes. The reflection of Loco’s boyish smile shone in the blade of his raised knife. Blood dripped off its edge and landed, steaming in the white snow. He licked along the flat of the blade, wiped it clean on his pants, and then tugged the knife away again, seemingly making a point of showing Silence where he kept it.
Then they roasted what remained of the rabbit over the fire and Silence watched them eat, his stomach rumbling, his mouth salivating. In the end they freed his hands and let him clean the bones and after this his hands weren’t tied behind his back again.
At night Loco still held Silence’s chain close to his heart. Even with a fire burning and hides hung up like a tent against the wind, the cold was biting. Men and horses huddled together, and Silence slept next to Loco on the same fur, under the same blanket.
In the first night Loco said, “I could not wish for a better bedfellow than one who would not hurt a fly if it didn’t pull a gun on him first.”
And each night Loco wished him sweet dreams, voice soft like the good wife, seeping with irony, and then rolled over, turning his back on him. Silence could have run then, it would have been an easy thing, to unfasten the collar around his neck and creep away into the night, where he would lie stretched out in the snow, frozen to death before the sun rose again.
It would have been an easy thing to slide his hand under Loco’s coat to reach for his knife and perhaps then he’d succeed in ramming it straight into Loco’s shriveled heart before he’d even know what had come over him. Or perhaps he would not be so successful — men with bad consciences are light sleepers — and Silence would find himself grappling with Loco, rolling on the ground, each man fighting for control of the blade, fingers interlocked around its handle, and their scuffle would wake the other men, who would not hesitate to put a bullet through Silence’s head before he could sink his teeth into Loco’s throat. And so he would die without sin, his brain splattered over Loco’s face like his last earthly emission.
Whenever Silence woke up in the early hours of the morning, when the fire had long gone out so the air was sharp like crystals in his throat, Loco lay behind him so close that he could feel the warm puffs of his breath on the back of his neck, and he lay still then like the corpse, paralyzed by the thought that he might soon feel a knife held to his throat and a hand at his belt buckle.
Days passed and despite his ill treatment Silence’s wounds healed. The fever died, his body wanted to live, he had no say in the matter. At times he felt like a broken vessel, mended again, but still empty, its essence spilled across Snow Hill, muddled into the blood seeping through the wooden floor boards and frozen on the snow.
His legs ached but he kept walking and walking like an automaton, dragged along by his captors who kept pushing on into a country so desolate that they never saw a human face or the smoke of a chimney. The horses grazed on what little dead grass they could find under the snow, or lichen and moss, which they scraped from the trees. The days were still short, they couldn’t walk for long, and in the brief span that the sun was up, it was a slow and hard march. There were no paths to follow, the horses broke their way through the tall snow, Silence on his chain trotting in their footsteps.
It was quiet out there in the mountains. Rarely did the wind rustle in the dark green treetops and when it did, it sent down fine mists of powdered snow that swallowed all sound. The land lay still like a painting. No animals cried at night, no birds were flying in the sky, and even the men soon ran out of words, their idle chatter dying down to gloomy silence. Only Loco still smiled and hummed songs and made joyful remarks about the beauty of all living things on God’s great earth.
On the fifth day they reached the foot of a tall mountain, which had no name, because no one ever spoke of it.
“Up there,” Loco said, pointing high above the tree line at a little dark square in the white landscape, “there is a cabin with soft beds and enough wood and food to last the four of us for eight weeks.” A little smile, a tug on Silence’s chain. “Or three of us for ten.”
They had made it only halfway up the mountain, where the trees still stood like gallows, dark and tall, when a thunderous crack rang out from above, so loud that it seemed to split the sky like an ax. All eyes went up to the peak of the mountain and they saw how the solid white blanket of snow suddenly seemed to break like a plate dropped and shattered, fissures running through it in a zigzag pattern. For a split second that felt so long — like when you reach for a gun and the span of time before you feel the trigger under your fingertip seems to stretch forever — it was all frozen in motion: the snow atop the mountain, the riders on their horses, Silence at the end of his chain. And then, with a crackling like first one thunder breaking and then ten and then a choir of so many thunders that was like the roar of the abyss, the snow came rolling down towards them.
Loco was the first to turn his horse around on the spot, and dashed past Silence the way they’d come, trying to get out of the avalanche’s path. Silence could only grab the chain that kept him tied to Loco’s horse, before he found himself yanked off his feed and dragged along the ground at great speed. The world was spinning past him in a swirl of gray and white. He could feel the earth itself shaking beneath him, louder and louder. Moments later the avalanche hit him like a solid wall, and dragged him down with it, making him tumble and rotate around his own axis like a little pebble rolling downhill.
And then from one moment to the next everything was black and quiet.
Dazed, confused and hurting, Silence didn’t know up from down anymore, or left from right. Like the marionette with its strings cut, his arms and legs were twisted at odd angles, he couldn’t straighten them, he couldn’t turn or dig, he couldn’t move at all, because what had been fine powder snow was now packed tightly around him, feeling solid like stone, and wouldn’t budge no matter how hard he tried to wiggle.
To think that it could be so dark under the white snow and that snow could be so heavy. It was like he’d been poured into the mountain itself, and the mountain was shrinking in on him with each second that passed. The pressure on his body was building, snow was pressing onto his eyes, pushing into his ears and into his nose and into his mouth. In a moment of abrupt clarity Silence knew that he would die like this, choking on snow before he could even freeze to death.
Not claustrophobic panic but a strange tranquility came over him at that thought. For so long he’d fought, struggled, killed and lived, and now it would just be over like this, not with guns blazing and blood flowing, not with glory and honor, but in still, indifferent silence. God had dug his grave and buried him in it. All he had to do now was die.
Silence closed his eyes, falling into darkness, and thought of his mother’s arms, wrapping tightly around him at night to keep him from crying.
Suddenly a single light broke through the darkness, and then another, and they grew as bit by bit the weight of the snow was taken off his chest. Silence instinctively gasped for air, filling his lungs, and consciousness returned to him. Consciousness hurt. His skin was on fire, the sky above was painfully bright. A bird flew by, black as coal. A silhouette blocked out the light. Two big watery blue eyes stared down at him.
“You won’t get rid of me that easily,” said Loco and laughed.
It was the chain that had saved Silence’s life. Although he’d been buried deep in the snow, and the chain torn from the saddle as the horse was swept away, it had gotten tangled around a tree and withstood the terrible force of the snow rolling downhill. As soon as the snow had settled, Loco, who had been luckier than his horse and managed to ride atop the avalanche, had simply followed the chain and had dug him out again.
They did not find William nor Charlie. While Silence stood with chattering teeth next to him, Loco surveyed the newly created landscape. Some trees were snapped off like toothpicks, others stood at odd angles, proof of the force that had come down the hill, but the snow lay still again and it was as if the men and their horses had never been, buried by the country, which considered them not any more important than a pebble or a crow’s feather.
Loco appeared to mourn the loss of his own horse more than the loss of his companions.
“Wood and food for sixteen weeks,” he said and pointed towards the hut again, which stood untouched, it had not been in the avalanche’s path. “We’ll have a wonderful time, you and me, and come spring, all of this mess we’ve gotten ourselves in will be forgotten.”
While Silence shuddered even in his fur, because the cold seemed to have crept into his bone marrow, Loco was elated that day and pranced ahead, swinging Silence’s chain in his hands.
Before nightfall they had passed through the swatch of destruction left by the avalanche and climbed so high that the trees grew small and withered and then entirely disappeared, leaving only the barren rocky landscape unique to mountaintops. The air was thinner here and it was so quiet that even the crunching snow under their boots was muffled.
When Loco spoke it was an odd thing, as if he was whispering straight in Silence’s ear. “Three times now we’ve escaped death, you and me together, isn’t it funny?” he said. Silence, who’d been trotting along, his eyes lowered like the tired mule, felt a tug on the chain. “Come here, friend, I’ll set you free.”
Only when Silence looked up at Loco, woken from his stupor, did he become aware that they’d already reached their destination. He was shivering from the cold, his eyes were watering, his joints were aching and every muscle in his body seemed strained from the fall; and the cabin promised food, water, warmth and rest.
Docile as a lamb, Silence came stumbling forward, while Loco reeled him in and in, the chain jingling loud and clear. Silence stood tall and unflinching, when Loco reached for his throat, looking down at the little man with all the disdain he could still muster. Loco only smiled, his eyes big and blue and repulsive. His soft fingertips traced a tender path over the beaten leather of the dog collar, casually brushing against the underside of Silence’s jaw and finally came around his neck to unfasten the collar. The smile on his face widened and cracked open as he bared Silence’s throat and revealed the ugly pink scar that ran jagged across it.
“Such a pretty thing,” he said, tilting his head like a clever bird, and he seemed to consider touching it but abruptly turned away instead. “You’ll have to tell me all about it one day.” With a high pitched laugh he opened the door to the cabin. “We have so much time to talk, I’ll get a sound out of you eventually.”
He entered the cabin and held the door open like the servant, his back bent comically, his arm stretched out in a welcoming gesture, his outline bright against the darkness inside. “Come inside, I don’t bite, and the bed is made.”
The thought of escaping Loco had grown more remote with every painful slow mile they’d made, or perhaps Silence had swallowed it down with the rabbit’s tender meat. When the door closed behind him, all he could feel was relief.
The bed was made, it was soft and warm and Silence’s bedmate held him tight in his arms. Loco’s breath tickled his ear. He smelled like sour old sweat and women’s perfume. The knife was still in his pocket, trapped between their bodies. Silence could feel the hard outline of it against his lower back.
The wind picked up outside, rattling the window shutters. It howled like a pack of hungry wolves closing in on them.