"I know a feller up on Colt Ridge who could mount that bear's head for you, Mrs. Pemberton," Vaughn said, "or tan the hide if you notioned that."

"No, leave it with the deer," Serena said, and turned to Galloway. "Carcasses are used out west to draw mountain lions. I assume it would work here as well."

"Maybe," Galloway said, looking at Pemberton though he spoke to Serena. "Like I told your Mister when he first come to these mountains, if there's one still around it's big and smart. It could end up tracking him. Let it get close as that bear did, and he'll get more than a hug."

"If you find that mountain lion and get me one shot at it I'll give you a twenty-dollar gold piece," Pemberton said, glaring at Galloway before turning to Vaughn. "Or anyone else who can lead me to it."

They reloaded the farm wagon and started toward camp. Galloway drove while Vaughn cradled the injured dog in his arms. The rusty springs beneath the buckboard squeaked rhythmically as they rose and fell, and the swaying motion made it appear Vaughn was rocking the hound to sleep. In the wagon bed, the other dogs huddled against the cold. The land slanted upward, and thick trunks of oaks and poplars quickly filled in the white expanse behind them.

Once they got to the ridge crest, Pemberton and Serena let the others ride on ahead. Pemberton's pulse still beat quick, and he knew Serena's did as well. The trail soon became only a space between trees in the day's last light. Cold seeped in through sleeves and collars. They rode close together, and Serena reached out and clasped Pemberton's hand with hers. He felt the coldness of it.

"You should have worn gloves," he said.

"I like to feel the cold," Serena said. "I always have, even as a child. My father used to walk me through the camp on days the loggers claimed it was too cold to work. I shamed them out of their shacks and into the woods."

"Too bad you didn't at least save a photograph of that," Pemberton said, recalling how he'd once asked about family photographs and Serena had answered that they'd burned with the house. "It might stop some of our workers griping about the weather."

They rode on, not speaking again until they crossed the last rise and descended onto the valley floor. Camp lights blazed in the distance. No tree unsmoothed the landscape, and the snow was tinged blue. Pemberton noted how the faint light gave the illusion they traversed a shallow sea.

"I liked the way we killed the bear together," Serena said.

"You had more to do with killing it than I did."

"No, it was gut shot. I merely finished it off."

A few flurries swirled around them, sifted from a sky the color of indigo. The only sound was the crunch of snow under the horses' hooves. In the quiet darkening Pemberton and Serena seemed to have entered a depthless space only they inhabited. Not so different from when they cleaved in the night, Pemberton realized.

"Too bad Harris couldn't come along today," Serena said.

"He assured me he'll come next time."

"Has he said anything about the Glencoe tract?"

"No, all he wants to talk about is this national park boondoggle and how we have to band together to keep it from happening."

"I assume that we also includes our partners."

"They have as much to lose as you and I do."

"They're timid men, especially Buchanan," Serena said. "Wilkie's just gotten old, but it's Buchanan's nature. The sooner you and I are shed of them the better."

"We'll still need partners though."

"Then men like Harris, and, as soon as we can, partnerships where we have a controlling interest," Serena said as they moved through the snow-capped stumps. "I'm going to hire a Pinkerton and find out what's really going on in Tennessee with this park. I'll have him check out Kephart as well. See if he's as stellar a citizen as John Muir."

The woods no longer sheltered them from the wind, and cold air worked its way through jacket tears the bear had made. Pemberton imagined Serena in her father's timber camp, rousing the workers on days colder than this one.

"What you told Galloway is the truth," Pemberton said as they entered the camp. "If the bear had attacked you instead of me, I would have done the same for you."

"I know," Serena said, clasping Pemberton's hand tighter. "I've known it since the night we met."

WHEN RACHEL WENT TO THE BARN TO GET A cabbage sack for the ginseng, she found, for the third morning in a row, that no eggs warmed under the two bantams or the Rhode Island Red. A fox or weasel or dog would have killed the chickens as well, she knew, so figured it a possum or a raccoon, maybe a black snake come to fatten up for the winter. Rachel found the cabbage sack and left the barn. She thought about going ahead and getting the fishing pole and searching out a guinea egg. The sky was jay-bird blue, the day warmer than any in a week, but the chimney smoke wasn't rising but blowing down, so a change in the weather was coming, maybe by afternoon. Another snow would make the ginseng hard to find, and she couldn't risk that, so Rachel fetched the mattock from the shed but left the fishing pole. Something else I'll have to do when I get back, Rachel thought.

She wrapped Jacob in his bundlings, and they crossed a pasture whose barbed wire now kept nothing in, empty for the first time in her life. Rachel saw the trees they walked toward had all their fall colors now, their canopy bright and various as a button jar. Before long the land slanted up the north face of Colt Ridge. They entered a stand of silver birch and hemlock, which Rachel passed through without slowing down. Far off toward Waynesville, she heard a whistle and wondered if it was the lumber company train. She thought about Bonny and Rebecca, the two girls she'd worked with in the kitchen, and how much she missed being around them. And how she missed Joel Vaughn too, who could be a smart aleck, but had always been nice to her, not just in the camp but as kids on Colt Ridge when they'd been in elementary school together. He'd even given her a valentine in the sixth grade. She remembered how, after her belly showed and other folks in the camp shunned her, Joel hadn't.

The land's angle became more severe, the light waning, streaked as if cut with scissors and braided to the ridge piece by piece. Soon poplars and hickories replaced the softwoods. Rachel saw a witch hazel shrub and paused to pull off some leaves, their pungent smell evoking memories of chest salves and days sick in bed. Moss furred the granite outcrops a dark plush green. She walked slowly, looking not just for the four-pronged yellow leaves but bloodroot and cinnamon ferns and other plants her father had taught her signaled places where ginseng grew.

Rachel found the bloodroot first, under a shaded outcrop where a spring head seeped. She tugged the plants carefully from the ground and placed them in her sack. When she accidentally broke a stem, the red juice used for a tonic stained her fingers. A squirrel began chattering in a tree farther up the ridge and was soon answered.

Rachel stepped carefully across the boggy ground. An orange salamander scuttled out from beneath a matting of soggy oak leaves. She remembered how her father once told her never to bother salamanders in a spring because they kept the water pure. On the other side of the outcrop, she found more bloodroot and a thick growth of cinnamon ferns. The ferns felt like peacock feathers as she moved through them. They made a whispery sound against her dress, and the sound seemed to soothe Jacob because his eyes closed.

She entered another stand of hardwoods and there it was, the yellow leaves shimmering against the gloamy woods. Jacob was now asleep so she laid him down, loosening the bundling so she could fold some of the cloth back to cradle his head. Rachel dug a good six inches around the ginseng plant to insure she didn't cut the root. Then she pulled her dress up above her knees and kneeled in front of the plant, held the mattock's handle inches from the blade as she raked dirt from around the stem and tugged free a pale root shaped like a veiny carrot. She separated the berries from the ginseng plants and placed them in the broken soil, covered them up and moved on to the next plant.