“Drop the stick, number twelve,” the man with the gun said.

The stick hit the ground in a soft clatter.

“Step away, over there. And you, number ten. Big man. Let him go and step over there with your faggot buddy.”

Released by Valentine, the boy drank the cold air into his torn throat and pushed up from the tailgate.

He pulled up his jeans and redid the fly and buckled the belt and turned around.

“Didn’t I tell you, boss? Cornholers.”

32

He has gear for her—snow boots and jacket and gloves and sunglasses, all rising from the footlocker and all in the style of a young and self-conscious boy. Things her brother would like. Yet she knows as she slips into the jacket, into the boots, that they have never been worn by a boy but by a girl more like herself, some predecessor whose traces she can’t see or smell but that are here just the same, like a left-behind shadow. The shadow in these clothes, in the fit of the boots and the jacket and the hat and the gloves is profound, and comforting, and sickening.

When he opens the door and stands aside she thinks she’s prepared but she isn’t. Th e whole white world crashing into her eyes, the cold, incredible brightness of it. She puts on the sunglasses and sees this world as the girl before her saw it: the mountain pines rising in their entirety toward the white sky, boughs heavy with snow. Th e piney air so intensely white and clean and cold it’s as if she’s never breathed before, never smelled before. She is so dazzled she almost doesn’t look back, but then she does. It isn’t a cabin but a shack. Hardly that. A low wooden storehouse half buried in the snow. Smoke like white birds fleeing the pipe. A stripe of red catches her eye and it takes her a moment to understand what it is, which is the painted runner of a sled. Long wooden child’s sled parked along the wall. It’s how he moves logs from the woods, provisions from the jeep-thing. Other loads.

It’s going to feel strange when we get in the deep snow, he’s saying, down in his monkey-squat at her feet, setting her bindings. It’s like learning to walk all over again, he says. But there’s no way to learn but to do it. Just remember to keep your legs apart, and try not to drag the tails, you might snag on something under the—

She sets off ahead of him across the small clearing, downslope, and when she falls, the arm she puts out to stop herself sinks and sinks, as if into fog. She comes to rest in her own impression, her face turned from the snow. She half rolls and tries to push herself up with the other arm and finds the same deep nothing below her. She understands she needs to get the snowshoes under her again before she can stand, but the gymnastics of that—the rolling, the grunting, the immodest exertions on her back—is a performance he won’t see, not out here.

He walks to her on the snow and helps her up. You stepped on one shoe with the other. Legs apart, remember?

She brushes snow from her legs, her hips, and sets off again, and makes it to the trees.

Better, he says, better. But let’s go this way. And he turns from the downward slope and leads her up instead. Up the mountain and into a woods of spruce

and fir and utter stillness. Her breathing is coarse and her quad muscles throb and he stops to check with her and she goes stomping by.

Don’t push yourself, he says. You can get sick at this altitude, and she says, I’m fine, and stomps on.

Th ey make slow headway against the slope and against the gravity of her body that wants only to go down. She searches for a change in the trees, for the suggestion under the snow of an order imposed by the path of a creek bed, or a road. She looks up compulsively for cables, listens for the sound of anything at all: traffic, chainsaw, helicopter. She remembers the blue road markers from that day in July and looks down expecting to see them like tiny heads trying to keep themselves above the snow.

How you doing? he says behind her, and she flinches at the sound of him. She takes two more steps and falls.

You’re getting tired, he says, appearing above her. Blocking the falling snow, her view of the trees. When you get tired you get lazy, and you can’t be lazy in snowshoes.

Where are we? she says.

What do you mean?

I mean where are we? Are we far from where you—from where my brother and I were? She hasn’t mentioned the boy since the beginning, since those first days.

He looks down on her. Nothing at all in his eyes behind the yellow lenses.

Why?

Why what?

Why do you ask.

Because I want to know.

Why?

Because I do. Wouldn’t you?

No. What difference would it make?

It might make you feel less lost.

Or more. Where you are is where you are, not where you’re not.

She stares at him. But I don’t know where I am.

Yes you do. You’re with me, right here.

He watches her, then looks away. You want to go back? Is that it? You want to spend Christmas day indoors? Aren’t we having a good time out here? Isn’t it beautiful?

Th e pitch grows steeper and the woods grow thicker, obliging them to weave around the trees in a series of switchbacks that make the climb easier but longer. And where the slope turns gentler, fewer trees confront the way, as if that were the design, until at last they reach a wide expanse of snow where the trees grow sparsely and are no taller than herself. Unless these are the tips of the trees and she is crossing a deep lake of snow.

Ahead, the trees vanish altogether, and then so does the mountain—abruptly, entirely, like the edge of the world. Nothing beyond but the gray sky and the snow swarming out of it as though here is the place where snow begins, where it’s made. She goes on toward the edge but he calls out Stop, and she stops and looks back.

He stands between a pair of small fir trees; they give him the illusion of great stature. We don’t want to go beyond this point here, he says.

Why not?

I’ll show you. Come back here.

She returns, and he draws off his glove in his teeth and reaches under his jacket and there’s the sound of a metallic snap and he’s holding the pistol.

It is the black, hard center of the white world. Th e only thing to look at or care about. Dizzily she sees her body here, left behind in the lake of snow to freeze and thaw with the seasons. Or maybe never to thaw but to lie in its last, fallen state for centuries, the story of her death preserved with her body, and she will ask him to please please not take the gear off, at least, the boots and the jacket and the gloves, to please at least do that much.

He raises the pistol and fires into the gray void. Th e sound is unexpectedly small, like a summer firecracker, yet it carries unexpectedly, caroming and returning to them from invisible reaches. In the instant after, she thinks there must be something out there he can see but she can’t, and she peers with aching eyes for the man, mountain climber, lawman, to come stumbling from the fog, hands to his guts, face twisted in pain and amazement.

Instead there’s a second, greater crack, like the gunshot amplified, and in the foreground a ragged blue seam appears in the snow like a vein shot full of dye. Th e vein widens, turns a deep glacial blue and then fills with white as the entire length of ridge shrugs and slips away down into the gray, pulling her eyes and her heart and the pit of her stomach down after it, down into the sky. Th e ridge falls and crashes and pounds against the side of the mountain. It takes a long time and sounds all the while as if it’s no farther away than when it began. Th en it stops, or seems to stop, and there’s nothing more to hear but the distant replay of thunder in the far, unseeable gorges.