Cold air spun about the room. Snow continued to drift in and collect at Billy’s leg, a climbing dune. She knelt there watching it, shivering.

What are you doing? said the girl—the strong one, the one she thought had abandoned her.

“I’m thinking.”

I hope you’re thinking how you’d better stoke this fire and get in that sleeping bag.

“Fuck that sleeping bag.”

The girl said nothing.

Caitlin held the ax, listening. Then she said: “Do you think he’s coming?”

Who?

“Either one.”

The girl was a long time answering and Caitlin knew what she would say.

I think what I’ve always thought. Th ere’s no one coming. Th ere’s only us.

Crystals swam in the air and landed cool on her face. Billy’s keys where she’d left them on the floor glinted blue in the light. Follow his tracks, that’s all. Get to the car. That’s all. She remembered snowshoes, the deep powder and her pounding heart, the Monkey in pursuit and no fall, no fall . . . He had bagged it all up, snowshoes and boots and jacket and gloves, took it away without a word. Bad girl.

She held the ax. Her heart clocking away the seconds, the minutes. Now that she’d let the faces of her family into her mind she could not get them out. Faces of the life before. And they were down there still, he said, still looking. Still looking and what will they find?

She listened for the girl—listened for anything. But there was nothing. Wind. The snow whispering along the floorboards.

She got to her feet and opened the stove gate and with the last length of firewood prodded the length that preceded it, now nothing more than a smoldering black bone of itself which at first touch fell into glowing red cubes. Flames arose and she placed the new wood carefully atop them and closed the gate incompletely so that the air would draw and the wood would burn more quickly and intensely. She set the bucket of water next to the stove and the ax next to that, and then she went to the cot and picked up a flannel boy’s shirt, once red now gone almost to black, and she put this on and buttoned it to her throat. Lastly she got down on her hands and knees and reached far under the cot until she felt what she was looking for and dragged them out. They were dusty and gray and shrunken, like creatures who’d crawled under there long ago and died together side by side. She took one in each hand and clopped them sole to sole and the sound and the feel of this nearly made her sob. She clopped them and the red dust of the trail and the gray dust of the years fell from them like snow.

There were no cans of food or snack bars or child’s boxes of juice or anything at all on the larder shelves and she dippered her hand into the bucket and drank three cold handfuls of water.

She looked at the man named Billy on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she took him by the ankles.

61

The way became more trail than road and before long they reached the place where the tire tracks dove down into the brush and one set of bootprints became two and they raised their Maglites and probed the gully with the beams, but the light struck the thick latticework of brush and went no farther. They switched off the torches and stood in silence, in moonlight.

“Want me to go on down there, Sheriff?”

“I guess not, Donny. We’ve got two men afoot now and we’d best see where they’ve gone to. Though by the looks of these tracks I’d say they’ve already got there.”

The deputy sniffled and looked back down the way they’d come, and up to where they were going. “What do you suppose made him do a thing like this anyway, Sheriff?”

“I quit even asking that question a long time ago, Donny.”

They went on.

The two sets of tracks progressed in tandem up the narrowing trail, one set landing wide of the other as if out of some compulsion, or superstition. As if one man were loathe to place his foot where the other’s had been.

“There ain’t no mistaking which is which, is there, Sheriff.”

“Let’s go quiet, Deputy.”

They came around a bend and, seeing only more trail, more tracks, stopped to get their wind. Kinney wanted a cigarette but put that out of his mind.

They’d turned to go on when a sound reached them, traveling in echo from up the mountain. A dull flat chock, as of an ax blow to solid wood. They stilled themselves and listened. Less than a minute later the sound came again and after that there was no more sound like it nor any sound at all. The deputy looked at the sheriff and the sheriff nodded, and they went on.

The trail grew more difficult and Kinney yielded the lead to his deputy so that he himself might concentrate on the surrounding woods, listening for any single thing which was not of the woods. They’d not climbed another fifty yards before he reached and put a hand on the deputy’s shoulder and they halted.

The deputy looked where the sheriff pointed and he saw the small flare of color deep in the monochrome woods, simmering and orange and

geometrical—a doorway. And seeing it he immediately smelled woodsmoke, as if one could not exist without the other.

“Damn, Sheriff,” he whispered. “Damn.”

Kinney lowered to a squat and removed his hat, and the deputy did the same, the shotgun bridged across his knees. They watched to see if anyone would pass before the door or window or come to shut it against the cold, but no one did.

The deputy whispered, “Sheriff, look up ahead here,” and he pointed to where the two sets of tracks abruptly diverged. The men rose and went stooped-backed up the trail and dropped once more to their haunches to study the tracks.

The deputy drew a gloved forefinger under his nose. “What should we do, Sheriff?”

Overhead, the white points of the pines sawed through the stars and sent a fine brilliant dust sifting down.

“I don’t like it,” said Kinney, “but I guess we’ll have to split up.” He leaned and spat dryly. “You go on ahead with those tracks and I’ll take these here. Set that radio to beep mode. If you see anything, beep me twice and wait for me to come, and I’ll do the same.”

They restored their hats to their heads, squared them, and stood. “Don’t use your torch if you can help it, and stay sharp, Donny.”

“Okay, Sheriff.”

He watched his deputy out of sight, then turned and stepped into the woods as his brother had done when he spotted the same remote light two, perhaps three hours earlier.

THE MOON FOLLOWED HIM, sidling through the treetops and attaching to him a disturbed version of his own shape, a liquid shadow that moved with perfect stealth while he himself blundered along behind. He kept an eye on Billy’s tracks and an eye on the light ahead, and he made himself stop every twenty paces and count to ten, just listening. He heard a twig fracture thinly in the distance, in the direction his deputy had gone, and nothing more. He considered whether he’d made the right decision splitting up. Made the right decision not calling Summit County to meet them

up here.

Meet us for what, for Jesus’ sake?

He had stopped to listen at a place where Billy had tripped over a tree that lay hidden under the snow. “Up here in goddam cowboy boots,” he said, and continued on.

He followed the tracks where they dodged through the pines, and when he glanced ahead once more to the lighted rectangle, now unmistakably a doorway, something passed darkly and soundlessly before it, like a tree felled in the middle ground but with no sound of its landing. He stood still and the tree came swinging back to darken the doorway again, and he saw then that it was no tree but some figure careening through the woods.

He stepped behind the branches of a young pine and watched the figure come on, antic and wayward, wildly lame in one leg. Bereft of all ballast or compass yet moving doggedly on some course, and it was the same course, he saw, that he himself was on and that was stamped in the snow by his brother’s boots.