He brusquely addressed Clare in a Pikuni dialect—Dale had heard the language used on campus by some of the Native American students and one professor, although these words sounded different somehow—and Clare answered his questions in the same language. The man finally fell silent, stared at Clare a long moment, nodded ever so slightly, wheeled his horse around, and rode away to the east.

The pickup started up again, and the Land Cruiser followed slowly.

Two miles further the BIA road ended. The Blackfeet woman turned her truck around and climbed down. Clare got out. Dale hesitated, wanting to speak to the other woman but not wanting to intrude on the silent scene. He stayed where he was.

The older woman said something that sounded angry but then quickly hugged Clare, got back in her pickup, and drove away in a cloud of dust.

Clare came back to the Land Cruiser. “We have to walk from here,” she said.

“Where?” said Dale. He looked around. No ranch houses or trailers were in sight. Nothing man-made was visible except for a distant fence. Ridges rose higher as they ran west to the Front. The land here was high desert and grasslands blending into the forested foothills. The only road visible was the one they had come in on.

“A mile or two,” said Clare. She squinted at the afternoon sun lowering itself toward the high peaks. “We’ll have time. Let’s use some of that backpacking equipment you have.”

“Will you tell me what our destination is?”

“Sure,” said Clare. She was already pulling their packs and hiking boots out of the back of the Land Cruiser. “I’d like to spend the night at a place called Ghost Ridge.”

It began snowing in earnest the day after Thanksgiving. Dale walked for hours that day, hands deep in the pockets of his wool peacoat. He had not remembered autumns in the Midwest being so wintry.

Duane’s farmhouse was colder after the removal of the plastic barrier at the head of the stairs. It was as if a cold wind was blowing down from the second floor—or as if the heat of formerly inhabited parts of the house was bleeding away into outer space through some hole upstairs. Dale had shivered in the study until almost 3:00A.M. after Michelle Staffney left and then had given up and gone down to the basement to sleep. It was warm near the furnace and the glow from the furnace and the old console radio, volume set low so that the music was not much more than a whisper, lulled Dale to sleep.

The next morning he had cleaned up the last of the clutter from their Thanksgiving dinner and then had gone upstairs. It was bitter cold there. Hesitating a second, Dale finally worked up courage to step across the threshold of the front bedroom.

Erotic excitement hit him like a tsunami. He forced himself to stand there, just inside the doorway, letting the tide of lust flow over him.

Dale had always thought of himself as a physical, if not overly sensual, person, but this wave of desire was pure lust—physical excitement completely removed from thoughts of romance or love or the reality of another person. Dale was bombarded with half-images of penises, breasts, vaginas, pubic hair, sweat, nipples, erections, and semen spurting; he heard the moans of passion and the whispered filthy nonsense that only the drunkenness of desire could free one to whisper. Blood flowed into his own straining erection, and his pulse pounded in his ears.

Dale staggered out into the upper hallway, caught his breath, and went down to the relative warmth and sanity of the kitchen to recover. It took ten minutes for his body to release the coiled spring of desire.

What the hell is going on? Dale had never heard of a psychic phenomenon consisting of a place haunted with. . . with what? Sexual stimulation. “Fucking weird,” he said aloud and had to smile at the appropriateness of that phrase.

He went into the study to work on his novel. The screen was black except for a message on the black DOS screen.

>The lords of right and truth are Thoth and Astes, the Lord Amentet. The Tchatcha round about Osiris are Kesta, Hapi, Tuamutef, and Qebhsenuf, and they are also round about the Constellation of the Thigh in the northern sky. Those who do away utterly sins and offenses, and who are in the following of the goddess Hetepsekhus, are the god Sebek and his associates who dwell in the water.

Dale stared at the message for a moment. Finally he typed—

>You’re getting long-winded. What’s with this Egyptian shit? I thought you just communicated in Old English. Who the hell is this? What do you want?

He waited, but there was no answer. Dale walked out to the kitchen, poured a glass of orange juice, and returned to the study. Only the previous lines of text glowed on the screen.

>Fuck you and the Nile barge you rode in on,typed Dale. He turned off his computer, went back to the kitchen, pulled on his peacoat, and went out into the snow for a walk.

The black dog was following him. Dale was about half a mile north and west of the farmhouse, walking along the line of trees toward the creek, when he looked back and saw the dog moving slowly along his trail. The heavily falling snow made it hard to see details, but it was obvious that this hound—although black with a pink patch on its muzzle—was four times the size of the little dog that he had first seen. Even more disturbing was the fact that four other black dogs—all large, but not as large as the hound in the lead—were also following his tracks in the snow.

Dale stopped, heart pounding, and looked around for a weapon—a fallen fence post, a heavy stick, anything. Nothing came to hand.

The hounds had stopped about forty yards away. Their coats were impossibly black against the snowy fields and falling snow.

Dale began moving more quickly—not running for fear that he would cause the hounds to give chase, but walking in a half-jog—trying to get to the little patch of woods, where he could find a tree big enough to climb. The saplings along the fence here were far too small.

The black dogs shuffled along behind him, keeping their distance but following relentlessly.

Dale was panting when he reached the trees. He climbed the fence and moved quickly into the woods, looking for a tree with stout branches.

What am I afraid of? Am I really going to let some stray dogs tree me way out here?He looked back through the snow and the tree trunks, saw the black dogs pausing at the point where he had entered the thin screen of trees—saw how huge the lead hound really was, larger than any rottweiler or Doberman Dale had ever seen—and realized instantly that the answer to his question was You’re damned right I am.

Dale found a tree with branches that would hold his weight, grabbed a branch in readiness to climb, and looked back, half expecting the black hounds to be bounding into the darkness of the woods, tongues lolling, teeth bared, eyes burning red. . .

The dogs were gone.

Dale stood there breathing hard, swiveling, certain that the pack of wild dogs had moved to flank him somehow.

The only sounds in the little woods were his ragged breathing and the soft fall of snow.

He waited ten minutes—until his hands and feet were freezing and the drying sweat on his face and body had started to chill him—and then he ripped one of the stouter lower branches off and walked back the way he had come.

The dogs were gone. But dog prints were everywhere. Ghosts and demon dogs don’t leave paw prints, he thought, and tried to smile at his own silliness. Tried and failed.

The prints headed back toward the farm, disappearing into the falling snow.

Dale headed east, following the ridgeline back to County 6 where it came out at Calvary Cemetery. Clambering over Mr. Johnson’s fence across the road from the cemetery, Dale saw a man moving at the far end of the graveyard.