Afon
The deer drops where it stands.
It's a young buck, maybe a hundred and forty pounds, and it was browsing the low cedar at the edge of the ravine when I spotted it through the trees. One shot, just behind the shoulder. It folds into the snow and doesn't get up.
I lower the gun and run to it. A wounded deer can travel half a mile on adrenaline, and I don't have the time or the energy to track a blood trail through two feet of powder.
But there's no need. The buck is dead before I reach it. Clean kill, no pain for the creature. Its eyes are already going glassy.
"Sorry, friend," I tell it. "But we're out of beans worth eating, and the lady doesn't strike me as the type who forages."
I kneel beside it and get to work. I've field-dressed more deer than I can count, and my hands know the job without my brain needing to participate. Knife in. Open the cavity. Roll it to drain. The steam comes off the carcass in the cold morning air and my fingers go red and slick.
I keep my mind on the task because the alternative is thinking about last night.
About her hand in mine.
About the things I said in the dark.
Clenching my teeth, I press harder on the knife and keep cutting.
Wolf would normally be out here with me, losing his mind over the smell, but I left him in the hut with Caroline. Partly for warmth and partly because, if anyone comes up that trail while I'm out here, I want sixty kilos of teeth standing between her and the door.
I'm halfway through quartering the buck when something in the distance catches my attention.
Down the mountain. South-southeast. A smudge against the gray sky.
Smoke.
Not chimney smoke, either. Chimney smoke is thin and steady. This is fat, black, and rolling, the smoke of something large burning all at once.
I wipe my hands on the snow and pull the binoculars from inside my jacket. I glass down the slope, past the ridge line, past the stand of birch where the trail bends west.
There…
… is my cabin.
Or rather, there was my cabin.
There's not much of it left anymore.
Flames rocket up through where the rafters used to be, orange and ugly against the snow, and the black smoke pours off in thick torrents.
Two trucks sit in the clearing. I count four men.
One of them is walking the perimeter with a gas can, splashing the woodpile.
My woodpile. Fuel I gathered for my own destruction.
"Winter's long," I told Caroline, what feels like a lifetime ago.
Not for that cabin, it isn't.
I watch them for a while. There's nothing else to do. It's four miles down and a thousand feet of elevation, so even if I wanted to save it, by the time I got there, the place would be ash and the men would be either gone or waiting for me with rifles.
They want one of two things. Either they hope to flush me out, make me come running down the mountain in a rage, or they want to take away everywhere I can run to. Knowing the kind of men they are—and knowing who runs their sordid little operation—I'm guessing the answer is probably "both."
The man with the gas can empties it onto the porch, then tosses the can into the greedy flames.
I lower the binoculars. I'm not a materialistic man, but it's still hard not to be pissed. Everything I own is in that building. The books. The good axe. The bed. The mug she drank out of, the one I washed and put back on the shelf.
It's wood and metal and fabric. None of it bleeds. Doesn't fucking matter.
I pack the deer quarters into the game bag, sling it over my shoulder, and start back toward the hut. But I don't go straight there.
There's a stop I have to make first.
Forty yards northwest of the hut, there's a cairn.
Just a pile of rocks, the same as a hundred other piles of rocks on this mountain, except this one I built myself the first week I came up here, all those months ago.
Three flat stones on top, stacked smallest to largest. A marker only I would recognize.
I set the game bag down and start moving rocks.
The ground underneath is frozen, but I dug deep when I buried it, below the frost line, and I packed the hole with gravel so it would drain.
Still, it takes me nearly three minutes with the camp shovel to reach the box.
Olive drab, military surplus, waterproof gasket around the lid.
I haul it out and crack it open right there in the snow.
Inside: ten thousand dollars in banded hundreds. Two passports, neither in my name. A Makarov pistol wrapped in oilcloth with three loaded magazines. And at the bottom, in its own sealed bag, the satellite phone.
I look at the phone for a long time.
When I buried this box, I made myself a promise: that I would never dig it up. The box was a last resort. If I ever had to fall back to it, it meant that the old life had found me, that the mountain hadn't been far enough, and that everything I'd suffered through had been for nothing.
I buried it anyway, because I am not an optimist by nature.
I take the phone out of the bag and press the power button. The screen lights up. Battery at sixty percent. Lithium holds a charge in the cold better than people realize.
There's only one number stored in it.
I don't dial. Not yet. I just confirm the thing works, then shut it off again and put it in my jacket.
I take the cash and the Makarov, too. The passports, I leave.
If it gets to the point where I need a new name, Caroline will already be home or dead, and neither passport has her picture in it anyway.
I fill the hole back in, restack the cairn, and pick up the deer.
The smoke is still rising behind me. I can smell it now, faint, carried up the slope on the wind. My whole life down there, burning, and the stench of it follows me all the way back to the hut.
Caroline is at the window when I come out of the trees. I can see her face through the rippled glass, and I can see the moment she registers that I'm carrying a hundred-plus pounds of dead animal, because her mouth opens and stays that way.
I push through the door. Wolf is on me immediately, nose working, tail going hard.
"Down," I tell him. He sits, but his eyes never leave the bag.
"You shot something," Caroline accuses.
I hang the game bag from the hook by the door, where the cold will keep it. "Deer."
"That's it?!"
"Would you have preferred I shot a McDouble with fries?" I ask sarcastically.
She reddens as she bites back a laugh. "This isn't about my hunger, asshole. I was worried someone found us! You just went all John Wayne, blasting away, then sprinted off into the woods!"
"Apologies," I say, still sarcastic and biting, if only because I can't help but love the fire it draws out of her. "Next time, I'll leave a note."
"Yeah! You should! That's the least you can do!" she snaps.
I sweep a hand around this desolate hut. "With what pen? On what paper?"
She doesn't have an answer for that, so she switches targets. She does that. I've noticed. When one line of attack fails, she pivots without losing speed.
"You were gone a long time for one deer."
"Field dressing takes time."
"You also smell like a campfire."
I stop with my jacket half off.
She's sitting on the edge of the bed with the wool blanket around her shoulders, and she's watching me with those pale green eyes. Susan's eyes. They miss nothing, exactly the same as Susan's never did.
"Afon. Why do you smell like smoke?"
I told myself yesterday that I've lied to better interrogators than her, and that's true. But I'm tired. Worn down in a place that sleep doesn't reach.
So I tell her the truth. "They burned my cabin."
She goes still. "What?"
"I saw the smoke while I was dressing the deer. Men in trucks torched it." I hang the jacket on the second hook.
"Why didn't you do something?" she demands, aghast.
I shrug. "It'll burn to the foundation. There's nothing to stop it and nobody to call."
"But… But, Afon…" She stands up. The blanket falls off her shoulders. "It's your house."
"No," I correct. "It's just a building."
"How can you not be the least bit sad?"
I turn to glare at her. She really doesn't understand—I don't deserve anything good in this life. Not the cabin, not Wolf, and sure as fuck not her. "Should I go cry in the snow?" I spit. "Would that make you happy?"
"At the very least, you could act like a person whose house just burned down!"
"This is how I act, Caroline." I cross to the stove and feed two logs in, holding my fingertips close to the flames until the feeling returns. "They did it to send a message: You have nowhere to go. Getting upset about it would mean the message was received."
"It was received! I received it! I'm receiving it right now and I wasn't even the addressee!
" She limps a few steps closer, but stops just out of arm's reach and hugs herself.
Wolf gets up, walks over, and presses against her leg for reassurance.
He's got a hell of a lot more emotional intelligence than I do, that's for damn sure.
"Okay," she muses to nobody in particular. "Okay. So what do we do?"
"We stay put," I reply. "This is a big mountain, and the hut isn't on any map. They don't know about it. We have meat now, and wood, and water. We wait them out."
"For how long?"
"As long as it takes."
She paces a small, anxious circle, favoring the bad ankle.
Wolf tracks her with his eyes. I watch her, too, with guilt heavy in my gut.
I'm not being kind to her right now, and this is not her world.
She doesn't know how it feels to hunt and wage war, to grapple with killers.
That's my domain, not hers. But she's been thrust into it whether she likes it or not.
She's been grabbed, zip-tied, shot at, frozen half to death, and she's still got her chin high and her spirit strong.
After all that, she's still standing in this miserable hut asking what we do. Not what I do. We.
Bill's daughter, indeed.
"Caroline."
She stops pacing, but doesn't turn. "What?"
"I've been unfair to you."
She whips around to gawk at me. "I'm sorry, what was that? Could you speak directly into the microphone?"
"Don't make me say it twice."
"Oh, I'm absolutely making you say it twice. Possibly three times. I want it notarized."
I almost smile. "Here's the deal," I say. "I'll tell you everything. I made a promise and I intend to keep it, even if I wish I didn't have to. But you came all this way, so you deserve the whole story. Your father, the tattoo, the envelope, all of it."
"But," she infers.
"But?"
"I knew there was a but. There's always a but with you. You're a but-based lifeform."
"You want to hear the terms or not?"
She zips her mouth with two fingers and gestures for me to continue.
"I have to tell it in pieces," I say. "Not all at once. The story is thirty years long, and parts of it connect to other parts, and if I dump it on you out of order, you'll draw the wrong conclusions and hate the wrong people. So I tell it my way. In my order. When I say so."
Her face twists in a frown. "How do I know 'when I say so' doesn't mean never? Because historically, Afon, your track record on the whole telling-me-things front has been—how do I put this legally?—hot fucking garbage."
"You don't know," I admit. "You'd have to trust me."
She laughs, short and sharp. "Trust you?! The man who dumped me at a bus stop."
"The man who came back for you."
Her grimace deepens. "This is extortion. You're holding my own family history hostage."
"Yes. I never claimed to be a good man."
She throws up her hands. "He admits it! Openly! In front of the dog!"
"I swear, Caroline, I'm not doing this to torture you. Some of what I have to tell you, I've never said out loud. Not once. I need to do it in a way I can survive. That's the truth, and I can't be any more honest than that. Take it or leave it."
She studies me for a long moment. The light through the rippled window makes her hair look almost gray, and for a second, she could be Susan, standing in that kitchen on Seventy-Eighth Street, asking Bill where he'd really been all night.
I'm promising her the truth, but there are still parts of things I intend to conceal for as long as possible.
I won't mention the satellite phone in my jacket.
The phone is for if everything goes to hell, and I'd like for it to stay buried in my pocket the same way it stayed buried in the ground—untouched unless there's no other choice.
"Define 'pieces,'" she says. "Are we talking chapters? Paragraphs? Or are you going to give me one word a day until I die of old age?"
"Take it or leave it, Caroline."
She chews her lip. Wolf looks up at her, then at me, then back at her.
"If I agree," she says slowly, "you start today."
I think about it. The deer needs butchering. The wood needs splitting. There are a hundred chores between now and dark, and not one of them would take as much out of me as talking will.
"Tonight," I concede. "After we eat."
She sticks out her hand. "Then we have a deal."