Afon
I wake before dawn.
For twenty years, the first thing my body did upon waking was take inventory of threats. Door. Window. Exits. Confirm whatever weapon was nearest.
This morning, the first thing my body registers is Caroline Oglethorpe's cheek pressed against my sternum and her hand still tangled with mine over the ring.
The threat inventory comes second.
For some reason, that doesn't bother me like I thought it would.
I lie there in the dark and listen to her breathe.
She sleeps like someone who's never had to wake up fast in her life—loose-limbed, mouth slightly open, one foot hooked over my shin.
Her hair smells like woodsmoke and faintly, stubbornly, like whatever floral product she put in it a week ago in another world.
The stove has burned down to nothing. The wind has not.
In fact, the wind has gotten worse.
I've been listening to this mountain breathe for six months.
I know its moods the way I used to know which of Lukas's silences meant boredom and which meant somebody was about to disappear.
The sound coming off the ridge right now is a warning of bad things to come.
It's a deep, sustained howl out of the northwest.
I extract myself from under Caroline a centimeter at a time. She makes a small, wounded noise and rolls into the warm spot I leave behind. Wolf lifts his head from her feet to give me a questioning look.
"Stay," I mouth at him.
He puts his head back down, but his ears prick up as he assumes guard duty.
I dress in the dark, take the Remington off its pegs, and slip outside.
Gone is the dry cold of the week. This morning, I'm greeted by a heavy dampness. It wriggles under my clothes and stays there. The sky in the east should be lightening up by now, but it isn't. It's a nasty kind of dark, and the snow coming out of it isn't falling so much as traveling sideways.
Two inches of fresh powder already over yesterday's crust.
I make my circuit. The paracord lines are intact, the cans undisturbed. The dead spruce is still across the mining road, wearing its new snow like a wedding veil. No tracks on the south trail. None on the deer path, either.
Then I come around the back of the hut, to where I hung the deer.
I strung the quarters from the meat pole I rigged between two spruces—eight feet off the ground, which is high enough for most things in these woods.
But I guess it wasn't high enough, because the pole is down. One end has been dragged clean off its crotch in the tree, and the rope I tied it with lies in the snow, frayed where teeth worked it apart.
The meat is gone.
All of it. Both hindquarters, the backstraps I wrapped in the tarp, the shoulder. The snow around the pole has been churned into a crime scene. Tracks overlapping tracks, four sets at least, maybe five, dog-like but narrower, the stride too long for any dog.
Coyotes.
A whole choir of them. They must have worked the rope in shifts while the wind covered the noise. Probably around the same time that I was occupied with my head between Caroline's legs.
I stand in the wrecked snow and let the anger come and go. There's no profit in it. Coyotes do what coyotes do; the failure is mine. A man who hangs meat low and lets himself get distracted with innocent things deserves whatever mess he wakes up to.
Twenty years ago, I'd have called this what it is: sloppiness. Now, I can only heave a tired sigh.
I follow the drag marks twenty yards into the trees, just to be thorough.
They've cached what they couldn't eat, buried in snow that the storm is already erasing.
I could spend half a day recovering scraps that would make us both sick.
For obvious reasons, I don't bother. My only remaining choices are getting made for me.
I walk back to the hut and do inventory.
Beans: eleven cans. Kerosene: maybe four days at current burn rate.
Coffee: two days, if Caroline keeps drinking it out of spite.
Kibble: six days for Wolf, less if I start splitting it with us, which I have done before in a life I don't talk about.
Wood: plenty. Wood was never the problem. But you can't eat wood.
I take stock of what's outdoors, too. The storm coming down off that ridge is not a one-day storm. A week pinned in this hut means we'll churn through everything we have. And the moment it clears—the moment the sky opens up enough to run snowmobiles—Reznik's men will come swarming.
So that's about the brunt of it.
We can starve waiting for them, or we can be found fed.
Those are the options if we stay.
So we cannot stay any longer.
I stand at the woodpile with snow collecting in my beard, and I run the route in my head.
I do it backward, from the destination to the door.
Pike Hollow is the only goal that makes sense right now.
It'll take twelve miles if we went by the trails that Reznik's men will no doubt be watching.
Closer to fourteen the way we'd have to go: down the north drainage, along the creek where the trees are thick and the ground is ugly, around the long, craggy shoulder of the mountain that no snowmobile can traverse, and into town from the back side.
Worse still, it has to be on foot. The snowmobile is basically a flare with a seat on it. Anyone with half an ear can hear that aftermarket exhaust for two miles in still air. It also leaves a track a blind man could follow. It's basically screaming our location to the world.
On foot—and hidden in a storm—we're nothing but two gray smudges in a world of white noise. The same weather that wants to kill us is the only thing offering to hide us.
But Caroline's ankle… Will it hold? My bullet wound will sting, but I don't think it will slow me terribly. I've done worse with worse.
I turn the route over and over. I'd give us 50/50 odds of making it out unscathed. Shit chances, and if I had it my way, I'd change a lot of things. But I don't. It's this or nothing.
Well, not nothing.
The satellite phone sits against my chest like a second, heavier heart.
One call and Lukas would have men in Pike Hollow by nightfall, storm or no storm.
He has helicopters, he has people who owe him things in every county in this state.
But then I would owe him things, again, forever, and—knowing Lukas—so might she.
I won't let that happen.
Not while my legs still work.
When I go inside, Caroline is awake, sitting up in the bed with the quilt around her shoulders. Wolf is beside her with his chin on her knee. They both look at me as I come through the door.
"Uh-oh," she says. "You have your something happened face on."
"That's just how my face looks."
She shakes her head. "You can't bullshit a bullshitter, Afon. Hit me. What's the bad news?"
So I tell her what happened. She listens all the way through without interrupting, which a week ago I'd have said she was physically incapable of.
"So it's gone? All of it?" she asks when I finish.
"Every last bite. Coyotes have good taste."
She closes her eyes. "I regret complaining about the venison. The universe has punished me for my hubris by repoing the only thing we had that mattered." She lets out a sad exhale. "This is my fault."
"No," I disagree. "It's just a thing that happened. That's life."
We both conveniently ignore the fact that this might have been avoided, at least in part, if we hadn't gotten a little carried away last night. I don't exactly feel guilty about it—not that aspect of it at least—but that's probably because I can still taste her honey on my tongue.
"Okay," she says. "So we're down to beans. How long can we—"
"Not long enough," I interrupt." She doesn't even argue, which tells me how seriously she's taking this.
"And there's a storm coming in that's going to be worse than anything you've seen up here.
It'll pin us down for most of a week. The food won't last that long.
Even if it did, once the weather breaks… "
"They'll come looking."
I nod. "Yes."
"How comforting." She pushes the quilt off and swings her legs over the side of the bed, wincing only slightly when the bad ankle takes weight. She's healing. The question is, is she healed enough? "So what's the plan? Because I know you, and you didn't come through that door without a plan."
I wince. This is the part I was dreading.
"We go down."
Caroline goes still. "How soon?" she asks in a weak voice.
"Within the hour, while the storm is building but before it peaks. And…" I hesitate. "… we have to walk."
"Walk?!" she bleats. "Afon, we have a snowmobile! It's right outside!"
"It's too loud. The minute I start that engine, every man in that camp knows exactly which slope we're on. On the machine, we're fast and obvious. On foot, in this weather, we're slow and invisible. Slow and invisible wins."
"Fuck, I hate when you're right. How far is it?"
"Fourteen miles."
I see her doing the same mental route I did. She's not dumb, just out of her element. "What about my ankle?"
"I'll wrap it, and I'll set the pace. We'll stop when I say stop and move when I say move.
There's a hunting lean-to at the seven-mile mark if we need it, and I'm guessing we probably will.
" I crouch down in front of her, so we're eye level.
"I won't pretend it's going to be anything but miserable.
You're going to be colder than you've ever been.
Your ankle is going to hate me, and so are you.
But I didn't pull you out of that bunkhouse to watch you starve. "
Her eyes are huge and liquid. And, more importantly, brimming over with trust I know I haven't earned.
"What happens when we get there?" she asks.
"That part, I'm still working on. Luckily, we have fourteen miles' worth of thinking time."
I'm not ready to tell her about the sat phone in my pocket or whose number lives in it. We cross one bridge at a time, and that one's still on fire. "First, we hike. The other problems will still be waiting for us at the bottom of the mountain."
She looks at me, uncertain. Outside, the snow is going from sideways to something with intent, ticking against the rippled window like thrown gravel.
"Caroline." I take her hands. She clutches back immediately. "Do you trust me?"
We both know the full extent of what I'm asking.
I've lied to her before—and, fuck, I'm still lying to her right now, if only by omission.
I'm asking her to trust the man who put her on a bench in Pike Hollow and drove away.
Trust the man who still hasn't told her what her father did, or what I did, or why the answer to both will hurt.
Her chin comes up an inch, the Oglethorpe chin, Bill's stubborn jaw on Susan's face.
"Yes," she says. "I do."
I nod once and stand, and we start to gather our things. "One more thing," Caroline says as she shrugs my flannel into place over her shoulders. "When we get to town, you're buying me the greasiest, least bean-adjacent meal that sad little place can produce. That's my fee."
"Noted," I say.
God help me, I'm almost smiling when I say it.