14. Jakob
JAKOB
The trapline runs north along the ridgeback where the terrain drops off into a granite wash.
Three snares. Two deadfalls. I check them without thinking because the work is automatic, encoded in my hands and my feet and the animal part of my brain that keeps me fed while the rest of me churns on things I have no language for.
The first snare is empty. The second holds a snowshoe hare, stiff and cold, dead maybe four hours.
I reset the wire and tie the hare to my belt and keep moving.
The deadfalls are undisturbed. I reset the triggers anyway because the work needs doing and because if I stop moving I will think about the photograph and her face when she held it and the quiet, careful way she asked about it.
Like she was handling something made of glass.
Like she already knew the glass was broken.
I stay out longer than I need to. An hour.
Maybe two. The cold is deep and clean and it scours the inside of my skull the way nothing else can, and by the time I turn back toward the cabin the sky has gone from charcoal to full dark and the stars are hard white points above the treeline.
I come up the south trail and see the cabin and the first thing I register is the chimney.
The smoke is thin. Too thin. The fire is dying, which means she hasn't fed it, which means she's asleep or she's gone.
My pace changes. I don't decide to walk faster. My body decides.
The steps. The door. I shove it open with my shoulder and the cabin hits me with lukewarm air that should be hot.
The woodstove is banked down to coals, the orange light barely reaching the kitchen table.
The oil lamp is cold. The bed is empty, the wool blankets folded in that precise, fussy way she folds everything.
Her salvaged sneakers are gone. The shirt she sleeps in is gone.
The small pile of belongings she gathered this morning for the rescue crew, the bag I handed over without looking at her, is gone.
She left.
The thought arrives like a round hitting center mass. Clean entry. Total devastation. I stand in the doorway and the home is quiet in a way it hasn't been since before she arrived, and the quiet is wrong.
I drop the hare and I'm already moving. Out the door.
Off the porch. Around the north side of the home to where the road starts, and I crouch in the frozen mud and there they are.
Her footprints. Size seven, maybe six and a half, the tread pattern of those useless canvas sneakers pressed into the soft ground where the ATV ruts carved channels earlier today.
She's favoring her right foot. The left prints are shallower, the toe digging in deeper than the heel, compensating for the twisted ankle that I wrapped with my own hands less than twelve hours ago.
She's walking downhill. Alone. In the dark. On a road that was buried under thirty tons of debris two days ago, through country that still has a displaced black bear roaming the drainage.
I go back inside. Thirty seconds. Headlamp.
The Remington 870 from the rack by the door, four shells of buckshot in the tube and two more in my jacket pocket.
Fixed blade on my belt. I don't take a pack.
I don't take water. I don't take the first aid kit, and that decision is deliberate, because the first aid kit means I am planning for a scenario where she is hurt, and if I let that scenario into my head right now I will lose the cold operational clarity that is the only useful thing the military ever put inside me.
I move down the road at a pace that would gas most men in a quarter mile.
Long, ground-eating strides, my boots finding the hard-packed center of the road where the footing is solid.
Her tracks are easy to follow. The mud holds them like plaster casts, each print telling me her speed and her gait and her weight distribution and her state of mind.
She was moving with purpose. Steady pace, even stride length.
Not running from something. Walking toward something. The town. Cell service. Her family.
Space to think.
The words form in my head and I recognize them as hers even though she didn't say them out loud before she left.
I know her now. Four days and I know the way her brain works, the way she retreats into logistics when her feelings get too big, the way she organizes pantries and folds blankets and bakes ruined cookies because control is her painkiller the same way isolation is mine.
The road switchbacks. I cut the corner through the trees, gaining fifty yards, and drop back onto the gravel. Her prints continue. Then I see the tire tracks.
Fresh. Wide tread. Heavy vehicle. Parked recently, the engine oil still darkening the frozen ground beneath where the block sat. Two sets of boot prints. Men. Both heavy. One drags his left foot slightly.
The cold clarity in my head sharpens to a point fine enough to cut steel.
I start running.
The road drops through a stand of old-growth fir where the canopy blocks the starlight and the darkness is total. I kill the headlamp. Don't need it. The sound carries uphill through the cold air like it's traveling through water, every syllable crisp and undistorted by wind.
A man's voice first. Low. Laughing. The kind of laugh that has teeth in it.
"...all the way up there with that psycho? Bet he kept you real warm, huh?"
A second voice. Higher pitched, nasal. "Come on, sweetheart, we're just offering you a ride. Ain't safe out here for a pretty little thing all by herself."
She is not crying. She is standing her ground with that ridiculous, stubborn, beautiful spine of hers.
"I said no thank you. I'm fine walking."
"Road's a long way down, darlin'. Lot of dark between here and town."
"I'm aware."
The nasal one laughs again. I hear gravel shift. Boot soles scraping. Someone moving toward her.
"Thing is, we don't much like Billsberry up on his hill, acting like he owns this whole ridge. And we real curious what kind of woman shacks up with a man like that."
I'm close now. Fifty yards. Forty. I can see the shape of the truck blocking the road, the dull glint of a cracked taillight, and three figures in the gap between the truck bed and the tree line.
Two standing. One backed against the truck's quarter panel.
The small one. The one with her arms crossed over her and her weight shifted off her left ankle.
I lean the shotgun against a tree trunk. The Remington would end this in a way that creates paperwork and questions and a sheriff driving up my road, and I do not need any of those things. What I need is my hands.
Thirty yards. Twenty. I stay on the soft shoulder where the pine needles muffle my footfalls.
The big one is closest to her. Six feet, maybe two twenty, carrying most of it in his gut.
He's reaching for her arm. His fingers are about to close around her bicep and the distance between that moment and the moment I arrive collapses into nothing.
I hit him from his blind side. My left hand clamps the back of his neck, fingers digging into the tendons on either side of his spine, and I use his own forward momentum to drive his face into the side of the truck bed.
The sheet metal booms like a drum. He goes boneless.
Not unconscious, but close. His knees fold and I let him drop, stepping over him the way you step over a fallen log on a trail.
The nasal one has half a second to process what just happened.
He uses that half second to reach for something on his belt.
A knife, maybe. A flashlight. It doesn't matter what it is because I'm already inside his reach, my right hand closing around his wrist and torquing it behind his back in a standing kimura that puts his shoulder joint approximately two degrees from dislocation.
He screams. High and thin and nothing like the tough-guy drawl from thirty seconds ago.
I walk him backward into the tree line and pin him against a Douglas fir. My forearm goes across his throat. Not crushing. Controlling.
"Look at me."
His eyes are white-rimmed and rolling. I squeeze his wrist and the shoulder joint grinds and he focuses.
"You know my name."
He nods, frantic. The bark of the tree is digging into the back of his skull.
"Then you know what I did for twelve years before I came to this mountain. You know what they trained me to do."
Another nod.
"That woman is mine." The word comes out of me like it comes from somewhere below my diaphragm, below my stomach, from the bedrock layer of me that existed before language and operates on principles that have nothing to do with civilization.
"If you look at her again, I will find you.
If you speak to her again, I will find you.
If you drive this road after dark and I even think you slowed down near my ridge, I will come to your house while you sleep and I will finish this conversation with different tools. Nod if you understand."
He nods so hard his teeth click together.
I release him and he crumples sideways into the undergrowth, gasping, clutching his shoulder.
His buddy is on his hands and knees by the truck, blood sheeting from a split across his forehead, crawling for the driver's side door.
I let them go. The truck engine turns over on the third try, the transmission grinding as the big one finds reverse.
Headlights sweep the trees and then the road is empty and the sound of the engine fades downhill until there is nothing left but the wind in the canopy and the sound of Kinsley breathing.
I turn to face her. She's still pressed against the spot where the truck was, her arms wrapped around herself, her hazel eyes enormous in the darkness. She stares up at me and she processes what she just witnessed. The violence. The speed. The absolute absence of hesitation.
She opens her mouth to speak and I don't let her.