6. Colt
Colt
I watch her from across the cabin, propped up against the pillows with the blankets pooled at her waist, her eyes on the fire like she is still working through everything that happened in the woods yesterday.
Color has come back into her face after the long sleep.
She looks small in my shirt and the layers of wool I piled on her, and something about that pulls at me harder than it probably should.
Vulnerable. Mine to keep whole. The thought has been sitting in my chest since I carried her out of that wreck, and it only gets louder the longer she stays under my roof.
This cabin used to be quiet in a way I never questioned. Now every sound she makes fills it differently, and I am starting to notice how much space that quiet used to take up.
I cross to the bed, boots soft on the floorboards. “You need anything, darlin'?”
She blinks up at me, still shaking off sleep. “Do you have a notebook I could borrow? Something to draw in. It helps me think. Helps me feel like myself again.”
I do not hesitate. There is a spare notebook on the shelf by the door, the one I use for trap line notes and supply lists when it is just me out here. I grab it along with a pencil stub worn down to almost nothing and carry them over. “Here. Use it for whatever you need.”
She takes it with a small smile that lands somewhere behind my ribs and stays there.
Her fingers brush mine for half a second, soft against skin that has not been soft in years.
She settles back against the pillows, opens the notebook across her lap, and I sit down on the edge of the bed beside her, close enough to feel the warmth coming off her but not close enough to crowd.
She starts drawing right away, her hand moving fast and sure across the page like the pencil already knows where it is going.
A moose comes first, big antlers, a ridiculous expression that somehow reads as personality even in a few lines.
Then a speech bubble, then a tourist figure standing beside it, the whole thing coming together faster than I expect.
Her tongue pokes out a little at the corner of her mouth when she is working through a tricky line, and I find myself watching that more than the drawing itself.
She is pretty like this, focused and unguarded, her hair falling loose around her face, the fear from yesterday tucked somewhere out of sight for the moment.
She finishes the strip, the moose arguing with a tourist over a picnic basket, and laughs quiet at her own punchline.
“What's the moose's name,” I ask, because I want to hear her talk more than I want the quiet back.
She glances at me, surprised, like she did not expect the question. “Bartholomew. He is deeply unimpressed with humans and their picnic etiquette.”
“Bartholomew.” I try the name out and it sits strange and good in my mouth. “Sounds like a moose with opinions.”
“He has a lot of opinions. Mostly about tourists leaving trail mix everywhere.” She flips to a fresh page, already sketching the next panel.
“I used to draw him back in college, whenever a professor said something insufferable. He got me through three semesters of a very pretentious art theory class.”
I watch her work while she talks, half listening to the story and half just watching the way her whole face changes when something amuses her.
The fire pops low and even in the hearth, throwing enough heat to keep the cold at the edges of the room where it belongs.
Outside the wind keeps up its relentless push against the walls, snow hitting the window in small bursts like something trying politely to get in.
In here there is just her pencil on the page and the sound of her breathing, and I think I could sit through an entire storm just like this and call it a good day.
“It's silly,” she says after a while, cheeks going a little pink under my attention. “But it helps.”
“It's not silly.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. “You're good at this. Real good.”
She smiles again, smaller, and goes back to the page. I stay beside her a long while, the bed warm from her body and the fire both. Her shoulder brushes my arm when she shifts to turn a page, and the contact sends something sharp through me that has nothing to do with the cold outside.
Eventually I stand, the floorboards creaking under my weight. “I need to go check that your car is hidden good. Once this storm breaks enough for anyone to drive up here, I don't want a trail leading them straight to my door.”
That is the truth, but not the whole truth.
What I do not tell her is the light I saw on the logging road last night, or the fact that I have been running the timeline in my head since I woke up, working out how long it would take a man on foot to reach this cabin from where I saw those headlights stall.
I keep that to myself. She does not need one more thing keeping her up at night.
She looks up fast, her hand stilling on the pencil, worry flooding back into her eyes. “It is dangerous out there. The storm is brutal. You could get hurt, or lost.”
I lean down and press a kiss to the top of her head, her hair soft under my mouth. “I have been through worse than a little snow. I know every inch of this mountain better than I know my own hands. I will be back before you finish that next panel.”
She nods, though the worry does not leave her face. I pull on my heaviest coat, my gloves, grab the snowshoes propped in the corner, and step out into the white waiting on the other side of the door.
The wind hits like a wall the second I clear the threshold, driving snow into every gap in my layers, cold enough to burn where it finds bare skin.
I pull my hood tighter and start moving, boots sinking deep with every step, the world reduced to white and gray and the black shapes of trees looming out of the storm like something out of an old story my father used to tell about men who went into the mountains and did not come back the same.
He is the one who taught me to read snow the way other men read newspapers.
How a print holds its shape different depending on how long ago it was made, how wind carves drift lines that tell you which way trouble is likely to come from, how the absence of tracks can say as much as the presence of them if you know what you are looking at.
I use all of it now, working the trail back toward the road, checking the edges where drifts run thinner, brushing away fresh powder with a gloved hand at anything that catches my eye.
Nothing yet. No boots that are not mine.
No tire tracks cutting through where they should not be.
The mountain is still keeping her secret, for now.
The wind gets worse the closer I get to the open stretch of road, snow piling thick against rock and tree alike, every step a small negotiation with a drift trying to swallow my leg to the knee.
My face goes numb despite the hood. My hands ache inside the gloves.
I keep moving anyway, because she is back there trusting me to come back, and that is reason enough to keep my legs working through anything this mountain wants to throw at me.
The car comes into view eventually, half buried in the drift against the pine it hit, front end crumpled, windshield fractured into a spiderweb that still catches what little light gets through the clouds.
I circle it once, checking the snow for anything that does not belong.
Just my own tracks from before, already filling in fast under the fresh fall.
I get to work, using the small shovel strapped to my pack to build the drift higher along the sides and over the roof, dragging branches from a fallen pine across the top until the whole wreck disappears into the landscape like it grew there.
From the road it will read as nothing but another snowbank.
No metal showing. No color. No sign that a woman's whole life changed course right here two nights ago.
I’m nearly finished when I see it. A boot print, half filled with snow but not filled all the way, pressed into the drift maybe thirty feet off the road where nobody has any business walking in this weather.
Too big to be a woman's. Too deliberate in its spacing to be an animal that lost its footing.
I crouch beside it, running two fingers along the edge where the snow has not quite erased the tread pattern yet.
Fresh. A few hours old at most, laid down sometime after the worst of last night's snowfall had already started tapering off.
My gut goes cold and still in a way that has nothing to do with the temperature.
I follow it a short distance, enough to confirm the stride length and the direction, before the trail vanishes under a fresh drift the wind kicked up sometime in the last hour.
Whoever left it was moving with purpose, not wandering lost like a hunter who took a wrong turn.
They were looking at something. Maybe the road.
Maybe the exact spot where a car went off it two nights ago.
I don’t have proof of anything yet. Could be a local who knows these trails better than the tourists ever do.
Could be nothing at all. But I have spent enough years reading sign to trust my gut when it tightens like this, and right now it is telling me the light on the logging road last night was not a plow crew or a lost hunter looking for a turn.
I set three more traps around the car instead of the two I planned, spacing them wider, rigging the tension higher than I normally would for anything smaller than a man.
My hands stay steady doing it even while everything else in me wants to move faster, wants to get back to that cabin and put my body between her and whatever is out here walking these woods with purpose.
I finish, check each line twice, and take one long last look around before I turn back toward home.
The walk back feels longer than the walk out, every shadow between the trees demanding a second look before I let myself move past it.
The storm keeps working at me the whole way, but I push through it faster than I probably should on legs already burning from the deep snow, because she is waiting, and because I need to see her face and know for certain that nothing found its way to my door while I was gone.
The cabin comes into view at last, smoke still curling steady from the chimney against a sky gone the color of wet ash.
I stomp the snow from my boots and step inside, and the warmth after that cold hits me like something physical.
Nora looks up from the notebook the second the door closes, relief flooding her face when she sees it is me.
I hang my coat by the fire, shaking snow from my shoulders. “Car's hidden good. Traps are set around it too. We’re safe here for now.”
That’s true, as far as it goes. I don’t mention the print in the snow, or the way my gut hasn’t fully unclenched since I found it. She does not need that weight added to everything else she is already carrying, not tonight.
She breathes easier at my words anyway, shoulders dropping under the blankets. I cross to the bed and sit beside her again, the mattress giving under my weight. Her hand finds mine, warm against fingers still half numb from the cold, and I let her hold on as long as she wants to.
I’ll do whatever this mountain requires of me to keep her safe. If that means carrying a secret or two a little longer than I would like, so be it. Some storms you weather quiet, and wait for daylight to tell the rest of the story.