Reid:It’s snowing? A lot????
Reid:What do I do about Victoria and Fluffy???
Reid:Where are your candles and stuff if the power goes out? I feel like the power’s gonna go out
Reid:Blankets? Emergency rations? Can Dolly double as a blanket?
Me:R-85 and C-347 are literally wild animals, they’ll be fine. They have good shelter.
Reid:They look cold
Me:You’re projecting.
Reid:Are you one hundred percent sure I can’t snuggle either of them?
I ignore that question. We’ve been over this, so I tell him that the emergency supplies are in the same place they were the last time the power went out, and he asks wherethatis, and we’re still going back and forth when my work phone starts ringing.
Yes, I came to a cabin in the middle of nowhere and had to bring two phones. Satellite technology has made it incredibly difficult to getone fucking minuteof peace.
“Gideon,” Dale says as soon as I answer, no preamble. He sounds a little out of breath. “You’re out by Copper Hollow, right?”
“I’m not far,” I tell him.
“You come across that girl?”
I’m staring out the window, snow swirling as the blue-tinted darkness falls. Dread settles over me like a blanket.
“What girl?” I ask.
“The girl chained to a tree.”
I’m already by the stove, stepping into my still-wet boots, because—
“There’s a girlchainedto atree? What the fuck?”
“You didn’t come across her?”
“No,” I say, and my voice echoes off the wood-paneled interior of the Forest Service cabin that, up until now, felt pretty cozy. “Why the fuck is there a girl chained to a tree?”
“I think she’s protesting that new mine on Swayback Mountain. People are real mad about it but it’s right outside of the National Forest so there’s not—”
“She’s an adult?”
“Yeah?”
I take a deep breath and close my eyes for a minute, because when Dale saidgirlI was picturing a nine-year-old in a bad situation, not a grown woman who did this to herself. She’s probably not doing great right now, but still. At least she’s not a kid.
“I haven’t seen awomanchained to a tree, no,” I tell him, a little calmer as I grab my coat with one hand. “If I’d seen a woman chained to a tree in this weather, she wouldn’t be chained to a tree anymore.”
“Shit,” he mutters, and then I can hear him talking to someone in the background, snatches of conversation coming through. I put the satellite phone—which is just a regular smartphone connected to a small satellite receiver, I remember when a satellite phone required its own backpack—on speaker and lace my boots up. At least my socks are dry.
“Yeah, her friend hasn’t heard from her,” Dale says, and I can tell he’s trying to sound calm but he… doesn’t. “Everyone down here who’s any sort of emergency personnel is busy pulling people out of ditches or worse, do you think you could—”
“I’ll go find her,” I say, pulling the double knot on my right boot tight. “Send me the coordinates.”
Three minutes later I’ve got GPS coordinates as well as semi-detailed directions from Dale, if you countthe creek where we had to take down the beaver dam in ’83 and I thought one of those things was going to gnaw my leg clean offas directions, and I’m heating up the Forest Service’s truck while folding the map to precisely the right spot. Already, it’s half-dark, the snow is swirling hypnotically in the headlights, and all the roads up here are barely dirt tracks anyway. They’re hard enough to find in full daylight when it’s not snowing.
For the record, I don’t want to be doing this. I was all set to heat up some dinner, maybe make some tea, wash every dish that the chipmunk touched, and then settle in with a book and go to bed by nine. That’s the whole point of volunteering for grouse observation duty for two weeks during Christmas: peace. Quiet. Solitude. As much as I don’t want that chipmunk living in the walls of the cabin, it didn’t ask me any pointed questions about whether I’m ever going to get married or come back to church. The chipmunk won’t passive-aggressively ask me how everyone in my household is doing and then deadname my brother Reid.
