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, therewasmy 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.Mywoodpile. 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.
