Midafternoon, I take the binoculars up to the overlook above the ravine. It's a forty-minute climb. I leave Wolf with Caroline and tell her I'm checking snares, which is half-true, because I do check the snares on the way.
From the overlook, I can see a long gray ribbon of the valley, and at the end of it, small as a thumbnail, the logging camp.
I brace the binoculars on a rock and look.
Activity.
Three trucks now, plus the van. Two more snowmobiles are parked by the equipment shed, covers off, ready to run. Men rove between the bunkhouse and the trucks. I count seven, then eight. One of them is hauling something long and wrapped from a truck bed into the shed. Another stands by the generator with his arms crossed, not working, just watching the tree line.
A lookout. They didn't have a lookout before.
Then a man comes out of the bunkhouse in a long, dark coat, and everything around him changes shape. The men near the trucks stop what they're doing. One jogs over to him. The lookout straightens up.
It's too far to see a face, or to see anything but the coat and the way eight armed men arrange themselves around one man who isn't carrying anything.
The boss is here.
I watch for another half-hour. I'd hoped that they would nurse their wounded and fuck off to wherever they come from, but it's clear that that's not happening.
No, they'restaging.Burrowing in, readying for war.
Tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, they're going to start walking this mountain in a grid. The hut isn't on any map, but all they need to find us is time and patience, and they have both of those in greater supply than I do.
I lower the binoculars and look at the snow between me and the valley. My mind is forty minutes below me, lying in bed with a woman fast asleep in my flannel shirt.
I climb back up before dark.
"How were the snares?" Caroline asks when I come in. "Any hope for a non-venison meal in my near future?"
I shake my head. "Empty."
"You were gone two hours."
"There were a lot of snares."
She looks at me for a while. I'm sure she knows. She's known since the cabin that I lie to her about the things that would scare her, but she's decided, for now, to let me.
"So it's venison again?" she sighs, resigned to her fate.
"Cheer up," I tell her. "We have beans, too."
She throws a pillow at my face.
The dream is the same as always, except when it isn't.
It starts on the road outside Saratoga Springs. It's December. I see the county road, the frozen mud shoulder, the field beyond it. Yelena's Subaru is on its roof in the field and the wheelsare still turning, all four of them, turning and turning, and I'm running through the snow and not getting any closer.
That part is always the same. In real life, I never saw the car like that. By the time, the car was in an impound lot and she was in a drawer.
But the dream doesn't care what I saw. The dream shows me the slowly spinning wheels.
Then it changes, the way it's been changing lately, and the field becomes the clearing behind my cabin, and the car is burning, and the person inside it isn't Yelena anymore.
"Afon."
A hand lands on my chest. I come up out of it fast and hard.
"Hey," Caroline croons. "It's me. You're in the hut. We're okay."
