"Nobody sane is."
"We are."
"My point stands."
I'd laugh if my face still worked. "Okay. So what does this mean? Math it out for me."
"It means we can't follow the creek." He looks downslope, into the churning white, and I watch the route in his head getcrumpled up and thrown away. "The creek bends east in two miles. Right into their pattern. We'll have to go west instead, around the high shoulder, and come back down behind them."
"How much does that add?"
He doesn't answer right away, which is his version of trying to get out of answering at all.
"Afon. No bullshit, remember?"
"Three miles," he sighs. "Maybe four, depending on the snow up top."
Four miles. On top of fourteen. On an ankle operating with way fewer ligaments than normal. I close my eyes, but then, behind my eyelids, I see the bench in Pike Hollow, the white van, Buzzcut's hand over my mouth, and the decision gets very easy, actually.
"West it is," I declare. "I always wanted to see more of this mountain. It's been such a charmer so far."
That doesn't get a smile out of Afon.
"Stay close," is all he says. "There's no telling what could happen next."
The detour is even less fun than anticipated.
The high shoulder of the mountain is exposed in a way the drainage wasn't, and the wind up there is in a way worse temper. It scours the slope down to rock in some places and piles the snow into thigh-deep drifts in others, and there's no pattern towhich is which, so every step is a gamble with my ankle as the stake.
Afon shortens his stride to match mine without being asked. Wolf stops ranging and walks pressed against my left leg, a hundred and twenty pounds of mobile windbreak slash furry crutch. I love him so much in that hour that I would put him in my will.
I stop talking. All I'm capable of doing is watching Afon's boots and putting mine where his were. Somewhere along the way there, the snowmobile whine fades
Somewhere in there, also, Afon slows down.
It takes me a while to notice it. With a man like Afon, who keeps so much close to the chest, every bad thing is subtle… until it's very muchnotsubtle at all.
He's still breaking trail, still handing me over the bad spots, but his pauses get longer. He starts using trees for support. A hand braced against a trunk here, a shoulder against a deadfall there, always disguised aschecking our bearingorlistening. At one point, he stands with his hand pressed flat against a spruce for a count of ten, and I think,He's tired, and with good reason, because he's been doing the work of a plow truck for seven hours.
But it's only when we reach the lean-to that I realize just how bad it's gotten.
In theory, it's four o'clock, but if you looked at the sky, you'd think it was five 'til midnight on the eve of the apocalypse. Underneath that dark, ominous overhang, a three-sided shed of weathered planks appears, tucked under an overhang of rock.Compared to this thing, the miner's hut was the Ritz freaking Carlton.
But I'll take it.
"Oh, thank God," I croak, and stagger the last twenty yards on an ankle made of crab meat and Elmer's glue.
Afon doesn't stagger. But he puts his hand on the lean-to's corner post when he reaches it, and he leaves it there for too long. That's when I finally look at him and see the source of all his silent misery.
The left side of his jacket, just above the hip. The fabric is dark there. Darker than the snow-wet dark of everywhere else. When I take a step closer, the smell reaches me through the cold, faint and coppery, and my whole body goes numb.
"Afon."
"It's nothing," he barks at once.
"You'rebleeding." My brain runs the tape backward and suddenly sees everything it missed. "How long has it been open?"
"It doesn't matter."
