Page 64 of She, Wolf, Him.

"You'll find it, won't you."

"I will," I say.

He looks at me a moment longer, then steps back and lets me by. I've said those two words in a dozen parishes and sold them every time, the same as I sold the king. This is the first time the saying has cost me anything, because this is the first time I've meant it. I walk on.

Her lane runs off the square by the well, and she's in it. Agnès, at her own woodpile, gathering split lengths into the crook of one arm, steady, taking her time, a woman keeping her hands where her heart can't follow them. Her face gives the lane nothing. It never has. The village reads that stillness as duty. All autumn I've read it as strength. Today I don't try to read it at all.

I don't cross to her. Yesterday I stood at her door with nothing in my hands but sorrow, and her silence sent me home. It was right to. The next time I stand there I mean to bring her a true thing or nothing. No performance. None of the coin I've paid every crowd from here to the coast. True. She lost the better part of her days this week because I let a valley believe its dying was done. Why her grief weighs on me as no other grief in this parish does, I don't examine. I've given up lying about the dying. I've room for only so much honesty in one week.

The widow's house at the hamlet's edge lets me one room, boards, a borrowed table, and the best light of its day at noon. I clear the table and lay this autumn out on it. The maps, such as I could make them. The dates. The twist of grizzled hair I've carried since the betrothed man's morning. The thread in its spill of paper. And a clean page, because a true account needs to live somewhere surer than my memory, which has shown me this season it will strike out whatever frightens it.

I write the account as I'd demand it of any man reporting to me. The places, high to low, in their order. The sign at each. The print entered at its full size. The trail that has ended on bare stone every time since summer. The shape among the firs, in ink at last, dated the evening I saw it, nothing softened. Read cold, it's the deposition of a madman. It's also the first sane page I've written in this valley.

Then the last column, because a true account carries one. Who found each of them, who stood nearest, who tended what was left.

My own name goes down first, and it goes down often. To the drover, and again at the hay-store. The stranger who rode in with the dying and has profited by every grave since. If this page ever travels to Mende, a lawyer could hang me with my own ink, and on the worst mornings I'd near enough help him argue it. If I won't put my own name in the column, I've no business keeping one.

Then the column wants the other name.

She washed the shepherd before I ever saw this country. She laid out the man from the lower pastures, and after him the drover nobody claimed. The man she was promised to is on this page already, among the dead. She washed the priest who'd have gladly watched her shamed. Yesterday she laid out the dearest friend she had and plaited her hair for the ground. Every soul this autumn has taken, all but the one they kept from her, passed through her keeping on its way down, because that's the office this village bound her to when she was still a girl, and the office never asked what it cost her.

The pen sits over the page and doesn't come down.

I finish lists. Finishing them is the trade. I've finished every other page on this table, against my own neck's interest, and called it honesty. This one I fold half-written, small, and put it away under the maps. The column doesn't lie. Columns can't. But she's up that lane grieving the half of her life this autumn tore out of it, and I won't turn her into a line in a hunter's account. There's no reasoning in that. I've none to offer. It isn't shame and it isn't peace, and I leave it there.

The light goes early now. I sit while it thins, the maps squared, the thread in its paper, the page under both.

When I rode into this country, the hunt was the size of the Margeride. Any ridge could have held my quarry, any of a hundred black valleys. That country has been shrinking all day. It shrank behind the hay-store. It shrank just now under my own pen, and I let it.

Whatever I'm hunting, I've stopped believing I'll ride out to meet it. It's near. Tomorrow, before light, I walk the close ground again. The morning after too, and every morning the frost will let me, until the near country has given up what it's holding.

Find what's true and kill it. And when at last it lies dead at my feet, I mean to know its face.

34

TOWARD THE VILLAGE

GASPARD

The tracks led not away, as all before, but inward, toward the houses, toward the hearths, toward the very doors we bar against it.

— DEPOSITION OF A ROYAL HUNTSMAN, MENDE, 1766

The cold has changed its mind in the night. I feel it before I'm out of the widow's door, a stillness with an edge on it, the first frost hard enough to take a print and hold it, and any man who has hunted an autumn through in this country knows what that hour is worth. From false dawn to sunrise, everything that moves in this valley is written down. Every fox, every hare, every late-walking man leaves his night's business printed in the rime, and then the sun climbs and takes the record back.

Two mornings back I stood under the king I hung on the church wall and swore off being wrong on purpose. Since then the close ground has had me before light both mornings. Yesterday it paid me nothing. This morning the frost pays me all at once.

The granite shelf sits white under the last of the dark. Since summer that stone has ended every trail I've run in this valley, swallowed every stride at its edge and given not one of them back. I've come to hate it, the way a man does a witness that won't talk. This morning it talks. Across the white of it, spaced wide and even, the rime is bruised through to dark stone, mark after mark, where weight and warmth went over in the night.

I crouch at the first of them with my breath smoking. Four toes, plain at the melted edge. The size I already know and still don't like to look at. And a stride with no hurry anywhere in it, the gait of a beast that fears nothing on this mountain because nothing on this mountain has ever given it cause.

Rime like this keeps for an hour and not a minute past. I go along the shelf print to print at a hunter's trot and come off the far side onto frozen pasture, and there the prints stand clean and deep, fairer sign than this valley has ever paid me. The old joy of a running trail takes me before I can distrust it.

Then I straighten to see where the line is going, and the joy dies standing.

Downhill. The causses lie south, broken country a beast could den a lifetime in, and the trail turns its back on them. The deep wood lies east, and it turns its back on that too. It goes straight down the sheep-bitten slope, through the gap in the fold-wall, toward the smoke.

Saint-Élie is coming awake below me, grey on grey, the first chimneys drawing. A dog starts up and leaves off. A door goes. A woman's voice climbs the hill after a child, "—back here, you, it's near the—" and loses the rest of it to the distance. And the stride runs on down toward all of it, easy as a carter's horse on a known road, sign so clean it reads like a beast past caring whether it's read.