Page 76 of She, Wolf, Him.

The village lies white and barred under the moon.

No light shows anywhere. Snow sits on every roof, clean as washing, and the lane runs down between the houses unmarked, no print on it but what I put there. Nobody walks Saint-Élie after dark, and nobody has since the leaves turned. The one man who did, they tied to a post for it, and here he is again, out under a full moon with a gun, the very picture the Berthou woman swore to. Let her be at her shutter. Let her have the whole show. Come morning there'll be a carcass to answer for me, or I'll be past minding what's said.

Her lane lies off my shortest road to the trees. I take it anyway. There are turnings a man stops lying to himself about.

Her house stands dark at the bottom of it. Shutters drawn, the bar down behind them if she's minded me, no seam of light at the joints, and the chimney cold. Asleep. Warm, and safer behind that oak tonight than any other soul in this valley. I stand a short while in the wall-shadow with my breath smoking, and I give the dark window the only vow I have left. Sleep, and hold the bar down. By morning it will be done with, one way or the other.

Past the last house the lane gives out into the sheep-walks, the snow goes from trodden to virgin, and the climb begins. The air above the village has teeth the lanes never grew. My breath freezes into the stubble along my jaw.

Where the wood takes me in I stop once and look back. Saint-Élie lies small and white below, one street, one bell-tower, every hearth banked, every door barred. From this height all of it would hide behind a thumb held up at arm's length, the village and every grave it dug this year together. Half the souls asleep down there would still watch me hang, and none of them asked me out tonight. I've let that count go. There's one door in the little white huddle of it I'd be sorry never to knock at again.

Under the chestnuts the going is easy, the fall thin underfoot, the light coming through the bare limbs in pieces bright enough to count stitches by. Higher, where the beech gives over to fir, the wood shuts the light out, and the hush under the boughs is total.

There are two fears in this trade. The working one keeps my hands quick and my ears open, and I've earned my bread inside it half my life. The other is the one that's lived in me since the pack had me down in the mist. It strips the trade out of me and leaves only the old sum. Run or die. I carry them both up the hill, and only the first one gets the use of me.

I cut its track in the first deep snow under the firs.

Fresh past anything this country has ever dealt me. The edges of the prints stand sharp yet, not an hour settled, the four-toed span I could draw blind, the stride longer than my own. The line of it runs straight up the hill, unhurried, a walker going where it means to go. All season this track has ended at granite and left me holding nothing. Tonight the snow holds every step of it, print after print, up into the high wood.

I follow, and the wood swallows the both of us.

The sound comes when I've climbed the best part of an hour, and it stops me with one foot in the air.

Low and long, with more chest behind it than any wolf I've ever stood over, dead or living. I can put a name to every noise this country makes in the dark, and I stand there with my breath shut off and no name coming. It rolls down through the firs from the open ground under the crown of the hill. It doesn't come again. The not-coming-again is worse.

Then the wind swings downhill and brings me the rest. Musk, and iron under it, the smell of the killing floor when a beast is opened up and steaming. I met it first at a warm empty lie-up in my first week in this country, and once more since, with no carcass to answer for it. I called it nerves and an empty belly. There's nothing left to call it tonight. Whatever wears this smell on a living hide carries the slaughter with it.

I go up the last of the slope on my knees and one hand, slow as frost creeping, the rifle across my back, to where a lip of bare granite breaks the snow at the edge of the open ground. I put my head over it a finger's breadth at a time.

The clearing below is maybe eighty paces across, ringed round with firs. The moon stands full over it, and the new fall gives the light back doubled, so the whole floor of it lies lit fair as a church at Easter.

At the far side, half into the tree-shadow, the shape is standing.

It stands broadside to me, its head down. My eye starts the measure the trade has trained into it, and the measure will not come out. There's too much height at the shoulder, and the shoulder is set where no running beast carries one, high and forward, made more for bearing than for speed. The neck runs too long before the head. And it is still, stone-still, in a cold that keeps every living creature in this country moving. Snow settles along the breadth of its back, and it doesn't trouble to shake it off.

The second fear has found me now and is working at its leisure. But the first one holds, and the trade goes on doing itself. The range, the wind, the fall of the ground between the muzzle and that grey breadth of shoulder. Still air. I haven't missed a standing shot at that distance since I was a boy scaring crows off a seed-field.

I ease the rifle over the granite and bring the stock home to my shoulder. The lock's cold reaches my cheek through the stubble. The shape has not moved. My breath wants to run away from me, and I make it come long and slow instead, the shooter's patience, the last thing in me that still works.

In a ruined byre at the edge of the village, with the winter coming through the roof, I made a woman a promise. I told her I'd end it before it ever came near enough to touch her. Below me stands everything that has hunted her all autumn, the whole season of graves gathered into one hide, standing easy at the wood's edge, as a beast stands in its own pasture, minding nothing, fearing nothing.

I find the trigger. I let the last of my breath go, down to the quiet at the bottom of it where a true shot lives.

And I keep my word.

41

HER EYES

GASPARD

It stood in the open ground and let the moon have the whole of it, as though the light were its by right. Nothing that fears man stands so.

— HUNTSMAN'S ACCOUNT, THE MARGERIDE

The crack of the shot goes up the clearing and comes back off the hills twice, smaller each time, and the shape at the wood's edge goes down where it stands, all at once, like a felled ox.

After that nothing in the clearing moves.