Page 11 of My Halloween Hunter

"Well," she says. "Would you look at that."

"What?"

"Nothing you don't know." She folds my fingers closed, then reaches under the counter and comes up with a length of heavy red wool, a hooded wrap the colour of holly berries, of blood on snow, and settles it around my shoulders.

"Cold up the pass after dark," she says. "You'll want to be seen."

His cabin is empty when I go back for my bag. His mug is on the rack, and his rifle is gone from over the door, and I stand between the two chairs waiting for him to come in, and he doesn't.

He knows I'm going. He knows exactly where I am, because he always does, and he isn't going to stop me.

I sit down in the dusty chair, my chair, and cry into my hands for four ugly minutes. Then I get up, because I'm not a woman who begs a man to want her, not even this man. I take the lens cap out of my pocket and set it in the middle of his table where he'll see it first.

The sun is going down orange behind the western ridge when I turn onto the pass road, Edna's jack-o'-lanterns grinning in my rear-view mirror, and I drive up the mountain in a red cloak with my hands shaking on the wheel.

6

Cade

The moon comes up over the east shoulder fat and orange, one night off full. Hunter's moon, my father used to call it.

I'm on the ridge above the switchback with my back against a boulder and the pass road laid out below me like a grey ribbon, all the way down to the valley — Edna's lights, the dark Birch cabin, my own dark cabin. I left before she came back for her bag. If I'd stayed, I'd have stood in front of that door. I'd have taken her keys and thrown them in the creek and put her in my bed and kept her there till spring, and part of her would have let me, and by March she'd have hated me for the rest of it.

So I walked up here in the dark, same as the first night. To watch.

My line shack sits a quarter mile below the ridge, stove laid and cot made, the place I sleep in rut season. I didn't go in. I want to see her go.

A week ago I was a man who wanted nothing. I know better now what I am, and I know what I'll do the way I know weather: I'll give it a week, maybe two, and then I'll find out which street in Vancouver she lives on and go and stand in the dark across from her window until she looks out and sees me there. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm done being ashamed of anything to do with her.

But I never asked her. That's what sits in my chest like a stone. Ten years of never asking anybody for anything, and I chased her and caught her and fucked her against a tree and put her in my bed, and not once did I open my mouth and ask. I took, every time.

Down in the valley a flashlight bobs along the road between the houses with four small shapes behind it. Edna's porch is lit orange with pumpkins, and somebody's kid is howling like a wolf and doing it badly. Halloween. I'd forgotten.

Then headlights come around the bottom switchback, crawling slow.

I'd know that car by the sound alone, the rattle in the exhaust Ray didn't touch because Ray never fixes anything that isn't broken. My hands close into fists on my knees as the lights climb and swing and climb again, past the second bend and the third, and then stop.

Right there, on the flat gravel shoulder where it died a week ago with the frost coming on and the light going amber.

The engine cuts, but the headlights stay on, two white beams pointed up the empty road. Nothing moves down there for a long time. Then the driver's door opens and she gets out wearing red — a hooded wrap red as blood on snow, the only color on this whole mountain, glowing in the moonlight as she stands in the beams with her breath going up white.

Edna. That woman.

Darcy walks to the treeline, to the spot where she stood the first night and pointed her camera into the dark at me, and pushes the hood back.

"Cade."

The pines take my name and throw it back.

"I know you're up there." Her voice shakes, then steadies. "You always are."

I'm on my feet.

"You'll walk up a mountain in the dark for a piece of plastic." Louder now, and angry, so angry. "You'll cut a tree in half so I don't lose the light. But you can't say one word to me with the lamps on, you big stubborn—" She breaks off and breathes. "Come and get me. And when you've got me, you'd better have something to say."

She turns and walks into the trees, red disappearing into black, and the stone in my chest cracks straight down the middle.

I go down the ridge.