Nate swore again. He slammed his hand against the doors of the shed. Slammed it again and then looked toward the other camp — his family’s camp that his father had built, every damn log of it. The camp where three criminals were holed up, probably having themselves a good old time right about now, laughing themselves sick. The tears came then: tears of rage, tears of exhaustion, tears of fearful loneliness.

He was a prisoner.

He might just as well have been thrown in jail. The snow was as good as any walls if you were trying to pin somebody down, keep them in one place. If he tried to set out for the track right away, he’d be lucky to make it there by one the next morning, by which time he’d have long since died of exhaustion and exposure. Only his ghost self would be standing out there by the tracks waiting for the friendly whistle of the Budd as she came barreling around the bend. He didn’t think they stopped for ghosts.

He fumed. Swore a lot. Recovered. Clamped his mouth shut and looked across the yard toward the H-house. He took a deep breath and plunged in. His anger, like a wave, carried him back. He slammed the door and punched the kitchen wall. Then he leaned on the counter and squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to scream.

When he’d gotten himself together, he loaded up the fire and curled up in the ratty old easy chair to look out at the lake.

What are you doing here?

He tried to remember how the masked man had said it when he first arrived. He’d sounded surprised to see him. Which was weird, because he’d already guessed someone was in the cabin based on the tracks, the snowshoes outside the door. He knew someone was in the building. But he’d been surprised by who he saw, as if he hadn’t expected to see Nate. How did he say it? “What are you doing here?” Or had it been “What are you doing here?”

Whatever he’d said, he knew Nate wasn’t Dodge Hoebeek. He seemed to know a whole lot about way, way too much.

Around 1:00 p.m., the old man came around again. It was hard to tell if he was grinning behind his ski mask, but Nate figured he must be.

“Why don’t you take that thing off?” said Nate without thinking, too angry to stop himself.

The man stared at him. The rheumy eye looked worse. He blinked, once, twice. “You know who those boys over there are?” Nate didn’t answer, but his face must have given something away. “Yeah, I figured as much. You guessed, di’n’t ya.” It wasn’t a question.

Nate thought about it. What more did he have to lose? He nodded.

“Well, that’s something. You’re not quite as stupid as I thought. So, here’s the deal, kid. You play this right and you just might get out of this mess alive. And when you do, you’ll have yourself a story to tell. But see, I don’t want to be part of that story. I don’t want you givin’ no description of the third man in the operation. Y’hear me?”

Nate nodded.

The man nodded back. He was leaning, his hand on the counter, favoring the leg that made him limp.

“Seems like you took a little stroll,” he said, barely keeping the laughter out of his voice. “How was that for you?”

Nate toyed with the idea of telling the man where he could shove his ski mask. Instead, he just turned toward the window and looked out at the lake, his hands stuck deep in his pockets, watching the snow stirred up into a fury now by the incessant wind out of the north. A wind that was bringing nothing but trouble.

“Eh?” said the man. “You waiting on that de Havilland Beaver with your weekend buddies onboard?” Nate didn’t turn, didn’t answer. “Man, oh man, I’d love to see Chuck Belanger wrestle that plane down into this wind.”

Nate stared through slits out at the snow racing away from him toward the islands and the narrows. This guy knew everyone. Everything.

“Assuming Chuck was even around. Which he ain’t, by the by; he’s down in Florida. Smart man.” He waited, and now Nate couldn’t talk even if he’d wanted to because tears were seeping from his eyes. Partially it was at the news that there was no one at Lauzon, so his dad wouldn’t be coming in by plane even if he had gotten the message. And partially because every lie he’d come up with was being thrown back in his face, one by one.

“I’m talking to you, boy,” said the man, his voice surly again. “Dodge,” he said, with no attempt to conceal his scorn.

Nate just stared out at the day clouding over, obliterating the sun, bringing with it another night in this place of memories he didn’t want to have to deal with. The man strode across the room, and before Nate could do more than hunch his shoulders, the guy had his neck in a vise-like grip from behind.

“You should be polite to your elders, kid.” The words came out like bullets from between his teeth. “I saved your scrawny ass just now, whether you know it or not.”

Nate reached up with both his hands to try to release the man’s grip on his neck.

“Let me go!”

But the man bent down close to his ear, close enough for Nate to smell his breath; it was as if a muskrat had crawled into the guy’s mouth and died. Then with one more pincer-like squeeze, the stranger let go, pushing Nate’s head forward so that his face almost smashed into the windowsill.

Nate swung around to look at the man. “You’re pretty tough for a guy who hides behind a mask.”

The slap came out of nowhere, so lightning fast Nate couldn’t have ducked if he’d tried. His face twisted in agony. His cheek burned. New tears threatened but he forced them back. He wasn’t going to give this man the satisfaction. But when he reached up to feel his cheek, he realized that his face was already filmed with wetness.

The stranger stepped back. “I come over to make sure you wasn’t hatchin’ no more little plans.” He waited. His voice didn’t sound so harsh anymore. He was breathing hard, as if maybe the slap had taken something out of him. “Like I told ya, those boys over there . . . man, you do not want to mess with ’em. You try any other stunts like that . . . well, I won’t be able to do nothin’ for you.” Again, he waited. What was he waiting for, another thank you? Nate took his chances and turned away again. “Ya hear me?” said the man, coming nearer, lowering his voice as if there were people nearby listening. “You keep quiet. Keep your head down. And like I said, you just might make it out of here alive. You got that?”

Nate turned to look at him. “Got it.”

“Good.” The man’s hard hands rubbed the wool of his mask as if it were itching his face something terrible. He rubbed the wetness out of his bad eye. Nate wasn’t fool enough to mistake the moisture for tears. He straightened up, stretched a crick out of his back, and turned to leave. “The Bird just saved your bacon. Don’t forget that.”

“What?”

“You wanted to know who I am? The Bird, that’s who. All you need to know.” He limped toward the door.

Nate’s mind was racing. A chance to get out of here without the bird. He had thought they were talking about the helicopter. But . . .

“They want to get rid of you, too,” said Nate.

The man stopped. He turned around slowly.

“What’s that?”

Nate stood up and faced him. “When I first got here, I spied on the camp over there. One of them had been up the hill to this old miner’s cabin. You can get recep —”

“Yeah, yeah, I know the place. What’d you think you heard them say?”

Nate stared the stranger in the eye. With the light on his covered face, Nate could see the glint there. “The one who stayed at the camp came out to meet the other guy. He said he’d talked to someone named Kev?” Nate waited. The man gave nothing away. “Anyhow, the guy said ‘they’ couldn’t come. But there was a chance the guys could get out without the bird. Something like that.” He paused and then, as if Dodge were right there whispering in his ear, he said something else. “They made it sound like they really didn’t like you much.”

Just reading his body language, it was possible for Nate to see that his words had landed.

“You’re full of crap.”

“No, I’m not,” said Nate, feeling bold. “At first I thought they were talking about the chopper — like a whirlybird. They weren’t. Those guys don’t need you. Not anymore.”

The next thing Nate knew, he was falling back into his chair with the man hovering over him, one hand on each of the easy chair’s armrests, his face inches from Nate’s. “Wha’ do you know?”

“I only know what I heard,” said Nate.

“I wanna hear everythin’!”

Nate turned his face away. The stench of the man was making him gag. An insane fantasy came to him: he’d deposited the filleting knife down the side of the easy chair and now all he had to do was pull it out and thrust it up into the man’s guts. His belly was right there! So close. Nate could imagine the thin blade slicing up through the man’s bib overalls, slicing into his flesh, his innards, so that they spilled out all over him like in a scene from The Walking Dead. He shuddered, had to fight the urge to throw up.

The man pulled away, but didn’t walk away. He stood, his arms crossed. “Talk to me,” he said.

Nate looked up at him. Looked into his eyes, one clear, one not. There was something going on here, something he didn’t understand. This guy was not like the other two. He was nasty, all right, but Nate had obviously struck a nerve. He might get himself slapped again, but this man might be the closest thing he had to an ally.

“Those are the guys who escaped from the Sudbury Jail, right?” The man neither nodded nor shook his head. “I recognized them from TV. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what they said.” He paused, swallowed. “They were hoping for the helicopter to come for them, but it couldn’t. I’m guessing that’s because of the storm.”

Nate looked at the masked face, trying to assess if the man was going to lash out at him again. “When I was getting the water, I noticed a round kind of hollow in the snow. And I wondered if it was like the . . . I don’t know, the downdraft from a helicopter.”

“The rotor wash.”

“Yeah. And I remembered watching the video of the men trying to climb into the helicopter, and it was just hovering there, stationary, and it dawned on me that that’s how they got here. They were dropped off, but the helicopter couldn’t land on account of the snow.”

The masked man sniffed, rubbed his nose. “More like what might be under the snow,” he said.

“Solid ice.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, copter pilots don’t like what they can’t see. This time of year — and this close to shore — there’ll sometimes be slush under the snow sittin’ on top of the ice.” He stopped and cussed, as if he’d said too much.

Nate picked up where he’d left off. “So from what they said, I figured they were either going to have to wait out the storm and then clear a spot on the ice, or get out some other way. And you were the only other way out. But maybe not anymore.”

“You’re full of it.”

“Maybe. But you’re the one who found them this place, aren’t you? It was a place you knew about — I don’t know how.” Nate waited a moment, but it was unlikely this guy was going to tell him anything more. “Except that now it sounds like they’ve found some other guy who can help them get out of here and bypass you. Cut you out.”

The man looked at the lake, dabbed at his rheumy eye again. It was leaking bad. He scratched his arm, tapped his foot. And a strange thought occurred to Nate. It was as if now, this man, the Bird, were somehow a prisoner as well.