Nate woke up disoriented. Not spatially; he knew this little box of a room as well as he knew his own bedroom back home. He was disoriented in time. For a moment, he didn’t know when he was.

It was the light. The light sifting in the curtained window was wrong somehow. It wasn’t summer light. It wasn’t morning light. It was coming from the wrong direction. A watch. He was wearing a watch. Then he remembered — felt — the clunky Rolex he’d taken off Shaker’s thick, limp wrist, and lifting his arm to the light, he saw that it was five o’clock. Late afternoon.

But what day?

Cal was asleep by the stove. The scotch bottle was empty. The cabin was cooling down. Nate heaped some wood on the embers in the stove. He looked at Cal’s sleeping face. Some faces in repose were neutral. Some, like his mother’s, looked peaceful. Even when no one was looking, Astrid Ekholm smiled. But there was no peace in Cal’s face. His features were strained. He looked like a man in a tug-of-war that never ended. He was sweating, too, despite the chill in the air. The wound had seeped right through the old sweats Nate had found for him. The bandage would need changing. But sleep was good, even if it took a bottle of booze to get there. And it wasn’t exactly as if he craved the man’s company.

He wandered over to the little window in the east wall that looked out onto the yard. There stood the sled with the dead body strapped to it. Crap. He’d have to do something about that. He turned away and stopped. Closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath, in and out. Night was coming. He’d have to do something about it right now.

Dressed warmly, he set off. He fired up the Doo. He cleared a place on the workshop floor, found an old paint-stained drop cloth. Then he dragged the corpse into the shed and laid him out, covered him over. He stood and stared at the bundle in the dimming light. He didn’t think the drop cloth would keep the mice from him for long.

He shuddered.

He had killed this man. He had deliberately led him up a treacherous path to a sheer and hazardous drop. He had taken his own life into his hands, true, but he had lived and Shaker had not. It was not something he could have ever imagined doing in a million years. He closed his eyes again and lowered his head in prayer. But his prayer didn’t get all the way to God. It was a prayer to his friend Dodge. “You saved my life, man,” he said. Then he opened his eyes and shook his head slowly in bewilderment. The idea of Dodge saving anybody’s life seemed so totally whacked out he almost laughed. He didn’t want to do that. Hysteria didn’t seem far off.

He was about to leave the shed when he suddenly turned, found the padlock, closed the door, and locked the dead man inside. He wasn’t taking any chances.

With renewed energy, Nate collected the plywood shutters in the sled and drove them over to the H-house. He had brought along some supplies from the work shed, so before he put the shutters back up, he screwed in several pieces of one-by-six across the back door to keep it tightly closed. By the time he’d replaced the shutters, the sun was just a yellow crayon line along the western hills and the deep cold was settling in. He was hungry, but he felt a little bit better. At least one camp was shipshape.

“A little better” didn’t last long. When he stepped into the house, Cal was groaning and thrashing his head from side to side. Nate took off his outdoor clothes and made his way over to the old man. The tug-of-war wasn’t going well. His expression was of a man in mortal pain. Sweat poured from his ragged face. Nate knelt and hesitantly leaned toward the sopping red bandage. The smell made him gag: a putrid smell, the smell of tissue breaking down, infection setting in.

Nate stood up, stepped back two, three paces. When was this going to stop? Was he going to have two dead men on his hands by the end of the day?

“Kid,” said Cal. He’d opened one eye, which was trained on Nate. He reached out for his arm, except that his hand fell short, landing with a thump on the arm of the chair. “I need help,” he said.

“I’ll change the bandage,” said Nate.

Cal’s mouth hung open. He shut it, and Nate watched the old man’s stringy throat constrict as he tried to summon up some spit. “You gotta take me somewhere.”

“There is nowhere. The Budd’s been and gone.”

Cal’s eye closed. It seemed to take him some minutes to register the news. Or to accept it. Then he opened both his eyes. “You gotta get me help.”

Nate nodded, and then he said, without a trace of irony or anger, as if he were just asking a reasonable question, “How am I going to do that?”

Cal’s eyes closed again. He became still and Nate wondered if he was finally facing his fate, the enormity of the mess he’d gotten himself into. Then he opened his eyes again.

“Likely,” he said.

“What?”

“Likely La Cloche.”

“What about him?”

“Down at Sanctuary Cove.”

“Yeah, I know, but —”

“He’s got a radiophone.”

The information caught Nate off guard. He actually knew Likely had a phone. There’d been a couple of times when his mother or father had used it. He just hadn’t thought about it.

“Nate, are you listening?”

“Yeah, yeah. But is he there?”

Cal swallowed hard and the muscles in his face strained. “It don’t matter.”

“I mean, how could he be with this snow and him being disabled and —”

“I said it don’t matter! It don’t matter whether he’s there or not. I know where he keeps his keys.”

Nate wasn’t sure why he was surprised. And here he’d thought they were somehow special up at the north end. Cal probably knew where everybody kept their keys.

“Don’t zone out on me, kid.”

“Sorry. I . . . Yeah, so . . .”

Cal reached out his hand to Nate and managed to snag his arm, but he was too weak to hold on to it and his hand fell to his lap. His eyes appealed to Nate. “Please,” he said. Nate didn’t actually hear the word but saw the shape of it on the old man’s lips. Probably not a word he’d used all that often.

“Okay,” said Nate. “I’ll go, except I don’t know how to use a radiophone.”

Somehow, even in dire pain, Cal managed a scowl. And seeing it was almost a relief. There was life in the old bastard yet.

Nate wasn’t going anywhere without changing Cal’s dressing. An argument ensued, but Nate was holding all the cards. The sweatpants he had lent Cal were toast. He rolled them down. Cal was harder to move now than before because he seemed to have no strength at all to help out. The upside was that he had no fight left in him to struggle.

Nate breathed through his mouth, avoiding the worst of the stink as he cut away the bandages. Wearing a pair of rubber washing-up gloves he found under the sink, he balled up the soggy dressing and hurled it in the woodstove, where it sputtered and bubbled. Gross.

He was about to hurl the sweatpants in, too, but didn’t want to smother the fire. He put them in a garbage bag he’d deal with later. The wound looked every bit as bad as it had before, even more livid in color. He cleaned up the surface with wipes and then applied the ointment and new compresses and the rest of the bandage roll. Then he found another pair of old torn, paint-stained sweats, put them on Cal, and stopped to take a breather.

He looked at the eggs and bacon sitting on the table. They’d been out all day, abandoned. He was starving, but he didn’t have the time to cook. So he made himself a sandwich: peanut butter and some old blueberry jam that had crystallized. It was from a batch Fern Hoebeek had made the previous year. He’d harvested the blueberries along with Dodge and Trick down by the dam, and Dodge had pretended a bear was coming just to get Trick’s goat.

The bread was dry with blue mold spots. Too bad. There wasn’t time to toast it, so he wolfed the sandwich down anyway and ended up gagging. Lukewarm water was all he had to wash it down with. The invaders had left a couple beers in the fridge but that, he figured, was the last thing he needed. If he made it through tonight, he might just want one later. Then he went to look at a large-scale map of the lake on the wall. There was Sanctuary Cove on the eastern shore, almost at the southernmost end of the lake.

“For Christ’s sake, kid, what are you doin’?”

Cal’s sleep had obviously reawakened his foul nature.

“Coming,” said Nate, but he kept staring at the map. He wondered whether this is what a wild-goose chase looked like.

“If killin’ me is what you had in mind, you’re doin’ a good job.”

“You’re the one who got himself shot,” said Nate.

Which set Cal off, more foulmouthed than ever — a regular Vesuvius of red-hot resentment. His eyes closed and his body taut with pain, he still managed to hurl abuse at everything and everyone who’d ever crossed him or let him down. Untouched by any of it, Nate watched with rude fascination. And he thought of his father. He believed Burl Crow to be about as good a man as ever walked the earth. Listening to Burl’s father bluster and rage, Nate’s esteem for his own father only grew. How did any human manage to overcome such a start in life? Amazing.

The rant ended. The room grew quiet but for the ticking of the fire Nate had stoked up. He’d be gone a good long time.

“You still here?” said Cal.

“No,” said Nate. “I’m gone.”