Hang on.” Quinn gazed into the rearview mirror. “Someone’s coming.”
I slumped into my seat, out of sight. Quinn picked up his mobile and held it to his ear as though listening. I heard the metallic rumble of studded tires as a car drove past us. It was the first vehicle we’d seen since the school bus.
I sat up. “You see anyone?” I asked as Quinn steered the Jetta back onto the road.
“Lady with a couple of kids in back. We’re good.”
“How many people live here in the winter?”
“Maybe four hundred. Why?”
“Just running the odds that we’ll actually find these people.”
“Maybe you should worry that they’ll find us.” He tipped his head toward an unmarked gravel road. “That’s where we were yesterday. You still want to do this?”
“Yeah. Drop me off and pull over where I can find you. I’ll walk down and see what’s there and meet you back at the car.”
Quinn looked doubtful, but after checking to be sure there were no other cars in sight, he stopped to let me out. “Don’t get lost.”
I slung the Nikon around my neck, hopped out, and headed quickly down the gravel road. Quinn did a U-turn and drove in the direction we’d come from, back toward Slythamn.
Once I was out of sight of the road, I clambered up a sharp incline, into the woods. Frozen reindeer moss and dead leaves crunched beneath my boots, and branches tore at my hair. I looked back and muttered a curse. I’d left a trail of footprints on the thin skin of snow dropped by the squall. I hoped that another squall might cover my tracks before someone noticed them.
The wind was frigid, and I wasn’t wearing gloves. I jammed my hands into my pockets. It felt like years since I’d had a camera with me, and I didn’t want my fingers to be numb when I used it. The air smelled of pine and raw earth and decaying leaves, with an underlying brackish scent. We weren’t far from the shore.
After a few minutes of pushing my way through overhanging limbs and past mossy stones, I reached a clearing. I ran my fingers through my hair, dislodging bits of bark and lichen, then cradled the camera against my chest. The Nikon may have been heavier than my old Konica, but its heft and shape were as familiar as my own hands. Despite my underlying dread and my brain ticking like an overheated engine, I felt exhilarated. Those few days without a camera had left me feeling as though I’d lost a sense more deeply embedded than sight, the sense that I can see everything at once, past and future and present, before choosing the precise moment to hit the shutter release and capture the single image that best represents the truth.
Digital photography expands that notion. Immediately and endlessly manipulable, it offers the illusion of infinite choice and recall: by constantly shooting or recording everything, one freezes the present, making it recoverable.
And yet the present is always lost. Film photography creates images from the stuff we’re made of: salt, traces of metal, water, carbon. Digital process makes us believe that we can control time. Film reminds us that we dissolve in it, like salt in water or bone in acid.
I halted, trying to get my bearings. The trees all looked the same, an endless progression of spruce, birch, beech, scraggly hemlock, which formed a shifting, vaporous web of vegetation. Yellow leaves carpeting the ground gave the illusion of sunlight. I walked by instinct, hoping I’d eventually come across the dead fox. Failing that, I’d backtrack to find Quinn.
After several minutes, a pale object appeared in the shadows. It looked uncannily like a body, or part of one—an arm or a leg suspended from one of those black trees. Then the wind shifted, and for an instant the sun broke through. What I’d mistaken for a body was the white column of a birch. Bark peeled from its trunk in long strips. Something moved in its upper limbs—a raven, fluttering to where the dead fox dangled from a branch.
The raven halted, its black beak stabbing with precise, impartial patience at the fox’s exposed rib cage. I froze, holding my breath; then raised the camera to my face, opening the aperture as far as it would go. I waited. Three heartbeats, and the raven cocked its head to stare at me with one yellow eye. I pushed the shutter release, its gentle click more the memory of a sound than a sound itself.
The raven hopped and twisted its head to regard me with its other eye. The feathers on its neck rippled as though another creature moved beneath them. It clacked its beak, gave a low gurgle.
Not a sound of alarm—it continued to stare at me, as though waiting for a reply. I remained still and it repeated the gurgling cry. At last it raised its wings and flapped away from the fox’s carcass, flying so close above my head that I could hear the whistle of air through its feathers before I lost sight of it among the trees.