It had started the night before, when the snow sifted down onto the carcass of his horse and there was no sound beyond the intermittent release of its gases and no stars to wish upon. That’s when he began to “What if” it to death, going back to the morning, kissing her face and feeling the flutter of her eyelashes that, as he’d helped her from the saddle two hours later, were already icicling with frost.
What if he’d stopped before three kisses became four, before four became more? But he hadn’t, and too long in bed gave them a slow start, their breakfast hurried, the Sunday edition of the Bridger Mountain Star outside the mudroom where the paperboy had tossed it. If he’d picked it up he would have checked the back page for the weather. What kind of Montanan were you if you didn’t keep an eye on the sky? But he had a pannier in each hand and they were in too much of a rush to get to the property where they pastured the horses, and then to the trailhead with dawn breaking, a sifting of snowflakes she caught on her tongue, but dead calm, just cold enough that the horses blew steam from their nostrils.
It was called the Aphrodisiac Graveyard, a series of wind-scoured openings on a south-facing slope some few miles west of the wilderness boundary. Here the bulls shed their great antlers in February and March, and Freida Toliver, who had a business making antler chandeliers, wanted to get them off the ground while the beams were still that rich dark mahogany and the tines ivory tipped, before porcupines gnawed them and the weather blanched them of their value.
That was before the fairytale snowfall turned into stinging shards of ice and the temperature dropped thirty degrees in an hour, and any thought of collecting elk antlers was long forgotten.
He couldn’t really say where they made the first wrong turn. Like most people who became lost, he thought that he knew where they were for some time after he didn’t. It wasn’t just the visibility, which had dropped from twenty miles to as many yards, but the wind blew the snow into a sea of scallops, dulling colors and swallowing landmarks to the point where it might have been a different country, or, rather, no country at all. A trail that he remembered as crossing a low saddle seemed to have vanished, along with the saddle, and so they took another trail—“This is it, right, Freida?”—and she shook her head yes, feeding into his confidence, willing it to be so. An hour of lying to themselves later, it became obvious that it wasn’t.
“I thought you were an Indian,” he said, trying for a smile, and failing.
Where the hell are we?
It was a gamble, giving the horses their heads, trusting that they would find their way back to the pack trail. And their hearts lifted when they thought they had found it, only to discover that it was an elk trail that branched like a strong man’s forearm veins, some bleeding back into each other, others not. The horses followed one of those veins down into a creek bottom, and it was there, in the dark heart of the mountain, and no longer sure even which mountain, that he’d made the first attempt to build a fire. But the pack of bar matches he found in a pants pocket were damp, the heads only smearing against the chemical strip.
What if I hadn’t given up smoking and had my lighter, he’d think. What if?
“I might have some in my fishing vest,” she’d said. It seemed absurd now, the notion that they might do a little fishing in one of the high-altitude tarns. “It’s in the saddlebag,” she told him. But her hands shook so badly she couldn’t undo the buckle.
“Here, let me.” He rummaged through the vest.
“Try the inside zipper pocket, the one with my license.”
“I did.”
He lifted his shoulders and let them fall. She looked at him, and did exactly the same. Like she was his echo. That’s what they were to each other. He even called her that, Little Echo. She was Northern Cheyenne and had taken to it. Told people it was her tribal name.
He bent down and hugged her. He felt the frost of her eyebrows melt against his cheek and thought of the morning, holding her close, feeling her heart beat.
“I don’t want to die,” she said.
He looked at her, a small woman made smaller by the immensity of the country that was felt rather than seen and the fourteen hands of her horse that stood nearby, its empty saddle already frosting with snow.
“Nobody’s going to die, Freida. Don’t even think it.”
It was the way they had together, one strong, then the other.
I could start a fire with the gun, he thought. It was something he’d read about, possibly in the same issue of an outdoor magazine where he’d read about a hunter who’d survived a night of thirty below zero by crawling inside the carcass of a moose.
He pulled the handgun from the holster, the single-action Ruger Blackhawk that was her birthday present to him when he’d turned fifty. Five cylinders loaded, the chamber under the hammer empty. He tried to recall the procedure. You formed a tinder nest with cloth, dried grasses, anything that was flammable. Then you pulled the bullet from a cartridge case, dumped half of the powder and stuffed a piece of cotton cloth over the remaining charge, and fired it into the tinder nest. The idea was that the smoldering cloth would catch the tinder aglow, and you could lift up the nest and coax it into flame with your breath. In the illustration, it had looked like the man was praying, lifting his hands to heaven, exhaling fire.
He had a multi-tool in one of his saddlebags, fifty feet of parachute cord and a roll of duct tape in the other. A Montanan’s holy trinity. You could do anything with a kit like that—mend fence, haul a deer out to the road, splint a broken arm. Maybe even start a fire.
He broke a handful of the tiny branches that quilled the lower trunk of a pine tree and collected some larger wood to feed in later. Tinder took more thought, and she was the one who suggested that he unravel wool threads from the tops of his socks. He wadded up the threads as she searched her pockets and came up empty.
“Did I see you put on the panties with the hearts?”
She nodded, too cold to frown at the question.
“Oh, right,” she said, the shoe dropping. Nothing burned like cotton.
“I’d use mine, but they’re poly.”
She said okay, but her hands were so numb she couldn’t trust them. “I might stab myself,” she said. She had bitten through her tongue from the shuddering of her jaws and her voice was thick with the blood in her mouth.
“I’ll do it,” he told her.
He worked her zipper and carefully cut a patch of cloth from the top of the panties. Under his fingertips, he could feel her abdominal muscles crawl from the ice of his touch.
“We’re going to laugh about this someday,” he told her.
She nodded, but didn’t speak. The cold had started with her hands and feet. Then it had crawled up her arms and legs. Now it had settled like a pick in her chest. Even the drawing of breath was an effort. She turned away and spit blood onto the snow.
“This is going to do the trick,” he said.
He tore thin strips from the cloth and wove them into the tinder nest. Pulling a bullet wasn’t easy—the hard-cast .41 Magnum loads were crimped into the case necks so they wouldn’t shift during recoil—but by rapping on the neck to expand the brass and twisting the bullet with the pliers on his multi-tool, he managed. He placed the nest at the base of a big pine so it wouldn’t be blown over by the gas escaping from the barrel.
The first shot from the heavy revolver resulted in a brief glow in the center of the nest, but it went black before he could pick it up.
A little more powder? The second try was better, producing an orange-limned marble of smoldering tinder that died slowly enough to give them heart, but died all the same.
“What about the flies?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You can shave off the hair and the feathers. It will burn.”
“Trout flies, you mean?”
She nodded. “I packed my vest in the pannier. Those big dries, the golden stones and the salmon flies, they have lots of wing material.”
“You know, that’s a really good idea,” he said. “I knew I married you for some reason.”
It looked like modern art, a softball-sized bird’s nest of dried grasses, rusted pine needles, bits of cloth with pink and purple hearts, all of it woven together with ginger neck hackles, bucktail and marabou stork fibers dyed in a half dozen hues.
“That ought to catch fire just looking at it,” he said.
Then the .41 spoke and for a time there was a new color on the mountain, a molten candle of hope. The matchstick-sized sticks caught fire and the flames licked up as they used their hands for wind blocks. But the ground was cold and it sapped the fire even as they fed it.
Come on. Come on. They blew on the struggling licks of flame.
“Not so hard. You’re blowing it out. This needs a woman’s touch.”
That’s my girl, he thought.
But it was like the CPR he’d once performed on a victim of lightning strike. You kept pressing the breastbone and sharing your breaths, even after the heart under your hands grew cold.
She had been waving her hat to coax the flames and pushed the frozen clumps of her hair out of her face.
“Éoseetonéto,” she said. “It’s really cold.” And in English, “I’m freezing.”
He knew soon as she went to the people’s language that he’d lost her. She never did that unless she was at wit’s end.
“Maybe he was right,” she said.
“Who was right?”
“The man, the one I told you about. With the cat. He said that April was the best month to die.”
“He’s just a crazy old loon. You said so yourself.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
But that’s when it had really sunk in, and looking down at her—she was in the dark, the fire was out—he had a thought. This is how it ends. You wake up with the woman you’d searched all your life to find, who changed her name for you and who you couldn’t think of going on without, and that night you lie down with her and die. There are no premonitions. You’re just another victim of nature’s impersonal calculus.
He told himself to stop it. After all, there were still two bullets in the Ruger. He tipped out the cylinder to double-check. And thought of the horses. They were Rocky Mountain horses, not the biggest of their breed, but just as big as a moose.
He shook the cartridges into the palm of his left glove to show them to her, sensed, rather than saw, the recognition take shape in her face.
The brass gleamed in the light of his headlamp.
“Time to decide,” he said. He meant they could try again to start fire or—the unthinkable. The unthinkable that had started as a halfhearted joke only an hour before, but was far from it now.
“I don’t think I can do it.”
“What? Shoot old Henry? You always said he was nothing but a mule with short ears.”
“Either of them. They’re our family.”
He looked at her, her eyes squinted up against the cold, the frozen creeks of tears that ended in beads of ice.
“I’m sorry it’s come to this,” he said. “It’s sure enough my fault.”
“I’m the one with the damned business. I’m the reason we’re here.”
True, but little solace.
“I know what you’re thinking and you can just stop it right now, Mister J. C. Toliver.”
The paisley scarf she’d pulled up over her mouth was frosted from the exhalations of her breath and her voice shuddered, but the words held out a note of hope. “I thought maybe if we could just get them to lie down, we could snuggle up between them.”
“You know they won’t lie down in this kind of weather. Hell, old Henry barely lies down ever. And when’s the last time you saw Annabel off her feet? It’s the only way. If we can ride out this storm, we can walk off this mountain tomorrow morning.”
“I know.” For a moment the wind that swirled in the treetops died and they listened to the horses blow.
“All right,” she said. A harder edge to the voice, another woman speaking now, the one he was counting on.
“If we’re going to do this, let’s do it while it’s still light enough to see. But I’m not shooting my own horse. We’re shooting each other’s. Down in that little witch’s heart.” She gestured toward a patch of tangled timber. “If you can pull the trigger, I guess I can, too.”
“All right then.” And again: “It’s the only way.”
“I just need a minute, that’s all. Just a minute with her. Go down there and wait for me.”
“We don’t have long.”
“I won’t be long. I just have to say goodbye.”
He’d never seen her after that. He’d called out for her. He’d gone looking. He still had the gun and the two bullets. After a while, he used one of them.