THE OWL COUNT

ELIZABETH HAND

In mid-March, Louis’s childhood friend Eric died of a cerebral aneurysm after being in a coma for nine days. The memorial was in the small Vermont town where they’d grown up together. Louis drove there from northern Maine, spent the night at a friend’s house after the service, and left again next morning.

It was late afternoon when he got back home, to a few inches of new snow. He went inside and fired up the woodstove, sorted through the few items of mail that had arrived since he’d left, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and checked his mobile. There he found a text message from his old friend Yvette.

Looks like the best night for the owl count will be tonight or Monday. Moon is just past full now. Will be cold but I’m afraid if we don’t get out this week we’ll miss the chance because of weather.

Louis stared out at the bare trees silhouetted against the dusk. After a moment he wrote, just returned from a funeral in vermont, can do it tomorrow maybe

Immediately she replied: No, supposed to snow early tomorrow. Need to go tonight.

Louis swore softly, then sighed. ok what time

Will pick you up @ 11:30. See you then!

He finished his beer and reheated some soup for dinner, checked the temperature and weather. Twenty-eight degrees, cloudy, not much wind. Heavy snow predicted but not till morning. Not an ideal night, at least as far as Louis was concerned—it was way too cold.

But the owls wouldn’t care, and neither would Yvette. Like Louis, she was widowed. Her husband, Buddy, had been Louis’s close friend, a game warden who’d been two months from retirement when he had a heart attack while searching for a snowmobiler who’d gone missing up by Greenville. Louis always felt like he’d taken Buddy’s death harder than Yvette. Not true, he knew that; it was just Yvette’s way. Her composure and oddly fatalistic good humor remained unshaken by death, war, the slow decay of the wilderness where they lived. And now, her own illness.

Louis’s wife, Sheila, had died within a year of Buddy. That was over a decade ago. The plastic bins full of medications she’d been prescribed in her last months were still jammed onto the floor of the bedroom closet, where her winter coats, flannel shirts, and snowmobiling gear continued to hang alongside Louis’s own. Like Yvette—like everyone—he’d been downsized from his teaching job when their university rolled over to the AI modules. Since then he’d gotten by the same way his Maine ancestors had a century earlier. Bartering and scavenging; hunting and fishing; coaxing pumpkins, squash, beans, onions, garlic, Jacob’s Cattle Beans from the stony soil and longer growing season that was one of the few enduring benefits of the so-called lost winters.

“You can grow tomatoes in Maine now!” Yvette always marveled.

“Yeah, but not potatoes,” Louis would retort. The mutated potato bugs had seen to that.

He washed his soup bowl and spoon, went outside to bring in more firewood. If it really did snow the next day, he’d be too tired from the owl count to bother in the morning. He drank another beer, set the alarm for 11:00 p.m., four hours from now, and went to bed.

He woke when the phone rang. Yvette again. He looked blearily at the time and groaned. “Jesus, you couldn’t let me sleep another fifteen minutes?”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t wake up!”

Louis had never overslept for the owl count, but he knew that wasn’t the issue. Yvette was too excited to wait. “Well, give me a few minutes. I need some coffee.”

“I have coffee.”

“I give up. See you when you get here.”

He heated water for the coffee and dressed. Thermal long underwear, a pair of wool hunting pants that had been his father’s, a ragg wool sweater and another that Sheila had knit for him. Two pairs of wool socks, old insulated Bean boots. Most years, he and Yvette didn’t hear any owls. But it was guaranteed that they’d freeze as they waited in hopes of doing so.

He’d just finished gulping down the coffee when Yvette’s headlights cut through the darkness outside the kitchen window. She left the car idling and entered without knocking. Louis held up his coffee mug. “Want some?”

Yvette perched on the arm of the chair beside the woodstove. With her green snow pants, oversized black boots, and red parka, its pointed hood pulled up so that wispy white curls framed her face, she resembled a garden gnome. She glanced at the coffee mug and shook her head.

“I’m all set,” she said. She watched Louis with the avid expression of a dog awaiting a walk. He grabbed gloves and knit cap, pulled on his own parka; shoved his mobile in a pocket, and stuck another log in the woodstove.

“Okay,” he said.

Yvette hopped up and hurried outside. Louis followed, the snow soft beneath his boots. He got into her old Subaru, where she handed him a clipboard.

“And there’s more coffee.” She pointed at a thermos on the floor, put the car into gear, and gingerly pulled out onto the road. “I’m so excited!” she exclaimed, and grinned.

Louis had joined the owl count twenty-six years earlier, when Yvette’s former owling partner moved back to Florida. Back then, the program was administered by a Maine college that had received a grant to do a study of the state’s owl population. The top data sheet on Louis’s clipboard dated to that time.

We seek to establish owl presence across our landscape, to estimate population and density for common Maine owls, and to detect changes in distribution or density perhaps related to human influences . . .

Data was collected by teams of volunteers across Maine between early March and mid-April—breeding season. They monitored five owl species—short- and long-eared owls, saw-whet owls, barred owls, great horned owls. The project ended years ago, but Yvette and Louis had continued to go out nearly every spring since. This was Yvette’s idea, of course, but except for that year when Sheila had finally gone into hospice in Bangor, Louis accompanied Yvette every time, including the March night only weeks after Buddy’s death.

The Subaru jounced down the rutted drive to the road as Yvette downshifted to avoid potholes and frost heaves. Louis’s car was a hybrid, nearly as old as Yvette’s Subaru, but it didn’t fare as well in winter. He stuck the clipboard on the floor and reached to turn down the heat. Yvette’s car reeked of dog and scorched engine oil—the head gasket leaked, so she had to top off the oil every other day, from a stockpile she’d traded for with gallons of tomato sauce and some deworming medicine with a 2007 expiration date. Her dog, Wilmer, was back at the house. The only time he didn’t accompany Yvette was during the owl count.

“Damn!” Yvette slapped the steering wheel and Louis looked at her in alarm. Yvette never swore. “I forgot to check if there’s batteries in the CD player! Do you have any?”

“At the house, maybe.” He twisted to look into the back seat, piled with outdoor gear and blankets covered in dog hair, and snaked out his arm to retrieve the portable boom box, a decrepit piece of outmoded technology that Yvette coddled as though it had been one of her wheezing dogs. She’d bought it specifically for the owl count. That must have been more than thirty years ago, when CDs were already being phased out.

As far as Louis knew, she never used it for any other purpose—he’d never seen a single other CD in her house. Some nights during the summer, she’d play the owl-call CD on the deck of her house up on Flywheel Mountain, watching as the owls appeared ghostlike from the darkness above her head. A practice the Owl Monitoring Program had strictly warned against, back in the day, but the study had ended so long ago, who was possibly left to care? Certainly Yvette had seen and heard more owls during these forbidden sessions than they ever had during the owl count.

He peered through the CD player’s smudged plastic window and saw the disc. Did she ever even remove it? Probably not. He hit Play, watched as the disc began to spin. “It’s working,” he said.

“Thank God.”

The car juddered as she steered it onto Route 217, one of the secondary roads that threaded through this part of the Allagash territory. Yvette had meticulous directions for the owl count—the exact mileage between each stop, numbers on utility poles and mailboxes, descriptions of unusual trees or rocks, notes for other landmarks. Once upon a time, there had been sporting camps here, then family-friendly resorts, then a few glampsites, a fairly desperate and frankly insane attempt on the part of entrepreneurs from away that failed almost overnight. As the timber companies went under, most of their holdings went to the state, but with no demand for paper, building materials, or recreation, the land had reverted to wilderness. A new and different kind of wilderness: the nature of the boreal forest changed as conifers and evergreens adapted to the longer growing season or, in many cases, died.

Someone from away might not notice the difference. Looking out the window of the Subaru, Louis still saw the black encroaching walls to either side of the narrow road, the trees closer to the broken tarmac with each passing season. He rolled down the window—even with the heat off, the car was stifling. Cold air rushed in, balsam and the pissy scent of cat spruce, along with a more forbidding, granitic scent that he knew presaged snow.

“It feels like it could be a real storm,” he said, cradling the boom box in his lap.

“I know.” Yvette sounded triumphant. “That’s why I wanted to go tonight. Can you see the Gazetteer back there? Grab it, will you? I want to head up to the Araweag.”

“Really?” The Araweag was paper-mill land, or had been before it was clear-cut long ago. Now it was boggy, impenetrable thickets of speckled alder and blackberry crowding the wetland.

“I want to try something different. Miriam Rogers told me her son was hunting moose up there and saw a great horned owl. Hunting, in daylight.”

“The owl or Miriam’s son?”

“The owl. He watched it swoop down on a snowshoe hare. Poor bunny.”

“A snowshoe hare? In broad daylight?”

“That’s why I want to go.”

“If the owls are hunting in daytime, why would we hear them now?”

Yvette swatted him. “Just tell me how far it is.”

He opened the glove compartment so he could read by its light, flipped through the Gazetteer until he found the right page. “Twenty miles, maybe? Bad roads, though. Some may not be open anymore.”

“Let’s stay on 217. Make a few of the old stops first.”

Louis nodded. He closed the glove compartment and tossed the Gazetteer onto the floor behind his seat, swigged a mouthful of tepid coffee from the thermos, and closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Yvette said. “It was your friend, right?”

Louis didn’t open his eyes. Yvette had mild dementia that manifested mostly as forgetfulness. “Thanks.”

“After Buddy died,” she went on cheerfully, “someone told me I should watch for signs. Lori, she’s the massage therapist used to live at Stone Farm. She told me if I wanted a sign from Buddy, I should close my eyes and count to three. When I opened them, the first three things I saw, that would be the sign.”

“Did you ever see anything?”

“Just the dogs.”

Eyes shut, Louis thought of Eric, the last time they’d met. Walking along the Battenkill, the river where as boys they’d fished for brownies and brookies: once one of the world’s great trout streams, now nothing but a stony track that resembled an ancient Roman road winding through the Vermont woods. When he opened his eyes, he saw only his own reflection in the black glass of the Subaru’s passenger window.

When they used to do the owl count, Yvette would put a big cardboard sign that read OWL MONITORING PROGRAM on the dashboard. In those days, more vehicles were on the road. Not many, especially in the middle of the night, but there’d been a few times when people slowed or even stopped. Always men, they often seemed to have been drinking, another reason Louis liked to accompany Yvette. Once a state trooper had approached them—someone had noticed the parked Subaru and phoned dispatch. The policeman had been bemused, even more so when Yvette played him some of the owl calls.

“Well, just be careful you don’t run out of gas,” he’d finally said. “Cold out here.”

It had been years since they’d seen another car or pickup at night, but Louis felt the familiar frisson as they pulled over beside their first landmark, a Bangor Hydro power pole that hadn’t been live since 2013. A small piece of metal stamped 141A was nailed to the pole, but Louis had long since learned to identify it by the surrounding fields: once farmland, now overgrown with highbush blueberry and sumac.

In daylight, you could spot the centuries-old clapboard farmhouse in the distance. When he and Yvette had first done the count, lights shone from one or two of its windows and dogs barked, alerting the household to interlopers in the road, but no one had ever come out to investigate. Louis heard the old man who’d lived there wandered off one night a few summers ago. His body was never found. Now Louis could barely make out the house, ghostly white against the black trees.

Yvette asked, “Did you check the volume?”

Louis reached again for the boom box. He switched it to the radio, reflexively turning the dial. Nothing but static until he hit the Christian music station out of Houlton, one of the few remaining stations in operation and the only one with a signal strong enough to be heard up here. Louis adjusted the volume, grimacing, and quickly switched the player back to CD mode.

“Did you bring extra batteries?”

Louis shook his head. “I told you, no.”

“Oh,” said Yvette. She turned the car off and stared at the steering column with vague interest, as though she’d never seen one before. “I didn’t hear you.”

“That’s okay.” Louis often wondered if her forgetfulness might be an evolutionary advantage. If you couldn’t recall the world as it had once been, you couldn’t miss it.

Though the evolutionary benefits diminished once you factored in things like forgetting to eat or misplacing the car keys while you were out in the middle of the night in subzero weather. He slid the key from the ignition and pocketed it.

Yvette smiled. “I didn’t forget the key.”

Louis smiled back. “Neither did I.” He turned on the dashboard light, fumbled a pen from his parka pocket as he balanced the clip-board on his knees, turning from the first data sheet to the one beneath.

MOMP 2012 MAINE OWL MONITORING PROGRAM

MAINE AUDUBON AND THE MAINE DEPARTMENT OF INLAND FISHERIES AND WILDLIFE

He filled in the date and time, ignored the other blank spaces—Observer, Route Code, Observer Email/Phone Number, Assistant’s Name—and began to fill in the information for Stop 1:

Time (military): 00:27, Temp: 28F, Cloud Cover: 40 percent

For Wind he circled the appropriate numerical Beaufort Wind Scale, guessing it was a 2 [4–6 mph, light breeze, wind felt on face, leaves rustle], even though there were no leaves to rustle. He glanced outside and saw spruce boughs rippling, changed the 2 to a 3 [gentle breeze, leaves and small twigs in motion]. He notated Noise and Precipitation in the same way, circling 0 for Precipitation [note that survey should not be conducted if precipitation is a 3 or above] and 1 for Noise [relatively quiet], even though when he cracked the window, it was pretty much silent outside.

For Snow Cover he circled C [complete]. For Frogs: Yes/No, No. He left Car Count and Plane Count blank. He couldn’t remember when he’d last seen or heard a plane. He filled in the Playback info from memory—Boom Box, High Volume, Memorex, Audible at 1/10 mile—and left the Comments section blank, for now.

“Ready?” asked Yvette.

“Almost.” He turned to the next sheet, scrawled in the date, his name and Yvette’s, the name of the township. He didn’t bother with the odometer reading, but looked outside once more before filling in the stop and habitat descriptions: Pole 141 A, Overgrown fields and abandoned house to right of road, woods to L. “Okay, let’s go.”

He set the clipboard on the floor, opened his door, and stepped outside. Yvette turned off the dashboard light, grabbed the boom box, and did the same. “Not that cold,” she said.

Louis gave a noncommittal nod. It didn’t feel that cold, but he knew how it worked, especially with snow in the forecast. No fear of frostbite, but the humidity would seep through your parka and gloves and cap: if you didn’t keep moving, within a short while your blood would seem to cool and thicken, your bones to feel as though they held ice instead of marrow.

And you weren’t supposed to move, not once the playback started. Yvette set the boom box onto the rust-pocked hood of the old car, pointing it toward the distant empty house across the fields. That overgrown swath would still be ideal habitat for owls and their prey—voles and white-footed mice, rabbits and snowshoe hare, smaller winter birds like chickadees that would be sleeping now but might be caught at dawn or dusk if they stirred.

He leaned against the car, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness, his ears to the silence. His breath clouded the air as he tipped his head back and saw a few stars pricking through the haze. Cloud cover only 30 percent, he thought, but that wouldn’t last. A few feet away, Yvette’s pose mirrored his own, but her eyes were closed. Not sleeping: listening intently. He squeezed his own eyes shut, his head still uptilted.

Everything sounded the same: white pine needles a susurrus like waves on the shore; the skreak of spruce branches rubbing together; a noise like knuckles cracking that might be a deer moving through the woods. He recalled what Yvette had said about watching for signs, held his breath, counted to three, and opened his eyes.

For a split second he thought he saw another pair of eyes gazing into his, then realized they were stars, momentarily dazzling in a gap of clouds that moved swiftly across the sky. The wind carried a faint scent of crushed bracken and balsam. Almost certainly a deer had left its bed, awakened by their presence. He looked over his shoulder and saw Yvette watching him, her hand on the boom box. She raised her eyebrows. He nodded; she nodded back, then pushed Play.

The owl-call sequence began with a low electronic beep, followed by the first track: two minutes of silence. During that time, Louis’s hearing grew more acute, the rustling of trees amplified so that he could distinguish between individual branches as they rubbed together, some high, others closer to the ground. After two minutes, the second track kicked in—the call of a short-eared owl; a series of brief, breathy hoots; repeated twice, then another two minutes of silence.

Louis held his breath, straining to hear a reply. Many years ago, he had seen a short-eared owl in daylight, skimming above a field, its yellow eyes bright as traffic lights, tiny tufted ears nowhere in evidence. He saw and heard nothing now. The next call was the long-eared owl’s: a single, rather toneless hoot, repeated several times, each after a few seconds’ interval, followed by the two-minute silence.

Only now it wasn’t so silent. Tiny things stirred nearby—small birds fluttering nervously in the lower branches of the spruce trees. Mice skittered across the dead leaves that had rucked up against the tree trunks to provide shelter from the snow. Squeaks and rustlings, a swift settling back into a new, more watchful silence.

The saw-whet owl was next. Its breathy piping cry grew gradually louder, paused, then repeated. Louis had seen one of these too, improbably perched upon his bulkhead one late-spring morning. It looked like a toy, small enough to fit into his cupped palm, with enormous orange eyes that, when it blinked, gave it the appearance of a sleepy child. Louis had longed to pick it up, it looked so utterly helpless and soft. When he went to check on it an hour later, it was gone. He hoped it hadn’t fallen prey to some larger owl or eagle. He cocked his head, hoping to hear a response in the silence that followed.

Again, he heard nothing but wind in the trees. Like him, the birds and mice were holding their breath. He glanced at Yvette and saw her staring raptly into the sky above the field, her gaze flicking back and forth. Was she watching something? He squinted but could make out only darkness seeded by a handful of stars.

Two tracks left. The barred owl came first, the owl they were most likely to hear, with its distinctive demand Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? followed by a six-minute silence—barred owls sometimes took longer to reply.

This was the most difficult part of each stop. Six minutes could be an agony, if you were cold and unable to move. The frigid air crept up from his frozen feet: he felt immobilized, his legs encased in ice as though he were trapped in one of those fairy tales where people turned into statues. He no longer felt his fingers in his gloves. He tensed his muscles, fighting the urge to shiver, when, fainter than the sound of his own breath, an answering call echoed from somewhere far off in the black woods that surrounded the overgrown fields.

Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?

Elation flooded him; he glanced at Yvette and saw her grinning like a madwoman. He strained to hear another call but none came. The long silence broke with the final track, the great horned owl’s loud, increasingly threatening Who? Who?? WHO???

Its cry died off into the sound of wind rattling the aster stalks. Louis tilted his head slightly, mentally counting down the remaining seconds, and stiffened.

Something was walking across the snow. Furtively: it paused before its feet broke through the frozen surface, a sound like a boot crunching shattered glass.

Heat flashed through Louis’s body, terror and adrenaline. He looked at Yvette and saw her eyes widening, not in fear but wonder. He turned to see what she gazed at, detected nothing at first but then caught a glimpse of a dark blur at the edge of the field, maybe twenty yards away. In an eyeblink it had disappeared into the trees.

An electronic beep signaled the end of the owl-call sequence. Louis grabbed the boom box. He and Yvette jumped backed into the car, slamming the doors closed behind them. Louis locked his, leaned over, and did the same to Yvette’s.

“Did you see that?” she asked, eyes so wide she looked like an owl herself.

“I don’t know.” He set the boom box at his feet—it felt cold as a block of ice—yanked off his gloves and blew on his fingers as Yvette turned the ignition. “What was it?”

“I don’t know.” Hands gripping the wheel, she craned her neck to peer past him, to where the black line of spruce and pine gave way to the long, white expanse broken by brambles, stands of dead aster, and milkweed. “It looked like a person.”

“It can’t have been a person,” Louis said, even though his thumping heart suggested that’s exactly what he believed. “A deer, probably.”

“It was upright.” Yvette stared outside for another minute before she sighed, turned on the headlights, and began to drive, very very slowly, continuing to look out the passenger side of the windshield. “Did you see it? Tall and kind of stooped. It might have been a bear.”

“Bears don’t walk upright. Not in winter, anyway. They’re hibernating.”

“But you saw it, right?”

He shrugged, unwilling to look at her. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “I saw something—I think I saw something. I definitely heard something. I thought it was a deer. That noise their hooves make when they break through the crust.”

“Deer don’t walk upright.”

“Then it was a person.”

Now he did meet Yvette’s gaze. They grimaced in unison.

“That’s not good,” she said. “They could freeze.”

“Do you think we should go back?”

“No.” They both laughed, and Yvette added, “Maybe we should go back? What if it’s someone who’s lost?”

“No one’s lost.” Louis removed his knit cap and pressed his hands against his ears to warm them. As heat flooded the car, and him, his fear abated. “It was probably a deer. I mean, it could have been an owl—I just saw it from the corner of my eye. You heard that barred owl, right?”

“Yes! ‘Who cooks for you?’” Yvette hooted, and laughed again. “Did you write it down?”

Louis shook his head. He retrieved the clipboard and pen, using his mobile as a flashlight as he scrawled Barred owl. He couldn’t recall the last time they’d heard an owl respond to the CD when they were out in the field like this—four or five years ago? Yet he heard plenty of owls when he was at home, barred owls and the occasional great horned owl, and he and Yvette had even sighted them a few times when they were driving along the owl-count route. Maybe there were simply fewer owls than there used to be, along with everything else. Fewer bats, fewer nightjars, fewer bugs, fewer bees.

Fewer people too, since the last few outbreaks, though it was hard to think of that as a bad thing. Friends of his in the warden service said that wildlife populations appeared to be rebounding, not just deer and moose but apex predators and omnivores. Black bears and coyotes, mountain lions and wolves, whose existence the state’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife had a decades-long policy of denying, despite numerous sightings. The last confirmed wolf in Maine had been shot dead in Ellsworth in the 1990s, but Louis knew people who’d seen them, reliable witnesses—hunters, trappers, loggers, fishermen. The wolves came down from Quebec. No one knew if there were enough in Maine for a breeding population. Funding for that sort of study had disappeared long ago.

Yvette longed to see a bear or wolf. Louis was content to think that they were out there at a safe distance from his home. Hearing a family of coyotes erupt into howls in the middle of the night, fifty feet from his driveway, could be hair-raising enough.

“What’s the next stop?” he asked.

“Deadman’s Curve.”

After about five miles, Yvette pulled the car over again, this time along a heavily wooded stretch. The road here hadn’t been plowed, but wind had scoured most of the snow from the broken blacktop. A decaying mobile home stood a dozen yards from the road, its roof and walls collapsed to expose clouds of soggy pink fiberglass insulation, shredded Tyvek, and splintered beams, like some immense piece of roadkill.

As Louis stepped out of the car, he recoiled from the odor of mildew and an overpowering reek of rodent urine, along with the stink of something dead, a rat or scavenging fox or coyote. He pulled his scarf up to cover his face as Yvette motioned him back into the car, and they pulled up farther along the road, out of sight of the trailer.

“Whew. That was bad.” He stepped outside cautiously, pressing his scarf against his nose so he could breathe in the reassuring scents of damp wool and woodsmoke. “It’s better here.”

Yvette nodded. She looked drifty, like maybe she couldn’t quite remember where they were, or why, but when she saw Louis watching her she smiled and set the boom box on the car’s hood. For a minute they stood without speaking. Louis lowered his scarf and breathed in tentatively, catching only the faintest whiff of mildew.

Not far from the road, on the same side as the ruined trailer, a stream ran through the woods. A small stream—with his long legs, he could have jumped across it without much effort—yet deep enough that it hadn’t frozen. No one had bothered to trim the trees here for ages—while most of the power poles remained standing, the power companies had long ago stopped maintaining them. As a result, the oaks and maples and birches had grown unchecked, their branches nearly meeting above the road to form a ragged net in which a few stars gleamed like trapped minnows. In the darkness, the little stream sounded startlingly loud, more like a torrent than a brook.

“Ready?”

He turned back to Yvette, nodding, and she pressed Play.

The owls’ mournful liturgy repeated itself as before, alternating between silence and melancholy summons, its only response a fretful twittering from above that Louis recognized as a red squirrel’s alarm. The cold seemed more penetrating here; because of the tangle of branches over the road, Louis thought, then realized that was ridiculous. There was no sun. It must be getting onto 2:00 a.m.

He cursed himself for not bringing along a thermos of hot coffee. He knew better than to ask Yvette to abort the trip: she might forget what day, or even year, it was, but the owl count was sacrosanct. As the great horned owl’s cry faded into the final, silent track, Louis didn’t bother to suppress a yawn. He rubbed his arms, noting that Yvette remained stock-still, her hood’s pointed tip silhouetted against the trees like a spearpoint. The rushing stream sounded so loud he wondered if they’d missed the beep signaling the end of the call sequence. But then he heard the soft beep. Immediately he turned to open the car door. As he did, an explosive sound echoed from the woods directly behind them. Louis shouted: he stared into the trees, then at Yvette where she stood and gazed open-mouthed at him. He heard splashing, a huffing noise that turned into a strangled grunt as something crashed through the underbrush. An overpowering fecal odor filled his nostrils, rot and shit but also sweat, a smell he’d never encountered that was somehow horribly recognizable.

“Get in!” he gasped at Yvette, but she’d already grabbed the boom box and was back in the car. Louis flung the door open and saw her fumbling for the keys—she’d forgotten again and left them in the ignition. He got inside and locked the door, shouted at Yvette to do the same. The Subaru’s engine rumbled and the car shot forward, fishtailing across the slick road then straightening as Yvette hunched over the steering wheel.

“That was a bear!” She sounded exultant.

Louis said nothing, tried to slow his breath enough to speak without his voice breaking. “The fuck it was,” he said at last. He pulled off his gloves, hands shaking, and turned to look through the rear window. The car’s brake lights cast a dull crimson glow across skeletal birch trees and a fallen evergreen bough that Yvette had somehow avoided. “It sounded huge.”

“Bears are huge. It could’ve been a moose. Or a beaver.”

Louis snorted, but she was right. The sound of a beaver slapping its tail on the water in warning could reverberate like a thunderclap. “There’s no pond back there, just that stream.”

“Maybe it runs into a pond nearby. Check the Gazetteer.”

Louis shook his head impatiently—he felt at once irritated and frightened—but he picked up the Gazetteer and found the corresponding map among its frayed pages. “Nope. No pond.”

Yvette slowed the car to a crawl, its studded tires grinding over the snow. “There should be a turn in the next few miles. For the Araweag—I think it’s on the left. Can you check for that?”

“You still want to go?”

“I thought we decided.”

“Yeah, but. That thing . . .”

“I know!” Her cheeks were flushed, excitement more than cold, he suspected. “See if you can find that turn.”

A glance at the open Gazetteer on his lap showed the township, a formless green space threaded by streams that connected myriad small ponds, lakes, and wetlands. Broken stitches indicated a seasonal road, which these days meant an impassable one. Before he could voice a perfectly reasonable excuse for not going there—they’d get stuck, run out of gas, and not be found until spring, besides which there was just as much likelihood of hearing owls right here on the old route as in the Araweag—Yvette brought up the single unreasonable one.

“Are you scared?”

He took a deep breath. “Not really. Just—that noise, it spooked me. And the smell? Did you smell it?”

“I did.” Yvette wrinkled her nose. “Phew! Like when my septic field overflows every year.”

Yvette’s septic field hadn’t flooded in decades—she’d switched to a composting toilet, like nearly everyone else, as the grid became unreiable. Louis knew it would be pointless to remind her of this. She’d laugh and say, Oh right, I forgot. Then forget it all over again, just as she’d done with the car keys. He cleared his window, the glass already steaming up, stared out at the shifting crosshatch of black and gray-white. Trees, rocks, snowdrifts, trees.

“It smelled worse than that,” he said. “Like . . .”

“It could have been a moose. It sounded big.”

Louis nodded, frowning. He picked up the thermos, took a swig of cold coffee, then offered it to Yvette, who shook her head. “Whatever it was, it smelled like it had rolled in something dead,” he said. “Like a dog does. And what was that noise? It sounded like an entire tree came down.”

“Like I said, moose.”

“A moose doesn’t knock down trees.”

“Well, it’s not the same thing we heard at the first stop, whatever it was.” Yvette tugged her hood from her face. “It’s four miles from there to that old trailer. Nothing goes that fast. Maybe an owl,” she added after a moment’s thought. “Horned owls, they’re fast.”

Yvette turned the wipers on. It had started to snow—tiny, dry flakes, the kind that normally blow off the windshield, but they weren’t driving fast enough for that. She hunched over the steering wheel, scanning the road. “I think there’s a sign—didn’t there used to be a sign?”

“I don’t remember.” Louis didn’t bother to keep the irritation from his tone. He peeled off his gloves and closed his eyes for a moment, imagining himself back at home in bed, warm and asleep. Then he remembered Eric was dead. He was old enough now that grief had become a near-constant presence, a prolonged dull ache rather than the piercing anguish he’d experienced when he was younger. The aftermath of his wife’s death was like a raging virus that left him sickened and weak for several years, a virus that could be reawakened by stress, or sunrise, or a scent. You don’t recover from grief, he’d learned, it can’t be cured; it only appears to go into remission, to flare up, not as intensely perhaps but retaining its nightmarish power, with the next death.

He had not even begun to mourn Eric. He thought again of that last time, just over a year ago, the two of them leaving the dried-up Battenkill to hike up a ski trail, a broad swath of young beeches and sugar maples that had sprung up when the ski mountain closed early in the century. Eric white-haired but hale, more so than Louis, who’d had to stop often to catch his breath, holding on to young birch trees that showered them with autumn leaves like a rain of new pennies. “They found a mastodon in the Mastigouche,” Eric had told him, and Louis laughed.

“That sounds like a song,” he said, and began to warble. “Mastodon, in the Mastigooooche . . .”

“No, really—there was a landslide, and they found its tusks in the rubble. Like in Siberia, where they keep mining mammoth ivory where the permafrost used to be.”

He started as Yvette nudged him, looked up to see her grinning at him. “I know,” she said. “It was the Agropelter!” She pronounced the word with a slight lilt and the accent on the final syllable, the way her Quebecois grandmother would have. Agre-pel-tay´.

Louis made a face. “Well, I hope not,” he said, and they laughed. Yvette’s great-grandfather had been a trucker who worked the Golden Road, the hundred-mile-long, mostly unpaved track that ran from the old paper mill in Millinocket to the Quebec border, and her great-great-grandfather had worked in Canadian logging camps. Yvette’s grandmother claimed he had hundreds of stories about the terrible things that could happen in the North Woods, but the only one Yvette recalled was about the Agropelter. Half human, half ape, the Agropelter sat in treetops and hurled rocks and branches at unsuspecting woodsmen, sometimes killing them.

“Sounds like a bad excuse for knocking someone off with an ax,” Louis had remarked the first time Yvette recounted the legend.

Now he checked the time: 2:17. “Getting late,” he said. “And it’s starting to snow. We’re supposed to call it off if it snows.”

“Who’s going to check? And it’s not snowing now,” she added. Which was true: the sifting flakes had stopped. “You came—why did you come if you didn’t want to?”

“I needed to be distracted.” That sounded cruel; she might not even remember his best friend had died. “Because of Eric.”

“Of course,” she said, her customary briskness softened. “I remember.” She grasped his hand and squeezed it. “I’m so sorry, Louis.”

“Thank you.”

“You know, when Buddy died, my friend Lori told me if I ever wanted a sign from him, I should just close my eyes. The first three things I saw when I opened them, those would be the sign.”

“Yes, you told me that.”

“Oh, sorry!” she said without embarrassment. “I keep forgetting.” He turned away, recalling how Sheila during her illness had joked that whatever he did after she died, he shouldn’t marry Yvette. “Not a chance,” he’d told her, and that had never changed. His eyes stung and he closed them, thinking this time of Sheila, not Eric; opened them and gazed at his bare hands, the red knuckles swollen and fingers twisted from Dupuytren’s contracture.

He leaned over to check the gas gauge. A quarter tank, enough to get home. He wondered when and where she’d been able to last fill the tank. Bangor, probably, which meant she’d used up a considerable amount of fuel driving home afterward. He looked in the back seat again, reached into the heap of dog hair-covered fabric, rummaged around till he found a zipper, and pulled at it. A sleeping bag emerged, trailing a chewed-up leash.

“There might still be some of those hand warmers,” said Yvette. “Poke around, see if you can find them.”

“That’s okay. I was looking for a weapon, actually. In case it tries to eat us.”

“Very funny. They only eat owls, my gran said. And woodpeckers.”

“Well, we’re safe then. The turn looks to be about eight miles, on the left. You remembered that fine.”

The car inched along, Yvette downshifting as they crept over knee-high frost heaves and avoiding potholes large enough to swallow a bicycle. Intermittent gusts of snow would cloud the air then just as swiftly disappear, the tiny flakes not big enough to constitute a squall. The real snow wouldn’t start until morning. If it looked like it was going to come down sooner, they’d simply turn around.

They drove in silence, interrupted only when one of them pointed out a former stop—the flat boulder overlooking a bog, the sweeping vista where they’d once heard two great horned owls—or when they spotted something. A fox crossing leisurely in front of them; a snowshoe hare sprinting off in alarm, its long hind feet kicking up feathers of snow; a pair of tufted ears like devil horns above glowing green eyes, barely visible in the underbrush.

“Bobcat!” said Louis.

“Lynx!” cried Yvette in triumph.

“Oh, come on, how could you tell?”

“It was bigger than a bobcat.”

“It was there for two seconds!”

Yvette pursed her lips in a smug smile. “I just know.”

Louis unzipped his parka as the car grew overheated, the doggie smell vying with the faint, scorched-sugar scent of antifreeze that seeped from the vents. “You have a radiator leak,” he said.

“I know. Bob Marsh said he’d fix it, come spring.”

Louis checked the odometer, trying to figure out how much far-ther it was to the turn. They’d been driving for at least twenty minutes, a long time to cover only eight miles, even in the middle of the night, even on these roads.

“Do you think we missed it?” he asked. “The sign could be gone. That old access road could be completely overgrown by now.”

Yvette’s brow creased. “I hope not. Let’s give it another few minutes.”

A few minutes became ten—Louis clocked the time. He couldn’t do anything else with his mobile; even back in the early part of the century, there hadn’t been service here.

“Look.”

Yvette inclined her head to the left, where a twisted metal pole jutted toward the road at a thirty-degree angle. Atop it dangled a small green sign so rusted Louis could barely read it. FR 2973, a fire road.

“Huh. I haven’t seen one of those for years.” Once ubiquitous, these numerical signs designated seasonal or little-used roads. The numbering system had disappeared when towns had to conform to Emergency 911 standards, meaning all roads needed an actual name.

Despite the warmth, Louis shivered. He peered into the darkness past the twisted pole. “Can we even get down there?”

“I’ll just turn in, we can park and walk a bit if the snow’s not too deep.”

Louis ran his hands across his knees but said nothing. His knees ached, his back. The Dupuytren’s contracture in his right hand made it hard to move his fingers in the chill. He’d dressed for cold, not for trudging through deep snow.

But the old fire road, while overgrown and snow covered, still showed signs of use. He saw snowmobile tracks veering across the broad path, along with those of another vehicle, a small Sno-Cat probably. Someone poaching firewood, now that the territory was basically no-man’s-land. A few inches of snow had fallen since anyone had last been here—judging by the crust, at least a week ago—but not enough to impede walking.

He zipped up his parka, watched as Yvette made the turn and drove several yards. He winced as the old Subaru jolted over a buried rock and bottomed out. “Maybe this is far enough?”

Yvette nodded and brought the car to an abrupt stop, forgetting to take it out of gear. Louis’s skull banged against the headrest. “Ow!”

“Sorry!” Yvette clapped her hands to her face. She began to laugh, then reached to touch Louis’s neck gently. “We don’t have to stay long. Miriam’s son saw a great horned owl here. He was hunting—moose, I think. I would love to see another one of those. The owl, I mean. Or the moose.”

“I would rather not see a moose at night,” said Louis, gingerly rubbing the back of his neck. “Not if it’s going to knock a tree on my head.”

“That wasn’t a moose. Bear,” said Yvette.

She pulled up her hood and stepped out of the car without the boom box. Louis considered leaving it inside—maybe she’d forget the reason they were here, and they could just head home. But then she turned and pointed at it. He tucked it under one arm and joined her, stumping through the snow and halting in front of the car.

Shreds of gray lichen littered the snow, and the dark scales of pine-cones resembling fingernail clippings, which fell where red squirrels had fed in the trees overhead. Balsam and pine resin scented the air, rather than pissy cat spruce and crushed bracken. Even though the road was only a few yards off, he felt as though with a few steps, he’d traversed a hundred years, backward or forward, to a moment when his presence was as inconsequential as a thread of reindeer moss.

He found the thought oddly comforting. Perhaps this was how Yvette felt all the time. He set the boom box on the top of the car, tugged his knit cap snugly over his ears, pulled up his hood, and stared at the sky.

Far above him, a gap in the clouds revealed stars so brilliant he imagined he heard them crackling in the frigid air. The night seemed absolutely still—he felt no wind on his cheeks, and the jagged black evergreens that scraped the horizon appeared not to move.

And yet he did hear something. A faint, nearly subliminal sound like static, a noise he could imagine accompanying the prickles that presaged the agonizing leg cramps that woke him some nights. He cocked his head, trying to figure out if he was imagining it and, if not, where it came from; glanced over to see Yvette looking at him, eyebrows raised. Within moments her expression altered, from perplexity to alarm to outright horror. He opened his mouth to ask What? Then he heard the same thing.

He thought it was the wind at first: a low rumbling that lasted mere seconds before it stopped. In the near silence he heard Yvette’s breathing and his own, a frantic rustling in a tree overhead. He exhaled shakily, caught his breath sharply when the sound recurred—louder this time, closer, rising then fading into a long echo that, after several moments, died away completely.

And, after another few moments, resumed. The cry rose, not the yodeling ululation of a coyote or wolf, both of which he knew: something deeper, more sustained and resonant. It died away before recurring a fourth time, much louder, so close that the hairs on his neck and arms and scalp rose, as from nearby lightning. Sensation flooded him, an emotion he had never experienced before: a horror so all-encompassing his stomach convulsed. His arms grew limp, his knees buckled, and he slumped against the car’s hood, gloved fingers sliding across the smooth metal as he tried to grab it.

The sound faded. Silence surrounded him, long enough that his gasps subsided and he drew a shuddering breath, wiping tears onto his sleeve. He struggled to stand upright, bracing himself against the car, and cried aloud when the sound came again, from not more than twenty feet away. Loud enough now that he could detect within the deafening bellow a grinding anguish, physical pain and also a deeper torment, as the cry exploded into a thunderous roar. His ears ached but he could clearly hear as it crashed through the trees, not blindly but with steady purpose, pausing between each step as though ensuring the ground would bear its weight. A shrill piping sounded in his ears, the saw-whet owl, he thought with desperate calm, before recognizing his own scream. The roar came again and with it a wave of heat.

He gagged as that smell of fecal rot overwhelmed him. A tree crashed down, pine needles and splinters of wood stabbed his cheek and his vision blurred as blood washed across one eye. Soft feathers brushed his face, or fur, he could no longer distinguish between what was his skin, his body inside his layers of clothing, his scalp or neck or toes. His feet disappeared, the ground beneath them. With a moan he slanted his gaze sideways, searching for Yvette in the maelstrom of snow and broken bark, hair, blood, bone, and feathers.

He saw only a smudge of red, the tip of her parka’s hood. He tried to breathe but found his mouth sealed shut by the wind; tasted blood, he’d bitten his tongue. He thought of Yvette, of Sheila in bed beside him, of Eric walking next to him as they traced the lost Battenkill.

He closed his eyes, counted to three. Who cooks for you? he thought, and opened them.