38.

NOW

I headed out on the snare line, bundled in thermals, jeans and my wool jacket. A dusting of new snow lay on the ground and my nostrils were pinched with cold. Diana had recovered from the miscarriage but her injury kept her from hunting. With fishing no longer an option, she had taken me into the woods, taught me how to set a snare and walked me through her line. I carried a burlap sack for what was dead and one of her hunting knives for what wasn’t, although the one time I’d found a live rabbit in a snare I’d laid the sack over its head to hold it in place while I unlooped the wire from its hind leg. Then I watched it hop off with a mixture of regret and relief. I hoped Diana never found out.

Dull sunlight filtered weakly through the broken clouds as I walked. The thermometer outside the cabin registered nine degrees. I oriented myself to the Witness Tree and hiked on. The bear spray was on my belt and the little compass was in my pocket and yet, slowly and almost without knowing it, I’d started not needing to rely on it. I found myself being able to read the land and the sky, to feel the slight shift in the air as weather approached and to tune my ears so I heard the quick movement of small game. I saw hares that had been brown in summer begin to turn white as winter approached, and birds flying low before storms. Once, I watched a hawk drop out of the sky to snag an unsuspecting squirrel and I began to understand how the slow and weak became prey for the strong. How survival depended on awareness and readiness. I started to see nature as a teacher but only if I slowed down enough to actually receive her lessons.

I pushed myself as the forest and animals did: gathering strength for winter, noticing details, sensing the change in relationships. I had to. Not only because it was the first week of December and freeze-up was underway but also because I could no longer deny the truth. Every night I lay in bed and willed the blood to come.

I’d done the same in high school when I realized with growing dread that my thickening waist wasn’t the result of too many pizza slices in the cafeteria but because my period hadn’t come. At the time, I’d been more afraid of what my mother would do than the fact that I might become a single mother or have to marry Matt, who’d just been suspended from school for arriving drunk to class. I imagined her making me confess in front of the whole congregation and sending me to some home for wayward girls, or making me wear a red A like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, which, unfortunately, had been part of our English reading list that year. One day, I got so desperate I jumped off a ten-foot-high stack of hay to the barn’s concrete floor in an attempt to start the bleeding. All I got for it was a pair of stinging feet. Finally, I told my father and he drove me to a clinic and silently signed the papers for the abortion. He looked at me differently after that but I didn’t think he ever told my mother. It was the thing between us, the snuffing out of something.

Now the consequences of being pregnant seemed even more dire. Only this time I pictured a tiny version of Xander nestled in my womb and knew I could no more end its existence than I could end Xander’s. My only option was to escape before I got too big, and then figure out how I would survive with two children.

I shoved the thoughts from my mind, finished checking my line (empty) and hurried south to scout the river. Would it be frozen enough to let me cross?

Instead, I found Rudy.

I was weaving through the trees above the river when I saw him. He was a small dark figure in the middle of a stretch of ice that ran from one side of the river to the other. He held his arms out like he was a tightrope walker, and he slid his feet as if he were skating. His trail led to the far bank and it appeared he was returning from wherever he’d been, although he was headed slightly upriver now. What the hell was he doing?

I started to call out and then stopped myself. Even though he seemed to have forgiven me for my threat and he leaned against me as I taught him his letters and their sounds, I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t tell Mark I’d been wandering far from the cabin. Yet I couldn’t leave him alone. What if he fell through the ice and there was no one there to save him? I hunkered down behind a split-trunked tree and watched.

Even from fifty feet away, I could see the determined look on Rudy’s face. His eyes squinted into the gray December light and his white-blond hair stuck up in matted chunks. Angela had tried to cut his hair last week but he’d skittered away like she was an executioner about to lop off his head. She called him a spoiled brat.

Again I wondered about the things he’d seen in his ten short years. From his watchful ways, I guessed that getting punched by that trapper had not been the worst that had happened to him.

Finally, he reached a tiny pocket of beach just below the spot where I crouched, and I let out a breath. He fished something out of his jacket and seemed to study it. Then he gathered a few twigs and made a small tepee on the sand. I started to sneak away but something held me. He located a clump of moss, stuffed it under the twigs and lit it with what was in his hand, a silver lighter.

Where had he gotten that?

He watched the flame for a moment, then pulled a small leather pouch from somewhere under his coat. He opened it and laid out a red stone, what looked like a black knight from a chess set and some kind of military medal on a red, white and blue ribbon. Next came a white square of paper that he carefully unfolded, revealing a crinkled photograph. He set a rock on it to hold it in place. His little fire jumped and spit.

He pulled his hunting knife from his belt and stabbed it into the sand.

Then Rudy began to dance.

He stomped his feet, threw his head back and yipped into the sky. A raven flew past, croaking out a complaint. Or maybe it was a warning.

Puffs of white rose from Rudy’s lips as he twirled and leaped and shouted a cry that sounded like “Poke the hay” or “OK hay.” It made no sense.

I watched him dance and pound his chest, and I thought how powerless a boy like him must have felt against a world that had been so cruel. I began to feel like a voyeur, so I turned and moved quickly back onto the trail through the woods. I could hear his faint cries as I left.

Two hundred feet farther, I spotted what looked like a thread of gray smoke rising from behind a distant ridgeline. I stopped and told myself that it was a hunter trying to warm himself against the cold and not an assassin. Mark and Diana would occasionally see signs of hunters around. And yet I felt a sudden chill. If it was Rick or his partner and I could see his smoke, wouldn’t he be able to see ours too? I watched for a few moments and decided Mark’s paranoia was rubbing off on me. What assassin would build a fire and give away his location? And since the smoke came from behind the ridge, wouldn’t our fire be hidden from view? In the end, I didn’t say anything to Mark. Besides, how could I have explained why I’d wandered so far from my trapline?

Diana looked up as I went into the cabin, her gaze falling to the empty burlap sack in my hand. She was at the stove, frying a couple of eggs. “You were gone a long time to come back with nothing,” she said.

“I got a little turned around, that’s all,” I said.

“Christ,” Diana said, and shook her head.

Mark was at the table, whittling. He set down his knife. “Turned around how?” Ever since his trip to town, he seemed even more jumpy.

“Just turned around,” I said.

Diana dumped the eggs onto a plate and carried it to the table. Fifteen minutes later, the cabin door opened and Rudy came in.

“And where have you been?” Mark asked.

“Nowhere,” Rudy said.

I thought of his strange dance.

Mark looked at Rudy’s pants legs, which were wet and spackled with mud. “What did I tell you about wandering off?”

“I didn’t go off.” Rudy stared at the floor.

“Look at me, Rudy,” Mark ordered.

Slowly, Rudy raised his head.

“What if the bad guy comes? What if you’re out there and he finds you and hurts you? What if he makes you lead him to us and then hurts all of us? Haven’t I told you that we’re safe only if we stay together? Haven’t I said that our world is the only one we need?”

“I guess,” Rudy muttered.

I thought again of the smoke I’d seen behind the ridge.

“Stop mumbling,” Mark said.

“Let him be,” I said.

Mark looked directly at me. “We all need to watch out for one another and stick close, OK? No more wandering off our property. No more getting lost. We need to be more disciplined, more careful in our ways.”

For a worrisome moment, I wondered if Mark had followed me or somehow found out where I’d gone. “I’ll try,” I said.

Angela uncurled herself from the floor where she’d been playing Candy Land with Xander.

“Who wants tea?” she asked.