It’s cold and dark, and I’m limping along the pathway through the woods, using the rifle as a walking stick. My right foot’s useless, just a throbbing mess of flesh and bone. Everything else hurts too . . . every cell in my body. And I’m so tired . . . just so incredibly tired . . .

There’s a flashlight in my left hand (I must have taken it off the rifle), and in its beam I can see the lightness of the falling snow, and I can see the white-topped branches of great black trees, and up ahead of me I can see an endless climb of rough wooden steps leading up the steep-sided slope to the narrow dirt track at the top . . . and then another pathway appears beside me, running parallel to this one, and on that pathway there’s a wolf . . . a big bad wolf . . . and the red-hooded figure of a little girl carrying a basket . . . and as I watch them walking along their pathway through the woods, I hear a voice from a thousand years away

shake it . . .

like this

and all at once the ground tilts beneath my feet and a blizzard suddenly erupts out of nowhere, a great white whirlwind of giant snowflakes swirling and tumbling all around me . . .

And then I’m back in my room with Ellamay, and I’m staring at the snow globe on my shelf, and she’s saying, What is it, Elliot?

“Nothing,” I tell her, looking away from the snow globe.

What did you see?

“What do you mean?”

You know what I mean. What did you see just now in the snow globe?

“Nothing . . .”

She knows I’m lying. She always knows.

Just tell me, she says quietly. What did you see?

“It was snowing . . . like someone had shaken it up. That’s what made me look at it. And I saw something . . . or I thought I did.”

In the snow?

“In the whole thing.”

What was it, Elliot? What did you see?

“This,” I tell her now. “I saw this.”

The bedraggled figure limping along the pathway, the falling snow, the white-topped branches of great black trees, the endless climb of rough wooden steps leading up to a narrow dirt track at the top of the slope . . .

I saw it all in a timeless moment.

And I’m seeing it all again now. But this time, I’m not seeing it in my snow globe, the one I keep on the shelf in my bedroom, I’m seeing it in Auntie Shirley’s snow globe, the one she keeps on the windowsill in her living room, and at the same time I’m seeing it from both inside the globe and inside my head . . .

I’m there, limping along the path through the falling snow toward the wooden steps . . .

And I’m here.

I don’t seem to know why I’m heading toward the steps, or where they go, or what I have to do when I get to the top . . . but for now that doesn’t seem to matter. All that matters, and all I know for sure, is that I have to climb them.