Drop City

27

It was Halloween, October thirty-first, Pan's favorite day of the year, and what did he have to show for it? Nothing-no black cats, no skeletons, not even a jack-o'-lantern. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, black dark, and the river, the big roiling silver playground chock-full of fish and game he'd cavorted on all summer, was locked up tight in a tomb of ice. Freeze-up, that's what they called it, and Pan had shuffled off down the frozen highway of Woodchopper Creek in the declining light of day to see that the last open channel had sealed up overnight. It was twenty below zero. There was a wind. He'd stood there shivering on the rock-hard bank and listening to the silence-it was mind-blowing, all that noise of buckling ice and angry water, all that _life,__ smoothed out to nothing, not a whimper, not so much as a pop or burble-and then he'd hiked back up the creek to the cabin and stooped outside the door to fill his arms with firewood.

Nobody blinked. He came in through the dogtrot, slammed the outer door to, then squeezed through the heavy cabin door like a contortionist and slammed that behind him, his nose dripping, fingers numb, the sawed-off lengths of pine tucked under his arm like a stack of unreadable books. A garment of cold-thinned air came with him, and the _smell__ of the cold, almost a chemical smell, and what was it going to be like when the temperature dropped another twenty degrees? Another forty? He crossed the room, poked the coals and laid on the wood, and nobody said _Hey, man, what's it like out there?__ or _Did it lock up?__ or _We thought maybe you were frozen to a stump or something.__ They said, “Raise and call.” They said, “Two pairs.” They said, “Three jacks, pair of nines.”

Joe was cramped in at the table with Sky Dog and Dale, shuffling cards. They'd been playing poker for the past twelve hours at least-since they got back from the Three Pup on the snow machines, anyway-and they showed no sign of letting up. They kept a joint circulating. They were drinking beer out of the quart bottle and they threw back reds and Dexamils according to need, and he'd sat in himself for a while and made sure to look after his own pharmaceutical well-being, but he'd got to the end of that and what he wanted now was some action, some fun, some _Halloween,__ for shitsake.

Joe had the generator going because money meant nothing to him and he could fly in gasoline anytime he wanted, and so the lights were on, and that was a pure and beneficial thing in one way-at least you could _read__ to fight back the boredom that was already closing in like a smotherer's hand-but it was a curse too. It was curse and a royal pain in the ass to the degree that Pan, pacifist and flower child though he might have been, was considering triple homicide and maybe suicide into the bargain, because electricity meant music and for Joe Bosky music meant show tunes and country-“Oklahoma,”

“The Sound of Music,” Kitty Wells, Roy Acuff, Flatt and Scruggs, Eddy Arnold, Gene Autry. _Gene Autry,__ for Christ's sake. Ronnie couldn't let himself think about it, and he stuffed his ears with toilet paper to try to blot it out, but the corny booming voices and twanging strings and country yodeling seeped through nonetheless, polluted his consciousness till he actually found himself _humming__ the shit. _The hills are alive__-if he heard the hills are alive one more time he wouldn't be responsible for his actions, he wouldn't.

Of course, the irony, sad and piss-poor as it was, was that the hills were dead and so was everything else. Joe kept talking about trapping, about the excitement of running a line and seeing what was there for you _gifted up from nature,__ but he never did anything but talk. He was through with trapping, that was the reality. He was making his money flying booze in to the Eskimos in the dry villages along the Kobuk River, selling cases of Fleischmann's gin and Three Feathers whiskey and Everclear for ten times what he paid for them in Fairbanks. Ronnie had gone with him, twice, just to see what it was like, and it was the end of the world, that was what it was. Windowless shacks, chained-up dogs, dirt streets and garbage blowing in the wind, no roads in and no roads out-Boynton was midtown Manhattan in comparison. He'd made a buck or two himself, selling the odd lid of pot out of the stash he'd taken with him from Drop City-and he'd tried to _give__ the shit away to Norm and Marco and Verbie and he didn't know who else and still everybody treated him like a leper, and that wasn't right, even though when he looked at it in the light of day he could see where he'd fucked up, fucked up big time, and he re-gretted that, he did. But the Eskimos-little half-sized scaled-down comical cats with hair like walking grease who wouldn't look you in the eye if you set their shirts on fire-the Eskimos wanted it, oh yes indeed.

“Wolves,” Joe was saying over the thin toilet-paper-muted buzz of the stereo, “that's where the money's at. For a pilot.”

Ronnie had been reading one of the nineteen paperbacks in the cabin-all by Louis L'Amour and all dull as silt-and he rested the book facedown on his chest and took a sip from the silver flask he'd won from some cat at the Three Pup two weeks ago, eight ball, and he couldn't miss, and looked to the table.

Dale Murray was wearing his sheepskin coat and a fur hat he'd bought off the head of some Indian woman at the Nougat for the price of three Brandy Alexanders-that was all she would drink, Brandy Alexanders, though the cream for them came from a can of Borden's evaporated milk and the brandy was grain alcohol filtered through a leftover tea bag. He and Sky Dog had about had their fill of the snowy north and for the past week or so they'd been trying to talk Joe into flying them to Fairbanks, because, as Dale kept saying over and over until it was about to stick to the walls, _California is where it's happening. Fuck this shit. I mean, fuck it.__ And Joe kept saying, _Tomorrow, man. When it clears.__ Now Dale glanced up from his hand and said, “What do you mean, wolves?”

Sky Dog, his eyes drawn down to blood-flecked slits, tugged at the collar of the once-white wool sweater one of the Drop City chicks had knitted for him in happier days. “You mean those big friendly dogs out there howling in the hills every night, morning and afternoon?”

“I mean bounty money, that's what I mean. You pick them out against the snow, they've got nowhere to hide. It's like swatting flies.”

“I thought you were a trapper, man? What happened to trapping?”

Joe gave a shrug. It must have been about forty degrees in the cabin, but he was stripped down to a thermal T-shirt and the tattoos that twisted round his forearms like battle scars-or maybe destination scars would be more accurate (_Got this one in the Philippines, this one in Saigon, and this one, this one I got in a place so bad you don't want to even know the name of it__). “You have any _idea__ the kind of work it takes to run a trapline? It's nuts. Crazy. You have to be some kind of caveman like Cecil B. Hardon to want to do that, some kind of terminal loser with his head about fifty feet up his ass. I just said fuck it and left my traps out there last winter, bones in them now, I guess, and they can just rust away to shit for all I care. No, I got smart. Took to the air. I mean, what's the sense of investing in your personal aircraft if you're not going to use it, right? Sixty-three wolves, in every shade of color from pure black to pure white, that's what I took out of the country last winter, and every one of them run right into the ground-at thirty-five bucks, per, for the bounty, that is, plus what the pelts'll bring. Who needs to pan for gold when it's out there running on four paws?”

Sky Dog snapped his head back as if he'd been slapped. “That isn't right, man, that is just not right, I don't care. If you shoot all the wolves, you've got no predators, and if you've got no predators the whole ecology is out of whack. I mean the moose and the caribou and whatnot, the rabbits, they'll eat up the forest till there's nothing left. I'm out, by the way.” He folded his hand and shoved it into the middle of the table.

“Hah. That's what you say now-that's what you say when you get back to your hippie reservation in Malibu where all you have to worry about is does she have to wear that many clothes or not, but if you had to live up here you'd change your tune pretty quick.” Joe leaned back in the chair and the chair creaked at the joints. He took up the quart of beer and then set it down again, leaned forward and poured himself a shot from the bottle of vodka he kept on the floor where it would chill, because if it was forty degrees at seat level it was probably about ten below down on the floor. “Wolves are nothing but trash. They'll tear the anus out of a moose and lap up its guts while it's still standing there, they'll kill anything in sight, whether they're hungry or not-just for the pure pleasure of it. No,” he said, pausing to throw back the vodka, “I'd kill the last pregnant wolf right here on the cabin floor in front of the governor and his cabinet if I had the chance, and you know what, the governor'd probably give me a medal.”

“Who is the governor, anyway?” Dale Murray wondered aloud. Sky Dog scratched at his collar, then reached across the table for the bottle, helped himself to a shot. One minute, one of a million-a billion-ticked by.

“Fuck if I know,” Joe said.

Pan, from the bed by the stove, the book spread across his chest: “Hey, people, I hate to interrupt, but do you know what day today is? It's Halloween.”

All three of them just stared. The stove heaved and sucked air. It was as dry in that cabin as it must have been out in the middle of the Atacama Desert. Finally, Joe Bosky leaned over to spit on the floor. “So what do you want me to do,” he said, “put on a wig and dress up like a hippie? Or maybe a woman-would that work?”

But Ronnie didn't reply-he was off someplace else, suddenly transported back to last Halloween, to Peterskill, on the banks of the housebroken Hudson, a place where there were stores and bars and clubs and head shops and where you could get any variety of dope you wanted, day or night, clothes, records, steaks, Chinese, Italian, Dunkin' Donuts, Kentucky Fried, the place where he'd wrecked his first car, the place where his parents lived. And his friends. His buddies. The people he'd grown up with. He felt so nostalgic suddenly, so lost and cored out, he had to pound his breastbone to keep from vomiting up the moose chile they'd been eating out of the pot the last three days. A ball of acid rose in his throat, burning like exile, and it brought the tears to his eyes. He and Star had really done it up that night. They were flaming, triumphant. Two majorly righteous parties, and then they went to a club with a live band, and she'd been dressed as a cat, in tights and a velvet shell that clung to her in all the right places, painted-on whiskers he'd licked off of her by the time the night was out, and she wasn't the only one-all the chicks were dressed up like sex kittens or foxes or vampires, showing off their cleavage and their legs and everything else. He wondered if anybody had ever done a study of that, some sociologist, because the chicks invariably dressed up as everybody's sexual fantasy, while the men, the cats, always went for the absurd. And what did that mean? The men could hang loose, get stoned, party, but the women-the females, the chicks-they wanted to be salivated over, they wanted _worship.__

Ronnie had gone as Pan, with a pair of leftover devil's horns painted forest brown, pipes he'd found under a pile of crap in the music room in their old high school and the hairy-hocked leggings his mother had made for him on the sewing machine, and she was handy that way, his mother. And it wasn't _that__ absurd, not at all. More cool, really. People had come up out of nowhere to compliment him, and if he hadn't exactly won the prize for best costume-some asshole in a Spiro Agnew mask got first prize, a real authentic three-foot-tall hookah the club owner, Alex, had brought back from Marrakech-he didn't care. That was the night he'd left Ronnie behind, the night he'd _become__ Pan for good. The memory of it pushed him up off the bed and he began shoving the felt soles down into his boots, doubling his socks, lacing the boots, layering on clothes.

“Where you going, man?” Sky Dog wanted to know. “Trick or treating?”

It was eight miles to Boynton, walkable now on the highway of the river, and four to Drop City. Two times four equals eight, that was what he was thinking, and out in the dark, in the cold, his breath going like a steam engine, Pan turned to his right when he hit the river, heading north and east, thinking of Star. They'd be celebrating at Drop City tonight, no doubt about it-Halloween, the feast of the freaks, was in the air. Norm would do it up. If anybody would, Norm would. He heard the cold rush and snap of his footsteps as he compacted the thin layer of snow over the ice, one foot in front of the other, four miles no more than a stroll in the park and he didn't feel cold at all, not in the least.

Sess Harder had once unraveled the mystery of the distances for him, in the days when he could show his face around Sess's cabin, that is-which he no longer could since he'd burned Pamela for the five bucks, but hey, _tant pis,__ as the French say. His boots crunched snow. The wind fell away and the moon was there. What he couldn't understand was why the river was called the Thirtymile-shouldn't it have been thirty miles from Boynton then and not less than half of that? Sess had been busy, always busy, mending the gangline for his dogteam, and Pan had hung over him with a neighborly beer in one hand and a smoke in the other while the mathematics played out in Sess's deep, unhurried tones. “The distance is measured from Dawson, in the Yukon Territory,” he told him. “Originally, what happened was people floated downriver from there, and so you've got your Fortymile River south and east of Eagle and your Seventymile just north of it, and what happened, I guess, is somebody didn't want to call a river the Hundredmile-too daunting a number-so they just called this one the Thirtymile, because it's thirty miles, give or take, down from the Seventymile. Does that make sense?”

No, it didn't. It hadn't. They should have named it the Clothesline or the Dinosaur or the Punctured Pineapple, or maybe they should rename it after Jimi Hendrix's mother-sure, and he'd have to get up a petition as soon as he got back to civilization. He went on that way, a string of increasingly ridiculous names running through his head, the silence and the vastness of the river and the hills spiked with shadow and the moon, the _moon,__ gone down deep in him-Halloween, how about that? — and he'd never felt so _connected__ in his life. He bore right again at the mouth of the Thirtymile, no more concerned than he would have been turning the corner from MacDougal onto Bleecker, and when he came to Sess's cabin, to the glow of it floating against the backdrop of the trees and the smell of the woodsmoke drifting on the air like a promise, he kept on walking.

By some miracle, Sess's dogs didn't sound the alarm. If he concentrated on distinguishing one shadow from another, he could make out the line of doghouses thrust back against the ankles of the trees, but there was no movement there, no faint rustle of steel-link chain or whisper of ruffled fur, no sound at all but for the rush of the wind in his ears. The dogs were asleep, curled up tail to nose, breathing easy in the fastness of the night. They dwelled here, they belonged, and so did he, so did Pan. He kept on walking, and maybe his toes were a bit numb-his boots weren't the best-but it was nothing he hadn't experienced before, back in New York. Colder, maybe, but not by much. He could remember five and ten below when he was a kid, ice forming in a grid of overlapping crystalline stars on the inside panes, his father kicking in the driver's side door of the Studebaker because it wouldn't start no matter how he goosed it and the sweet metallic smell of the ether he sprayed down the carburetor in the vain hope it would come to life. His father. The image of him held for just the fraction of a second, then slipped away, a fading reel in the projector of his mind. He was walking. He walked the immensity. Thought nothing. The moon-the harvest moon, the Halloween moon-lit the way.

Drop City came to him first as the scent of smoke infusing the night air, then as a cluster of lights so pale and inadequate he couldn't be sure he was seeing them, not until he mounted the bank and came up the rise to where the five cabins described a crescent above the river. Four of them were roofed and lit from within, sailing high on the sea of the night, but the fifth was just a collection of notched logs, waist-high at best, and he thought of Mendocino Bill and Alfredo and their big hyped-up plans, make way and look out, here comes the city on the hill, the metropolis, Chichén Itzá and Taj Mahal all rolled into one. Lift that plank, man, push that saw. Still, he had to admit they'd got farther than he'd expected, because those were stovepipes projecting out from under the roofs, and that was real, honest, actual smoke trailing away on the wind, and where there was smoke there was fire and where there was fire there was warmth. He was right there in the yard-Ronnie, Pan, come back to say hello on a night like no other-and he hesitated.

He hadn't been near the place since the end of August, and though he'd run into a couple of the brothers and sisters at the Three Pup and the Nougat and Setzler's store, he really didn't know how people felt about the whole thing, whether he'd be welcome or not, forgive and forget and let's move on. Especially Norm. Norm he did not want to see, or Alfredo either. He was standing there in the cold of the moon, half-decided to slink away back to Woodchopper, and fuck Drop City, if they didn't want him he didn't want them, when something in the atmosphere shifted and he heard laughter, conviviality, somebody's voice raised over somebody else's and then a cascade of hoots and catcalls washing over both of them. He held his breath. Concentrated. And then he heard the music. There was music coming from the meeting hall, the thin attenuated whine of steel strings and the repetitive thump of drums. He crossed the yard, put his head down, and pushed through the door.

It wasn't what he'd expected. People were gathered there, all right, eight, ten, eleven faces staring up at him from the gloom of candlelight, but nobody was dancing or even talking, and nobody was laughing now. It was Buffalo Springfield on the stereo, Neil Young's stretched-wire voice working through “I Am a Child” in a way that made it seem like a dirge, the whole close stuffed-up pot-reeking room gone sad with it till Ronnie wanted to take hold of somebody by the arm and say, _Who died?__ Star wasn't there, Marco wasn't there, Norm either. Or Merry. But Freak was there, and Freak at least had a greeting for him, whacking the stump of his tail and inserting a cold nose into the cup of Pan's ungloved hand, and didn't anybody recognize him, didn't anybody give a shit one way or the other? “Hey, man,” he said, as faces picked themselves out of the shadows, “what's happening?”

Mendocino Bill broke the spell. He rose up off a crude bench by the stove, mountainous in a cableknit sweater his mother or his ex — old lady must have sent him, lifting his feet with the exaggerated care of a deep-sea diver wending his way between the killer octopus and the giant man-eating clam. “Holy shit,” he said, “look who it is. Hey, people,” rotating his head to take in the loft and the thermal-socked feet aggregated there like some sort of fungal excrescence, “it's Pan.”

Murmurs now. Neil Young went on killing the song, killing everything, people rising like zombies out of the murk, Geoffrey, Weird George, Dunphy, Erika, Deuce, all of them squinting at him as if he were six miles away. Was it Pan, was it really Pan? But where-? We thought-? Holy shit! It's Pan. And there didn't seem to be any hard feelings now, soul shakes all around, and here, man, have a hit of this, and he did, he did, but where was everybody else? This was Halloween, wasn't it-or had he miscounted the days?

Angela was there, Maya, Creamola, Foster. “We're hip,” Bill was saying, and he backed up against the stove to warm the big palpitating lump of his backside, “it's just that nobody really, I mean, we just didn't get it together. Plus the pumpkins were like the size of grapefruits when that first frost hit-”

“Snow, you mean,” Creamola said.

“We carved a zucchini,” Angela put in, and there it was on the windowsill, a collapsed green loaf of a thing with a couple of holes poked in it and a pathetic flicker of candlelight emanating from somewhere in its pulpy depths. “And Reba had Che and Sunshine dressed up like devils-they made the rounds, trick or treating here, and then at Star's cabin and the one I'm sharing with like Erika and George and Geoffrey.”

He saw now that a few people-the chicks-had made up their eyes and spattered a little glitter on their cheeks and foreheads and Weird George had maybe freshened up his bones and garlic, but it was a far cry from any kind of celebration Pan could have conceived of. But what was happening with _him__? With Dale and Sky? Were they coming too?

“No,” he said, “they're playing cards,” and even as he said it he knew how lame it sounded. The fact was that Dale and Sky Dog were also personae non gratae here, ushered out by Marco and Alfredo after a couple of halcyon days of screwing, drinking and lying comatose in the sun, and they'd made it clear that Joe Bosky was unwelcome too-Pull Your Weight or Bail, PYWOB, that seemed to be the new motto of Drop City, and you could forget LATWIDNO. “But where's everybody else?” he asked, at the center of a wheel of faces.

Angela said: “Lydia's back.”

_Lydia.__ He felt his groin stir. “Where is she?”

“At Star and Merry's. They're the only ones that would take her in.”

And he learned this: Lydia, flush with cash and laden down with scotch, chocolate bonbons and cigarettes, had blown in a week ago on the back end of some wild hair's souped-up snow machine, replete with stories about the flesh trade in Fairbanks and the temperament of the Alaskan male, and she'd burned through Drop City like a wildfire. The party lasted two days-people just wanted distraction, anything, anybody, because you could only split so much wood, chow down so many bowls of mush and play Monopoly till you wore grooves in the board before you started wondering _Is this all there is?__ It wasn't even winter yet and already hard times had descended on Drop City. Factions were forming. People were terminally bored, suicidal. They had no snow machine, no way of getting out, unless they wanted to walk the twelve miles to Boynton in subzero temperatures, and Boynton itself was locked in. And what about the wild hair and his snow machine? Rain had slept with him-prostituted herself, fucked him up, down and sideways-and he'd taken her out with him in a trailing blast of exhaust and a flapping curtain of snow. She was probably back in San Francisco by now.

Pan just stared at them. The joint came round and he took it. There was beer-Tom Krishna's homebrew, and it wasn't half bad. “Hey,” he said, sipping from the jar, “Tom's improving. He gets out of here he ought to go directly to Budweiser, what do you think?” Nobody laughed. People fell back into the shadows. He settled in and just _felt__ things for a while, and when he got comfortable behind it he pushed himself up and changed the record, a little rock and roll to shake things up, _Excuse me while I kiss the sky.__ But Bill, the big overblown Freedom bus — riding sack of suet and hair, Mr. Downer, said they had to conserve the battery and switched the thing off, and then he was back out in the cold, thinking Star, thinking Merry, thinking Lydia.

The thin crust of snow cracked under his boots like gunfire. It was colder now, the moon haunting the sky and the stars scattered in its wake like pustules on a broken-out face, and he had no illusions about Star, or Merry either-but Lydia, at least Lydia was mad for him, always had been, right from the first. She wasn't his type, of course, but it had been a long dry stretch living like a combination lumberjack/monk at Bosky's, humping wood, hunting, keeping the stove going when Joe was out cruising the empyrean in the Cessna. They'd brought two Indian chicks in one night and for a drunken day or two they'd gone through all the permutations, and that was all right, he wasn't complaining-or maybe he was. This wasn't what he'd signed on for, no way in the world, and if he had the bucks he'd be out of here in a heartbeat-for the winter, at least. Hawaii sounded nice. La Jolla. Ensenada.

Star's cabin was the one on the end. There was a dogtrot to break the wind, a pair of windows glowing, a curl of smoke from the stove. He stood there outside the door a minute, wondering if he should knock or what, and then he pushed on through the dark closet of the dogtrot and gave two raps at the cabin door. Nothing. He rapped again. Heard voices, the shuffle of feet. Then the door creaked open on its hinges and Marco was standing there in his bleached-out jeans and workshirt, looking noncommittal, looking stiff and unwelcoming, and there was no love lost between them, not since the pot incident, anyway, and the only thing he could think to say was “Trick or treat.”

Star's voice rose from the depths then. “Who is it? Ronnie? Is it _Ronnie__?” And then he heard a squeal from Merry, or maybe it was Lydia, and a long sustained jag of laughter from all three of them, as if the very fact of his existence was the funniest thing in the world. Marco gave him a nod and the three women, exuding the close, compacted odors of the sheet, the blanket, the nightie-the odors of the flesh-were there at the door in their sweatpants and sweatsocks, cooing their greetings. “Come on in,” Star insisted. “Jesus, don't just stand there-”

Inside, it was close as a prison cell. You could put your fingertips on one corrugated wall and practically reach across to the other. It was dark, hot, dry. The two built-in bunk beds dominated the place and you had to crouch to avoid the six hundred tons of crap hanging from hooks and lines strung across the room, wet socks and underwear, parkas, jeans, boots. Incense was burning. The stove glowed. There was a little table by the front window littered with cards and books and dirty plates and he fell into the chair Star pulled out for him and jerked off his gloves while the chicks hovered over him, three pairs of breasts at eye-level and their lit-up faces beaming down on him like alien probes searching for signs of life. “I can't believe it,” Merry kept saying, and Jiminy was there too, he saw now, looking daggers from one of the top bunks.

Pan shrugged. “Hey, it's Halloween,” he said by way of explanation. “I thought I'd stop by. See what's happening.”

Nobody could argue with that, and pretty soon the three women were crowded in at the table with him, sharing a plate of sugar cookies with orange sprinkles baked specially for Halloween, firing up a joint, passing round the warmed-over jar of homebrew while Marco and Jiminy conversed in a low murmur from the upper bunks. Lydia was wearing a fur coat that fell all the way to the floor-“Cross fox, given to me by an admirer; you like it?”-and she was looking good, beyond good, and hadn't she lost some weight, was that it? “You look dynamite,” he said, and he had an arm round her shoulder.

“Whoa, listen to Pan,” Merry giggled. “Been without it too long, huh? Living like a what, like a goat, out there with Joe Bosky? What about me? Am I looking dynamite?”

She was sitting knee to knee with Star and they were doing each other's faces up for what was going to have to pass for Halloween, slashes of black down the bridge of the nose and across the cheekbones and everything else a pale putrescent green. This wasn't the year for sexy costumes. Or the place. “Oh, yeah,” Ronnie heard himself say, “groovy. Super.”

“What about _me,__ Pan?” Star said. She pursed her lips and simpered and he couldn't read her eyes, not at all. He wondered if there was something there still, or if she was cutting him loose, goodbye, so long, no regrets, and so what if they were in Mr. Boscovich's class together and outdid Lewis and Clark and balled under the stars and shared every last nickel? So what?

Lydia said, “I'm surprised you never made it in to see me dance-what's the matter, baby, you lose interest? Or was I just not worth a four-hour drive?”

The three of them broke down then, poking, catcalling, gobbling, pounding the table with the shining heels of their hands. Ha-ha. Big laugh. And Ronnie-Pan-got sucked into it, trying to make excuses, and the excuses were real, they were true, because the car was, in fact, terminal and Joe flew only when he felt like it and he hadn't felt like it lately. What was he supposed to do-walk?

“So now I look dynamite, right? Now that I'm sitting two inches from you.” Lydia flashed her purple eyes at him. She was joking, fooling with him, her tone light and probing, but then her face clamped up on him, just like that. “And I suppose, Mr. _Pan,__ Mr. Big Lover with your big dick, you want me to just roll over and make it with you as if I'm starved for it or something? Is that it?”

Ronnie was at an impasse. He was stoned, he was tired, he wanted to get laid, but Socrates would have had a hard time with this one-yes was the honest answer, but yes closed the door, and no was just another kind of groveling, and he didn't care how hard up he was, he wasn't going to grovel, especially not for Lydia. She wasn't even his type.

Out of the suspension came Marco's voice: “You took both of the rifles and the handgun too. They don't belong to you, brother, and we want them back.”

“Oh, come on, Marco,” Star said, her voice gone tight in her throat, “not now.”

“You get your moose yet-you and who, Bosky, Dale and Bruce? They still living with you?”

“Who? You mean Sky Dog?”

“Yeah, _Bruce.__ That's his name, you know, just like you're Ronnie and I'm Marco and Jiminy's-what's your name, anyway?”

Jiminy's voice, a whisper, a croak: “Paul Atkins.”

“Right, Paul. Did you get your moose?”

Another tough question. Yes and you're damned; no and you're an incompetent and you give the guns back anyway. “Yes,” he heard himself say. “A bull. Prime. Joe says he must have weighed eleven hundred pounds. We spotted him from the air-he was right out there in the open, this big blotch moving across the snow. I mean, we've got meat, plenty of it. I mean, if you want some-”

But what Marco said, predictably, was: “We want the guns.”

“Okay,” he said, “I hear you.” He squinted into the gloom of the upper bunk and picked up the focused glare of Marco's eyes. There was no way he was giving up the handgun-and it was just pure luck he wasn't wearing it now-or the thirty-ought-six either. The thirty-thirty, maybe. Maybe that. “Tomorrow. I swear.”

Then it was Star going on about the garden and how they'd got practically nothing out of it-they started too late, and they'd learned a lesson there-but the pot came out okay, no buds to speak of but they'd dried out the leaves and got something out of it that wasn't half bad. It got you there, anyway. And then there was a silence and Star, in her brightest voice, was saying, “Come on, Jiminy, Merry, Marco, let's go trick or treat over at Norm's and leave these two to have a little privacy for a while, what do think? Huh?”

No sooner had the outer door slammed than Lydia got up to lay a couple of sticks on the fire, though compared to Bosky's the cabin seemed as airtight as a Volkswagen and it must have been eighty-five already. She left the door of the stove open so they could watch the flames, and he appreciated the gesture, but he was sweating through his clothes and his throat was so dry he could have died for a glass of iced tea or a root beer-or a root beer float, A&W, just walk up to the window and give them your order on a muggy hot upstate New York day that scorched the skin off the back of your neck, the cicadas buzzing in the trees and the waxed cup perspiring in your hand. How about that for a fantasy? It was funny. Here he was in Alaska, in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, snow on the ground and the temperature hovering at twenty below, and all he could think about was lemonade thick with ice in a tall cool glass, or a vodka and bitter lemon, gin and tonic, anything cold, the colder the better.

Lydia took the lantern down from its hook and blew out the flame, a thin wisp of greenish smoke rising from the aperture and an evidentiary whiff of kerosene hanging on the air. She left the candles burning. He watched her move round the room, weaving through the clutter till she found her purse hanging from a nail beside Star's navy blue High Sierra backpack, the one she'd kept in the trunk of the Studebaker all the way across country, and how about that, Pan was thinking, Star's backpack. Lydia dug another stick of incense out of her purse and came to the table to light it off the candle guttering at Ronnie's elbow. She set the incense in its holder-cloves, that was what it was, cloves and maybe peppermint-and then produced a joint from the pocket of the fox coat. She gave him a wide-lipped smile, lit it and handed it to him. Then she dropped the coat to the floor, pulled her sweater and brassiere up over her head in a single fluid motion and shook out her hair. “You want me to dance for you?” she said. “Seeing as how you missed me up onstage at the Wildcat?”

“Yeah,” he said, “that would be nice.”

She began a slow bump and grind, spinning an invisible hula hoop round her midsection while the big hips rotated and rotated again, and then she stepped out of her jeans and dropped them to the floor too. “What do you think, Pan, Pan the satyr, you want me now?”

She watched him from the lower bunk as he fought off his clothes, so many layers, the two shirts, the sweater, the long johns-he felt like a six-year-old undressing for his mother after a day in the snow, but Lydia wasn't his mother, uh-uh, no way in hell, and that was a good thing too, because there was nothing going to stop him now. The boots. He tore at the laces, kicked at the heels. “Come on, Ronnie,” she murmured, spread out for him there, waiting, “you don't want me to get bored here, do you?”

He came for her as if he'd been shot out of a bow, and there was the usual sucking and licking and wrestling for position on the narrow slat of the bed, all good and well, all part of the agenda, love, Free Love, but she seemed to be wearing her panties still and he was pushing into her and tugging at them all at the same time, and what was this, some kind of tease? “No,” she whispered, pulling away from him, “no, we can't.”

“What do you mean _we can't__? What are you talking about?” He was right there, right on top of her, his hands making the circuit of her. “You didn't take your pill? Is that it? Because I don't care, I'll be careful-”

The purple eyes, the tease of a voice. “No,” she said, “that's not it.”

“Jesus,” he said, and he might have been praying-he _was__ praying. “So what, then?”

“Didn't anybody tell you? Because they've been treating me like the dregs around here, Reba especially, the bitch-she's the one that got found out. By Alfredo, I mean.”

“What? What is it?”

She shrugged and the bed quailed beneath her. “Crabs,” she said.

“Crabs?”

“I don't know where I got them, I really don't. And I don't think it was Arnold.”

“Arnold? Who's Arnold?”

“You don't know him,” she said. “He like owns this sporting goods store? He drove me back here. On his Ski-Doo. All the way out from Fairbanks, with a three-hour pit stop at the Nougat. He was sweet. He really was.”

Pan felt himself shrinking.

“Nobody's got any of that ointment,” she said. “That's the problem. It's not like there's a drugstore around the corner, know what I mean?”

“So big deal,” he said. “It's not like VD or anything”-and it was all in the mind, wasn't it, because he came back strong now, ready to burst with it-“I mean, we could still do it, couldn't we?”

She went right to sleep afterward, down and out for the count, and by the time he pulled out of her and rubbed himself as best he could with a dry bar of soap and a towel he found hanging by the door, she was snoring. Head back, breasts flattened across her chest, all that _hair__-she snatched in the air and blew it out again, hitting all the high notes as if she were playing a trumpet voluntary without the trumpet. That was all right. He forgave her that. Lydia, his treat _and__ his trick. He pulled on his long johns, but then peeled them down again and took a good long look at himself and ran the towel over his loins one more time, no problem, nothing there as far as he could see, and then he dressed in a hurry because there were four long cold miles to traverse before he could start snoring himself. He shrugged into his parka, hot, sweating, and he was about to push out into the night, relishing the idea of the cold, when Star's backpack caught his eye.

For a long time now-since he'd left Drop City, anyway-he'd been thinking about getting out, bailing, just turning his back on the whole thing and getting reacquainted with a little _civilization__ for a change, and he'd written his parents three times begging for money, a one-way ticket, traveler's checks, anything, but he might as well have been dead for all they cared. So Star's backpack. There it was, hanging from the nail next to Lydia's purse. And he knew something about that backpack that Star wasn't aware of, and she should have been, because how could she ever have expected him to travel with her through all those nights on the road, in tents and motels and diners and fast-food outlets, at gas stations-Where'd you say the ladies' rest room was? — without his knowing the contents of that backpack as well as he knew his own. And it wasn't like he was stealing, not exactly, because that three hundred dollars wrapped up in a sock in the bottom of the innermost pouch was three hundred dollars she'd kept back from him, and how many times had he bought breakfast, cold drinks, cigarettes, how many times had he sprung for the motel or the campground fee? Momentarily, he felt bad about it-this was Star, after all, Star whom he loved and had always loved, at least for the past year, and these three bills were her fail-safe, her ticket out, and now she was going to be hung out to dry. But she'd hung _him__ out to dry, hadn't she? She'd gone for Marco. Big mistake. And she'd set this little thing up with Lydia tonight, right in front of everybody, and if that wasn't a kiss-off, then what was?

He found the door, found the night. The smoke rose against the moon, the lights in the windows of Drop City North cut their indentations out of the shadows. There was no one out in the yard, no sound but for the crunch of his boots against the plaintively yielding snow. Pan reached in under his parka to adjust the crotch of his pants-but not to itch, not yet-and then he started off across the frozen plain of the river.

28

The air was crisp, burned immaculate with the cold, and it did him good to be out in it, breathing deep and moving purposefully across the landscape as if he belonged here, as vital as the wolf, the hare, the moose, and it was good too to escape the numbing togetherness of Drop City for a few hours at least. Most of the others were content to sit around with a deck of cards, a sketchpad, a guitar, the hours falling away like so much sloughed skin, and what's the hurry, man, be cool, but Marco was a different animal altogether. He couldn't relax. He felt bored, stifled. He needed to get out, explore the country, open up his senses, _learn__ something. The washed-out faces of Drop City looked up at him in surprise, the wind in the trees, the fire stoked, Rice Carolina simmering in the pot, even the dog too lazy to lift his head from the floor. You really going _out__ there? In this?

Six people were writing novels, or maybe it was seven, depending on whether the thin unspooled script crowding the pages of Alfredo's notebooks turned out to be fiction or a tract on the joys of communal living-Alfredo wasn't sure yet, but there was going to be plenty of time to work it out one way or the other once the curtain fell on the daylight, and that was coming soon, November twenty-first, according to Sess Harder. There was a lot of knitting going on. Scrabble, checkers, chess. And of course people found time to toboggan down the hill, organize skating parties on the river with the three pairs of skates in Drop City's possession, build snowfreaks with willow roots for hair and somebody's worn-out bandanna and maybe an iridescent green shirt or spangled vest thrown into the bargain. Fun and games. It was all fun and games.

The sky hung low. Through the morning the temperature had risen into the single digits, creeping up the ladder of the thermometer in a grudging, slow, hand-over-hand ascent. There might have been snow in the air, if he knew enough to feel it, to smell it in the way Sess Harder could, or Iron Steve or old Tim Yule, who sat outside on the porch of his frame house in Boynton no matter what the weather. Marco could feel the tug of Drop City loosening as he made his way downriver, and he did look back, two or three times, just to admire the way the buildings defied the vacancy of the land, to watch the conjoined swirl of the smoke from four separate stoves twist up into the sky and listen to the fading shouts of Che and Sunshine, their figures drawn down to nothing as they hammered across the yard in their homemade snowsuits and red rubber boots.

He'd given Ronnie a week, and a week was more than he had to spare. Joe Bosky and Pan the wood sprite might have gotten their meat, and Sess Harder certainly had his and probably everybody in Boynton had theirs too and half the weekend hunters from Fairbanks, Anchorage and points south, but Drop City had nothing. And that was a concern, a real concern, because pretty soon it would be too late, the moose gone stringy and tough from the rut, and despite the protests of the vegetarians, they were going to need meat to get them through till spring-either that or they'd be trapping mice under the floorboards and boiling up their shoes like Charlie Chaplin. It was frustrating too. At the end of October, just before Halloween, he and Star had been awakened by a sound that was like the rumble of fifty-five-gallon fuel drums rolling down the hill out of the trees, a deep thump and boom that resounded through the cabin and shook him out of bed and right on out the door in his stocking feet. Two moose-bulls-were going at each other on the gravel bar, great big quaking truckloads of meat suspended on the ridiculous poles of their delicate moose legs, no thought in the world but for each other and the cow just visible in the stripped yellow crown of willow behind them, and Marco standing there with empty hands like some Stone Age hunter's apprentice, and what was he going to do, throw rocks at them? Jump on their backs and cut their throats severally while the tribe looked on wringing their hands? Ronnie had taken the rifles as if they were his alone, and Ronnie was going to give them back. It wasn't a question of ownership or even of right and wrong. It was a matter of survival, just that.

There was no sign of life at Sess's place-smoke rising from the chimney, but nothing moving in the yard-and that was all right, because he didn't intend to stop in till he was on the way back, _with__ the rifles slung over his shoulder. Sess was his advisor, his mentor, the man who was going to instruct him in all the recondite ways of the country, and he'd already had to endure the humiliation of admitting to him that they had no rifle worth the name with which to go out and get their meat-Deuce had a.22 for potting rabbits and ground-hogs, and that was about it-and he was damned if he was going to appear weak in front of him again. So he walked on by the Harder cabin, and though the dogs raised a noise, no one came to the door and no face appeared at the window.

There wasn't much snow-just enough to whiten the ground-and Sess had told him not to expect Santa's Workshop or whatever the people down below tried to make Alaska out to be. This wasn't a postcard. It wasn't the Cascades or the Sierra Nevada. The country around here, in the interior, was about the driest in Alaska, and if they got twelve or fourteen inches of precipitation a year, that was about it. The thing was, the precipitation _stayed.__ There was no meltoff in winter, and in summer, the rains just pooled over the permafrost, which in turn created a vision of paradise for the mosquitoes-and the midges and no-see-ums and all the rest of the winged and fanged world. Marco kept on, studying the snow for sign, trying to read the country the way Sess would. It was warm now, up into the teens, at least, and he unzipped his parka and let the ends of his scarf dangle free. After a while he found himself whistling, a shrill, between-the-teeth rendition of “I Am a Child,” and where had that come from? He'd been fooling around with the guitar again lately-Geoffrey's guitar-and this just might be a tune to pick up on, he was thinking, nothing too complex, a sweet lilting melody floating over the chords, but then the vocal-the vocal might be a stretch. He'd just have to take it down a key or two, that's all.

His mood changed abruptly as he rounded the bend onto Woodchopper Creek. He wasn't whistling now, and he wasn't thinking about guitars either. He'd never been to Bosky's place and didn't know what to expect-beyond trouble, recalcitrance and a shitstorm of lies, excuses and backpedaling from Pan, that is. He pictured him-Pan, Ronnie-with the little lost drawn-up bow of his lips and the tumbling chin and the eyes that always managed to look hurt and put-upon but never stopped assessing you, as if he were rating his own performance moment to moment, Ronnie the thief, Ronnie the backstabber. He steeled himself. Gulped air till his lungs were on fire. And he wasn't walking anymore, but marching, marching like a soldier going into battle, right on up the creek, across the yard and onto the porch, and he was so wrought-up he didn't even notice that Joe Bosky's ski-equipped Cessna 180 with the stripped fuselage and the crudely stenciled _N__-number was nowhere to be seen.

He knocked, and that was ridiculous in itself, because nobody came calling out here, no Mormons or newspaper boys or Avon ladies or neighbors borrowing a cup of sugar. Nobody had ever knocked on this door. Nobody would ever knock on it again, not if the cabin stood a hundred years. A wind settled in the branches overhead, cooled the sweat of his face. “Ronnie!” he called. “Ronnie, you in there?” Nothing. Or was that the sound of movement, of voices? “Ronnie, it's me. It's Marco.”

He was about to push his way in-nobody home, and wouldn't that be a miracle-when the door swung back and Pan, in bare feet and thermals, was standing there gaping at him like a fish on the end of a hook. Pan had been asleep, that was it, a yellow crust beading his eyelashes, hair flattened to one side of his head, advantage Marco. “Oh, hey, man,” he mumbled. “Hey, good to see you.”

From inside, sleep-wearied, the voice of Sky Dog, of _Bruce:__ “Shut the fucking door, will you? What the fuck you doing, Pan?”

Ronnie slouched back into the room, talking over his shoulder. “You want coffee? I was just going to make coffee.”

Marco ducked under the lintel and entered the cabin, shutting the door behind him. It was dark, his pupils clenched round the glare of the snow and the reflective ice of the creek, and for a minute he couldn't see a thing. He could smell, though, and what he smelled was a curious mélange of overcooked meat, bodily stinks, unwashed clothes and soap-the soap and lye Joe Bosky used for tanning his wolf pelts, and there was that smell too, the smell of the skin and the dead stripped-off fur of animals. Ronnie was a ghost at the stove, then the door of the stove swung open and there was the sudden incandescence of the coals and the silhouette of a thin-wristed hand framed there laying fuel on the fire.

“No,” Marco said, “I don't want any coffee. I don't want anything from you except the guns you stole.”

“Hey, Ronnie, man-who is that? Is somebody here? Joe? Joe, is that you?”

“Fuck you, Sky!” Ronnie shouted suddenly, with real vehemence. “Go back to sleep, all right? Shit,” he cursed, slamming the coffeepot down in the direction of the stove, “there's no peace around here, not for a fucking minute!”

Marco stood just inside the door. He wasn't moving. If this was going to get nasty, then let it. He was ready. He'd been ready for a long time now, since that day in the ditch back in California, since _Bruce__ had trashed his things and Ronnie had laid his hands on Star. “The guns,” he repeated.

Ronnie came into focus now, round-shouldered, big-headed, the dirty white thermal underwear clinging to him like a mummy's wrap, the depth and clutter of the cabin stirring to life behind him in a storm of dust motes and dander and two beds materializing suddenly against the back wall, one of which contained a human form: Sky Dog, the mystery resolved. “What do you mean _steal__?” he said. “I didn't steal anything. Norm gave me those guns because I was the only one that wasn't too lame to use them, and you know it as well as I do, _man,__” and he snarled out the final locution as if it were a curse. “So screw you with your _steal.__” The pot rattled on the stove. The dust motes settled. And then, as if they'd been having a minor philological disagreement, a matter of semantics and not substance, all over now, open, shut and closed, he added, “You sure you don't want a cup of coffee?”

Marco saw the two rifles then, a simple scan of the room and there they were, suspended from nails driven into the wall above the unoccupied bed, but what he didn't see was Ronnie reaching into the pocket of the parka hanging from the clothesline over the stove. _Enough,__ he was thinking, angry, on fire with it, and he crossed the room in three strides and hooked down the top rifle, the.30–06 Springfield, and he was reaching for the Winchester when Sky Dog sat up in the bed opposite and muttered, “Hey, man, what do you think you're doing?” and Ronnie pulled Norm's uncle's long-nosed slab of a pistol from the inside pocket of the coat and said, “Put it down, man. Put it down and get the fuck out of here before you get hurt, and I'm telling you, don't push me, Marco, don't push me, man.”

But he was beyond all that, beyond threats, beyond Ronnie and Bruce and the minuscule and rapidly dwindling toehold they had in his life, and he strapped the Springfield over his shoulder as calmly as if he were getting dressed in the privacy of his own bedroom, then took down the Winchester and pulled that over his shoulder too. He gave Ronnie a long look, Ronnie at the stove in his underwear with the pistol he'd worn strapped to his thigh all summer extended now in the quaking grip of his light-shattering hand with its rings glinting and fingers curled. “Don't push me,” Ronnie repeated, and without knowing what he was doing, he let his other hand descend to the crotch of his thermals and he began to scratch himself, his fingers working in deep, digging hard, moving unconsciously to another imperative altogether.

And suddenly the whole thing was hilarious, a joke, as comical as any ten pratfalls, and could anyone have given a more inspired performance? Ronnie was holding a gun and Ronnie was scratching. Ronnie was in his underwear, with sleep in his eyes and his hair flattened to one side of his head, snarling _Don't push me,__ and Ronnie was scratching. Marco crossed the room, shifting his shoulders to accommodate the heft of the rifles, swung open the door on daylight and paused there a moment. “Take care, Pan,” he said, and it was all he could do to keep from laughing aloud. “And you too, Bruce,” he called, “goodbye, man. And thanks for everything.”

Outside, the light was weakening. The sky had compressed and the clouds lay curdled and pale over the tops of the trees. His breath hung frozen on the air and he moved off and left it behind, one puff after another. He'd gone half a mile before he thought to stop and check the chambers of the rifles, because what good were they if there was no ammunition? There were two rounds in the Springfield, one in the Winchester. He felt foolish, but he could hardly retrace his steps, knock on the door all over again and ask Ronnie to cough up the bullets, which he might very well have purchased on his own at the general store in Boynton and which were readily available to Marco or anybody else the next time they felt like making the twenty-four-mile roundtrip stroll into town and back. Two rifles, three bullets. The night he'd gone with Norm to visit the uncle in Seattle (and it was just as he'd envisioned it, déjà vu, the old man in the bed and the snowshoes on the wall, and though he didn't believe in karma or mysticism or any kind of predetermination at all, it was enough to chill him even now), the uncle had rattled on about using only two bullets a year, one for his moose and one for his bear. Well, all right. For the first time all fall, Marco had the means to lay in meat. And when he shouldered the rifles and came up out of his crouch, he listened to the breeze and studied the snow with the ears and eyes of a hunter.

At some point-he couldn't be sure later exactly when, whether it was half an hour up from Woodchopper or less-he saw moose sign along the south bank of the river, the neat parallel indentations of the hooves, the browsed willow, a dark scatter of pellets against the blank page of the snow, and he veered in off the ice to follow the trail. It led him inland, and there was more than one moose here-two, or possibly three, depending on how you read the tracks, and he was no expert, he'd be the first to admit it. Still, he'd hunted deer growing up in Connecticut, and a moose was just another kind of deer, six times as big, maybe, and dangerous, capable of turning on its adversary and goring him, battering him, crushing the life out of him, but for all that, a deer. He unslung the.30–06, with its two rounds, and eased through the unforgiving willow as stealthily as he could manage. There were their tracks, another pile of droppings, and up ahead, a V-shaped swath any fool could follow cut right through the center of the thicket. He went on, intent on the hunt, and hardly noticed when it began to snow.

If he'd thought about what he was doing, he might have been concerned. He was on unfamiliar ground, the light was leaching out of the sky and the snow had begun to quicken. Worse, he had no shelter, no food, not even a day pack with paper, matches, a ground cloth-he'd been out for a stroll, an hour-and-twenty-minute walk on the open ice to Woodchopper Creek in clear weather, and he hadn't felt the need to bring anything with him. He shouldn't have been hunting, not dressed the way he was and without even the most rudimentary equipment, but he had the guns, a real novelty, and he saw the tracks, and he just didn't think. In fact, as he worked his way deeper into the trees, he was thinking about Pan's itch, how funny it was, how telling, how pathetic.

Lydia had come back with crabs-lice, genital lice, hard little creeping things like ticks that were easy enough to get rid of if you went directly to the drugstore, slathered on the proper ointment and burned your underwear on the funeral pyre of intimate relations. But Drop City didn't have a drugstore, and it was a long cold walk to Boynton, and there was no guarantee you'd find what you needed there either. The crabs spread through Drop City like dye in water, and then the camps formed and the accusations flew, and the crabs-clinging, persistent, enamored of blood and secret places-became the markers in the war between Free Love and commitment. Star didn't have them, nor did Marco. But Jiminy had given them to Merry, and he wasn't saying where he'd contracted them, and Reba had infected Alfredo, fooling no one, because she'd been making it with Deuce and Deuce had-speculation now-jumped on Lydia, as had half the other _cats,__ because she was back and she was available and she was new all over again. And so Lydia was the pariah, though she hadn't known what she was doing, because it took a week or so for the crabs to mate and lay their eggs and emerge to bite and suck and excrete their waste until the skin erupted and everybody _itched.__

Marco thought it was funny, _La Ronde__ staged in the hinterlands. Long-standing resentments flared up. Hypocrites assailed hypocrites. People wouldn't speak to one another. They passed in the yard without looking up, dug into the communal pot for rice pilaf and meatless marinara and the person standing next to them might as well have been dead. As a result, the population of the three cabins and the meeting hall was in constant flux, Deuce at the foot of the bed one night, Angela, Erika or Geoffrey the next. Reba, as medical advisor, shrieked out over the clamor of one very contentious meeting and insisted that everybody, whether they were infected yet or not, had to shave their pudenda bald and soak their underwear in Clorox to kill the nearly invisible eggs of the things, and Mendocino Bill, himself itching, said people should forget coming to him for Dr. Scholl's because it had about as much effect as cornstarch. Norm was itching. Premstar was itching. “I know it's going to sting, people,” Norm boomed out over the tidal roar of the community in extremis, “but I say a little kerosene, maybe a shot glass full, rubbed in each night for a week.”

Crabs. Crab _lice.__ They were one form of life on this planet, evolved to fill a niche, as the evolutionists would say. And what was the ideal form of life, one that exists independently, preying on nothing, creating its own food source through photosynthesis? The plant, the tree. Yes, but given that life form, given the tree and the leaf, evolution presupposes the insect to feed on it and the fungus to break it down, and the bird to feed on the insect and the cat on the bird. And here he was, with a gun in his hand and the snow driving bristles in his face, doing his level best to prey on another and grander form of life. And why not? If the crabs could gnaw at his brothers' and sisters' groins, then why couldn't he-why couldn't they-gnaw at the leg of the moose?

It was nearly full dark now. The trees were shadows, the tracks growing faint. Marco knelt to study them, all his senses alive, listening, watching, not daring even to breathe, and then he lifted his head and there it was, a moose, or the head of a moose, projecting in a dense clot of shadow from behind the nearest spruce in a forest of them. It was canny, this moose, its nostrils flared as it tried to pick up his scent, the bulk of its body secreted behind the trees, in no hurry to commit itself. He waited a long breathless moment for it to step out into the open, gauging where the shoulder would appear so he could aim for it, or just behind it, and do the fatal damage. But the animal barely moved, nothing more than a twitch now and again to lend it animacy, and finally, afraid of missing his chance, he took aim, the blood boiling in his veins-Do not miss, do _not__-and squeezed the trigger. The night tore open in thunder and flame, and yet, incredibly, the moose stood rooted to the spot. It wasn't until he fired the second shot that it dropped in a dark swoon to the ground and he was coming after it, coming to retrieve it with hands that trembled and legs that had gone weak.

The snow sifted through the needles with an admonitory hiss. Marco stumbled forward, one shot left, the slug in the Winchester, praying that the thing was dead, that he wouldn't have to sacrifice it all over again, because this was enough for one day, more than enough. And then he was there, by the tree with its black skirts of tightly woven needles and the bark that smelled of pitch, of air freshener and Pine-Sol, and saw that there was no moose, wounded or otherwise, lying heaped in the snow. He heard a sudden sharp heartrending cry then, the cry of a human baby spitted by some fiend on the point of a bayonet, and looked down at his feet. There _was__ something there, a black weakly thrashing living form, a thing he'd shot while it clung to the bark of the tree eight feet from the ground, impersonating the head of a moose. And what was it? Weak and bristling, the life sucking out of the hole he'd put in it-a porcupine, that's what it was, the humped and hobbling old man of the woods, fit only to feed to the dogs.

For a long moment he stood there, watching the thing thrash its spiked head against the ground, back and forth, back and forth, a metronome keeping time with its agony and its unbelief-or was that its tail? All the while, the dark thumping kept time to the beat of his own unavailing blood. He felt foolish, felt lost and hopeless and incompetent, felt ashamed, felt guilty. And then, as the night deepened and the snow struck down at the unprotected flesh of his face, he hammered the dark form at his feet with the heel of his boot until it stopped moving, then hurried off to find the way he had come.

29

She'd always been a night person, or that was how she liked to think of herself. A night person haunted the clubs, slept late, sucked all the glamour out of the dwindling dark hours when the straight world was asleep and dreaming of mortgage payments. Nobody wanted to be a morning person, or at least nobody wanted to admit to it. Morning people grinned and mugged and threw cheer in your face at seven-thirty A.M. when you barely knew what your name was and your blouse with the Peter Pan collar was on inside out and the kids, the students-morning people all-were already filing into the room to let their oversubscribed hormones go to war with their metabolic disorders. Her mother was a morning person. Reba-Reba was a morning person.

Star was sitting at the table in the meeting hall preparing yet another community meal-dried salmon stew, with rice for consistency and tomatoes and peas out of the institutional-sized can for color-and she was smiling to herself as Merry chopped onions and Maya hammered at the stiff jerked slabs of fish with the butt of her knife. Night person. Morning person. The distinction didn't mean much up here, since it was night pretty much all the time now, the kind of night they gave you in the casinos in Las Vegas so you'd never stop handing over your money, the night of the POWs with the black bags pulled down over their heads, black night, endless night. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, according to the only timepiece in Drop City's possession, Alfredo's Timex with the two-inch-wide tooled-leather band that never left his wrist, and it was dark, had been dark for some time now. Somebody said it was snowing outside. Somebody else said it had been snowing for the past hour. The dog looked up briefly and laid his head back down again, as if it were too heavy a burden to bear.

People were scattered around the room in a funk of unwashed clothes and matted hair, down, dejected, disheveled, the energy level hovering around zero-they didn't even look as if they'd be able to lift the forks to their mouths come dinner, and Star had a brief fantasy of feeding them all by hand, then changing their diapers and putting them to bed one after the other. It was depressing. When they spoke, it was in a whisper, as if nobody really wanted to express their thoughts aloud, and the cramped space of the meeting hall buzzed with an insectoid rasp of timbreless voices sawing away at the fabric of the afternoon. Faces were vapid, eyes drained. It was a day for getting stoned, and Drop City had been diligent about it. Star was floating right along herself, drifting like the cottonwood fluff on the river, back when there was a river-and cottonwood. She got up to fuel the fire and get some oil sizzling in the bottom of the pot. Three steps from the table to the stove, but she saw the pale slashes of the snow against the window like interference on a black-and-white TV. Marco was out there somewhere, that was what she was thinking. He should have been back by now.

Merry was saying, “I'll never speak to Jiminy again, I swear. Not unless he tells me who it was, and I already know, I mean, I'd have to be blind not to-”

Maya, chopping: “Dunphy.”

“-I just want to hear it from him, like the truth, just once. Just once I'd like to hear the truth come out of his mouth.”

Both of them looked across the room to where Lydia, wrapped in her fur coat, sat against the wall leafing through one of the magazines she'd brought back as a communal offering-_Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone__-along with pounds and pounds of chocolate, French milled soap and Canadian whiskey. And crabs. Crabs too.

Star threw a handful of chopped garlic into the hot oil and everybody perked up visibly because there was no denying that scent, and then she went to Merry for the onions. People froze to death up here, that was what she was thinking-and what was that story she'd read in high school, the famous one where the guy, the cheechako, can't get a fire going and tries to kill the dog to warm his hands? The dog was too smart for him, that much she remembered. But he was a cheechako, that was the telling point, a greenhorn who didn't know the harshness of the country or the implacability of the night, a tenderfoot, a novice. Like Marco. There were animals out there in the woods, wolves, bears, that writhing dark buzzsaw of a thing that jerked across the ground as if it had been set on fire-the wolverine, the glutton, the intimidator-and if it could eviscerate a goat in ten seconds flat, then what could it do to a human being? People shot each other up here too, over guns, with guns, but then Ronnie would never- “Smells good.” It was Lydia, looking over her shoulder now. “What's it going to be tonight, the salmon surprise?”

Star smiled, pushed the hair away from her face with the back of her hand. “What else?” she said, stirring garlic and onions around the snapping of the oil. “It's the specialty of the house.”

She looked up then, past Lydia, to the door. She'd heard a noise, a thump at the frame as if someone had fallen dead on the doorstep-_Marco,__ she was thinking, _Marco__-and then suddenly the door flung open and slammed to again, and Jiminy was there in his Salvation Army greatcoat, stamping and blowing. He was wearing a knit hat that clung to his skull and came down tight over his ears and he'd wrapped his scarf round his head and face like a chador. Snow had crystallized in his eyebrows, it was caked atop his hat and batter-spread across the padded shoulders of the coat. “Jesus,” he muttered, unwrapping himself layer by layer, “it's cold enough out there to piss and lean on it.”

Star saw him exchange a glance with Merry-“Hi, Mer,” he said, but her eyes just bored right through him-and then it was his turn to say “Smells good” and he was crowding in at the stove, working up some friction between his palms and peering into the pot as if he were thinking about folding up his limbs and climbing into it.

“Snowing hard?” Star had inverted the Spiracha bottle over the pot with one hand while she shook white pepper out of the big rust-topped can with the other, spice for the hordes, and it could never be spicy enough.

“Snowing and blowing,” he said, and everybody in the room was listening. “I was like skating? Out on the river where we cleared that nice bumpless patch for a rink? But then the snow came up and pretty much ruined it.”

“You didn't see Marco, did you? Because he's been gone all day.”

“What, hunting?”

“No,” she said, taking up the long wooden spoon and giving the contents of the pot a vigorous stir. “He went down to Woodchopper to get the guns Pan appropriated for himself.”

“I'm sorry, but Pan's a major league jerk,” Bill put in. He was hunched over a chessboard with Harmony, his oversized feet dangling from the edge of the loft in a pair of candy-striped socks with turned-up toes. “Worse, he's just a scam artist, like the street people that came in and ruined the Haight for everybody. He's out for nobody but himself. Period.”

“He's into me for ten dollars,” Harmony said.

Tom Krishna was wrapped in a blanket atop one of the bunk beds set into the wall. He looked up from the book he'd been reading-the teachings of some guru whose name Star couldn't pronounce; all she remembered was that he'd lived on air and had achieved _moksha__ after dying of brain cancer in a Tibetan lamasery. “I gave him sixteen dollars that last time, for personal items, you know? And what'd I get? Nothing. Not even a taste of that grass he says he invested in for everybody.”

“What a laugh,” Bill said.

That went round a while-the subject of Pan, and if she'd been depressed before, now she felt bereaved, as if he'd crawled off somewhere and died, because nobody would defend him, not even Lydia-and then Jiminy turned his fleshless backside to the stove and asked Tom Krishna if the new batch of beer was ready yet and Tom said it was and the snow fell and the dog slept and she realized she'd never had an answer to her question. Maya relit the joint they'd been working on earlier and passed it to Merry, who passed it to Star. She took a hit and passed it on. That was what communal life was all about, passing things on. But what about Marco? What about the responsibility for him, for getting seriously worried here, for organizing a search party-were they all just going to pass that on too? “Alfredo,” she said suddenly, her voice too loud, “what time is it?”

Alfredo was up in the loft with Bill and Harmony, ready to take on the winner of the chess match. They were playing a tournament, twelve players, twelve matches a day, twelve days running. When that was over and the victor had been crowned, they'd play another one. “Three forty-five,” he called down in a broad, matter-of-fact voice that could have belonged to an announcer in a TV studio, to Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley. Three forty-five. The real world, the mechanical world, intrudes.

“Because, I don't know, Marco's been gone since noon or something-shouldn't we, I mean, isn't anybody going to go out and look for him?”

It must have been two or three hours later when they all sat down to dinner-or when dinner was served, that is, because Drop City no longer ate as one. There wasn't enough space, for one thing. When they dragged the table out from the wall and set places around it, only eight people could be seated comfortably, if you could call balancing on a wobbly two-foot-high round of black spruce comfortable. The rest just took a plate, heaped it up with rice or beans or pasta and hunkered down on the floor or the nearest bed or climbed the ladder to the loft, impressing on everybody just how cramped three hundred and sixty square feet of living space could be. The other limiting factor was the interpersonal feuds that were always flaring up out of nothing, but never more so than when everybody was confined to four cabins with no California sunshine to massage away the hard feelings-and people shuffled in and out of those cabins in a human shell game so bewildering even Star and Merry could barely keep track of who was on the outs with whom. Half the time they'd just come in, scoop something out of the pot and run for one of the cabins with it. And that prompted a new Drop City rule: everyone was responsible for his or her own plate. People scratched their initials into the bottom of the enameled plates and bowls, and some, like Weird George, had already reached their crockery limit and had to eat out of old peach and apricot cans.

Norm blew in for dinner, trailing Premstar, Reba and the kids, and he wasn't his usual self. He didn't stamp or roar or call out greetings to the flock, just bowed his head, ducked out of his parka and got in line at the stove. There was fresh whole-grain bread laid out on the top shelf within easy reach of the stove, and butter out of the one-pound can. That and the salmon-rice dish, heavily laced with soy, and Kool-Aid and Tang to wash it all down, along with three big half-gallon jugs of Tom Krishna's yeasty homebrew and two pans of fudge brownies. Humble fare, but there was plenty of it, and the vegetarians could be glad Marco didn't have a gun, because when he did there'd have to be two meals prepared each night, the one incorporating moose or whatever, the other without it.

It was still snowing. Star wasn't given to senseless worry or the paranoia that certain grades and varieties of grass can generate-or maybe she was-but by the time dinner was on the table she was a wreck. There was no sign of Marco. It was an hour and a half to Woodchopper Creek, ten minutes to settle his business, and an hour and a half back. Three hours and ten minutes, and he'd been gone for six, six at least. Earlier, while the salmon was thickening in the pan, she'd got Merry and Maya to go out into the storm with her and shout his name into the wind. They'd taken Freak with them in the hope he'd catch Marco's scent, and they'd gone as far downriver as Sess and Pamela's place, but Marco wasn't there and they hadn't seen him. Pamela said it was probably nothing, he'd stayed on at Woodchopper when the storm settled in or he'd thrown up a temporary shelter and got a fire going, and really, Sess had camped a hundred times in much worse, hadn't he? Sess had. He acknowledged that. But Pamela was only saying the expected things, to calm her, and Star, though she was three miles high and drifting like a cloud, didn't miss the look she exchanged with Sess. They all had a cup of tea, then the three of them went out and shouted Marco's name till their throats were raw and their lungs burning. When they got back, Star went to each of the cabins in succession, thinking he might have looped round them in the storm, but nobody had seen him, and when finally she returned to the meeting hall and the smell of the food and the shot of Everclear Bill gave her to calm her nerves, he wasn't there either.

If that wore her down, the worry that ate at her with every thump of her heart and made the storm a curse and the meal as bland as boiled cardboard so that she couldn't take more than two bites of it and had to sneak her plate to the dog, what came next was even worse. It was an hour after they'd eaten. The dishes were soaking in the big washtub on the stove. People were passing cigarettes, the eternal joint. Alfredo had tried to get a sing-along going, but nobody seemed to have the heart for it, and it wasn't anxiety over Marco that had them down, it was just boredom, the sameness of the food, the faces, the night. Nothing was happening. Nothing was going to happen. This was the life they'd chosen. Voluntarily.

Norm was sunk into one of the lower bunks with Premstar, their backs against the wall, feet splayed out on the floor. He was looking old. His skin was so pale it could have been the underbelly of a fish peeled off and sewed into place, and his hair, bucket-washed, hung limp and thin around his ears. There were hairs growing out of those ears, she saw now, out of his nostrils, climbing up out of the neck of his shirt. Never repaired, his glasses looked as if they'd been thrown at his face, dirty grayish lumps of Reba's sticking plaster holding the frames together in a tentative accord with the forces of gravity. He was sniffling, victimized by the cold oozing its way through the collective mass of his brothers and sisters, his eyes red-rimmed and terminal. And he was itching, itching like everybody else. Pasha Norm. Norm the guru. Norm, the guiding light of Drop City.

He pushed himself up with a grunt, and he was just like her father struggling up out of his chair after his team had gone down to defeat, shoulders slumped, eyes vacant, one hand going to the small of his back and whatever residual ache stabbed at him there, and then he crossed the room to the table and poured himself a cup of beer from the half-gallon jug. Why she was watching him, she didn't know. She'd been playing a distracted game of cards-pitch-with Merry, Maya and Lydia, and as her gaze drifted round the room she'd somehow settled on Norm, as if she knew what was coming, as if she'd had a premonition, not only about Marco and Ronnie and the long downward slide of the night, but of the fate of Drop City itself.

Norm tipped back his head, the hair spilling loose around his shoulders, and drank noisily from the cup. “That's beer,” he said, fighting back a belch. “That's the best thing about this place, our greatest achievement-Tom Krishna's beer. We ought to bottle it and sell it. 'Old Flatulence,' we'll call it. How does that sound?”

Nobody laughed. But he'd accomplished what he wanted: he had the attention of the room now, people looking up from books, games, conversations-he was working up to something, they could all sense it.

“You know,” he said, talking to the room now, “while we've got everybody gathered here, or mostly everybody, if you want to discount the people harboring grudges and ill will, and I guess that's probably about _half__ of us, people, half the Drop City Maniacs gone round the _bend,__ and how about that as testimony to the power of brother- and sisterhood?” Still nobody laughed. “While we've got everybody here I just want to lay something on you, I mean, on behalf of me and Premstar-” They all looked to Premstar, who sat still as an icon, her lips parted in an expectant pout, her eyelids gleaming naked because she was out of glue for her false lashes and down to the last few dwindling traces of her pastel blue eyeshadow. Premstar glared back. She was out of her league here, Star was thinking, a prima donna in a community of equals, and there was no excuse for her, none, zero. She could pout all night long for all anybody cared.

“Let me guess,” Bill said. “The Air Force is making an emergency drop of eighty-seven tubes of crab ointment right out on the river-”

“And six color TVs, with rabbit ears the size of the Empire State Building,” Weird George cried out, thrusting up his mug of beer as if to propose a toast. “And all the back issues of _Playboy__ in existence!”

There were a few sniggers, a nervous laugh or two. The stove sighed. Snow ticked at the windows. Merry looked up from her cards and held Star's eyes, as if to say, _What next?__

Norm had no problem playing to the gallery. He was like an actor-he _was__ an actor-and he swung round on the pivot of his heels and threw out his arms as if to embrace everybody leaning over the rough-hewn edge of the railingless loft, the cheap seats, everybody in the cheap seats. “I only wish,” he said.

Reba, who'd been sitting in the corner staring at nothing while Che and Sunshine picked sodden lumps of fish off their untouched plates and flung them at one another in a silent, dragged-down war of attrition, spoke up suddenly. “We need a Ski-Doo is what we need. So we can get into town and get the damned ointment, because this is ridiculous, and the mail, and, and-”

“And see some new faces for a change,” Bill finished the thought for her.

Weird George said he'd like to hoist a few at the Three Pup.

“Toothpaste,” Maya said. “Shampoo. An orange stick for my nails.”

Jiminy's opinion was that they were welcome to walk-“Walking is good for you, man, like the best exercise in the world”-but nobody rose to the bait. The idea was patently ridiculous. Sure, they could walk the twelve miles, and a few people had done it since the river had frozen up, but it was twelve miles _back,__ and there was no place to stay in Boynton because the bus had no heat in it and Sess Harder had refused them the use of his shack cum toolshed, even for just an overnight stay. Everybody was out here now-no more furloughs-and they were going to stay here till the river broke up in May. Count the months-two weeks more of November, then December, January, February, March and April. It was a lifetime. A prison sentence. And already they were chafing, all of them-what would it be like in three months? In four?

Everybody chased the issue around for a minute or two, any topic the subject of rancor and debate, and then there was a silence, a time-out while they each contemplated the future, both individual and communal, and then Bill coughed into his fist and looked up and asked Norm what he had on his mind.

Norm put on a mask. His face was neutral but for his eyes, his red-rimmed eyes, sharpening suddenly from the depths of the two holes he'd poked in it. “It's nothing really, no big deal, nothing to get _uptight__ about, people.” He paused, and though everybody was busy with something, they were all listening, all of them. “Well, it's Premstar,” he said. “Prem hasn't been feeling too well-”

Again, all eyes went to her. She was glaring out of the cave of herself, bristling with some kind of animus, sure, but she looked as healthy as anybody else. And pretty. Pretty as a beauty queen. Which in itself was unforgivable.

“And I've had some news about the ranch-which I've been waiting for the right moment to share with you, good news and bad news too. The good news is we've got my attorney in there fighting the county's right to foreclose on the property-I mean, we could sell it yet, clear the back taxes, and have the bread, I mean, the _wherewithal,__ to really do something here. I mean, new buildings, sauna, snow machines, something for everybody-we can really make this place work, people, make it livable, _comfortable,__ even. And self-sufficient, definitely self-sufficient. That's my goal, that's it right there-”

What's the bad news? Star wanted to say, and her heart was going-she didn't need bad news, not with Marco out there somewhere in the night, maybe lost, maybe hurt-but Bill beat her to it. “So what's the bad news?” he said.

No hedging now, no going back: Norm thrust his face forward, challenging the room. “I've got to split,” he said. “Me and Prem. But just for like the tiniest little running jump of a hiatus-that's what it is, a _hiatus__-because they want me in court down there, and-well, I fixed it up with Joe Bosky. He's going to fly us to the airport in Fairbanks. I mean, when the weather allows.” He looked into each face around the cabin, ticking them off one by one. “Plus Prem,” he said. “Prem's sick.”

It took a minute. They were in shock, that was what it was. They were staggered. Punch-drunk. No one could have guessed, not in their wildest-Star watched their faces go up in flames, their eyes turn to ash. They couldn't talk. Nobody could say a word. Norm had just held a glowing torch to the roof of the meeting hall, he'd napalmed the village and scattered the refugees. She felt herself lifting out of her seat as if she were in another dimension altogether, and wasn't that the kind of thing that happened to you when you died, when you had an out-of-body experience, hovering above the scene in pure sentience? She was high up, running with the clouds, and then she burst through them into the barren night of the stars and the planets and their cold, cold heat. And now there were angry voices, frightened voices, flaring out all around her as if they wanted to shoot her down. “But Marco,” she stammered, fighting to be heard, “you don't understand, you can't leave, nobody can-Marco's out there!”

She went out into the night, shouting for him, but the shouts died in her throat-he wasn't coming back, nobody was coming back, Marco was dead, Drop City was dead, and she might as well have been dead herself. The wind spat snow at her, rammed at her shoulders, thrust a dry tongue up under her collar and down the back of her pants. She hunched herself in the parka and made a circuit of the place, up to the goat pen, down to the river and back, the tracks filling behind her even as she lifted her feet, the clouds stilled, the hills immovable and silent, transfixed on the spearheads of the trees. The snow was nearly to her knees and drifting now, picking up structure and definition. There was no feeling in her toes. Her feet were like blocks, her fingertips numb. She was freezing. She was helpless. There was nothing she could do. She went round a second time, fighting it, screaming, “Marco! Marco!” She paused, listened, called out again. No one answered.

Then she was in her cabin, laying wood on the fire. She had the place to herself, at least for the moment, because everybody else was in the meeting hall, debating, shouting, glutting themselves on the bad vibes and negativity, and the people who hadn't been there for dinner were there now-she'd seen the hurrying dark forms huddled against the snow, panic time, oh yes indeed. She tried to steady herself. Tried to talk herself down from the ledge she'd stepped out on here. What she needed most of all was to be calm, to think things through in a slow, orderly fashion. Marco was lost. Norm was bailing. _Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.__ She saw herself a Drop City widow, sidling up to Geoffrey or Weird George, peeling potatoes, hauling frozen buckets of human waste out to the refuse heap, living day by day through the slow deterioration of everything she cared about, everything she'd built and fought for, and maybe she'd pile up stones in memory of Marco, the way the Indians did, and cry over the stones and her battered hands and the whole impossible naive idealistic hippie trip she'd been on ever since she left home. What a fool, she thought. What a fool she'd been.

She thought of the money then. The three pale stiff silvery green notes wrapped up in the sock in the inside flap of her backpack, her insurance policy, cab fare, bus fare, air fare, the means to get out. Ronnie had got out, Sky Dog and Dale Murray, Rain, Lester and Franklin-and Norm was on his way. Verbie was living in town with Iron Steve in a rental with electricity and running water. Lydia was only parked here, the most temporary of arrangements, everybody knew that. And so why should she suffer? Why should she wear herself down in the thankless role of _chick__ and scullery maid? She got up from the bed and went to her pack.

She dug through her summer tops, her cutoffs, sandals, a bundle of letters she'd meant to send, camping gear, books, suntan oil, three, four, five pairs of clean socks, her poncho, but when she reached into the inside pocket, deep down, at the bottom, there was nothing. It had to be a mistake. She upended the pack on the bed, went through every pouch, pocket and fold of clothing and laid everything out where she could see it, thinking she would hike the twelve miles to town all on her own, just follow the river like a highway, walk into the Three Pup and offer to pay one of the bush pilots to fly her out, Howard, maybe-he would do it, no problem. She'd offer fifty and keep the rest for a one-way ticket home-not to Florida, not to Hawaii, but home-and she saw herself sitting back in the reclining seat, eating a hot meal off the tray, prepackaged food, civilized food, and her mother standing there at the gate at Kennedy with Sam and the dog, and her father, if he could get off work. She started to cry then. She couldn't help herself.

For a long while she just sat there, staring down at the pattern of her things spread out over the bed. Then she went through everything again, sobbing deep in her chest, rubbing at her nose and eyes with the back of her sleeve. Then she got up and searched round the cabin, peering down the length of the shelves, fanning through the paperbacks, though she knew she hadn't moved that money-not unless she was losing her mind, not unless she'd been sleepwalking or dreaming herself into another dimension. She retraced her steps. Searched through the empty pack again and yet again and finally used her penknife to take the lining out of the pocket, but what she clenched in her hand was only nylon, navy blue nylon, manufactured in Taiwan.

The money hadn't vanished into thin air. It hadn't grown legs and run off. Someone had stolen it, that was the only conclusion, some thief, somebody who'd had the nerve, and the leisure, to go through her things behind her back-Merry, Maya, Jiminy, Marco. But no. She couldn't believe it of any of them, and besides, no one had known the money was there-it was her secret, her secret stash. She was desolated. This was the end of brother- and sisterhood, this was the way it played out. In betrayal. Selfishness. Meanness. In thievery. Where was the flow in that? Where was the breakthrough? It came to her that everybody must have had a secret stash, something they were holding out on for their own selfish little reasons, even Marco, even Merry, and so it was only logical that they would suspect each other and rifle-that was the word, wasn't it? — rifle each other's possessions.

Once more she went through everything, desperate now, flinging wrung-out socks and unfurled sweaters and spine-sprung paperbacks over her shoulder, and she was looking at the door and listening for footsteps as if she could hear them through the screen of the storm, a heartbeat away from _rifling__ Jiminy's things, Merry's, Marco's, when she thought of Ronnie. He'd been alone here, with Lydia, and if anyone knew her secrets Ronnie did, if anyone would have gone through her things, if anyone would even have thought of stealing from her, lying to her, cheating and two-timing and offering her up to teepee cats like a prostitute and playing the unwitting victim all the while, it was Ronnie. Ronnie had her money. Ronnie.

She looked up into the devastation of the room. It was like a pit, like a cage. Smoky, stinking, everything a jumble and nowhere to escape to. The joints of the stovepipe didn't fit right, the gusts ran right through the chinking in a hundred places, the door was like a wind tunnel no matter how many layers of rags and paper they stuffed into the gaps round the frame. It was hopeless, everything was hopeless, and she couldn't seem to stop crying. Time passed-minutes, hours, she didn't know. The wood of the stove burned to coals and then ash. She was shivering. Sitting there and shivering, with no will to feed the stove or even wrap herself in a blanket. And then the door rattled on its hinges and she looked up and Marco was there.

Marco. He was a sheet of white, white everywhere, layered with it, his mustache frozen over his lips, his lips white, the flesh of his cheekbones gone the color and texture of dripped wax. He didn't unwrap his scarf, didn't remove his hat or tug at the straps of the guns slung over his shoulder-he just moved into the room on stiff shuffling feet and caught her in the deadfall of his arms.

30

Pamela was sitting at the window of the darkened cabin, lighting one cigarette off another and staring out into the moonlit yard. This was her favorite form of recreation, once the cooking was done and the dishes washed and she'd worked the furs as long as she could stand the tedium of it and patched Sess's clothes and patched them again till his pants and shirts could have stood up and paraded around the room like walking quilts-once that was over, once the wood had been hauled in and the stove tended and tomorrow's bread set to rise in the pan, she sat and watched. The weather had been clear and cold for the past week, and the moon had become her sun, omnipresent, unimpeded, lighting up the snow of the hills like a stage set. She'd been out earlier (at five P.M. by the windup clock Sess had made his obsession; the ticking drove him to distraction, he claimed, and over and over again he wondered aloud how she could possibly care what time it was anyway), and she'd watched the pulse and stagger of the northern lights going green and yellow-green and shading to purple, to red, until she'd felt the cold and come back inside. Sitting here, at the window, was better than reading a novel or laying out a hand of solitaire or doing crosswords. It was her downtime, her contemplative time, and she stared into the landscape in the way other people might have stared into a picture or a television screen. A fox in winter coat came through the yard every day, twice a day. Owls sat the trees. Ravens stirred like black rags thrown down out of the night. Twice she'd felt some inexpressible shift in the current of things and looked up to see a train of wolves clipping through the crusted snow on the proscenium of the riverbank.

As for the clock, she insisted on it. Yes, she'd given herself over to her man, and yes, she trusted his judgment, valued it, and she looked to him for sustenance and protection, all of that. And she saw his point. To live here, in the bush, was to live in primitive time, timeless time, and to have clocks ticking away the artificial minutes of man-made hours defeated the purpose, undermined the whole ethos of the natural world. But you had to make concessions, that was the way she saw it, or they'd be living in a cave and rubbing sticks together-and what about the chainsaw, the auger, the fiberglass fishing rod, the outboard engine he was talking about buying come spring? They were necessary, he argued, tools that helped them live better, because he didn't have to tell her, of all people, how thin was the wire stringing their life together out here under the immitigable sky where disaster was in the offing every minute of every day.

All right. For him it was the chainsaw and the outboard motor, but for her it was the clock, the calendar, the thermometer. If it weren't for the clock she wouldn't know if it was six in the evening or six in the morning, and people might argue that it didn't make a lick of difference, because morning and evening were artificial constructs like the days of the week and the counting out of the years from the birth of Christ, as if that mattered, as if it were real, as if God existed and the Argument from Design was a fact. She didn't care. She liked numbers, liked figures, needed to know that it was six twenty-five on December eighteenth, nineteen hundred and seventy, Anno Domini, and that the thermometer had stood at thirty-two degrees below zero when she last looked-and she might just get up again and step out the door and see how far it had dropped in the interim. She might. And she might keep a diary too, just simple things, just facts-the day, the time, the temperature, what they were eating, what was in the sky, in the trees, on the ground. That was her business, her _thing,__ as Star would say, and who could deny her that? Not Sess. Certainly not Sess. So let him wake in the night to the ticking of the clock. It wouldn't kill him.

She was about to get up and do just that-check the temperature-when she saw an upright shadow isolate itself from the trees and move on up the bank toward the cabin with the slow disconnected movement of a figure in a dream. She held the nub of the cigarette to her lips, smoking it right down to the filter, and watched. The figure moved closer, huddled, kicking through the snow on limbs that separated and joined and separated again, and she felt her whole being leap up inside her: it was Star, coming to relieve her of the burden of contemplation. What was it-what would Star say? It was far out. It was party time.

She was at the door before Star could knock, afraid that she might see the darkened windows and think no one was home and turn back for the hippie camp. “Well, hello, hello,” she said, sweeping her into the room, “what a surprise, what a nice surprise, and Merry Christmas, have I wished you a Merry Christmas?”

Star accepted a cup of tea, the expensive Darjeeling blend Pamela kept in a sealed tin for visitors, and Pamela found herself rocketing around the room in a high state of excitement, stoking the fire, lighting lamps, setting out a plate of crackers and cheese, bread, butter, two-berry jam, and spoons and a knife-where was the knife? — all the while talking nonstop, talking as if she'd been the prisoner of a tribe of deaf-mutes on a desert shore. She talked so much, so steadily and without remit, that it must have taken a quarter of an hour to realize that Star wasn't right there with her. Star wasn't saying anything, or hardly anything-just answering yes or no to the flock of questions she was throwing at her, nodding or grunting or chiming in with an _Uh-huh__ or _I know what you mean__ in a kind of call and response. Finally Pamela got hold of herself. She bit her tongue. Forced herself to take a long sip of the tea that was already going cold on the table before her. “Right,” she said, “right,” as if she'd just solved an equation that had been baffling a whole team of mathematicians for weeks, “why don't you tell me about it?”

She lit another cigarette. Star joined her. They held the taste of tobacco on their tongues a moment, looking into each other's eyes, then exhaled simultaneously. “Is it Marco?” she asked in a long trailing sigh of recycled smoke. “Is that it? Are you worried about him?”

Star shrugged. She was tiny-petite, a size four-and she'd never looked more lost and childlike than she did now, the hair pulled back neatly from the central parting and tucked behind her ears as if a mother had fussed over it, her shoulders thin and slumped, her eyes gone lifeless with a child's renewable grief. Marco was out on the trapline with Sess-he'd wanted to learn by doing, he said, and Sess had taken him under his wing-and they were siwashing, camping out on the trail, in temperatures that would certainly drop to minus forty or lower overnight. Or they weren't siwashing exactly-Roy Sender had built two crude timber-and-sod cabins at strategic junctures along the forty-odd miles of the trapline, and though they had dirt floors and none of the amenities of a year-round cabin, barely even a window between them, they did have sheet-metal stoves that Sess always kept in good repair, with an armload of kindling and neat lengths of stovewood ready to hand. Plus, Sess had gotten the two extra dogs he'd wanted-Howard Walpole's dogs, actually, sour as vinegar but good pullers. (Howard didn't need work dogs anymore because he was trading up for speed so he could try his hand at racing, just for the kick of it, he said-and had she heard the rumors about the Iditarod starting up again, with real prize money? — but everyone knew he'd never get off the seat of his snow machine long enough to get the dogs in harness.) And so Sess would be able to cover ground a whole lot faster and more efficiently than he would have a year ago.

“Because if that's what worrying you, honey, you can just put your fears aside-Sess knows what he's doing. He's the most capable man in the country, just ask anybody.” She gave a little laugh, picturing him out there in the patched-up parka she'd trimmed with wolverine for him, best fur in the world because it wouldn't ice up with the tailings of your breath, standing tall on the back runners, his eyes squinted against the wind, the sinew pulling and muscle jumping in his arms. “That's why I picked him, you know that. And listen, thirty-five, forty below isn't critical, not really. At sixty I'd worry.” She laughed again. “But only just a little. Sess is smart. He could weather anything out there. But what about Marco-he come through that frostbite okay? When was that, anyway-about a month ago now?”

It was cold at the table. The wind always seemed to find the smallest cracks and slivers, as if exposing a cabin's flaws was its whole purpose and function. She thought of getting up to fine-tune the draught of the stove, maybe lay on more wood, but something kept her rooted in the chair, something just beginning to unravel like a ball of yarn, comfortable, newsy, the news of people and their complaints.

Star just shrugged, as if that were the only gesture she knew. “I guess,” she said. “But, yeah, he's okay. He's got these two white lines, they look like scars or something, over his cheekbones-but you've seen that, right? — and his toes are okay, like the two that turned black, his little toe and the one next to it on his right foot?” She stared off across the room, her brow wrinkled, thin white fingers tugging at the ends of her hair, summoning the picture. There was no sound but for the faint rattle and sigh of the stove sucking air.

“Reba said they were going to have to go and Norm said but wouldn't they just rot and fall off and Reba said you're thinking of toe_nails,__ this is toes we're talking about. But they recovered. Miraculously. They're not exactly beautiful, and he did lose both nails, but there's no infection and I was like mortified because he wanted me to cut them off of him with the hatchet, I mean, can you believe it? Me? With a hatchet?”

So they laughed over the horror of that and puffed at their cigarettes and Pamela fed some wood to the fire and they both went over and sat on the bed and curled their feet under them in sympathy. After a while Star said, “That's not why I'm depressed. I know he'll be cool with Sess-”

“Cold, honey, he'll be cold.”

Star gave her a weak smile. “It's Drop City,” she said. “It's like the whole thing's just falling apart-did you hear Weird George, Erika and Geoffrey just walked out with the clothes on their backs?”

She hadn't heard. She knew the nephew was gone, and the little pie-face with the false eyelashes, and a handful of them kept pestering Sess-they'd pay him anything, whatever he wanted-to mush them and their guitars and she didn't know what else on into Boynton. And he was willing, why not, cash was cash, but the trapline came first because once you set those traps you were obligated by every moral force there was in the universe to tend them, if only to curtail the mortal suffering of the living beings that gave you your sustenance, because you didn't waste, you never wasted-waste was worse than a sin; it was death.

“That's terrible,” she said, and she meant it. She'd got used to having neighbors, Star, Merry, Maya, Reba, people she could talk to, women, other women. Last winter she'd been in an apartment, in a city, working in an office full of people. There were movies, shops, bars, restaurants. Now there were furs, now there was Sess. She was happy-she was, she knew she was, happier than she'd ever been-but the ineradicable nights were already stacking up, the stir-crazy nights, the nights when Sess wasn't enough, when nobody could be enough. And there was something else too, something bigger than all of that, her news, her secret, and if she didn't have Star to tell it to she'd go mad with keeping it in.

Star's face floated there beside her in the soft light of the lamp, sweetly pretty, unblemished, no more a hippie face than her own. “People are eating by themselves now,” she said. “And the food, they're fighting over the food.”

“But I thought you said there was plenty, more than enough-didn't you tell me Norm laid in six months' worth of the basics? He spent hundreds of dollars you told me-”

“We're not running out. It's more like hoarding, I guess you would call it. People are raiding the pantry, just taking anything they want, almonds, raisins-all the dried fruit disappeared. You can forget the powdered milk too. And the chocolate.” She made a face, lifted her hands and let them drop. “The flour's all full of these little black specks-I thought it was pepper at first, that somebody'd maybe dropped the pepper shaker in there when they were battering fish-but actually they were mouse turds, millions of them. And Reba-she seems to think she's in charge since Norm split, and she's always calling these meetings, her and Alfredo, to quote 'address the food situation,' but nobody comes.”

“It's not even Christmas yet,” Pamela said. She didn't know why she said it-she didn't want to be negative-but these people, these _hippies,__ had to understand what they'd gotten themselves into here. It was like that fable her mother used to read to her and Pris when they were little, Aesop, she thought it was, about the ant and the grasshopper.

“I know,” Star whispered. “I know.”

Later, after they'd finished a second pot of tea and the moose steak sandwiches with sliced onions and horseradish sauce Pamela fixed for them, Star asked her if she'd mind if she spent the night-the whole trip, the whole _scene__ upriver was getting to be too much for her and she just couldn't face it, not tonight. Would that be all right? Would it be too much trouble? Of course not, Pamela told her, no trouble at all-she'd fix her up right here, in Sess's old bed, and could she believe he'd slept here alone, on this narrow little pallet, all last winter?

She gave her one of her flannel nightgowns and wrapped her up in Sess's parky-squirrel sleeping bag and her pick of the furs-they had a whole fur emporium to choose from, and what all those slinky high-heeled women in New York and Chicago wouldn't have given for even a peek in the door-and it was nice, it took her back. It was like being a child again, with Pris at her side and the tent arching over them and the comfort of their mother snoring lightly from the cot in the corner. Or having one of the neighborhood girls for a sleepover when you didn't sleep at all, not till dawn. It was past midnight when she turned out the lamp and went to her own bed in the add-on room, feeling relaxed and peaceful, and tired, gratefully tired, thinking of the neat symmetry of the arrangement-the girls were here, bedded down under one roof, and the men were out there, huddled side by side in the cold clenched fist of the night.

In the morning, they lingered over coffee, fresh-baked bread and powdered eggs in a scramble of ham, peppers and tomatoes, watching the light come up in a gradual displacement of shadow until it settled into the pale wash that served for dawn, dusk and high noon at this time of year. They listened to the radio together-_Tundra Topics__ on KFAR and _Trapline Chatter__ on KJNP, and learned that Olive Swisstack sent all her love to Tommy, in Barrow, and Ivor Johnson's ex-mother-in-law needed him to call her, urgently, and that Jim Drudge was radioing in from Fort Yukon to say that he was drawing breath like anybody else on the planet and very pleased about it too-and then they lit their first cigarettes of the day and played a very lax game of chess.

“You know, Star,” she said, after she'd pinned down the king and announced checkmate in a soft, matter-of-fact way, “there's something I wanted to tell you all last night, but, well-it never came up, I guess.”

Star glanced up from the board, where she'd been idly fingering the king's bishop that wouldn't be much use to her now. The half-empty cup stood at her elbow. A cigarette-was it Star's or her own? — smoldered in the ashtray.

This was good, this was very good, the glow of the light through the window, the gentle respiration of the stove, the silence. A calm descended on her. She might have been asleep still or stretched out on a towel at some resort in the tropics, nodding over the glossy novel propped up on her chest. “I'm pregnant,” she said. “Or I think I am. I haven't told Sess yet.”

She looked past Star to the window and beyond the window to the hills and then back again, right into her friend's face, into her eyes. “So I guess that means you're the first to know.”

31

What passed for light these days was just a fading gleam on the horizon, light in name only, a sorry pale tuned-down glow in the southern sky that was there to remind you of what you were missing. It was sunny in Miami Beach, dazzling in San Diego, and you couldn't put the light out in Patagonia or McMurdo Sound even if you wanted to-it was as if the whole globe had been tipped upside down and all you could shake out of it was a few shadows falling away into the grudging night of the universe. That was what Pan was thinking as the engine snarled out its dull, repetitive message-_all's well, all's well, all's well__-and the wingtips caught a glint from somewhere and the running lights pulsed out of sync till he was as tranced as he might have been in some dance club with the strobe going and the music so loud he couldn't have said what his own name was.

He was cold. Freezing to death, actually. Outside, on the ground, it was approaching forty below, and here they were up at six thousand feet where the air was thinner-and colder. Joe had the heater going full blast, but it barely registered against the wind howling in through the cracks in the doorframe and around the window, and why couldn't they make these things airtight? Why couldn't they insulate them or rig up a heater that actually made some kind of difference? He couldn't feel his toes. Under his shirt, the beads were like separate little pellets of ice. A cold clear fluid dripped from his nostrils and dampened the backs of his gloves. In desperation, he wrapped his arms round his shoulders, shivering so hard he thought his fillings were going to come loose.

Beside him, Joe was a rock. His shoulders filled the cockpit, the bulk of him made bulkier still with the puffed-up eiderdown lining of his parka. He kept a gloved finger on the yoke, stared off through the windscreen or gazed idly out one side or the other, no more concerned with the howling Arctic blast in his face than a polar bear curled up on an ice floe. He hadn't spoken-or shouted-a word for the past fifteen minutes, but then Pan didn't expect conversation, since you couldn't hear anything over the clamor of the engine anyway. So he suffered in silence, thinking only of the cabin now, of the gentle shush of the skis on the snowbound ice-of touching down and scrambling out of this torture box-and of the fire he was going to crank up in the stove. He let a long shiver work its way through him, then reached for his day pack in the backseat and extracted the silver flask.

The flask was filled with Hudson Bay rum, the same shit basically as the Bacardi 151 they used to use for flambés at the Surf 'N' Turf-tasted godawful, like kerosene, but it got the job done. Warmed you. Burned you right on down from your palate to your rectum, and he still remembered Mr. Boscovich at the board diagramming the human digestive tract-_Nine meters long,__ he called out as if he were singing, _and can anybody tell me how many feet that is?__ Pan gave a little laugh at the memory, then unscrewed the cap. He held the flask to his lips as the plane jarred and settled, a little spillage soaking into his beard and pinning dark beads of moisture to the thighs of his jeans, but it did the trick-it burned till he had to pound his breastbone to keep from spewing it back up-and then he tapped Joe's arm and offered up the flask in pantomime. “You want a hit?” he shouted.

Joe gave him a long, slow look, as if he were trying to place him, as if they hadn't lived in the same cabin for the past three and a half months and been airborne together for the better part of the day, and then he shook his head slowly and let a sad smile fill up the hole in the middle of his beard. “Not while I'm flying,” he shouted back.

“Not even a nip?”

“Don't tempt me.”

They were on their way back from Ambler, on the Kobuk River, where they'd taxied up to a shack on an island just west of town and unloaded eight cases of bourbon, rum and vodka purchased three days ago in Fairbanks. The shack was listing to the left on the uncertain prop of its stilts, sad and abandoned-looking, but there were wall-to-wall people inside, having a party, and that was a surprise. They looked at him out of their retreating eyes-all of them, men and women, trading around the same face, the face Genghis Khan must have worn after he'd got done conquering an out-of-the-way village and raping all the women and eating the dogs and sucking down the last drop of distilled rice liquor in the district. But it was cool, because they wore their hair long and spent their time getting as high as they possibly could on whatever they got their hands on and they'd never even _heard__ of nine-to-five, neckties, Wall Street and Mr. Jones. They still hunted caribou when the herds crossed the river in the fall, though the hunt was reduced now to just coasting up to the animals in a flat-bottomed boat when they were helpless in the water and shooting them point-blank with a pistol, and they all had snow machines and outboard motors and bought their clothes out of a catalogue. But they ate caribou tongue and Eskimo ice cream (caribou fat whipped into a confection with half a ton of sugar and a scattering of sour berries; Pan tasted it-“Ice cream, brother, it's ice cream,” Joe Bosky told him, egging him on, but he spat it right back out into the palm of his hand and the whole room went down in flames, laughing their asses off, funniest thing in the world, white man). They also ate Cheerios and Fritos and Ho-Ho's and Hellmann's Mayonnaise sandwiches on Wonder Bread, all of it flown in to the Eskimo store by the bush pilots who represented the world.

Joe told him that the coast Eskimos-the igloo dwellers, like Nanook-used to all piss in a trough and save it to wash in, to cut the grease on their skin and maybe discourage the lice too, but these people-the little sawed-off Genghis Khans with their nubby teeth and faraway eyes-didn't carry things quite that far, or not that Pan could see, anyway. They stank, though-good Christ, they stank, body, breath and hair. And their dogs were the rattiest-looking things he'd ever seen, ten or twelve of them staked out in every yard, no doghouses, no nothing. Rangy, ugly, yowling things chewing on caribou heads and moose hooves and the kind of fish remains Sylvester the Cat used to pull up out of the bottom of the trash cans in the cartoons. In a word, pathetic.

They stayed an hour, maybe. Pan sold a half-ounce baggie of grass to an Eskimo cat he vaguely recognized from the last whiskey run, and he had a couple rum cokes and breathed the stink of the room and joined in the general sniggering laughter, and then it was back in the plane, the dual controls-yoke on the instrument panel, rudder pedals on the floor-moving in and out on his side as if an invisible presence were sitting in his lap. They shot up off the snowbound river, the shack, the village, the naked stripped willows and softedged firs receding and dwindling beneath them, and then there was the horizon and the promise of light to the south.

Pan had made enough runs with Joe to recognize the markers along the route home, and he checked off the white suckhole of Norutak Lake, Indian Mountain sticking up out of the hills at forty-two hundred feet like an inverted Dairy Queen cone, the Koyukuk River a mad scrawl across the face of the deepening night, and finally the lights of Stevens Village and the broad pan of the Yukon. The river flowed west here, but hooked around at Fort Yukon, where it flowed north pretty much all the way from the Canadian border, so to follow it at this point would have been a waste of time. Joe crossed the river at Stevens Village and cut inland to pick it up again at Boynton, and Pan wasn't alarmed when the river fell behind them and the dark hills loomed up again-it was the direct route, the quickest ticket to the stove and the sleeping bag and the mooseburger on a defrosted bun with fried potatoes and coleslaw on the side. In two days, he and Joe would fly into Boynton for his send-off party at the Nougat, and then he was going home, back to Peterskill in time for Christmas, and _that__ was going to be something, the stories he could tell, and the weather would be nothing-he'd go around in a T-shirt, a tank top and shorts (“What, you call this _cold,__ bro?”). And the concerts, the Fillmore, that new place in Portchester, John Mayall, B. B. King, Taj Mahal. Fuck Star. Fuck Drop City. Fuck them all. He was in a zone, shivering, dreaming. He took another quick nip from the flask-just for the comfort of it.

But then, gradually, he began to realize that they weren't going directly home-they passed over Woodchopper, or what he was pretty sure was Woodchopper, and came in low over the morass of creeks and cleft hills of the Thirtymile watershed. The moon had propped itself up in the sky by now, fat, cold and full, and the snow gave back the light of it till it was brighter than it had been all day. You could see everything against the snow, clearings, bogs, even a line of animal tracks. Joe banked and came in lower still, no more than three hundred feet above the ground, his eyes trained on the shapes and shadows there as if he was looking for something.

“Hey, Joe,” Ronnie shouted. “Hey, man, what's up? Aren't we going home?”

Joe rotated the heavy ball of his head to give him a look, then turned back to the window. “Hand me the rifle, will you?” he said.

Despite himself, despite the cold and the misery and his essential _needs,__ Pan found himself smiling. “You going to tag a couple wolves?”

The engine pulled them through the night, past the swoop of the trees and the leaping hills and falling declivities. “Check the bolt on that thing for me,” Joe shouted.

_No complaints,__ Ronnie was thinking. He was thinking, _All right, why not?__ The wolves were there, money on the hoof, or the paw, actually, greenback dollars gifted up by nature, as Joe put it. They'd been out three days ago, on the way back from Fairbanks with the booze-they'd meant to fly directly up to Ambler but Joe saw wolf sign below and got distracted. It was a kill, a moose laid out in the snow in a Rorschach blot of blood-reddened loops and spiraling paw prints. The wolves were on it, six or seven of them, soapstone gray quickening to black, their eyes feasting, heads twisted round to assess this ratcheting threat from the sky, and then suddenly they were running and Joe buzzed them and banked to come at them again. Once he'd leveled the plane and angled in behind the straining dark forms below, he shouted, “Take the yoke,” and Pan held them steady as he hung out the window and took aim.

The snow leapt where he missed, white blooms flowering in a bed of shadow, and Pan could see it all though he was concentrating everything he had on keeping them level. _Crack! Crack! Crack!__ The wolves flowed like water. A long minute, and they fell away beneath them till Joe took the controls, came round again and again had Pan take the yoke. This time, when he leaned out, sighted through the scope and fired, one of the dark streaks suddenly compressed as if it had been ground down by an iron heel, and it was a streak no longer, but a wolf, writhing. They chased on after the pack and shot a second one a mile away, then circled back and found a place to land. The snow was knee-deep. The first wolf's spine had been broken. It lay there in the snow, staring up at them in incomprehension, bred and whelped in hidden places, fed on moose, on rabbit and vole and caribou, helpless now, and staring. “Go ahead,” Joe said, “but don't mark the fur. Aim for the eye.”

Now Pan strained to see what Joe had picked out below even as he lifted the rifle out of the back, bought new out of the display case at Big Ray's Sporting Goods in Fairbanks with Eskimo dollars-a.375 Holland & Holland with a 4X Weaver scope-pulled back the bolt and handed it to him. There were tracks in the snow below them, he saw that now, a beaten trail that might have been made by a full-on congress of wolves, and it looped in and out of the clumps of trees, disappeared for whole seconds at a time and then reappeared heading south along the banks of the river. The moon had never been brighter, never in all Pan's experience, and he'd seen it hanging in the sky too many times to count, in the back alleys behind the clubs, through the windshield of his car, big and luminous and enhanced by the full range of the pharmacopoeia that lit his perceiving eyes. Tonight, though, tonight it ran back at them, everything silvered with it, Joe's parka, his face, the hands on the controls, but where were the wolves?

And then suddenly, out from under the trees, there they were, a pack running in formation, and Joe was hollering “Take the yoke, take it!” The air inside the cockpit went from frigid to terminal as Joe pushed open the window and the flash-frozen breeze hit them. Pan had the yoke, the plane in a bank left, Joe aiming, but wait-these weren't wolves, were they? No, no, they weren't-they were dogs, and that was a sled, and two figures separating themselves from the flowing script of the page below, people, men, and what was Joe thinking, had he gone blind or what? “Joe!” Ronnie shouted. “Joe, those aren't wolves!”

No matter. Because Ronnie was holding the plane in a steep bank and Joe was firing, once, twice, three times, the bank steepening, Joe cursing-“Fuck! Fuck and goddamnit to hell!”-and neither one of them noticing just how close to vertical the wingtips had become until Joe dropped the gun and pulled them out of the spin and just cleared the bank of trees ahead of them. The engine screamed and there was a jolt, a sickly amplified wet hard slap as of skin on skin and the tip of the right wing had a crease in it suddenly and the whole plane was shuddering as if it were about to fall apart.

Joe fought it. Joe knew his stuff. Joe wasn't about to crash an airplane that cost him twenty-five thousand dollars just because the tip of the aluminum wing was folded in on itself like a crushed beer can, oh, no, not Joe. They must have gone two or three miles, struggling back toward the river, and where was the altitude here, why didn't he pull back on the yoke and get them up out of the treetops? before Ronnie understood that they were going down. There was something ahead, not the river, just a break in the trees, muskeg, hummocks of dead snow-crowned grass like so many fists thrust up out of the ground, and then they were down, the landing gear buckling under them and the whole fuselage pitching mercilessly to the left and into the looming impervious bark-clad shins of the trees.

Nobody much liked Joe Bosky-he was respected, feared, maybe-but he wasn't the sort of cat people would praise for his gentleness and his niceness and his manners. Ronnie dug him, though. Ronnie had a sort of younger brother — older brother bond with him, and if you said one thing for Joe you had to admit he had his shit together, and if you looked and listened and paid attention you could learn everything there was to know about the country. About guns. About flying. He'd already given Pan half a dozen lessons and let him take the controls sometimes when they were just cruising from point A to point B, and that was something to be grateful for. Pan thought maybe someday he could come back up into the country-some summer, next summer even-and make a go of it as a bush pilot, guiding hunters and fishermen, beating the weather, riding the breeze, going in and out as he pleased. Another thing about Bosky was that while he might have been part of the war machine at one point, a Marine, no less, he had a pretty loose attitude about things-he wasn't a flag waver or any kind of fascist at all and he never ran off at the mouth about Claymore mines and gooks and all the rest of it. What was his goal in life? Pan had asked him one night as they sat at the table with Sky and Dale, picking sweet dark ptarmigan meat from the bone. To have a good time. To get drunk, get laid, raise some hell and answer to nobody. “So you're a hedonist, then?” Dale had put in. “Bet your ass I am,” Joe said.

And Joe would know what to do in the present situation, except that Joe wasn't talking. He'd said one thing only after Pan had cut the seat belt with his hunting knife and dragged him out of the crumpled cockpit an hour and more ago, and that was, “Build a fire.” That problem had taken care of itself, though, because when they veered into the trees the left wing folded back against the fuselage and the gas tank let loose and they were lucky even to have gotten out before the whole thing went up. Which it did. No sooner had Pan dragged Joe out into the snow than there was a flash and a thump and their ride home became a bonfire. Now it was nothing but a smell on the air and the cold was seeping back, and Joe was beyond giving advice.

Ronnie could feel his heart shifting gears in his chest. They were in trouble here and no doubt about it, but he wasn't thinking too clearly because he'd hit his head a couple times on the control panel-it just seemed to go after him, as if it had suddenly come to life with the sole purpose of beating his brains out-and that crust of frozen liquid that kept splintering every time he involuntarily grimaced over the red blur of pain that had settled in his left shoulder and made his arm trail away from him as if it didn't want to belong to him anymore, that was blood. Joe was unconscious. Not dead-he was breathing still, though Ronnie was no doctor, and even if he was it wouldn't do him much good out here with no drugs or instruments or tools beyond his knife and the dead weight of the pistol strapped to his thigh. What he did do was cut a couple dozen spruce branches and mound them up so Joe wouldn't have the exposed ground leaching the vital heat from him, and he was in the process of trying to get a fire going. He'd collected some of the dead and yellowed inside branches and snapped them across his knee to make a whole tottering pyramid of kindling, and he'd dragged a few bigger sticks out of the snowheaps as well, and he did have matches and even a few odd scraps of paper in the bottom of his backpack-the only item of survival gear he'd managed to drag out of the plane before it went up.

The moon was a terrifically heavy thing as he crouched there beneath it, baring his wooden hands for just an instant to strike a match on the uncooperative slab of the limp cardboard book-unsupportable, that moon, crushing-but though his hands were like catchers' mitts he was going to survive not only this but anything else the evil forces out there might throw his way because the match caught and the wind held its breath and the cluster of desiccated pine needles began to glower and crackle and get greedier and greedier still. He pulled on his gloves. Tore at the branches round him and built the fire till it leapt up and took over on its own. “Joe,” he said, “Joe, we got a fire here,” but Joe was unresponsive, Joe was cold, Joe was out for the count.

Pan crouched by the fire, beat his hands together. No one was going to come to their rescue out here. Whoever it was in the sled couldn't have been far, but why would they bother? It was Sess Harder and his old lady, had to be, unless Joe had gone completely psychotic on him, and Sess would have paid admission, premium seats, to see Bosky dead. So it was up to him, up to Pan. What he would do was wait for morning, for the half-light and the glow painted round the hills to the south-that would give him direction, and he'd work his way east to the river and then go north for Drop City. He could do it. He was tough. He was young. He knew these hills, he knew the river. He'd have to build up the fire for Joe, build the bonfire of all bonfires, and leave a mountain of wood there too so when Joe came out of it, _if__ he came out of it, he could stay alive till Alfredo and Bill and the rest of them-_Reba__-could get to him.

That was the plan. It was a lonely plan, a hard plan, but everything was going to be all right. The fire beat back the night. The cold began to slink away and back off into the shadows and though he couldn't feel his feet, his fingers had begun to tingle, and that was a good sign. When your core temperature dropped, the blood fed your organs to keep the machine going and the extremities were sacrificed, just another adaptation for survival, and where was that bear he'd shot the ear off of now? Hibernating, like all the moles and rodents in Drop City, and that was another way to survive. But he could feel his fingers and that meant there was no damage done, or nothing bad, anyway-he'd rather be dead than go around like Billy Bartro from high school with the two cauterized stumps on one hand and three fingers on the other because he was trying to make a pipe bomb in the basement and had to live the rest of his life wearing a pair of dove gray golf gloves like some kind of butler out of an English novel. No, he was all right. Everything was cool.

It was then that he thought of the flask. He'd left the backpack up against a tree well outside the circle of the fire-didn't want to see _that__ burn-and now he pushed himself up and went back to retrieve it. A hit or two, that's what he needed. To warm him. Calm his nerves. He wasn't going anyplace, not till tomorrow morning, anyway, and it was going to be a long cold unendurable night-might as well get a buzz on. He fetched the pack, settled in again by the fire. He thought of Joe momentarily-maybe he should try forcing a little down his throat, like in the movies, see if that would bring him out of it-but he needed to tend to himself first. He'd really done something to his left arm, torn a muscle or something, and the pain of it shot all the way up into his shoulder socket and back down again when he tried to pin the flask to his chest so he could unscrew the top. The whole business was awkward, especially with his gloves on, but he managed-he had to, he had to get his _head__ clear here-and in the next moment he was holding the cold worked-metal aperture with the silver inlay to his lips and taking a good long hit.

It was a mistake. And he knew it was a mistake in that instant. His throat seized and he doubled over, his whole body jolted with the shock of it. He was all ice inside, the liquid supercooled in that flask beneath the trees till it was a new kind of death he was pouring down his throat, and he only wanted it out of him. It wouldn't come. He was on his hands and knees, gagging-gagging and coughing and retching-the fire laughing in his face, Joe Bosky slumped silent on a throne of spruce cuttings, and he kept gagging till all that cellular _material__ that constituted the lining of his pharynx and esophagus sloughed loose and the tensed muscles of his limbs just couldn't keep him off the ground any longer.

32

The first night on the trail they camped in a cabin that seemed to have been generated out of the earth itself, no different qualitatively from a cluster of boulders or a stand of trees. It had a shed roof, one sharp slope from the high end to the low, and the battens of ancient sod that composed it had sprouted birch and aspen and a looping tangle of stripped canes and leafless branches. There was a cache in the foreground, from which a hindquarter of moose wrapped in burlap hung rigid on a strand of wire, and in the flux of the moonlight it could have been something else altogether, something grimmer, darker, and Marco had to look twice before he was convinced. The dogs had no qualms, though-they made a dash for the place and then sat impatiently in their traces out front of the cabin while the moon flashed pictures of their breath rising over the dark hunched shapes of them.

He could see the doghouses now, strung out beneath the trees, crude boxes knocked together from notched logs and roofed with symmetrical mounds of snow-covered straw. There was a hill behind the cabin, soft with reflected light, a creek in front of it. Everything was still. If you didn't know the cabin was there you could have passed within a hundred feet of it and never seen a thing, except maybe for a glint of sunlight off the panes of the single window-in the right season, that is, and at the right time of day.

They'd taken turns riding the runners and jogging beside the sled, and he'd jogged the last mile or so and was sweating inside his parka, a bad thing, a dangerous thing, because the sweat would chill you to a fatal point if you didn't get yourself in front of a fire as soon as was reasonably convenient. “What do you think the temperature is?” he'd asked Sess half an hour earlier as they tossed the last of the five stiff-frozen martens they'd caught into the sled and rebaited the trap, and Sess had grinned and knocked the ice out of his mustache with a mittened hand. “I guess about minus forty,” he said.

There was a thermometer nailed over the doorframe of the cabin, and after he'd helped Sess stake out the dogs and toss them each a plank of dried salmon, he consulted it in the pale lunar light. The mercury was fixed in the null space between the hash marks for minus forty and minus forty-two. “Good guess,” he said, as they pushed their way into the dark vacancy of the cabin, its smells-rancid bait, lamp oil, spruce, fish, the intestinal secrets of lynx, marten, fox-stilled by the hand of the untenanted cold.

“Hell,” Sess said, “it just dropped an extra degree in the meantime-but let's get a fire going and get comfortable, what do you say?”

“Sounds good. What can I do to help?”

They were standing in darkness, in the chill, and then Sess had the lamp lit and the cramped clutter of the place took on definition. “Nothing,” he said. “Just sit and make yourself comfortable.” Marco sat, shivering now, and watched as the kindling in the sheet-metal stove took the light from the match and the frozen kettle appeared atop it and Sess bent to retrieve a blackened pot from the earthen floor and swing its weight to the stove in a single easy motion that culminated with the sharp resistant clank of metal on metal. “Keep it simple,” Sess said, “that's my motto.”

They both moved in close to the stove as the fire caught and rose in a roar of sucked air and the room came to life with a slow tick and release. Smells came back. The kettle jolted and rattled, seeking equilibrium. “What's in the pot?” Marco wanted to know, and he'd never been hungrier in his life, in need of sugar, of fat, lard, sticks of butter, the basic grease of life, and no wonder the Eskimos subsisted on seal blubber-you really had to readjust your carburetor up here.

“Moose stew.” Sess was fumbling around on the shelf behind the stove, looking for bowls, spoons, cups. “Made it last time through. What you do is you hack off a healthy chunk of that moose flank outside, fry it in bear fat with some flour and onions, salt, pepper, a little Tabasco, whatever vegetables you've got on hand-it was dried peas and lentils in this case-then fill it to the top with liquid, boil it down and toss your rice in. And voilà, Moose Stew à la Harder. And the beauty of it is, you just set the pot down on the floor when you close the place up and it's frozen like a rock inside of the hour.” He rubbed his palms together and held them out over the stove. “Roy taught me that.”

“And now you're teaching me.”

“That's right. Now I'm teaching you.”

If he'd had his doubts-camping, _siwashing,__ in forty-below weather-the stew drove them down till he could begin to envision himself in Sess's place, at home out here no matter what the conditions, taking what the land gives you, living small and a million light-years from the suburbs and the compulsively trimmed bushes and the rolling lawns and ornamental trees, because whoever landscaped this place outside the window did one hell of a job and no denying it. The stew was delicious. He had three bowls and polished the bowl when he was done with the pilot bread Sess kept sealed in a glass jar on the shelf. There was coffee, with sugar and evaporated milk, half-thawed blueberries in thick syrup for dessert and three shots of E&J brandy each. They sat cramped in at the little table by the window and fingered their cups and watched the way the moon dodged and shifted and went about its business amongst the trees. They talked trapping, talked snares and baits, talked Drop City, talked women.

“I'm not surprised, truthfully, to hear the nephew sprouted wings,” Sess said, “considering that girlfriend of his, because she's a downtown girl if I ever saw one.”

“He'll be back,” Marco said, and even as he said it, out here with nothing but a makeshift stove and a half-rotten spruce wall to keep him from becoming another casualty of the country, the mortal punctuation to yet another cautionary tale, he doubted himself. When Norm had pulled out, all of Drop City went into a panic, and after the panic, they went into mourning. Norm was their rock, their founder, their guru-he'd brought them all out here into the wilderness with the irreducible power of his vision, his money, his energy-and now he'd deserted them. Star sobbed till Marco thought her ribs were going to crack. Reba ate Seconal by the fistful. Jiminy wanted to shoot the skis off Bosky's plane, handcuff Norm if necessary, anything, kidnap Premstar. Bill roared in Norm's face for a whole day and a half, and you could hear his voice starting up like a chainsaw every few minutes and falling off again till it was the defining sound of Drop City, available even to the last cabin out. And then the plane came and Norm and Premstar were gone, peace, brothers and sisters, and screw you all- “Yeah,” Sess said, “I'm sure he will. If he gets another girlfriend.”

Marco shrugged. They'd put out the lantern to save fuel and to give them a better view of the night beyond the window. “I don't know,” he said, “maybe we don't need him. Maybe it's all part of the greater plan.”

“The greater plan? You're not getting mystical on me, are you? Here, have another shot of brandy. It's good for you.”

“I mean, some people are serious about this and some aren't-Alaska, let's all go to Alaska, kids, and we'll dance to the light of the moon. You know what I'm saying? We'll see how it shakes out now that we're on our own.”

“Lydia,” Sess said. “She's the one. If I had my pick, she'd be the one I'd go for. But don't tell Pamela.” He looked down into his cup. “By the way, just out of curiosity, did you ever-?”

Marco shook his head. “Not my type. But I guess you heard she brought us a little present from Fairbanks, right?”

“Present?”

“Yeah,” Marco said, holding his eyes. “Crabs.”

Sess leaned into the table. He was grinning. “You don't mean Alaskan king, do you?”

“I don't have them,” Marco said. “And neither does Star. So that says something right there.”

“Oh, you're hooked, brother, you're hooked. Your wandering days are over, all she wrote.” He lifted the cup to his lips, set it down again. “But seriously, you need a woman up here. If you're serious about the country, I mean. If it wasn't for Pamela, I'd be climbing a tree right now, I'd be picking fights at the Three Pup, passed out on the floor, too sick to run my traps and club that lynx today out of its misery. Which, by the way, I ought to drag in here and skin.” There was a silence. “Stay tuned,” Sess said after a while, “that's my advice. But listen, we've got a long day tomorrow, up to the next camp on No Name Creek, and I've about had it, how about you?”

They were up with the first light, which came just after nine A.M. in a gradual dull accretion of form and shadow beyond the window. Breakfast was moose stew. The dogs had dried salmon, choked down in a fury of wild-eyed snarling and jockeying for position. The sky was low and ironclad. The temperature was minus thirty-eight and rising.

He helped Sess put the cabin in order-moose stew on the floor, water in the kettle, kindling and stove-cut lengths of birch and poplar stacked up in a crude box in the corner-and then they harnessed the dogs. To Marco's eye, the dogs weren't much-savage-tempered, erratically colored and furred, with long angular stick legs, narrow waists and big shoulders. Back home, in Connecticut, they would have languished in the dog pound for the required two weeks, unlovable, inelegant, unadoptable, and then they would have been put down one by one, a gentle stroking of the ears and then the quick sure jab of the needle. The two close in to the sled-the wheel dogs-were called Lester and Franklin, a Sess Harder reference (and homage, or so he claimed) to the Drop City dropouts he'd seen panning for water in a goldless creek one glorious summer day, and the one just behind Lucius, the lead dog, was called Sky, just to extend the joke. “Let's not make this a shaggy dog story,” Marco told him when the introductions went round out front of the cabin on the Thirtymile, and Sess liked that. “I guess I should've called one Norm,” he said.

But now it was thirty-eight degrees below zero and there was no time for joking. The dogs were in a frenzy to get into the traces and get going-you could hardly slow them down for the first hour or so-and Marco was bitten twice, right down through his gloves and into the flesh, as he tried to clip Sky into the gangline, and if that wasn't bad karma he didn't know what was. “Jesus,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the din of the dogs, “are they always like this?”

Sess had just waded into the middle of a three-dog fight, rearranging ribs with his moccasins and hammering the big furred heads with his balled-up fist. “You want dogs with spirit,” he said, and then they were off.

That was a rush, pure exhilaration, the air so cold it burned, your lungs on fire with it, arms pumping like a marathoner's, now on the runners, now off, feeling the surge of uncontainable power that ran like an electric jolt through the spines and churning legs of the wolf-dogs and right into the sizzling core of you. Marco had never experienced anything like it. They hurtled along the trail, too energized to feel the cold, until they came to the first set and the dogs sensed it, smelled it, and pulled up short.

The bait was gone, the trap sprung, and there were lynx tracks like mortal punctuation in the snow. Sess showed him how to reset the trap, sprinkle a couple handfuls of snow over it for concealment, then nail a rotted goose wing soaked in beaver castor three feet up the trunk of a tree just behind it. And what made the best bait? Whatever stank the most. For marten, Sess used the guts and roe of the salmon he'd caught last summer-after they'd been properly fermented in a mason jar set out in the sun for a couple weeks. “No big deal,” he said. “Little tricks. Anybody could learn them.”

They stood there, looking down at the set, the dogs curled tail to nose in their traces, the faintest breeze agitating the treetops. “Even Joe Bosky?” Marco asked. “Even Pan?”

Sess didn't bother to answer-the question was too irritating, Marco saw that immediately and wished he could take it back. To this point, he and Sess had been getting on heroically, of one mind, and as Sess saw that he could keep up, that he was hard-driven and no tourist at all, he'd given him a larger share of the responsibilities, harnessing and feeding the dogs, mushing them, building up the coffee fire at lunch.

Sess was staring down at the scatter of tracks, hands at his hips, his parka so patched-over you couldn't tell its original color, and his face was set, engraved with suppressed emotion like a wood carving of Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. The wolverine lining his hood took the breeze, and Marco watched the long dark hairs move and gather there, and suddenly he was thinking of the goats and the powerlessness he'd felt in the face of that implacable presence thrust up out of the woods. And what would they do if they encountered one today-or a bear? All they had with them was a.22, because Sess wouldn't let him bring the big rifle-too late for moose, and it was just unnecessary weight. But the bears would be hibernating by now. Not the wolves, though. And what about the legendary _cauchemar__ of the north, the winter bear, the grizzly that went into hibernation too soon and awakens desperate for the meat and fat it has to have to survive? What would a.22 do against that?

It was getting dark when they came round a switchback in the trail and the dogs slowed and began to throw quick darting looks back over their shoulders. There was a set up ahead, but something wasn't right. Something was caught there, something too big to be a marten or a fisher, and it wasn't dead and frozen like the sleeve of a fur coat hanging limp in cold storage, but alive and yellow-eyed and jerking spasmodically at the straining dun leash of its right rear leg. It was a wolf, that was what Marco thought at first, but Sess let out a low curse-it wasn't a wolf, but a coyote, all but worthless for its fur because no wrapped-up pampered matron on Park Avenue or Lake Shore Drive wanted to walk into a restaurant in a thing like that.

The dogs were crazy. They smelled the kill and they let out a furious, frustrated, caterwauling racket, jerking at their leads in a tangle of ratcheting jaws and misplaced feet. Sess tied the sled off to a tree a hundred feet away and the two of them came up to where the animal lunged and snapped at them from the radius of its trapped hind leg. There was blood in the snow. The coyote had tried to gnaw through its own fur and hide and gristle and bone to free itself, but it was too late now because there were dogs there and men and one of them had a gun and the other a stick. “Shit, I'd just as soon wade in there and knock him out and free him if I could,” Sess said, “but he's got too much pep in him yet. I don't want to risk it.”

The animal was pinned there, crippled, nothing but solaceless terror in its eyes, though it jerked and growled and threatened, and where was the peace and love in this, where the pacifism and the vegetarian ideal? It was the color of a German shepherd, smaller maybe, but with the same deep dun color and the black-tipped guard hairs. Marco felt his stomach clench. Could you live in the country without this? Could you live on fish alone? On what you made in the summer on a fire-fighting crew? On welfare, unemployment, on tuna casserole and macaroni and cheese? His breath smoked in the air. Sess handed him the.22. “Go ahead,” he said. “Put him out of his misery.”

It went dark then, or it seemed to. The coyote had stopped struggling. It crouched, panting, head hung low, the fire gone from its eyes. Marco never even brought the gun to his shoulder. “I can't,” he said, and handed it back to Sess. He turned away to go see to the dogs and a moment later the hovering silence discharged itself with a single crack of the rifle.

Later, when the clouds had cleared and the moon swung up over the horizon, they found themselves in an open meadow along the river, no more than fifteen minutes from the cabin on No Name Creek that was their destination for the night. The coyote, frozen through and stiff-legged now, was strapped to the top of the sled like so much excess baggage. (“Skin it out and take it home to your girlfriend,” Sess had said. “Nail it to the wall, make a rug out of it. Call it your first kill,” he said.) The dogs were lagging now, especially the two in front of Lester and Franklin. They jerked forward, then held back, hips twitching, legs kicking out arrhythmically. Marco was riding the runners, Sess jogging alongside him. That was when they heard the plane, a thin buzz of mechanical clatter on the air that was too cold to resonate.

They kept going. There was a cabin awaiting them, a fire, another pot of moose stew-or maybe it was potage of moose or moose fried in lard with defrosted potatoes and onions and maybe dried carrots on the side-and an airplane was nothing to them. It was probably somebody out of Eagle, headed to Boynton or maybe Fairbanks or Delta. Marco let the buzz fade away in his head. He was in a dream state almost, all his senses heightened as if he'd dropped acid, alive to every shading of the path ahead, to the taste and smell of the compacted air, to the swift whispering rush of the dogs' paws in the snow, to the great and marvelous engine of his own breathing and the unconquerable beat of his rock-steady heart. This was his moment, this was his connection, and he felt it in every cell of his body. He wasn't even cold. Not in the least.

But that thin unobtrusive buzz that might have been the drone of a mosquito in a sleeper's ear on a restless summer night became something greater, louder, a looming clattering presence, until he couldn't ignore it any longer. He looked to the straining backs of the dogs, to the dark line of the trees in the distance, and then he looked to Sess just as the plane broke out of the treetops behind them, no more than two hundred feet above the ground, buzzing them. Sess never stopped running. He shouted to the dogs, urging them on. And then to Marco, everything rushing in a fluid stream of night and snow and the wind they were generating in their flight-and that was what this was, _flight__-he shouted one word, “Bosky!”

They both watched the aircraft make the far end of the meadow, bank and come back at them, and there was nothing they could do about it, no time to wonder over the hate and recalcitrance that had brought them to this, no time for reason or even speech. They ran. And Bosky came at them. There was gunfire-of that Marco was sure, the snow leaping beside him and one of the dogs crying out and stumbling in the traces and the others carrying it along in a dark tide of necessity-and then there was the sharp explosive sound of something moving at high speed contacting a stationary object, a single dead whack, and they were in the trees and the plane was gone.

The first thing Sess did was halt the dogs under cover of the trees and tie up the sled. Then he pulled the.22 from the sheath he'd made for it just under the left handlebar and fired two useless shots into the night. “Fucking son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Fucking madman! Scumbag! I'll kill you!”

Suddenly it was cold. Intensely cold. The kind of cold that ran through you no matter how many layers of clothes you had on. Marco was numb, numb all over. He barely knew what had happened, gone from one dream right into the shroud of another, but he had the presence of mind to remember the dog. It was hurt. He could hear it whining, the thinnest paring of sound, like a violin careening to the top of the register. “Sess,” he said into the stiffening shroud of silence, “I think one of the dogs is hurt.”

It was a foot or a leg-Marco couldn't see for sure in the play of moonlight and shadow. He stood there, helpless, as Sess bent over the dog, removed it from the traces and lifted it up in his arms and carried it to the sled. He watched Sess set the dog in the body of the sled, beside the stiff-legged carcass of the coyote, and watched as Sess rearranged the dogs, the breath of dog and man alike hanging dense in the air. There came a distant sound at some point during this ordering of events-Marco couldn't have said when, exactly, whether it was a matter of seconds or minutes-and there was a flare of light some two or three miles off. “Good,” Sess muttered, working in the cold, every pause and syllable an engine puffing in the night, “good, the son of a bitch. Good. I hope he's burned up and dead.”

They reached the cabin in minutes, and minutes later they were going through the same ritual as the night before-unharnessing, staking, lighting the fire, settling the kettle and the big blackened pot on the stove-but they hardly spoke. They were like relief workers, methodical, bloodless, following the logic and the dictates of the moment. Sess brought the dog in-it was Sky, one staring blue eye, one deep unhurried brown-and set him on the floor under the light of the lantern. The dog whined softly and Marco saw that its right front foot was gone, or the toes anyway. Sess stalked across the room and came back with a bleached-thin flannel shirt and tore it into strips. “Can I do anything?” Marco asked and Sess said he could go out and feed the dogs, that would be a help.

Only after they'd eaten did the shock of what had happened let go of them to the point where they could begin to talk about it. Everything was quiet. The dog was back outside, its foot swollen with the knotted bandage it had no doubt already chewed off, the cabin-cruder and older than the one they'd inhabited last night, built by Roy Sender himself in a time before airplanes came to rule the country-had begun finally to hold the heat of the stove, the kettle was sending up steam and they were both staring into the residuum of coffee grounds in the bottom of their cups. Marco got up, warmed his hands at the stove. “You think they went down, don't you?” he said.

Sess looked up at him. “Yeah,” was all he said.

“Think they're dead?”

“I hope so. I pray to god they are. Because if they're not, I'm going to have to kill them.”

“I'm saying _they,__” Marco said, and he had to use one of his mittens to lift the kettle off the stove and pour scalding coffee into his cup, “but it could have been just Bosky, right?”

Sess held out his cup for a refill. “You can't fly and shoot at the same time.”

“So it was Ronnie? You think it was Ronnie too?”

“Son of a bitch,” Sess said. “Son of a hippie bitch. I want _him__ dead too.”

Eventually, without really discussing it or pausing to think it through, they both began to shrug back into their clothes, the two shirts, the sweater, the parka, the scarf Star had knitted, and Marco laced up his boots while Sess pulled on his mukluks, and then they were back out in the night, minus forty-four and dropping. The dogs stirred, and one or another of them let out a low interrogatory woof before they settled down again. Sess had the.22 in his hand. The snow shifted beneath their feet.

They retraced the trail to the meadow and then turned inland in the direction the plane had taken, walking at a good pace, the moon slanting through the trees to light the way. The country was dense here, off the broken trail, but they were anxious and they pushed through it as if they were passing down a long corridor in a hotel with one double door after another. Marco let his mind wander, thinking about Star, about Christmas coming and what he ought to get her, given his limited resources. Maybe he could make her something, he was thinking. Something for her hair-a barrette carved of wood or bone, or maybe bone earrings, something like that. And then he was thinking of Ronnie. Pan. If Pan was in that plane, and he had to have been, then Pan was dead, the first casualty of Drop City, the first postmortem. Norm would be back. Maybe even Weird George, Verbie and some of the others. But Pan wouldn't. The thought chilled him. Or he was already chilled-it depressed him, brought home the strangeness of all this, of walking the remotest hills anybody could hope to find on this earth beside a man with a gun in the deepest night he'd ever known. And where was his father now? And the Draft Board and General Hershey?

“Up there,” Sess said, and it was as if his voice were disembodied, as if the country itself were throwing its voice, the ventriloquism of the night. “See it-see that glow?”

They climbed a ridge and looked down on the light that seemed so wrong out here, a fire, a bonfire, snapping briskly at its tether on the numinous ground, color in a colorless place. There were two figures stretched out by the fire, one on the snow, the other propped against a tree in a bed of spruce cuttings, and beyond them, the settled shape of the burned-out plane. Nothing moved but the wheel of the fire, rising up and dying back, spitting embers into the sky, wavering and flaring again.

Marco came down the slope at a run, slamming through drifts, shattering tree limbs and the grasping fingers of dwarf willow, alder, birch and black currant, heedless, in the grip of something he couldn't name, even as Sess Harder stalked behind him, gun in hand. He went to Ronnie first, to Pan, and tried to turn him over, but Pan was stuck fast to the ground in a spill of frozen blood and mucus, and he was inflexible, dead, dead for sure, as stiff and dead and frozen as the coyote strapped to the sled. He didn't like Pan. He'd never liked him. But he didn't wish him this.

He looked up at the sound Sess Harder's hand-stitched mooseskin mukluks made in the snow, the soft susurrus of his walking. Sess was standing over Joe Bosky now, and Joe Bosky's eyes were open and he was trying to say something. There was no blood on him, not a spot, his white parka as pure and unblemished as the snow caught fast to the shell of the earth. His eyes shone in the firelight and he wanted to move, you could see that, to get up, to stand and accept the challenge, but he couldn't. A term came into Marco's head then, something out of the newspaper, out of the obituaries: _internal injuries.__

External injuries were bad enough out here, but internal injuries, what you couldn't see, didn't really offer up much hope. They would have to go back for the sled, load him into it, mush past Drop City, Sess's cabin, Woodchopper, and on into Boynton, and somebody would have to fly out of Boynton and take him to the hospital in Fairbanks, and all of that with internal injuries, the ruptured organs, the severed spinal cord, the slow seep of secret blood. But Sess had the gun in his face, had the muzzle of it resting right on the bridge of his nose, the cold kiss of the barrel marking the place where his black bushed eyebrows met, and Joe Bosky was struggling to say something, final words, and what he said, even as Sess Harder lifted the gun out and away from him and rested it over one solid moon-white shoulder, what he said was, “Fuck you.”

33

At first she didn't know what to say, thinking of Che and Sunshine, their squalling faces and stamping inconsolable feet, the noise of them, the dirt-always dirty, born dirty-and she looked away, trying to compose herself. She ran a finger round the rim of the coffee mug and plugged in her million-kilowatt smile, and though she wanted to say _No, oh, no,__ as she would have responded to news of cancer, heartbreak or any run of sorrow or affliction, she managed finally to murmur something appropriate, or at least compliant. And then, before she could think: “Do you-I mean, did you-?”

Pamela took one look at her and burst out laughing-she had to set down her cup because she was laughing so hard, her eyes squeezed down to semicircular slits, her hands gone to her temples as if to keep her head anchored on her shoulders. “You'd think I'd just announced that the roof was on fire or something from the look of you-really, Star, you should see herself.” She let out another laugh, slapped a hand flat on the resounding plane of the table. “God, you're funny.”

Star laughed too, easing into it-sure, all right, she'd let herself in for it-but even as she laughed, as the two of them laughed, she was thinking of herself, of what she would do if it was her. She'd stocked up on birth control pills-they all had, Reba's idea, her obsession, actually-but she'd come to the end of them weeks ago. When she and Marco made love it was cautious love now, restrained love, with the threat of repercussions hanging over the act, and he always pulled out of her at the crucial moment-_coitus interruptus__-as if that could forestall the inevitable, and how many of the girls she'd gone to Catholic school with were on their second or third child already? She'd kill herself. She'd have an abortion. But where? How? Somebody told her the Indian women knew of a way, some root they boiled into a tea, or maybe they made it into a poultice that drew out the fetus like pus from an infection- “You know, you're supposed to congratulate me. You're supposed to squeal and jump around-we're both supposed to squeal and jump around. I'm going to have a baby. You're the first person I've told and you look as if you just found me floating in the river in a sack.”

She wanted a cigarette. She'd already had her first of the day and she was trying to cut back, not only because of the expense and the fact that your brothers and sisters were constantly bumming them off you day and night, but because they were a habit, and she didn't want to develop any habits except love and kindness. Pamela's pack of Marlboro's lay on the table between them. Star eased a cigarette from the pack, lit it, exhaled. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It's just that I can't imagine-personally, I mean. I mean, I've got so much to live for-” But that sounded wrong-it was wrong. She tried to recover herself, because Pamela-her friend, her sister-wasn't laughing anymore. “You want a boy or a girl?” she said finally.

Pamela went off then, everything copacetic, pleased with herself, lit up with it. She wanted a girl, couldn't imagine anything else, but when she and Sess had talked about it-theoretically, that is-he'd leaned toward a boy, which was only natural. He was quiet about it, but he wanted to see a new generation in the country, of course he did, and with a boy he could teach him everything he knew about living off the land and respecting it. “He'd want a boy,” she said, and she slipped a cigarette out of the pack now too. “But so did my father.”

“And he got two girls.”

“That's right.”

And then they were laughing again.

They smoked their cigarettes and thought their private thoughts, drank coffee, played a second game of chess-which Star won-and then the rubber match, which went to Pamela. Together they made lunch, a thick cooked-down broth with egg noodles and put-up vegetables from the Harder larder, and then they settled in to read by the stove. Though they hadn't discussed it, the unspoken arrangement they'd arrived at telepathically at some point the previous night was that Star was going to stay on till their men returned from the trail. Star had washed and dried the dishes-she insisted on it-and let Pamela sit there by the window as she put everything back on the shelves in proper order. She took pride in that-she knew the place as well as she knew her own. And the pans glistened when she was done with them.

After a while she moved from the chair to the bed, pulled a fur over her legs. She could feel the nicotine and caffeine ricocheting off the walls of her blood vessels, but she wasn't nervous or coffeed-out, just steady and calm and alert. The book she had with her was by Richard Fariña, _Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me,__ the hippest thing going, recommended by everybody and dog-eared and chewed-over so many times it had to be the sorriest volume in the Drop City library. It was all right. Funny, wild. But the scene it described-college, dope, thumbing your nose at the straight world-just seemed alien to her now. Or remote-that was a better word. Before long, she was asleep.

She woke to lamplight, a smell of baking. Pamela was there at the stove, her hair coiled atop her head and shining with the soft flickering pulse of the lamp's wick. The windows were black. A distant voice, thin and disconnected, carried down out of the hills, and then it was answered by another and another. “What time is it?” she said, pushing herself up from the pillow. She felt as if she'd been asleep forever.

“It's early yet. Four-fifteen.”

“I'll never get used to this.”

Pamela was taking something out of the oven-a cake in a circular pan-and she paused, the hot pan held out before her, the sweet all-embracing scent filling the room even to the farthest corners, to give Star a look over her shoulder. “You'll get used to it,” she said. “Believe me.”

They were eating cake-angel food, barely cooled, with chocolate fudge icing-when they became aware of a subtle change in the tenor of the night, the faintest chink of the clip on a dog's harness, a sound as of the earth breathing in and out again, and then they were up from the table and standing at the open door of the dogtrot, peering out into the moonlit yard. The men were there-Marco and Sess-and the patient line of the dogs, sitting in their harnesses, waiting to be freed and staked and fed. Pamela turned back into the room to put the kettle on and Star followed her to get her parka, and in a moment the two of them were out in the moonlight, the shock of the supercooled air searing the nicotine from their lungs.

A quick hug, one man, one woman, and Pamela was down amongst the dogs, unclipping them individually from the gangline and leading them to their separate houses and their separate stakes. Star stood there in the cold, shifting from foot to foot, wanting to help, but she didn't know the dogs or what to do with them and so she drew back and waited. One of the dogs, she saw that much, was injured and riding up atop the sled, the frame of which seemed overburdened, piled up beyond sense or reason, and where were the furs? She'd looked forward to the furs in the way a prospector's wife might have looked forward to the jar of gold flakes brought down to her out of the hidden seams of the hills-absent the killing of the animals and the mechanics of their suffering, that is, because she didn't want to think about that, didn't want to know or even imagine it. The furs, the furs alone were what interested her. The beauty and richness of them, mink, otter, fox, delivered up from nowhere, magically, like the salmon that gorged the streams and the ducks crowding the skies. But where were they? And what was this protruding from the frame-boots? A spare pair of boots?

She was about to say something when Marco loomed up out of the blue glitter of the snow, took her by the arm and led her through the dogtrot and into the cabin. His beard was ice. His eyes were cracked and broken. The tip of his nose was the wrong color. “Something happened,” he said.

There were sounds from outside, Sess's voice, Pamela's, the dogs yapping and clamoring for their food. “What?” she wanted to know, straining to read his face even as he turned away from her and held his hands out to the stove. She felt sick suddenly. There was a shadow sweeping over the ground, over the cabin, over Drop City. “What? What is it?”

“Ronnie,” he said.

“Ronnie?” She didn't understand him. What could Ronnie possibly have to do with a hurt dog and three days out on the ridges and down in the ravines in forty-below-zero weather? Ronnie the thief? Ronnie the irrelevance? Who cared about him? Who cared about him, really? He'd gone to high school with her. He'd been her lover. He'd stolen her money.

Marco wouldn't look her in the face, and that scared her.

“What?” she demanded. “What happened?”

“He-they tried to, him and Bosky, in the plane. He died. He's dead.”

Still she didn't understand. “Who? You mean Joe Bosky?”

“Both of them. It was a plane crash.”

She had to sit down then, and Pamela was in the room now and Sess right behind her, the door slamming to, the last breath of the cold trapped and dissipating inside the furnace of the four walls, the shrinking space of the cabin crowded suddenly, shoulders, faces, limbs, three people in parkas stalking around and recoiling from one another as if they were trying to make their way through Grand Central at rush hour: _Ronnie? Dead?__

Eventually-it must have been an hour, an hour or more-she went out into the yard, her hand clasped in Marco's, to look at him there in the sled, because she still didn't believe it, didn't believe really that anybody could die-the old maybe, maybe them-but nobody she knew, nobody like Ronnie. Like _Pan.__ They'd come across country together. He'd made her laugh. He'd pressed himself to her in the hush of her room, on the seat of the car, in the starched sterile drum-tight beds of motels in anonymous towns, he'd read to her, sung to her, praised her and loved her. And now he was lying there frozen in the sled, a shadow, a dead lump of nothing pressed in death to the dead lump of Joe Bosky-and those were his boots, Bosky's, sticking out of the bottom of the sled on his dead frozen feet. For a long moment she stood there looking down at the dark hummock of the sled, Sess and Pamela immured in the cabin, Marco beside her. She was trying to cry, but there was nothing there. “I want to see him,” she said, and her voice betrayed her.

Marco's breath trailed away from his lips, silvered and alive. “You don't want to see him. Really, you don't. Come on, let's go inside. We'll spend the night and decide what to do in the morning. Okay?”

It wasn't okay. She stepped forward, the dogs rustling at their chains, the stars riding up and away from her till the whole night seemed to plead for intercession, and then she pulled back the blanket and the moon showed her what was there.

“That's not Pan,” she said.

And it wasn't. It was something twisted to impossibility, nothing natural, nothing she could identify, no face even, because it was turned from her in its frozen cowl, just the slant of a face, that was all, and it could have been anybody. “Come on, Star,” Marco whispered. She saw the hair then, spilling off the spool of his head, grown out finally to its maximum length, hip, very hip, as hip as anybody could ever have wished or dreamed, and she slipped the glove from her hand for just an instant to feel it move beneath the pressure of her five bare fingers.

On Christmas Eve, just after the light faded from the sky, it began to snow. Marco and Jiminy had cut a tree and set it up in the back corner of the meeting hall, and everybody gathered over eggnog (rum and evaporated milk, whipped with nutmeg, sugar and powdered egg) to decorate it with God's eyes made of yarn, scraps of silver foil, strings of glass beads and paper chains. The twelve-volt battery, newly charged in Boynton and retrieved on the back of Iron Steve's snowmobile, was hooked up to the stereo in the loft, and so there was music, people shuffling through the albums to find their favorite cuts, nothing religious, really, no hymns or carols, but mystical stuff, Ravi Shankar, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, Coltrane, Rollins, Dylan.

There were four stoves at Drop City, one in each of three finished cabins, and the ancient Great Majestic range they'd brought upriver in the boat to do the communal cooking in the meeting hall, and all four were in use. They were roasting two turkeys and a goose delivered frozen from the general store in Boynton by Sess Harder, and a pair of spruce hens Marco had managed to shoot under a tree somewhere, with potatoes, stuffing and gravy, and for the vegetarians there was a broccoli and cheese casserole, meatless lasagna and mashed turnips. And cookies. A thousand cookies.

Star was in the midst of it all, juggling pots on the range, slicing, chopping, whipping, the music getting up inside her till it was like a whole new circulatory system working in symbiosis with the original one, the one she was born with, and when somebody handed her a joint, she took it and held it to her lips a moment and passed it back again. She sang to herself, hummed, made up lyrics for the tunes that didn't have any. The gravy thickened, the snow faltered. Lydia was dancing with Tom Krishna and Deuce, and Jiminy was dancing by himself, Harmony and Alice handed out personalized ceramic mugs to every one of Drop City's eighteen remaining residents-each one with a reasonably faithful representation of the recipient's face molded into it-and Marco came up and surprised her with a pair of earrings-peace symbols-he'd carved out of a scrap of caribou antler. And just when she thought it couldn't get any better, Pamela appeared at the door with two bricks of fruit cake and a bottle of brandy tucked under her arm.

There was a jabber of greeting, dishes already set out on the sheet of plywood they'd extended the table with, steam rising, the dog-Freak-looking hopeful, and then Star took Pamela's coat and flung it up to Mendocino Bill in the loft, because that's where the coats were going, no room anywhere else. Pamela stood there, giving off energy, and then she was hugging people, one after the other. She was looking good-healthy, pretty-her face colored by the wind, her hair parted in the middle and trailing down over her sweater till the reindeer dancing across her chest were hidden in a spill of honey-blond hair, and she was wearing the beaded headband Star had given her. “You know what you look like?” Star said, handing her the joint that had just appeared magically in her hand.

“No, what?”

“Like a hippie.”

“You mean a hippie _chick__?”

It took her a minute. “Are you playing with my head?”

“Who me? Never.”

She watched Pamela make a pretense of inhaling, then took the joint back from her. “So where's Sess?” she asked.

A shrug. “Out on the trail. But he'll be here. He'd better be.” She shook out her hair with an abrupt flip of her neck. “It's our first Christmas together. I'll kill him if he doesn't make it.”

The notion struck her as funny, because why wouldn't he make it? Was it that compelling out there? As far as Star could see there was nothing beyond the windows but the night and the cold and the hills that folded back into another set of hills and another set beyond that. This was where the life was, the only life within miles. There was food, music, beer, wine. There was eggnog, there were cookies. Laughter and conviviality. There were people here. Brothers and sisters. “Oh, he'll make it,” she said. “I'm sure he will.”

Later, after they'd eaten, Verbie and Iron Steve showed up, extending the party all the way out from Boynton, and they danced, everybody, all of Drop City, even Che and Sunshine, and there was nothing lame about it and nobody to sulk and lie and exaggerate and cheat and steal and pronounce it lame, nobody. At midnight, Bill dropped down out of the loft, got up as Santa Claus with a cotton-puff beard and every strip of red clothing Drop City owned draped round the bulk of him, and announced he had a present for everybody, right outside the door. People stirred, exchanged glances. Outside? There were groans, catcalls. “Is he for real?” Merry said.

“Believe me,” Bill coaxed, “you're going to like it.”

Star was drifting, nestled in beside Marco and Pamela on the bunk closest to the stove, sated, warm, letting the music infest her. She hadn't said a word in an hour. She felt bad for Pamela, because Sess hadn't showed, and that was the one damper on the evening-the bummer, the downer-the one thing that hadn't worked out. Pamela was worried, she could see that, and as the hours slipped by she'd said all the conventional things till there was nothing more to say, and then a joint went round, and a jug of wine, and she leaned back into Marco and let herself drift. But now, now Bill was in the middle of the room and people were coming back to life-it was Christmas, there was a surprise, a present. For everybody, he said.

It took a while, people fumbling into their jackets and boots, searching for gloves and scarves in the tangle of clothes in the loft, but then they were filing out the door into the cold. Bill led them. He was in the yard out front of the meeting hall, Santa with his freak's flag of hair and cotton-puff beard, his arms spread wide. It was clear now and cold to the teeth of the stars. “Here it is!” he shouted, and they lifted their eyes to the sky and saw the light pulsing there, cosmic light, yellow-green, blue, a tracery of red, indefatigable light, light that soared up out of the black shell of the horizon and burst and shattered and renewed itself all over again.

34

He was moving as fast as he could, the storm blown out now and the quarter moon slicing through the cloud tatters to illumine his way. The wind was in his face, the cold rode his shoulders like a hitchhiker. There was no sound but for the whisper of the sled's runners in the fresh powder and the faint, wind-scoured chiming of the cold steel clips on the dogs' harnesses. He was late, very late, ten or twelve miles out, thinking of Pamela waiting for him at the hippie camp, of Christmas and the present he'd kept hidden in the back doghouse since before she was his wife and just a hope flickering on the horizon. It was in the sled now-he'd snuck it in there, all wrapped in a spangle of colored paper that featured candles and bells and holly and suchlike, three mornings ago, early, when she was still in her slippers and the light hadn't yet come into the sky. He'd harnessed the dogs then, kissed her at the door and moved out across the yard and into the trees with a promise, three days, Christmas, the hippie camp.

The dogs knew they were heading home, six dogs now because Sky would never run again, and they ran as a team, as smooth and efficient as the conjoined wheels of a locomotive, streaming through the night, barely aware that he was there with them. They were going a good flat-out ten miles an hour, he guessed, and so he'd be there before long-by midnight anyway, judging from the stars. The present was nothing he'd made or bought, nothing you could mail-order or find in a store. It was a gift of nature, like the furs, the salmon, the moose, like gold. He'd found it projecting from the bank of the river after breakup had torn the earth away to leave it exposed, a bone-yellowed gleam against the flat alluvial gray of the gravel bank. He knew right away what it was-Charlie Jimmy, of the Indian Village at Eagle, had showed him one once-the curving dense-grained tusk of a mastodon, intact, earth-stained maybe, but a magical thing, a blessing, a totem to take away your fears and sharpen your prowess till you were one with the frost and the melt and the cycle of lives gone down and sprung up again.

He squinted into the wind and pictured the animal itself, the pillars of its legs, the rich red pelt stretched over a mile of hide, the tumbling sluggish winter life of the shadowy herds emerging like phantoms from the impacted ridges and wind-blown plains and then vanishing again as if they'd never been there in the first place. But would she like it? He didn't have a clue. It could be carved, certainly, made into jewelry, bric-a-brac, chess pieces, but to his mind that would be a sort of desecration. She could take it to bed with her, make use of it as a fertility charm, but she didn't need any charms, not Pamela. He smiled at the thought and the ice cracked at the corners of his mouth.

He was late because he'd had an accident, one of those things that happen once or twice a winter, no matter how careful you are. He'd been leaving the cabin on No Name Creek with the new furs he'd taken and the ones he'd had to leave behind the previous week in order to accommodate the mortal remains of Bosky and Pan, two dead men, frozen and dead, and he'd miscalculated along a stretch of the creek thick with overflow ice. It had warmed for a few days and then dropped back down to zero and the stream had bubbled up through the ice and then frozen in layers beneath it, and both his feet plunged in up to his calves before he could get back up onto the runners of the sled. He wasn't wet all the way through-the three pairs of socks and the two felt liners saved him there-but there was still nothing else for it but to stop, tie up the sled, make a fire in the lee of a rock ledge and dry everything out.

It wasn't a crisis. Just one of those things. And he'd taken advantage of the time to check the dogs' feet for ice and any scrapes or open cuts and rub them with ointment, and then there was a period where he just lay there under his tarp and watched the fire as the snow sifted down out of the branches of the trees and erased the sky overhead. It gave him time to think, because the last week had been chaotic, questions from the sheriff and the sheriff's deputy, a round of drinks at the Three Pup in memory of the dead men, more questions, papers to fill out, the life of the town, the funeral. Bosky had frozen to death, and so had Pan-after doing something so unthinking and senseless not even the wild hairs could believe it. Or maybe they could. Same thing had happened to a soldier on maneuvers out of Fort Wainwright once, oh, three, four winters ago, thought he'd eschew the regulations and bring himself a little comfort out there on sentry duty in the dead cold heart of the night. It was a shame. It was a pity. But up here planes crashed and people froze. That was the way it was.

What nobody knew, except for him and Marco, was that while the hippie-Pan-was already a corpse when they got there, Bosky was alive and breathing and aware enough to put his last two words together. It was a hard moment. The moment Sess had been chasing after for two years and more. He stood there over him with the.22, and he was going to squeeze the trigger-out of anger, sure, there was that, hate and anger-but out of something else too, call it compassion, call it habit. He brought the barrel of the rifle up to finish Bosky in the way he would have finished any spine-sprung thing caught in a deadfall or a trap meant for something bigger, death in an instant instead of an hour-that was human mercy in a place that had none to spare. But he didn't. A bullet hole would have required explanations, and those explanations would have led down a trail of deceit and dissembling he wanted no part of. And another thing: Bosky didn't deserve a bullet-better save it for the rabid skunk, the porcupine, the summer rat. What he did finally, after duly recording the man's final words, was turn his back, and he didn't argue about it with Marco-he wasn't in an arguing mood. Or a democratic one either. The two of them just backed away from the fire, the wreckage, the corpse of the one and the slowly congealing flesh of the other, and then they came back in the morning and loaded up the human weight and hauled it in. “No reason,” he said to Marco, “to mention anything. The plane went down, that's all, and we brought them in.”

So that was the end of it. And though he'd never gloated over the death of any man-or any creature, for that matter-he had to consider that for him, at least, Christmas had come early. Somebody, some stooped and weeping parent or aunt or black-eyed sibling, would come in the spring and take the small things of sentimental value out of the cabin on Woodchopper Creek, and then the place would stand open to anybody who wanted it, though nobody would. Over the years the roof poles would rot, the sod would give way to the pull of the earth, the walls would buckle, the floorboards subside. Birds would nest in the stovepipe, mice in the bureau drawers. On a given night, in the still of winter, a wolf would trespass in the yard, divine the last dim lingering whiff of the scent of Bosky, Pan, Sky Dog, and lift a leg to eradicate it.

Sess could appreciate that, the natural order-let it stir, let it settle again. The wind was in his face. The northern lights were out, driving down the clouds. The snow whispered at his feet, talked to him, sang out with the rhythm of the night. He was heading home, riding the runners, breathing easy, a man clothed in fur at the head of a team of dogs in a hard wild place, going home to his wife.

The End