Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

The Walking Stick by Michael Luth

Michael Luth is a native Coloradan who currently makes his living as circulation manager for a national financial daily. He tells us that he has been writing fiction almost since he learned to read at the age of four, but has only recently begun to submit his work to magazines. His first published work reflects his interest in the psychology behind a criminal act...

Gene fingered the cold metal object in his jacket pocket and continued his wait, hunkering his shoulders against the wind. He had been playing with the thing absentmindedly to make the time pass, his index finger tracing the flat edge, following the circumference from the blunt-ended shaft to the narrow, tapering point. When he realized what he was doing, he smiled to himself, recalling the owner of the object. If things went well, it would be returned.

He had to show it to Vicky first. She would see it and it would help his cause. He turned it around and around, thinking what he would tell her when she arrived. He just had to win her back. It had taken so long to get her to meet with him. She would listen, he knew, when she realized how much he loved her and how miserable he was without her. The beginning of the end of that misery had started only yesterday, here by the river.

The day had held the promise of Indian summer with the appearance of a fuzzy, October-like sun, but there was slushy, dirty snow beside the trail and it was January and only forty-five degrees. Gene held the soda bottle by the twist-off cap, swinging it at his side as his feet propelled him along the asphalt trail that ran beside the Cache la Poudre River. When he came to the footbridge, he trudged up the incline and across the span, stopping in the middle. He opened the bottle, took a swig, and looked out over the slowly moving river.

The water was strangely high for January and the only icy patches lay in the shadows from the scruffy, leafless willows on the south bank of the river. Far downstream, in a quiet, wide stretch, he saw several ducks gently rocking with the current. He watched them for a while, sipping his soda, but his mind floated off with the sound of the rushing water and he began to think about Vicky.

He missed her body and wanted to hold her, if only for a moment. She had been so wonderful to touch and hold, and when she touched him back, her learned, gentle way of being sexual was so foreign to anything he’d experienced with any other woman that he felt she had invented it herself. That you could approach ecstasy from a quiet hand-holding place and reach it so easily and completely without the wild tearing and screaming run at it he’d always assumed was necessary, had been a revelation. And now he might never know it again.

A deep sigh took his breath away as completely as a punch in the stomach. More than anything he missed her simple presence. Just being in the same room with her and hearing her talk, listening to her enthusiasm over a book she had read or the taste of a pastry she’d made from a magazine recipe. She was so wide in her interests and so rich in her passions that he felt humble and a little naive. He’d always believed his mother had ruined him for strong, knowing women before she had gone, but he had been wrong. There was something special about Vicky, and now, God help him, now she wouldn’t even see him, wouldn’t even return his calls. She even managed to be out of the office when he made his coffee deliveries to her building.

Gene crossed to the other side of the bridge, went down the embankment and off the main trail, taking the muddy path that snaked through the trees on the north side of the river. He lost thought of her for a few minutes as he worked his way between the puddles and dirty snow patches, making a game of not getting his shoes dirty. He succeeded fairly well until he suddenly heard her voice, as clearly as if she were walking behind him.

“You’re twenty-seven and I’m forty-five. That’s just too much of a difference. I didn’t think it was at first, but then I didn’t think things would go this far. We, I mean I, made a mistake. Let’s just be thankful for what we had and go on.”

This was her phone voice, words she’d told him after finally returning three days’ worth of unanswered messages. She’d shown some concern about their differences in education, but seemed most concerned about their ages. He had thought that it would pass, that she would come to believe how little it mattered to him, but it had blown up in his face.

Gene came to a broad open space, a meadow with a large pond. Even though it was well above freezing, the pond was covered with ice and the ice was littered with branches and large stones. The mountains, the front range of the Rockies, rose up in the distance behind the pond. He walked over to one of the pair of picnic tables along the pond’s east bank and arranged himself so he could look out at the pond and the mountains. The sun was surprisingly low, already prepared to slide behind the mountains and bring on the winter night.

He had only dated her for a month. She had flirted with him mildly for six months, always smiling and polite, never condescending. He had decided finally to ask her out when he sensed that she was attracted to him, that her jokes and banter were ways of extending their brief conversations when he made his weekly stop to service the office coffee station. He knew she’d been surprised at his request that Friday to meet her for a beer after work, too surprised to do anything but laugh and shake her finger and walk away. But then she had somehow managed to get his phone number and had called him and arranged a date, saying she didn’t want any gossip around the office. She’d been that forward, and now she wouldn’t even talk to him.

He tried to think of her arguments, what she’d said that last time, after their last dinner together.

“I’m almost as old as your mother.”

“You’re nothing like my mother. She doesn’t know how to French kiss,” he’d replied.

“It’s not funny. I’ll be going through menopause any time now. Maybe I am right now. Maybe that’s why I’m acting crazy.” She said this with tears in her eyes. “You don’t even know what menopause is.”

“I know what it is. And it doesn’t matter. I’ll help you through it.”

“Oh God, you’re so naive. You don’t know what life does to you.”

“I’m willing to find out.”

“Don’t you see, when you’re my age, I’ll be an old woman. You’ll want someone younger for sure. Even if we lasted that long.” She shook her head slowly, looking right through him. “It just won’t work.”

That was the last time he saw her. She left his car and went into her house and closed the door and then let his phone messages pile up on her machine without answering even one. It was like his mother, leaving him; leaving him and never coming back.

Gene heard the low barking of a dog and turned to see a black mongrel go skittering out onto the ice in pursuit of a bright orange Frisbee. The dog looked like it had Lab in it and was old and shaggy-looking. What surprised Gene was that the person the dog returned the Frisbee to was not some similarly shaggy college student but a short, gray-haired woman. She took the disc from the dog and threw it again. As the dog took off, the woman walked on up the trail that went around the pond from the south side. She had a cane or a walking stick but still moved along at a brisk pace.

When the dog returned with the Frisbee after the second toss, the woman ignored it and the dog fell into place behind her, matching her pace. She marched along, the actions of her stick serving to speed her up in an unexpected way. When she came to a young, barren cottonwood, she took the stick and batted it about the lower branches as if checking the tree’s sturdiness or maybe trying to shake something out. The dog sat down and looked expectantly up into the tree, the chewed-up Frisbee hanging in his mouth.

The woman moved on down the trail. When she was exactly opposite Gene, on the other side of the pond, she stopped again and seemed to be taking in the view of the mountains. The dog sat beside her and dropped the disc. The sun shone above her head and in the far-off distance you could see Long’s Peak. She and the dog stood as still as icons. They might have been praying.

Watching her with her dog, Gene could not help thinking about Vicky, and he would have given anything for her to be there with him, to be able to say to her how lovely she would be in twenty years and how grateful he would be to still be with her. It came to him in a great surge, tears distorting his view while his throat constricted around a huge dry lump.

Gene leaned back against the top of the picnic table and drank the last of his soda. He knew he was feeling overly sentimental; he knew he should just get on with his life. The last swig of soda was warm and sickeningly sweet. He carefully replaced the cap and set the bottle on the bench beside him. He looked up at the blue sky, trying to enjoy the day, the extraordinary warmth, the clear sky, the sense that spring would, after all, eventually arrive. He knew he should be grateful for the day, but it was like a picture in a magazine and his senses were dead to all but a dull perception that he was in the picture.

He heard the jangle of chains and to his right he saw the black dog come trotting up the trail with the Frisbee in his mouth. The dog saw Gene and stopped uncertainly and looked back to where the old woman was emerging from the copse of small, barren cottonwood trees just up the trail. She was moving a little slower now, using the walking stick to probe the way ahead. When the dog appeared sure that she was coming, he resumed his trot, heading straight for Gene.

Gene expected the woman to say something to the dog, to call it back, but she seemed unconcerned. He wasn’t really a dog person, so he was uncertain about what to do when the dog came within a few feet and dropped the Frisbee and looked at him. The Frisbee was faded and worn and had numerous tooth holes in it. Gene wouldn’t have touched it if you’d paid him. The dog stared at him. It had gray in its muzzle and rheumy eyes.

“Nice old guy,” he said. “Nice dog.”

“Stewart is always in the mood to play,” the woman said, close enough now for her strong voice to carry over the fifty yards. “I suppose that is one of the privileges of being a dog: You don’t have to mature and in fact are a more pleasant companion if you retain your puppy qualities.”

Gene nodded, trying to get a line on the way the woman spoke. It almost sounded foreign, it was so graceful and dignified. He saw the careful arrangement of her silver hair and nice coat and tasteful slacks and thought that her voice and diction matched her perfectly. She was beautiful, mature, and playful, all at the same time. Just the way Vicky would be when she was older — he just knew it.

“I guess it’s a nice day to be a puppy,” Gene said. It wasn’t the way he felt, but it sounded right.

“Yes indeed. Stewart and I come here every day and this is indeed a ‘good one,’ ” she said, not really looking at him. She stooped down gingerly, using the stick for support, and picked up the Frisbee. Steadying herself, she gave it a flip up the trail. The dog, Stewart, took out after it, nudging it along with his nose until he was able to get a purchase with his teeth and pick it up. Rather than returning it, he rambled on ahead. The woman continued on too, looking ahead at the dog or something beyond, perhaps the river.

Gene watched her move out of sight, back along the river toward the bridge. The feeling of loss compounded itself in him and he felt himself sinking lower and lower. It just wasn’t fair. He felt only love and it brought him nothing but pain. It wasn’t fair at all. He grabbed the bottle beside him and tried to take a drink. It somehow angered him to find that it was empty, as if someone else had drunk it. Suddenly furious, he threw the bottle high into the air, out over the pond. His arm wasn’t very strong and the bottle didn’t travel far, but still he expected it to break. It angered him more when it merely rang hollowly, bounced twice, and then spun on its side.

He almost ran out onto the pond, but knew the ice was too thin. Instead, he searched for some rocks. The soil was sandy and not frozen, but there were no throwing-size rocks readily visible. He dug about with the toe of his boot and managed to dislodge a few stones the size of a walnut. When he had accumulated nearly a dozen, he set them aside and carefully launched each one at the bottle. He threw as hard as he could, wanting each stone to be deadly and purposeful, to shatter the bottle into a thousand pieces. The shattering of the bottle was important and would prove something, would relieve him of his sorrow and pain. It made sense to him in a way that none of the rest of it did. His arm grew sore before he made it through the dozen rocks. None of his throws so much as threatened the bottle.

He started back home, walking with his head down, trying to imagine the embryos of spring flowers beneath the slimy, mucky mud along the trail. He let his shoes get covered with the brown mud as he continued down the middle of the trail right through the worst part, since he didn’t want to damage any of those flower embryos. It was something like empathy for the flowers, as if he was another unbloomed, frozen thing, imprisoned in a cold place.

He was looking down like that when he saw the thing stuck in the cold ground. At first he thought it might be the tip of an arrow. It was pointed enough to have stuck into the ground, but it came out easily when he reached to retrieve it. He spun it around with his fingertips to see if he could tell what it was. It was gray with oxidation at the top, but was shiny and worn on the very tip. It had a round, cylindrical head with an opening that looked as if something had been inside, because it was not as tarnished as the rest of it. The other head of the cylinder had a spike on the end of it, long and square with a dull, rounded point. It was the tip of something all right, but it was too large to have been on an arrow. He put it in his pocket and continued on.

When he crossed the bridge again and came to the paved part of the trail, he stopped for a minute and used the pointed object to scrape the mud from his shoes. Up ahead, at the parking lot, he saw the woman letting the dog into the backseat of a small blue car. She walked carefully around to the other side, put the walking stick in ahead of her, got into the car herself, and then slowly drove away.

Watching her leave, Gene felt a great hopelessness, as if the old woman’s leaving was symbolic of his never getting back together with Vicky. The hopelessness made his feet stick to the walkway and he had to drag himself toward home. At the door, he fumbled for his keys and came upon the object and suddenly realized what it was. It had to be the end to the woman’s cane. That was what it had to be. And the fact that he had found it when he felt so low and that it came from the beautiful old woman made him realize that he shouldn’t feel so gloomy. This had to be a sign of good luck. He took it as a symbol of hope and resolved that he would try one more time to convince Vicky. He fondled the small hard object and knew he would find a way.

He tried to be cagey about timing his call to her, so he could catch her when she might answer reflexively and not filter the call through her answering machine. He spent the night turning the light beside his bed on and off as he kept thinking of things to tell her, reaching for the message pad on his nightstand to record the thoughts. The minute he put pencil to paper, his thoughts lost their coherence. At five A.M. Gene got up, put on his sweats, and jogged up to the 7-Eleven for a coffee and an apple fritter.

The phone trembled in his hands when he finally decided to dial her number at six-fifteen. She would be getting up to let in her cat and take a shower and might be groggy enough to simply pick up and not think about it. Gene held the notebook in his hand. The flimsy pages trembled and he knew the coffee had been a bad idea. He punched the numbers, all but the last digit. He looked at what he had written and decided it was worthless, decided to let it go. Somehow his finger hit the seven anyway.

It rang only once before she answered in a wholly awake voice that startled him with its cheerfulness. He had expected to have the upper hand, catching her groggy and unalert, but it was he who listened to her say “Hello” three times before he even responded, and then only to grunt out a “Vicky” which sounded as if he was trying to disguise his voice.

“Gene,” she said quickly, amazing him with her instant recognition of his voice.

“I just wanted to see how you’ve been getting along,” he said. “It’s been so long since we’ve spoken.”

“You know, I’m thinking about changing my phone number. I can’t have you leaving all of those messages and tying up my machine.”

“I only want to let you know that I’m thinking about you. There’s nothing sinister about it. You don’t need to change your phone number.”

“Don’t sound so pitiful.”

“I’m not being pitiful.” He knew he had to channel this in another direction. He was losing his edge. “Why do you care so little about how I feel? If I didn’t care so much I wouldn’t call. It doesn’t really matter what you think of me. I’m only concerned about you.”

“Don’t try to make me feel bad about my decision, or I’ll hang up.”

“I’m not trying to make you feel bad. Why are you being so hard?” This had been a bad idea. Everything he said was the wrong thing. He wanted to be angry, but was too desperate to feel angry. “I only wanted to see how you were doing and tell you that I found that lost earring of yours. The jade one that you got from your daughter.”

“You found it? I thought we turned your house inside out. Where was it?”

“It was stuck to a little flap of duct tape on the back of the nightstand. It fell off like we thought, but never made it to the floor. It got stuck on this tape.”

Gene had totally forgotten about the earring until the moment he blurted out about finding it. He knew what the earring meant to her. He should have thought of it earlier. “I wanted to return it and see how you were.”

She was silent for a moment and he knew it was no time to hesitate. “I know that you’d probably prefer I didn’t bring it by your apartment. Would you mind if we met somewhere so I could give it to you? It wouldn’t take but a second.”

“Couldn’t you just leave it at the office?”

“I could, but I’d really like to give it to you personally,” he said, adding quietly, as if as an afterthought, “We could just meet at the park. You know, Martinez Park, down by the river.” They had taken walks there before.

“I really don’t think we should see each other again. I’ve said everything I want to say and there’s no point in rehashing things. Why don’t you just drop it off at the office. Leave it with Marie. She’ll get it to me.”

“Please, Vicky. I don’t want to make a big thing out of this, but it’d be really nice if we could just meet and say hello, and I could give you your earring.” Gene was prepared to say he wouldn’t give it to her any other way, but that would be his last, desperate option. He didn’t want her to know his desperation. He knew that was what frightened her.

“Okay, Gene. But I’m warning you: I’ll only stay long enough to say hello and get the earring back. Not a second longer.”

“Vicky, that’s all I want. Nothing more.”

And now she was walking toward him and Gene knew he should resist the urge to rush over and hug her and kiss her and show her how he felt. Instead, he calmly let her walk over to where he stood waiting on the hill above the playground. The October-like weather of the day before had been replaced by a quick-moving cold front. A thin layer of snow laced the entire area. It was in the thirties, but a brisk wind out of the northwest made it feel much colder.

She had on a pale blue hat of lambswool and matching scarf and mittens. Her hair, the blond of an Aspen tree’s bark with the same silvery streaks, fluttered around her face. She stood without speaking, holding her mittened hands before her. Gene moved toward her, feeling tears leak from his eyes, wind-tears, but it wasn’t the wind at all.

“Hi, Vick,” he said, reaching his arms out to hug her. She stopped just short of him, his gesture dying as his arms slowly fell to his side. “You look great,” he said as he noticed how she self-consciously avoided coming any closer. He sniffed and looked over his shoulder toward the path. “Would you mind a little walk?”

She had on her long coat and as the wind continued to whip around them, she crossed her arms and angled her head at him. “I know you don’t intentionally try to deceive me, but that’s just what you’re doing.” She shook her head, which still held that angle. “I really don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I just don’t think we have anything to talk about.”

Gene smiled, calculating that it would make him look sheepish. “Please. We’ll just go a little way. There’s something I want to show you.”

“I need to get back to work. Would you just return my earring?”

Gene felt the end of the walking stick in his pocket and suddenly wished that he had arranged this all differently. He’d thought she would be more giving if they met face-to-face, but she still seemed to have totally abandoned him. If he could only touch her, maybe that would make the difference. He felt the urge in his hands and his arms, he wanted just to feel her body and he would have some relief, but he resisted.

“I’ll give it to you if that’s all you want, but I don’t think that what I have to say will delay you too much. And there really is something I’d like for you to see. It might explain to you how I really feel.”

She continued to hug herself, letting the wind buffet her about as if she were on the bobbing bow of a ship. She looked at him closely for the first time, and he caught a sense that she was hurting in some way. He suddenly knew that she wouldn’t have agreed to come at all if she hadn’t needed to see him. And she probably wanted to touch him, too. He moved to her and grabbed her hand, even as she pulled away.

“Come on. You’re really going to appreciate this. I know you will.”

Her struggle was meager, but Gene could feel her reluctance as he led her along the trail. The wind was directly in their faces now and they both kept their heads down. There was a stiffness in her hand and she did not return his grip. He knew that she might pull away at any moment. He said nothing until they came to the bridge.

“It’s over by the pond,” he said, lifting his wrist to see his watch and ascertain that it was about the right time. Her hand came up with his and after he glanced at the watch, he kissed her fingers through the mitten, and when he looked at her face, he saw a smile. He thought of a hundred things to say, but knew that none of them would sound right until he had shown her, until she realized what she meant to him.

The trail to the pond, sticky with mud the day before, was now frozen and covered with gritty patches of snow. The precariousness of the footing finally made her grab his hand firmly. As they came out of the trees along the river and into the open area around the pond, the sun abruptly flashed from behind one of the speeding clouds and its warmth momentarily neutralized the sting of the wind. He led her to the picnic table and they sat down. Gene looked around the pond, but did not see the old woman or her dog. She said she came every day, though: She should be by soon.

They still hadn’t spoken. For Gene, her presence, still allowing him to hold her hand, was communication enough. They sat facing each other on the cold wooden slats. He compressed her hands between his.

“There was something, someone, I saw here yesterday that reminded me of you. It gave me such an overpowering feeling, that I just had to tell you about it.” He heard the trembling in his voice, but could not control it. “But I knew you weren’t really interested in talking to me and anyway, it was something you needed to see.”

She turned her head and moved her lips to speak, but no words came out. A few more strands of her hair had come loose and were whipping against her cheek and down to the scarf on her throat. Gene wanted to brush the hair away from her skin, to tuck it away and then to kiss her cheek. He wanted to do this in such a strong way, but again he resisted. She would have to see first. He knew that somehow she was softening toward him, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

“I wish you hadn’t shut me off so completely,” he said, sensing her nervousness. She had pulled her hand away and had brushed the hair from her face, as if she had known that he wanted to do it himself. “You don’t know how much I miss you.”

“I know that you miss me. Sometimes, I miss you too. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re just too different, just too far apart.” She smiled sadly when she said this and Gene saw how much she meant it.

“We’re not really that far apart. Not in years. Not really.”

“It’s not just our ages.”

The sun had gone behind the clouds again and Gene felt the cold eating away at his determination. He looked around but still did not see the old woman. Nothing would change unless Vicky met her. He had to show her and try to re-create for her what he had felt the day before. But maybe the old woman wouldn’t show up. He didn’t know how long he could wait.

“I can change the things you don’t like about me. I can see why you think I’m immature. I know I’m sloppy and don’t eat the right things and watch too much TV. I know these things, but I can change them. I care so much for you that I’m willing to do anything. I want you to know that. Anything.”

She reached out and put her hands in his again. They looked like two puffy blue kittens curling up in hand. The wind-tears came into his eyes again.

“...can’t pretend that I can ignore those things you spoke about as well as the differences in our ages,” she was saying. “I want you to be you and I want to be me. I want a nice calm life with someone I can rely on... to be there when I need him down the road.”

“That’s me, Vicky,” he said, the tears in his voice now. “That’s me.”

“I wish it was,” she said, “I really do.”

“You don’t understand,” he suddenly shouted, standing up, banging his knee on the underside of the picnic table. He turned his back to her, to the wind, and scanned for the old woman again. The trees along the river rocked in the wind, their barren branches looking stiff and frigid and ready to break. The old woman had said that she came for a walk with her dog every day. Maybe the footing was too poor for her. Maybe she had lied.

Vicky stood up beside him. She had her arms wrapped around herself. “I’m getting cold, Gene. And I really need to get back to the office. Could you just let me have the earring? Let’s not get all worked up over what we can’t change.”

Gene had forgotten about the earring. He had forgotten his story. He put his hand in his coat pocket as if the earring might magically be there. Instead, his fingers found the cold metal object, the end to the woman’s cane, and he knew that it was all he had to show Vicky. The woman wasn’t going to come, and his words were futile. This was his last chance.

“I wanted to introduce you to this woman, this old woman I saw yesterday. She reminded me of you.” He had turned to face her. She had her back to the wind, to the pond, and loose strands of her hair were whipping around again. The wind bit at his chafed face. The change came over her face slowly, a hardening of the corners of her mouth that spread up her face, along her cheeks, and to the corners of her eyes, which suddenly glazed over, making him glance at the pond to see if it were now sheeted over with ice, too.

“How could some old woman remind you of me?” she asked in a frigid voice.

“It wasn’t that she was old. That’s not what I meant. It was this combination of things, this joy of life and this dignity.”

“But she was old,” Vicky said, and he knew how hard it was going to be to get her to see. “How old is old? I mean, to qualify as an old woman did she seem to be sixty or seventy or ninety?” She paused and Gene knew just what she was going to say and he was already shaking his head. “Or was she my age?”

“No, no, no. You don’t see. It’s just the opposite of what you think. Just exactly the opposite.” He still had his fingers on the thing. He wondered if he should show her. She was angry and defensive now. Anything might set her off. “She had this dog. I forget his name, but he carried around this Frisbee and she threw it for him and you should have heard her laugh.”

“An old woman with an old dog who reminded you of me.” Now she was shaking her head. “This is why we can’t be together. You claim to be mature but if you were you wouldn’t even mention such things. You wouldn’t go to such pains to point them out. If you’ll just give me my earring, I’ll be going now.”

“I don’t have your earring,” he said, louder than he intended. “I never had your earring. I just wanted to see you, to explain how I felt and somehow it just hasn’t worked out like I planned.”

Now she looked like the ice had totally penetrated her, had even become compressed into something harder and colder than ice, like coal pressed into a diamond. She stood before him like an ice-diamond, beautiful and colder than anything that had ever existed.

“On top of everything else, you lied,” she said and he could barely understand her words, they were so tinny and high and frigid. She turned and started off.

“She had a walking stick, too,” he said, although he knew she wouldn’t hear even if she was listening. “She used it so gracefully, like it was just a part of her. I know that’s how beautiful and graceful you would be and I only wanted to be beside you when it happened.”

She was halfway to those barren cottonwoods along the river when he found that he was moving, too. And he had the end of the walking stick in his hand. He had it in his right hand and his arms were pumping as he took long strides in a jog, coming up on the back of her. When he got close enough, he reached out to stop her, reached out his right hand as if to tap her on the shoulder.

She let out a scream as the edge of the walking stick swished by her head, narrowly missing the whiteness at the back of her neck. He knew what would happen when the pointed object hit her, even as he raised his arm to bring it down again, this time too close to miss. It would not be blood, he knew that, there was no chance for it to be anything as warm and essential as blood. It would be something blue that came out, something blue and frigid that came from a cold heart. Oddly, he missed her again, as she had fallen. He stood over her, the both of them breathing hard, jetting mists of exhausted life into the air.

“You don’t deserve my love,” was all he said. “I met someone yesterday and thought you would be as worthy, but I was wrong.”

He was both kneeling and raising his arm to try again when he saw the dog, the handkerchief around its neck and the Frisbee in its mouth. The old woman was twenty yards back, coming up slowly, a strange grimace on her face. She looked as if she was saying something as she approached, but Gene could hear nothing but his own ragged breathing. He saw her step carefully around a particularly large snow-covered piece of the frozen trail, using the stick, but the bare wooden end of it slipped and he knew he should return the tip, he had it right here in his hand.

Gene tried to stand again, to offer her the end of the walking stick. He was still wondering why she had raised the stick when it cracked against his head, just above his ear. He continued to offer her the object as the blows moved to other parts of his body and he felt the teeth of the dog at his arm. He still thought this was just a simple misunderstanding, even as the stick caught him across the mouth and he tasted his own cold blood.