Each day, Jack walked to the frozen river and found a new set of boot prints stamped up its center. He never saw tracks anywhere else, just in the snow that sat atop the ice. It was January now, and having been at Red Ives alone since October, he’d been considering the possibility that he was losing his mind.

Whoever was making the tracks had to be watching him, he was sure of it. Somewhere out in the forest, ducking behind cedars and pine. Maybe they were creeping around in the woodshed. Maybe that’s where they slept. If not, they must have shelter nearby, some cabin or shack in the surrounding north Idaho mountains. The forest was so thick that it would be easy for something small to go unnoticed. Without shelter, they would have frozen to death by now. The temperature had been dropping below zero at night for the past week, and the snow around the cabin was six feet deep, drifts nearly as high as the cabin roof.

Jack was the winter caretaker at the Red Ives cabin, the furthest reaching outpost of the Forest Service on the St. Joe River. The closest human to him this time of year would be near the town of Avery, forty miles away.

No one had wintered in the Red Ives cabin since the 1980s. The last caretaker died in an accident while removing snow from the cabin roof. This year, the Forest Service decided they’d bring one back. The damage to the cabin had been severe the past several winters.

As caretaker, Jack’s days were monotonous; doing chores, reading, eating, and sleeping. Sometimes, he’d go out and stand on the river bridge for hours, taking in the view of the river valley Red Ives was nestled in, getting lost in his thoughts.

The frozen-over river looked like a desolate, white, unstriped highway snaking its way through the crowding Bitterroot Mountains, which were dense with fir, pine, and cedar. In just a few months spring warmth, rain, and runoff would bring lush, vibrant green to the mountains. Jack’s dad had once told him that during the spring melt the river was known as The Swiftwater. Lethal rapids formed in narrow, rocky, and shadowy canyons, creating swirling eddies that could drag a body below a rock and hold them there for hours or days. The river teemed with trout, bass, and northern pike. The water was raucous, clear, and violent, and had killed countless loggers, railroaders, and tourists over the past couple hundred years since settlers had arrived.

Jack didn’t think settlers was an accurate term, though. The trees and granite and steepness would never allow it to truly be settled, no matter how much they logged, mined, and attempted to flatten it. The river and the mountains had a way of breaking people, particularly those suited to the flat, malleable land and lethargic, muddy rivers east of the Rockies. Only the self-sufficient, or maybe the crazy—those addicted to the pain and suffering and beauty—remained, alongside the repeatedly displaced Coeur d’Alene people, who had been there long before white men attempted to tame and exploit the resources of the area.

Although the river raged during spring and summer, now, in the dead of winter, the St. Joe was at rest on the surface, tucked in by a white, icy blanket, and lined with leaning firs with cracked, gray bark. Color was hard to come by, but each morning, the miniature shadows that danced in the fresh set of boot prints on the river were clear and present.

Ω

It all started on Christmas Eve, a few weeks earlier. That morning, Jack opened his eyes to the gray morning light coming through the window.

The fire had died overnight, making the air in the cabin frigid and stagnant, the rooms seeming wider, hallways longer. After making a new fire he put on his heavy red-checked flannel coat, pulled his frontiersman down to his brow, and walked onto the porch with coffee. The thermometer read negative-two degrees Fahrenheit. Jack’s nose hair froze within seconds, and the skin around his mouth became taut. Steam rose off his coffee as he surveyed the mountains.

A red-breasted bird, about the size of a sparrow, fluttered down and landed on a branch in a sixty-foot Douglas fir that stood in front of the cabin. It was a red-breasted Nuthatch. He watched as it fluttered in and out of the tree, eventually disappearing into the heavy branches altogether.

He finished his coffee and spat off the edge of the porch, leaning over the railing and watching the warmth of his saliva melt into the snow. It left a coffee-colored pockmark in the surface. He lit a cigarette and headed to the woodshed. As he made his way across the snowy lawn he looked at the ridgeline across the river. A heavy, freezing mist intermingled with the pines, and there looked to be a small clearing in one spot along the top. He planned to hike to it, but was waiting for a clear day so he could really capitalize on the vista.

The morning was spent cutting, splitting, and hauling firewood onto the porch. Given he split wood almost every day, often just for exercise and to pass the time, there was more than enough to last him through the winter. He worked feverishly, like he had been taught to as a kid. Work hard and fast, block out any pain or discomfort he felt in his body—or his mind—and lose himself in the labor.

After about four hours of work, early afternoon arrived, and Jack went inside and made a sandwich. Outside it had warmed into the teens, so he decided he’d walk down to the river bridge and eat.

The Forest Service owned the bridge and kept it gated. Horseback riders got permission to use it during the summer to pasture horses on the opposite side of the river. There were stables there, too. The bridge was only wide enough for one vehicle, and it was the last spot to cross the river if you didn’t feel like getting wet. That is, when the river wasn’t frozen.

Jack walked onto the bridge and looked at the mountains that made up the narrow river valley. The Bitterroots weren’t monstrous, no high-alpine peaks like further south in the Sawtooths or Tetons. But they were big enough, and steep, and they were everywhere at once, prairies sparse and small, the valleys narrow. They were dark, the evergreen forests thick with trees and undergrowth. Suffocating. The forest makeup of the Bitterroots resembled the lush central Cascades more than the Rockies they were a part of. They were the type of mountains where hikers and hunters get lost, never to be heard from again.

In his admiration of the mountains he nearly missed the whitetail doe down at the river bank. She caught the corner of his eye, maybe thirty yards out, picking through some dead-looking brush. She was big, standing at about four feet tall at the shoulder. She was alone. Jack thought that was strange, as deer usually moved in small groups, particularly in the winter.

The doe looked up at Jack. Her bushy, white, paintbrush tail stood at attention, and the two locked eyes for several moments before she hopped up the snowy riverbank and bounded toward the tree line.

That’s when he noticed them in his periphery. The boot prints in the snow.

The bridge was about fifteen or twenty feet above the ice of the river below, and with everything white with snow, the tracks were insignificant enough that his eyes had easily passed them over.

He frowned at them. Eventually he shoved the last of his sandwich in his mouth and walked to the far end of the bridge, sliding down the river bank. He heard no creak or groan as he walked across the ice, just the whoosh and crunch of his boots on the snow. He walked carefully nonetheless, listening for any indication of weakness.

The prints went upriver. They were slightly smaller than his. The boot tread was like a splayed, boot-shaped waffle stamped in the snow.

An elk bugled on some nearby ridgeline. The piercing call echoed up and down the river valley. Jack, engrossed in the boot prints, flinched at the sound. He swiveled his head briefly in the direction of the bugle, then looked upriver. He decided to follow the prints.

The snow was knee-deep, and his thighs were burning after less than twenty minutes of trudging. He didn’t notice the burn though, or at least didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he picked up the pace until his legs grew numb. He felt he could keep going for miles. As he went, he continuously scanned the river banks while staying aware of the prints that stretched out before him.

After about 45 minutes of walking something caught his eye. Closer to the east riverbank he noticed a different set of tracks. He walked over and inspected them. The tracks were not human. They were wolf.

Jack’s back straightened and he scanned his surroundings. His right hand listed toward his hip for the Glock 20 he usually carried when venturing from the cabin. It wasn’t there. Caught up in the intrigue of the boot prints he hadn’t gone back for it. All he had was a hunting knife on his opposite hip—a lot of good that would do him.

The pawprints were at least four inches wide. His skin grew tight and he began to sweat under his coat. He looked into the trees above the river bank. The gray and black trunks of cedars and pine created something like a fragmented curtain, obscuring whatever might be out there. He felt watched, tracked, hunted.

Hugging the west river bank, he turned back and headed home, continuously scanning his surroundings, knife in hand. His ears rang as he strained to hear any noise other than his own steps in the muffled snowscape.

As he passed by some brush that reached out over the riverbank, a group of quail flushed out, six pairs of wings beating hard, like several decks of playing cards being shuffled simultaneously. Jack startled, and in the process his boot slipped out from under him. He almost fell backward, overcorrected, and came crashing down on his chest. The ice under him groaned. After laying there a moment he pushed himself up, and when he stood, he noticed a patch of red where he’d planted his right hand. Just then he felt a growing burn in that palm. Somehow the knife had slipped as he’d fallen, and he’d sliced his palm across the blade. He hadn’t noticed it at first; everything had happened so fast. The cut was fairly deep, and almost two inches across. Blood pulsed from it.

He retrieved his knife with his left hand and re-holstered it, then clasped his left palm over his right to block the wound, and kept walking, grimacing every so often as the pain worsened. Once the cabin came into sight, maybe ten minutes before nightfall, he picked up the pace, breaking into a full-blown jog for the last couple-hundred yards. Once he stepped onto the cabin porch, he felt like he could finally breathe again. He looked over his shoulder one last time and went inside.

Later on, after bandaging his palm, he fixed himself dinner. Bacon and eggs.

After dinner Jack stoked the fire. Kneeling in front of the fireplace, he pulled out a cigarette and got the end started in the flames, then stuck the filter in his mouth, inhaling deeply. Even as a regular smoker, that first strong drag still gave him a small head rush. He sat there on his knees for a moment, his eyes closed, until the spins went away.

He went to the writing desk and opened his journal to the first open page; the first two-thirds of the composition notebook was already full of thoughts and reflection. Nearly every night he’d opened the journal to this very page where nothing yet had been written. He would crack the window next to him and sit and smoke Reds, staring at the blank page, or the wall in front of him, and not a single word would come to mind. Eventually, he would flip back to a random page and read.

He took another deep drag of his cigarette and read his sloppy handwriting, another entry from what seemed like another life. A life where he was in love. A life he pushed from his thoughts each day, refusing to think about Clara, refusing to recognize his own pain and regret. But as he read he would sink back into that world, just for those few minutes. Just for a taste of a time when he wasn’t so alone.

Ω

Since Christmas Eve he saw the boot prints in the river nearly every day. Outside of that, his days didn’t change much. He did his chores, cleared snow from the roofs of the buildings, chopped wood, tended fire, ate, drank coffee, smoked, and read. January passed, and now he was a week into February.

It was late morning by the time he made his way out to the bridge, cigarette on his lip. He stopped at the midway point, leaned on the rail, and stared down at the boot prints. The sun was trying to peek through the overcast sky, but wasn’t having much luck. It was a bit warmer than it had been, low twenties, and it had snowed again overnight.

The whitetail doe was back, picking at the dead-looking brush just up from the river’s edge. Over the three weeks since Christmas it had methodically worked a little further upriver with each passing day. It never seemed to notice Jack at first. But once they made eye contact, it would bound away.

He had been attempting to befriend her. He would sprinkle corn the length of the bridge, and the next day, it was always gone. He began working the trail of corn a little closer to the cabin. It was his doe that was eating it, too, because many mornings he saw her from his bedroom window.

Jack would walk out to the bridge, fistful of corn in hand, hoping she was at the river bank. If she was, he’d make a clicking noise with his tongue, like he used to with the horses he rode as a kid. He didn’t know if a deer would respond to that, but figured it was worth a try. He’d shake some corn over the railing, and the doe would watch him, never taking a step in his direction. Eventually she would spring over and through the brush; smooth, easy, and silent, disappearing into the trees.

Today was no different. After another failed attempt to bring her closer, she disappeared into the forest. He decided to finally venture down and take a closer look at what she’d been munching on.

He followed the river’s edge and looked up into the brush. It appeared to be nothing but a web of leafless, spindly branches. But, once he reached the furthest point of her grazing, he noticed the little red berries clinging to the branches. It looked like choke cherry, or maybe serviceberry, but he wasn’t sure. Nonetheless, the further upriver he went, the more berries he saw.

When he returned to the cabin he took a trip around the perimeter to survey the amount of snow on the roof, checking for heavy drifts. After assuring things were in good shape he inspected the garage too, where the four-wheeler, snowcat, and his pickup were parked.

On the side of the garage closest to the cabin, he noticed something. Hidden among some unruly juniper was a lone shrub. It was similar in color and structure to the unkempt juniper, so it blended in pretty easily, but he noticed something unique about it. It was littered with little red berries.

It had evergreen needles, and nestled among them were hundreds of berries. They were similar to those down at the river, but not quite the same. They were about the size of a fattened pea, but structurally, they reminded Jack of an inverted green olive. They had a hole in the end that made the core visible. The core was a greenish-brown, the outside a bright red. It was striking in the stark white of the wintry world around it.

He finished checking the garage roof, then went in and grabbed the bag of corn. He started at the bridge, trailing the corn up through the yard in front of the cabin, directly to his newfound shrub. He figured the doe would have to befriend him now, leading it right to a new source of what was clearly its food of choice—little red berries.

Ω

The next morning Jack had oatmeal and coffee in the kitchen, sitting at the small window-side kitchen table. As he drank and ate, he read Pete Fromm, tales of a winter Pete spent alone in Idaho not terribly far from where Jack was now.

There weren’t many chores to do that day, so he decided to change the oil in his pickup. It didn’t need it; he’d changed it not long before coming to Red Ives. But it was something to keep his hands busy and his mind engaged.

Mid-afternoon he headed back toward the cabin and decided he’d do some reading on the porch before he lost daylight. As he walked by the Douglas fir in the front yard, something caught his eye near the garage, a mound of some sort.

He was still about fifteen yards away when he realized the lump in the snow was the doe. Before he even reached her, he knew she was dead. Not ten feet from her body was the shrub he had led her to. Some of the berries lay around the shrub that had been picked through. Frozen vomit was splayed in the snow around her mouth.

Jack felt a sharp, stinging pain of guilt. Had he poisoned her? He dropped to his knees, took his gloves off, and gently placed his hands on her bloated midsection. Her body still had the smallest semblance of warmth.

Having grown up on a small ranch, Jack had seen countless dead animals. He’d come to terms with death, the circle of life, at a young age. But something was different this time. Some mixture of love and self-hatred balled up in his chest as he knelt over the doe. Gently, he placed a hand over his mouth and shook his head. He could smell the wild of her on his fingers.

Ω

Jack drug her body several hundred yards upriver and burned it not far from the bank using gasoline and firewood. It took several hours, most of it done after nightfall. It was a grim affair, but he had to do it. He didn’t want his blunder to possibly kill some coyote or group of crows that decided to feed on her body.

The stench of the burning carcass and gasoline was almost unbearable, but Jack watched it burn for over an hour. He stared into the fire, his glassy eyes hardly visible between the brim of his frontiersman and the top of the black paisley bandana tied around his face.

“What happened?” The words came from behind Jack, who yelped and spun around. He fumbled for his Glock.

A man stood there. His voice was monotone and hollow, like he’d said the words through a tin can. Jack pointed his gun at the man, who had a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. His face was hardly visible, standing just at the edge of the light being thrown off by the fire.

Jack didn’t know what to say. The man, looking to be in his sixties, just stared with black eyes, a thick and tangled white beard hiding his face. He wore heavy forest-camo winter gear and a trapper-style hat. The man didn’t seem fazed by the gun pointed at him. To Jack, the man’s silent refusal to move or react felt like a challenge.

After a moment, Jack made the realization. “You’re the one who walks the river.” He didn’t say it as a question.

“I am.”

“Why?”

“I’m hunting.”

Jack shifted a little, the gun still aimed at the man’s chest. “What are you hunting?”

“Wolves.”

The wolf hunter looked away. He walked to a few leftover pieces of firewood and fixed a round on its end near the smoldering body of the doe, and sat down. The flames had almost died out, but a rounded heap of red coals lay in a mound that was roughly the shape of the doe’s torso. The man laid down his rifle. Slowly, Jack lowered his gun. He didn’t re-holster it, holding it loosely at his side.

“I’ve never seen you before,” Jack said.

“I hunt at night.”

“Always on foot?”

“Good exercise. Cover about twenty miles a night. Leave home at sundown, get back at sunrise. Sleep most the day.”

“I’ve been up here since October.” Jack shifted his feet.

“I know.”

“I’ve never heard a shot.”

The wolf hunter lifted his rifle to show the barrel. A silencer was affixed to the end of it.

“Why do you use a silencer?” Jack asked.

The wolf hunter gave Jack a sideways look, smiled, and shook his head as if he’d just told himself a joke. “Wolf pelts are real beautiful, you know? Somethin’ about ’em. People like ’em. Willing to pay.” He removed his hat, displaying the gray fur on the inside of it. “Hell, I like ’em.”

“Do you eat the meat?”

“No.” The hunter scoffed. “Wolf tastes like shit. Rancid. I either let the buzzards pick ’em,” a smile formed as he motioned toward the bed of coals, “or I do what you’re doing.”

“This was different.”

“Mhm.” He stared at Jack.

“Have you hit your allotment?”

The man gave Jack another sideways look.

Jack knew the hunting allotment for wolves to be thirty per year in Idaho. It was a number he thought was too high, and people were pushing to increase it. The governor supported a proposed law that would allow people to kill an unlimited number of them. They’d be endangered again in no time, deer and elk populations would explode, and prairies around the state would go to shit. People never seemed to learn. Or in the case of this man, didn’t seem to care.

A group of coyotes somewhere upriver broke into song. It began with a few solitary yips that seemed to crack the stillness and silence of the frigid air. It grew into a panicked, caterwauling frenzy. After about thirty seconds there was a crescendo; then, in a breath’s time, the night fell utterly silent again.

“Let me ask you a question.” The hunter removed his gloves. “You ever been totally transfixed, captivated by somethin’? Like…a booze hound, or a dope fiend, or a sex addict is?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Sure.” The wolf hunter glanced at Jack, then began to pick at his nails. “That’s kinda how them pelts are for me. Can’t explain it. Out in the woods, trackin’ ’em…once I get a one’a them monsters in my sights, right before I pull the trigger…I can taste it.”

Jack frowned.

“Not wolf meat.” He curled his nose and waved his hand through the air. “But you know…you know how when you’re about to eat somethin’, somethin’ you know is gonna be tasty, and your jaw gets all set, and you get that taste, not the flavor of whatever food, but some other taste, this taste back in the corners of your mouth.” He tapped his finger against his lower left cheek where his jaw hinged. “A taste you can’t quite name.” He looked at Jack with a knowing smile, his eyes narrowed. “You know what taste I’m talking about. Every man does.”

Jack said nothing. The wolf hunter warmed his hands over the bed of coals. The smell of the gas and carcass didn’t seem to bother him. Then his face hardened, and his black eyes set upon Jack in a challenging way. “I got a right to ’em.” The words came out heavy and sullen.

The cold of the night was beginning to shrink the reach of the fire’s heat.

“Do you live nearby?” Jack asked. He wanted the man to leave, but he also wanted to know more about him, for his own peace of mind.

The wolf hunter gave him a wary look, and nodded, almost indecipherably.

“Family?”

“I live alone,” the wolf hunter said, then changed the subject. “So what happened?” He motioned toward the bed of coals before spitting into them.

“She got poisoned. Burned her so the scavengers didn’t get poisoned too.”

The hunter looked at him for a moment with a barely visible smile. Not a friendly smile. It was a look of condescension. He looked back to the coals.

“Your tracks always go upriver,” Jack said.

“Walk upriver to start, easier moving. Gets my old legs warmed up. Take a different trip back each night through the woods. Look for dens. Keep an eye out for tracks and their kills.”

Jack said nothing.

The wolf hunter stood and put just his left glove back on, leaving his right hand bare, and slung his rifle over his shoulder. “I better kick rocks.”

He walked up to Jack, leaving maybe two feet between them.

“Stay safe.” The wolf hunter held up his bare right hand, not breaking eye contact, not blinking. Jack left his leather glove on and shook the hunter’s wrinkled, naked hand. The hunter left, returning to the ice, and continued up the Joe.

Jack hurried to the warmth of the cabin, the security of its walls.

Ω

He skipped dinner and pored through the literature available in the cabin, anything that had to do with vegetation. He knew the doe’s death had to have something to do with the shrub, the berries. Thoughts of the wolf hunter occasionally crept into his mind. He walked about the cabin and closed all the drapes.

After several hours of research, deep into the night, he found it. It was in a Forest Service document detailing invasive species in Idaho.

The bush he’d led the doe to was an English Yew. It was an invasive species. People planted them for aesthetic reasons, but they were toxic to some species native to the northwest. In 2016, fifty antelope died in south Idaho from eating the berries of a Japanese Yew, another invasive version of the shrub. A photo showed at least twenty dead pronghorns lying in the snow somewhere outside Boise. The berries confused the animals because they looked so similar to the Pacific Yew, native to the northwest and a staple of the winter diet for deer, elk, bear, and antelope. The toxin from the non-native berries attacked the heart, and the doe had died of cardiac failure.

Jack put the paper down and rubbed his eyes. He wondered how the shrub had gotten there. Maybe it had been planted by mistake, or maybe whatever nursery it came from had a mix up. Or maybe a seed had somehow been transported from somewhere else, by people or wildlife, taking root by dumb luck in that flower bed.

He tried to light a cigarette, but his hands were shaking, and eventually he gave up. He walked to the writing desk, opening it to the blank page. After staring at it for a while he opened the desk drawer and pulled out a small felt baggie. He removed a jewelry box from the back, took a deep breath, and cracked the box open. The engagement ring stared back at him like a cyclops, a lone, modest diamond for an eye.

He snapped the box shut, stuffing it back in the desk drawer. In the dancing fireplace-light of the Red Ives cabin, he closed the journal and leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling.

Ω

For the next several days Jack seemed to be caught in something of a daze. He went through the motions, did his chores, and would often spend a good portion of each day away from the cabin. He began walking to the horse pasture and stables each day. Sometimes he would sit in the old matted hay in a stall and read. In the evenings he’d smoke on the porch and watch for the wolf hunter to pass by on the river. He never saw him.

One day it was snowing softly outside; steady, with no breeze. Around mid-morning Jack crossed the river bridge. He stopped on the bridge for a moment to survey the river, the ridgelines. There was no fog, and the clouds that hung over the valley sat higher than the mountaintops, the lightly falling snow the only visual obstruction of the ridgelines. It was quiet. The only sound was the snow stacking up around him, like faint white noise from a record player. The clouds were soft and bulbous, with deep gray shadows, the texture possessing a darkened marshmallow quality.

He noticed that his heart was beating faster, and his chest felt a little tight. Then he recognized a strange pang of guilt. Some distant part of him told him he wasn’t worthy of witnessing something so beautiful, so perfect. He felt stupid just thinking that, but that was what some part of his mind was telling him. He shook his head and started walking, fixing his eyes on the horse stables.

When he got to the stables he looked at the stalls he’d been camping out in the past few days. He decided he’d clean the stables. He felt like he needed to work, be productive, do something. He needed to regain some control, some agency over the monotony. The blinding loneliness of the cold, dark winter was sinking into his bones.

The stalls hadn’t been cleaned at the end of the past season. The hay was matted and no good; it all needed to be replaced before horses were brought back in the spring. Clearing the old hay from the stalls wasn’t his job, but he decided to do it anyway. He removed every last straw and attempted to rake the dirt floors, which proved to be impossible with the frozen ground. He washed the walls with a hard-wire brush and a bucket of soapy water that he continually fished newly-formed ice chunks from. On one particular wall there was a shit stain that wouldn’t come off.

He went over the stain two, three, four times. The longer he worked at it, the more frustrated he became. His ears grew hot and his chest tightened. He called the stain a motherfucker and a son-of-a bitch and any other name he could think of and scrubbed madly, almost in a panic, as if someone would be there soon to check on his work, and if he weren’t done by the time they arrived he might receive a beating. When he finally gave up, he hurled the scrub brush into the wall.

After staring at it for a few moments he shook his head and picked up the brush, dropping it into his bucket of dirty suds. He wondered if there was paint in the garage. He’d check that evening.

When he went to exit the stall he reached for the door and placed his hand on a desiccated salt lick. He stopped and looked at it. He removed his insulated leather glove, exposing his hand to the frigid air, and touched the lick, rolling it on the rope, feeling the coarse and uneven texture catching on his calloused palms. It needed to be replaced.

As he held the lick—his hand growing numb the longer it was exposed to the cold—he scratched at it, bits of it flaking to the ground. It reminded him of when he was a kid, tasting the salt licks in the barn for no particular reason. He brought it up close to his mouth, paused for a moment, then tongued it lightly. It tasted like nothing. He dropped it. It clattered against the wood of the gate. He looked behind him, half expecting the wolf hunter to be standing there, that smirk on his face.

He was alone.

Ω

Potatoes and bacon for dinner, and a post-dinner cigarette on the porch. It was a moonless night and the sky had cleared, the clouds from earlier in the day having moved east toward Missoula. The air was so cold it stung his skin. He eyed the starlit river valley, waiting to see the wolf hunter, but he never did. A wind had picked up and whistled in a way it only can during winter, after autumn has stripped the cottonwoods naked and the buckbrush is buried in snow. It reminded Jack of early springtime in Wallula—where he used to live with Clara—when the Russian olive trees and cattails are still leafless, the wind whistling across the cold and gray prairie, slicing through bunchgrass and sagebrush. He hated it. He didn’t even bother to finish his cigarette, he couldn’t stand to listen to it any longer.

Jack had an unopened bottle of rye stashed in the writing desk. He’d been saving it, although he wasn’t sure what exactly he was saving it for. Something about the wind gave him a thirst for it. He grabbed a mustard glass from the kitchen and drank it straight and warm.

Music. He needed music. He found a stash of cassette tapes and popped a John Anderson album into the circa-1980s boombox in the kitchen. He drank and smoked and listened to “Black Sheep” and “She Just Started Liking Cheatin’ Songs” and some other songs at the kitchen table. Before he knew it, the bottle was over half empty.

Eventually, he stumbled out to the writing desk as “Seminole Wind” played in the kitchen, and stared at the blank page for a while before flipping back just one page. He lit another cigarette and poured more whiskey. He read the last entry he’d made, an entry from six months ago.

It was from the night Clara told him he made her feel bad about herself. That he was too critical. That he made her feel controlled and unhappy. That she didn’t love him anymore. The night she told him she’d met someone new, and that he made her feel good, made her feel happy. The night she said she was leaving.

There were some small smears of blood on the page. He remembered after she left that night he’d gotten drunk and punched a wall.

After he finished reading he slapped the journal shut and threw it in the direction of the fire like a frisbee. It splayed open as it flew across the room and hit just above the fireplace, falling safely onto the hearth.

His eyes welled with tears and the rye warmed his cheeks. He tried to block the thoughts of her, but it was out of his control. The booze had opened a lethal treasure chest. He could smell her hair, right there in his memory. Sweet and earthy, the aroma of the slough still in it after slogging through the marshes all day studying coots or mallards at her job at McNary Wildlife Preserve.

At that moment, Jack knew that he was alone in the most absolute way. He wanted to cry more, but the tears stopped. His chest grew tight, like a balloon was inflating behind his sternum. His hands grew numb and tingly. His head ached.

“I’m done.” He stood. He threw his hands in the air, tears running down his cheeks. “I’m done.” He took off his clothes, his movements sloppy and unhinged.

In just his underwear, he walked out into the freezing night, into the whistling wind that made him want to bash his ears with closed fists. The sky was clear, the stars magnificent. The Milky Way was a thickened cloud of stars swooning over the river valley.

Jack made his way down to the river, his bare feet and legs sinking shin-deep into the snow. The cold sent bolts of searing pain up through his legs. He ignored the pain best he could. His nipples hardened, his skin tightened, and his shoulders reached up toward his ears. Soon, his feet bled from the thousands of tiny ice cuts, a growing dab of blood in each footprint he left. Once he reached the middle of the St. Joe he walked upriver. The feeling in his feet and legs was almost gone now.

After walking for a while he stopped and stared into the sky. The moon was hidden, blocked out by the world. He thought of the moon circling the earth, staring at the sun, hurrying to get back around to the other side each night, just to feel its warmth again. Jack figured the moon must be lonely and bitter.

He found it. An orb of blackness, nearly invisible. The moon, caught in earth’s shadow.

He heard a crunch of snow behind him. When he turned he nearly fell, his whiskey-impaired balance nearly betraying him. He looked up and saw the wolf hunter was approaching, along his usual route up the river, rifle slung over his shoulder.

He was about fifteen feet away and moving closer.

“What?!” Jack threw his hands in the air. “What?” He said it again, although with less gusto this time. Eventually he pulled his arms in against his midsection. His entire body was shivering.

The wolf hunter didn’t slow at all as he came upon Jack, who began to back-pedal, nearly falling, and stepped to the left at the last moment. The hunter didn’t change course at all, cutting close enough to Jack for his sleeve to brush against Jack’s bare arm, continuing upriver. He would have walked right through him if he hadn’t moved to the side.

With bloody feet and fingers that Jack could no longer feel, he hugged himself and rubbed the outsides of his arms, trying to warm up. The pain was excruciating, his whole body vibrating.

He took a deep, rattling breath as he watched the wolf hunter walk away. What am I doing? Thoughts of his mom, his dad, his sisters, his best friend floated through his mind. What the fuck am I doing?

He turned around, still caught in his own embrace, and stumbled his way back to the warmth of the cabin. When he got there he wrapped himself in blankets and went to the fireplace. He stared at the journal for a moment, picked it up, and tossed it in. When the pages caught they burned brightly, streamers of smoke simultaneously lifting from the binding, sinewy and black. He felt a fleeting urge to reach in and pull it from the flames. Instead, he laid down on the hearth, a couple of feet from the fire, and watched the pages burn.

Ω

A few days passed, and in that time a blizzard passed through. The morning following the storm the brightest sunshine Jack had seen since early December radiated through his bedroom window. He sat up and blinked against the unfamiliar brightness. He glanced at the calendar tacked to the wall, seeing it was March 1^st. His beard itched. He rubbed his face and fingered the tangle of wiry hair. It felt strange and unfamiliar, like his face wasn’t his own. He decided a shave was in order.

He stood and walked to the window, surveying the bright world outside. The sunshine made him want to walk all day. He decided he’d hike to that clearing on the ridge. He shaved, got dressed, and found his snowshoes.

When he exited the cabin the air was a biting cold, the sky cloudless and clear. The smell of the light breeze carried no scent, neither the life of spring nor the rot of autumn. The lack of fragrance seemed to sharpen the contrast between the cornflower sky and whited-out ridgelines. The day was a bluebird, as the skiers would call it. The sun reflected off of everything and his eyes began to hurt. He went back inside and found his sunglasses, a pair of classic black Ray-Bans.

As he snowshoed through the fresh powder toward the river bridge, he noticed a group of seven elk, two of them bulls with monstrous racks, shuffling through the horse pasture. He watched them until they disappeared into the trees, then he crossed the bridge, continued to the tree line, and entered the forest where the doe normally had. Even with more than four feet of new snowfall, the game trail was there, a clear valley in the powder. Judging by the fresh sets of hoofprints, the sunshine had brought the deer out of their hiding spots as well.

The forest, mostly made up of pine and cedar on this mountainside, was thick, and the trail was steep. Sunlight slithered through the tree canopy wherever it could. When Jack looked up through the trees it was like looking into an evergreen kaleidoscope.

It took a few hours, but eventually he reached the clearing. There was a rock there, as if it were placed just for him to sit on. He brushed away some of the snow and settled down atop it, gazing into the distance. The Mallard Larkins Pioneer area was below him, and the Bitterroots sprawled in all directions. The air may have been the clearest it would be all year. There were no clouds, no haze, no fog, just brilliant blue sky and miles of snow-buried mountains. Jack didn’t believe in God, but he understood now why the movies so often pictured them standing upon a snowy mountain on a sunny day.

That feeling he’d gotten once before returned, the one he’d had that day on the river bridge, that he was unworthy of appreciating something so beautiful. As if he were being indulgent. He didn’t understand this feeling, but it made another part of him feel shame, made him want to look away.

He reached in his coat and pulled out a cigarette. He stuck the filter in his mouth and flicked his Bic. Just as he was about to light it a gust came up, putting out the flame. He was about to snap the lighter to life again, but then he stopped, pulled the cigarette from his mouth, and stared at it. He was feeling a taste he couldn’t describe, back where his jaw hinged. He felt saliva collecting back there.

Jack closed his fingers around the cigarette and squeezed, grinding his hand into a balled-up fist, the paper and tobacco coming apart in his cold, bare palm. He released it all into the wind and lifted his gaze, taking in the vista, the mountains, all of it. He didn’t know exactly how long he stayed that way, as time seemed to dissipate.

At some point, almost as if he were waking from a sleep, he noticed that the sun had moved. It had been straight out ahead of him on the southern horizon, but now it was quite a ways to his right, toward the west, and looked to have maybe another hour before it sluffed off the edge of the world.

He decided it was time to go. After taking one last look he headed back down the trail. It was steep, so he practically slid down some of the hillsides. The spikes on the snowshoes would catch, and he’d fall, then he’d get back up and do it again. He stopped and rested once, standing in the woods, feeling the quiet closeness of the trees. Then he was off again, run-sliding down the trail. He laughed for the first time in what felt like years. It felt strange and euphoric. He broke a light sweat under his coat. He left no clear prints in the trail.

Dusk was falling as Jack arrived at the cabin. As he approached he thought of the roof. He realized he hadn’t checked it before leaving that morning. He’d gotten too caught up in the sunshine, the hike, and hadn’t even thought about snowdrifts.

The front side looked alright, the trees in the front yard shielding much of it. But the back side was a different story. The drifts were several feet tall, plenty enough to do damage. He unbuckled his snowshoes, tossing them on the porch, then made his way to the garage to get the ladder and snow rake. He waded through thigh-deep drifts.

Why did you take your damn snowshoes off? It was a stupid mistake. He had only been thinking about climbing the ladder. Eventually he got to the garage, grabbed what he needed, then started back. He felt a twinge of panic. It was getting darker and colder, probably in the single digits, and he had to clear a few hundred pounds of snow from a steep roof.

Then he fell, trying to walk too fast through a four-foot-deep drift. Since he was dragging the ladder and rake he landed on his face. His freshly-shaved cheeks felt rug-burned. Sweat ran into his eye, stinging and blurring his vision.

He got up, kept going. He was almost there, and he shifted his grip on the wooden ladder, then felt a searing pain in his palm, the one he’d cut back in December. He yelled and dropped what he was holding. There was a two inch splinter in his palm, and it had opened up the still-healing scar. Hot blood pulsed from it. He cussed and picked his things up and walked the rest of the way. When he got to the edge of the roof he propped the ladder up against the snow that shrouded the eave. He rested a moment and looked at his hand. He grabbed hold of the end of the splinter and pulled it out, the skin pulling tight, the pain a flash of heat. More blood came, making his palm warm and slick. He looked back at the trail he’d left in the snow, noticing the dark red drip-drip-drip that appeared toward the end of it.

He turned back to the roof, grabbed the rake, and tossed it up. The snow groaned as the rake made impact, but he didn’t notice a shift.

Daylight was nearly washed from the sky overhead. It was a deep blue, stars just beginning to poke through. Jack took hold of the ladder with his bloody right hand, set his boot on the bottom rung, and ascended.