Chapter 9 Tracks That Ring

She stood in the doorway with the cold coming in around her like water around a stone and she looked at the tracks for a long time before she moved, because looking was the first thing and moving was the second, and a woman who did them in the other order gave away information she could not get back. The tracks came out of the spruce on the east side of the clearing, walking, not running, with the even spacing of a thing that had somewhere to be and plenty of time to get there. They crossed the open ground in a straight line, and the line pointed at the cabin door the way a compass needle points at north, and three meters short of the door the tracks stopped. Not turned. Not veered. Stopped, the way a bird stops in the air, and beyond that third track the snow was unbroken all the way to the wall and around it and away on every side, a page with one sentence written on it and then nothing. She went out with the hatchet in her belt and knelt over the last print and put her fingers beside it without touching it and did not learn from it what she wanted to learn. The snow had come wet and gone hard, and the original shape of whatever had made it was a suggestion under a skin of ice. It was long. It was narrower at one end than the other and wider than her own boot. The stride from print to print was longer than her stride by a hand's length. She could tell herself it was a moose, because a moose walks with a stride like that and there were willow flats up the creek where a moose would winter. She could tell herself it was a wolverine, because a wolverine covers ground like it is being chased by the end of the world. But a moose does not walk up to a door and stop, and a wolverine does not walk. People walk. She followed the line back into the spruce and lost it within twenty meters, because the ground under the trees was a mess of old snow and new and the light there was the color of a bruise and the trail went to ground the way trails do when the wind in the branches scours the surface clean. She quartered the stand of trees for an hour, widening her search, reading the snow the way she read a chart, and what she found at the far edge of the spruce was one more print, softer than the others, set in a drift and already half erased, pointing north, up the valley, toward the claim. She did not follow it. She stood at the edge of the trees with the print at her feet and the cabin at her back and the sun going down behind the Wahtuk in the way it had begun to go down, low and fast and without argument, and she made a decision that a part of her disliked. She went back to the cabin. She barred the door. She put the rifle—which she did not have, which she had never had, which she had thought about every day since the crash—she put her hand on the hatchet instead, and she sat up most of the night with the stove ticking and the wind working the spruce, and she listened. Nothing came. That was the thing she could not make peace with. Nothing came, and nothing happened, and the valley went on being the valley, and a set of tracks that walked to her door and stopped was a fact with no story attached to it, and the wanting of a story was her own problem and no one else's. --- Two days later the snares told her a second fact. She checked the line every morning, forty snares on the hare highways, and she knew each one the way a mechanic knows the bolts on an engine, by position and by the small story of its wire. The snare on the birch run above the creek, number eleven in her counting, was not the way she had left it. The wire had been cut. Not chewed and not broken; cut, clean and straight at the loop's throat, as if with a blade. And the stub that remained had been retied to the stake with a knot she did not use. She knelt in the snow with the cut wire in her fingers and worked the knot with her thumb the way she would work a property of an aircraft she did not trust. It was a figure eight, a knot for a rope under load, turned through its own loop and drawn tight, and it was a good knot. It was a better knot than the one she tied. It was the knot a person ties who has been shown how, and shown well, and has tied it ten thousand times, and she had never tied it once in her life. She checked the rest of the line. Nothing else was touched, not a wire, not a catch. Just the one snare, cut and retied, and left empty, as if the message was the knot and not the hare. She crouched in the cold for a while and let herself think it through, because thinking it through was the only tool she had. A marten would have chewed the wire. A fox would have taken the hare and left the loop a mess. The cut was clean and the retie was deliberate and a deliberate hand was a hand, and if there was a hand in this valley then it was attached to a person, and if there was a person in this valley then there was a person who had been in it long enough to find her line, and who did not want to be seen, and who had left behind a knot and, walking away, nothing else. There were other explanations and she built them one at a time and took them apart. She was tired, and a tired mind sees patterns. The wire could have failed on its own and the cold could have done the rest. The tracks could have been a moose and the moose could have stopped and the snow could have lied. But the knot could not be explained by any of that, and the knot sat in her hand and would not go away, and a knot was a decision somebody had made. She went back to the cabin and she took the rifle that did not exist and she put it out of her mind and she sat at the bench and wrote in the log, in the plainest hand she had, the only sentence she could stand behind. Eleven cut and retied, she wrote. Tracks to door on the 4th. No one seen. Continue line but set no more near the cabin. Then she sat back and looked at the words and understood, with a clarity that was almost a comfort, the difference between fear and information, which was a thing she had learned in a cockpit a long time ago and was learning again in a colder room. Fear was a weather. Fear filled the whole window and told her nothing about what was outside it. Information was a direction and a distance and a time, and what she had was information, whatever her neck had to say about it. Something was in this valley. It had not hurt her. It had, in its way, announced itself, twice now, the way a careful person does when they want to be known as careful. And a careful person who walked to your door and stopped was a person who had looked at you and decided, this time, not to knock. She banked the stove for the night and lay down in the dark with the hatchet on the bunk beside her, and the last thought she had before she slept was the one she could not shake, and she turned it over and over the way a person turns a stone to find the cold side. Whoever it was had been walking in this valley in these temperatures, and had cut one of her snares and tied it back with a knot she had never learned and gone away into the spruce without a light and without a track. And that took a body either hard as iron or wearing more than she had, which meant that somewhere out there, in a valley she had believed was empty, there was shelter she had not found. ---