第14章 Restored Cache

She came back to the cabin from the snares on a morning in the last week of January to find her woodpile restocked, and she stood in front of it with a hare in her hand and looked at it the way she would look at a fault in an engine, carefully, and without the comfort of a name for it. The pile had been cut, and cut well. Two days of spruce and birch, split to the size that fits a barrel stove's door and no larger, stacked the way a person stacks who intends the pile to shed rain off its own back, the bark up and the ends to the weather, all of it under the eave in a row longer than the row she had built herself. The saw hung on its nail. Her hatchet was where she had left it, on the bench, the handle to the door. Nothing was missing. Everything was more. She checked the snow for tracks and there were none, because it had snowed in the night, and the wind had moved the snow along the ground as it always did, and a valley that covers a set of tracks as a matter of course is a valley that will never tell you anything you have not seen with your own eyes. She checked the stumps where the wood had come from and found them two hundred meters up the slope, cut low and flat and clean, in a grove of dead standing spruce she had not noticed and would have noticed if she had walked that slope. She checked everything and she found nothing and she sat down on the bench with the hare and laughed, one short bark of a laugh, the first time she had laughed since October, and she did not entirely know why she was laughing and she stopped before she found out. That night she left a note. She had no paper to spare but she had the back of the map envelope and she tore a corner of it and she wrote on it in pencil, small. You can read this or you cannot. The wood is a thing I needed and I am not going to pretend I did not need it. There are two whitefish on the flat stone at the trailhead. If you took the fish, I would know you are a person. If you left the fish, I would know you are not hungry. I will not follow you. I will not look for you. I will be at the claim cabin all winter and I will leave something there every week whether you take it or not. She put the note under the flat stone with the fish and she went to bed and she lay for a long time listening, and the cabin creaked with the cold and the stove ticked, and in the middle of the night she heard footsteps in the snow outside, slow and unhurried and spaced like a person's, once around the cabin, the full circle, and then away, and she lay in the bunk with the hatchet in her hand and her heart going and she did not get up, because to get up would be to open the door and to open the door would be to end the only arrangement she had left. In the morning the fish were gone and the note was gone and the footsteps were not there. The snow in front of the door was smooth and clean and unbroken all the way to the spruce, and there were three hares in the snares she had set the night before, and one of the three had been killed with a stone. She sat with that for a long time, because a stone was not a snare and a stone was a hand and a hand was a person, and a person who killed a hare with a stone at forty below was a person who was very good at this, and had been at it a long time, and had decided, at last, to answer her. After that the arrangement had a shape. She left the fish and she took the wood and she did not see him and she did not try. She set snares and some of them came up killed with a stone and some with wire and she could not always tell whether the wire had been hers or his. She left the fish and every third or fourth day she would come back to the flat stone and find it changed, and the change was always the same kind of change: a thing she needed, given quietly, and taken away again without a word. A coil of wire she had not made. A bundle of spruce roots, cleaned and split for lashing. A small tin of rendered fat, brown and clean and labeled in a hand that was not hers with two letters she did not understand. And once, on a morning in the first week of February, hanging from the nail above the bench where the number four trap had hung since the cabin was built, a hand-knitted mitten, grey wool, the right size for her, one of a pair, with its mate not there. She wore the mitten. She wore it on the left hand, the one with the two fingers that no longer worked right, and she wore it every day for the rest of the winter, and it was warm, and it fit, and she never once found out where it came from and she never once saw the other one and she had been in this valley long enough to understand that both of those facts were, in their own way, the point. The doubt came with the gift, the way it always did. She was a pilot and she dealt in instruments, and her instrument said that a person in this valley who wanted her dead had had a hundred chances and had not taken one, and that a person who wanted her to live had done more for her than she had ever asked, and that a person who wanted her to live and would not show his face was a person with a reason, and the reason was probably that he knew something about this valley she did not, or something about people, or something about himself. And her other instrument, the one that lived in the back of her head and had been reading the log for weeks, said the other possible thing, which she wrote down once and never wrote again because the words frightened her. The words were these. There is no one here. There is the cold and the cabin and the fish and the wood and me, and I have been alone in the dark of a valley for a hundred days, and a woman alone in the dark can make a knot she does not remember tying and cut a woodpile she does not remember cutting and leave a mitten for herself and find it hanging where she left it, and never once catch herself at it, because the thing that catches you is the same thing that is doing it, and it is tired. She read that back and she crossed it out with three hard lines and she wrote under it: No. She wrote under it: The knot. And then she closed the log and banked the stove and went to bed, and she did not sleep, and the valley did not sleep either, and somewhere far up the ridge the wind worked its way through the trees and made a sound like a door opening slowly, and she lay and listened to it and thought about the other mitten, wherever it was, and about who, in all that white and all that dark, had knitted a pair. ---