It was a still day, and clear, the sun well into its daily twenty-hour journey around the summer horizon. The spruce were thick here, but they were dying from the spruce bark beetle infestation, too, which meant a lot of them had fallen over, or tried to. It didn‘t make the going any easier, and the third time they‘d had to get down on their hands and knees to crawl beneath a horizontal trunk there was increasing skepticism displayed concerning Mutt‘s trailing abilities.

Just don‘t let her hear you say that, Kate said.

Yeah, but who works this hard to off themselves? Luke said.

Yeah, what‘s wrong with a nice little bullet to the head? Mark said. Yeah, and you realize we‘re going to have to pack this fucker out when we find him, Peter said.

Maybe he‘ll be able to walk, Matt said, without much conviction.

Could be worse, Kate said. At least it‘s too early for mosquitoes.

But they were all thinking about that gunshot Kate thought she‘d heard. The going was rough and got rougher. They stumbled through patches of ice and snow that the shade from the forest had hidden from the sun. The rest of the time the surface beneath their feet ranged from bare, frozen ground to wet moss. Everyone‘s jeans were soaked to the knees, and Matt, who had a particularly fine head of hair, had lost some of it to clawing spruce limbs. More comments were made, most of them profane.

Kate, the smallest of them and therefore the quickest through the underbrush, said, Jeez, what a bunch of whiners. You‘d think you guys had never been hunting in your lives.

Mutt, who had been appearing and disappearing in front of Kate for the last hour, rematerialized to nip at the cuff of Kate‘s jeans. She turned, looked over her shoulder, gave a peremptory bark, leaped over a fallen tree, and vanished again. Kate clambered over the same trunk and was suddenly and blessedly in a large clearing on the south-facing slope of a small hill. She stood there blinking in the bright sunshine, breathing in deep gulps of cool, clean air. She felt as if she had just emerged from a long, underwater swim.

She looked around for Mutt, spotting her at the top of the clearing, fifty feet away. Mutt was dancing impatiently in place, giving out an occasional imperative yip. At her feet was a haphazard pile of dead brush and leaves lumped together over something else, at which Kate was instantly certain no one was going to want to take a closer look.

The five men thrashed their way out of the brush and came to a stop behind her. Oh man, Matt said, spotting Mutt immediately. I was really hoping . . . Yeah, me, too, Mark said.

Something caught the edge of Kate‘s vision and she looked around, scanning the edge of the clearing. At almost the same moment something large started thrashing through the bush about halfway between them and Mutt.