Why did I even stop at his house? I could say I’d done it for Mariëtte Chamberlain. But really, I was indulging my twin vices: curiosity and arrogance. Bruce Jewett, meanwhile, had leveraged my intellectual conceit against me. He sent me on a fool’s errand up Pill Hill while he laid his steel traps below.

If I am going to survive the night, I will need to dig into my small store of humility.

I have to assume, for instance, that despite my self-assurances, my fire is visible. I have to acknowledge that in staying put I am making myself an easy target. I have to admit that I am facing a human predator who may be smarter, stronger, and more ruthless than I am.

I push through the firs into the circle of light. When forced to travel, the hunter-gatherers of the Pleistocene used to carry hot coals in the horns of aurochs. It’s far easier to bring a fire with you than to make a new one in the dark and wet. I scrounge around until I find a rust-bitten can that once contained Maxwell House Coffee. It will serve me as a bull’s horn.

Suddenly Shadow lifts his chin from his paws. His ears go up. He stares past me toward the firs along the river.

Then he bolts.

A split second later comes the gunshot.

I throw myself onto the snow.

The shack starts splintering as bullets rip apart the plywood boards. Again my body reacts without any conscious direction from my brain. Leaving behind the dropped can of embers, I begin to crawl into the trees.

Bullets rip into the flaming logs, raising sparks. The shots are coming so quickly I don’t know if it’s a single shooter with an automatic weapon or multiple shooters with semi-automatic weapons. I have to fight the urge to stand and run. I keep squirming forward on elbows and knees: making myself a low target.

Somehow I find myself among the roots of an ancient oak. Bullets bury themselves in its massive trunk. Ahead of me is the unexplored forest, infinitely dark. I keep crawling.

14

The river road took me through the dead man’s orchard. Between the rows of twisted trees were frozen white paths, wide enough for a tractor to pass, and there were tracks in the snow where a heavy machine had been at work. A picker must have come through since the last storm and plucked the branches clean of every last Winesap (or whatever varietals Chamberlain had cultivated).

I shouldn’t have been surprised that the professor’s horticultural experiments continued postmortem. Mariëtte Chamberlain would never abandon her father-in-law’s studies any more than she would abandon her crusade to prove he’d been murdered.