She smiled then, a long, slow, incite-to-riot smile. “Im always available. Im just not easy.

“Youre telling me.

TWELVE

Wood River Mountains, September 3

She was so tired.

Tired and numb to anything but putting one foot down after the other.

That morning there had been planes flying overhead, and he had kept them both in the rough shelter of spruce boughs he had built the night before. He wouldnt allow a fire, and she was as cold as she was tired. He had insisted she put on every article of clothing she had, and still she was cold, shivering, teeth chattering, she couldnt seem to stop them.

It didnt matter, because none of it seemed real, not from the moment she had heard the shots and come running down the path from the creek to see him standing over Marks body.

Mark, already dead. Mark, to whom she would now never be able to say she was sorry.

Somewhere deep inside, the pain and the grief stirred once, stilled again. To feel pain, to feel grief, one must think, and she would not allow thought.

She would not think of how he had stood looking at her as seconds passed, then minutes, as she did nothing, said nothing. No protest, no scream for help, she hadnt tried to run, nothing. Hed told her he was hungry, and shed made him the lunch she had planned for Mark. Hed admired her beadwork, and shed said thank you. Hed told her to take her clothes off, and she had. Hed told her to lie down on the bed, and she did. He had raped her, and she had endured it, motionless, unprotesting, her husbands body cooling in the creek not fifty feet from where they lay.

She didnt know where they were, except that they were in the mountains, tall ones. He seemed to know where he was going, and she was aware enough to see the sun rise in the east and to see that they were traveling in a southeasterly direction.

They had seen grizzlies feeding on salmon in the creeks they crossed. They had seen moose standing in still ponds, up to their shoulders in water and with their heads submerged as they rooted for forage. They had seen rabbits beginning to shed their brown summer coats and replace them with winter white. They had seen no other people.

He carried a backpack, and they ate food cold from cans. They couldnt risk a fire, he said, not now that they were so close to home. When they got home, he said, he would build her a fire in the stove and she would be warm again. Hed missed her, he said, hed had no one to cook for him, to clean for him, to put the buttons back on his shirts, to help him tan the hides of the mink and the marten and the beaver he trapped during the winter, to help him dress and butcher the caribou he shot in the fall, to plant the garden in spring. He smiled at her, his odd light-colored eyes serene with happiness.