“What was it really like?” Maul said again and again. “When you noticed the pit was empty.”

“A lightning bolt.”

“Anything else?”

“Like the plague,” she said, “when you thought it had passed your town.”

“Smart of her to drag the calves. To make steps out of corpses.”

“Any idiot would have dragged those calves.”

She took a double dose this time. They understood each other perfectly. They were not friends. When this search was done, when Ginny was gone in some permanent way, no longer empowered to ruin the rest of them, they would all move to separate towns, separate continents if needed, and each tell their own facts, never coming in contact. When he asked which child she loved the most, she told her children’s middle names, birthdays, and what they were like as infants. She couldn’t remember so made the truth up. He asked again and she denied then revised. She wrote the answer in her little locked book: Yes, there is one, though it’s not really more love. More like more affinity. Her mind came loose with this talk, the proximity. It looks like more-love to the less-loved. Be careful, she would tell them. It’s nature’s plan to separate mother from children. Heartbreak. Every child is a pioneer. Maul shot a young bear during “The Night of the Deputy.” They never told the others. She wrote it in her mind as a play: Dan in the foreground, sleeping through the bear’s death and the deputy’s both. Maul caped the bear since the night was young. He rolled the hide up and lugged it far out of camp, leaving the lump of naked meat for Ella’s work. He rolled the hide out again to full length and left it, a tiny bear rug on huge sand. It seemed vindictive. She understood it. He wanted a secret too. She’d cut one roast only from a flank. Lavish. They’d rolled the rest of the naked body behind a log together. They saw birds flying eager from the Switchbacks. She’d jerked the roast in a Tupperware of brine. The morphine grains wore off and ran out. She stared into the bear in her dreams, the stomach cut open revealing a pistol, a bottle of baby oil, a perfect rabbit blinking.

The first morning on the ridges Saul banged on the sorrel’s shoe and Ella told Maul “The Pit and the Dancers.” How once upon a time in a parlor in a farmhouse in a small town by a western river, a personal cyclone had hit.

The TV blared. The cow pit was empty. One man, Dan, was in shock. One woman, Ella, was cooking to soothe and nourish, while Saul, Ella’s husband, dialed the sheriff to ask for news of Ella’s missing sister.

“Sand in the eyes,” Maul said. He waved, Go on.