“Our eyes will be nearly blind at first in the dark,” Dan said. “They’ll grow bigger with each generation to compensate for the new scenario of permanent darkness.”

“I got it,” Saul said. “Evolution. Improving as needs change. The dark descending.”

“I need to understand this now.”

“That’s what every person feels.”

“This darkness,” Dan said. “I can’t take it anymore.”

“I know what you mean.”

They might have hugged in the dark as their headlamps spun, but that cannot be reported here. Rather, Saul was cross-legged on the snow, then he stretched his legs out in front of him, crossed his boots at his ankles, slouched a little.

“I’m not the same as you,” Dan said.

“Men are all the same,” Saul said. “Like all wolves are the same. All wolves kill sheep. One way to handle them.”

“There’s all kinds of differences in wolves,” said Dan, and then they were going on about wolves.

“Why argue?” Ella wondered.

“Okay,” Saul said. “Agreed. There’s differences. But go for the big picture here. We’ve been friends a long time. It doesn’t have to end this way.”

“How do you know this is an ending?”

“You’re pointing my rifle at me. As you noted.”

“Bowman’s out there somewhere.”

“’Course he is.”

“Ginny is behind him in a cave with a knife.”

“Poor Bowman,” Saul said. “A dead man.”

“I don’t care that much about dying,” Dan said. “I want my life again.”

Ella’s face was blue in the flame. The little sea in the pot was blue light boiling. She turned to look at Saul and the sea went dark as his legs lit up and then the flat side of his big face. She grabbed the pot’s edge with her bare hands and flung it at Dan.

Dan fired the .270. Saul was flung back. He lay on the snow as if pinned to the ground with a steel stake. His hand reached up to touch his middle. Dan had done it, put a hole in Saul. An eye for an eye. Dan let the rifle fall in front of him, looking at a dead man. Ella leaned over Saul, seeing him in a new way. She had a few moments in blue smoke and sulfur to consider who Saul would be now. This new man: Saul the Victim. He licked his lips as if he would speak to her one last time, to apologize or analyze, surely not to complain. She didn’t look when Dan lifted the rifle again, shouldered it, and turned to kill someone else. He searched the dark behind him. But the dark is big and hard to sight in.

“Where’s Maul!” Dan called.

“Dead,” Bowman’s voice said from somewhere out there.

Dan swung around. The headlamp beaconed out.

“Kill that goddamned light,” Ella snapped and wiped her splattered temple.