Courtesy of the hot springs, it’s the first time in months that, as Hassler struggles onto his feet, he doesn’t feel as stiff as a rusted hinge.

He’s thirsty but his water froze overnight.

He eats just enough jerky to beat back the mad, raving hunger he always wakes to.

Lifting his rifle, he scopes the clearing for any sign of movement.

It’s a good twenty or thirty degrees colder than yesterday—barely above zero—and plumes of steam ascend in a perpetual cloud off the hot springs.

Otherwise, nothing moves in that vast winterscape.

He digs out his compass and the little patch of map and then heaves his pack onto his shoulders.

Hassler crawls out from under the overhanging branches and sets out across the meadow.

It is cold and perfectly still, the sun on the rise.

In the center of the meadow, he stops and glasses the terrain through the scope of his Winchester.

For the moment at least, the world is his alone.

As the sun climbs, the glare off the snowpack becomes painful. He would stop to retrieve his sunglasses, but the welcome darkness of the forest is just within reach.

It’s all lodgepole pine.

Two-hundred-foot giants with straight, thin trunks and narrow crowns.

Forest travel is considerably more dangerous, and at the edge of the trees Hassler pulls the .357 out of an inner pocket of his duster and checks the load.

The forest climbs.

The sun pushes through the pines in splashes of light.

Hassler crests a ridge.

A lake comes into view that shines like a jewel. Close to shore, the water has frozen, but it’s still liquid out in the center. He sits on a bleached tree stump and raises the butt of the rifle to his shoulder.

The lake is immense. He scopes the shoreline. There’s nothing in the direction he intends to travel but unblemished, glittering white.

On the opposite side—a couple miles away—he spots a bull in a bloody patch of snow pulling long ropes of intestines out of a massive grizzly bear whose throat the abby has torn out.

Hassler starts down the gentle slope.

At the lakeshore, he studies the map again.

The forest comes close to the water, and keeping between the shore and the trees, he makes his way around to the western side of the lake.

The trek through the snow has worn him out.

Hassler unslings his rifle from his shoulder and collapses near the water’s edge. In proximity, he sees that the ice isn’t thick. Just a fragile crust from the hard overnight freeze. This snow has come early. Way early. By his reckoning, it’s only July.

He scopes the shoreline again.

The woods at his back.

Nothing moves but that abby across the lake, its entire head now buried inside the grizzly’s belly—gorging itself.

Hassler leans back against his pack and takes out the map.