As sophisticated as Karo seems, Maeve sees that she can’t be easy to work for. The idea makes her soften, and she tries to brush Sadie’s hand, a kind of Thank you, as she follows Karo out, but she can’t quite catch the girl’s eye, and the door shuts behind them.

They cut quickly across the lobby and out the door, then follow the line of the building toward the woods, their reflections rippling in the center’s wide windows. About fifty yards out, the shoveled path ends abruptly and they move off through snow that’s already almost knee-deep. Ahead of them, a trail marker gleams fluorescent at the border of the trees, and the vestige of a path picks up again, less recently cleared.

The air is crisp and clean. Maeve inhales, and breathes out the obvious tension between Karo and her assistant. Glad to be outside and free of it.

“We had snow early last year too,” Karo says. “Almost as bad.” She squints up at the sky, as though testing her theory, then corrects herself: “Not this bad.”

“When I arrived last night it was raining,” Maeve tells her, at a loss for something to say. Her experience of alpine weather is exactly nil. She follows Karo through the trees into a little fairyland of cabins, each set a few hundred feet apart from the others. Somewhere nearby, she can hear a dull echo, the rhythmic thunk of a hammer.

“I wondered about bears—” Maeve says. “There was a warning sign on the road—but maybe they’re already holing up for the winter?”

“In November? No, I wouldn’t say so. Anything’s possible, of course: they may be adjusting to the new weather patterns faster than us. But they generally stay higher up in the mountains. This time of year, it’s really the elk you have to worry about. Rutting season.” Karo thrusts her shoulders back like a girl trying to get some attention at a club. “Mating. It’s not their fault.” She breaks into a bold smile, pleased with herself. “They’re not rational.”

The path curves and the rhythmic sound grows louder. Maeve slows, peering into the trees. The forest here is almost all evergreens, tall and spindly lodgepole pines and dense firs; it’s hard to see. But there’s definitely something there, moving.

She pulls back a little. It’s a man.

He’s wearing some kind of camouflage gear, a parka in mottled grays and browns, but his hat is orange. The kind hunters use so they don’t get shot. He cuts a fine figure among the trees: tall and somehow commanding, even all alone like that. The sound she heard wasn’t a hammer. It’s an ax. He’s chopping wood, setting up logs to split on a wide stump.