It takes all of Maeve’s will to leave it there. Her stomach hurts. The day before, the bear was inside the tree line, close to human activity. What’s strange here is how open the landscape is. There’s no easy cover where they are, no place for an animal to shelter, nowhere to get out of the snow.

“Still nothing to worry about?” Anna says. “They’re more afraid of us than we are of them?”

Justin tugs at the zipper of his parka. “I’d like to see the numbers on that,” he says. “I’d like to read the interview where an actual bear states that to be the case.”

Karo takes a few steps out, scanning the way ahead. There’s no other sign of life, but the wind whipping at the top layer of snow has already covered their own tracks.

“Well, we’re out here now,” Sim says.

Karo’s jaw tenses and she looks from Dan to Sim and back again.

“It’s true,” she says finally. “If the road is open, then problem solved.”

Anna reaches into her pocket, pulls out a bell. “And here I thought I was being neurotic.”

“Oh, handy,” Justin says. “A dinner bell.”

“We’re a large group, we’re making plenty of noise—” Sim says.

But Dan steps over to where Maeve and Anna are standing close. “Go ahead and wear the bell if it makes you feel better.”

Sim turns and stalks past him, farther up the trail.

Dan pauses, but then he unclips the can of bear spray from his belt and tosses it to Karo. He takes a new one out of his pack.

“Front and rear guard,” he says, pushing past Sim again.

They keep on, Anna’s bell marking time now as they go, the three men in front and the women behind.

Maeve keeps her eyes on the horizon ahead and says nothing, but inside her mittens, her hands are curled into fists. Justin spins around, casual, as though he’s just being social and not really looking behind them, but maybe just a little. His red scarf flutters slightly in the wind. For a moment he walks backward, narrating.

“It was only their snow pants that saved them—six overdressed artistes mauled at mountain colony,” he says. “News at eleven.”

He turns to face forward, tripping and recovering as he goes but making it stylish all the same.

It’s another half hour of slogging before they finally come to where Dan thinks there should be a road.

There is no road.

“Okay,” Dan breathes, and it’s the first time his voice wavers. Maeve feels a hard squeeze in the center of her chest.

The western ridge snowpack, when it came down, sounded closest. The more immediate worry.

“And it was closer,” Dan says now. “We know that’s true. It’s just that the trigger point of the avalanche here on the eastern side—”