He was on the forest road now, heading uphill gradually through a curtain of snow that made him dizzy watching it fly towards him like boulders. The road was treacherous and indistinct, without a single set of tracks to follow. He took a deep breath, wound down the window an inch to let some air in, and a few flakes swirled in and brushed his face. Only a mile or so before Hawk’s place and he willed himself to concentrate. The end of Hawk’s drive could be missed so easily, especially in this weather, and he had to make sure he didn’t drive past. But God, the snow was making him feel bad. His head was buzzing and his eyes were narrowed to slits to see where the hell he was going. And then, without warning, his soul was being sucked into a twister, and the blackness came and took him.

The sinister black shape of the log house changed instantly to the warm brown thing it was as Daniel broke the beam of their yard-light sensor and stepped onto the porch. Silently he awarded himself points for fitting that thing last fall. It was a marvel for switching itself on, letting you see what you were doing as you got out of the car in the dark before you opened up the house, but right now it had been better than a marvel. For the last quarter of an hour he’d felt like running. He knew he was behaving like a schoolboy, but that feeling of being watched, no, more than that, being stalked, had been living in between his shoulder-blades the whole way up.

Well now he was home, and he was going to shake off his boots, get this jacket off that he was sweating like a hog under, and crack open a beer. He stamped on the wooden slats of the porch and turned off the flashlight. The yard-light would stay on for forty seconds until he either switched it on permanently from the lobby or broke the beam again with his body. He took off his gloves and found his key from the bunch on his belt. It felt good to open the door and get stuff going. The house was warm as toast, the big oil-burning stove going like a dream back there in the kitchen. Daniel turned the lobby and living-room lights on, fingered a few letters Tess had left on the telephone table for his attention, and hung up his jacket. He let the yard-light go out of its own accord. It had served its purpose.

It was weird not having Tess and Larry home. She usually heard his truck droning up the hill and waved to him from the sitting-room window. And Larry would crash into him like a train, shouting at him in English and Siouan about the kind of day he’d had.