Sometimes Sam had to take the staff minibus and pick them up; all part of the menial work as an employee of the Silver Ski Company. Other company guys minded plenty when it was their turn, but Sam kind of liked it. The Aussies were funny. In fact last season he’d gotten real friendly with a guy called Bunny Campbell from Melbourne, who’d invited Sam, Katie and the two kids out to Australia for a vacation. They’d never go. Sam knew that. But he got the occasional card from Bunny and it made him feel cosmopolitan, knowing someone half-way round the world.

Jess loved Bunny, her two-year-old hormones already tingling to the six-foot, golden-tanned antipodean hunk. Occasionally he would come and drag Sam out for a beer after work, sweep Jess into his arms and do a mock tango while Sam fetched his jacket. Sam had watched Katie watching Bunny and preferred not to examine the emotions he felt. Bunny was a good guy. A friend of the family.

The last card had come from Hawaii where Bunny was surfing. There was a picture of a model with big breasts holding a surf board under her arm, which Bunny had defaced by drawing a beard on the girl’s chin. The card had been addressed to Sam Two-Dogs-Fucking-Big-Chief-Skis-Like-A-Cow, and after initial irritation, Sam had laughed and stuck it on the door of the ice-box where all the other postcards lived. He hoped Bunny would be back this season. Sam never thought he’d have friends like that. Big, funny, happening.

White.

That was the truth. White friends. That’s what made him happy. And unhappy at the same time. Real unhappy, remembering what big tanned guys like Bunny used to mean to him when he was young – a time that didn’t get head space – not if Sam Hunt could help it.

Still, winter was good.

Like most Silver residents, the Hunts preferred winter to summer, but whatever the season, it was a bitch of an expensive town.

When the grimy railroad workers had built Silver over a hundred years ago, original name Siding Twenty-three, it was nothing more than a collection of tin and wooden huts in a clearing cut in the pines.

Now, any real estate agent’s window in town would make the ghosts of those guys swoon. Photos of houses were displayed like pornography, their doors open wide, their interiors on show to the casual viewer. And printed below, in discreet blue type, were prices that read like telephone numbers.

Little surprise then that the big houses by the river were mostly holiday homes, owned by rich city people; people who dressed expensively, and seemed built on a different scale, the way the women’s bones were so fine and the men’s shoulders so broad and square.