They started again. Slogging along. Following the snowmobile’s tracks. Before long, he was resting every few yards. He stopped and looked back and in the moonlight he watched the dark stand of trees, because he thought the buck might come again. But it didn’t come.

They were higher. By now the snow was two feet deep. The air thinner. The wind had quit and most of the snow. Starlight, moon. Nothing moved in that cold high world. Jack struggled through the trees, pulling up dead branches where they stuck out of the snow, and his hands were numb. With each step, the snow swallowed his legs to the knees. Oh, he was tired. At every curve it looked as though the cabin might lay just ahead, but his eyes were seeing wrong—it was not.

“We’re close,” Ava called to him.

They came upon a vast high rim where a fire had passed through sometime long ago. The stand of black pines was dark and wasted but still strong enough to bear the snow. The cedar was all but black. Here Jack slowed, and he knew he couldn’t go any farther. He looked across the field with the pale light of the winter moon painting the snow and tinging the thin twigs of pine, and in the violet dark, he could see the tracks of the snowmobile curve up and over the slope, and they kept going on and on. But you are not going on, he said. You are coming to an end.

He stopped.

He sat in the snow.

“He’s the best kid,” Jack said.

Ava trudged over and fell down beside him, cowled in her coat. They sat there in silence. Frail snow whispering down. He tried to think of something to say, but he couldn’t. He knew this feeling. Of time. The reality of the world. All of it wrong. How could it be named? The thought in the darkest part of him. The thing he believed to be true. “It’s not good.”

“What?”

“There’s no plan. We don’t have a plan.”

She unsnapped the buttons at the throat of her coat and lowered her hood. She looked at him, saying nothing.

He tried to think of words to describe it. Put a candle to the dark. “The feeling never really leaves. This … wrongness. Like when you’re dreaming, and you think you’re awake, but you know something is off. Somewhere life has gone off the rails. It’s not right. It’s a fake. You can’t convince yourself it’s okay, even though you try. You just … know. This life isn’t the way it should be.”

The quiet, the cold. His heart beating.

“And you have to do something,” he said. “Because you know it’s out there—your right life. The real one. But you can’t find it.”