Part 2
The boot print was too fresh to explain away, and the letters on the tape made Ruth’s cold hands go still.
COY.
She knew only one family in Juniper County whose name began that way, and their name had been nailed above the feed store, the taxidermy shop, and half the outfitter trucks in town for as long as Ruth had lived there. Coyle. Wade Coyle’s father had trapped these ridges before there were printed regulations on the gas station wall. Wade had grown up telling people he knew the mountain better than any state biologist with clean boots and a clipboard.
Ruth folded the tape into her glove and looked toward the trees where the mountain lion had disappeared.
Then she heard an engine.
It was faint at first, carried strangely by the cold, but it was there: the low growl of a snowmobile somewhere below the ridge road. Ruth’s heart tightened. She killed the lantern flame, shoved the broken cable and tape into her coat pocket, and dragged the shovel marks over the churned snow as best she could.
She had no time to erase the ravine. No time to erase herself.
The engine grew louder, then faded south as if the rider had turned down the old logging road instead of climbing toward the notch. Ruth stayed crouched behind the lodgepole pine until the sound disappeared. Only then did she let herself breathe.
By the time she reached the cabin, her legs were trembling so badly she had to grip the porch rail. She brought the tools inside, leaned Sam’s rope by the stove, and tried to take off her boots. Her fingers would not obey. She sat on the bench in the mudroom and stared at them, confused by the simple act of unlacing.
The room tilted.
She woke on the floor with her cheek against the braided rug and the stove gone dull red.
For three days Ruth drifted in and out of fever.
Later, she remembered pieces: the kettle whistling until it boiled dry; her own voice calling Sam’s name into a room where only the wind answered; the taste of aspirin and old coffee; the storm pushing snow against the windows until the cabin felt buried. Once she thought she heard claws on the porch boards and struggled to sit up, but there was nothing outside except a hard, white glare.
On the fourth morning, Maggie Doyle found her.
Maggie was not really a neighbor. In Juniper Creek, anybody within ten miles who noticed whether your mailbox got emptied counted as one. She worked the counter at the post office, delivered medicine on her own time, and possessed the kind of cheer that could become an interrogation if a person looked weak.
She let herself in with the spare key under the flowerpot, took one look at Ruth on the couch, and said, “You stubborn old woman.”
Ruth opened one eye. “Good morning to you, too.”
“Don’t you good morning me. Your mailbox is buried, your porch light’s been on since Tuesday, and you look like something the plow left behind.” Maggie set a paper bag on the table and came closer. “What happened?”
“Cold got into me.”
“Cold doesn’t put rope burns around your coat.”
Ruth glanced down. The marks were visible where the rope had pulled tight against the fabric. Her mind cleared enough to remember the tape, the boot print, the cable. She looked toward the hook beside the door where Sam’s rope hung again, wet and dirty from the ravine.
“I slipped,” Ruth said.
Maggie folded her arms. “You slipped three miles up the ridge in the middle of a storm?”
“I didn’t say where.”
“You didn’t have to.” Maggie’s voice softened, which made it harder to lie to her. “Ruth, if you’re wandering out there alone at night, somebody needs to know.”
“Somebody did.”
Maggie followed her gaze to Sam’s mug on the table. She did not say anything for a few seconds. Then she took off her gloves, filled the kettle, and began moving around the kitchen as if scolding could wait until the patient was less breakable.
Ruth let her.
By afternoon, Maggie had restarted the stove, made soup, and threatened to call the clinic in Livingston if Ruth’s fever climbed again. Ruth allowed most of it because arguing required strength she did not have. But when Maggie reached for the mud-caked coat to hang it by the fire, Ruth sat up too fast.
“I’ll do that.”
Maggie froze with the coat in her hands. “What’s in the pocket?”
“Nothing that belongs to you.”
“That answer is exactly why I’m asking.”
Ruth held out her hand. After a long pause, Maggie gave the coat back. Ruth kept it folded across her lap until Maggie left near dusk, promising to return the next day with antibiotics if she had to steal them from the clinic herself.
Only after the cabin was quiet did Ruth take out the strip of survey tape and the broken piece of cable.
She laid them on the kitchen table beside Sam’s mug.
The cable was dark with old rust where it had been wrapped around the tree, bright where the cutters had bitten through. It was the kind of thing that could be dismissed by anyone who wanted not to see it. Scrap. Ranch wire. Something dragged in by a storm.
But the tape was harder to ignore.
COY.
Ruth touched the letters with one finger.
She had not spoken more than ten words to Wade Coyle in two years, not since he had come by after Sam’s memorial and offered to buy Sam’s old maps “before they got ruined in a widow’s attic.” She had hated the way he said widow. As if grief were a weakness he could inventory.
A thump sounded outside.
Ruth’s hand closed around the cable.
The cabin went still.
Another sound came from the porch, softer this time. Not a knock. A weight shifting on wood.
Ruth rose slowly, took the flashlight from the counter, and moved to the window beside the door. Her fever made the room swim, but she forced her eyes to focus through the frost clouding the glass.
At first she saw only snow. Then the porch boards. Then the rabbit. It lay near the top step, whole and fresh, its white fur almost invisible except for the dark mark at its throat. Beside it, pressed into the powder with impossible quiet, was a paw print nearly the size of Ruth’s open hand. The mountain lion had come down from the ridge. Not to the ravine. Not to the woodshed. To her door…
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