Part 3
Nora pulled Alex behind the stove and found the iron ring set low in the rear wall. The narrow panel had swollen in its frame. Grandpa had shown her the escape hatch the previous fall and joked that it was for hunters who invited a bear to supper.
Alex dragged once, silently, and the panel opened into wet spruce limbs. Nora pushed the cedar box and canteen through, then crawled after them. Alex barely cleared the opening before the front door crashed inward.
They kept low until the shack hid behind the slope. Then someone shouted, and Alex caught Nora’s hand and ran.
He chose the open swale. Nora yanked him sideways. “Bog.”
What looked like mossy ground shivered beneath the rain. She led him along exposed stones at the edge, then into a creek screened by willow. The water climbed above her knees and stole her breath.
“Upstream,” she whispered. “They’ll expect down.”
For roughly two hundred yards they fought the current, placing each foot before trusting it. Alex braced her when the bottom dropped. At a fallen cottonwood she climbed over the root ball, and they left the water on a shelf of rock that held no prints.
Behind them voices spread through the trees, then drifted the wrong way.
Nora’s fingers had gone stiff. Alex stripped off his coat, wrapped it around her wet shoulders, and made her move. “Shelter. Now.”
“There’s an old prospectors’ dugout past that ridge. Half a mile.”
“You can make it?”
“Can you?”
His breath came out between a laugh and a groan. “Apparently I have to.”
The dugout was a door in the hillside under a tangle of thimbleberry. Inside, a small iron stove sat beside a box of dry split wood. A cedar chest held rough work clothes, blankets, and a child’s red jacket left by someone years before.
They changed behind opposite corners and hung their clothes on a wire near the stove. Alex’s borrowed pants stopped above his ankles. Nora’s jacket smelled of dust and woodsmoke, but it was warm.
She divided the last venison and dried huckleberries. Alex tried to give some back.
“Equal,” she said. “That was the bargain.”
They ate in the amber stove light while rain strengthened outside. Alex asked about Grandpa Mick, and Nora told him how he could read a storm in the undersides of leaves, how he traded carved spoons and marten pelts for flour, how he made her copy paragraphs from old library books until her handwriting stopped leaning downhill.
“Why did he come out here?” Alex asked.
“He had an apartment once. A job fixing machines. He said the city asked him to become somebody he didn’t like.” She opened the cedar box and showed Alex the photograph, the fireweed, and the cracked compass. “Mom came to him when I was little. Then she left me too.”
“We can try to find her.”
Nora closed the lid. “Why would I look for someone who knows where she left me?”
Alex did not rush to answer. “You shouldn’t have to. I’m sorry.”
Nora loosened her grip on the cedar-box latch.
Later Alex said, “Valerie used to cover my dinner plate with foil. Then one night there wasn’t a plate. Ryan stopped saving me a seat at his games before that.”
When the stove settled to a red glow, Alex said, “Victor Sloan is my chief operating officer. He pushed hardest for the sale, but a rival buyer would gain from it too. Whoever arranged this knew my route and company schedule. Sloan points one way. It isn’t proof.”
“Could Ryan have done this?” Nora asked. “Because he’s angry?”
Alex looked at her across the stove. “No. He has reasons to be angry, and I gave him most of them. But my son would not hire men to kill me.”
“Ryan knows the things you regret.”
“He does,” Alex said. “For one second I let that frighten me. I hate that I did.”
Nora added a stick to the stove. “Grandpa once caught his own boot in a snare he was checking because he hurried.”
“Your grandpa admitted that?”
“After I stopped laughing.”
They slept beside the stove. In the morning Nora folded both blankets into the chest and left a packet of matches from Grandpa’s kit. Alex started to object, saw her face, and put his own unopened energy bar beside them.
Cold rain followed them southeast. Nora used the compass sparingly, choosing stone, creek bed, and pine duff that would hide their direction. By afternoon Alex was limping badly, but whenever she slowed for him he said, “Keep your pace. I’ll tell you if I’m done.”
They reached the highway ridge near sunset and found only a forest of black spruce below. Nora checked the compass twice. The needle held southeast.
“The road should be there,” she said.
“Could the storm have turned us?”
“Could’ve been Grandpa remembered the old logging road wrong. They close roads when creeks wash them out.” She hated saying it. “There’s a river east. A settlement downstream.”
Alex sat under a huge cedar whose low limbs made a dry green room. “Then east.”
They huddled against the trunk as darkness came. Alex put his arm around her only after asking. His body shivered as hard as hers, but the shared heat helped.
Nora woke to a change in the rain. Beneath it came the eager chop of dogs barking, then lights wavering among the trees.
Alex saw them too. “How did they find us?”
“Scent from the shack, maybe. Or from our wet clothes before we changed.” She scanned the slope. Running on open ground would let the dogs close in. Fifty yards uphill, two slabs of granite leaned together above a dark seam Grandpa had once called the needle’s eye.
“There’s a cleft,” she said. “A cave behind it. The dogs may lose us on the rock.”
“Can I fit?”
“If you turn sideways.”
She looked from his broad shoulders to the sweep of the nearest light. “You go first. I can run downhill and pull the dogs off. They want you, not me. I’ll circle back.”
Alex caught both her shoulders. He did not squeeze, but his voice changed. “No.”
“I’m faster.”
“I’m not sending you downhill while I squeeze into a hole.”
“They might not hurt a kid.”
“Those men tied me to a tree.” He released her and pointed at the granite. “Both of us through the cleft. Move.”
Nora nearly argued. Then she saw Grandpa at the cabin door, holding her back with one arm before walking into a storm himself. Alex wore the same fixed look. She could waste their remaining seconds fighting it, or use them.
The lights swung toward the cedar. A handler called to one of the dogs, and the barking sharpened.
Nora tightened the box strap across her chest, took Alex’s hand, and waited until both lights dipped behind a rise.
“Now.”
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