Now, gun in hand, Martin moved east across the field as he pursued the fox, trudging along, his feet strapped into the bentwood-and-rawhide snowshoes. His breath came out in cloudy puffs. His feet were wet and cold, soaked through already. The fox tracks continued in a straight line, out into the orchard Sara’s grandfather had planted. The trees were unpruned; the few apples and pears they produced were woody, bug-filled, and spotted with blight.
Sara and Gertie would be out of bed now, wondering where he was. There would be a pot of coffee, biscuits in the oven. But he needed to do this, to kill the fox. He needed to show his wife and daughter that he could protect them—that if a creature threatened their livelihood in any way, he would destroy it. He’d kill the fox, skin it himself, and hand the pelt over to Sara, a surprise gift. She was clever, skilled with a hide and needle and thread—she could make a warm hat for little Gertie.
Martin leaned against a crooked apple tree to catch his breath. The snow swirled around him, limiting his visibility, making him feel strangely disoriented. Which way was home?
He heard something behind him—the soft whoosh of footsteps moving rapidly through the snow.
He turned. There was no one there. It was only the wind. He bit down on his lip, touched the warm ring in his pocket.
Ten yards ahead of him, a gnarled old apple tree moved. He squinted through the blowing snow and saw that it wasn’t a tree, but an old woman hunched over. She was dressed in animal skins, her hair tangled like a nest of serpents.
“Hello?” he called.
She turned, looked at Martin, and flashed him a smile, showing pointed brown teeth. Martin blinked, and it was a tree again, gently swaying under a heavy coat of snow.
The fox darted out from behind it, half a chicken still in its mouth. It froze, looking at Martin, its gold eyes flickering. He held his breath, shouldered the gun, and sighted the fox, which now looked up and watched him, its eyes like little rings of fire.
The fox looked at him; suddenly, for two whole seconds, it wasn’t the animal’s eyes that gazed dispassionately at him, but Sara’s.
Martin Shea, you are the one I shall marry.
One day, we’ll have a little girl.
Martin blinked, trying to push this image from his mind—this was no trickster fox from a fairy tale. It was just his imagination, the result of a childhood spent absorbed in all those books.
The fox, now an ordinary fox with ordinary eyes once more, turned, dropped the chicken, and leapt away just as Martin squeezed the trigger.
“Damn it!” Martin shouted, realizing he’d missed.
He took off running in the fox’s direction and saw there was fresh blood on the ground. He’d hit the animal after all. Martin reached down; his fingertips brushed the snowy tracks and came away red. He raised them to his lips and tasted. It was sharp and salty and made his mouth water. Then, gun at the ready, he followed the trail through the orchard, up over the rocky ridge, past the Devil’s Hand, and down into the woods below, until he could only see a faint red every few paces. The beeches and maples, all stripped bare of leaves and shrouded in snow, looked unfamiliar. For an hour or more, he moved on through thickets of dense growth, last year’s raspberry canes lashing out at him, home farther and farther away. The woods grew darker. He began to wonder if he had made the right choice, coming out here in the storm.
“Too late to turn back now,” he told himself, foot aching as he pushed himself forward.
He didn’t allow himself to think of the accident very often. When he did, it was at times like this—when he felt as if the world he inhabited was against him in some profound way.
He’d been up on the hill cutting firewood. It was a pleasant late-summer morning a year after he and Sara were married. He’d found a clearing full of deadfalls, already dried out, and was cutting them into stove-sized pieces and loading them onto the cart. He worked all morning, went home for lunch, then returned to the woods, pleased with how much he’d accomplished. He’d told Sara to keep supper warm—he’d work until either the wagon was full or it grew too dark. She’d frowned, never liking it when he was in the woods after nightfall.
“Don’t be too late,” she’d said.