1
Owl’s first thought is of the foxes, getting to them before the man does, if it isn’t already too late. She’s sure-footed—Seth always says so—gaining easy purchase on the steep, wooded slope beside the driveway the moment Mrs. Baptiste drops her off at the farm. There’s no time to waste; when Owl saw the man out the window of the Suburban, he was almost halfway to the first curve of the access road to the sugarbush. Black ski cap, shoulders hunched against the cold, pack on his back.
Icy crust crunches underfoot, collapses beneath her scant 120 pounds, but Owl rides the skid, grabbing low-hanging branches only long enough to keep her balance, until she bursts out onto the snowshoe trail and pelts off down the gleaming, hard-packed surface to the clearing where the den is.
She slides onto her knees behind the ground blind she built from saplings, balsam bows, and jute twine, peering through, her gaze riveted on the den entrance, a hole dug into the hillside.
There are the usual crisscrossing trails of tracks—four toes, four claws, a chevron-shaped heel—but no way of being sure if the foxes are inside. Mating season is still on—Seth and Holly mentioned waking to the chilling shrieks of a vixen this past week; Owl herself wakes to nothing, save her alarm clock bed shaker beneath her pillow on school days—so the foxes may be out roaming now, about to wander directly into the path of the man.
Owl’s gloved hands squeeze into fists; she allows the foxes two, three, four seconds more to show themselves. Then it’s time to act. The farm is maybe a five-minute run from here, but there’s no guarantee that Holly’s home from work yet; Seth will be driving the skidder in Gunnar’s woodlot until supper. These trees are Owl’s. She’ll go it alone.
REACHING THE ACCESS road means a dash across two gullies, ten minutes if she really pushes it up those embankments, digging handholds into the snow to keep from backsliding. Her thighs are burning by the time she reaches level ground again, entering the sugarbush, where the land becomes groomed, looking more like the forest of storybooks, open spaces between maples allowing her to run all out toward the road. Five-gallon galvanized sap buckets fly by like hovering moons, hund
reds of them, often two or four to a tree—Owl ought to know; she helped Seth and Holly hang them last week, fitting spouts into holes drilled into the trunks—until the ground hits a sharp downward pitch, and the dirt road lies open ahead.
Owl hustles along the crest of the embankment until she catches up to him; he’s only a few minutes ahead, moving at a slow, trudging pace. She lets the noise of her approach alert him to her presence, stopping where she stands, on the high ground, one hand resting against the nearest tree.
The man turns, his gaze traveling, not immediately picking her out of the woods, dressed as she is in a brown weathered Carhartt coat, neutral-colored for blending. He doesn’t freeze at the sight of her, but instead slowly rests back on one heel, staring.
“This is private property.” She speaks loudly—usually something she cringes from, moderated volume and diction vital to her, a shield—but she’s using every tool of intimidation she knows against a man over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, built. She has her folding knife, of course—always has her knife. Searches for any sign that he’s already bagged one of the foxes, but the backpack he wears is black nylon, something you’d bring to school, not store a bloody carcass inside. “You can’t be out here.”
As he moves closer, she sees the youth on him. Unlined face, clean-shaven. No man—perhaps just barely. His heavy, angular bone structure lends him some years, hat pulled down right over his brows, giving his eyes a low, tracking look. Neither is he smiling, doing anything to disarm. He scans the trees behind her,
maybe wondering if someone else might step out. “Where’d you come from?” Some of this she picks up with her left ear—hearing loss only mild in that one—and the rest she reads from his lips.
Owl hesitates, shifts, starkly reminded of how seldom she really deals with strangers. “No hunting.”
He flashes his open palms at her, concealed in black knit gloves. “See a gun?” First hint of mocking in his expression. He advances further, testing, seeing if she’ll back up. “You forest ranger around here?”
“I found Duke traps. Four of them.” Last month, baited with dog food and sown around by the very edge of their posted property line along the mountain roadside, gleaming stainless steel, mostly hidden by scattered dead leaves. “Coil spring traps.”
Nothing shows in his face. She waits, rocking slightly on the balls of her feet, not sure what she expects, only sure that her heart rate has picked up and suddenly she’s not so certain of herself in this role, protector.
“Come down here.” He tilts his head toward the packed dirt. “Come on.” She watches, held to this spot by only the thinnest resolve. “What, don’t you want me to see you?”
He lunges then, hands held out to grab.
She’s in flight, bursting through the brush like a grouse before she registers the exaggerated stomp of his boot at her—like scaring off a stray—but the fear of him giving chase still drives her another twenty feet before
she spins around.
Glimpses his form through the trees, continuing up the road in the direction he’d been heading, head tipped slightly back now, as if he might be laughing at her.
OUTRAGE FUELS OWL the rest of the way back to the farm, past the red-shingled sugarhouse, the equipment shed, the side-by-side. Holly turns from filling her arms with firewood, which is kept stacked in neat rows along the deck of their A-frame cabin, to watch Owl’s approach, her eyes wide and startled.
Owl brakes at the railing, grasping the welded wire fencing panel, using her free hand to sign until she can speak, keeping it simple to make sure Holly gets it. Man—open hand, splayed fingers, thumb touching from forehead to chest.
Her aunt sets the stove lengths down. “Where?”
“On the access road.”
“Hunter?”
Owl heaves her shoulders up, scanning the open pasture to the tree line. When she turns back, she’s missed something Holly’s said; Owl recognizes the awkward spooling of seconds well.
“Where’s your backpack?” Holly repeats, pulling her phone out of the pocket of her fleece vest, checking to see how the cell signal looks
before texting Seth.
“The driveway.” Hesitates, torn between embarrassment and wanting Holly to understand the incident on the embankment, no one around but herself and the stranger. “He tried to . . . scare me. Run me off.”
Holly’s brow creases and she gives up on an immediate response from Seth, tucking her phone away and gathering the wood. “Let’s go in, okay?”
In the kitchen—compact, cabinets and half-sized appliances along the left wall, table and chairs against the right—Holly checks on the bread dough she’s left to rise, then goes into the small living room space beyond to feed the woodstove, her attention pulled to the front windows by something Owl can’t hear. “Speak of the devil.”
Outside, Seth’s Ford F-350 pickup crawls to a stop beside Holly’s Land Rover; he climbs out—too thin these days, walking with a pronounced limp—holding Owl’s backpack up by the top loop as he comes through the door. “Forgot something.”
“There’s a guy in our woods. I told him he was trespassing, but he wouldn’t leave.” Owl watches Seth’s face, waiting for him to register the violation of it. To unlock the gun cabinet and bring out one of the rifles he keeps meticulously cleaned but rarely uses, the last time over a year ago, when he shot a raccoon Owl found behind the house, dragging one hind leg, biting at the air—obvious signs of rabies.
Instead, he pauses, shuts the door behind him, pulling his camo ball cap from his head and tossing it to the tabletop in a way that Holly can’t stand, then sets her backpack beside it. “Let me call Wallace.” Goes to the CapTel lan
dline phone, speed-dialing Wallace Morley, neighbor, sometimes fishing buddy, the phone automatically connecting to an operator at a distant captioning service Owl regards with some superstitious misgiving, even though she’s the entire reason they applied for it.
The conversation is brief, words scrolling hesitantly across the caption screen as they speak, a hoarse laugh on Seth’s end before hanging up. “It’s Wall’s grandson. He sent him up.” His gaze on Owl is steady. “Boy’s early. Wasn’t expecting him for over a week.”
Holly folds her arms. “First I’ve heard of it.”
“Haven’t had a chance to tell you. I hired him on to help with the sugaring.”
Holly’s response is shocked relief, stance slackening. She’s been after Seth to get some help other than Owl for a couple years now, a suggestion he’s staunchly refused, no matter how badly his knee aches at the end of a long day; but nobody can miss how often he uses the side-by-side and the tractor now, anything to cut down on walking around the sugarbush. “Wallace told me the kid’s been looking for work, something to get him out of Manchester.”
Holly pauses. “Owl said he scared her.”
“I said he tried. It was stupid.” Owl’s tone is steely, looking to Seth. “I thought he was after the foxes.”
Uncertainty passes between the grown-ups, but Seth scoops his cap back onto his head, earning a wry, half-amused look from his wife. “Nah. City kid. Doubt he knows his ass from his elbow when it comes to trapping.”
“Or sugaring.” Holly’s smiling now, an expression not unlike the sun hitting full across the face of their cabin in late morning, blasting the interior with light. Broad cheekbones, teeth white against her brown skin, about four shades darker than Seth and Owl’s Scotch Irish peasant stock: She’s Passamaquoddy, though Holly’s heritage and past are something Owl treads around carefully, a patchwork of impressions pulled from offhand comments or stories told to Owl when she was little. Owl knows how it is to hold privacy close as an infant, to nurse a hurt that others wouldn’t understand, even family. “Why didn’t he come to the house first? Does he think you pick syrup bottles off the trees?”
“Well, I told Wall that I’d start Cody out tapping the last half acre we didn’t get to yet. Guess they must’ve figured I’d be out there today.” Owl’s nose wrinkles at anyone granting the stranger a name. “I’ll load up the wagon, show him around, get him situated. Sounds like maybe you two got off on the wrong foot.” Seth grasps the doorknob as he turns back to Owl, switching to the unspoken wavelength they share, cultivated from the day he and Holly brought her home to Waits Mountain, a seven-year-old with a four-inch fracture in her skull and a stunned terror of her brave new world without sound: Want to come along? his expression says.
She takes a deliberate step back, jaw set.
He nods slowly. “Okay.” Opens the door to the chill day. “Plenty of time to start fresh tomorrow.”
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