The Winter People Read Online Free PDF

that when Sara saw this, she gathered a lantern and went looking for him.
    “I was sure I would find you dead,” she told him later. “I almost couldn’t bring myself to climb the hill. I didn’t want to see.”
    She found him alive but unconscious, crushed and bleeding. Sara managed to lash together a stretcher from two saplings and Martin’s coat and dragged him down the hill by herself.
    In the weeks of Martin’s recovery, during which Lucius reset hisbones as best he could and Sara wrapped his leg and foot in poultices to speed the healing, he would ask her again and again how she, so tiny, had managed to get him down the hill.
    “I suppose God helped me,” she told him.
    O n he trudged, following the animal’s small tracks, unsure of where he was or how much time had passed. He searched for the sun in the sky, but there was too much snow, too much gray, for him even to see it. Though he knew the woods around the farm well from his years of hunting and gathering firewood and maple sap, he didn’t recognize a single landmark. The trees around him seemed gangly and monsterlike as they fought their way up toward the light. The snow was falling too hard, too thickly, covering everything familiar. He followed the tracks, the only thing he was sure of, and was relieved when they circled back toward the rocks. He was exhausted. Hungry. His foot ached, and his mouth was dry. He sucked on clumps of snow, but it did little to quench his thirst.
    Crisscrossing what remained of his footprints from earlier, he climbed back up the hill, slipping and sliding on the steep parts, grabbing hold of poplars and beech trees, and came, at last, to the Devil’s Hand—a collection of enormous rocks that seemed to reach straight upward, wearing a fresh glove of pure white snow. But there, in the shadow of the center finger, right where the tracks led, the snow had been pushed away, and there was a little opening he’d never noticed before. The small mouth of a cave.
    Martin crept to the entrance. It was quite narrow, barely large enough for a man to crawl through, and didn’t appear to be very deep. It seemed a cozy little alcove. The fox rested against the wall, panting, thinking perhaps that it was hidden in the shadows. Martin smiled. She’d been hit in the left flank, the fur blown away, flesh exposed. He could smell the rich iron scent of her blood. Her whole body seemed to tremble as she watched him, waiting.
    Martin raised the gun and pointed the barrel into the cave.
    He aimed for the head, not wanting to ruin the pelt.
    W here’s Gertie?” Sara was running toward the barn as Martin came out. He’d skinned the fox and nailed the pelt up to dry against the north wall of the barn. He’d done a messy job, nothing like what Sara would do, but, still, it was done. He’d succeeded.
    Martin blinked at her, the bright snow overwhelming after the darkness of the barn. “Not here,” he said. He was tired. Cold. Impatient. Killing the fox should have left him feeling satisfied, but instead it had unsettled him, perhaps because at the end it hadn’t been a fair fight, the animal cornered and frightened.
    Sara’s eyes were wild, frantic. She hadn’t put on a coat, and stood shivering in her sweater and housedress. Snow sat in great clumps in her hair and on her shoulders.
    “Where have you been?” she asked, her eyes moving over Martin’s soaked, muddy pants, his coat stained with fresh blood.
    “The fox came back. Killed three hens. I tracked it down and shot it.” He raised his head high as he said this.
See what I can do? I can protect what is ours. I have the heart of a hero
.
    “I skinned the fox,” he said. “I thought you might make Gertie a hat.”
    Sara reached out and grabbed the sleeve of his coat, fingers working their way into the damp wool. “Gertie wasn’t with you?”
    “Of course not. She was still in bed when I left.”
    All Martin wanted was to go inside and change into dry clothes, have some