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Autumn was the season in which his father and, much later, his wife had been lost to him, both taken through violence. Now, in this same season, Jubal Little was gone and, like the others, gone violently.
    Cork was deep in thought and thoughtlessly following thebeam of the flashlight when he became aware of a tingling at the nape of his neck and along his spine. He snapped back into the moment and had the overwhelming sense that he was being tracked. Someone was following him, or perhaps pacing him on one side of the trail or the other. He couldn’t say why he felt this. Had he heard the tiny, bonelike crack of a foot snapping a twig on the ground, or the sound of a body sliding through brush? He stopped and swung the light into the woods all around, then shot it down the path behind him. Nothing. He listened intently, but that, too, proved useless.
    He wondered if his imagination was running wild, if he was simply being paranoid. On the other hand, someone that day had tracked him and Jubal in the woods without either of them knowing. Someone had been able to commit murder and slip away without being seen or heard. Was this person right now watching Cork from some dark vantage? Was another arrow, soundless in its flight, about to hit its mark?
    “Jesus, Cork,” he said out loud. “Get hold of yourself.”
    In the wet, heavy air of the enormous dark, his voice sounded weak, offering him little comfort.
    He was relieved when he finally broke from the trees and saw, across the open meadow on Crow Point, the welcoming lantern light that shone through the windows of Meloux’s cabin. A cold wind had come up, and it ran through the pines at his back with a sound like the rush of floodwater. He was a dozen yards into the meadow when he heard the voice, and he spun, swinging the flashlight beam as if it were a saber hacking at the dark. As before, it illuminated nothing but forest.
    Cork called out, “Who’s there?” knowing, even as he spoke, that it was useless. If it was only his imagination, no one was there to reply. And if someone had actually tracked him this far, why would they reveal themselves now? Yet he was certain he’d heard someone speak.
    He retreated from the wall of forest and turned his back to the trees only when he was fifty yards away, a distance that,especially in the dark, would challenge even the best of bow hunters. He jogged the rest of the way and didn’t feel entirely safe until Meloux’s door was opened to him.
    *   *   *
    Rainy Bisonette was a lovely woman, though not pretty in a fashionable way. She never wore makeup or tried to hide the gray streak in her long, black hair. Her hands were callused and her nails clipped short. Rather than lithe or willowy, she looked strong. Cork thought of her as substantial, although he would never have said so out loud because it didn’t sound at all complimentary. In his own mind, what it meant was that Rainy, in her intelligence, her compassion, her humor, her enjoyment of life, was pretty much everything a man could ask for, and a great deal more. He thought himself lucky to have found her.
    Rainy put together coffee in a blue enamel pot. She set it on the iron cookstove at the center of the cabin’s single room. While it brewed, she gave Cork a big piece of corn bread left over from dinner, buttered and topped with blackberry jam that she’d made herself, and that he gratefully devoured.
    The room was simply furnished, mostly with things Meloux had made over the years. A table and three chairs of birchwood. A bunk with a thin mattress whose ticking was straw mixed with dried herbs that the old Mide chose for their fragrance and their particular power. A sink with a hand pump, and above it a few cupboards. The walls were hung with items that harked back across all the years of Meloux’s life—a toboggan, a deer-prong pipe, snowshoes whose frames were made of white ash and whose bindings were leather, a gun rack that held an old Remington.