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general, brown fogginess that obscured even their faces and clothes where they sat posed upon an ornate, high-backed settee placed before the backdrop. Their dressfronts starched and their skirts arranged just so about their crossed and folded legs. The mother held the daughter’s hand, and their free hands were composed precisely on the armrests. Their faces serious as befitting a moment of high gravity—neither smiled but for their eyes, and the girl was the softened echo of her mother and her mother so very beautiful. In all, a proper keepsake for a soldier gone to war to help him dream of home and hearth, and indeed the Union boy who’d shot Abel wore it on a chain near his heart when Abel found it. And there were long times and many afterward that Abel stared upon the tintype and fancied there his own wife’s face, his own daughter’s, had they lived and posed thusly for him.
    As it often did these past months, the old man’s heart fell to beating all wrong. A scrim of sweat broke upon his forehead and his breath whistled in his chest. He shut the frame carefully and reached to grip his knee with his right hand as he leaned to better breathe. He began to cough, hot and harsh and sick and foul tasting, and he coughed a long time. When it was done, Abel spat out the door intothe dark so he would not see its color. After he felt right again, and before he could reconsider, he opened the frame once more, pried out the glass, then stepped toward the fire and turned the tintype out into the flames. He watched the bleary image blacken and after a while tossed the frame itself upon the coals. The dog watched him, and he lifted his chin. “It was a poor thing to thieve a thing like that,” he said softly.
    Abel stood beside the fire and watched the ocean move constantly, restlessly, in the outer dark. He looked at the stars that glistened hard and cold through gaps in the clouds and at the hazy moon behind. He looked at the dog where it lay sleeping by the snapping fire. Older now, it tired easily and slept hard, its long legs moving restlessly as it gave soft little puppy-barks from its dreams. Abel watched it for a time, then shed his clothes and stood naked, pale and ghostly in the shadows.
    He started across the wrecked driftwood toward the sand, picking his way along carefully. The tide seethed and rattled along the shore. It sprayed and echoed on the stones in the deeper waters and slapped against itself still farther out, under the moon as it moved beyond the clouds, where men could not dwell nor prosper. Beds of kelp, like inky stains upon the general darkness, bobbed on the swells while mounds of it, beached days past, lay quietly afester with night-becalmed sand fleas near the driftwood bulwarks. Glancing to the little river that cut sharply and dark through the sand, Abel saw the largest wolf he’d ever seen, standing in the current watching him.
    The old man stood stock-still. The wolf stared and did not move. Silver, moon-struck water fell from its underjaw and its hackles were raised in a dark ridge somehow reminiscent of other predators, saurian and long-extinct. They were silent together in their separate places on the shore—the old man and the wolf—and when it finally stepped from the river and turned to lope back into the forest, Abelsaw the moonlight glint hard and fast off a crude, handmade collar round its neck and wondered how much dog was in it.
    “I’ll be damned,” he said softly, thinking maybe he was or would be. “I’ll be goddamned.” Then he turned back toward the ocean and walked out into it.
    Abel caught his breath as the cold, cold water closed around his bare thighs. He looked down the lean, pale line of his body and felt the ache throb freshly in his ruined elbow and down his forearm to the center of his palm as though the old, violent metal had spread corrosion to those places. The dark water swallowed whole his lower half while moonlight reflected his torso back, pinning and