Page 4 of My Halloween Hunter

It took her one walk down a road.

After midnight I'm at her wall.

I tell myself it's the rounds, because I do check every rented cabin in this valley, for bears and chimney fires and fools. It isn't the rounds. Her scent is all through the cold air around the building now, picking up smoke from the walls and picking up my valley with it, and I walk the north wall breathing it in until my jaw aches.

At the east window I stop.

She's up in the loft; I heard the ladder hours ago. I put my palm flat on the glass where she stood washing that mug and lean my weight into it, and that's when I hear her, eight feet above me through the boards.

It's small and muffled, a breath caught behind a hand. Not a sleeping sound, and not a frightened one either. I know every sound a scared animal makes, and that isn't one of them. That's a woman touching herself in the dark while she listens to me walk around her house.

Everything in me goes still and certain, the same stillness that comes over me when the bull steps into the clearing and the whole world narrows to the line between us.

So I go around the walls again, and again, and let her hear every step. Let her count.

The fourth time, I go up on the porch and put my hand on her door. The brass is cold, and it turns a quarter under my palm. Unlocked.

Ten rungs to that loft. I'd be on her in six seconds and she'd let me, and it would be good, but it would be mine and not hers. I want it to be hers. I want her to come down that ladder on her own two feet and put herself in my hands — or run, and make me catch her.

I let go of the handle.

3

Darcy

"I know you're there."

The creek answers. Nothing else does.

I'm crouched on a gravel bar with the camera on its tripod and black water sliding past, three hours into the morning, and he's been out here with me for every minute of it. I never see him. But there's a needle in my chest now that swings when he moves, and right now it's pointing north-east, up the slope and into the old pines.

Fifteen seconds of silence is long enough to feel like an idiot. Then a branch cracks, one sharp deliberate snap ninety yards up the hill, and I understand that he's answered me.

My hand goes into my jacket pocket and closes on the lens cap. I've been doing it all day, running my thumb over the ridged edge like a worry stone. A mountain man found this and set it where I sleep, and any friend of mine would have the RCMP on the phone before I got to the end of that sentence.

I come out here every morning anyway.

The next morning the deadfall is gone.

It was a pine as thick as my waist, lying across the creek trail at the second bend, and yesterday it cost me twenty minutes, a bloody knee and the best light of the day. This morning it's been bucked into rounds and stacked neatly at the trail's edge, the cut faces pale and weeping sap, sawdust still damp in the frost. He watched me fight that tree and lose the light, and then he came out in the dark with a saw.

I lay my palm on the fresh-cut wood. It's cold and sticky and smells so green my eyes water.

That afternoon I leave my pack on a boulder while I shoot a sequence downstream, and when I come back there's a thermos sitting beside it, steel and dented and older than I am. I was forty feet away the whole time and heard nothing. When I unscrew the lid, steam curls up off black coffee strong enough to strip paint.

I drink every drop sitting on that rock and staring up into the trees, the heat going down my throat and settling low in my belly. I don't taste the coffee. I taste that he made it, with his hands, for me.

Walking back along the creek with the light going, I hear him behind me for the first time.

Not ninety yards off in the trees. Behind me, on the trail, close. Boots on frozen needles, matching mine so exactly that it takes a dozen steps to be sure it isn't my own echo. When I speed up, it speeds up. When I stop dead, it takes one more step than I do, deliberately, and then stops too, and in the silence afterwards I hear breathing — slow and deep, a big chest, somewhere behind my left shoulder, close enough that if I turned I'd be looking straight at him.

I don't turn. I can't. Every muscle in my back has locked, my heart is going so hard the edges of my vision pulse, and I stand on the creek trail with my fists clamped around my pack straps while something that could break me in half stands behind me and breathes.

It goes on so long my eyes start to sting.

Then he comes closer, one step, until I can feel the heat of his breath on the back of my neck through my hair, and he breathes in. Long and slow, drawing my scent into his lungs like he's tasting it. A sound comes out of me that isn't a word.

When I finally whip around, the trail is empty. There's a boot print in the frost an arm's length behind my heel, and nothing else.