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  What nobody knew, except for him and Marco, was that while the hippie—Pan—was already a corpse when they got there, Bosky was alive and breathing and aware enough to put his last two words together. It was a hard moment. The moment Sess had been chasing after for two years and more. He stood there over him with the .22, and he was going to squeeze the trigger—out of anger, sure, there was that, hate and anger—but out of something else too, call it compassion, call it habit. He brought the barrel of the rifle up to finish Bosky in the way he would have finished any spine-sprung thing caught in a deadfall or a trap meant for something bigger, death in an instant instead of an hour—that was human mercy in a place that had none to spare. But he didn’t. A bullet hole would have required explanations, and those explanations would have led down a trail of deceit and dissembling he wanted no part of. And another thing: Bosky didn’t deserve a bullet—better save it for the rabid skunk, the porcupine, the summer rat. What he did finally, after duly recording the man’s final words, was turn his back, and he didn’t argue about it with Marco—he wasn’t in an arguing mood. Or a democratic one either. The two of them just backed away from the fire, the wreckage, the corpse of the one and the slowly congealing flesh of the other, and then they came back in the morning and loaded up the human weight and hauled it in. “No reason,” he said to Marco, “to mention anything. The plane went down, that’s all, and we brought them in.”

  So that was the end of it. And though he’d never gloated over the death of any man—or any creature, for that matter—he had to consider that for him, at least, Christmas had come early. Somebody, some stooped and weeping parent or aunt or black-eyed sibling, would come in the spring and take the small things of sentimental value out of the cabin on Woodchopper Creek, and then the place would stand open to anybody who wanted it, though nobody would. Over the years the roof poles would rot, the sod would give way to the pull of the earth, the walls would buckle, the floorboards subside. Birds would nest in the stovepipe, mice in the bureau drawers. On a given night, in the still of winter, a wolf would trespass in the yard, divine the last dim lingering whiff of the scent of Bosky, Pan, Sky Dog, and lift a leg to eradicate it.

  Sess could appreciate that, the natural order—let it stir, let it settle again. The wind was in his face. The northern lights were out, driving down the clouds. The snow whispered at his feet, talked to him, sang out with the rhythm of the night. He was heading home, riding the runners, breathing easy, a man clothed in fur at the head of a team of dogs in a hard wild place, going home to his wife.