“I can’t say I wasn’t,” he said. “Not a hundred percent. I watched the place quite a while, though. Didn’t see a soul.”
“How close is the cabin to the shed?” said Handy. The color was drifting back into his face and it relieved Arie to see he’d regained some focus.
“It’s close,” Curran said. “Thirty feet, maybe.” He straightened from his crouch by the fire as well as he could in the low space and reached into the carry-basket. “Check it out,” he said.
“Please tell me you have steaks in there,” said Renna. Her head was on Handy’s shoulder, and she continued to vigorously rub his back.
“Whoa up,” said Arie. She rested a hand on Curran’s arm. “Before you show us your haul, I want to hear more about this sense you had of being watched. Tell us that piece, first.”
Twin reflections of the fire shifted in his eyes. “At first it looked empty,” he said. “No trace of smoke, no sign at all from inside. Things were overgrown—you know how the woods creep in and take things back. There was something off, though.” He shook his head, brow furrowed. “It’s too tidy, maybe? Something started giving me that back-of-the-neck feel of being watched, so I grabbed what I could from the shed and we split.”
“And Talus?” Arie said. “What did she think?”
“Yeah,” Curran said, glancing at the dog, now curled asleep in her place by the entrance. “She was kind of weird.”
“Weird how?”
“We weren’t working on the same wavelength,” he said. “There I was, getting the whim-whams, and she was nosing around, looking at me like—well, like she was bored.”
Arie added a small chunk of wood to the fire. It was damp on its surface and hissed in the yellow-white bed of embers, raising tendrils of steam. “She’s not one to ignore trouble,” she said. “I trust her nose better than my two eyes and ears.”
“Might be someone recently cleared out,” said Handy. He drank the last of his tea and loosed his arms from the blanket, adjusting it to cover Renna’s bare upper body.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Arie asked him.
“Damn, Sister,” he said. “I’m plenty warm. Best leave off that fire before it eats every bit of oxygen in here.”
Arie studied him a moment and judged he looked restored enough. With the five of them crowded inside and the fire throwing a fierce heat, their faces—even Handy’s—were sheened with sweat. The shelter had taken on the temperature of a foul-smelling sauna. “Humor me,” she said, “and put your feet close. Better safe than sorry.”
He straightened his legs in front of him and flexed his long, still-puckered toes. “Show us your truck,” he told Curran.
Curran reached into the carry basket and lifted out two quart jars, one in each hand. They were both full nearly to their sealed tops. He grinned.
“Hungry?”
-3-
SWEET CORN. PICKLED BEETS that stained their fingers and teeth. Best of all, two quarts of thick stew studded with peas, potatoes, and chunks of meat that almost melted in their mouths. There were six jars someone had home-canned with utmost care. Their small decorative labels dated to the last summer before the Pink. Whatever else Curran might have in the basket could wait.
Arie studied the lids for an intact seal and judged all but one of them—a pint jar that held chunks of cooked winter squash—safe to eat.
With the tip of her knife, she pried open the brass disk of one jar and nodded at the little hiss of breaking suction. The sweet and delicate smell of corn wafted over them, somehow overpowering even the funk of wood smoke, wet clothes, and unwashed bodies. Talus, who’d just been snoring, came wide awake. She eased into the circle of firelight next to Curran, the picture of attention.
Arie looked around at their eager faces and almost laughed. “Put your tongues back in your heads,” she said. “Best to get a solid boil on it first. Let’s not flirt with botulism if we don’t have to. Curran, get into the fire there and rake me out a few inches of coals, level enough for the bucket to sit on.” The metal pail still held an inch or so of the nettle tea; she left it, pouring the corn on top. Then she popped the lids off the stew and added it to the mix. She set the jars, empty but for a skim of stew, on the ground in front of Talus. “You needn’t wait. Clean those for us, love.” The dog set to work, her long pink tongue making an easy job of it.
The food only took a few minutes to heat through, but seemed to take forever. Once Arie judged it ready and portioned out a share for Talus, they fell ravenously to the meal. Small flat stones, then fingers, served to scoop every last morsel. For several minutes, the only sounds were rain outside, fire inside, and the scrape of rock against bucket.
Finally, Renna leaned back. “Oh god, so good,” she said, and made a resounding belch. She put a hand over her mouth, but was really smiling for the first time in days.
“Hear, hear,” said Arie. “Compliments are due the chef, whoever it was.”
“And thanks to the cow that went in the stew pot,” said Curran.
“That’s not cow,” said Handy. He ran a finger around the inside of the pail and happily licked traces of gravy from his fingers.
“Bear,” said Arie. She opened the pickled beets, speared one for herself, and handed the jar to Renna. “There’s a fine dessert.”
“Bear,” mused Curran. Talus had settled in next to him, her head on his thigh while he gave her a thorough rub behind the ears. “You know bear when you see it in a jar?”
“I love it,” said Handy. “I’d eat it every day, if I could.”
“I never had it in my life.”
“Was a young one went in that stew,” said Arie. “Tender, wasn’t it? Not a hint of gaminess. The person who butchered that bear did the job right.”
“That’s sort of sad,” said Renna. She’d roused herself and stood facing away from them in the shadows, dressing. “Killing a little bear.” She returned to the fire, buttoning her flannel shirt.
Arie handed her the empty pail, which Talus had busily polished off when they were done. “You tell me it’s sad when your belly is empty again,” she said. “Put that outside to catch water.”
“Might have been a mercy,” said Curran quietly. “Could have been an orphaned cub.”
“Could have been road kill,” said Handy. “My brother Harold found a bear on the side of the road one night when he was coming from the casino. The body was still warm, so he drove home quick, got his pickup, rolled his oldest son out of bed, and the two of them heaved it into the truck and back to the house. They hung it from a tree and spent the rest of the night dressing it out. His wife Julia came out on the deck the next morning to see what the hell they were up to at the crack of dawn, and when she saw that naked bear hanging in the yard she let out a yell and dropped her cup of coffee.”
“I’m still back a turn at the casino,” said Arie. “Harold?”
Handy caught her eye and quirked a half smile. “Another story for another day, Sister.”
As if another day is guaranteed, she thought. It pricked her, his casual mention of an imagined future, where the simple pleasure of family gossip after a warm meal was the natural order of things. She mirrored his easy smile and held him in the moment. “I suppose. But… Julia, you say? You can’t mean one of those nasty little Flink girls.”
“One of those, yes.”
Renna had put the bucket just outside the entrance and pulled the matted door back into place. “So your brother’s wife wasn’t a big fan of bear meat, I guess.”
“Oh she liked to eat a bear just fine,” said Handy. “But a yearling that size, a hundred or a hundred-fifty pounds, head and paws taken off already, hanging neck-down and stripped of its fur, well—”