The chugging of an old vehicle could be made out over the sound of her car. She twisted around and in the distance could discern two uneven cones of headlights bouncing up the dirt road in her direction. The vehicle was moving slowly and the good light penetrated in a straight line toward her like an arrow while the weaker one wobbled its light across the ground. As it came closer, she could make out the dark mass of an old sedan behind it and, buttoning her coat, decided to take a chance. She got out of the car on the low side and clambered up the bank onto the roadway. She held her arms straight out from her sides, raising and lowering them in what she thought was a universal request for assistance. Then the car slowed down and stopped, the animated, snow-filled beam of good light shining off into the distance.
The driver’s door opened and a huge man got out, a dark beard against a torn military coat, a billed cap pulled low. For some reason he didn’t speak, didn’t ask what her problem was. She listened to her own overly detailed description of the deer coming onto the road and grew acutely aware of ice she now felt under her feet and the odd patience with which the man let her speak. The three other doors of the car slowly began opening, and she could see men getting out. “I don’t think this will be necessary,” she said, without quite understanding what she meant. “Not required,” she added with a dismissive wave of her hand, then turned and hurried through the drifts into the night. She didn’t look back until she was out of breath, when she could see the interior lights of her car and the shapes of men going through it. In another few yards, the snow obscured them.
Evelyn was walking away from the river. She knew that by walking away from a river you could be walking into nowhere. But at the moment, walking of any kind seemed entirely positive and the snow was at her back, the only way she could see through it at all though it didn’t prevent her from colliding with a fence. The wire was too tight to crawl through, so she felt along until she reached a brace post and climbed over. To be inside the fence was a relief. Pioneers coming through Indian country often wept when they saw fences. But she was beginning to get cold and would have to find something to break the wind. The first prospect of shelter was a slight ridge, but the snow had piled up just beyond it and the lee was insufficient; this was a possible place to die and therefore would not do just now. She felt quite level-headed in acknowledging that she was unprepared for death. Even if her mind was in ribbons, she wanted to go on.
The strap broke on one of her shoes. They offered little protection, but she now had to shuffle on one foot to keep from losing it and, from time to time, lost it anyway. The snow was melting in her hair and running down her neck, and she wondered if she hadn’t been better off following the fence, or if perhaps she should have trusted those men. Nothing in her route suggested a destination unless it was sunrise still three hours off, if she could last. It was heartening to plan to meet some point in time when meeting some point on earth seemed unattainable. She realized how cold she had gotten when the thought crossed her mind, What difference does it make? She was traveling toward sunrise and sunrise was traveling toward her. Either they met or they didn’t. Nothing else mattered. She and sunrise were old friends, no?
Evelyn sat at the base of a juniper tree acknowledging that it was poor shelter and that while she was certainly not giving up, it was time to await an idea. That was all that was missing. Noting that the broken shoe was gone, she was vaguely surprised that she hadn’t noticed any pain or coldness in that foot. Perhaps, she thought, it was simply more courageous than the other foot. Maybe it was tired of sharing. Lately, people were always offering to “share” with you, usually something entirely unwelcome, occasionally a nasty surprise. Her heart went out to the warmer foot for keeping its own counsel. Overhead, the slumped contours of the juniper were sagging with snow. The shredded bark against her back seemed protective. Then something strange happened: the wind stopped, leaving an apprehensive quiet.
Her head was down on her chest and the snow piled upon herself when she heard a tentative lowing which gathered into a broad, inquiring volume. Evelyn stared hard toward the rumble of deep voices, the spinning whiteness of the snow. At length, the first black faces began to appear, massing in front of her, crowding for room, then around her, each different from the next. In her black dress and loose coat, she curled on the ground before them. The circle tightened until she felt their heat.
Was this the warm outer room of death? Evelyn was wrapped in several army blankets, her head turned against a gray-and-white-striped ticking pillow. The shade of the bedside lamp had pine trees appliquéd to panels of imitation buckskin, the seams laced not with rawhide but shoelaces. The room smelled of cold wood, and beyond the uncurtained window the flat winter light contained no detail. Evelyn ran her hands over herself and discovered that she was in the same black dress, then noticed pants and an old blue sweater folded over a chair, it seemed, for her use. Some of the tension went out of her body, and she was aware of a sound outside.
Evelyn looked down into a yard enclosed by a shelter belt of caragana and evergreens, grown tangled together and unkempt, banked by graying snow, fastened here and there by debris that seemed to have blown from the general refuse of the house into the nearest thing that stopped the wind: newspapers, binder twine, plastic grocery store bags. Wrapped in one of the blankets, she started as a figure appeared below her dragging a length of wood and adding it to a rick of logs and branches. An empty flagpole stood to one side, its ropes slapping in a steady wind. The figure was a man, encumbered by heavy clothing and a navy blue hat whose earflaps were drawn alongside his face, and for as long as she watched, he continued to drag wood from out of her sight into the square steadily formed by the logs. What is he building? A shelter? Nothing about this procedure changed, and in its repetition was something grim that Evelyn wished to see no more of. She turned from the window and looked at the clothes on the chair, reluctant to put them on. When she dropped the blanket from her shoulders, she regarded the previously fashionable black dress as some annoying slut suit and unhesitatingly rid herself of it and replaced it with the baggy, warm and clean clothing on the chair. She balled up the dress tightly and put it on the chair, where it began to expand; she compressed it again and pressed it between the rungs. She was ready to be seen, should there be anyone to see her.