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It was not the woman but the child in her arms that had moved Annie most. It gave her a pang of what, at the time, she refused to acknowledge as jealousy. It was the same feeling she'd had when she saw Tom's and Rachel's initials in the concrete of the well. Oddly, the other photograph, of the grown Hal, gave full mitigation. Though he was dark like his mother, his eyes were Tom's. Even frozen in time, they disarmed all animosity.

'Do you ever see her?' Annie asked when he'd finished.

'Not for some years. We talk on the phone now and then, about Hal mostly.'

'I saw the picture in your room. He's beautiful.'

She could hear Tom smile behind her head. 'Yeah, he is.' There was a silence. A branch, white-crusted with ash, collapsed in the fire, hoisting a flurry of orange sparks into the night.

He asked, 'Did you want more children?'

'Oh yes. We tried. But I could never hold on to them. In the end we just, gave up. More than anything, I wanted it for Grace. A brother or a sister for Grace.'

They fell silent again and Annie knew, or thought she knew, what he was thinking. But it was a thought too sorrowful, even on this outside rim of world, for either one of them to utter.

The coyotes kept up their chorus all night. They mated for life, he told her, and were so devoted that if ever one were caught in a trap, the other would bring it food.

For two days they rode the bluffs and gullies of the high Front. Sometimes they would leave the horses and go on foot. They saw elk and bear and once Tom thought he saw, watching from a high crag, a wolf. It turned and went before he could be sure and he didn't mention it to Annie in case it worried her.

They came across hidden valleys filled with bear-grass and glacier lily and waded up to their knees through meadows turned to lakes of brilliant blue with lupine.

The first night it rained and he pitched the little tent he'd brought in a flat green field strewn all about with the bleached poles of fallen aspen. They got soaked to the skin and sat huddled together, shivering and laughing in the mouth of the tent with blankets over their shoulders. They sipped scalding coffee from blackened tin mugs while outside the horses grazed unbothered, the rain sleeking off their backs. Annie watched them, her wet face and neck lit from below by the oil lamp and he thought he'd never seen, nor ever would he see, any living creature so beautiful.

That night, while she slept in his arms, he lay listening to the drumming of the rain on the tent roof and tried to do what she'd told him they must, not to think beyond the moment, just to live it. But he couldn't.

The following day was clear and hot. They found a pool fed by a narrow twist of waterfall. Annie said she wanted to swim and he laughed and said he was too old and the water way too cold. But she wouldn't take no for an answer, so under the dubious gaze of the horses they stripped and leapt in. The water was so icy it made them shriek and they had to scramble right out and stood hugging each other, bare-assed and blue, jabbering like a couple of loopy kids.

That night the sky shimmered green and blue and red with aurora borealis. Annie had never seen it before and he had never seen it so clear and so bright. It rippled and spread in a vast luminous arch, trailing folded striations of color in its wake. He saw its crenelate reflection in her eyes as they made love.

It was the last night of their blinkered idyll, though neither gave it name, other than by the plangent joining of their bodies. By tacit compact forged only of their flesh, they took no rest. There was to be no squandering in sleep. They fed upon each other like creatures foretold of some dreadful, limitless winter. And they only ceased when the bruising of their bones and the raw traction of their coupled skin made them cry out in pain. The sound floated through the luminous stillness of the night, through shadowed pine and on and up until it reached the listening peaks beyond.

Some time after that while Annie slept, he heard, like some distant echo, a high primeval call which made every creature of the night fall silent. And Tom knew he'd been right and that it was a wolf he'd seen.

Chapter Thirty-three

She peeled the onions then cut them in half and finely sliced them, breathing through her mouth so the fumes wouldn't make her cry. She could feel his eyes upon her every move and she found it curiously empowering, as if his watching somehow invested her with skills she'd never thought to possess. She'd felt it too when they made love. Maybe (she smiled at the thought), maybe that was how horses felt in his presence.

He was leaning back against the divider on the far side of the room. He hadn't touched the glass of wine she'd poured him. In the living room, the music she'd found on Grace's radio had given way to a learned discussion about some composer she'd never heard of. All these people on public radio seemed to have the same cream-calm voices.

'What are you looking at?' she said gently. He shrugged.

'You. Does it bother you?'

'I like it. It makes me feel I know what I'm doing.'

'You cook fine.'

'I can't cook to save my life.'

'That's okay, you can cook to save mine.' She had been worried when they got back to the ranch this afternoon that reality would come crashing in around their ears. But, strangely, it hadn't. She felt clothed in a kind of inviolable calm. While he'd seen to the horses, she'd checked her messages and found none among them to disturb her. The most important was from Robert, giving Grace's flight numbers and arrival time in Great Falls tomorrow. It had all gone alrighty, he said, with Wendy Auerbach - in fact Grace was so alrighty about her new leg she was thinking of putting in for the marathon.

Annie's calm had even survived when she called and spoke to them both. The message she'd left on Tuesday, that she was going to spend a couple of days up at the Bookers' mountain cabin, seemed to have stirred not the smallest ripple. Throughout their marriage she had often taken time on her own somewhere and Robert presumably now saw this as part of the process of getting her head back together after losing her job. He simply asked how it had been and, simply, she replied that it had been lovely. Except by omission, she didn't even have to lie.

'It worries me, all this back-to-nature, big-outdoors stuff you're getting into,' he joked.

'Why's that?'

'Well, soon you'll be wanting to move out there and I'll have to switch to livestock litigation or something.'

When they hung up Annie wondered why the sound of his voice or of Grace's hadn't plunged her into the sea of guilt she surely knew awaited her. It just hadn't. It was as though that susceptible part of her nature were in suspense, with its eye on the clock and mindful that she had owing yet some few, fleeting hours with Tom.

She was cooking him the pasta dish she'd wanted to make that evening they'd all come for supper. The little pots of basil she'd bought in Butte were flourishing. As she chopped the leaves, he came up behind her and rested his hands lightly on her hips and kissed the side of her neck. The touch of his lips made her catch her breath. 'It smells good,' he said.

'What, me or the basil?'

'Both.'

'You know, in ancient times they used basil to embalm the dead.'

'Mummies, you mean?'

'Daddies too. It prevents mortification of the flesh.'

'I thought that was about banishing lust.'

'It does that too, so don't eat too much.' She tipped it into the pan where the onions and tomatoes were already cooking, then swiveled slowly in his hands to face him. Her forehead was against his lips and he kissed her there gently. She looked down and slotted her thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans. And in the sharing quiet of that moment Annie knew she could not leave this man.