An endless time before a shape formed itself in the doorway, and I had to blink my watery eyes clear before I seen it was Dad. He closed the door, crossed the yard. Shook his head. There’s no one here, he said.
But there was. Maybe not in the kennel. Maybe still as far away as Fairbanks. But he was with us, anyhow. I carried him with me the same way I carried Mom, he wouldn’t let go. Not long as I still had his money hid under my bed.
Day after we found the footprints outside the kennel, we got a second big snowfall. Dad come home after plowing the next evening and dropped into a chair at the table. Didn’t bother to shuck his boots or take off his coat. He’d been gone since early that morning, and the night before I never did hear him come home, it must of been long after I was asleep.
That’s the last of it, he said finally. For now.
He wiped a hand over his face. His eyes baggy. The plowing was decent enough money, he couldn’t turn it down. But I suspected that if he was going to miss out on a good night’s sleep, he would of preferred to spend those hours on the back of a sled instead of in the seat of his truck.
What’s this? I gestured at a loaf of bread he’d brung in with him, wrapped in plastic and unsliced.
Helen Graham made it, he said. She thought you kids might enjoy it. Nice of her.
I dropped the bread. Helen, at the clinic? You went there?
Cleared the parking lot.
Then you went in.
He peeled off his hat. Bent to untie his boots and grunted. Hand me that bottle behind the toaster, would you?
He meant the whiskey Steve had brung over, still half full. I fetched it, along with a glass, and set it before him. He was already exhausted, and a shot or two of whiskey would guarantee sleep that wasn’t just deep but bottomless. I felt about six different ways at once. It would be a trial, breaking trail after two big snows. But it would be worth it, just to be on a sled and outside.
But the bread on the counter nagged at me.
So you talked to Helen?
He drained the glass, poured another.
How’s—I mean, she hear anything?
I didn’t know how to ask what I wanted to ask.
Dad drained his second glass. Mr. Hatch, you mean? he said. He shook his head. She hasn’t heard anything since they sent him to Fairbanks. I reckon he got patched up then headed south.
South? My mouth went dry. Why south?
Dad shrugged. What his driver’s license said—Oklahoma, I think it was. Or Kansas. One of them middle states.
He yawned then, and stretched, while I tried to imagine myself a grown man, someone far from home and injured, and missing a few thousand dollars. Would I still have enough on me to find a car I could drive after I left the hospital in Fairbanks? And if I did, would I use that money to stay in Alaska just long enough to find the pack I’d dropped in the woods?
Or maybe, instead, with no money and only one thing on my mind, I would hitchhike as far south as I could get, then start walking. And maybe if the weather got cold enough, I would find an unlocked door and a woodstove, and grow so warm after shivering in the biting wind, I’d fall asleep till the owner come home. Jim Lerner’s description of his intruder didn’t sound like Tom Hatch, but Jim probably hadn’t memorized every detail about his visitor or snapped a picture. He might of got the age wrong, the shape of the man. Jim’s place was north of ours. Not so far away it would take more than a day or two to walk the distance between.
Which led me to the footprints outside the kennel. There’s where my thoughts got tangled up. If Hatch had spent the night in our kennel, he was gone now, he’d chose to dive back into the woods to search for his pack instead of knocking on our door to share with Dad exactly how he come to arrive in our yard with a stab wound that nearly killed him. Which meant maybe I was safe. Except when Hatch didn’t find the pack where he’d left it, there was a chance he would come to the house after all. Or maybe he would give up, go back to where he come from. Or maybe he would call the VSO because he was the victim of not one crime but two.
Or maybe he was already back in Oklahoma or Kansas, safe at home in his own bed. There was too many maybes for me to sort.
Dad hoisted himself up then, yawned again. I can’t keep my eyes open. I’m for bed.
Me too, I said too quick, it was only a little after eight, but he didn’t seem to notice how eager I was.
I followed him up the stairs, the house going dark behind us as he clicked off lights one by one. Water running in the bathroom, toilet flushing. Scott, in his room reading, calling good night to us. The floorboards creaking as Dad trudged past my room.
Night, Trace.
Night.
I lay on my bed, still dressed, door cracked. Listening. Waiting. Fretting over a set of footprints and what they might mean.
It was only a handful of minutes before I heard his snores rumble up the hallway, but I made myself wait more than an hour before I got up, long enough to be sure Scott was asleep, too. Old Su and the retired dogs lifted their heads when I come back down the stairs. I crept across the kitchen. At the door, clicked my tongue at Su to follow me.
The second I drug the small sled out of the kennel and the dogs seen it, they started barking. I held my breath and watched the house. Expected a light to shine from Dad’s window, him looking down to see what was all the ruckus. But the window stayed dark.
I fastened the snow hook round the trunk of a tree and laid out the rigging, then harnessed the dogs, Zip and Flash, with Su on the lead. One more check to make sure the sandbags in the basket was strapped down tight. Then I stood on the runners, reached back and pulled the snow hook loose. The dogs bolted forward, and the three of us sailed across the yard, onto the familiar trail and into the night.
We run. The air cold against my face, like glass in my lungs. The snow flying up from the ground as the dogs galloped, breaking the trail easier than I expected, sending stinging needles against my cheeks and forehead. No sound except the runners over the new snow and the breathing of the dogs. The moon overhead painted the snow with the slender shadows of bare branches. We passed the tree where Tom Hatch’s handprint had long since faded. Bypassed the lake on the alternate trail, the water likely not frozen enough to hold us. Crested the hill with the two boulders on either side of the trail. Come to the place where the trees started to thin out before the river, and that’s when a feeling hit me, come down so hard I lost my breath and my eyes welled up. Like someone had took away my heart but I didn’t know it and had been walking round empty but not understanding why, till right then, as I stood on the runners of the sled, it come back to me. I felt it inside me, beating strong in my chest for the first time since Mom died. Alive, every speck of me. It wasn’t just about the race. I hadn’t run the dogs in weeks, and the previous winter I’d spent most of my time alone in the woods, no dog by my side, only the memory of Mom to keep me company. A season without my heart was long enough.
We sprinted into a clearing and I called out, Come gee! to bring the dogs round in a wide U-turn, got them back on the trail. Headed home, slower now. I hopped off the sled from time to time and run alongside it, then worked the dogs to a stop when I come to a spot where I’d set a trap the day before when I managed to sneak out while Dad was plowing. I’d left a figure-four deadfall where a set of ermine tracks made a path near a hollow log. I liked this kind of trap on account of all you need is two heavy rocks and three sticks, you carve notches into the sticks and assemble them so they hold up one rock and when an animal come along to take the bait you have laid, it triggers the trap and the first rock falls and crushes the animal against the other rock.