When we pulled into the drive, I threw open my door and got out of the truck even before it had stopped.
Tracy! I heard Dad holler at me, but I was already running round the back of the house, I threw open the door and tracked snow across the kitchen. Homer and Canyon both sprung to their feet, barking, bringing Scott down the stairs, already in his pajamas, Helen looking up from her book in the den, a shout of surprise dropping out of her. Both of them unmarked, unharmed. Alarmed by an intruder but the intruder was me, there wasn’t no one else.
Where is he? The words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them.
Where’s who? Helen asked. She put a hand on my cheek. You’re so flushed. Do you feel all right?
Jesse’s in the shed, Scott told me.
But Jesse wasn’t in the shed, he was at the door, frowning and glancing at Dad. I heard the truck— he said.
I shrugged Helen off, pushed past Jesse and went back outside. Run to the middle of the yard, that panicked-rabbit run. I turned, scanning the perimeter of the woods. Trying to hear the sound of someone approaching over my own panting.
Tracy! Dad was calling after me.
The kennel. I remembered the night we found Jesse’s footprints outside the building, a good place to hide till the middle of the night when no one would expect a visitor. I sprinted across the yard, pushed the door open so hard it slammed against the wall and swung back at me. I held my breath and listened as I crept across the room, listened for someone else breathing, floorboards creaking, anything, as I went stall to stall only to find each one empty.
You want to tell me what’s going on? Dad spoke up from behind me.
Jesse was in the doorway. The two of them staring at me, wanting answers that I couldn’t give.
I— I started, and all at once felt lightheaded. I staggered. Helen, who had followed Dad to the kennel, rushed over to me and put her hand on my forehead again.
You’ve got a fever, she told me then put her arm round me. Is this why you came home early? she asked Dad, then said, Come on, let’s go back to the house and get you into bed.
I let her usher me outside, confused and tired. A sort of terrified calm rushed through me, the resignation a critter feels in its last moments, when it sees your knife, feels your hand round its neck, and some part of it understands everything will be over soon.
When we got to the shed, Jesse peeled away from the group. I went after him, seized by an idea.
I seen the man from the fair, I told him.
Jesse’s face as confused as Dad’s.
The man who won the strength game, I tried again.
Understanding lit his eyes.
What’s she talking about? Dad asked.
Jesse shook his head.
But when I let Dad and Helen lead me to the house, I glanced back at him. Mouth pressed into a frown. He’d got my message.
Upstairs, Helen took my temperature then give me a couple pills from the medicine cabinet. I tried to insist that I needed to help take the dogs out of the dog box but I didn’t try very hard, truth was I could barely string words together I was so exhausted from the day and the panic and the strange disappointment of coming home to find everything and everyone just as I had left them. Dad would take care of the dogs, Helen assured me. What I needed now was sleep. So that’s what I got.
I didn’t wake till noon the next day. The house quiet, no sound but the radio someone had left on. I stayed in bed, watching snow fall past my window, long enough to hear that the Junior had wrapped up just before eleven that morning, a seventeen-year-old musher from Big Lake had come in first, second went to the rookie from Bozeman, and a girl from Nome had placed third. I expected to burn a little at that news, and was surprised to find I didn’t care.
I finally crawled out of bed close to one. My face still flushed when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t feel hot except to the touch, my palms was clammy. Before I’d left for the Junior, I had took two squirrels, it should of been enough to get me through a few days before I needed to find something else warm. I felt sick, but it didn’t feel like the same kind of sick that come when I hadn’t drunk. I splashed water on my face and brushed my teeth, then went outside to find the truck gone.
I knocked on Jesse’s door, then pushed it open when there wasn’t no answer. He was gone, too, his bed made and a book he’d borrowed open and facedown on his small table. The woodstove dead but still warm to the touch.
I went back outside into snow that come down thicker now, big palm-sized flakes wafting from the sky. The yard eerie with quiet.
Now, I thought. A silent message from me to Tom Hatch. Come right now, when it’s just me and you.
The thought threatened to send me into a panic again. Even though I knew he was close, he had the upper hand. But I had tricks. Tools. Years and lives I had drunk in, everything the animals I’d killed had taught me. Hatch didn’t have none of that. I breathed deep. Slowed my thundering heart.
I waded through new, shin-deep snow to the trailhead. The nearest trap was only about a mile down the trail and with any luck I would find a catch.
The day muffled with mounds of snow, it clung to the trunks of trees and blotted out the sky. But there was a grinding in my head, like metal chewing on metal, a sort of screaming that made it hard to think. I tried to clear my mind of Hatch’s face. Smiling as he raised his hand and waved. Good luck, musher! The look of recognition in his eyes the day he landed in our yard. His brows knitted together, his face too close to see in detail, as he pressed himself onto Jesse.
I tried to be Jesse. Went looking inside myself for what I knew of Hatch, the kind of man he was. Methodical. Handy. Patient, till he wasn’t. He had courted Jesse in his way, but then something had gone wrong, his patience had run out and something else had took over, landing the two of them behind the barn. Later, they had come north, Jesse first and Hatch after him. I could piece that much together. Then I walked into the story with my knife in my hand and my mind washed away with a tide of blood.
Nearly five months, Hatch had stuck round after Dad took him to the clinic. He’d spent at least some of that time in Fairbanks, recovering from his wound. Time he must of spent puzzling out where Jesse might of gone. Then what? Had he come back to the village, started hanging round the roadhouse and the post office, chatting about nothing to folks till it wouldn’t seem odd when he asked about the family whose yard he’d collapsed in? He’d discovered enough to show up at the Junior. And if he knew anything about my family, he knew who Dad was and probably figured that odds was Iditarod champ Bill Petrikoff Junior would be in Anchorage come the first Saturday of March, along with his kids, gearing up to run the big race. Leaving his property empty. If anyone stayed behind to keep an eye on things, it would probably be that young man Petrikoff had took on, the one who didn’t say much and lived in the shed out back.
My trap was empty, so I hid myself in some brush and waited, the thoughts in my head churning and grinding against each other so loud I felt certain every animal in the woods would hear and stay away. But after a spell, a fox come slinking out of the trees. About ten feet from the creek, he stopped short. Sniffed the ground, then circled round a spot in the snow that didn’t look no different from any other spot. I held my breath. His ears, each one big as a plate, facing forward. He stopped, lowered his head. Waited. Then launched into the air and come arcing down, face-first into the snow, his hind legs and tail the only parts visible till he resurfaced with a mouse between his teeth.