I roll out of the bed and reach for the closest layer—one of his flannels, the soft plaid one, hanging on the back of the chair. It swallows me. The sleeves come to my knuckles.
"You are wearing my shirt."
"I look better in it."
"You do."
We dress fast, stealing kisses between layers. The mood is light, playful. The danger of the box canyon feels a million miles away. The terror of the scree slope is a story to tell at parties.
We walk out into the main room. The house is cold, so Nash feeds the woodstove while I fry bacon and start the coffee.
"Looks like we have the place to ourselves," I say, eating a piece of bacon straight from the pan. It's crispy, perfect.
"We always have the place to ourselves." Nash grins. He pours two mugs from the pot. "Let's go take a look at the meat house. Then we can discuss how to utilize this empty kitchen."
We step out the front door.
The cold air hits us, crisp and startling. It's a beautiful day, blue sky, no wind, the snow sparkling like crushed diamonds. It's an Alaskan morning that makes you believe the world is innocent.
The smokehouse sits about forty yards across the yard, tucked against the dark tree line—a small cedar shed with a peaked roof and a mesh screen door I can see even from here. Nash tells me it's supposed to smell like woodsmoke from a hundred feet away this time of year.
Today, I don't smell anything.
Nash stops on the porch steps. He freezes, the coffee mug halfway to his mouth.
"Nash?" I ask, sensing the shift in him instantly. "What is it?"
"The smoke," he says softly. "There's no smoke."
"Maybe it just went out."
"The stove's on a timer. It doesn't go out on its own." His voice is different. Flatter. "And the door's crooked."
I look. Even from the porch I can see it—the mesh screen door doesn't sit right in the frame. It's off its top hinge. The whole rectangle is tilted, hanging by one screw.
Nash sets the mug down on the railing. His movements are suddenly precise, efficient. The lover is gone; the guide is back.
"Stay here," he says.
"What? No." I put my mug down too. "I'm coming."
He moves. He walks fast toward the smokehouse, boots crunching loudly in the snow. I stay half a step behind him, because I'm not eight years old and I'm not staying on the porch.
As we get closer, I see why the door won't sit right.
Something pried it.
Long gouges rake down the cedar where the mesh used to seal against the frame. The padlock is intact—still hanging on its hasp, still locked—but the hasp itself has been ripped clean out of the wood on the other side. The door swings loose on the one hinge that's left.
Nash pushes it open with two fingers.
The inside of the smokehouse is a horror show.
Four cured haunches hang from a beam. Two more are on the floor, one still trailing part of its rope, the meat torn open in long, ragged strips. A rack of jerky lies knocked sideways, stripped bare. There's no blood—cured meat doesn't bleed—only grease smears and drag marks through the sawdust, out the door, toward the trees.
"That was a year of meat," Nash says behind me, so quietly it's worse than shouting.
And everywhere, everywhere, on the floor of the smokehouse, on the trampled snow outside the broken door, on the churned drift bank at the tree line—paw prints.
