A hiker. The Monkey shifts somehow in his jacket. You’re a ways off the trail, aren’t you?
Like I said, I saw the smoke.
The Monkey shifts again. You saw that?
I smelled it first.
Ah.
They are silent. Water drips from the roof and rings in its wells.
What about you? the hiker says.
What about me?
What brings you up here?
I’m a volunteer ranger.
A volunteer ranger. What’s that mean?
It means I’ve got a cabin down the mountain I don’t want burning up.
The hiker says nothing. Then he says, Hadn’t we better see about getting her out of there? She might be hurt. Are you hurt in there? he calls.
Run, damn you, she whispers. Get away. Get down the mountain.
She sounded fit enough a second ago, says the hiker. There’s a padlock on the door, but she said there’s an ax out here somewhere.
I heard that. Is that it over there?
Where?
Behind you. Under that tree. Where that wood is.
The hiker changes his footing in the snow, is still, and then moves quickly in the direction he came. Okay, he calls. It’s an ax. I found the ax, he calls to her. There’s another man out here. He’s a volunteer ranger. We’re gonna come around and knock the padlock off the door, Caitlin.
He is walking again and she tracks his footfalls, and the Monkey’s, as they circle the shack, and soon the hiker arrives once more at the front door.
Don’t, she breathes. Don’t, don’t . . .
Don’t do it like that, says the Monkey. Use the poll.
The what?
The blunt end.
Why?
Cause you’ll ruin the edge.
Who gives a damn if I ruin the edge?
There is silence. Then the hiker says Wait and through the door comes a sound she knows, a sharp festive pop, like a single firecracker. Hardly loud enough to startle a bird yet sudden and sharp enough to cleave open a mountain and send it shearing down itself. Immediately the door shudders in its jamb, as if he has decided to throw his weight at it, but feebly, and then in defeat has slid slowly down to the snow.
I do, says the Monkey.
She hears him click open the pistol. Eject the casing. Snap the pistol shut again. Something scuffs at the outside of the door, down low, near the floor. Like an old dog scratching to be let in. There is a second pop and the scuffing stops.
SHE IS ON THE cot as before, unmoved, legs drawn up in the same tight ball of herself, when she hears him returning. His footsteps, the sled runners, moving more easily through the snow. She remembers the high snowy ledge, the tumbling emptiness beyond, but he has not been gone long enough for that, has stashed the body someplace nearby. As he unlocks the padlock the timbers crack overhead and her legs spasm, kicking as they do in dreams of running, and her mind plays her a scene in which the last thing she sees and feels in life is the cold, blued face of the only other human being in all this time who knew where she was, who heard her voice. A stranger with whom she will now lie through however many years, centuries, nothing to do but hold each other until they’re found, rags of cloth and mummy’s flesh inseparable, histories inseparable, locked in each other’s bones. More in love by the look of them than any man and wife of the living world.