There was less than a mile of woods between the Bissells’ land and Bert and Betty’s house. Ordinarily, it was a 15-minute walk, and it was impossible to get lost because Betty had made hatchet marks in the trees for the kids to follow. Also, the woods were divided into three sections, so you could always tell if you’d gotten spun around somehow. The first section of forest had been harvested for timber a while back—Zoe’s mom preferred the term “raped and pillaged”—so the trees closest to the Bissells’ house were new growth. They were mostly flaky gray lodgepole pines. They were planted so close together that they seemed to be huddling for warmth.
The second section was Zoe’s favorite: giant larches and Douglas firs. They were Montana’s version of skyscrapers. They were only a hundred years old, but looked dinosaur-old, like they’d come with the planet.
The trees closest to the lake had burned in an unexplained fire before Zoe was born. They’d never fallen, though, so there was a quarter-mile’s worth of charred snags just standing there dead. It was a spooky place—and Jonah’s favorite part of the woods, of course. It was where he played all his soldier-of-the-apocalypse games.
Walking to Bert and Betty’s house meant following the path through new trees, then old trees, then dead ones. Zoe and Jonah had made the trip a thousand times. There was no such thing as getting lost—not for long. Not in decent weather or in daylight.
After Zoe had walked 20 feet or so into the young part of the forest, the world became quiet. There was just a low hum in the air, like somebody blowing across the top of a bottle. She felt sheltered and the tiniest bit warmer. She aimed the flashlight at the treetops and then at the surly sky above them, and she had a weird, dreamy impulse to plop down in the snow. She shook her head to erase the thought. The cold was already gumming up her brain. If she sat down, she’d never get up.
Zoe shone the flashlight in a wide arc along the ground, looking to pick up Jonah’s tracks again. The beam was weak, either because of the batteries or the cold, but eventually she found them. Jonah probably had a ten-minute head start on her and because he was wearing snowshoes he’d be covering ground faster. It was like a math problem: If Train A leaves the station at 4:30 p.m. traveling 90 miles an hour, and Train B leaves ten minutes later traveling 70 miles an hour … Zoe’s brain was too numb to solve it, but it seemed like she was screwed.
Jonah knew the path to the lake but he must have been following the dogs. Their paw prints were messy and wild. Maybe they were being playful. Maybe they were chasing grouse or wild turkeys, which sometimes rode out storms beneath the skirts of the trees. Maybe they were just flipping out because it was so cold.
Zoe could see Jonah’s snowshoe tracks chasing the dogs every which way. She couldn’t tell if he had been playing along happily or if he had been terrified and begging them to turn back. In her head, she repeated over and over: Just go home, Jonah. This is insane. Just leave the dogs. Just walk away. But she knew he wouldn’t abandon the dogs no matter how scary things got, which made her angry—and made her love him, too.
So she just kept slogging through the woods. Which sucked. Drag right foot out of snow, lift it up, stick it in again. Drag left foot out, repeat. And repeat and repeat and repeat. Zoe was losing track of time. It took forever to go even a couple hundred feet—and much longer when she had to hike herself up and over a fallen tree. Her legs and knees began to ache, then her shoulders and neck. And she became obsessed with the hole at the top of her hat where the tassel used to be. She imagined it yawning wider and wider, and could feel the wind’s bony fingers in her hair.
After Zoe had been in the woods for 20 minutes or so, her cheeks, which were partly exposed to the air, were scalding hot. She thought about taking her gloves off and somehow peeling the skin off her face—and then she realized that that was completely crazy. She and her brain had stopped playing on the same team. Which scared the hell out of her.
The ground started to level off and Zoe saw an enormous old fir tree up ahead. New trees, old trees, dead trees. She was almost a third of the way through the woods. She told herself to keep walking, not to stop for anything, until she could touch that first giant tree. That would make everything feel real again.
About ten feet from the fir, Zoe stumbled on something under the snow and belly flopped onto the ground. A bolt of pain tore through her head. She’d hit it against a rock or a stump, and could feel a bruise blooming on her forehead. She took off a glove and touched it. When she pulled her hand away, her fingers were dark with blood.