Chapter One The first thing John said when he came inside was that that he had seen blood in the new snow. "Blood?" Anna mused over her coffee, not awake enough yet to feel alarm. "Yes, beside the driveway," he said. He hit the newspaper against his leg to get the ice off of the orange plastic wrapper. It was a habit Anna hated because it left cold, clear pools on the kitchen tile that seeped even through her thick winter socks. "Just a few drops, not a lot. Still." Anna could picture the blood, how stark it must look against the crystallized white, like rubies loosened from a ring and fallen into a white fur pelt.
"Where could it have come from?" "A deer, I think," John said. "There were tracks going off into the trees." "Oh," Anna said. "Again?" "It looks like it," John said. "They didn''t get a clean kill this time." He sat in one of the worn oak chairs and unfolded the paper. "I''ll take Charlie out later and try to find it." "Why? What good will it do?" She knew, of course, but she wanted it to be spoken.
"Well." He cleared his throat. "It might be suffering." She nodded. They both knew they couldn''t allow anything to die slowly in the cold, bleeding to death. Not on their land. They were decent people. She asked, as she had the last time, "Should we call the game warden?" He looked at her over the paper for a moment, thinking.
"Let''s wait," he said. "I want to make sure there''s a good reason first." They were, after all, used to keeping their own counsel. Neither of them had any interest in hunting or knew anything of hunting laws, though they had read stories about these subjects in the Gazette and knew generally when hunting season fell. Anna didn''t even know how to find the number for a game warden if she needed to call one. She assumed John would know, though he had never called one, either. They ate in easy silence. Anna picked at her eggs, sipped her coffee, and watched John read his paper.
Every once in a while he frowned, and she knew he was probably reading bad news, obituaries, politics, crime, fracking, reports of invasive species that would kill the trees. That''s all the paper ever had in it besides births and weddings. She tried not to think of the blood. It was nice to watch John without his noticing. She studied his eyes, the pleasing wrinkles at their sides that meant that he had laughed a lot. Nearly everything he did possessed an air of benign absentmindedness that had only increased over time. He tapped his foot as he read. Anna could tell from the squeak that he had forgotten to take off his boots again, and she knew that the snow would be melting onto the kitchen floor in dirty rings.
She sighed. Still, staying annoyed with him was hard; he was easygoing, and he tended to take good care of her. She stood and began to do the dishes while he finished the paper. The window over the sink let chilly air seep in that made the metal faucet handle cold. The taps sputtered at first. As she waited for the water to run hot, she looked at the naked maples and tall thin evergreens at the edge of the yard. The snow had clumped on the needles, making them droop. The trees looked heavy, gray, depressed.
It was still only the middle of autumn, and it had been harder than most. She knew the ground would be white and blank for months yet. The floor under her feet leeched cold, making her heels ache. She was glad there wasn''t much to wash. The soap bubbles burst in the sink in tiny rainbows. The almost-translucent, spotted skin on her hands turned pink. The blue veins at the tops spread like roots. As she dried her hands and slid her wedding ring back on, John stood and stretched, yawning wide and slow like a bear.
"Well," he said. "Are you going out now?" Anna asked. "I guess I''d better," he said. "Who knows how far it might have gone." He kissed her on the cheek. "Be careful." "Old Charlie hasn''t thrown me yet," he said. She stood at the kitchen counter and listened to him rummage in the hall closet for the rifle.
The rifle was only a secondhand .22 they''d purchased years ago, when they''d first bought the property, but it would do well enough at close range. They both hated the gun and knew nothing of killing except that it should be both careful and quick. They had originally been driven to buy it for protection of their livestock from wildlife and dogs, and it came out only in emergencies. That meant that Anna had never used the rifle, and had seen John shoot it exactly three times. Once, at a tree trunk to warn off a couple of coyotes that had been prowling near the chicken pen. Once to put down the Hansons'' gelding when it had gotten loose and was struck by a car. She could still hear the horse screaming when she remembered; she had called their own vet to ask where in the forehead to shoot it for a clean kill, shaking so badly that she had misdialed several times.
And once to kill a dog with distemper that someone had dumped off near their house. If you lived out of town, you had to get used to some killing. That was the way of things, she knew. But that didn''t mean you had to like it. Anna was sorry that John needed to take the rifle with him. She knew that he was trying not to seem bothered by it. "Take your cell phone," she said. "I''ll be in the tub for awhile, but I can help you after I get dressed if you need it.
" But she was still at the kitchen window watching twenty minutes later when he finally led the ageing mule, Charlie, out of the barn and towards the woods. The mule was, as always, beautifully rigged with one of John''s handmade saddles. John specialized in custom orders, hard-to-fit horses, the short backed Quarter horse sore from trees that bridged, the wide table back of a paint with no withers, the large flat shoulders of a Tennessee Walker, the slab-sides of mammoth donkeys. John sometimes had Anna help him with the leather tooling when orders piled up in the spring. To her, it felt clumsy, unnatural, knocking the stamp into the unyielding hide, and the leather sewing machine with its noise and strength frightened her, made her hold her breath while her heart pounded. She sometimes found herself in awe of John, who was comfortable around such industry. She watched him check his girth and swing up on Charlie''s back. The mule''s ears flicked back and forth, listening.
John patted the mule and spoke to him, then reached back to check the rifle in the scabbard. Charlie looked thick and warm in his winter coat. She saw John kiss the air, their signal to the mule to go ahead. It was strange to see the expression from far away without sound. Charlie tucked his nose and strode forward, and they were soon lost in the horizon of slim trunks. Anna knew, without remembering how, that at least one out of every ten of the trees in Vermont forests stood tall even though the tree was actually dead, though it was harder to spot the dead ones in winter. Going into the woods was always a little like walking among ghosts. She pictured not only the spirits of trees, but caribou, mastodons.
Lives that had passed through the land before hers and would never come back. As she waited for her bath to run, Anna thought of all she ought to do that day. She kept a list stuck with a magnet to the fridge, ticking chores off as she went, but today was a good day, and she could remember much of what it contained. The barn needed to be mucked out, more hay dropped from the loft, the chickens fed and watered. The cold often made these tasks seem impossible. There were some bills to pay, and the house, of course, could always stand a cleaning. She watched the Epsom salts swirl and vanish in the steaming water as it roared from the faucet. She tested it first with her foot, then stood in the tub, acclimating herself to the heat.
She knew she ran it hotter than she was supposed to. It turned her skin red, and sometimes it hurt. The hotter it started out, though, the longer she could stay in, weightless and untethered to her unwieldy body. She held onto the sides of the tub and lowered herself inch by inch. As she sat, she could feel her joints loosen, relax, and the pain soon seemed to float around her, no longer a part of her, but a part of the water. The ache hovered around her wrists, hips, fingers, and knees in filmy clouds. She closed her eyes. When the cold finally started to spill into the bath, too, Anna pulled herself up and wrapped herself in a towel.
She dressed in faded jeans and a sweater that was too big for her. Her once-brown hair, she pulled into a tight ponytail. Older women, she knew, were supposed to keep short hair, but she was used to the low-maintenance collarbone-length style and couldn''t bring herself to cut it. She didn''t like growing older, though she didn''t try to fight it; there wouldn''t have been any point. Appraising herself in the mirror, she tried to judge her reflection as a stranger might, but she didn''t make herself look at her wrinkles, the sagging lines of her neck; she looked instead at the dark brown eyes, which she thought still had some of the depth and sparkle they''d had when she was a girl. She rubbed moisturizer into her skin, enjoying the feeling of softness and luxury that came from it. She didn''t bother with makeup anymore. There had been no missed calls.
She knew that John likely didn''t have a signal, which was spotty even on the best days so close to the ranges. The Green Mountains and White Mountains together were like two hands cradling the Kingdom between them, isolating the region from the land around it, making it colder and lonelier, but also protecting it--giving it a history all its own. Its inaccessibility had become part of what she liked about it. She texted John so that he''d have a message to respond to when he could: "Is everything okay? Find the deer?" She found it hard to stay motivated when John was gone; with so much to do, she didn''t know where to start. He always had a way of streamlining tasks and m.