Page 3 of My Halloween Hunter

It's as cold as the rail. I turn it over in my fingers and look into the trees, and the trees look back, and I put it in my pocket.

2

Cade

Her car's still warm when I find it.

I put my palm flat on the hood and feel the metal cooling, the engine gone quiet for no reason I can see, and then I breathe in. Road dust. Cold coffee in a travel mug on the passenger seat. And under both of them, something sweet and warm and alive that has no business being on my mountain.

It goes through me like a round of buckshot.

Mine.

The word doesn't come from anywhere I think with. It comes from the part of me that knows where the elk are bedded before I've found a track, and I don't argue with that part, because it's never once been wrong.

Her boot prints are on the shoulder, two of them side by side with the toes turned in where she stood to shoot the road. Small, and deep at the heel. A woman who plants herself.

I pull the black kerchief up over my nose. It's for the cold, mostly. The rest of it is that a man's breath shows in October, and I don't want her seeing anything of me yet.

I go into the trees.

She's a quarter mile down when I find her, and I close the distance at a lope, silent on the needles, then drop back and hold two hundred yards off her left shoulder. Nineteen years I've guided men through this country after elk and sheep and bear, and I know how to hold a line on something so it never sees me coming.

So I learn her. She has a long stride for her size, dark hair stuffed under a knit hat, hips that swing when she walks and a camera bouncing against them. She hums off-key and doesn't seem to know she's doing it.

Then her head comes up.

She feels me. Nobody feels me. She stops and I stop, and she stands in the road fussing with a strap that doesn't need it while the back of her neck shows pale in the last of the light, and I want my teeth on it so badly my jaw aches.

She turns and looks straight at me.

She can't see me, and it doesn't matter. She lifts that camera and points it into the dark exactly where I'm standing, the shutter cracks across the cold, and my cock goes hard so fast it hurts.

I stand between two pines with my hands open at my sides and let it happen. Let her look at the dark with me in it.

When she lowers the camera and walks on, her steps are louder. It isn't the sloppy noise of someone scared enough to stumble. It's even and heavy, heel-first, gravel crunching out into the trees on purpose.

She's frightened. I can smell it on the wind.

She's also leaving me a trail.

I follow her all the way to the valley floor. Through Edna's window I watch Edna hand her the cabin key before she's asked for anything, then look past her through the glass, straight at the treeline where I'm standing.

Old witch.

Then the woman laughs at something Edna says, and I see her face full on for the first time. Freckles across a sunburnt nose, one front tooth a little crooked, and a mouth too wide for the rest of her that takes over her whole face when she laughs. I put a hand on the nearest trunk and forget to breathe.

I'm at the Birch cabin before they've finished talking.

She fights the stove for three tries while I stand forty feet off in the frost with my arms crossed, listening to her swear at it. I could have it roaring in a minute. Every curse she lets out makes me harder.

Then she stands in the window, lit gold, all of her, and reaches for the curtain.

She leaves it.

She washes one mug for a long time. From forty feet I watch her nipples tighten under that sweater, and my hand is on my cock through my jeans before I've decided anything. I don't stroke. I hold myself in my fist in the dark and watch her not close the curtain, and I don't come, because I'm not wasting it on the frost.

I came up here at thirty-four with my father's cabin, my father's rifle and no use for people, and ten years later nothing has changed my mind. Clients in the fall, a creek, a stove. Nothing up here I can lose. I built it that way on purpose.