Nathan's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The wind dropped after dark. Arizona stood up from the dirt floor and went to work without speaking. She pried two planks from an inner wall and broke them over her knee. In the center of the cabin she found a ring of stones half-buried in old ash. She cleared it with her glove and laid the wood across an iron grate that had been left propped against the wall. The fire caught on the second match. Smoke climbed through a hole in the roof. Heat pushed back at the cold in slow waves. Nathan held his hands close to the flames. Outside, the wolves had come back. He heard one pace along the wall behind him, then settle. Arizona fed the fire and watched the door. She did not look tired. She looked like someone counting hours. "You've been here before," Nathan said. "Not just the forest. This cabin." Arizona did not answer right away. She reached into her coat and took out an envelope. The paper was yellow at the edges. A red wax seal held it shut, pressed with the shape of a snowflake. She turned it once in her hands and put it back. "He gave me this four years ago," she said. "Told me to keep it until a man came asking about the lake. Told me not to open it. Told me not to read what's inside before he met you himself." She looked at Nathan across the fire. "I haven't opened it. But I know what he told me out loud." Nathan kept his hands where they were. "Then tell me." "He was on the far shore that morning," she said. "He saw your daughter go in. He saw someone else there too. Not a stranger. Someone he recognized. He wouldn't say the name to me. He said he'd say it to her father or to no one." She fed another plank into the fire. "I should have told you at the gate. I'm sorry. I wanted you to get there before you knew. I thought if you knew, you'd run ahead and the wolves would have you." Nathan sat with it. Eleven years of putting up paper, and the answer had been one day's walk from the lake. He thought of the questions he had practiced in the truck. None of them fit anymore. He would not ask the old man whether he had seen anything. He would ask him for a name. Outside, a wolf scratched once at the base of the door and stopped. Arizona laid the rifle across her lap. The sealed letter stayed in her coat. Nathan watched the fire eat the wood and waited for first light.