Matt had been back in Malpais two weeks, and the porch by the river was the third place that week to turn him away. Six men sat on the long swing outside the tackle shop, drinking coffee, and they went quiet when he stepped up. He asked again about the girl. He gave her name, the year she left, the street she had lived on. The oldest man looked at his boots and said they didn't know any such girl, and would he please move along. Matt did not move. He pulled the money clip from his back pocket, the leather stamped with his own name, and set it on the swing's armrest. From inside the clip he lifted a green hair tie, flat from years of pressure between folded bills. He said she gave it to him the summer they were eleven. He said he had carried it since. The men looked at the tie the way people look at a stranger's medication. One of them told him a piece of elastic was not proof of anything. He tried the woman at the diner next. He told her he remembered the girl's chipped front tooth, the scar under her chin, the name of her dog. The woman wiped the counter in slow circles and said half the town could guess those things from an old yearbook. She said she had heard he was asking everywhere. She said it was starting to sound like a man hunting, not a man missing someone. She asked him to finish his coffee and go. He walked out along the water to the place he kept returning to, the wooden loveseat swing his grandfather had hung between two cottonwoods behind the small house where both rivers met. He and the girl had sat there a hundred afternoons. He sat now alone and understood what the town had been telling him. Memory was not evidence. The tie was not evidence. To every stranger in Malpais he was a tall man with a story and a scrap of elastic, and stories and scraps did not open doors. Something moved on the far bank. A wolf stood in the shallows, lean, watching him without fear. It drank, lifted its head, and held his eyes for a long moment before it turned back into the brush. Matt sat very still. The girl had told him once, on this same swing, that her mother's people kept to the ridge north of town and that the wolves there were counted as kin. He had not thought of the sentence in twenty years. He thought of it now. He put the hair tie back in the clip and the clip back in his pocket. He would stop trying to convince strangers. He would go to the ridge and find the people who would already know her name. He stood up from the swing. For the first time since he had come home, he knew exactly where to walk next.

Matt left the motel at dawn with a pack of water and jerky. The road out of town thinned to gravel, then to a footpath through weeds. He walked past the last building on the edge of Malpais, an old factory with broken windows and vines pulling down the siding. Trees grew through the roof. Beyond it, the land climbed. He had two weeks of diner grease and motel soap on his skin, and every step carried that smell of the town uphill with him. He found the trail marker an hour in. A tall trunk stood alone at a bend in the path, split top to bottom by an old lightning strike, the wood inside still black. Boot prints crossed each other in the dust at its base. People had been walking between the town and the ridge for a long time. He rested his hand on the burned wood and understood he was being watched already. He had felt it since the factory. Higher up, the path passed under a low branch hung with bones. A skull, jaws wired open, ribs and long bones tied beneath it with sinew. The bones were old, cleaned by weather. He stopped under them. This was the line. Past this, he was on someone else's ground, wearing the wrong smell, carrying the wrong week on his clothes. He thought about the diner woman calling him a hunter. To the animals ahead of him he would smell exactly like the people who had told her to send him away. He stepped off the trail and stripped down by a runoff creek. He scrubbed his shirt and jeans against a rock with cold water and gravel until the fabric burned his hands. He rinsed his hair, his arms, the back of his neck. He rubbed handfuls of wet pine needles across his skin. He dressed in the wet clothes and kept climbing. Halfway up the next rise, a wolf stepped out of the brush ten yards ahead. Lean, gray and brown, ears forward. It did not growl. It stood in the path and watched him breathe. He stopped and let it look. He kept his hands open at his sides. After a long moment it turned and walked uphill, slow enough that he understood he was meant to follow. He followed. His clothes dried stiff on him as he climbed. The wolf never looked back, but it never went out of sight. When the trees opened onto a shelf of rock near the ridgeline, the wolf stopped and sat. Below, Malpais was a scatter of roofs by the river. Ahead, woodsmoke rose from somewhere he could not yet see. Matt had made it past the bone line. He had shed the town off his skin, and something on the ridge had chosen to let him keep walking.

The wolf led Matt off the shelf and up a narrow cut in the rock. Smoke thickened in the trees. They came out in a clearing where a wide hide teepee stood against the pines, wolves painted around its base in black and red. A fire burned outside it under an iron pot. Two men and a woman stood by the fire and watched him come. None of them spoke. The wolf sat down at the woman's feet. At the edge of the clearing stood a tall carved post. Wolves at the top, then a long snout, an owl, a turtle at the bottom. The paint was old but kept up. The woman pointed at the post without looking at Matt. He understood. He walked to it and put his hand flat against the wolf's mouth at the top. His hand shook. He kept it there until she nodded once. "You crossed the line," she said. "That gets you the fire. It does not get you a name." She was maybe fifty, gray at the temples, her hair tied back with a plain green band. Matt's stomach dropped. He knew that band. The girl had worn one exactly like it every day of the summer she turned eleven. He said nothing about it. Not yet. "I'm looking for someone," he said. "She lived in town when we were kids. Her mother's people were up here. She told me once, only once, and only to me." The older of the two men shifted his weight. "Town men say a lot of things," he said. "Prove she told you." Matt reached into his shirt pocket and drew out a hawk feather, brown and cream, the shaft worn smooth. "She found this by the creek behind the factory. She split it with me. She kept the other half in a tin under her bed. She said her uncle up the ridge taught her hawks watched the boundary." He held it out on his palm. "If you knew her, you know if that's true." The woman took the feather. She turned it in the firelight. She looked at the man who had spoken, and something passed between them that Matt could not read. Then she looked at the green band around her own wrist, and back at him. "Her uncle," she said, "is dead six years." She closed her hand around the feather. "But he did say that. And she did split a feather with a town boy. She told me his name once, when she was angry at him for not following her." Matt's knees went soft. He sat down in the dirt by the fire without being asked. The woman crouched across from him. "She is not here," she said. "She has not been here in a long time. But you have bought the right to ask where she went. Eat first. Then we talk about what you owe before I tell you."

The woman crouched by the fire and started to speak. Then dogs barked in the trees. Voices came up the trail, low and steady, men calling to each other about weight and rope. She stopped mid-word. The two men by the fire turned toward the sound. The wolf at her feet stood up. She looked at Matt and her mouth went flat. "Hunting party," she said. "Back early. They will not want a town face at this fire." She stood and brushed her hands on her thighs. "You have to go before they clear the trees. Now." Matt did not move. "You said you would tell me where she went." The voices grew louder. Someone laughed. Through a gap in the pines he saw two men dragging a big buck by the antlers, arrows still in its side. Behind them another man shook out a wide painted hide and slung it over a low branch at the edge of the clearing. The hide showed bears and deer and mountains. It was a marker. This was their ground again. He had minutes, maybe less. "Name the debt," Matt said. "Fast. I'll take it." The woman studied him. She reached into the teepee and pulled out a folded blanket, pale wool with green and blue dream catchers stitched down its length. She pressed it into his hands. "Her mother made this. She left it here when she went. You carry it to her. You do not open it. You do not sell it. You put it in her hands and you tell her who sent it." Matt nodded. "Where." The woman's eyes flicked to the trees. The dogs were close now. She spoke fast. "South. Past the salt flats. A town called Ruso. She works at the feed store there. She goes by her mother's name now, not the one you knew." She touched the green band at her wrist. "Do not come back up this ridge. Whatever you find down there, you keep it down there." Matt tucked the blanket inside his coat. He stood. The first hunter stepped into the clearing and stopped when he saw him. The man's hand went to the knife at his belt. The woman raised one palm at the hunter and the other at Matt, holding them apart. "He is leaving," she said. She did not look at Matt again. He walked past the fire, past the carved post, past the dead buck in the dirt. No one followed. The wolf watched him go from beside the woman's leg. He made the trees before the shouting started behind him. He did not look back. He had a name for the town. He had a blanket he could not open. He had a direction, and it was south, and it was not this ridge.

Matt cleared the ridge trail by mid-morning and hit the southern road with the blanket buttoned inside his coat. The wool pressed warm against his ribs. He kept a steady pace and did not look back for the first hour. When he did look back, he saw a rider a quarter mile behind him, holding the same speed. The road ran open here, low scrub on both sides, no cover for miles. The rider had picked him up somewhere near the flats and had not closed the gap or fallen away. An hour on, the road bent past a leaning tree with a thick twisted trunk and branches that swept low over the ditch. Matt walked under it and used the turn to glance back without turning his head. The rider was still there. He had slowed to match. When Matt lost sight of him behind the trunk, the man did not reappear for a long minute. He was using the tree the same way Matt had, to look without being seen. Matt kept walking. A mile on he came to a small saloon set back from the road, gray boards and a trough out front, two horses tied to the rail. He did not stop. He wanted to know if the rider would. He counted three hundred steps past the door and looked back. The rider had pulled up at the trough and swung down. He was not drinking. He was watching Matt's back over the neck of his horse. The road dropped toward a creek and Matt saw his chance. A stand of willows leaned over the water, their long branches hanging to the ground like a curtain. He walked to the bank as if to fill his canteen, stepped through the leaves, and did not come out the other side. Inside the green shell he crouched, unbuttoned his coat, and worked the hawk feather out of the inside pocket. He set it on a flat rock at the base of the trunk, striped side up, where a man pushing through the leaves would see it before he saw Matt. Hooves came down the road and stopped. Boots hit dirt. The willow branches parted and a thin man stepped through, hand on his belt knife. His eyes went to the feather on the rock. He stared at it. His hand came off the knife. He looked at Matt, then at the feather again, then backed out through the leaves without a word. A minute later the horse went back up the road the way it had come, at a trot, then a canter. Matt picked up the feather and put it away. He sat under the willows until his hands stopped shaking. The rider knew the mark and it had sent him running, which meant the mark was known on this road, which meant someone down it was watching for the same girl he was. He stood up, buttoned the blanket back against his ribs, and kept south.

Matt reached the edge of Ruso by late afternoon. The road widened and the first thing he saw was not a building but a tree. Someone had trained it into a wide crown at the town line, apples and pears growing together on twisted trunks, flowers packed around the base in a low ring of red and white. A bench sat under it. Two old men were on the bench, talking quietly, not watching him. No one else was on the road. A town that let its border tree grow like that was not a town under siege. It was a town that had time. Matt slowed his steps and thought about what that meant for a girl who had come here to disappear. He walked in past small houses with swept porches. He found the feed store two streets in. The building was wood-framed with a broad front window and a plain painted sign above the door. Sacks of grain sat stacked on the porch. The window was clean. A hand-lettered card in the corner listed prices in a careful, even script. He did not go in. He crossed the street and stood in the shade of a covered walk where he could see the door. A saloon sat opposite the feed store, gray boards and a trough out front. Matt went inside and took a stool at the far end of the bar where he could still see the street. He ordered coffee. On the bar between him and the next stool lay a woman's necklace, forgotten or set down, a braided leather cord strung with pale and black beads and a white tooth pendant. He picked it up. The clasp was whole. The cord was not cut or broken. Someone had taken it off and laid it down on purpose. He set it back where he found it and watched the feed store door. At six o'clock a woman came out with a broom and swept the porch. She wore a work apron over a plain dress. She swept slow and even, corner to corner, then leaned the broom by the door. A man passed on the walk and she raised a hand to him. He tipped his hat. She said something and he laughed. She went back inside and came out a minute later with a watering can and tended a row of pots along the rail. She locked the door herself when she was done. She kept the key on a cord around her neck. Matt paid for the coffee and stepped out into the last of the light. She had swept her own porch. She had greeted a neighbor by name. She wore the key. No one stood at her shoulder, and no one watched her from a window. She had not been taken. She had chosen this. He buttoned the blanket tighter against his ribs and walked back toward the saloon to find a room. He would come to her tomorrow, on her terms, at her door.

Matt took a room above the saloon and came back down for a plate of food. He picked a table by the window instead of the bar. From here he could still see the feed store across the street, dark now, the porch swept clean. A diner sat two doors down from the feed store, its lit sign bright against the dusk, people coming and going through the chrome-framed door. The street had the easy traffic of a town at supper. He would not stand out here. He ate slow and watched the door she had locked with her own key. A deputy came in around eight. He hung his hat on a peg and took the stool at the near end of the bar, where a full cup of coffee and a fresh cigar waited for him without asking. The saloon keeper set them down like a nightly habit. The deputy lit the cigar and settled in. He was not drinking. He was working, in the slow way small-town law worked, by sitting where people talked and listening. Matt kept his head down over his plate. He heard the saloon keeper laugh at something the deputy said. Then he heard his own description. Tall man. Coffee at the far stool this afternoon. Watched the street more than he drank. The deputy asked if the man had given a name. The saloon keeper said no. The deputy said he would like a word when the man came back down. Matt's right sleeve was buttoned at the wrist. Under it, on the inside of his forearm, was a wolf's head in black and red ink he had carried since he was seventeen. The girl had drawn the first sketch of it on a scrap of butcher paper by the river. Anyone in Malpais who had known him as a boy could name him from that mark alone. If the deputy asked him to roll up his sleeve, or if word traveled the twenty miles back up the road, she would hear his name spoken by a stranger before he ever reached her door. He would lose the goodbye he had come for. He left coins on the table for the food. He did not go up the stairs to his room. He walked out the front like a man stepping to the outhouse and kept walking. Two streets over he stopped in the shadow of a shuttered porch and took the hawk feather from inside his coat. He tucked it into the band of his hat where it would show. Then he circled back through the alleys to the feed store and sat down on the porch steps with his back to the door. He would not sleep here. He would wait for first light and knock before the deputy started his rounds. Her terms had been tomorrow at her door. He had only moved the hour.