Nathan came home from a four-county run with frozen hands and saw the red light blinking on the answering machine. He had bought the machine eleven years ago, the week after his daughter drowned. The casing was yellowed and one corner was cracked from a drop he didn't remember. In all that time it had blinked for him twice. Both calls had been nothing. He kept his coat on and pressed the button. A man's voice came through the speaker, low and unsteady. He said he had seen something at the lake that day. He said he had waited too long to call. Then he said he was sorry and the line went dead. No name. No number. The machine clicked and reset. Nathan stood in the dark kitchen with his keys still in his hand. He played it again. Then four more times. The voice belonged to someone older, and there was wind behind him, and something else — a dog, maybe, or wood splitting. Nathan wrote down every sound on the back of a gas receipt. He called the phone company and waited forty minutes to be told they could not give him the number without a warrant. He called the sheriff who had worked the case. The sheriff said he would try and they both knew he would not. Nathan drove out before sunrise to the lake where his daughter had been last seen. The water was locked under a slab of pale ice, banked with snow that had hardened into ridges. He walked the shore the way he had walked it a hundred times. He looked for anyone who might live close enough to have watched a child that summer day eleven years back. A stone arch marked the trailhead up the ridge, the kind hikers used as a meeting point. A young woman in a white parka stood under it, watching him come. She said her name was Arizona. She said she had grown up on this mountain and knew who left the message. Nathan asked for the name. She did not give it. She said the man who called lived up past the treeline and did not come down except for supplies, and that he would not answer his door for a stranger from the lowlands. She said she could take Nathan to him. She said it would take two days on foot and the weather was turning. Then she said, flat, that someone had asked her to watch for him. Nathan asked who. Arizona looked at the ice and did not answer. He thought of the machine at home, still blinking, still holding the only voice that had ever said the right words. He told her he would go. She nodded once and started up the trail. Nathan followed her through the arch and the lake fell away behind them.

They climbed for half a day before Arizona stopped talking. The trail bent through black spruce, and the snow grew deeper between the trunks. Nathan kept his eyes on her boots and matched her steps. When she paused at a clearing, she did not look back at him. She looked sideways into the trees. Then she unslung the rifle from her shoulder and laid the bow across her pack within reach. "Four of them," she said. "Maybe five. Since the gate." Nathan had seen the gate an hour back. Iron, taller than him, paw prints hammered into the frame. He had thought it was old hunter's pride. Arizona had walked past it without a word, and he had followed. Now he understood it had been a warning, and they were already on the wrong side of it. He turned slowly. He saw nothing but trunks and the gray light between them. Then a shape shifted, low and pale, and was still again. "Don't run," Arizona said. "Don't crouch. Walk where I walk." She started again, slower now, the rifle held across her chest. Nathan followed three steps behind. The wolves moved with them. He could hear paws breaking the crust on both sides. One coughed, close enough that he felt it in his teeth. Arizona did not raise the gun. She kept her pace even and her shoulders loose, as if she were crossing a kitchen. The trees opened onto a low shape half-buried in snow. A hunting camp, bent poles lashed at the peak, the door cut from old planks. Arizona walked straight at it. She did not hurry. Nathan wanted to run and did not. Twenty steps out, a wolf stepped onto the trail behind them. Nathan saw it over his shoulder. Long legs, pale coat, head down. It watched Arizona, not him. She reached the door, lifted the latch, and stood aside. "In," she said. Nathan went in. She backed in after him and pulled the door shut. The latch dropped. Inside it was dark and cold and smelled of old smoke. Arizona leaned the rifle against the wall and sat on the dirt floor with her back to the door. Her hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs until they stopped. "They were testing," she said. "If we'd run, they'd have taken you first. You're slower." Nathan sat across from her. He could hear them outside, circling once, then moving off through the brush. After a while there was only wind. "We sleep here," Arizona said. "They'll be back at the door by dark. We go at first light, and we go fast." Nathan nodded. He thought of the voice on his machine, the old man waiting somewhere past this camp, and how close he had come to never reaching him. He looked at Arizona's steady hands and understood she had done this before, and that she had been more afraid than she had shown.

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.