He laughed at himself. Two years here and you’re turning into a New Englander, he thought. But what he felt wasn’t really old-fashioned New England frugality. No, it was post-supervolcano desperation. When you used something these days, you could never be sure you’d be able to replace it.
That flurry of motion was a fox. He took them for granted now, though the first one that darted in front of his SUV had freaked him out. He supposed there would always be foxes and weasels and mice and squirrels. They’d find enough to eat, whether people could or not.
Sure as hell, a squirrel chittered at him from high in a pine. If he’d had a .22 instead of a .30-06, he might have knocked it down. Rob had nothing against squirrel meat, one more delicacy (if that was the word) he’d met here. But hit a squirrel with what was originally a military round and you didn’t commonly leave enough to be worth salvaging.
He’d had to walk farther to reach the woods than he would have at the start of the winter before, and quite a bit farther than he would have the winter before that. Like the moose, the firewood had held out so far. What would they do when it ran out? You couldn’t raise baby pines to a useful size on table scraps in a few months.
The wind eased up. The snow kept falling, but more nearly vertically. Rob could see farther that way, or thought he could. Maybe his eyebrows were just a little less frozen. That over there in the electric-orange vest was another hunter. Moose hardly ever wore vests like that.
Someone had got shot near Dover-Foxcroft in spite of a DayGlo vest. He’d lived. Officially, it was listed as an accident. Unofficially . . . People said the guy who’d plugged him didn’t get along with him. Still as near a stranger as made no difference even if he’d been here more than two years, Rob didn’t know about that one way or the other.
More motion, this time straight ahead. Damned if that wasn’t a bull moose, sure as the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt. Rob did his best to impersonate a bright orange pine sapling. The moose dug at the snow with a big splayed hoof. Not much grass had come up during this abbreviated sortasummer. Rob would have bet the moose’d come up empty. And he would have lost the bet, too, because it lowered its dewlapped head and started pulling up whatever it had found.
“Yeah, you go ahead and chow down.” Rob’s mouth silently shaped the words. Fog gusted from his lips. If he’d worn glasses, it might have screwed him up. Not a sound came out to spook the moose. Slowly, smoothly, he raised the rifle to his shoulder.
A gunshot.
Next thing he knew, he was lying in the snow. He couldn’t figure out how he’d got there. He didn’t hurt or anything—and then, all of a sudden, he did. Quite a bit, as a matter of fact. “Fuck!” he said, in lieu of howling like a wolf. No wolves in Maine yet, or none anybody knew about, anyhow. From how far up in Canada would they have to come? However far it was, they hadn’t got here.
And Rob had other things to worry about. It felt as if one of those wolves that weren’t here was gnawing on his left leg. He wondered if he wanted to look down. If that bullet had shattered tib and fib, they were liable to have to take the leg off. A cripple in the Ice Age—just what I always wanted to be.
Blood on the snow, more of it every second. It steamed like his breath. Breath, blood—both showed life going out. He hiked up his jeans and his long johns. Each had a neat piece bitten out.
His stomach lurched when he saw that his leg had a piece bitten out, too. But then he realized the wound was a groove. It had got the muscle on the inside of his calf, but it hadn’t—he didn’t think it had—smashed the bones to smithereens. He yanked a hanky out of his pocket and packed the bleeding gouge with it. Not exactly sterile, but he’d worry about that later. Little by little, he realized he’d probably be around to worry about it.
The other hunter lumbered over to him. The moose was long gone. “Dude! What happened?” the other guy said brilliantly.
“Some dumb asshole went and shot me,” Rob answered. “The fuck you think happened?” His wits began to work again, after a fashion. “You got anything I can use to hold this bandage in place?”
“Sure do.” The other hunter pulled a fat rubber band out of his trouser pocket. What he was doing with it in there, God only knew. Rob took it gratefully any which way. In the war, he would have dusted the wound with sulfa powder. He would have done it now, too, if only he’d had any.
Another man came up. “I’m so sorry! I was aiming for the moose.” He had to be the guy who’d nailed Rob.
“Yeah, well, you got some long pig here,” Rob said. The local only stared at him, so he had no idea what long pig was. Clueless git, Rob thought. Aloud, he went on, “Look, I don’t think it’s too bad. Can you guys get me back into Guilford and let them patch me up?”