Her tanned cheeks had a ruddy glow. She ran her hand through her hair and tossed her head. She looked up at the ridge, then down at the frozen ground. “I was goin’ huntin’, anyway. I’ll walk with you a while. I don’t know Knoxville, never been there, but I know which way it is, all right.” They were toughened by the walking of the past few weeks and rested now and well fed, so that the climbing wasn’t bad at all. The slopes abounded in mountain laurel and ginseng. Tim thought how the place must look in spring with the shrubs and nut trees in bloom. They traversed a half mile of loose rock, deep and uncertain on a steep slope. They stopped at the top and rested a minute. Red grabbed at a sapling for support and the woman said, “Don’t trust yourself to little trees. If the roots give way they take you with them down the mountain.” She sniffed the air. “Snow soon.” Red said, “That ridge must be six miles from here, or more.” The woman looked back. Her bright eyes swept the valley once and she picked up her musket and moved forward. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE There was snow lying in patches on the northwest side of the mountain. The shoulders of rock were scarred and barren except where earth had clung to sheltered places, nourishing moss and scraggly pines. To the west the rugged land lay under their hands, pounded out by the dizzy height, going on across the miles until it met the sky. The branches of the distant trees, stripped bare by cold and wind, wove a feathery texture of browns and reds, deep violets interrupted by the dusky green of spruce and pine, tall enough, no doubt, to dwarf a man, but in the distance seeming no bigger than scraps of moss. Red stood with his hands on his hips, his beard pointing toward the distant land, his face showing wonder and fear, as if God had taken him by the hand. The woman was first to turn away. There was love in her face. “It was here I saw the last of Nate.” Tim’s thought was so strong it almost said itself out loud. She knows he won’t come back. The woman pointed in the direction they’d come. Just to the left of a slate-colored shadow on a hill far below they saw a curl of smoke. “Smoke from our cabin,” she said. “I left a fire on the hearth, remember?” As they watched the smoke, snow began to fall. The flakes were small. They could almost be counted at first, little pinpoints of white. Then they filled the distance, and the hills and ridges all around were washed across with a milky haze. The flakes came faster. They were larger now, and one by one the landmarks were engulfed in a sea of white, leaving just the swirl of snow and silence everywhere. The woman patted her sack of meal. “Time for food,” she said. They found a sheltered place in an angle of rock and the men gathered bits of dead pine for a fire. The woman took off her mittens and worked with her swift, brown hands, slicing meat from a skin pouch that hung at her side and stirring cornmeal into the can.