The wood heap was getting low. Pauline hugged a pile of split oak and pine to her chest, kicked the door open with her foot, and dropped the logs with tired determination. She'd have to ask Chris to cut more wood for her tomorrow. The stove had gone out. Concentrated on restarting her fire the first go round, she crinkled newspaper, then placed kindling and one small log through the metal door, lit the paper in several places and watched while it caught slowly, then with more enthusiasm, as first smoke then flame rose from the solitary log. Stacking on pine for quick heat, Paula closed the door and relaxed, admiring fine snowflakes chasing and dancing down the porch-side window. She was home. She was safe. Soon she'd be warm again.

She stopped. "Yeah. Got some extra?" Hers hadn't done well and it was too late to sow them again and expect a yield worth working for.

"Come up and get a mess." Ada stood and walked toward an empty drywall bucket. "Here. Fill this."

Pauline sat between lush rows of peas and mustard greens and beets, searching through thick leaves for the full, bright pods that hid her favorite vegetable.

"Get some beets if you want 'em too," Ada offered.

Paula pulled a few and threw them in the bucket for pickling eggs.

She nearly stepped on it, saw the movement from the corner of her eye. Golden brown, diamonds, two maybe three foot long, triangular head. Pauline froze as it coiled and slithered under porch boards, then ran for her axe by the woodpile, waiting barefoot on green grass the first really warm and true spring day. She'd give the body to Kevin, ask him to make a belt, maybe a rifle strap, with it. The river was deep blue, curling against cliffs, disappearing into flat pasture bordered by forests that climbed onto the mountainside. Paula thought of her homemade piling-stairs, now dry enough to venture, dug into the high bank, ending at a forgotten, brush-grown inlet beach. Perch would be biting. She kicked a rotten log aside, bent to pull a few nightcrawlers out of damp ground, and dropped them into a tin coffee can that lay in the yard. Come on out, snake.

"Hey," Kevin called, appearing at the door of his chicken house. "What're you doin'?"

"Tryin' to get that coon. He's rabid."

"Wait a minute. Let me get my .45."

Kevin reappeared, pistol in hand, from the tool shed. "Where is it?"

"Went into those trees there." Paula pointed toward a rectangle of thin softwoods where not too many years earlier a summer vegetable garden had flourished. They walked in silence toward the brush.

"There he is." Kevin shot, hit the coon in its right shoulder, as Paula raised her rifle, shot, missed, then hit its back. The coon ran into a thicket of honeysuckle.

"How can he keep going?" Pauline demanded, astonished.

"Last stage of rabies," Kevin explained. "Can't eat, can't drink, can't feel pain, more than it's got already."

"Jeez. Let's get it." Paula sighed.

They reached the hedgerow and shot till the coon lay still.

Pauline dropped her rifle and sat on the ground, staring. "Got a drink?" she asked.

"Sure," Kevin grinned and reached in his back pocket for the flat silver flask, lined in glass, with his grandfather's initials scratched into the top. "Here you go," he offered.

"Here's to the coon," Paula said, welcoming the warm burn of Tennessee whiskey to taunt muscles and a tense stomach.

"Here's to the coon," Kevin echoed, grabbing the flask and toasting their wild friend's grizzled remains. "May it go to a heaven full of overflowing garbage cans."

Pauline laughed. She admired coons for their curiosity, dextrous hands and painted mask faces.

"Right," she said, lying back to bake the aching out in mid-day heat from a mountain sun.

"I reckon."

Pauline had been up and out in the chill of a November night since 4 a.m., walking, as light filled the Valley, farther up and into the mountains. She'd missed a doe.

"It's a six-pointer."

"Yeah. I see. Do you want the head?"

"Huh-uh. I've got enough. I'll make a gunrack with the horns, if you like."

Paula smiled and nodded. "I'd love it."

"Can you help drag?"

"Sure."

Together, with rest stops, they pulled the buck slowly down and into Pauline's yard. Chris gutted it carefully, dropping the liver, kidneys and heart in a large bucket of cool water, then hung the buck by its back legs from metal hooks on a heavy sawmill board nailed between two shaded trees.

"Can you skin it?"

"Yeah," Paula reassured him. "Go on."

"I want to get back out, over to Gorland's Ridge."

The Ridge was a campsite where generations of men met with whiskey and stories of kills and tracking and jokes that swelled late through hunting nights into cold and bleary dawns.

Paula laughed and picked up a forged-steel hunting knife. "Have fun."

Chris headed up the old Carriage Trail.

"Thanks," she called as the blade slit a clean ring through rough hairs and hide around the buck's left shank.