Page 121 of The Island

Olivia laughed. “Wow, you still have that? Mr. Cutler will be impressed.”

“You think I’ll get an extension?” Owen said, laughing with her.

“Let me help you with it,” Olivia said.

And the kids sat together and began reciting the planets and the phases of the moon.

Heather yawned and lay back on the cave floor.

She listened to the fire crackle and the kids talking and she closed her eyes and sleep came the way it never came in Seattle but the way it had come in the mountains of Olympic National Park when she was a girl.

35

Snow falling like tea leaves spilled from an old tin chest.

Falling on the mountain and the wood and the newborn ferns. Falling on the doe tracks by the river that only she had seen.

The smell of kerosene lingered on the backpacks. She liked it. She was half high off it. That and the bacon and the lard, and the sugar in the breakfast coffee.

They were half a mile from the ridge that they had scouted last night.

Deep in the forest now. Through these big dinosaur trees with fairy-tale names: Sitka, Douglas fir, western hemlock, big-leaf maple, black cottonwood.

A cardinal chirped a warning. A raven watched them with indifference.

They reached the ridge and settled down to wait. They were well concealed behind ferns and a massive fallen oak lying in the understory like a dead god. Lichen wrapped the oak like an emerald bridesmaid’s dress, and as the snow blew sideways from the mountain, it transmuted it slowly into the gown of the bride herself.

Her dad took off her backpack and helped her into a bivy bag.

He set down the Mossberg and the Winchester.

They didn’t talk. They communicated in signs. They were, she thought, like escaped prisoners of war in an enemy country not wishing to give themselves away.

She was warm enough in the bivy and her old coat, her dad’s army beanie, and the fox-fur mittens that her mother had made for her last winter.

She lay on her belly and watched the elk herd gradually work its way up the valley toward them. Her father offered her the binoculars, but she shook her head.

A hawk circled above, his wings the color of the red wagon she’d had when she was a very little girl.

Her father checked the weapons.

The Mossberg shotgun was for a bear attack. It was loaded with birdshot and buckshot and slugs in an ascending sequence of lethality.

The single-shot Winchester Model 70 had been in the family since before the Korean War.

The elk were close now. She took off the mittens and cradled the rifle.

She looked through the sight, and the animals became startlingly close.

She loaded the .257 round.

She leveled the weapon and waited. And waited.

They were upwind and so effectively hidden that the elk had no awareness of any danger. The animals smelled earthy and nutty and she could hear them snorting and snuffling as they tore at the ferns and mosses. They were talking to one another in low-frequency moans like elephants.

Her father and she were not talking.

There was nothing to say.