Jak was carrying it at the high port, ready for action, his white fingers gripping the dark walnut stock with its high-comb Monte Carlo undercut cheek piece.
The pack on his back, containing survival provisions, was weighing perilously light.
The animal had led him up into a maze of meandering canyons, all coated in snow, each one indistinguishable from the one before or the one to come. Jak had a wonderful sense of direction, but the swirling blizzard was robbing him of that and he was no longer certain which way was home.
His streaming mane of white hair was coated with crystals of powdery snow and ice, making it stiff and heavy, tinkling faintly as he turned his head.
He squeezed between a large, rounded boulder and the sheer wall of rock that lined the arroyo on his right. His boots rattled into a cache of old cans and bottles, rotting away and biodegrading with an infinite slowness since the distant years of predark.
The snow had stopped falling about an hour earlier, and the covering was untouched and virginal.
Jak continued to pick his way after the cougar, pausing when he saw tracks ahead marring the perfect blanket of unsullied whiteness. He glanced behind him, feeling a momentary discomfort, then stooped to examine the trail.
They were both human and animal, combat boots and mountain lion. His own boots. And the mutie cougar.
Jak realized that he had been walking in a blind circle through the canyons.
He also realized with a chill of fear that the tracks of the cougar overlaid his own boot-marks, meaning that the animal was following him.
Jak started to swing around, finger on the trigger of the Winchester, knowing in his heart that it was going to be far too late.
KRYSTY LAY ON THE BUNK in the dark cabin, under the two threadbare blankets.
The oil lamp had given out so long ago that she couldn’t remember, and the wood for the fire had been exhausted about three days earlier.
When Ryan hadn’t come back from his trading trip to the ville across the big river, and the snows had closed in on their little home, Krysty had begun to ration the food that remained, gradually cutting down what she ate each day.
Her ribs had begun to protrude through the skin, and she could see the sharp planes of her face changing in the broken square of mirror that hung above the sink in the kitchen. The bright sentient hair was dull, clinging miserably to her head.
There was a thumbnail of dried cheese left and a handful of oats.
Nothing else.
She was deeply aware of her own weakness, and certain now that Ryan wasn’t coming back, leaving her with two choices: to lie still and starve and slip away in the bitter cold, painless and easy, or to get up on her feet, pull on a coat and her dark blue Western boots, open the cabin door and try to make it to the ville.
Uncle Tyas McCann had once told her of an exploration to the farthest reaches of the Antarctic. An Englishman who hadn’t wanted to slow down his companions with his frostbitten feet had walked out of their tent, saying that he was going outside and he might be some time.
Krysty had always remembered that.
Her fingers shook as she buttoned the coat, and she had hardly enough strength to pull on the boots embroidered with the pretty silver falcon wings.
She noticed that the skin around her nails had gone dark blue, almost black. Last time she’d looked at her feet, the toes had been in even worse shape.
A coughing fit racked her, making her double over the bed, eyes weeping, the pain tearing at her chest. The one small window in the cabin was coated so thickly with ice that it was impossible to see out.
She wondered what had happened to Ryan. There had been a strange vision, oddly blurred and unreliable, of him walking through a plaza in a small frontier ville, past heaps of decayed corpses. Krysty had glimpsed movement among the bodies, but then lost her hold on the seeing.