Mary Ann touched the map hidden inside her coat.
“Instead, he used those breaths to send me north.”
Mrs. Harper’s expression softened.
“Grief makes a person hear promises where there are none.”
“Maybe.”
Mary Ann pulled on her gloves.
“But Thomas never wasted words.”
She kissed Mrs. Harper’s cheek.
Then she leaned into the rope.
The sledge moved.
By sunrise, Bell Creek had disappeared behind her.
For hours the world became nothing but white ground, black pines, and the sound of Mary Ann’s breathing.
Thomas’s map was crude.
A creek.
A forked pine.
A narrow ravine.
Three circles he had drawn beside what looked like a ridge.
Then a heavy X beneath a line marked:
RED WALL.
By noon, clouds swallowed the mountains.
Silas asked, “Mama, are we finding Papa?”
Mary Ann’s feet faltered.
Samuel looked up from beneath the quilts.
“Papa’s in heaven.”
“Yes,” Mary Ann whispered.
“Then why are we going north?”
Because your father died with terror in his eyes.
Because I am afraid he hid something from me.
Because I am more frightened of turning back than going forward.
Instead she said, “Papa left something for us.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
The storm struck an hour later.
At first the snow came as hard little grains.
Then the wind rose.
Within minutes, the mountains vanished.
Snow became a moving wall.
Mary Ann tied a scarf across her mouth and bent lower against the rope.
She fell once.
Then again.
The second time her knee struck rock hard enough to tear skin beneath her dress.
By midafternoon, blood had soaked into her stocking.
The rope burned through her gloves.
Her palms blistered.
Behind her, the boys stopped talking.
That frightened her more than the storm.
“Silas?”
A pause.
“Mama.”
“Samuel?”
No answer.
Mary Ann turned.
Samuel’s eyes were closed.
She dropped beside the sledge.
“Samuel.”
His eyelids fluttered.
His lips looked pale.
Mary Ann slapped his cheeks gently.
“Stay awake.”
“Tired.”
“No.”
She dragged both boys against her chest.
“You hear me? Nobody sleeps.”
The wind shrieked through the trees.
Mary Ann looked in every direction.
Nothing.
No shelter.
No trail.
No cliff.
For the first time, despair cracked through her.
Perhaps Bell Creek had been right.
Perhaps she had dragged her children into a frozen wilderness because she could not accept that a dying man sometimes said meaningless things.
“Thomas,” she whispered into the storm, “if you sent me here for nothing, I swear I will find you in heaven and kill you again.”
Something moved through the snow.
Mary Ann froze.
A shape emerged between two pines.
Gray.
Low.
Four-legged.
A dog.
It stopped twenty yards away.
Mary Ann stared.
“Mercy?”
The old dog lifted its head.
She knew him.
Everyone in Bell Creek did.
Mercy belonged to Gideon Vale, a solitary trapper who lived somewhere northwest of town.
More importantly, Gideon was the only man Mary Ann knew who had occasionally worked with Thomas beyond the northern timberline.
“Mercy!”
The dog turned.
Walked away.
Then stopped and looked back.
Mary Ann’s heart began hammering.
She pulled the sledge forward.
The dog moved again.
Whenever Mary Ann fell behind, Mercy waited.
He led them between two ridges where the wind weakened, then through a narrow corridor of spruce and stone that Mary Ann would never have noticed beneath the snow.
Finally, the storm shifted.
For perhaps twenty seconds, the white curtain parted.
A massive wall of red sandstone rose before them.
Mary Ann stopped breathing.
She tore Thomas’s map from inside her coat.
The heavy X.
The red wall.
The ridge above it.
It matched.
“This is it.”
Silas peered from the blankets.
“Papa’s place?”
Mary Ann looked at the enormous cliff.
“I think so.”
But there was no cabin.
No mine.
No door.
Nothing.
Only sandstone.
Daylight was disappearing.
Mary Ann ran her frozen hands along the rock.
One crack.
Another.
Snow filled every crevice.
“Mama,” Samuel whimpered.
“I know.”
She searched faster.
Her fingers had nearly gone numb when her hand slipped suddenly into a narrow hollow.
