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He parked his truck in the gravel in front of the Jim Bridger Lodge, and when he stepped out into the chilly dark, the dog in the back of the rig next to his was a dog who knew him. A lot of the roughnecks had dogs; you saw them standing in the bed of the four-wheel-drive Fords. It was kind of an outfit: the mud-spattered vehicle, the gear in back, a dog. This was a brown and white Australian shepherd who stood and tagged Donner on the arm with his nose, and when the man turned, the dog eyed him and nodded, or so it seemed. What the dog had done is step up on the wheel well and put his head out to be stroked.

“Scout,” Donner said, and with a hand on the dog, he scanned the truck. Donner was four hundred miles from home. He knew the truck, too.

Donner had just come out of the mountains after a week fishing with a woman who was not his wife, and that woman now came around the front of Donner’s vehicle. He stopped her. She smiled and came into his arms thinking this was another of his little moments. He’d been talking about a cocktail and a steak at the Jim Bridger for days, building it up, playing the expert the way he did with everything. She was on his turf, and he tried to make each moment a ritual with all of his talking. He had more words than anyone she knew. Around the campfires at night, which he built with too much care, he’d make soup and fry fish and offer her a little of the special brandy in a special glass, measured exactly, and he would talk about what night means and what this food before them would allow them to do and how odd it would be to sit in a chair in the Jim Bridger the night of their wacky end-of-season New Year’s Eve party and order the big T-bone steak and eat it with a baked potato, which he would also describe in detail.

It was September and they’d gone in twelve miles, backpacking from the trailhead at Valentine Lake. A quarter mile from his truck, he’d stopped and put a burlap bag of Pacifico bottles in the stream that fed Valentine. “We’ll be glad to see those on Friday,” he told her. “That is my favorite bag in the world; I’ve pulled it out of twenty creeks, and every time it was full of cold beer.”

And that is what they had done today in the late afternoon, their legs sore. They’d walked through the sunny pines for two hours, no speaking, and then he’d stopped and when she caught him, he knelt and pulled the dripping bag and its treasure into the sunlight. They sat on the bank and he opened the bottles with his knife. The cold brown bottles were slippery in their hands, the labels washed off, and they were like two people having their first beer on earth. She put her hand on the wet burlap. It was all as good as he’d said it would be.

They were both changed from the trip in ways they didn’t understand. He was fighting a kind of terror that had grown, and now as he ran his hand under Scout’s collar and scratched the animal, the feeling rose and tightened his throat.

“I know somebody in here,” he said to her.

“I know you do,” she said. “Happy New Year.” She kissed him. She had given herself over to him sometime at midweek and was not even fighting the love that had taken her.

“No,” he said, “really. I know this guy.” He indicated the big truck. “I know this dog, Scout.”

“Scout?” She’d heard about this dog.

“Right,” he said. “The dog from the story.”

She put both arms around him and asked, “Does this mean we don’t get our steak?”

With the euphoric bravado that had infected the whole adventure, he put his cold hand under her sweatshirt and pulled her up and kissed her in front of the dog. Then he took her hand and led her into the big log tavern he’d been talking about for five days. The two windows in front were lined with tiny celebration lights and foil letters read Happy New Year! The season always ended this weekend at the Jim Bridger: they pulled the dock up onto the shore of Long Pond behind the place and packed all the patio tables and chairs in a barn off to one side, and celebrated New Year’s Eve a hundred and twenty days early.

Inside there were two little rooms, the small barroom with eight stools and, past a kind of narrow passage, the dining room, which held a scattering of tables, each with a red checked tablecloth, just as he had told her. A dozen trophy heads protruded from the walls, twelve- and fourteen-point deer and over the fireplace a bull elk that would have gone a thousand pounds. There was no one in the bar, though there were oil-field and hunting jackets on every stool, and bottles and glasses standing all along the wooden surface, as if everyone had left suddenly mid-drink. Brenda Lee sang from the jukebox, “Fool Number One.” It was full of scratch friction as if coming across the decades to find the room. The dining hall, too, was empty, though there were steak dinners on two of the tables and coats on some of the chairs. Donner sat the woman at a table, and then he saw something through the big back windows. They were flocked with white and gold spray and razored with a loopy script that read Happy New Year! Through the words Donner could see a group of people out on the wooden deck looking into Long Pond. “They’re all out back,” he said. “Some deal out back.”

Dormer had told the woman the second day of the trip that he had memorized her, her back, the backs of her knees, the scar on her shoulder, her navel, her nipples, how her hair grew, the way she looked immediately after stepping out of her clothes, the way she looked an hour later. But as they opened the plastic menus in the dark little room and he looked across at her beneficent smile, he didn’t even know who she was. This had all been accomplished on a rushing wave of what, adrenaline? Lust? Ego? Now that had collapsed and Donner felt ruined and hollow. He felt as if he’d used every gesture, every smile, and he knew that everything he did now was something borrowed.

“There it is,” she said, pointing at the menu. She was euphoric. She’d been euphoric for days. “T-bone steak with a baked potato.”

“There it is,” he said.

The door opened and the conversation noise roared in like a draft and then people followed it in, one and two at a time. Donner saw Rusty right away holding the door for a couple of his buddies, and Donner turned his back and faced the woman until he was sure they had passed through the room and back to the bar.

*  *  *  *  *

The waitress was the owner’s wife, Kay. Donner knew her name, but she didn’t know his. He was here once a year at most. She appeared in a big flannel shirt patterned red and black and a shiny tiara clipped on her head that in rhinestones read Happy New Year! and she kept the pencil, as he had described to the woman, behind her ear until she’d heard both their orders and then she wrote it down.

“What was that?” Donner asked her about the people coming in.

“Big Jess our bull moose made an appearance across the pond,” Kay told him. “He’s still over there pulling tall grass off the bottom and eating like there’s no tomorrow.”

“A moose?” the woman said. “We saw a moose.”

“We did,” Donner said.

Early the second day, still hiking toward their lake, they had passed through a willow break, and in one of the beaver dams a cow moose was feeding. She was standing to her shoulders in the water, and her huge head would descend and disappear and then emerge in a tremendous splash and her mouth would be full of dark green reeds and she would chew and drip. It thrilled the woman, and she covered her face with her hands. She looked at Donner with a radical amazement, as if her understanding of the world had been reset, and she pulled him over a hillock and dropped her pack. They came together in a way that shocked him, none of it something he could easily describe, not voracious and not tender, but seriously perhaps, and it sobered him and offered the first caution as to the nature of what he was actually doing.

The waitress brought back a bread basket and two plastic flutes of champagne. There was a little stone fireplace and Donner stoked the struggling fire with two fresh sections of split log. When he sat back down, she said, “So this is New Year’s.”

“It is.”

She scanned the room. “And they’ll close the shutters and all be gone tomorrow.”

“Right, until May first. But even that is early. The season here doesn’t start until June.”

Her eyes were on him, and she lifted her glass and held it until he touched it with his. She was waiting for him to say something, make a toast.

“Moose,” he said. “God save the moose.”

Now he saw her first confusion, and he worried she could read his face. He felt drained, but he smiled.

“Is that really Scout?” she said. “Isn’t that amazing?”

“Yes it is, my dear,” he said.

“So, is your friend in here?”

“Yes,” he said. “He’s sitting at the bar.”

“Rusty?”

“That’s his name,” he said. “You remembered.”

He didn’t want to talk about this, but he would if she wanted, because he realized that he didn’t want to talk about anything at all. From the moment the dog had touched him, everything was all gone. Donner was happy for the fire; if the grate had been dark, he feared he would have wept.

One year ago in September on Donner’s annual fishing trip, he’d gotten trapped by a surprise snowstorm in the Cascades, and he’d made a bad decision. It was now his favorite story, though he’d only told it twice, and when he told it, he told it carefully and honestly, owning all of his errors in the event. When he told it, something in him knitted up taut and he felt centered and ready. He had told the woman who was not his wife the story over dinner at an Italian restaurant seven months ago, and it was the story that had kindled all of the rest.

*  *  *  *  *

The big mistake Donner made while fishing the year before, larger than going into the mountains late in the year and getting caught by the four-day storm, was breaking camp late in the afternoon. He should have stayed put, as he had for three days while the snowfall continued without pause, steady and serious as if trying to put the year out once and for all.

He had arrived in a thick dusk and set up camp—the tent, the little cook station and grill, the log bench, the clothesline. He always had a clothesline, and on the clothesline he always hung a thin cotton dish towel bordered by a blue and green stripe. His mother had given it to him years before. He woke the first day in the strange quiet and even light and his tent half in on him. The snow was eight inches deep, and Donner had to dress carefully and search through the site for his gear. He broke dead limbs and made a small fire; he was a scrupulous fire maker, and he laid in wood for two days. He made a cup of coffee using the little press his wife had given him, and he brushed a space on the log and sat down and let the snow gather on his shoulders.

He had the wrong shoes for such weather, but by being prudent and drying them each time he returned to the fire, he was still able to fish in Native Lake. He was mindful of the wet rocks and stood with his legs angled on the last two and cast a series of flies into the blizzard. It was mesmerizing watching the snow in its vast echelons disappear into the dark water, and he had the rich, high feeling that comes from being alone in real places. He caught no fish on his flies.

He did, however, take several cutthroat trout on his smallest Mepps spinners, something they could see. These fish he fried slowly in his old pan with olive oil and a little tarragon, and he ate them with his fingers right out of the pan as snow still fell. At night he banked the fire with larger logs, and in the morning snow would cover them all but one small space where smoke would still be working its way into the cold new day.

He fished every year of his life, camping alone or with a partner, because, he said, it pinned everything else in his life in place. He came home tight with the regimen of sleeping on the ground and eating fish, and with a new effulgent appreciation for his house, the roof, the way the doors worked, chairs.

The year of the mistake he’d gone into the mountains under special pressure. Andrew, his fourteen-year-old son, had run away that spring and then come back, and then run off again. It had been a poisonous season of recrimination and fear. He had been a drummer in the school marching band, and then he was just gone and they did not know where.

*  *  *  *  *

In twelve years this had been the first snow, and though he wasn’t fully unprepared, it vexed him. He wished he had his gaiters. He ate cutthroat trout for three days, drank coffee, and on the fourth day, he made his mistake. In the low, even snow light, which was the same at nine A.M. as it was in mid-afternoon, he decided that he could no longer wait out the snow. Even if it stopped, it would be a week melting in the best of Indian summers. He would hike down halfway to the highway, seven miles, camp there overnight, and then continue down another seven to the highway where the bus had let him off.

He waited and waited, and then for some reason he broke camp late in the fourth day. He should have waited for morning, but he could not. When he pulled the tent and packed it, the little rectangle under it was green as summer, the grass and wildflowers pressed and vivid there like a window onto another world.

He knew he’d made the mistake immediately because of the difficulty locating and keeping the trail. There were yellow blazes hacked into trees at the proper intervals, but the pack trail was impossible to see in the two-foot snow. The rocks tripped him, and he learned in the first mile to simply fall when he stepped on the side of the angled rocks rather than struggle for balance. Game trails confused him and many times he’d follow an elk path and then fifty yards later come face-to-face with a tree the animal would have walked under; he’d have to backtrack in the growing gloom to locate the proper path. He was wet, but moving and warm. When dark took the sky, the snow persisted. He used his flashlight to find the marked trees.

As he had told the story to the woman in the Italian restaurant last February, it lived in him, each word, and he evoked the dark and the night and the snow. He told the next part with complete precision, how he’d followed the trail, breathing into the new night, and suddenly plunged into the huge open meadow. He had forgotten about it. The expanse glowed at him, offering no marker; the trail was lost. He walked into the snow field for some reason. Was he looking for a clue? He moved slowly now, regretting having left the trees, tramping through the powdered snow. A moment later he came to a rivulet he seemed to remember, the water amber and clear, and he walked right into it and watched the water flow over his boots. He was now somebody else, somebody he was curious about. It was a beautiful night, the snow now tiny dots still wandering, floating all around the man. Habit, he supposed, not a decision, but habit made him walk on into the snow toward the distant trees. He was trying to take care. He looked at his watch, which he was trained to do when confused or lost, but a moment later he couldn’t remember what it had said. He looked again, wiping the crystal with his gloved first finger. He swore at the instrument and walked on, each step a kick into the deep drifts, listening to himself cursing. He fell frequently on the uneven ground, and the falling filled his collar with snow and then his ear. Sometimes he’d stay down; he wasn’t cold anymore.

He didn’t remember getting up, but he was up and in the woods, his pack off, breaking dead limbs from trees, and he was on his knees with his fire kit, starting a fire with a little snarl of twigs, a fire that he nursed into the biggest fire he’d had all week.

As the fire grew in his story, the woman’s expression, which was already serious in the restaurant candlelight, grew grave, her eyes on his face, glistening.

His fire worked its way down through the snow to the green forest floor and grew out in a dry circle. He pulled a downed limb over and hung his wet clothing on it piece by piece until he was standing on his towel before the vigorous fire naked, the dots of snow burning on his shoulders. He made some soup and set up his tent while his clothes dried. Hunkered down in the circle of warmth he had created, sipping the steaming tomato soup, he felt as alive as he ever had.

It was about one minute later a dog burst into the bright ring, throwing a splash of snow before putting his iced muzzle onto his paws on the only patch of green grass in this whole world. The dog eyed the naked man. There had been no noise in the arrival, and Donner was sure at first that a coyote had made a mistake, but he stood his ground. When he saw what it was, he said, “Hello, boy,” and his voice sounded strange. Donner found the tags and collar frozen, and by the time he’d separated them and read Scout, and a Wyoming phone number, he heard a deep voice call from the dark, “Hello, the camp!” When Rusty Patrick stamped into the light, he looked at Donner and pulled his snow-crusted glove off to shake hands. “Well, here’s Adam. Is Eve in the tent?”

Donner pulled on his cotton pajama bottoms, which he always took camping. This last week when he erected their camp clothesline and hung up the dish towel, he had also pinned the pajamas to the line and the woman had taken the fabric in her hand and Donner could see her remembering the story.

But in the Italian restaurant last February, when she first heard about the snow camp, the ring of snow, the way it melted, she said, “I want that. I want to have that.”

*  *  *  *  *

The steaks in the Jim Bridger were big, an end over each side of the huge paper plates, and the baked potatoes were monstrous. The only real silverware was the three-tined fork Kay brought them and pocketknives. It was a trademark of the Bridger to give pocketknives for steaks. They were thick black Forest Master knives with three blades, but the nameplate on each read Bridger Club. The woman loved this, and though she didn’t look comfortable with the pocketknife, she went at the food with an energy and delectation that Donner envied.

All night long they’d shared the fun of the place, diners getting up and throwing their plates into the fireplace and toasting, “Happy New Year!”

“They’re not doing any dishes the last night of the year,” Donner had told her.

When she talked now, her mouth was full, chewing, smiling, and Donner knew he had done it double. She was a woman who didn’t talk with her mouth full, ever. She was in love and it was his doing. When Kay passed with the bottle, the woman held out her glass for more champagne, and Donner could see her beam. She was beaming.

A three-piece band was setting up in the corner, wiring the keyboard, as Donner and the woman finished their dinner.

“Are you going to speak to him?” she asked Donner. “Do I get to meet Rusty Patrick?”

*  *  *  *  *

The second thing Rusty Patrick had said to Donner a year ago in the snow camp was, “I’ve had a pretty weird month all around.” He worked a black revolver from his jacket pocket and showed it to Donner. There were frost starts in the bluing. Rusty hefted the gun and then lobbed it out over the fire into the snow. “I was dead for a while, but I guess I’m back. Do you know how fucking strange it was to see your fire? I came out of the trees and there’s this fire. Come on. Whose idea is that?”

After he’d had a cup of soup, he added, “But we’re still in plenty of trouble here.” His Levi’s were frozen in stiff sheets and his boot laces were welded with ice. He kicked and beat at his clothing to peel it off, hanging it to dry. He’d been out to climb Mount Warren and had hit it way too light. Both of his little toes were patched white with crystal frostbite, but he stood by the fire in his damp long underwear and toasted the falling snow with his coffee cup. “People in Sun Valley pay a thousand dollars a day for shit like this.”

*  *  *  *  *

Donner did not mention the gun when he told the story, and he did not tell the woman or anyone else what happened the night he met Rusty Patrick in the snow camp. As the snow continued, they had another cup of coffee with a lick of whiskey in it, and they decided to walk out in the morning. With two of them, they reasoned, they could take turns breaking trail. They were above eleven thousand feet, and they were still ten miles from the road. Donner had set his tent on the snow, not bothering to kick a clearing for it, and none of the tree wells were large enough for the little two-man spring tent.

He felt odd, wired and wasted, and he understood somewhere deeper than he could reach that when he had seen the dog, he had let go of all the prudence he’d garnered all day. He was tired. Rusty Patrick wanted to talk and did talk for the hour they lay in the tent. Donner felt the snow hardening under them as they settled, and he worried faintly about the cold, but he just lay back and listened.

*  *  *  *  *

Rusty Patrick had a resonant voice, so even his speaking voice scraped a hard bass note once or twice in every sentence. He was a roughneck driving trucks since the oil work had dried up. Now he hauled road gravel all over Wyoming. “They’re still blading roads,” he said. “That’s why there isn’t an unbroken windshield in this whole state.” At thirty-three, he had never been married, never had a real girl until this last summer when he fell in love with the new dispatcher, a woman named Darlene Youngman, who had come west from Pennsylvania. It was the story of this girl that he told Donner.

Rusty Patrick talked in the icy tent, stopping every once in a while to post a question. Donner was awake but not enough to answer, and after a pause, Rusty Patrick would continue. His heart was broken, he said. He used to think that was all bullshit, a broken heart, before this deal. He fell in love with Darlene Youngman and she fell in love with him, and their dating closed in on them until they were spending weekends together at his place in Rawlins or hers in Rock Springs. “I mean, I see now that love is a kind of craziness, right? I was lit up like a refinery at night, blazing, nothing like it. It made everything make sense. My stupid life, the unending wind, the great state of Wyoming. You ever been in love?” Rusty cleaned himself up, his bachelor apartment, his clothing, his truck, and he trimmed his mustache and got out the old Western Wyoming College bulletins that had been in a drawer for six years. He was planning on a career in the Forest Service.

The dog came to the mouth of the tent and looked Donner in the eye. Donner nodded his head and the dog stepped carefully in onto the sleeping bags, finally curling at their knees.

The resonant cadence of Rusty Patrick’s voice changed then, or so Donner thought from where he drifted listening. He wanted to drop into sleep, and he could have, but there was something holding him back, some caution, some change in the air and the grip of the snowpack beneath him.

“My boss was a good guy—at least he had been good to me, keeping me on when a lot of men were laid off. His name was Bob Baxter. He took me aside years ago and told me privately to get my big-rig license, and I did what he said, and it saved me. But there was something else. He took an interest in Darlene.” The company owner felt fatherly toward the young woman, and in all their hours together in the office, the man talked against Rusty Patrick, warning the woman about a man of his caliber. It was a steady lesson, an onslaught, and she didn’t tell Rusty Patrick about it. right away. Then one weekend two weeks ago, he’d taken her over to the Western campus at Rock Springs, just driving around with a school map so he wouldn’t get lost when he came here next year. He was excited. Their new life was diagrammed before them. He would move in with her and attend classes; he had nine thousand dollars in the bank and he could work part-time in town during the two-year forestry program. Then they’d go together down to Utah State or Colorado State and their lives would really begin. He was thinking about babies and had said as much. He was way in, far gone. That’s the way he had said it, ‘T was far gone. I mean, I’d brought up babies. I’d say anything and I meant it all.” They were walking across the windy campus when she stopped and told him quietly that he would never come here. He was surprised by this and asked her why. This is not something you’ll do, she told him. Her arms were folded and she went directly to his truck. It was early on Saturday, so many sweet hours ahead of them, but she sat stone still. When she didn’t talk, he didn’t talk, and he drove her home. When she walked to her door, he simply backed his rig up and drove home. His ears were ringing. He hadn’t talked to her since, but he’d gone in to see his boss. “I went to the office on that Saturday,” Rusty whispered. “And Baxter was waiting for me.”

Dormer could feel Rusty’s shoulder; he was crying, speaking sometimes through his teeth. “By then I was like a chunk of stone; it hurt so bad. There is nothing like it. It isn’t your heart; it’s your heart through every day of your goddamned life. I could understand why a woman like Darlene might want to leave a man like me alone, but I was sure that Bob Baxter. Would not. Have said anything. Against me.”

Rusty trembled for a while, breathing as if gathering steam for language. “He told me. He had told her. I was no good. For her. He told me he had been talking. To her since. He had found out we were dating.”

Rusty’s voice was quieter and the words were spaced oddly, some run together and some repeated shakily and some falling at great intervals. The new cadence woke Donner a level. “It took everything. I had. Not to kill the man,” Rusty said. “AndIcouldhavekilledhim with my my my fists. My life was over. I bought the gun. Four hundred bucks. That was. Tuesday. We’ve been up above here. Since. Then. In this this this this snow.”

The last word had been coughed out and immediately Rusty’s breathing changed to a shallow chuffing. It was late but the hard chill pressed in with a new edge; it had stopped snowing. Donner opened his eyes and listened, and he knew that after four days it had stopped snowing. The cold came down now with all the force of the hollow sky. He could feel the frigid air sizing his face, and his feet were aching again.

*  *  *  *  *

The story had made him sick. He imagined the big boyish figure of Rusty Patrick confronting an older man he thought of as a father and hearing such news. And the surprise of the surcease of falling snow was like terror, a blank, fearful void that came at Dormer’s heart. He tried to calm himself, but for the first time in the mountains he was afraid. It was very simple: he wanted to be home. The image of his son in his band uniform took the air from Donner’s lungs, the brass buttons on his red wool tunic, his high, proud face under the black beret, his seriousness with the snare drum. He wouldn’t even accept any help loading the drums in the car, and when they arrived at school, he went wordlessly into the crowd. And then he disappeared. One night after practice, Donner waited with his wife, and after one A.M., they called the police.

Donner was bumped from sleep by Rusty Patrick shaking beside him. At first Donner thought the other man was sobbing, because he had heard it in his voice earlier, but it persisted, a rippling shudder that wasn’t crying. “Hey,” Donner had said, but even on an elbow shaking the man, Donner couldn’t wake Rusty Patrick. The dog held tight at the bottom of the sleeping bags, his eyes open. The cold was at Donner, blades of it against his exposed neck as he moved up and checked the other man. He ran a hand over Rusty’s face and it came away wet, and then cold or no, Donner sat up on his heels and shined the light on his tent mate. The face was gray and smeared with blood from a nosebleed. A delicate fringe of ice rimmed the hair and Rusty Patrick was shivering in cramping spasms. His chest was wet. Donner was saying, “Come on, come on,” as he unzipped their sleeping bags. The other man was damp, cold to the touch, dropping into hypothermia. Both of Donner’s hands were bloody and he was getting the blood everywhere as he cut away Rusty’s underwear using his sheath knife. Both of the sleeping bags were superior grade, though the zippers wouldn’t mesh. Donner was talking the whole time now, saying simply, “Oh now, come on now,” and he slipped in with Rusty and wrapped the shell of his own bag over them as tightly as he could. It was what you did. There was no way to take the half hour to rekindle the fire and go that way. Patrick had gone to bed still wet and it had worked into him. Now Donner could feel the cold muscularity of the other man and he held him and moved slowly against him, his hands up and down, the tops of his feet up and down, his face against the side of Rusty Patrick’s head. He’d need to bring him up five degrees.

Even dozing, he developed a rhythm, covering the naked body of Rusty Patrick in this embrace, this massage. It wore him down and he felt useless. He woke and renewed his movements. Donner rolled on top of Rusty and in slow degrees as his strength left him, he let his weight descend. The dog moved up to them, and Donner could feel the dog’s breath against the side of his face. Rusty’s shivering had subsided somewhat, but Donner could still feel the blood warm against his neck.

“Come on, now,” he said, whispering, and when that litany lulled him to sleep, he started talking quietly to his son. “You can come home now,” he started. “It’s not a problem to cross through Indiana and then Nebraska…” and Donner listed the states one at a time in a prayer to his son. He spoke slowly, trying to lay out the fair terms of their rapprochement, so he might again be some part of his life, and in his recitation, he uttered their history, telling at length episodes they’d shared, especially the time they went onto the roof to retrieve the basketball. He’d gone up the ladder and Andrew had followed him onto the flat white surface the shape of Utah. It was littered with odd broken toys and an old volleyball as well as the ball he’d just heaved from the driveway. Each element of this scattered inventory brought a wave of revelation and nostalgia. The blue plastic elephant with three legs was five or six years old, sun-polished on one side, and Donner and Andrew sat on the short rear wall of the roof, looking down at the neighbors’ dog, who was swimming in the pool, and they talked about all the toys the elephant had been kindred to, and he asked Donner in real wonder how such a lost thing could get onto the roof. In the late-day shade, they laughed and speculated like two friends for an hour until his wife called them from below.

Donner hugged the freezing man. He trapped Rusty’s hands in the warmth between their legs. Their center was warm and Donner moved against it until he felt himself stirred, a reflex he gave in to. Rusty Patrick’s breathing had steadied into a rhythmic easy stride cut from time to time with a short shudder. Donner was calling his name now, “Rusty, hey, Rusty.” The man beneath him groaned in what might have been acknowledgment and moved, his eyes still shut, and then Donner knew that Rusty had taken him into his hands and they were together that way in the mountain tent.

*  *  *  *  *

In the morning Donner saw what he hadn’t seen for five days: shadows on the tent, the shocking sunprint of tree limbs on the gray canvas. It warmed to twenty five and then thirty degrees. They took a long time with their morning, boiling water for coffee and oatmeal and then another pan for washing. There was dried blood in their hair and on their faces and necks. The world was a blinding white, the sky blue in tiers to the horizon. They didn’t speak, both men packing up carefully and wearing sunglasses against the crushing light. The muted concussions of snow bundles falling from the thawing limbs sounded all around them, and the dog Scout circled in the snow-packed camp space ready to go.

*  *  *  *  *

Donner told the woman the rest of the story: the warming, brilliant day in mid-September, and walking out of the mountains with Rusty Patrick and his dog. The dog disappeared right away and then five minutes later came along working two cattle before him like an expert in snow herding. The men stopped to watch this display. Donner took off his jacket and tucked it into his pack. They would walk ten miles downhill on a snow-packed path behind an ever-increasing line of cows which the dog urged and instructed, a kind of rare pleasure that comes once in a lifetime.

In that larger well-lit world with a clear promise of tomorrow and home and hope, Donner thought it might be possible to speak to Rusty Patrick about what had happened, but at each juncture, as they stopped for water or granola bars or just to look the hundred miles east across the snow-patched plains, neither man spoke up except to say, “Some dog,” or the like. When they shook hands that evening at the bus station in a town that Donner would never visit again, he thought, I’ll never know any of this again, any of it, and I’ll never see Rusty Patrick again.

*  *  *  *  *

Now in the Jim Bridger, Donner and the woman who was not his wife had thrown their paper plates and steak bones into the fireplace and moved their table to the periphery of the dining room, stacking it upside down on those already there. It was after eleven and people, many wearing gold and silver paper party hats, danced. It was fun for the woman and she held on to Donner’s arm happily, pretending every so often to have something to whisper to him and kissing his neck instead. This was all better than he’d described it.

At one point she’d bought an embroidered Jim Bridger cap from the little glass case, a turquoise cap with a moose underneath the name, and she announced it was for Andrew, a present.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he said.

“He likes me; this is a good cap for him,” the woman had said. He didn’t like her using Andrew’s name. His wife’s name had come up from time to time in the last days, but it was just a fact, one he was steeled against. When she said his son’s name, it just confused him.

One of the band members had a full beard and every third song he’d hoist his accordion and announce, “The New Year’s Polka,” to which they’d already danced twice. Their waitress, Kay, danced every dance now in the warm wooden-floored room, each with a different young man. The employees were all going home and back to college, and she was dancing with them one by one. Donner heard, through all the talking and the music and the dinner noise, the regular bass beat of Rusty Patrick’s deep voice as he spoke to his mates in the other room. After a week of knowing what he was doing or pretending to know, Donner was dislocated and floating, his brave face paper thin.

At a few minutes before the hour, all the men from the bar were herded into the dining room by Kay’s husband, the bartender, and Kay herself went around and filled everybody’s glass with the champagne they’d been pouring all night. “Kay,” her husband said, emerging through the group of men, “evidently the clock in the bar has been five minutes fast for the entire year! Thank God we’ve made it for the toast.”

He was hooted down, and in the ringing laughter, Donner saw Rusty Patrick turn and look into his face. Rusty’s expression opened in strange surprise and he came immediately over to where Donner and the woman stood by the stone fireplace.

“No way,” he said, shaking Donner’s hand. Then he said it again and clapped Donner in an embrace. He opened his mouth again to say something, which would have been, What are you doing here? or Is it really you? but with his mouth open, he just hugged Donner hard again.

They were spilling champagne, and Donner could sense the woman at his arm also against him, but he could not speak. The room seemed to be glowing. Donner could only put his arm around Rusty and hug him again, feeling the whiskers against the bones in his face. When they stood back, Rusty asked the woman, “So, you must be his wife?”

She took his arm in their close circle and said no, she was his friend.

“I’m Rusty,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve heard about you.” Now she had her hands on both of his forearms. “I’ve heard the wonderful story.”

“One minute!” the bartender called. “Make amends or wait a year! Who needs champagne! Where’s my sweetheart!” His wife, Kay, appeared at his back and they kissed. The room was full, everyone shoulder to shoulder.

Rusty Patrick opened his face to Donner in a profound look, plaintive and deep. A basket full of noisemakers suddenly appeared between them, and the men took one each and started blowing the honking whistles until the accordion sounded the countdown: ten…nine…eight. The men’s look held. Donner felt a smooth hand on his face and the woman pulled him down, and she kissed him tenderly, keeping her hand there as the minute and the hour and the year lapsed for the people in the Jim Bridger. A shotgun sounded from out on the highway, and paper dots fell into everyone’s hair.

Immediately the band fired up and the room sorted itself out, alcoves of people widening until the dancers had some space. It was another version of “The New Year’s Polka.”

Rusty’s buddies all slipped back into the bar, but Rusty Patrick came to Donner, speaking in his ear. “How’s your son?” the man said, his voice full of real concern. “Did he make it home? Did you talk to him?”

Donner could only nod at Rusty then and drop his eyes and step back. The young woman who was not his wife had snugged the turquoise cap onto her head and threaded her hair out the back in a ponytail. “Let’s dance!” she called in the thrumming noise. “I haven’t danced all year!”

Donner was watching what his body did, and what it did now was push Rusty and the woman together and smile at them. “Go to it!” he said. “This runs a thousand dollars a day in Sun Valley. I’m going to get some air.”

*  *  *  *  *

The night was ripped, filled, upended with stars sizzling in the deep chill. Donner felt his scalp tighten against the gathering cold, and he blew great plumes into the air. He retrieved his binoculars from his car kit, and when he shut the door, the dog stood in Rusty’s truck to be stroked.

“Come on, Scout,” Donner said, patting his leg. “Let’s go see the moose.”

Scout stood two feet on the tailgate and Donner lifted the animal to the ground rather than have him jump. They walked around the side of the old Jim Bridger to the wooden deck over Long Pond. There were two people finishing an argument as he arrived and the woman said to the man, “That’s four strikes, Artie, and you damn well know it.” They went in, releasing a quick rush of noise.

The binoculars had belonged to Donner’s father and they were the best set he’d ever seen. He sighted Big Jess standing well into the trees on the far side. Donner breathed out and held so he could focus. The moose wasn’t moving, and Donner couldn’t tell if he was looking across at the party.

*  *  *  *  *

Certain decisions are made in daylight and certain decisions are made in darkness. Winter has its own decisions and summer has its own decisions, as do spring and fall. Donner drew a chestful of the sharp air. He’d made a decision last February with the woman whom he could now see dancing inside the painted window. It was made in the frigid early twilight under low clouds while the car headlamps passing on the highway seemed useless little fires that wouldn’t last the night, and that decision to use his story as he had, to show it to her, burn it like a match, had led to this new darkness and the longer night.