In a frozen forest, a game warden found a fugitive woman barely alive. She was hiding from a merciless justice system and a vindictive mother-in-law who had taken her daughter away. The man decided to save her.
And when he unzipped her old jacket, he stopped cold. December 1974 had turned brutal even by the standards of the northern woods. By evening, the thermometer outside the log cabin had dropped to thirty below and stayed there.
The air outside was dry and sharp. Every breath burned. Mike Harris moved through the trees on wide backcountry skis, pushing steadily with his poles along a packed trail.
He was forty-eight. Tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a heavy fur-lined coat and a warm cap, he moved with the efficient confidence of a man who had spent years far from town. The snow gave off a dry, even squeak under his skis.
White frost had settled on his mustache and thick beard from his breath. Across his back hung the familiar strap of an old double-barreled shotgun. Today he was checking the far line—his trap route for fox and marten.
The work was routine, almost automatic. The old-growth forest stood still. In weather like this, animals stayed deep in their dens, and birds kept quiet.
Only now and then a heavy clump of snow dropped from a spruce limb overhead and landed in a drift with a dull thud. Mike gave another push with his poles, glided into a narrow clearing, and stopped. His skis went still.
Ahead, on the untouched white crust of snow, he saw dark spots. Too dark, too out of place in that landscape. Mike moved closer.
He bent down without taking off his skis. Pulled off his right mitten, tucked it under his arm, and touched the nearest mark with bare fingers. The snow had softened there, with a faint sticky feel.
Blood. Fresh enough that it hadn’t frozen solid yet, hadn’t turned into a dark crust of ice. Whoever had left it had passed through not long ago.
The warden lifted his eyes and followed the trail into the spruce stand. He squinted against the hard glare of sunlight bouncing off the snow. The tracks were human, but that wasn’t the strangest part.
They were uneven, erratic. The person hadn’t been wearing winter boots or even shoes. These were bare footprints.
Mike shoved his hand back into the mitten. At thirty below, nobody stayed alive long in the woods without shoes. Not hours. Minutes.
He turned sharply, angled his skis toward the trail, and moved fast, driving hard with his poles. The line of tracks wandered. Whoever had made them was running on fumes—stumbling, falling, getting up again.
About a quarter mile later, Mike saw a dark shape ahead. Someone lay face down in deep snow beneath the roots of a wind-thrown pine, half covered in powder. He kicked off his skis and sank to his knees in the drift.
It was a woman. She lay motionless, her face buried in the crook of one arm.
She wore a gray quilted prison jacket torn to shreds. On her feet—nothing but dirty, frozen strips of cloth that had once been pants. Her feet were badly frostbitten, toes blue.
Dark hair had frozen into stiff clumps. Mike dropped to one knee, took her carefully by the shoulder, and turned her onto her back. Her face was white as paper.
Her lips had gone a frightening shade of purple. Her eyes were shut, lashes crusted with ice. She looked young, though the deep shadows under her eyes and the sharpness of her features spoke of exhaustion and hunger.
Mike pulled off a mitten and pressed two fingers to her neck, just below the jaw. Her skin was ice cold. He held his breath and listened.
One weak beat. Silence. Then another.
Alive. He pulled her jacket closed by reflex. Under the torn coat was a thin cotton shirt, and across her chest, painted in white, was a row of letters and numbers.
Prison issue. Mike slowly stood up. The thought came clear and simple.
A runaway inmate. There were two women’s correctional facilities within range.
If he picked her up now, carried her home, warmed her—he’d be guilty too. Harboring a dangerous fugitive.
Under the laws of that time, that could mean years in prison. For a man who had built his life around the freedom of open woods, prison might as well have been the end of everything. He stood over the freezing woman and listened to the wind moving through the treetops.
He could just turn around. Ski back to the cabin. Call the state police on the radio. By the time they came out on a tracked rig, nature would have done the rest.
No one would have to make a choice. Mike looked at the woman’s blue, damaged feet. Then at her face…
