Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

Jane stopped watching the snowflakes and turned to her. "He's not what they all think he is. They think he's a hunter, so he's entitled to hunt. That's the chance you take: if you run, there will be somebody like him who gets paid to bring you back. But he's not that anymore. He's a cannibal."

"What do you mean?"

"He's not working for the system anymore, catching people and bringing them in and then getting his reward. He's living by gobbling people up."

"Who else?"

"The last one I know about is an eight-year-old boy."

"Why was he after a little boy?"

"The boy inherited some money and disappeared. Barraclough heard about it and killed at least four people just because they were between him and the boy - killed them just to get them out of his way so he could get the money."

"Did he get it?"

Jane shrugged. "The lawyers still have to do their audits and studies and sort out at least eight years of paper. When they finish, they'll probably learn enough to charge an accountant who's already dead with breach of trust or something. They'll also find out that the money is gone. They don't know that yet, but it is. Barraclough would never have killed the accountant if he didn't already have it."

"Why did you come back here?"

"Because I was one of the people who let him do it. I don't want him to do the same thing to you."

18

The night was cold and the oil furnace hummed in the basement two stories below them. Jane sat quietly in the comer of the room looking out the window and watching the feathery snow falling, first to fill in the icy ruts on the road and then to lay a blue-white blanket over it. No cars passed on the street to disturb it, and nobody had been out to leave human footprints, so it began to seem that she and Mary Perkins were the only ones left, adrift in a place where there was no motion and no time.

Mary stirred and walked into the kitchen. After more snow fell, Jane could smell food cooking and hear plates rattling onto the table. The roasting smell grew thicker in the air, and steam that carried the scent of vegetables fogged the window. There was the creak of the oven door opening and then the thump of it closing. Mary's footsteps reached the doorway and she said, "Time to eat."

On the table were a roasted chicken, asparagus, carrots, and potatoes, an excess of food cooked absentmindedly without regard to the number of people at the table. They ate sparingly and with formality. When they were finished they cleared the table and washed the dishes without speaking. They were like two strangers stranded together in the only way station in the empty wilderness, surrounded by hundreds of miles of howling winds and drifting snow - not because they had decided to be together but because there was no other shelter.

Mary walked into her bedroom for a few minutes and came out to set a pillow and a thick quilt on the couch, then went inside again and closed the door. Jane went back to the window to watch. The snow fell for another two hours before she stood up and walked to the couch, pulled the quilt over her, and fell asleep.

In her dream a light, powdery snow was falling while she trotted ahead of her companion through the forest. It was cold, but she didn't feel the cruelty of it because she had worked up a light sweat. She ducked her head under spidery branches frosted with snow, knowing that if she bumped one, the snow would shower off onto the ground. Then pursuers would read that as clearly as a track, and the wind would be slower to cover it.

They were making their way south from Ann Arbor and she was watching for the rivers that fed into Lake Erie. First would be the Raisin, then the Maumee, then the Sandusky. This forest was wild country. Hunters from tribes from every direction came to get bear, deer, and beaver in the winter and passed through it in the summer on their way to kill each other. It had been full of armed men for a thousand years.

She listened to the breaths of the woman trotting along behind her, and at each breath there was more of her voice, more of a cry. Jane stopped and looked back. Mary Perkins had slowed down to a stagger, too tired to plant her feet in the trail Jane had broken for her, and now and then meandering to waste her strength fighting the deep drifts. Jane walked back in her own tracks and held Mary's arm as they walked. Mary tried to say something, but Jane pulled her near and whispered, "They could be close, so save your breath. Nothing does us any good but moving."

Mary didn't try to answer, so she returned her attention to the trail. It was important that they cover as much ground as they could while the snow was still falling to hide the signs of their passing. As soon as she had completed the thought, the snow stopped. The air was frosty and still, and their feet made loud crunching sounds each time they stepped on the unbroken snow.

The ones who were following them would be able to keep up a fast pace, running in their footsteps in the flat places where the going was easy, and avoiding the depressions where their tracks had sunk in deep. Jane was always looking ahead, using the glow of the moon on the snow to search for any irregularity in the terrain that she could use to hide their trail - a thicket or a fallen log or a frozen streambed leading to the next river.

Far behind, she heard the first call of the hunters. "Coo-wigh!" reached her in the still air, and it was answered by a whistle somewhere closer and to their left.

"We've got to run now," she whispered to Mary Perkins.

They stepped into a jog with Jane at the front again, keeping her strides short to push aside the snow and make the going easier for Mary. She heard more whistles, and then the report of a rifle off to the left, and there were faint voices behind. She stepped into a deep drift and fell, then scrambled out of it and saw the stream. They ran along it for about a mile. As Jane came around a bend she saw the platform. It stood alone on the bank, a row of poles lashed ten feet above the ground between two saplings. She could see that its surface had something on it, so she hurried to the thicker sapling and began to climb.

"What are you doing?" hissed Mary impatiently. "They're coming."

"We can't outrun them," Jane whispered. "They never get tired and they never give up. All you can ever do is fool them."

The sapling was smooth and half frozen, with a layer of frost on the northwest side that held the snow to it, but she hoisted herself up high enough to see what was on the platform. There was a haunch of venison with the hide still on it, and a fat chunk of flesh that could only be bear meat. Some hunter had stored it there to keep it frozen and high enough to be out of the reach of animals. Then she found the two pairs of snowshoes. She tossed them to the ground and dropped beside them.

She knelt in the snow and tied one pair on Mary Perkins backward, so the long narrow shaft was at the toe end. "Stay here. Don't move," she said, then ran along the streambed and into the woods where the hunters' trail began. She tied her own snowshoes on backward, made her way back to Mary Perkins and said, "Come on."

They stepped along more easily now, the snowshoes holding them on the surface of the snow. Jane followed the stream to the right for a hundred yards to the first place where the low plants penetrated the snowpack enough to complicate their trail, then turned right again, toward the east. They made a trail that looked as though it led in the opposite direction and belonged to the hunters who had cached their game on the platform.

When the first sunlight caught them, they were in a flat, open valley. Their trail stretched behind them for miles, and as soon as the sun was high enough to stir the morning wind, much of it would be blown away. She said to Mary Perkins, "Just one more run, to get out of the open before they see us."