The plow reached the access road at two-fifteen. A patrol truck followed, headlights cutting tunnels through the residual flurry, the white cross on its door matching the one on Ray's parka. Ray helped Ellen into a walking arrangement he had fashioned from a spare pole and patience, her skis strapped to the pack he wore, and they locked the cabin behind them with the simple latch that had held against the night. He left the lamp filled, the wood stacked, the quilt folded the way he had found it years of Christmases ago. On the table he left the brass compass, lid closed, beside a note written on the back of a ration inventory card in Ellen's hand, because she had insisted on writing it herself: *Borrowed. Return when the weather clears. —E.W.*
Ellen saw him leave the compass and the note and said nothing. Some gifts needed a night alone in a room to decide what they were for. Some notes were less instructions than hopes.
The truck ride into Silverton was loud with engine and heater and the driver's chatter about Christmas dinner at the Grand Imperial, where his sister-in-law made a ham that could convert atheists. Ellen sat beside Ray in the back bench, ankle elevated on a gear bag that smelled of rope and wax, and watched the mountains reappear as the snow thinned—peaks she had meant to write about and now suspected she would never describe accurately for a magazine, because accuracy would require admitting what had happened inside the borrowed cabin, and magazines paid for places, not for the way a person's voice sounded when he talked about the dead with love still intact.