"Not as lost as I was tonight," Ellen said.
For a while neither of them spoke. The fire took hold of the kindling Ray fed it—birch bark, then dry pine, then a chunk of oak that would last. The kerosene lamp threw its circle of gold across the table, the two chairs, the narrow bunk with its quilt folded at the foot. Outside, the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado did what they always did in a Christmas Eve blizzard: they erased the roads, the trails, the sky, and left only the cabin and the people inside it. In 1981 the world below still believed in uninterrupted travel and telephone lines that worked; the mountain, as usual, disagreed.
Ray poured water from a metal can into a dented kettle and set it on the woodstove. He moved with the economy of a man who had spent too many nights alone in rooms like this. Salt-and-pepper hair caught the lamplight when he bent to open the stove door. The close beard along his jaw was flecked with melting snow that he wiped away with the back of his wrist. At thirty-eight he carried himself like someone who had learned not to waste motion, not because he was lazy, but because waste on a mountain had a way of becoming consequence.