He smiled again, that same small tilt at the corner of his mouth, and handed her the mug with the elk. Their fingers brushed. The wool blanket shifted. Outside, a limb cracked under the weight of new snow, a report like a distant door slamming.
They drank in silence for a time. The ankle throbbed in a dull, insistent way that Ellen tried to ignore by cataloguing the room the way she catalogued hotel lobbies for copy: the wooden pegs by the door for coats, the shelf of canned beans and powdered milk, the framed topographic map yellowed at the edges and pricked with old pinholes, the single photograph on the mantel—a woman with dark hair laughing beside a younger Ray, both of them squinting into summer sun on a ridge, her hand raised as if to block light or wave. Ellen looked away from the photograph before he noticed she had seen it.
"You live up here?" she asked.