'Call him again,' I said.
Jacob ignored me. 'She's treed it,' he said to Lou.
Lou's hands were deep in the pockets of his jacket. It was an army surplus jacket, white for camouflage in the snow. 'That's how it sounds,' he said.
'We'll have to go in and get her now,' Jacob said.
Lou nodded, took a wool hat from his pocket, and pulled it down over his pink skull.
'Call him once more,' I said, but Jacob ignored me again, so I tried calling the dog myself.
'Mary Beth,' I yelled. My voice came out pitifully thin in the cold air.
'He's not coming,' Lou said.
Jacob shuffled back to the truck and opened the driver's side door. 'You don't have to go, Hank,' he said. 'You can wait here if you want.'
I didn't have a hat with me, and I wasn't wearing boots -- I hadn't planned on hiking through the snow -- but I knew that both Jacob and Lou expected me to stay behind, expected me to wait like an old man in the truck, and I knew that they'd joke about it while they made their way off through the trees and tease me when they returned.
So, against my will, I said, 'No, I'll go.'
Jacob was leaning into the truck, fiddling around in the space behind the seat. When he emerged he was holding a hunting rifle. He took a bullet out of a little cardboard box and loaded it into the gun. Then he put the box back behind the seat.
'There's no reason,' he said. 'You'll just be cold.'
'What's the rifle for?' I asked. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Lou grinning.
Jacob shrugged. He cradled the gun in his arms, flipped the collar of his jacket up around his ears. His parka was bright red and, like all his clothes, a size too tight for him.
'It's posted land,' I said. 'You can't hunt here.'
Jacob smiled. 'It's compensation: that fox's tail for my broken headlight.' He glanced toward Lou. 'I'm only taking one bullet, like the great white hunter. That seem fair to you?'
'Perfectly,' Lou said, drawing out the first syllable so that it sounded like 'purrrr.'
He and Jacob both laughed. Jacob stepped awkwardly up onto the snowbank at the side of the road, balanced there for a second, as if he might fall backward, then gathered himself and lumbered down into the trees. Lou followed right behind him, still giggling, leaving me alone on the road.
I hesitated there, wavering between the twin sins of comfort and pride. In the end it was pride and the thought of Lou's snickering that carried the day. With something bordering on revulsion, I watched myself climb up over the bank and set off through the snow, hurrying lest they get too far ahead.
THE SNOW was shin deep in the woods, and there were things hidden beneath its smooth surface -- the trunks of fallen trees, stones, broken branches, holes, and stumps -- which made the going much harder than I'd anticipated. Lou led the way, spry, scurrying ratlike between the trees, as if he were being chased. I followed directly in his tracks, and Jacob brought up the rear, a good ways behind us, his face turning a brilliant pink, just a shade lighter than his jacket, with the effort of moving his huge body forward through the snow.
The dog's barking didn't seem to get any closer.
We continued on like this for about fifteen minutes. Then the trees suddenly thinned, and the land dropped away before us into a wide, shallow bowl, as if, millions of years before, a giant meteorite had landed there, carving out its impression in the earth. Parallel lines of stunted, sickly looking trees transversed the hollow -- they were apple trees, the remains of Bernard Anders's orchard.
Lou and I stopped on the edge of the bowl to wait for Jacob. We didn't talk; we were both out of breath. Jacob shouted something through the trees at us, then laughed, but neither of us understood him. I scanned the orchard for the dog, following his paw prints with my eyes. They disappeared in the distance beneath the trees.
'He's not in there,' I said.
Lou listened to the dog's barking. It still seemed very far away. 'No,' he agreed. 'He isn't.'
I made a complete circle of the horizon with my eyes, taking in both the orchard and the woods behind us. The only thing moving for as far as I could see was Jacob, working his way aggressively through the snow. He still had another fifty yards to go and was progressing at a pathetically slow rate. His jacket was unzipped, and even at that distance I could hear the tortured sound of his breathing. He was using his rifle like a cane, digging its butt into the snow and pulling himself forward by its barrel. Behind him, he'd cut a wide swath of deep, messy tracks, so that it looked as if he'd been dragged through the woods against his will, struggling and kicking the entire way.
By the time he reached us, he was soaked with sweat, his skin actually steaming. Lou and I stood there watching him try to catch his breath.
'Christ,' he said, gasping, 'I wish we'd brought something to drink.' He took off his glasses and wiped them on his jacket, squinting down at the ground as if he half-expected to find a pitcher of water sitting there in the snow.
Lou waved his hand in the air like a magician, snapped his fingers over the right-hand pocket of his jacket, then reached in and pulled out a can of beer. He popped its top, slurped the foam from the lid, and, smiling, offered it to Jacob.
'Always be prepared,' he said.
Jacob gulped twice at it, pausing in between to catch his breath. When he finished, he returned the can to Lou. Lou took a long, slow swallow, his head tilted back, his Adam's apple sliding up and down the wall of his throat like a piston. Then he held the can out toward me. It was a Budweiser; I could smell its sweetish scent.
I shook my head, shivering. I'd started to sweat hiking through the snow, and now, standing still, my damp skin was becoming chilled. The muscles in my legs were trembling and jumping.
'Come on,' he said. 'Have a sip. It won't hurt you.'
'I don't want any, Lou. I'm not thirsty.'
'Sure you are,' he prodded. 'You're sweating, aren't you?'
I was about to decline again, this time more forcefully, when Jacob interrupted us.
'Is that a plane?' he asked.
Both Lou and I glanced into the sky, searching the low clouds for movement, ears keyed for the hum of an engine, before realizing that he was pointing down into the orchard. We followed his finger to the very center of the bowl, and there, nestled among the rows of stunted apple trees, hidden almost completely by its covering of snow, was indeed a tiny single-engine airplane.
LOU AND I reached it first, side by side.
The plane was resting perfectly flat on its belly, as if it were a toy and a giant hand had reached down out of the sky to set it there, snug beneath the branches of the trees. There were remarkably few signs of damage. Its propeller was twisted out of shape, its left wing was bent back a bit, tearing a tiny hole in the fuselage, but the land itself was relatively unmarked; there were no upturned trees, no jagged, black gashes in the earth to reveal its path of impact.
Lou and I circled the wreck, neither of us approaching close enough to touch it. The plane was surprisingly small, no bigger really than Jacob's truck, and there was something fragile about it: it seemed far too tiny to support the weight of a man in the air.
Jacob came slowly down into the orchard. The snow had settled more deeply here, and he looked like he was wading or shuffling toward us on his knees. Off in the distance, Mary Beth continued sporadically to bark.
'Jesus,' Lou said. 'Look at all these birds.'
At first I didn't see them -- they were so still in the trees -- but then suddenly, as soon as I saw one, they all seemed to jump out at me. They were everywhere, filling the entire orchard, hundreds and hundreds of black crows perched motionless on the dark, bare branches of the apple trees.
Lou packed some snow into a ball and tossed it at one of them. Three crows lifted into the air, completed a slow half circle over the plane, and settled with a soft fluttering onto a neighboring tree. One of them cawed, once,
