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little sissy Heinrich. All these years and still scared of goblins.
    Brank shook the mocking voice from his head. His father was dead now, surely. His mother, too. All the Branks of western Pennsylvania were gone. All except him and Trudy.
    He picked his way down the ridge, testing each step, careful not to veer off the trail and plunge headlong into the Hell. At a small gap the fog thinned, and he spotted a shallow limestone niche that a spring had eroded from the mountainside. He wouldn’t be able to stand upright inside, but he could at least crouch away from the cold wind.
    â€œHere we go, Buster.” He flung his sack into the damp crack. “I’ll build us a fire and we’ll roast Thumper here for lunch instead of dinner.”
    It took him a while to find enough dry tinder beneath the damp leaves, but soon he had a small pine blaze built on the edge of the rock.
    With four quick strokes of his knife he beheaded and eviscerated the rabbit. He pulled the skin off, then cut a green hickory branch from beside the spring and suspended the body over the now hot fire. Small droplets of oil began to bead up on the rabbit’s flesh. Brank grinned. Rabbit had always been his favorite.
    He stretched out his legs and pulled Buster out of his sack. The mud-colored snake was a yard long, the pattern on its back similar to that of a rattler. It twisted angrily in Brank’s hand, annoyed at being plucked from its warm bed and thrust into the cool air. “Just get off your high horse, Buster,” Brank warned the writhing reptile. “You’ve been sleeping on a hundred and twenty-seven primo coon skins all day. Not many snakes can say that.”
    The fire sent up wisps of thin gray smoke that carried the aroma of roasting meat. Brank put Buster back down on top of the sack and absently began to pluck the beggar lice that clung to his pants. Tomorrow, if the whiteout lifted, he would reach the Little Jump Off Post Office. There, people would ship his pelts to Michigan and sell him coffee and magazines. A shiver of anticipation ran through him.
    The rabbit’s juices began to drip down into the flames. The smell made Henry’s stomach wrench with hunger. He smiled. Rabbit had been the first thing he’d learned to kill in the woods.
    He was sixteen when he fled down here from Pennsylvania. He’d hung around the edges of small mountain towns, hungry for the sound of talk, finding thin comfort in the neon-lit windows of roadside bars. Even though he had his shotgun, the woods still terrified him and he lived on the sodden french fries and half-chewed steak bones that he dug out of restaurant trash bins. But what he had left behind at home had scared him even more and at night he always retreated into the woods where no one could find him. He would curl up beneath some tree, where every slithery sound the forest made sent a bolt of stark terror straight through him. Most nights he stayed awake, trembling, praying that God would arrange some kind of dispensation that would allow him back into civilization. Then, one morning while he shivered under a log on the north side of Big Stone Gap, a man appeared out of a locust grove. He wore a battered felt hat pulled down over his blind right eye and carried a shotgun with silver scrolling on the stock.
    â€œHidy, boy,” he said, smiling an odd smile. “You look to be in a fair amount of discomfort.”
    That was how they met. Fate Lyons was a Vietnam vet from West Virginia who, in exchange for certain favors, taught Henry Brank tracking and trapping and the million other things he needed to know to survive these mountains. Though Fate’s unrestrained appetite for boys eventually led to their parting, Brank still thought of him often, and with gratitude. He doubted he could have survived long without Fate Lyons’s tutelage.
    He wiggled the rabbit’s haunch. It moved freely away from the body, golden-brown and glistening. He