03

The path to the ridge began behind the woodpile, a narrow throat through the trees. He had worn it there with his boots, year after year, until even summer grasses bent to its memory. Today it had gone under. She had to trust her feet, her body’s recollection of each twist and rise, the way he had trusted it when the fog took the trail on hunting mornings.

She pushed into the firs. The snow beneath the branches was shallower, a powder dusting the needles, bright in the dim green. Her boots found the old ruts, the rocks that lay like buried bones under the soil. The pack hung heavy. The urn pressed between her shoulder blades.

One step at a time, she thought. The breath found its pace, drawing thin air into old lungs, sending it out again in rags of cloud.

She remembered another climb. A different season. Late September, the aspens burning with a gold so fierce it hurt to look at them.

“If I die up here,” he had said, “do not carry me down. Leave me for the hawks.”

“You’re not dying,” she had told him. It had been a joke. He was all wiry muscle and sun-browned skin, his beard still mostly dark. The idea of death seemed impertinent, like a salesman on the path.

“I’m only saying,” he said. “Animals don’t pack each other up and down. Makes no sense.”

Now, breaking trail through the snow, her breath harsh in the muffled quiet, she said, “You got part of what you wanted.”

The forest thinned. The trees shrank, then fell away. The path steepened. Here the snow had nothing to catch it, so it lay deep, clean, untrodden. Her thighs burned. She drove her boots in, feeling for purchase on anything solid beneath the white. The wind came now without hindrance, straight off the high slopes. It stung her eyes so that tears froze at the corners.

At a low place in the trail, she paused. The cabin below was only a dark square against white. Smoke climbed from its chimney, thinner now. She would come back to a cold house.

She shrugged off the pack. Her fingers were clumsy on the zipper. The metal burned with cold. She wrestled the urn out and held it, barehanded, until the ache sharpened into numbness.

How do you want this?” she asked the air. “A speech? Something poetic? Slow? Brief?”

The wind answered with its steady push.

He had never liked speeches. At their wedding, his brother had tried to toast them and lost his way in a tangle of metaphors about rivers and roads and God’s plan. Afterward, alone in their borrowed room above the tavern, he had shaken his head.

“If anyone knows what’s planned,” he said, “they have not told me.”

“You’re not curious?” she asked.

He had shrugged, unbuttoning his cuffs. “The day was long enough without maps.”

So now she skipped the speech. She turned the lid. It came off with a thin metallic squeal.

The ashes inside were lighter than she expected, pale and fine, with a few stubborn grains. Bone fragments, the funeral director had said, apologetic. They do not take as well in the furnace. We do what we can.

“I never thought you would be easy,” she murmured.

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