I spotted Eli. So much for him taking a break. He was twenty feet high in a leafless tree, the branches a black etching in the grayness. He was securing a camera on the tree to cover the entire area. He paused and sat back on the branch he straddled, one hand on the camera. Wind gusts had died away and the air was so still and so cold it fairly crackled. The smoke from the sweathouse smelled strong and heavy, the air so lifeless that the smoke had fallen back to the ground and made a smoke-fog hanging two feet off the snow. I looked in the direction of the creek and back to Eli.
“The vamps?” My breath blew in a cloud and rested on the air.
“The silver rounds are proving to be a problem. They’re too young to recover as fast as I’d like. Maybe I should have shot them a little less.”
“Mmmm. Maybe, maybe not.” I stuck a thumb at the creek. “I have to jump in the water.”
“Better you than me.” Eli grinned at me, that rare, fully open grin, showing teeth. “The water’s about thirty-eight degrees. You’re gonna freeze your ass off.”
“Well, crap.”
Eli laughed. “Swimming hole is that way.” He pointed more downstream.
I walked to the creek, following a trail through the snow broken by the Elder. The bank where she had stood was twelve feet above the water; the far bank was low, sandy, and littered with driftwood and plastic water bottles sticking up above the snow, and raccoon poo that rested atop the frozen white blanket. Deer tracks showed that a herd drank from here, only yards from the house, almost as if they were taunting Beast. I found the log across the water and walked out over it, my paw-feet sure on the iced-over bark. The pool below me was deep and still and green. From upstream came the splashing of a small drop. Farther downstream the water picked up its pace again, louder with whitewater. I stripped and tossed my clothes to the bank. Took a breath. Closed my nose flaps. Stepped off the log. Plunged down. Deep. Blackness closed over me.
My entire body went into spasm at the cold. I forgot how to swim, how to breathe. How to even float. My heart raced. Panic chased through me. My throat closed up entirely. My feet hit bottom and buried to the knees in the muck. Blackness was intense. A waterlogged tree was jammed into the bottom beside me, branches broken. I hadn’t thought about that possibility. I could have impaled myself. The only light was up, toward the air, where dawn was brightening the sky. I was growing cold fast. I reached out and pushed against the dead tree, pulling my buried feet from the mud and clay and rotting vegetation, and shoved off toward the surface.
I breached like a dying whale. Gasping in a breath that spasmed through my chest. Forcing my arms to move, I swam to the bank, my limbs already stiff and clumsy. I splashed too much trying to get to the high bank and then I had to figure out how to get up it. I grabbed twisted roots that seemed to come from a sycamore, pulling my weight up the nearly vertical hill. At the top, I staggered, so cold my heart was doing funny things. My pelt was drenched and I shook to get the water off, feeling like a dog as water shot out in a fine spray.
I sat on the snow, landing hard on a hidden root, my breath ragged and coarse. By my left knee, lying on top of the snow, was a brownish feather, eighteen inches long, wide near the shaft, narrowing midway down at the notch. The flight feather of a golden eagle. I looked up, from the feather to the sky, searching for the raptor, but saw nothing, and then down, along the trail the Elder had taken to and from the creek. Twenty feet upstream, her tracks marred the snow next to mine. There was no way she could have thrown this feather unless she tied it to a rock. The feather was resting on top of the snow, leaving no indentation, only the markings of the quill and, more faintly, the barbs, as if it had fallen slowly from the sky.
Carefully, I lifted the feather. Pulled myself to my feet, my knobby hands on a low branch of a tree. I was so cold I