Winter Prey

out the window. A roadhouse showed a Coors sign in the window. Three people, unisex in their parkas, laughing, cross-country skis on their shoulders, walked toward the door. “You just don’t believe it can happen.”

    The feds had stopped at a farmhouse a half-mile from where their ranging equipment said the radio beacon was. Visibility was twenty feet and was falling. In little more than an hour it would be dark. Lucas and Climpt pulled in behind the federal truck, climbed down, and went to the house. Tolsen met them at the door. “I’m gonna go down and watch the end of the drive, make sure he doesn’t tear out of there in a car.”
    “Okay. Don’t go in.”
    Tolsen nodded. “I’ll wait for the troops,” he said grimly. “Those two boys are gone?”
    Lucas nodded, grimacing. “Yes.”
    “Shit.”
    A farm couple sat in the kitchen with a grown son, three pale people in flannel while Lansley talked on the telephone. He hung up as Lucas and Climpt came in, said, “We’ve got a hostage negotiator standing by on the phone from Washington. He can call in if we need him. If there’s a hostage deal going down.” He looked worn.
    “We’ve got to do something quick,” Climpt said. “If there’s another sled in there, or if he gets out in a truck, we’ll never find him.”
    “So what’s the plan?” asked Lansley. “Where’s Carr?”
    “They’re ten or fifteen minutes back,” Lucas said. “Why don’t you go down and back up Tolsen. Just watch the drive, don’t get close. Gene and I’ll go in on the sleds until we’re close, then go in on foot. He can’t see us any better than we can see him, and if we catch him outside, we can ambush him.”
    “You got snowshoes?”
    “No. We’ll just have to make the best of it,” Lucas said.
    The farmer cleared his throat. “We got some snowshoes,” he said. He looked at his son. “Frank, whyn’t you get the shoes for these folks.”

    Lucas and Climpt unloaded the sleds and rode them through the farmyard. The farmer had given them a compass as well as the snowshoes. Fifty feet past the barn, they needed it. Lucas took them straight west, riding over what had been a soybean field, the stubble now three feet below the surface. The snow was riding on a growing wind, coming in long curving waves across the open fields. The world was dimming out.
    Lucas had strung the radio around his neck, and turned it up loud enough to hear the occasional burp: No movement . . . Nothing . . . Five minutes out . . . Get a couple more sleds down here, see if you can rent a couple at Lamey’s.
    A darker shape shimmered through the snow. Pine tree. The farmer said there was one old white pine left in thefield, two hundred feet from the Harris’s property windbreak. Lucas pointed and Climpt lifted a hand in acknowledgment. A minute later the windbreak loomed like a curtain, the blue spruces so dark they looked black. Climpt moved off to the left, fifteen feet, as they closed on it. At the edge of the treeline, they stopped, then Climpt pointed and shouted over the storm. “We’re back too far. We gotta go through that way, I think. Windbreak’s only three or four trees deep, so take it easy.”
    They moved back toward the road, Climpt leading. After a hundred feet he waved and cut the engine on his sled. Lucas pulled up beside him and pulled the long trapper’s snowshoes off the carry-rack.
    “This is fuckin’ awful,” Climpt said.
    Inside the windbreak, the wind lessened, but swirled among the trees, building drifts. They plodded through, and a light materialized from the screen of white. Window. Lucas pointed and Climpt nodded. They slid further to the right, moving down the lines of pine, coming up on the back of the double-wide mobile home. A snowmobile track crossed the backyard, curved around the side and out of sight.
    “Let’s get back a bit. I don’t think they could see us.”
    Keeping the trees between themselves and the house, they moved around to the front. A snowmobile sat next to the door. A space had been cleared for a truck or a car, but the space was empty.
    “I’ll watch the back,” Climpt said. He’d slung the M-16 over his shoulder and now slipped it off into his hands.
    “Sit where we can see each other,” Lucas said. “We gotta stay in touch.”
    Climpt moved back the way they came, stopped, beat out a platform with the snowshoes, and sat down. He lifted a hand to Lucas and put the rifle between his knees.
    Lucas