“The snow is coming,” she said, beside him.

They were standing on the banks and the river was moving below them in the dark and the light was coming up off of it from the campfire. The light moved and the river moved and he couldn’t tell which was moving more, but he thought it was the fire. Those tongues, there in the circle of charred stone, the smoke stretching away above them, invisible.

“Not yet,” he said, and he pointed. His hand was a white shape in the dark, without an arm. The coat was black and didn’t catch the fire, except at the edges, and she was following his finger with her eyes. He could see her doing it, looking, looking for the snow. “It’s only there, at the foot.”

“Where?” she said. Her one hand was on his side and he could feel her fingers all together in her glove and he could feel his heart beating beneath his coat. It was a beat like small explosions. Like having swallowed firecrackers that had somehow stayed lit.

“At the foot,” he said. The mountain was just a gray suggestion of a shape, but he could see it where it blotted out the stars and where those stars reflected off the snow. He could see it and it was huge, consuming the landscape below it. He could see it and he remembered all the times seeing it during the day and he saw that the snow was only at the foot and on the slopes leading up to the summit just as he’d known it would be.

“I see it,” she said.

“The ground’s not frozen,” he said. “It’s not cold enough yet, here.” It was October and they were camping for the last time in autumn on the plains and it was warm enough that the snow always melted after it fell. Always except for one year that his grandfather had told him about where it had come and stayed for months and the harvest had died and everyone had been hungry and cold and the mountain had, in those bleak days, truly seemed to dominate the towns that nestled beneath it. But then it had seemed all the more brilliant when the sun had come back and fallen on that mountain first and then found them all alive, all together as the spring flooded the grasslands.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll see them soon.”

“You promise?”

He grinned and the air was cold on his teeth. “I promise.”

She took his hand and they went down the bank and he felt the mud move beneath his shoes, but they didn’t fall. He slid, once, for the space of a breath, and his heart was in his throat. But then he was walking again and she was there and they were at the edge where the water was lapping against the shore with the sound of a thousand deer drinking in the night. They were doing that, he knew, all along the river, knowing that they were safe and that the guns would be silent until the dawn. He thought he could see one, further down, but it was hard to be sure with only the moon and the stars.

She saw it and pointed. “Look,” she said.

“I see it,” he said, and then he was sure. Its head was bent, the neck smooth with the short fur, the front hooves dipped into the edge of the river, the back legs taught and planted in the sand like the cedars across the fields where the forest took over. It was a creature of beauty, he thought, though he’d taken them himself, sometimes, with a rifle his grandfather had brought back from the war. He’d taken them and he’d thought they were beautiful both before and after and he’d sometimes regretted it, but he’d done it anyway.

“Let’s go,” she said. Her voice was quiet, a part of the stillness of the night.

“All right,” he said. They went across the river on a fallen tree and he saw the deer stand and look, its neck tight, its head up, and then turn and bolt back toward the cedars. The tree was wide and cracked down the middle and the river was only ten feet across at the most. They took it in careful little steps, the bark cracking beneath their feet, almost frozen from the spray of the river, and then they were across and in the fields.

The fields were the life of the valley, the blood in its veins and the dirt between its teeth. They gave corn and cattle and they took hours and years. They were the reason the people could survive there beneath the mountain and the reason those people had lives that were hard. But that hardness was like the hardness of the ironwoods in the heart of the forest, a strength that got them through the harvests and the winters and the years.

They walked and the ground was both hard and soft, that stage before it froze, before it grew cold enough to hold the snow and not let it melt off in the heat of the afternoon. The grass broke beneath their feet like little blades of glass and he thought he could feel the deer running, across the field, its feet pounding into the soil and the waves of that pounding running off through the ground until they found his feet. He looked at her and she was looking toward the mountain and he knew she felt the deer and also felt him walking.

“They’re amazing,” he said, not meaning the deer. “They’re going to be.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen photographs.”

“Not enough,” he said, and he said it with the certainty of someone who knew, of someone who had done it. Who’d seen it, seen them, and knew that a photograph could never bring justice along with it in the thinness of the paper. The temporary touch of the ink. Close, yes. But never complete.

They walked and she put her hand in his and he could really feet her fingers, then, though the glove was thick and the fingers were all rolled together in the end. He held her hand tightly, without looking like he was looking at her even though he was, out of the corner of his eye. He could see her smiling, and that was good, he thought. That was very good.

He looked back at the camp and the fire was just a little fire now, a little touch of flickering heat, a candle across the river. The others were around it, small dark shapes, bundles, with their shoes at the sides of their sleeping bags and their backs to the fire so their bodies could take in the heat as it burned itself out. They’d come out there because the season was late, the winter was falling, and they couldn’t do it again once there was snow that stayed. They’d come and he’d known he’d come for her, then, but he hadn’t been sure why she’d come.

He felt her hand tighten and they were walking together, softly, in step. The deer had stopped running in the night and it was looking at them with eyes that were like liquid, all of its muscles still tense, still gleaming with the sweat of the run it had taken. He couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there all the same.

“The town looks like fireflies,” she said.

He looked, and it did. Tiny lights burning there off across the fields with their rows and their stalks ready for harvest or already cut. They were a bundle of lights, all together at the distance, all grouped in like a school of fish or a flock of birds or a herd of buffalo or any of the rest. He’d known them all, once: a pride of lions, a murder of crows. But he hadn’t known the one for people, though now he did.

“A town of people,” he said.

She laughed. “Yes,” she said.

The mountain was growing before them and he knew they needed to stay a bit away from it to make sure it wouldn’t block the sky. He’d found a spot, already; it was just a matter of finding it again. A place they could go where they would be away from the lights of the town and the light of the campfire and yet not so far away that they couldn’t find their way back.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“We can go back,” he said. The air was sharp, each intake a cut, though not as cold as it would be. Cold enough that it brought the blood to his face and pushed it from his fingers, that it took the sleep and stripped it from him and he was glad for that, because he wanted them to be fully awake.

She pulled herself a bit closer to him. “No,” she said.

He thought of the time when he’d asked her to come with him, the way he’d followed her around, loosely, for a little while, both trying to work up the nerve and to find the right moment, and how eventually she’d turned around and looked at him and smiled and asked him what he was doing. He thought of how he’d both loved and hated that moment, how he still hadn’t worked up the nerve, but how he’d asked anyway. How she’d said yes, of course, that she wanted to come if he wanted to go.

He thought of how he’d felt then and realized he felt much the same way now, even with the cold, with the village, with that deer standing and watching them in the night.

They walked and the world seemed not even to be moving around them, just to be hanging there, slightly shifting, the same all around in the great circle that marked the edge of their vision in all directions. The frozen grass, the mountain ahead, the river tumbling softly behind them with the light from the embers coming up off of it in thin sheets. He wished it would stay that way, and he looked at her. He wished it would stay that way and never move and they would just be suspended somewhere between the fire and the mountain for the rest of their lives.

He wished it, and he saw that she wished it too, and then they were at the place he’d found before and the ancient logs were all around them. Trees that had been cut, some time past, cut and just left, like bones of mammoths or bones of elephants, white without their bark there beneath the white of the stars and the white of the moon.

“Let’s sit here,” he said, and he did. The wood was cold and hard and the logs were not so old as to be rotten, which was good, which he remembered from when he’d come before and made sure it was perfect. She sat next to him, her body hunched up against itself and against him, fighting the cold. He had his arm around her without even knowing how it had gotten there--it surprised him, when he noticed, and there was a slight moment of terror at realizing what he’d done. And then she had her head on his shoulder and he knew he’d done the right thing.

“It will be soon?” she said. Her words were muffled and he could feel her jaw working against the muscles of his shoulder and he liked the way she felt, there.

“It should,” he said. His fingers were crossed in his pocket and he was hoping.

“It will,” she said.

They sat and they waited for time that didn’t seem to pass and they both felt that was all right. He thought that he should have built them a fire, here, but then he thought that she wouldn’t be so close to him if he had, and he was glad he hadn’t. Glad he hadn’t thought of it. Because there was some part of everything that was luck, and that was it.

“Hey,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, and she looked up at him.

He leaned down and he kissed her and there was that moment of sheer terror again, of disbelief, of not knowing what he was thinking even as he was doing it. But the moment was gone as fast as his heartbeat, which was faster now. The moment was gone and in its place was something else altogether and time hung there for some length that he didn’t know and didn’t try to count.

And then she pulled away from him and looked up and raised her hand to the sky. “Look,” she said. Her breath was a small bit of steam, rising.

He looked and the lights were there, all across the sky. He’d known they were coming but he hadn’t known how they’d look when they arrived. They came up off of the mountain like a stream breaking around a stone, breaking and flowing off in all directions. They were blue, there, at the peak, and they swirled out in a twisting river to green, to purple. They ran across each other and through each other, turning the world bright with color and washing over the snow on the mountain so that it looked like a small glimmering sea standing alone in the air. They were moving the way heat moved off the pavement on a hot day, the way embers pulsed in the bed of a fire, the way his heart was beating hard in his chest.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

He didn’t say anything, but he bent down and kissed her forehead and then he sat up and they just watched the sky. They watched the lights reach from the mountain to the plains to the town to the river. They watched them take the whole of the world and tie it together. They watched the lights and they sat together and, off across the field, its eyes glowing with reflected light, its breath soft and gentle, its hair sleek and smooth and all its muscles relaxed now under the dome of the world, the deer stood and watched them both.