She’d learned that hunger has stages. First the gnawing, then the headache, then a strange lightness, almost pleasant, where your body stops asking and starts accepting. She was in the third stage now. The forest had changed over the past half mile. The trees were older here, thicker, their trunks wide enough that she couldn’t have wrapped her arms around them.
The undergrowth thinned as if something about this part of the woods discouraged growth at ground level. The light came through differently. Not the scattered, busy light of a young forest, but long amber columns that fell between the trunks like pillars in a cathedral. Nola stopped. Something was different. She could feel it before she could name it.
A shift in the air. A faint scent beneath the pine and earth that didn’t belong to the wilderness. Woodsm smoke. Faint, almost imagined. But there, the ghost of a fire, or the beginning of one, she followed the smell the way a drowning person follows the surface. The ground sloped upward for another h 100red yards, then crested a ridge so gently that she was on top of it before she realized.
And there, below her, in a shallow valley ringed by old growth Douglas furs, sat a cabin, not a ruin, not an abandoned hunter shack with a cavedin roof and beer cans on the porch. a real cabin built from logs so weathered they’d turned the color of iron. It was larger than she’d expected, two stories with a stone chimney on the west side that rose above the roof line like a watchtowwer.
The windows were dark, the kind of dark that could mean empty or could mean someone was inside, sitting still, watching. A porch wrapped around the front, its boards uneven but intact. The front door was slightly open, just a crack. And through that crack leaked a thin line of warm amber light.
