Death in the Pines by Thom Hartmann

walked to the door, pushed it open, just a few inches, but far enough to spill in the cold air. I felt it on my cheeks and hands. She stared through the crack as if seeing something in the remote distance. “This is not about saving. Those people will fail because they are trying to save something. There is nothing to save.”
    â€œThen I don’t understand.”
    â€œNo.” Her glance had that almost physical impact. I felt it in my chest and stomach. “You are trapped because you think the same way they do and view the world as they do. You must change first. You are, are—deaf, blind, lame. You must cure yourself first, and then you can help.”
    â€œNow I’m really confused.”
    She pushed the door wide open, went across the porch and down the three steps onto the snow. “Get a blanket. Put on your coat. Follow me.”
    WWHDTD? I suspected that Henry David would have serenely followed such a guide, perhaps to the surprise of his stodgier friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Well, hell, I’d been patting myself on the back not so long before, seeing myself as a Thoreau for the twenty-first century. So I pulled my jacket from its peg and reached for the top blanket on the bed. Before my hand closed on it, the cell phone chimed in its charger and I picked it up to answer.
    â€œOakley Tyler,” I said, not recognizing the number.
    â€œJerry Smith,” he said. His voice sounded unsteady. “I’m at the office, at my paper. Look, I need to talk with you about your investigating my grandfather’s death.”
    â€œWhen?”
    I heard him sigh. “I can meet you in Montpelier. The diner at the corner of State and Main. I need some time to clear my desk. Noon?”
    â€œIf I’m not there at the stroke, wait for me.”
    â€œNo problem. You’ll find me there.”
    I grabbed the green wool army blanket and draped it over my shoulder. Then something made me leave the phone connected to its charger, though the battery should have already been full. Somehow I did not think that Sylvia, or Henry David, would approve of it. I stepped out into the freezing morning air.

11
    S ylvia was walking away from me, into the forest. The sky arched a deep clear blue overhead. Above the treetops I made out the distant shape of Burnt Mountain, twenty miles east of us, looking as if it were no more than a mile away: the air was so cold that the moisture had frozen out of it, leaving it as deceptively transparent as the air of the high desert.
    I floundered a little when we hit a series of drifts, but ahead of me Sylvia didn’t even seem to notice the change in snow depth. She walked on, surefooted, not even sinking into the snow, not even crunching the crust as I did. Her walk had that lithe fluidity of a Native American, taking all the weight on the whole foot, not coming down heel-first and punching through as I did. And I doubted that she weighed more than a hundred pounds, a lot less than my one-eighty.
    Though the air felt well below zero, the sun was warm on my face. She led me through hardwood growth and around a stand of pines until we came to the same outcrop of rocks where I’d first met her. She stopped and said, “Spread out the blanket. We’ll sit on it.”
    I did as she asked and she sat, facing the river, somewhere down there below us. I knocked snow from my boots and sat beside her, cross-legged. I could smell the deer hide she wore, the odor bringing me images of a night forest, animals panting from having run a long way, a fawn nuzzling her mother’s teats, eager for the warm milk.
    Sylvia sat quiet and immobile, her breath slow, spine straight, gazing ahead at the treetops down the slope, where the forest floor slanted down to the river. I wanted to talk, but I didn’t think she’d welcome that. I began to shiver. Here the trees shaded us, and I missed the warm touch of the sun.
    After what might have been two or three