ONE

Cressida Hartley moved up to her parents’ mountain cabin to finish her dissertation. She would not become one of the aging lurkers around the Econ Department who hoped for sections of Intro to teach while the tenure track shimmered eternally on the far side of two hundred pages.

Her friend Tillie thought of the cabin. "Tell your folks you need three months free and clear and just bang it out up there."

As it happened, Sam and Sylvia Hartley were building a new cabin behind the old A-frame and they liked the idea of Cress being around to keep an eye on the construction; they even offered to make her student-loan payments for the duration. Her mother, with uncharacteristic restraint, didn’t mention that, historically, Cress hated the cabin and had never once gone up willingly.

Cress had never driven to the cabin on her own, either, but she’d remembered the turnoffs—north of Bakersfield onto a two-lane blacktop through the oil fields; then, just before the small agricultural city of Sparkville, a ninety-degree right turn due east toward the cloud-scarved Sierras; and finally, beyond the tiny, sad foothill town of Sawyer, a veer to the right of a huge red barn. The road began to climb then, twisting through oaks, back and forth, the blur of foliage alternating with glimpses into the ravine where the south fork of the Hapsaw River, low in August, formed green pools in biscuit-colored rock.

Being tossed around in the car for an hour was one reason Cress had hated going to the cabin. But it was better to be driving. And lovelier than she remembered, with glossy-leaved oaklimbs draped over the road, river views, and dramatic granite outcroppings. Scenery, she thought, was wasted on children, or had been on her. In no time she was in the pines, then passing the Hapsaw Lodge—halfway already! At 5,500 feet, cedars proliferated, and by 6,500 feet, the hundred-foot ponderosa and lodgepole pines prevailed, along with the odd cluster of red-trunked giant sequoias.

The Hartleys’ cabin was in the Meadows, a small private development surrounded by National Forest. Her parents had just left, and their housekeeper had come in, made the beds, and laid a fire, match-ready, in the freestanding Danish fireplace. Even in August, a fire at night was a pleasure.

But how ugly the A-frame was—she could see that now: its party-hat pointyness and spindly deck! And inside: the cheap pressboard paneling, the battered cast-off furniture, and ill-fitting venetian blinds. The fireplace, its blue enamel now blackened and chipped around the mouth, seemed a misguided effusion of the sixties, the Scandinavian design a prop for consciousness-raising and wife-swapping sessions—not that her parents went in for either.

A sugar bowl pinned down a note on the wood-grained Formica table: Upstairs shower stall cracked, use downstairs. Rick andJulie Garsh (contractor + wife) want to have you over. Enjoy.Love, Mom. Below that, in her father’s slanted scrawl: Enter high/low tempin log 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.

-

The sun had already slid behind Shale Mountain when she arrived, though another hour of light remained. She set up her typewriter on a card table in the living room. The air was warm and dusty, heat still shimmered off the deck. Outside, with her feet on the railing, she enjoyed a small portion of her mother’s bourbon until the mosquitoes found her.

Another reason she’d hated the cabin: no comfortable place to settle in. A wicker love seat was too hard. The built-in window seat was better—at least she could stretch out—but narrow, and also hard, its cushion degraded from years of direct sun. She grabbed the top issue from a two-foot stack of New Yorkers, then couldn’t stay awake. At eight, ignoring the thermometer and temperature log, she went to her usual room, the enclosed loft with an ultra-firm queen-sized bed that nobody else would sleep on. The day’s warmth had collected in a familiar stuffiness. She wrestled the window open along its corroded aluminum track. Wind soughed through the trees, bearing the scent of pine and mineral dust. The moon cast a blue glow. As a child, alone in this room, she’d often heard a distant chorus singing in the highest registers. She knew that the singing came from her own mind, that it was a response to silence and often the prelude to a headache.

She stretched out on the unforgiving bed and closed her eyes. There, at the very edge of hearing, far far away, a thousand voices labored, a cappella.

And so it was on familiar roads, in her family’s other home, with the blessings of those closest to her, that she veered off course, into the woods.

-

Morning brought still more reminders of why she’d hated the cabin: a panging headache, a weird gluey lethargy, small wheeling prisms in her vision. Her mother had attributed these symptoms to Cress’s attitude, admittedly rotten. But Sylvia Hartley was off by a letter, as Cress had discovered camping in the Tetons and skiing in Utah. Anywhere above 6,000 feet, she was a poor adapter.

She phoned Tillie in Pasadena at 7:40 a.m. "My head’s like an old hangover cartoon," she said. "With little devils pitchforking my eyeballs."

"Why are you calling so early?" said Tillie.

"The rates go up at eight."

They got off the phone a minute before. Cress squinted at the clock. The thermometer hung on the porch sight unseen.

She took three aspirin, then chopped carrots, onions, and celery, and made enough lentil soup for a week, possibly a lifetime. She stuffed a man’s large red mitten with ice and, stretching out on the window seat, placed it over her eyes.

The aroma of the soup must have carried outside. The porch creaked and Cress lifted the mitten. A very large dog nosed the sliding glass door as if waiting to be let in. She stood—too fast, setting the prisms into a frenzied whirl—and the creature too rose up on his hind legs. A bear.

He stood like a man, his arms hanging, his head cocked so that his long, whitened snout slanted upward against the glass. One eye—displeasingly small, yellowish, not intelligent—squinted in at her. The visible ear, round at the top and pinched at the stem, lent him a comical stuffed-toy look. He was definitely a he—in the sparser fur of the low belly was a hairier, vertical thicket, with something stuck on it—a dry leaf? A bit of bark? His own crustiness?

Perhaps overconfident of the Thermopane, Cress moved closer. Her heart, which recognized danger, began to race. But when had she ever been so close? She knew from childhood admonitions, Mustn’t meet his eye.

He was not a handsome or hygienic bear, no, his coat dirty, clumped, its dull brown bleached unevenly on the ends.

His black nostrils quivered, steamed the glass, and slid against it in dark, shiny adhesions, leaving smears. The claws, translucent black crescents, looked like plastic.

She moved closer yet, and he dropped back to all fours. Doglike again, he lumbered down the steps, shoulders rolling. The whole cabin shuddered.

She noticed then other smears, at the same heights, high and low, all along the sliding glass doors, the front set and the side ones.

Her hands shook as she phoned her nearest neighbors, the retired couple a...