Page 9 of My Halloween Hunter

Darcy

Cade has two chairs.

I notice it the first night, curled in one of them in his flannel shirt with my legs still not working right. One chair is worn to the shape of a big man; the other has dust in the seams of its cushion.

"Why does a man who lives alone have two chairs?" I ask.

He looks at the second one as though it's never occurred to him it was there. "Didn't know," he says. "Till now."

For three days I sleep in his bed with his arm locked across my waist like a bar across a door, and I wake up with his face in my hair. He doesn't talk much. He watches instead, his eyes following me across the room, and when I go out to shoot he's somewhere in the trees within a hundred yards every single time and doesn't bother pretending otherwise. He cooks elk, splits wood and sets my wet boots by the stove without a word.

He doesn't ask me one question about when I'm leaving.

On the second morning, the dust is gone from the second chair. He's beaten the cushion out over the porch rail and oiled the arms until the whole cabin smells of linseed, and he doesn't mention it and neither do I. I sit in it with my coffee and he sits in his, our knees touching, the fire ticking, frost-light coming in grey through the window, and I think I could live inside this morning. The thought arrives whole and I put it away fast, because I don't know if he wants me to.

The next day I climb the north ridge for the dawn light, and my phone buzzes itself off the rock. At the cairn there's exactly one bar of signal, which turns out to be enough for a week of the world to arrive all at once: emails, texts and four missed calls from Jo, my agent, who considers phone calls a form of violence.

I call her back standing on the cairn with my arm in the air like a lightning rod.

"Where are you?"

"B.C. A valley. My car died."

"The Wilderness Trust called." There's a pause while she decides not to oversell it and fails. "They want you on staff. Senior photographer, two years, Vancouver-based, full budget. They're opening with the caribou crossing in the Yukon in February."

I sit down hard on the rocks.

I've chased that exact job for four years — pitched them, submitted to them, stood at the back of their gallery openings in my one good jacket trying to look like I belonged there.

"They need you in Vancouver Monday to sign," Jo says. "Darcy. This is the one."

The one.

From up here I can see the whole valley: the creek a black thread through the frost, four chimneys sending smoke straight up into air so still it holds the smoke like a hand. One of them is his.

"I know it's the one," I say.

And I want it. I can imagine my name on their masthead, my work on their walls, two years of being paid to go to the most beautiful places on earth and come home with proof.

I don't say yes, and I don't say no.

I tell him that night.

He listens with his elbows on his knees and his big hands hanging between them while I lay it out — Vancouver, staff, two years, Monday — and when I'm done he's quiet for a long time.

"Good," he says.

"Good?"

"You should have it." He's looking at the fire, not at me. "You're the best I've ever seen at anything."

"You've watched one photographer work."

"Don't need to watch two."

I wait for the rest of it. For him to say don't, or put his hand around my wrist; for the man who circled my cabin four times a night and carried a lens cap down a mountain to say one word.

He gets up and puts another log on the stove, and that's all he says.