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I stood out there until her lights went off, and a long time after. Her bag was on the porch where she'd dropped it hauling her gear in, a luggage tag on the handle turned to the light from the window. NORA. And a Vancouver address I made myself forget before I'd finished reading it.

I know what a woman like her does with a man like me. She finds him. She sits him down in front of a microphone and asks him why, and plays his answer to a million strangers in their cars on the way to work, and his mother hears it in her kitchen in Moose Jaw.

I should have stayed away. I should have gone up to the line shack on the pass and let her ask Edna questions for a week and drive home with nothing.

I stood in her trees and watched her pull her hat off and shake her hair out, dark copper in the lamplight, and scrub both hands over her face and laugh at nothing, alone, the way people only laugh when they think nobody's there. And every reason I had for staying away went out of me like air out of a tire.

She came here hunting me.

So I'd hunt her back.

Six years of Special Forces communications taught me how to move through ground without leaving a signature. Four years up here taught me how to disappear inside a valley so completely that the people I talk down off mountains every week on the radio have never seen my face.

Nobody finds me.

She put the recorder on her porch rail that night with its little red light blinking, and she left her door on the latch, and I understood exactly what she was doing.

She was baiting me.

So I took it.

I walked her walls at two in the morning. Heavy. Loud on the frost. I wanted it on her tape. I wanted her to lie up there and count me, and she did, I could hear her breathing change every time I passed the east wall, fast and then catching, and on the fourth time around I stopped under the loft and waited to see which way she'd break.

She talked to me.

Low and level, through the logs, like a woman leaning into a mic. I know you're there.

Nobody has talked to me like that in four years. Not asking for help. Not reading coordinates off a GPS with the wind screaming in the background. Talking to me.

I answered her before I'd decided to.

Then I went around to her porch and bent down to that blinking red light and told her to lock her door. I meant it. A woman alone in a strange cabin with a man circling it should lock her door.

I also wanted her to know I'd read her name off her luggage tag.

In the morning she sat on the step in her socks and played the whole night back with her coffee going cold, and I watched her face when my voice came through. She put her hand flat over her mouth. She sat like that for a long time.

I watched her for days, waiting for an invitation.

"South fork of the creek trail," she said. "Nine o'clock. Two hours, maybe three."

A pause.

"You can come if you want. I'll be the one talking."

She went inside.

I was on the south fork by ten to nine.

I held fifty meters, parallel, in the trees. She's good on the ground. She moves easy and stops often, and when she stops she goes completely still with her head tilted and the recorder out, listening to the creek the way a good tracker listens to a trail. She talks into the recorder as she walks, little notes, the colour of the water, the frost on the stones, and every one of them comes out a shade louder than a woman talks to herself.

She isn't talking to herself.

By the end of that first morning I was at thirty-five meters, and I hadn't decided to close it.

She crouched at the creek bend where the water goes over a pale shelf of stone, and the light came down through the pines onto her hair, and I stood in the trees with my hands open at my sides and couldn't remember the last time I'd wanted anything at all. I'd built this whole life so I'd never have to want. Stove, radio, creek, the voices of strangers on bad nights, and nobody who could ever reach me.

She tilted her head at the water, listening, and something in my chest that's been switched off for four years came on and started to hum.