Old Canyon Road climbed the foothills until it offered a view far out over the Mission Valley. A carpet of clouds threatened precipitation.

Up ahead, three figures stood in the road: teenagers–a shirtless boy, skinny-nearly-skeletal, jacket hanging over his shoulder, and two girls. They did not move. He slowed to a stop, careful not to hit them. The boy had curly black hair tied in two ponytails on either side of his head. He smoked a long, thin cigarette. One of the girls held up a phone. She giggled and took a selfie with the valley as the backdrop. The boy let her finish her pictures, then slowly migrated to the side of the road.

Alan pulled up and rolled down his window. “Hey there.”

“Hi,” said the boy. “You here for the spin? Hundred bucks, easy.” He held up a delicate glass vial of blue liquid between his fingers. “L1. Strongest ever. Don’t even need L2 with this shit.”

Alan swallowed hard. “You’ll always need L2,” he said.

“Yeah?” said the boy. “Hundred and we can make it happy.”

“I’m looking for someone,” Alan said.

“I know people. I know everyone!” He turned to the valley, threw his hands up, and shouted something in Salish. “I know everyone!” The kid was riding the ecstasy of the spin.

“White Owl. I need to talk to her.”

The boy smiled down at him. “Who?”

“She goes by White Owl.”

The kid shouted to the girls in Salish. They stopped dancing and shouted back, and he laughed.

“What’d she say?” Alan asked.

“She said just keep on your current journey if you want to get into trouble. Owls fly on silent wings, and white owls are suspicious. Anything white is suspicious. You should take a picture before the snow comes. White owls are invisible in the snow.” He trotted down the hill after the girls. The shorter of the two did a pirouette and fell into his arms, and he kissed her.

Alan got out and stretched his legs, watching them shrink away until they were three indistinct figures. The side of the road was marked by a guardrail, beyond which the earth banked and tumbled down into a patchwork of fields and farmhouses and the great Highway 93.

He held up his phone, turned, took the photo, and stared out at the far distant hills. “You don’t have a job anymore, you stupid son of a bitch.” He looked at his contacts. His thumb hovered over a name and then touched it. It rang a long time before someone answered.

“Hello? Hello?” said a woman’s soft voice.

“Hey, Ashley?”

“Alan?”

“A couple years, I guess.”

“Try fourteen.”

“Sorry.”

“Fourteen fucking years.”

“I’m sorry, Ash. There’s no excuse.”

An extended moment passed where he could hear his sister’s breath. It was familiar to him.

“It’s my fault, too…” she said. “After…” Her voice fell off with an unspoken reference. “I told you I’ll never go back to the Rez.”

“This isn’t on you, Ash. I said I’d visit.”

“Time is a river, right? You okay, big brother?”

“I just wanted to say hi and hear your voice.”

“Hi,” she said. “Dad would have liked you staying there. He loved the valley.”

“He did,” he said.

“I was thinking of trying to call you. Like, for the last few weeks.”

“How’s Bran?”

“Good. Big now. Grown up.”

“I’m going to come and see you… soon,” he said.

“No, you’re not. But I love you,” she said.

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“I love you too.”

“I bought a restaurant,” she said.

“No shit? What do you cook?”

“A little bit of everything.”

“Dad would have liked that,” he said.

“Are you okay?” she asked again.

“I’m okay,” he told her again.

“We’re a couple of nut cases, aren’t we? Love ya, big brother.” She was crying.

“Love ya,” he said.

She ended the call.

The kids had vanished down the dirt road altogether. Were they ever really there? His face felt numb. His eyes stung from the cold wind.

----------------------------------------

DEAD END

It was snowing. Past each sign the road grew steeper.

NO TRESPASSING

The trees grew taller, their trunks like massive arrows shot through the earth, turning daylight into gray shadow.

NO RETURN

He parked in front of the fallen bridge and a green-primer car set on its rims with a smashed windshield and a sapling growing through its rear bumper. He got out and smoked a cigarette while inspecting the steep bank. The canal was deep and empty and lined with sharp rocks dusted with snow. Night was coming in.

He stepped on his cigarette and carefully navigated down the embankment, his shoes slipping on the rocks and the thin gauze of snow. At the bottom of the canal bed, he gazed up the slope of the other side. Old-growth evergreens towered over him; their tops reached up and were lost in the flurry.

He grasped a diving root and pulled himself up the other side until he could reach a branch crusted with ice. The cold numbed his fingers, making them clumsy. Three hours earlier, in Murphy’s office, he could not have imagined that he’d be on the side of a mountain surrounded by wilderness, tragically dressed the way bodies that have gone missing are found: slacks, dress shirt, a light windbreaker, and shoes with treadless soles.

A clump of soil under his left foot gave out, and he went down hard, the metal cowbell in his pocket punching him quickly in the gut when he hit the rocky slope.

“Ow! Fuck!”

Wind blasted down through the canyon of trees, peppering sleet into his face. If he didn’t know better, he’d think the mountain did not want him to continue.

The forest felt hostile and alien. He was a Montana boy, born and raised, but he’d never been one for the outdoors. He preferred to spend his time stuffed in a book, hanging out at the mall, or lounging in the coffee shops. He laughed at himself. Ash had loved nature. Funny that it was she who’d immigrated to the city.

What was that?

Near the corner of his vision, he thought he saw movement to his left. He stood still, taking short, shallow breaths so he could hear. Only the wind through the branches. Had he seen anything at all? He was unsure now.

Bears and wolves inhabited the Mission Mountains as protected species. Last summer, farther south on the range, a Japanese tourist had been killed by a grizzly and devoured over the span of several days by nature’s scavengers.

Or was it the Native Americans? He was, after all, trespassing on their land.

He trudged forward.

After they lost the old farm, they moved into a trailer park where his friends and enemies were all Natives. He used to pray his pasty white skin would darken. Even if he could get a tan, it might have stopped him from getting his ass kicked after school. Alas, his people were seemingly allergic to the sun.

Then there was Zoey, who was Kootenai. How he’d memorized her color—summer’s honey and smoky dusk.

“Hello!” he shouted, but his hale was swallowed by the wind and foliage. He tried to scan through the primeval wood and impenetrable undergrowth.

“Hello!”

The signal indicator on his phone bore a red line through it. The trees and the mountain were too dense. Maybe he was lost. Perhaps Little Joe had no idea where White Owl lived. Possibly, there was no such person as White Owl. It might be better to return and help Mickey devise a defense for Francis. If he went back now, he would still have daylight.

The tracks he made had already been erased by the snow. He attempted to use his GPS, but his wet screen wouldn’t recognize his fingertip.

Something on the side of the mountain caught his eye. He focused on it for a second, and it was like a secret image emerging from a 3D picture: a handrail made from dead branches had been nailed and tied to the trunks of the great pines.

He grabbed the rail and found crude steps hewn out of the rocks. As he climbed, he looked up and saw the webbing of a gigantic dream catcher in the trees above him, larger than the span of his arms. A loop of branches, about six feet across, supported a web of white, spindly hair that fluttered with large, white feathers. At the center of the dream catcher was the skeleton of a dead bird, the bones of its wings outstretched and bound with the hair like the prey of a gigantic spider.

Slowly, carefully, he ascended. Progress was arduous in the new fallen snow. In the dead of winter, it would be impossible. If this was the way to White Owl’s house, Francis would have to undertake this journey to get to school—every morning down, every evening up.

When he reached the dream catcher, he could barely maintain his grip. The skull stared at him with empty eyes and open beak, shouting a warning he could not possibly hear as he transgressed its frontier.

The stairs leveled out onto a ledge no wider than a yard, and a massive wooden door built into the cliff face stood before him.

He knocked.

Nothing.

He turned on the ledge and looked down the way he had come. Down there in the snow, blending into the shadow, a face stared up at him, wild and savage. He wiped the water from his eyes and looked again. No, not a face, just a mesh of branches.

He knocked again as hard as he could. He spun back around and scrutinized his retreat. There. Something had certainly moved, had leapt across the forest floor.

He took the cowbell from his pocket and rang it vigorously. Dong, dong, dong, dong echoed up the rock wall of the little alcove.

Flush with the rock, the door had its hinges bolted into the cliff with large, rusted lags.

Then, from the other side, came a muffled pounding, and the slab of wood cracked open an inch.

“Pull hard!” a voice shouted through the barricade.

He wedged his fingers into the gap between the door and the rock and pulled with all his strength. He could feel the negative pressure of the wind being sucked into the mountain. Slowly, the door came open, and someone shoved a plank of wood through to stop it from being pulled closed again.

“Fast,” said the voice.

He slipped inside with a gush of wind, and the door slammed shut behind him, plunging him into complete darkness.