A Wee Dose of Death by Fran Stewart Page A

or the snow would have filled in more, even with as little snow as is getting through the trees.”
    â€œQuite the tracker, are ye?”
    â€œYou would be, too, if you’d grown up around here.”
    â€œI learnt enough tracking when I was a lad; although”—he pointed to the narrow parallel lines we’d been following—“I never tracked wee beasties with great long footprints like that.”
    I moved off the path to my left. I could feel a good-sized branch under my skis. Thank goodness my skis hadn’t snagged on it. I glanced down and saw just a hint of smooth brown through the covering of snow. I yarned a branch on the slender birch ahead of me, thinking all the time how silly it was to leave yarn
here
, since I knew this place so well. The trunk leaned across a branch of an enormous sugar maple, and I thought about Robert Frost’s poem “Birches.” Had some boy, or girl for that matter, been swinging from this birch to that one nearby and back again, gradually bending the trunks as the trees grew? “Birches grow in Scotland, don’t they?”
    â€œAye. Many.”
    â€œDo children ever climb them and bend them down like this?” I gestured to the trees.
    â€œAye. Of course. Then, once they are bent, the goats like to climb them.”
    â€œYou’re teasing, right?”
    He looked incredulous. “Do ye not know that goats climb slanting tree trunks?”
    â€œCan’t say that was part of my education. Not too many goats around Hamelin.”
    I headed up the trail, and he kept pace, shaking his head in exasperation. “What kind of world has this become, where the most common knowledge is lost?”
    I plowed to a stop and glared at him. “I’m supposed to feel bad about a lack of goat lore?”
    â€œYe needna beceorest so.”
    â€œI’ll baykerayst if I want to.”
Whatever that is. It’s probably related to whingeing.
“I may not know about goats, but you don’t know about spreadsheets. Or mass transportation.”
So there.
    He narrowed his eyes at me.
    I found myself shivering and picked up my pace. The skiers ahead of us must have started dragging something—a load of firewood, maybe? The tidy parallel ski tracks had been obliterated by something wide. If I had to guess, I’d say they’d pulled a canvas tarp behind them. That cabin was fairly close, over the rise ahead of us. If they were there, I’d ask them what they’d done to make such a mess of the trail. I sure hoped a good fire was warming the interior. If not, I was going to start one.

10

    Whoops!
    M ac Campbell wasn’t ready to die—not from a broken leg, not from starvation, and not from freezing to death—but he gave serious thought to how small a chance he would have of staving off a murderous attacker in his present shape. He could never be accused of having too active an imagination, but the danger he saw himself in stoked the imaginative flames way more than he found comfortable. He massaged his fingers. Get a fire started. That was what he needed to do. There was kindling, some of it sticking out from underneath the body, but enough off to one side. A convenient stack of woodstove-sized logs filled a corner of the room.
    For some time, Mac didn’t worry about the body. He worried about how to drag himself around it so he could reach the woodpile. Why hadn’t they put the woodpile next to the door? That would have made more sense. Then he worried about how to coax a log off the pile without collapsing the whole shebang onto himself. Luckily, he’d dragged one of his ski poles alongwith him. He heaved himself back to the door where he’d left the pole, cursing under his breath—it took too much energy to swear out loud. Eventually he just threw the pole ahead of him and floundered back to his objective. He had to get a fire started. Had to. He couldn’t feel his toes. The only