He surveyed the carcass. The moose’s ribs showed stark from starvation. The flanks were caved in, the hide patchy with bald places where he’d scraped against trees to free himself of the pestilence of winter ticks. “Jeez. At least fifty thousand, maybe sixty,” Ridley estimated. “This boy was a regular Red Cross blood bank.”

Robin plucked a thick tuft of hair. Half a dozen fat ticks clung to the roots. She put the little colony into the plastic bag, zipped it and put it back in her rucksack. Anna hoped the baggie was one of the fancy double-lock kind.

No one spoke for a moment and silence settled like snow. A sound, both distant and immediate, didn’t so much break the silence as join it, the call of a gray whale beneath fathoms of seawater. Anna looked to Robin to see if she’d heard it too. A reflex from the bad old days, when windowpane acid had slammed into her brain so hard for years she’d been careful not to remark on odd phenomena lest she be the only one experiencing them. She’d thought she’d left that particular paranoia behind. The retro twitch must have been triggered by the weird black-and-white world, with its windigo and Cro-Magnon tribe.

And cold so vicious and unrelenting, it felt personal.

She tried to shove her hands in her pockets, but they were too fat to fit.

“The ice is singing,” Robin said. “It’s always moving, shifting. Sometimes it cracks like a gunshot. All kinds of sounds.”

Anna blocked out the fact that Jack Frost was gnawing her bones and opened to the song: far off, underfoot, a murmur of instruments not yet invented, hollow lutes and soft drums, the warble of birds without throats just beyond the threshold of hearing, as if it came into the mind on some other wavelength. In Texas, the wind sang in that same way when the rock formations were just right. Music so deeply ingrained in the world, Anna felt if she could listen long enough and hard enough, she would learn a great truth.