She pulled up by the front of the porch, giving the motor a couple of unnecessary revs to give him warning. He was waiting at the door by the time she got to the top of the steps. “Kate,” he said.

“John,” she said in return. Mutt gave an attention-getting sneeze behind her, and she turned, to see the big yellow eyes pleading for fun. “Okay if my dog flushes some game?”

“Turn her loose.”

“Thanks. Go,” Kate said to Mutt, and Mutt was off, winging across the snow like an enormous gray arrow, head down, tail flattened, legs extended so that they looked twice their normal length.

“Be lucky to see a ptarmigan again this year,” John commented as he closed the door. “Coffee?”

“Sure.”

He got a carafe out of the kitchen, along with a plate of shortbread cookies. Conversation was restricted to “please” and “thank you” until he had finished serving her and had taken a seat across the living room, at a distance that almost but didn’t quite necessitate a shout for communication. The interior of the lodge was very masculine, sparingly but luxuriously furnished with sheepskin rugs, brown leather couch and chairs, heads of one of each of every living thing in the Park hanging from the walls. No humans that Kate could see, but then, it was a big place.

It didn’t look all that lived in to her, but it fit him. He was a tall man with a lion’s mane of white hair, carefully tended and swept back from a broad and deceptively benevolent brow. He looked like he was about to hand down stone tablets. He’d kept his figure, too, broad shoulders over a narrow waist, slim hips and long, lanky legs encased in faded stovepipe jeans, topped with a long-sleeved dark red plaid shirt over a white T-shirt.