It meant that Sommer was the weak link, so Broker wanted him in his canoe in case anything went wrong. Besides, he was curious. Sommer was a Minnesota fiction writer and Broker-strictly a non-fiction guy-had the feeling he should have heard of him. But he hadn’t. He figured Sommer wanted to shoot a moose so he could write about it.

Broker was doing some hunting himself, but not for a trophy moose. Running from his marriage, he spent the days scouting the treelines and lakes half hoping to catch a younger, more resilient reflection of himself.

And he wasn’t alone. By day three it was clear that marital discord paddled with them as Sommer conducted a nasty long-distance feud with his wife on his cell phone.

As they canoed deeper into lake country, Broker overheard enough of the terse conversations to gather that Sommer and his wife were fighting over money.

Onward.

Right now Broker needed a fire and a pot of coffee, so he shivered into trousers, a fleece sweater, and a pair of old tennis shoes. Carrying his stiff boots, he unzipped the tent and hunkered outside.

Well, he’d wanted the rain to stop.

And nothing stops water like ice.

The campsite, and probably all 140,000 square miles of the BWCA, wore bridal white. Brocade, lace, floss, and fluff-the tents, the gear, the hulls of the two canoes, every pine needle, clump of moss, and boulder were gilded with frost.

He watched his breath condense, then tatter off gently in the still air; he estimated the temperature at 34 degrees. He was not distracted by the beautiful fantasy spun in the trees. They were still twenty miles from Ely traveling on water cold enough to kill them.

But Broker had to grin. Even with hypothermia as a risk, Sommer’s cell phone became an issue with his buddies because it violated the first rule of the wilderness, which was: You are on your own. Allen and Milt wanted a clean break with the hyperconnected world they’d left behind. Sommer wasn’t impressed by such purist conceits. Older, crusty, he’d pointed out that he’d once spent a year sleeping on the ground, and he’d muttered a few profane references to the 101^st Airborne and 1969 and a place Allen and Milt had never heard of called the Ashau Valley, and he would bring his goddamn cell phone, thank you very much.