Sarah heard the dogs first.
Hale's two dogs had been brought in from the outbuilding sometime in the night and they were in the main room now, settled near the woodstove with the satisfied heaviness of animals who had done their job and been rewarded for it. They lifted their heads when the snowmobile sound came through the trees, ears moving, and then their tails started and that was how Francis knew before he heard anything himself.
He went outside without his coat.
The cold hit him immediately but he stood in the yard anyway and watched the tree line where the eastern path emerged and waited. The sound grew, two engines, Colton and Walsh bringing them in, and then the shapes appeared through the last of the trees, the snowmobiles coming into the yard at a careful speed, and Sarah was
