"What the Smoke Does"

Tom flattened.

He pressed Marrow into the wet root-loam and put his own body between the captain and the dune, and he made himself a stone. Smaller than a stone. A wet leaf. A nothing.

The mist rolled past them in slow, deliberate fingers, parting around the buttress roots like water around pier-pilings. It was not rising. It was coming, low and purposeful, as if drawn toward the open sand behind them.

Boots on shell. The tall man crested the dune.

Tom could see only his silhouette — the long line of the fowling-piece, the broad hat, the patient turn of the head. The mist met him at the knees and seemed, for a moment, to hesitate. Then it climbed.

It climbed his legs the way ivy climbs a wall. Slow. Considered. The tall man looked down. His free hand moved toward his belt — not toward the powder horn but toward something smaller, a pouch perhaps — and he spoke, very softly, three words Tom did not know in a voice that was no longer quite a voice.

The mist stopped climbing. It hung at his waist, a gray skirt, and parted before him as he walked.

It knew him.

Tom's breath went out of him in a thin silent thread. Don't trust the smoke. Marrow had not meant the column above the trees. He had meant this. The thing on the ground. The thing the tall man wore like a coat.

The hunter took another step forward, scanning. The mist rolled obediently aside to show him the sea-grass, the drag-track, the dark smear of Marrow's blood pointing into the trees like an arrow.

He smiled, and started walking.