Chapter 10 – Winter
The cabins have long cleared out. It gets darker sooner during the evenings. The woods are silent but for the sounds of deer moving over dry leaves, crunching like cornflakes. Ducks dunk their heads into the surface of the water, taking their last swim before they must move on. Snow will inevitably come.
Even the mosquitoes leave him; they go and find something juicier to suckle. His blood is warm, but his skin is dry and cold to the bones. His hair grows, his beard does, too. He lets the body do what it's made to do. He's a bear settling in under layers, finding his place in a cave to find slumber.
Yet, not a cave. Edward never sleeps inside anywhere, never in a cabin. The coldest winters are known to be in Maine, yet Edward spends his nights under the makeshift tent he built from things he's borrowed. Not even the cabin, coincidentally three minutes away, has been occupied by his presence on the most coldest of days.
He's where he's supposed to be.
He finds no reason to leave.
If scavenging for food is hard work during hot summers, spring, and autumn, keeping alive during the winter is arduous. If he must stay, then he must follow a whole new set of responsibilities.
The digital thermostat he hooked up hangs in his tent, and every evening at 7 PM, he settles into bed. At 2 AM, when the frost is biting at his toes, he awakes. Pacing around the camp goes on for hours to warm up his limbs. No fire does this. Because anything that could jeopardize his secret is on the strict list.
He shovels snow to clear the paths, and when it snows mighty blizzards, the mounds stack up like giant walls around his camp. A single hole, warmed and plucked out from the middle of the woods is thawed. By morning, the collection of snow he's worked to put together during the early hours provides him with water for the rest of the day. He drinks and bathes in clear, cold water melted straight from snowflakes. Nothing is as pure and fresh to his liking.
And so the pattern begins again the next night. It's tedious, the struggle. Slipping away in his sleep would be easy. The reward of seeing the break of day is greater.
Nothing is as calming as the quiet in cold, blue winters. It's all worth it.
However, this winter is different. On this particular one, he thinks and thinks about a summer past that began with a hello, and ended with an incorrigible fallen girl. She takes up his thoughts. Thoughts that should be free to flow. Routine, maybe, not the audacity of chocolate locks and amber eyes.
Maybe he'll cave. He debates strongly with himself. Either pick up and leave, or let the Lady of the Woods lead him away ... this time for good.
Then spring comes, bringing wild turkeys and the sounds of chirping frogs.
He never quite made a decision.
….