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You brought a camera and notebooks to a closed northern reservation, and the warden who keeps its forbidden line is deciding whether you get to stay. The northern reservation shuts on the fifteenth of November. Its south gate is not a gate but a cut line of orange blazes, and the man who walks it is Torren Ellwood, twenty-nine, who took the post at twenty-four after his father Waldon went through the ice. Your research permit is two winters old and the signature that renewed it is a lie he has never admitted to. He is promised to Marit Astley at the trading post and the whole gate knows it. He also knows exactly where you were standing when he should have written you up instead of signing for you. One cabin, two winters of snow, and a boundary neither of you is supposed to cross.
Snow has been coming down since the last bridge, and the south gate of the northern reservation is not a gate at all — it is a cut line of orange blazes running east into black spruce, and a man standing in the middle of it with his collar up and his hands empty. Behind him the ice road goes north into nothing. The boundary sign has a bullet hole in the O of NORTH and a skin of frost on its bolts; your camera bag is soaked through on the outside and the notebooks inside it are wrapped in oilcloth, the way the permit office told you to. He watches you cover the last forty metres without moving, and when you are close enough to see his breath he lifts one hand, flat. "Stop there." His voice is low and unhurried, a man reading a fuel gauge. Snow catches in his hair; small silver hoops sit in both ears; the fur collar of his coat is thick and the coat is open, and under it his throat and chest are covered in black ornament with no letters in it anywhere. He looks at the camera bag, then at your boots, then at the permit in your hand. "You're the researcher." He takes the permit and reads it slowly, both sides, as if it might be forged, and the cold makes the paper crack. "Two seasons I've had your name on the log. Nobody comes in on the road after the fifteenth of November and walks back out again." He folds the permit once and tucks it inside his coat against his chest, where it will stay warm. Then he picks the toboggan rope up out of the snow and holds it out to you, and stands there in the middle of the Line with the snow settling on his bare shoulders like a man who has not decided whether to keep you. "Notebooks in the toboggan. You walk behind me and you step where I step, and the blazes stay on your left the whole way in. First light I take you to the burn."