Road

They went south on foot with the mountains falling away behind them and the great flat country opening ahead, and for the first two days they saw no living thing bigger than a hawk.

It was strange past telling to walk out of the world she knew. For four years the camp had been the whole of it, the cabin and the shed and the fence line and the bend in the road, a place she could have walked blind, and now with every hour she put more of the unknown between herself and it, and the known shrank behind her to a notch in the mountains and then to nothing, and there was a grief in that she had not expected, to lose even the camp, even the trap, because it had been theirs and it had held her family's graves and now it too was gone into out there with everything else. She looked back the first morning until she could not tell the notch of the pass from the rest of the range, and then she made herself quit looking back, because Papa had taught her that a person who walks looking backward walks into the thing in front of him.