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I can’t help groaning as I try to sit up. I’m always so stiff, waking after a day of climbing. (When I was younger I never had this problem. I suppose it’ll only get worse.) I ask her, “What are you doing way up here this time of year?” and she asks, “What are you?”

Her name is Loo. I tell her I’m Sang. Not too much of a lie, especially if you take it to mean blood and pronounce it “sans,” and now I am sans everything. (For a long time I was called rubbish.)

It’s been three days and we still haven’t captured him, therefore sweeping changes from the top on down. Higher-ups have been brought in. Those in charge are no longer in charge. How can one half-starved man, possibly wearing orange, and with a microchip, have escaped us all? We have the know-how and the wherewithal.

Loo won’t go home without more sticks. I help her. She’s all smiles when she sees how much I get. I shoulder a dead log, too. I think to chop it up when we get... wherever. First we climb on the main trail and then turn off on a smaller path, so small you have to know it’s there to follow it.

We come to a hut of stone and weathered wood. It looks like part of the mountain. It’s a hut as if out of a painting of a troll’s house in a book of fairy tales. The roof slopes almost to the ground. I remember fairy tales from before I was taken, otherwise I’d not know about them.

Loo’s grandma greets us at the door. I look past her and see it’s like a troll’s hut inside, too. Heavy handmade furniture, a worn-down board floor, a squat black stove, a squat black kettle steaming . . .

Loo and her grandma must have gotten marooned up here someway. I don’t ask how. The grandma has a hard time walking from the stove to the doorway. Perhaps she could no longer climb down. Yet to leave her here alone with just a child for help . . . I don’t see how they get by. They don’t look in good shape.

I don’t go in. I stand in the doorway. I say, “I am your enemy. I’m a fugitive. You risk your life if you take me in. I have a chip imbedded in my shoulder.” I tell the grandma about the reward though I don’t say how much. I hardly dare. It’s a sum hard to resist. It would make anyone rich for life.

For answer the old woman motions me in, motions me to sit down, motions me to take off my jacket and mittens, and then hands me a cup of strong strange tea. It tastes of pine needles. They have two rooms. Two nanny goats stay in with them.

I say, “You don’t realize.”

The grandma says, “I realize.” Her voice is a breathy growl.

She shows me men’s clothes hanging behind the door, but she won’t talk about them. In fact she’ll hardly talk at all. Just gives me stew full of tiny bones. Then she gets out a paring knife and motions me to lean over the table. I do. It’ll give her a chance to cut my throat if she feels like it.

(I had covered my shoulder first thing with pieces of foil from the dump on the outskirts of town so they couldn’t home in on me.)

Afterward she makes me a different sort of tea for the pain. The way I’m slurping down every odd-tasting thing she hands me, she could poison me in a minute, and I’ll bet she has whatever it takes to do it.

She wraps the chip back in my foil and puts it by the door. She says, “Take this out on the trail tomorrow. Throw it over the cliff.”

They make me a bed under the table I just bled on. I think to thank them but, warm and full of hot food, I fall asleep before I can get the words out.

We’ve sent out six units. We’ve commandeered the first huts along several trails as base camps. One unit has discovered a place where someone spent the night. No one is on the mountain at this time of year so who but the general could have slept there? We moved all our units to this one mountain trail.

An early snow falls all night and is still going on in the morning. I go out in it. I’ll not do as the grandma said. I’ll get rid of that chip at the top of one of the peaks. I’ll unwrap it so as to give them a false clue. Useless and foolish, I know, but I want to do it anyway. Perhaps if it’s so hard to get to they’ll not bother. They’ll think I