Crash! Hiss. Crash. Whisper. Another crash, far off now, and what might have been another but by now was too faint to know for sure.

Snowflakes trickled in through the vents and floated about the cab. Roland's body shook uncontrollably, even after the several minutes that it took him to muster the courage to open the door and peek out. Seeing nothing more than the hulking branches of snow-laden pines, Roland slid himself out of the drivers' seat and groped behind it for a flashlight. It was working, much to his relief, and he gained some small bit of comfort from having the additional light. Nervous, he shone the shaky beam into the woods and slowly played it from right to left.

Shining metal reflected the light a dozen or so yards away and he could make out the Peterbilt logo. That was all that was recognizable. The cab itself was gone, torn away, leaving behind ragged shreds of steel.

He swung the light further and found a mountain of timber piled in the road behind him. The chains that had secured the logs to the truck bed lay limp in the snow like cast-off shoelaces. Apparently the truck had hit the same hole as Roland, had gone airborne and jackknifed, or whatever it was that those big trucks did. Even so, it was incredible that so much damage could have resulted from such a low-speed crash. "Hello!" Roland called in a hoarse voice. "Hey! Are you ok? Are you hurt?"

No answer. Roland fumbled for his cel phone and saw that he had one feeble bar of reception, but just as he pushed 9-1 the battery failed and the phone went dark. "Aw, fuck, no!" he groaned. Damn it all. The guy behind him might have been an asshole, but Roland did not have the heart just to leave him to bleed to death or freeze in the darkness. "Hey, if you can hear me, I'm going to go for help. Just stay put! OK"

It was then that he realized that he was trapped. There would be no going back the way he had come, not with god-only-knew how many tons of timber spilled behind his SUV, and the road ahead was blocked by that big black boulder. The Nissan was going nowhere, and Roland was not about to try to navigate the woods at night on foot, especially since he had no idea where he was and in the darkness it would be suicide to...

Wait...what the...?

The road led into what looked like a black mousehole in the trees. The way ahead was clear, at least as far as Roland could see. He was certain that he had seen the fucking Rock of Gibralter land in front of him. It could not have hit and continued rolling down the mountain -- the trees on either side of the road were not even scratched. There was no sign of where the rock had gone, or for that matter where it could have come from in the first place.

Roland shuffled closer to the impact point. There was no rock. What he found instead were two broad, crescent-shaped depressions in the road. They faced each other, and to Roland they seemed very much like deer tracks, save for the fact that each one was larger than the Nissan and nealy waist-deep. He hurried back, and only then did he notice that his poor SUV was nestled down within a second pair of craters identical to the first.

A flash in the darkness caught his eye. Somewhere in the distance he saw two little white lights spinning and streaking through the black sky. They disappeared in an orange flash, a flickering candle flame that was gone as soon as it had arisen. Several long seconds later came the echo of a familiar crash.

Roland dove into the cab of his Nissan, jerked the door shut and locked it, even though it was ludicrious to think it would offer him any protection. The truck driver was on his own.

Dawn was breaking when Roland awoke, stiff and shivering despite his thick parka and the blankets he had wrapped around himself. He blew on his hands until he could move them enough to open the door. The air itself felt like ice, but thankfully there was no wind.

Snow had fallen steadily through the night. The jumble of logs was covered, the broken chains now invisible, buried. The snow softened the edges of the pits that he had discovered the night before and now they looked far less ominous. Roland felt foolish. Stress, worry, panic, all such things could combine to make a man see things that are not there. There had never been any black boulder. It had probably just been some pieces of wreckage flying past from the crashing truck.

The truck! Roland started running, weaving through the trees toward the wreck. The snow had tried very hard to cover it but the truck looked exactly as he had seen it the night before. Obviously the whole episode had not been some hallucination. The roof of the cab was torn completely away, exposing the seats and steering wheel. Roland climbed carefully into the ruined cab and brushed the snow away. He found no sign of the driver, nor any blood.

Could the bastard have walked away from the crash on his own? The possibility made Roland furious. "Probably fucking drunk," he snarled. "Hit a big treebranch, sheared off his roof and spilled his load, and then hightailed it home so the boss wouldn't know he'd been drinking. Probably telling them that it was all my fault, too."

Roland angrily pawed through what was left of the cab in hopes of finding a whiskey bottle or some other bit of damning evidence, or at least some papers that would give him the driver's name, but there was nothing. Disgusted, he picked his way past the torn metal and stood back to examine the wreck. Whatever it had hit, it had to have been mighty big to have ripped the cab in two that way and to have knocked all those logs off of the trailer. He walked around it in a slow circle, marveling at just how far from the road it had managed to roll, and the curious fact that none of the trees in its path had been so much as scratched. Stranger still was the presence of more depressions just like the ones on the road, two great crescent-moons facing one another, all the same size, always the same pattern.

He made himself stop thinking about them. Better not to get himself worked up into the kind of childish frenzy that had marooned him here last night.

The Nissan useless. Even if he could get it started it was sunk so deep in one of those pits that even with a towtruck it would take a whole day of work to free it. His cel phone was dead, and the radio in the truck had vanished with the roof of the cab. It was either stay put and hope for someone to come hunting for him, or try his luck on foot. He opted for the latter. That truck must have come from a logging site nearby, and it made sense that its driver would have hiked back to get help -- or to hide out, Roland thought bitterly. Gathering the blankets from the stranded SUV, he wrapped them snugly around himself and started back along the road.

Time passed -- hours, maybe -- before Roland heard the far off grunt and roar of a chainsaw. His spirits soared and he hurried as quickly as he dared through the snow. The loggers would have a phone and, better still, coffee. That thought alone chased away the worry that he might well encounter the same asshole trucker, this time in the company of his buddies. No worry. As long as there was a cup of something hot enough to melt the ice in his bones, he would forgive the man his sins.

The saw's murmering stopped but not before Roland had gotten his bearings. He left the road and made his way through the woods in the direction that he had heard the sound, and eventually he stumbled out of the trees and into a wide clearing where surrounded by an army of pale stumps sat a bulldozer, silent but clear of any covering of snow. Roland laughed with relief and ran toward it. "Hey, man!" he called. "I'm sure glad to see you. I need some help!"

The 'dozer was empty. Coffee break time, apparently. Oh, coffee! Roland glanced at the ground and saw fresh footprints all around. The men who made them could not be far off. Moving to the center of the clearing Roland turned in a slow circle, listening. There! Voices in the woods. He struggled to make out what they were saying, and more importantly which direction they were saying it. They were getting louder, though, which was encouraging. There were several of them all talking at once, breathless, excited. Louder. They were shouting as if in a brawl. The shouts became shrill, became screams.

A trio of crows flapped frantically up from the treeptops near the edge of the clearing, and over the branches something large burst into view. Four men scrambled and kicked in what might have been the bucket of a crane, but it was no crane. It was a hand. Huge, furred, inhuman, it clutched tightly around the men's bodies and hoisted them higher, a powerfully muscled forearm rising below it. Roland stared dumbfounded as the wrist bent down and the great fist opened. All four men fell at once, shrieking wildly, and disappeared from Roland's view behind the treetops. There was a noise like someone chomping on a mouthful of ice cubes, only louder, wetter. The shrieks stopped short.

Above him the forest canopy exploded outward as a towering bulk, taller even than those trees, shouldered its way into the clearcut. Its jaws were still working, lips and teeth dripping red. The muzzle and fangs screamed wolf while the shadow of a vast rack of antlers swept across the face of the sun. A cry of terror froze solid in Roland's throat as a colossal hoof, black and solid and shining, landed in front of him and sank into the frozen soil. A second hoof rushed forth from the woods and swept over Roland's head. For a fraction of a heartbeat he could see things packed into its cleft -- mud, snow, branches, a wristwatch still on the wrist -- before it swept past and crashed down behind him.

Roland could hear nothing for a moment. He could not feel the biting cold. Raising his head he gaped up, straight up, along the length of two looming legs, twin towers of steel clad in white and tawny pelt. It -- he -- had not noticed Roland. The muscle beneath the thick pelt tensed and the first leg lifted. The mighty hoof rushed past the petrified man below and slammed into the earth close to the bulldozer, the impact shaking snow off of tree branches a hundred yards away. The beast paused and lowered his head. Steam blasted from his nostrils. Bending down, he gripped the bulldozer in a single gigantic hand and lifted the ten-ton machine like a baseball. Still paralyzed, Roland watched as the beast drew back his arm and then hurled the bulldozer over the treetops. It was more than ten seconds, thirty heartbeats, before the faint impact reached Roland's ears, and by then the beast had vanished into the surrounding forest.

Roland ran. Trees raced past in a wild blur. Roots reached again and again from beneath the snow to trip him. Each time he fell he would cry out as if hot breath was blasting the back of his head, and he would be up again in a flash and resuming his mindless flight, heedless of the bruises and blood. East or West, up or down, it did not matter. He was a frightened rabbit in the shadow of a hawk, and his only thought was to move as fast as he could.

The Winter sun was beginning to fade when he crashed into an open glade and stopped short. High above the tree branches arched like the roof of a cathedral. Feeble sunbeams filtered through the canopy and painted a delicate tableau in the snow-swirled air, but it was not the ethereal beauty of the place that brought Roland stumbling to a halt. Instead, it was the thick layer of fur that carpeted the forest floor. Strands as long as his arm lay everywhere, individually and in tufts, all mingled with branches and pine needles and leaves and all matted down to the earth as though by some great weight. Roland heard a sound in the woods, the same sound that is made by a falling tree although he knew well that no one was left alive to have cut it down. He spun in place while his heart tried to claw its way through his chest. The sound came again, louder, closer. He could feel it, through his feet, through the air. Again, and Roland bolted for the nearest tree. It was huge, too big to even think of climbing, but one of its roots arched up from the snow and left a little cavity, barely more than a rabbit hole beneath. It was enough for Roland to wriggle his way in to just as a white and tawny leg emerged from the woods at the far end of the glade.

The beast shouldered through the treetops with a grunt and a growl, then ducked beneath, His antlers catching momentarily on the overhanging branches and leaving them creaking and swaying. Roland understood right then why rabbits lay so still even as hungry wolves sniff their way closer. Wide-eyed and barely breathing, Roland watched as the beast hunched forward, and then with a great thudding and thundering He crashed to his knees and lay forward, stretching His enormous body out along the length of the glade. The noise echoed over and over through the surrounding forest, and then the only sound was a long, low rumble, like an idling locomotive, and then a seemingly endless rush of steam from His nostrils. Another rumble, then a rush. Rumble, rush, over and over.

The massive head lay very close to Roland's hiding place. Now and then an ear bigger than Roland's entire body would twitch. The one eye that he could see was closed peacefully. Time passed, the sunlight giving way to the ghostly twilight of moon on snow. Other than an infrequent grunt or the sleepy kick of a mammoth leg the beast did not move, and Roland eventually gathered enough courage to creep from his hiding place. The cold had left him stiff and movement was painful. He knew that if he stayed any longer the frigid air would soon suck what life was left from him -- that is, if the beast did not wake up and find him first.

Wincing, Roland began to inch his way through the snow, moving with a delicate tread. Every crunch of the snow was a blaring horn, every little twig that snapped a shotgun blast above the roar of his own blood through his ears. Five steps. Behind him the rumble continued, then the rush. Ten steps. Rumble, rush. Twenty steps. Rumble. Twenty-two. Rush. Twenty-five. Rumble, a low grunt.

Roland stiffend and glanced back in time to see a furry wall hurtling toward him. It hit him hard, knocked him down and then lay upon him like a building. His scream got out before he could fully choke it back.

Rumble, rush. Rumble. Rush. Ten times, then more, with no change. Fearful, Roland raised his head as far as he could, which was just far enough to let him see that he had been pinned beneath the beast's arm. The weight was uncomfortable, but not enough to break anything, at least not yet. He figured that there must be something else hidden beneath the snowy blanket nearby, a log perhaps, that had borne the weight of that enormous limb and saved him from being crushed. Carefully at first, and then with growing desperation he pushed with both hands at the shaggy bulk, but it was like trying to lift a truck. Kicking was useless; his legs were pinned firmly beneath it.

The horror and dread of his predicament increased tenfold when the pallid light around him started to fade. High above, the outline of the moon that he could just barely see through the canopy was being swallowed up by clouds. "Please, no," he whispered aloud, but even as he said those words the moonlight whimpered and died. Roland was left in darkness more profound than any he had ever endured. His ears echoed with the howling of his own terror-charged blood, and the slow, steady, overpowering Rumble, rush. Rumble, rush. Rumble. Rush.

Roland woke with a yelp. When he raised his head he saw that through the canopy overhead the sky had turned pink. He knew that he had dreamed, but with his mind still sleep-fogged he was not certain what exactly had been dream and what had been real. He remembered being so cold that it felt as though the blood was crystallizing in his veins. That was gone. Roland felt warmth, wonderful, delicious, delirious warmth. He realized that he was upright -- can a man really sleep standing up? -- and that he was surrounded on all sides by dense fur, strands as long as his --

The nightmare became clear all at once. Roland's eyes snapped open wide and he would have pissed himself if he was able at that moment to move any muscles at all. Rumble, rush, all around him now. Rumble, rush. The beast's arm pinned him still, but instead of lying beneath it, Roland was now pressed between it and the side of the monster's chest.

His first instinct was to flail, to kick free and hit the ground running, but -- rumble, rush -- no. He could still get away. Fighting to steady his shaking limbs, he began to worm his way carefully upward, moving his hands no more than an inch at a time, gripping the thick fur and working himself higher bit by bit. He moved during the rumble, stayed motionless during the rush. It must have been the better part of half an hour before he slithered his legs out from between the furry walls and crouched upon the crook of the beast's elbow; the rest of the hour was spent in the long, slow, steady climb down. Climb during the rumble, hang during the rush.

At last his feet settled into the snow. He glanced with a shudder along the span of the beast's body, the long leg stretching down to the hoof a train-length away, and then he began to tiptoe away, ready this time to bolt at the first sign of any change in the beast's breathing. Rumble, rush. With the sun now risen he could at least he see a clear path through the trees. He had only to make it to the edge of the glade. Rumble, rush. The trees drew nearer. Rumble. Rush. Roland turned for one last look.

The one eye that he could see was open. Yellow as the sun and nearly as bright, it was fixed upon him. Rumble. Rush.

With a cry Roland wheeled and sprinted for the trees. He made it only four steps before something huge slapped down on him from above and drove him down into the snow. It was not fur this time, but warm leather. Immense fingers dug down into the snow and pushed beneath his body, curling around him and engulfing him in a painfully tight fist. The shriek of terror was squeezed from his lungs as he was hoisted off the ground. The cold wind bit at his face. He struggled for a few feeble seconds before the pressure abruptly gave way, and as he fell he remembered the sounds the men had made while they were falling and he realized that he was making the same sounds, and he remembered the other sounds that their bodies had made when they reached the end of their fall long before they would have hit the ground.

Roland landed and flopped about in panic before it dawned on him that it was fur once again, a vast shaggy sea upon which he had fallen. Bewildered, he sat up and peered around breathlessly. The swell of the beast's chest rose before him, and beyond that the glaring yellow eyes watched him from beneath the grand spread of His antlers. Those antlers slowly fell backward while the muzzle rose, showing its underside to Roland as the vast body beneath him relaxed. Rumble. Rush.

Images began to dance across Roland's mind. They were like silent memories flooding back from some past that Roland knew was not his own. He closed his eyes and shook his head; opened them again and swallowed. The images persisted. Roland's eyes widened. He felt the nape of his neck clenching tight. "What? No," he whispered. "Please. I don't want..."

Ahead of him the beast's jaws parted, flashing vicious fangs. A long tongue ran out and slathered over His whiskers. Roland cowered. "No no, please don't! I... I will."

Quivering, Roland gathered himself up and rolled to all fours. He began to crawl, faltering, toward the gigantic furry mound that rested languidly at the base of the beast's abdomen. He hesitated only a second before an unbearable scene flooded his mind's eye and spurred him onward. Whimpering, he climbed atop the warm bulk and lay his body along its length. "Like this?" he murmered, and then he shuddered, and pressed his cheek against it. Slowly he began to rock his body up and down, while beneath him the beast drew in a long breath and thrummed like an avalanche.

"Yes," Roland mumbled. He rocked faster while the bulk beneath him grew warmer still and slowly began to lift him higher. "I'll tell them. Of course. I know. I'll make them understand. This mountain is yours. Everything on it is yours."

The huge antlers rose into view as the beast lifted His head. Both eyes blazed down at Roland, who cringed and gulped and barely managed to whisper, "...including me."