Depth of Winter (Walt Longmire, #14)

by Craig Johnson

“She has my eyes.” She leaned farther forward, studying me with a frankness that was a little unnerving. “Gris.” “Nickel-plated is what Cady calls them.” She shook her head. “Not that cold, more like an autumn sky or like the ocean—clouded and deep.”

“El ratón se esconde en la espalda del gato.” “Meaning?” “The mouse hides on the back of the cat.”

After any great challenge or crisis, the moment comes when your nerves stop twitching and you settle down to the new condition of things because you feel that any possibility of fresh horrors is used up. You have little choice but to stand back and take in the whole picture. When it’s finally too late and you acclimate yourself to that’s it and there’s nothing left to do, except maybe one thing.

It seemed like we’d been driving for hours when I thought I could see something far in the distance, but I honestly wasn’t sure what it was, or if it was really there. In the simmering yolk of the sun, there was something with wings, great wings that in my imaginings spread, sending undulations of heat across the surface of the desert. The phoenix is the legendary bird with a brilliant plumage and a wondrous voice that rises from the pyre of its own ashes only to regenerate itself and fly to Heliopolis in Egypt to the Temple of R, the Egyptian god of the sun. A symbol of immortality and an allegory of resurrection, the thousand-year-old female bird was there in the road in front of us, and all I could think was that it was like the sun that figuratively dies each night and is every morning reborn.

There is a lie in all fiction, a fabrication that says that when the critical moment of your life arrives you will be rested, clean, composed, and prepared, but you won’t be. I guarantee it. You will be exhausted, scattered, dirty, and wounded. But with this comes one miraculous strength. You. Won’t. Care.

There is a marvelous Northern Cheyenne saying that you judge a man by the strength of his enemies.

The greatest sin in the artistic world is predictability—nothing will make me put a book down or get up and walk out of a theater faster than being five pages or five minutes into a work and already having figured out the entire story and what the characters are going to do.