Excerpt from Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Neither of them wants to call out to her, unconsciously afraid their voices will echo back at them from too deep an emptiness. Both of them think: What is this? How deep? and Dear God, no. Both of them think: A mine shaft? Neither says the word.

Annie had tried to imagine the shaft into which her grandfather descended one August day three-quarters of a century ago and from which he did not come out alive: fifteen hundred feet deep. No one could survive such a fall . . . but is this such a shaft? Annie is telling herself, no, it must be something else. Too small for a mine shaft, surely. Way too small. Then it must be a well. She heaves a half-sigh of imaginary relief. But what would a well be doing out here in the forest? The answer would be: The same thing as a mine shaft, serving a different landscape, a different time. And why in the name of anything would a well seem a relief? Her breath clutches up again.

Rough old timbers are laid across an opening in the ground six or seven or eight feet square. It is too early in the summer for much foliage to have sprung up yet, but each year it has grown up and died off, and grown up and died off, so the timbers remain exposed. One of those years, perhaps forty years ago when Justin and Annie's parents were in high school—and no one much has been here since, wandering into this forest which is after all nowhere—a tiny shoot grew up between the first and second timbers. As it grew, it pushed them apart, and it has become a tall solid tree, growing from inside the hole, through the timbers set into a collar to seal this shaft. As it happens, this is indeed a mine shaft, an air shaft, meant only for ventilation of the long since abandoned passages below.

Annie kneels painfully, all her weight on her cane, and calls into the darkness: Ursula. She can't tell anything about the depth of the hole. She calls again: Ursula, and then she sobs. She looks up at Justin. It has been a providence that Ursula was so close and they both had their eyes on her, or they might fall into blaming themselves or each other in their grief. Neither even considers that.

"The cell!" Annie says. "In the truck?"

Justin runs to the truck, his work boots seeming to shake the ground. The cell phone lies on the front seat, tiny and useless amid a scattering of animal crackers. In crisis the mind focuses on minutiae: he thinks, Now is that cookie a rhinoceros or a hippopotamus? He picks up the phone. No signal. Of course, no signal: there are no towers out here in the wilderness.

He tries to remember how many cars they saw on the road. All he can remember is the fat, furry rear end of a black bear cub shambling off into the trees near a river, and Annie trying to take a snapshot. He follows that rabbit trail into his mind and recalls the bright topaz eyes of what must have been a cougar just off the road as they drove up in the dark in the rain, the night before. But of course a car coming along the road now, Justin thinks, would be no help at all: none of their phones work either. A rusty dark red Subaru zooms by, heading north. The road is once again empty and silent, the sunlight bright and impassive.

Justin remembers a time as a teenager when his first car, a beater the color of pea soup, had stopped dead just west of Sault Sainte Marie at twilight. A passing car had offered to send help, then didn't. He recalls walking alongside the road in the dark, kicking stones, mumbling "goddamn fucker" again and again. Can't chance that kind of thing now. Trust no one. Justin has not trusted many folks in his life anyway. He carries a grudge about his father's having abandoned the family when he was three, not much older than Ursula is now.

From Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill. Copyright Ingrid Hill 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.