Opening paragraphs................

      The wind whistled down the frozen run of Shasta Creek, between the blacker-than-black walls of pine.  The thin naked swamp alders and slight new birches bent before it.  Needle-point ice crystals rode it, like sandpaper grit, carving arabesque whorls in the drifting snow,

     The Iceman followed the creek down to the lake, navigating as much by feel, and by time, as by sight.  At six minutes on the luminous dial of his dive watch, he began to look for the dead pine.  Twenty seconds later, its weather-bleached trunk appeared in the snowmobile headlights, hung there for a moment, then slipped away like a hitchhiking ghost.

     Now. Six hundred yards, compass bearing 270 . . .

-John Sandford, Winter Prey