Page 8

June 26, 1997

SOMEONE HAD SPOTTED SOMETHING UNUSUALmoving in the Red Grove’s cliffs. High up in an alcove, a mountain lion had made a den for her three kittens. Nobody in the community remembered seeing a whole mountain lion family before, as they are secretive, stealthy, and rare. Evidence appeared sometimes—a dried paw print in the mud, a deer carcass, a missing cat—but their presence was mostly theoretical, mythical, the ghost of something lethal that was somehow tied to what made the Red Grove safe, always just out of sight.

A news anchor from one of the nearby towns had arrived first thing that morning. Within the Red Grove, the rules were clear: no reporters. A cult in California had committed mass suicide a few months earlier, leaving thirty-nine people dead, and though the Red Grove was nothing like that, the people in the community all knew how damaging media spotlights could be, especially for the people who lived here in order to disappear.

By midday after the early-morning news report, there were thirty or so spectators, including a dozen outsiders who set up camp chairs along the road, everyone squinting through binoculars across the fields and up onto the rock outcropping, where the fat kits wrestled in the sun. Yes, the lions in and of themselves were spectacular, but beyond that, for the people of the Red Grove, they raised spiritual questions, supernatural questions. What might it mean? An indication of Tamsen Nightingale’s reincarnation? These wild animals wanting their land back, another person said. That’s not it, Luce thought, seeing in their brute strength a reminder to the world: nobody can fuck with us here.

Gloria spotted Ruby Wells talking to one of the outsiders, gesturing toward the lions and also back toward the red groves that dotted the valley. Yes, sure, Gloria wanted her kids to see the miracle of lion cubs, but mostly she’d hoped Ruby would be here. That fucker would not stop calling and had the nerve to show up on their goddamned doorstep. Well, no more.

Luce scanned the crowd, lingering on the outsiders. Not all serial killers fit the young-crazy-white-guy-listening-to-possessed-dogs type. There were the suave bankers you’d never suspect, or that meek baker who set women free in the Alaskan wilderness and then hunted them. You just never knew when someone was going to try to carve you out of your life. Right here in this crowd, someone had on a suspiciously thick jacket for the warm day, and that was the kind of thing someone would later remember, tearfully— I knew something was off about him. Why didn’t I follow my instincts? But it’s more than instinct. It’s common sense. Every sixty seconds a woman in the United States is sexually assaulted, perhaps by someone who seems perfectly nice at a speed-dating event, who tells you how pretty you look when he comes to pick you up, who even pulls a quarter from behind your niece’s ear.

Luce leaned over to her mother and pointed at the man in the oversize coat, saying, “There are laws on the books that say if you steal a bundle of hay, it’s a felony. But you can stab a woman with a knife or shoot her with a gun and get charged with assault, which is a misdemeanor.”

“Not now, Luce—why don’t you pay attention to these lions? This is amazing.”

“Gloria, these are the foundational belief systems of the world they live in,” Luce said, nodding toward the outsiders.

Gloria stiffened, embarrassed by the possibility of anyone hearing her paranoid daughter, but something in her softened, and she put a hand across Luce’s back, her daughter’s sweet skin smell and baby powder–scented deodorant up close, turned her so they were face-to-face. “Listen, baby,” Gloria said. “Do you hear yourself? You’re sixteen. When I was your age, I was playing volleyball and making out in cars and going to prom and—”

“Prom is basically the Cinderella fantasy—” Luce started, but her mother cut her off.

“Just hush for a second. Please? I made a lot of mistakes in the past. You know that. I know that. I’m sorry. But I am going to make things better. For you.” Gloria put both arms behind Luce’s neck, leaned down, and pulled her in so their foreheads touched.

Luce opened her eyes and was ready to hate it, but there was her mother, wild animal, softest animal, looking right at her. It took her breath. Something older than she could remember wanted it to never, ever end. “You’re mine,” Gloria said, so softly Luce could barely hear the words over the chattering crowd. Gloria lifted her hand from Luce’s neck and brushed a thumb against her cheek. “Stay here, soak in the gloriousness of these kittens, and hey, maybe even go talk to a cute stranger?” Luce rolled her eyes. “I’ll be home a little later. Walk Roo home when you guys are done.” She winked and disappeared into the crowd.

The presence of the mountain lions was weird, surprising in ways Gloria didn’t even yet understand. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on—how, in this supposedly safe place, what they were celebrating was the proximal presence of a goddamned lion, as if that were safe, as if nature itself weren’t brutal and violent. She knew the way a mother lion could rip open the throat of anyone, anything at all, trying to harm her babies.

She slipped back through the crowd. What is a mother? She asked herself this question not infrequently, trying to articulate what she was supposed to be doing. What is a mother if not a protector? If not a person who must provide the information and guidance to help a child make the best choices. There were a lot of things Gloria had not done as a mother. Hell, she was a human, her own human first and foremost. She would not sacrifice all of herself. Why should she? The sacrificial mother was a bullshit narrative. But she could do this one thing.

When Luce was one or two years old, Gloria had brought her a plastic clown mask. Here, she’d said, handing it to the baby, who still looked a little drunk in her new wobbling walk. Luce looked at her mother, not smiling, not reaching out to take it. Gloria tried again—here, shaking it closer to Luce’s hand, making it easy, but Luce stared, maybe didn’t even blink. It’s silly, don’t you see, honey, it’s so funny, she said, booping the nose. She said, Hi, Luce, in a high-pitched drawl, a clown voice, it was funny—but Luce didn’t budge. Didn’t crack a smile. Luce held in her hand a wooden mixing spoon, which Gem told Gloria she brought everywhere. This child so small and already so stubborn, so skeptical, so sure of what she liked and what she did not. But this is a clown, Gloria had tried once more, sticking out her tongue. Nothing.

Luce was not a baby who would pander. She did not pretend to be moved by something that did not move her. Not as a baby, not as a child. Not now, as a young woman. Gloria had brought the wrong toy. The only way to reach Luce was on Luce’s own terms.

She breathed in again, shakily, the mountain lions behind her. Got into the car, started the ignition. She had thought her children would never be as vulnerable as they were back when they were small. How foolish she’d been.

She could do this one thing, and even if her daughter didn’t understand yet, she would come to understand it.

The tall golden grass covering the hillside ahead bowed with a gust of wind that sent a pair of birds up out of hiding. One circled the other once before they flew away, not far off the ground, ducking and weaving between each other until they both shot up toward the sun.

Luce and Roo took the long route home, Luce pointing out the redwood wound where she’d recently seen a skunk family, the little one no bigger than her fist, Roo flinching at the creaking trees for the first time in his life, asking if Luce was worried about the calling man. “Nah,” she told him. “Do you know what seeing a family of lions means?” she asked. He didn’t. “It means fierce mother warrior protection for all those around,” she said. “It’s some of the old knowledge, Tamsen Nightingale stuff,” and though she’d made it up, it felt true.

They walked, stretching into the sun when the dense trees broke, snacking on a packet of beef jerky Roo had gotten from an outsider kid in exchange for a blue-bellied lizard he’d caught under a rock. The afternoon heat blurred the air off the road, but they weren’t in a hurry.

When they climbed up the long deck’s steps and into their house, they found only their aunt Gem, asleep in the same place she always was. Luce read, and Roo designed clothes for his dinosaurs, but Gloria hadn’t come home by later that afternoon or that evening. Luce warmed up tortillas with beans and cheese, let Roo tell her about the diet of Brachiosaurus, and cleaned the packed dirt from the carved bone she’d found, carefully scraping in its chiseled pockets, rinsing it under warm water to reveal the fine detail. Still, Gloria wasn’t there.

Their mother wasn’t there when the sun finally went down on one of the longest days of the year, wasn’t there when the near-full moon rose, when fog rolled halfway in but dissipated before it took hold, when a coyote yelled once the sky was full of stars.

She wasn’t there when everyone in the house was dreaming, except for Luce, who walked to the deck and peered down at the empty driveway once again. Gloria still wasn’t home.

For years, Luce had worked to convince herself that her mother would not up and disappear now that she had Roo and Gem to care for, but as she waited and waited she couldn’t help it—the idea growing as the hours ticked by and her mother was still gone. She’d never left for more than a few hours, and even then would have Gramms or Juan or someone check on them. But nobody called. No one came by.

What had her mother said as she left? She was going to make things better for Luce—better how? She told herself to stop worrying. Worry is a misuse of the imagination, Gramms liked to say. There was no point in worrying about Gloria running into someone like that monster in the Andes, murderer of some three hundred and fifty girls, their bodies revealed when a flood unearthed them.

About Gem, and her purple, swollen face. A berry, squeezed to bursting.

About this man who’d shown up at their house because she’d brought him here, yes, admit it—she was the one who’d made this all worse. She’d written the note, and then, instead of patching things over as she’d intended, she’d let her anger take hold and she’d hurt him, and now what? Now she’d given herself a reason to worry.

Luce looked out into the night and told herself to cut it out. Gloria would be home any minute. The stars held steady, pinpricks of light on a dark cloth, all up there in the sky even though the trees blocked much of the view. The star is there, she thought, even if I can’t see it. Though you could see a star’s light long after it was dead.

There was a day when the summer greens were going brown twice as fast as they ever had. The tundra swans were leaving in great clouds of white, and a green darner dragonfly, as long as a lily, landed on Tamsen Nightingale’s palm and then died before it could take off again. That was the thing—everyone and everything they knew were starving.

Tamsen and her two sisters, Margaret and Minnie, were newly married to three brothers, Arthur, Albert, and August. The state of Wisconsin—five years young—was looking bleak. The brothers, with no jobs or land, sat by the fire and spun tales of a better life. There was a place they heard of where the snow never fell. Where swans didn’t leave. There, it was easy to find a little plot of land where they could march out into golden sunshine that lasted all year. They could go to California. Land of warm creeks where your hands dig into the cool mud. And do you know what ends up in your palms? Gold.

There had been whispers of gold on the lips of every passing traveler, rumors of creeks so full of glitter you were likely to find golden nuggets stuck between your toes when you waded in.

The oldest brother, Arthur, had married the oldest sister, Tamsen, after a short courtship conducted in her family’s cabbage field. He was polite, he loved his brothers fiercely, and he mostly left her alone in the garden when she wanted to be alone. They smiled shyly at each other, and she imagined them old, in chairs by a fire, reading and sewing and smelling the night. The other sisters married the other brothers shortly thereafter so that they could stay knitted to their kin, so that where one string of yarn was tugged, the others would follow. The brothers’ father gave them his horse, and the sisters’ mother wrapped all her fine things in a chest and everyone wept with the knowledge that there was nothing for them to do if they stayed, no work and no food. The only direction was west.

And the morning they left, a warm spring day, Tamsen’s mother clutched her face and told her, tearfully, pleading, that she must keep her sisters safe. That no harm may come upon them, no injury, no violence. Tamsen looked over to where her sisters, elbows hooked, blew kisses to the donkey at the far end of the field. She promised.

The journey was full of perils. The nights were cold and the plains never ended and the bears were hungry and the snakes were angry. On they went.

They passed people friendly and willing to trade; they passed people unfriendly and unwilling to trade. The sisters sketched tulips and primrose and creeping hollyhock, chipmunks and beavers and eagles. Having spent their lives running the family farm, the sisters were skilled in identifying edible plants, and they kept the party fed even on nights when no hunting or trapping or fishing was possible, when the wind snuck right through their coats and scraped at them to turn around.

On day 129, weeks later than they’d expected, the brothers and sisters reached the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Fall was falling fast toward winter, and they started up.

Though Tamsen, as the oldest, was usually first among her sisters to climb trees back home or to plunge into the cold lake in the summertime, she was not first as they began climbing the mountain. Her sisters thought it was her homesickness.

“I think we should wait until spring,” Tamsen whispered to Arthur one night as they lay side by side under the stars. Though they shared private smiles, their intimacy, in bed and conversation, was still so new that it had taken her a few days to find the right words. They were halfway up the mountain. But Arthur knew at least a dozen other men from his hometown who were headed in the same direction, and he had promised his brothers that they would be first, already swimming in gold by the time the others arrived. They must press on, he said. Besides, they were a hearty winter people, thick-boned, callus-skinned, no dainty dragonflies.

She watched the back of her husband’s legs the next morning as he stepped onto rocks and dirt slick with frost; she watched his sure-footedness and the way her sisters helped each other up difficult passages, thinking about how they’d always done that, even when they were young, grabbing for one another like an instinct.

When they were still two days from the peak, a storm came in. The needled trees shook as the wind picked up, the air piercingly cold and pregnant with snow. But they were winter people, the brothers said again, “Snow-bred,” they chanted, pounding their fists against their chests, and they were heading into the golden promise of California. They pressed on.

Tamsen knew how to read the weather. She knew that they were nearly out of food, that the storm would bury plants and send the animals into their burrows. She also knew that none of the brothers would heed her warning; they thought it ungodly and strange when she read the wind or listened to the dirt. She tried a different approach. She told them she was having woman problems of the worst order, and she would not move another step off that canyon trail or the blood coming from her body would call the bears. Because of their histories with bears, she thought it would work. They’d huddle and wait out the storm. She’d keep her sisters safe, which she’d always done.

The brothers considered her predicament, shoulder to shoulder in a tight circle. Several times she approached the brothers, but they battedher away. By the time they came back to announce to the wives what they would do, Tamsen knew.

When she refused to go on, sure of their fate, the brothers decided they had to forge ahead without her lest they miss the gold that should be rightfully theirs. But Arthur knew he could not. A man was not supposed to leave his bride.

Arthur said they would catch up to his brothers on the other side of the summit. As they were packing, Tamsen whispered with her sisters, pointing out the cave she’d spotted nearby, instructing them to double back once the brothers were asleep that night. In that cave they’d stay safe together with Arthur, who was the most decent of the brothers. She whispered a curse on anyone who would hurt her sisters, kissed them, and promised to see them soon.

Tamsen brought Arthur into the cave and began cutting wood from fallen branches she’d dragged inside. “Don’t work, Tamsen, your body is leaking away,” Arthur said. He was smoking his pipe, leaning back against a rock.

“A bad storm is coming,” Tamsen said, nodding toward the mouth of the cave where the snow was already fat and heavy.

“What about my brothers? You didn’t even warn them,” he said.

“I tried.”

“You didn’t try. If you’d told me, really told me, I could of told them.”

Arthur stood and began collecting their things. “We must go immediately,” he said. “Pack up.”

“Don’t be a fool,” she said, the shyness of their early months fading and anger building. “We’d die out there.” Arthur ignored her, pacing the cave, looking out at the weather, which was thickening by the minute. Tamsen said, “I told my sisters to shelter in a cave up the mountain. If your brothers have the sense to listen to their wives, they will be fine too.”

“What will they think of me?” he said to her, and she saw the soft boy shape of his eyebrows from when he was with his brothers, the three of them talking about the animals they caught and loved when they weresmall and how they would sit together beneath the stairs to hide from their own raging daddy.

He told her to pack up again, but she did not, readying the cave instead for shelter. She tried once more to explain that her sisters knew of another cave, and so all his brothers needed was to listen and follow as the storm slammed harder. But Arthur knew the stubborn pride of his brothers, doubted that they would listen to these new women over each other, and his heart froze right to pieces at the thought of losing them. He grabbed his pack and lurched toward the cave entrance, determined to find them, but Tamsen, sure of his fate were he to head into the storm alone, and fond of him despite herself, grabbed at his legs from her crouch on the ground, a movement practiced from days of catching goats, and brought him down with a thud. From there, he would have to take a breath and reconsider, and she patted him on the shoulder, told him that first they needed a fire, pointing to the pile of logs, readied for his help, and turned away to prepare more wood.

She did not see the log come up over his head. She had no warning before it smashed down against the back of her skull.

Tamsen woke to blackness. She could see nothing. She slept. When she woke the next time, she could see with one eye, though it was difficult to open. She could not feel her hands or feet from cold. She sat up and looked around the cave, but Arthur was gone. Her sisters had not come back. She dragged herself to the edge of the cave. The tracks in the snow outside were faint, so it had been at least a day since Arthur had left, maybe more. Though the snow had stopped falling, it was piled high outside. She stood up and, retching, followed the tracks, bleeding, dragging herself along until, unable to see almost anything, she fell into the snow.

She’d die there, she knew. She closed her eyes, accepting her fate. But something stepped on her foot—once, then again, something heavy, and she feared a mountain lion, which she’d heard stalked these mountains. She used all her energy to kick the animal away, but her leg metonly air. She opened her eyes and sat up. No animal was around. The snow was deep, the air was freezing, and she knew she’d die quickly there, much too quickly for her to find her sisters, already too far ahead.

She began crawling back toward the cave. She crawled for a hundred years. She imagined the future, when some mother would be walking with her daughter and point to a mountain range in the shape of a crawling figure’s silhouette and tell her daughter the fable of Tamsen Nightingale, but how would anyone know that fable, she realized, if she weren’t alive to tell it.

When she dragged herself back into the cave, she was startled by a faint hissing and cluck. Without thinking, she pulled out the knife she kept tucked into her skirt, and as the family of jackrabbits that had entered the cave was fleeing, she crushed two baby rabbits under her body and caught an adult with her hands. She slit their throats with her knife and passed out, exhausted. The snow fell.

She woke, her hands covered in blood, and she slept.

On the second day, she woke, feeling a dryness in her throat and a cracking on her lips, as if she were made of the roads she grew up running down, dust flying behind her, rocks tripping her up. She melted snow in her hands and licked it. The cold was so deep in her body that even when she slipped back into sleep, she dreamed she was trapped in ice. In a small miracle, Arthur had left behind a pack—probably too much for him to carry—and once she could keep her eyes open long enough to riffle through, she found the tinderbox and started a fire. She cooked one rabbit and smoked the others. She dragged herself farther back into the cave, where there was a nest of pink, hairless rabbits from when she’d scared the parents out, dead from the cold. She ate them too.

She waited in the cave while the back of her head, gashed open, healed enough to allow her to walk. Daylight dimmed into darkness, darkness bled into daylight. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed—ten days, two weeks perhaps—but when she went outside, there were no footprints for her to follow.

There were some animal tracks, though, the tiny forks of bird printsand rounded paws of something catlike. She walked on and found no trail. She walked and walked, eating the last of the smoked rabbit, drinking melted snow, and she made it to the summit and started walking down, sure she’d find her sisters and also sure she wouldn’t.

It had snowed and snowed. She would find her sisters and run, and they’d start again.

Down the mountain she walked, snaking back and forth, hunting for her sisters, finding comfort in nothing. For days she walked, a week. She didn’t know how long they’d been separated—was it two weeks or three? She’d found food, but had they? They would have been out of their reserves a long time by now. She thought about Margaret, who would whisper out the window in the darkness of their childhood bedroom, telling her sisters she was soothing ghosts. She thought about Minnie, who’d steal their mother’s dresses and their father’s hats as costume pieces and jump out of closets to sing for them. Where were they? She grew weak, meat gone, body weary and freezing, and to stay warm, she imagined her sisters in a cave somewhere, warming themselves by the fire, for certainly they’d taken shelter in the last big storm, and that was when she came upon one big lump in the snow.

It was about six feet long, two feet across. She leaned down, knowing, just as she knew with the litter of kittens she’d found after they’d been accidentally shut out of the barn one night in a late spring frost. She brushed away the snow. There, beneath a thin layer of ice, was one of her husband’s brother’s faces. He looked like the ice on a shallow pond, bluish, fragile, with dusted snow in the eyelashes. The snow atop his body wasn’t thick; he’d died recently. There was no reason to shake his shoulder. She felt a pang of sadness for this man, who had gathered violets for Minnie, who could perfectly imitate the song of a sparrow.

But a sliver of yellow fabric on his neck caught her eye. She brushed the snow away and saw, wound around his throat like a scarf, Minnie’s dress. She had helped Minnie sew it the year before. Minnie had been wearing the dress the last time Tamsen had seen her, though she told herself not to worry, that likely she’d changed out of it and they’d all bundled in whatever clothes they could find for warmth. But her ribs ached—where were her sisters? Searching around, she found no smaller bodies, no sister-size shapes. Perhaps they’d made it? Run from their husbands or found animals to help them live, as she had?

She searched the snow, walking wide circles as hope buoyed her. She would do one more pass through the deep snow, and as she walked, she scanned the horizon for shelter—caves, a den, something to keep them warm. And then, up ahead, against the trunk of a large pine tree, she saw a length of canvas strung into a shelter. She hurried through the snow, anticipating her sisters inside.

And there was one huddled figure in the shelter. But it was not one of her sisters. It was Arthur’s other brother, leaning against the base of the tree, wrapped in many clothes.

“Brother,” she called, ducking in under the canvas. He didn’t respond. “Are you all right? Where are my sisters?” His eyes were open, though glazed, staring out into the snow. She tried again. “Where are Margaret and Minnie?” It would do no good to panic, though their absence caused greater alarm as the seconds passed. Still he said nothing. She crouched down so she was level with his face. Finally, then, she caught his eye. His mouth barely moved as he spoke.

“Help me,” he said.

“Where are they?” she asked, and the panic she had been tamping down began to swell.

“There was no food. The cold was too great,” he said, one hand clutching at her elbow; she moved quickly. She ducked out of the shelter and searched around, desperate, creating wide concentric circles in the snow, like the wake of a stone slipping into a pond. Blue, clear sky overhead, sparkling snow rounding everything beneath it into smoothed lumps. She searched, walking, stumbling, plunging her arms down to feel what was beneath her, big rocks, fallen trees. But then she tripped. Something else buried. It felt different, something in the air, inside her, knew. She did not want to dig. She had to dig. She dropped to her knees, not breathing, and began pulling out armfuls of snow. In her hand, something thin and hard.She pulled it to the surface. Gripped in her fist was her sister’s arm. Frozen, skin tinged cornflower blue, rubbery.

There was movement in her peripheral vision. The brother was dragging himself out of the shelter, through the snow, coming toward her. Tamsen did not turn to him. She pushed more snow off her sister’s body, cradled not just this familiar arm and hand she knew so well, no sleeves covering it, but also the elbow, this shoulder she loved, with no clothes to keep it warm under all this snow, digging until she found the chest and then the neck and finally her beloved sister’s face. Tamsen opened her mouth wide. The sound that came out screamed the moon in half.

Arthur’s brother was crawling toward her. Too weak to stand. He stopped a few feet away, dropped to his stomach, and clasped his palms in prayer. “We did not save them,” he said.

“Say what you did,” Tamsen said. He shook his head. Shame’s infection deep in him, too. Tamsen turned from her sister and stood above him, her foot very close to his face.

“Say it,” she said. All around, the dark, wet earth peeked through the shimmering snow where she’d dug, shadow craters of the moon.

“We took their rations.”

“And?”

“And their clothes.”

“You took their food and their warmth.”

“We would have frozen to death,” he said, and she heard his sorrow, but it did not move her.

“You let them die,” she said, amazed by the calm in her voice. “Where is my husband?”

“Three days gone. Searching for help. May God forgive us.”

“I see no God here to forgive you,” she said. “Only me.” A flurry of snow built in the air and stung the inside of her nose, her lungs, and she felt as strong as she ever had, swollen with purpose. She told her brother-in-law that she understood, that he should pray for forgiveness and she would pray with him for the souls of her sisters. He closed his eyes again, thanking her, so grateful for her understanding, he said, and clasped hispalms. She leaned over, picking up one of the rocks she had uncovered during her search. She did not hesitate. Brought it up above her head and then down on his skull.

She turned back to her sister then, knelt in the snow, and howled. When she could catch her breath, she uncovered the rest of Minnie’s body and the body of Margaret beside her. She howled, holding the naked, emaciated bodies, and the evergreens overhead swayed in a small gust of wind and the sky above glittered blue and there was nothing she could do but hold the bodies, and so she held them.

There would come a moment when her husband would return and find his brother bleeding out into the snow and find Tamsen crouched over the bodies of her sisters, not helping him, having harmed him, and he would explode with rage at her, she knew, but she could not bring herself to do anything about it. She stayed with her sisters’ bodies. She held them for one whole day and one whole night.

On the second day, under a clear blue sky, the freeze began to thaw. The exhaustion set into her body, the cold, the dark ache in her belly so far past hunger, but she carried on. She took her sister’s faces in her hands and closed their eyes. She filled their mouths with spruce. Limbs quivering, she worked. There was almost nothing left of her. The words she spoke and then sang came from somewhere deep in her bones, cells spinning themselves into harmony. She took her knife and cut off their hair. She dragged them farther, so they could be gifted to the animals for food, so the animals could do the work of cleaning their bones.

There was a version of her who might have ended things there, lay in the snow and slept beside her sisters. Maybe a mountain range would be named for all three sisters. But that version was gone.

The snow was too deep and hard to traverse for much travel, what with the weakness of her body, so she would have to wait a little while, find food nearby. She searched, though she knew it was pointless. Too much snow, winter laid down upon everything. She could die or she could live. She looked over at her dead brother-in-law, face down in the snow. The brothers had taken something from her sisters.

She crawled over to him and did not ask for forgiveness before she began pulling the stiff clothing off his body. Her sister’s dress, socks, coat, the fur-lined mittens, all of it went onto her body. With the extra warmth, in the protection of the shelter, she had to wait for the animals to do their work on her sisters, and she had to survive. She rested, but any strength in her body was leaving her hour by hour. She needed food. There was no other option. In the dawn light of the next morning she crawled back to the brother, held her knife in her shivering palm, and squinted against the bright orange rays shimmering on the snow. She wanted to live, and in order to live, she plunged the knife into his thigh.

Many times she had seen her mama butcher a deer or an elk or a moose, she had helped clean the meat, she knew how to separate the sinew. She loosened skin, cut all the way around the joints. Peeled the skin off, slit clean what meat she could. It wasn’t fast, but she didn’t need to be fast. She retched, swallowed, breathed. She would live.

She wanted to live, and she did. She ate the meat off her sister’s husband’s body. She ate and grew strength, and ate and removed more meat, shoulders and rump, preparing some for her journey, and then she was ready. She wiped the blood into the snow. Two pine cones over his eyes in thanks, in horror.

By then her sisters had been mostly cleaned. She collected what bones remained. As many as she could carry, she packed.

Down she walked, from mountain snow to rock, from rock to mud, from mud down the foothills to where the grasslands stopped holding snow. Into the long grasses. She walked and walked right into spring, the bones of her sisters on her back, the hair wound round her wrists, and found, finally, a valley. It was empty of people. It was filled with red-bark trees that reached almost to the sky. There, she set down the bones and, from them, began to build.