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ISABELLA HEARS THE unmistakable vibration of a rattlesnake tail, freezing her in a cold chill.

The seventeen-year-old girl raises her eyes from the stream—she was drinking from water hardly deeper than a puddle—and sees the snake on the other side of the bank. Its head is raised above its slithering body, thicker than a Coke can and stretching to longer than six feet. The scales are olive and gray in the distinctive diamond pattern.

The girl blinks her eyes to determine if she’s hallucinating. She’s lost track of the number of days she’s been crawling through the desert, dragging her useless leg behind her while following the trickle of the creek bed meandering through rocky canyons of sagebrush and prickly pear cactus. She’s been surviving on water and the tiny fruit buds blooming on cacti. She knows she can’t go on much longer like this.

She should crawl backward, but she can hardly move. She hasn’t eaten in days. Her hands are scraped raw and bloody, with several fingers missing the nails. And her right leg—the worst of her injuries—is broken in multiple places. Her shin bone is bent at an unnatural angle and bruised deep burgundy, her knee is almost as big as a volleyball, and her ankle is so swollen that she’s long since removed her shoe and left it behind.

The last thing she needs is a snakebite.

If treated quickly, snakebites aren’t fatal. She knows that. But she is already knocking on death’s door. A dose of venom squirted from the fangs would finish the job within a day.

That is if the snake is even real—not just her starving brain playing tricks on her.

As if in answer, the tip of the tail stands vertically, and the snake shakes the segmented point again, producing a rattling sound that sends a fresh chill down Isabella’s spine.

She’s not hallucinating.

She’s face-to-face with a real rattlesnake.

And if she doesn’t back away, the snake is going to strike. If there wasn’t a trickle of water separating them, it might have already attacked.

Once, when she was younger, she watched an uncle on the reservation kill a rattlesnake, but he had the benefit of wielding a long-handled shovel in one hand and a machete in the other.

She doesn’t have so much as a pocketknife.

Isabella attempts to ease backward, but when she tries to lift her stiffened leg, the limb screams in pain. Isabella’s eyes drop from the snake to the water, and she catches a glimpse of her own reflection. Her skin is coated in dirt and sweat and blistered by the merciless sun. The left side of her face is swollen and marred with a deep laceration that feels hot with infection. Her hair dangles down around her face, the strands tangled and dirty, knotted with twigs and cactus needles. Her face is coated with dust, her lips dried and cracked, her eyes wild.

She looks like some kind of cavewoman out of a movie, more animal than human.

Seeing herself like this, what’s become of her, ignites a rage inside her. Adrenaline floods her bloodstream. She looks around for some kind of weapon. She spots a rock within her reach. Roughly the size and shape of a football, the rock is half submerged in the water. Balancing on her one good knee, she attempts to pry the rock loose with both hands.

The snake lifts its rattle and shakes it again—the last warning she’s going to get.

She frees the rock and holds it over her head.

“Come on!” she growls at the snake, her teeth clenched.

The snake lunges forward, mouth open in a wide V, just as Isabella slams the rock down in an explosion of water.

Everything happens so fast she’s unsure if she hit it.

Then she sees a reddish color clouding the water. The snake’s long body flops around but the head remains under the rock. The death throes last for almost a whole minute before the snake’s body finally goes limp.

When Isabella shoves the rock aside and pulls the snake up, she sees the creature’s neck is smashed at the base of its skull, its mouth still hanging open, the forked tongue limp between its fangs.

She drags the body onto the bank and digs her fingernails into the scaly skin of the belly. It’s hard work without a knife, but she starts to peel the outer skin from the snake with a fevered determination. Her uncle breaded and fried the snake he killed, but she recalls the flavor being bland, like sinewy fish. The meat was full of tiny bones. She never wanted to eat snake again. But now she finds herself salivating, ready to devour the meat raw.

As she works, she remembers her uncle skinning the snake he killed. He cut the head off, then nailed the body to a board, where it dangled lifelessly while he peeled the scaly outer layer. Isabella’s mind is a fog of hunger and exhaustion, but she tries to remember something her uncle said to her as she watched. Some lesson she’s forgotten. The memory is right there at the edge of her grasp.

A sharp, stinging pain shakes her awake from her thoughts.

The snake’s mouth is clamped onto her forearm, the fangs embedded in her muscle, two syringes emptying themselves of poison. As she tried to tear off its skin, she must have triggered a muscle reflex.

Now she remembers the lesson.

Make sure to cut the head off , her uncle had said. A rattlesnake can still bite after it’s dead.