“I doubt a person drowning would have managed the squawking you did.” John is laughing at her panic. He adds, more gently, “I never lost you. I had you safe.” She’s shivering uncontrollably so he suggests that she go back to the house; he can find the traps himself, but she’s too frightened to go alone. The way home now seems to her one continuous and all-too-likely grave.

In the woods, under the trees, the snow thins and they can more easily make their way forward. They’ve caught two animals, a possum and a squirrel. Whatever horror these animals felt when the traps first sprang has been spent. Both are limp, eyeing Asia with resignation. Both are more starved than the Booths.

John lets them go. “They wouldn’t have been a mouthful anyway,” he says. “Poor miserable creatures.” And then, changing his mind when it’s too late, “But they were quite prepared to die. How stupid of me!”

Asia is numb by the time they make it home. The return of sensation in her arms and legs is fiery and painful. She trembles so hard it seems she might break a tooth.

Eventually, she is warm again. But still hungry.

—

John sells some livestock and finds a distant neighbor, Mr. Parker, who lets him purchase a lactating cow. John sets off on foot to fetch her. The snow is falling at a slant when he leaves, there is an icy wind, and Asia has a terrible premonition as she watches his figure blur and disappear. She runs after him, but only makes it as far as the family graveyard, where the crosses barely clear the snow, the dead lying deeper and colder than ever.

They expect him back that afternoon, but night comes and he hasn’t returned. The wind has stopped, but not the snow, which now falls straight and white from the black heaven. Asia lights the lamps, sets one against each of the chilled windows so that John can find his way home. Branches of frost blossom on the glass.

She retires to the settee and, in the lamplight, tries to pick up the story she was reading . . .

The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides moral man to evil . . .

But the words are meaningless on the page. Mother has set down her sewing and rocks in her chair, her arms tight around her own body. “My boy, my boy, my boy,” she says. “My own, my darling boy.”