He hunted small game, always in the vicinity, always with the bow.  Once she asked to hold the bow, just to see what it was like.  When she pulled back, nothing happened.  The bow was strung so tight it didn’t give an inch.  She stared at him.  How anyone managed to shoot anything with it, she couldn’t begin to understand.  If that had been her only means of acquiring food, she’d have starved within days.  And yet he continued to quietly bring in quail, ducks, once four rabbits from a hollow tree, once, definitely by luck, she said and he denied it, a gorgeous pheasant.

She watched him draw on a doe and fawn coming to water far up across the creek.  Then he slowly released the bow and lowered it.  “I hope I don’t regret that,” he said to no one.  Charlotte realized that not only was he more alone than she, but he thought about the immediate future more, always calculating.

While he dwelt necessarily on survival, Charlotte took the only chance she might ever have to concentrate on pure pleasure.  She retrieved the tin oven from the wagon and baked yeast bread, the heavenly aroma wafting off into the trees.  She loved having the time to prepare it, to mix, knead, allow it to rise, be punched down and then rise again.  Surprisingly, Chace ate it without complaint and she wondered what he was thinking since the distance between fresh-baked bread and years-old dried buffalo meat was about halfway around the earth.

She sat under a tree and read books, some familiar, some she’d never heard of and wondered where and how her father had acquired them.  And even more puzzling, why he’d given them to her.  Again, it was clear in those desperate days he was hardly thinking at all, in survival mode himself on her behalf.  When she got tired of reading, she sewed.  When she got tired of sewing, she brushed the horses.  With time still left, she lay back luxuriously and simply gazed up into the branches.  She found herself sighing with contentment, all the while questioning how this was possible.

She found out then that it wasn’t possible.  She woke screaming again in the night.  Despite her every effort, the dream only kept growing more vivid with time.  She saw his face, felt the kick of the gun and the warm blood pooling on the floor. She couldn’t get air, couldn’t breathe.

Chace was instantly there.  “Come out,” he said.  She was shaking too hard to speak.  “Charlotte.”  It was the first time he had ever used her name.  “You can’t stay in there like that.”

“I’m all right,” she said in a halting voice.

“I hate to say this, but if you don’t come out, I’m coming in and dragging you out.”