My mother didn’t notice when I took a jar with a tight lid and snatched the last egg, the one that had been meant for my lunch. Since it was, in some ways, mine, I reckoned that I had the right to spend it as I wished. But I wasn’t sure my mother would see it that way, so I took it when she wasn’t looking and carried it out with the scraps for Maisie.

“Oh, how spry you are!” I said to Maisie when I crept into the woodshed and found her on her feet, her tail wagging a little.

I knelt down and let her come to me, the puppies squirming and squealing in their nest of straw.

She put her nice, wet nose into the hollow of my neck and snuffed at me, licked my cheek, put one forepaw flat against my arm until I knuckled her ears and kissed her in return. She gobbled the venison as I fed it to her on the flat of my hand, piece by piece, not just the gristle but soft meaty bits, too.

I knew that twilight would soon come creeping across Echo Mountain, and the night critters with it. Deer, wherever fire had left a clearing. Coyotes, wherever there were deer. Raccoons, masked for plunder. And skunks, hunting for grubs and worms and frogs too young to be quiet on a spring night.

But skunks loved eggs most of all.

And I had one.

A nice big one from Mrs. Anderson’s Rhode Island Reds, who feasted on marigolds and wheat berries and laid hearty eggs for all of us who lived nearby.

I had planned to crack the egg into a notch of a big rotten stump below the cabin, where I’d often seen skunks digging for termites, and then wait for its thick, gamey smell to draw a skunk close while I waited in the trees.

But I looked into Maisie’s eyes, ran my hand down her washboard ribs, thought about the milk she made for her puppies, and fed the egg to her instead.

I cracked it with one hand into my other and held it out while she lapped and lapped until it was gone.

“So you can sleep well,” I whispered into her silky ear. “So you can come out of here soon and see the springtime.”

And I was startled by the swell of happiness and fullness that swept over me as she laid her head against mine.

When I crept into the nest with her puppies, she trembled a little but didn’t protest. Not even when I lay among them and they belly-crawled up to my warmth and butted me with their hard little heads, Quiet the one to find my neck and claim it for his own, curling against my pulse and sighing as if he’d found what he was looking for.