I almost echoed Samuel then. I almost said, “How come Esther isn’t helping with the tallow?” But I didn’t.

Esther did her fair share. It didn’t matter that she liked housework. What mattered was that she did that work, leaving me free to do some of what my father had once done. Yard chores. Gardening. Fishing. And anything involving fire.

My mother didn’t notice the paddle of balsam I carried behind my back. She didn’t notice when I tucked it behind the woodshed. But I knew she would notice when I spread it on my father’s scar. The place where the tree had struck him. Which was as close as I could get to what ailed him.

I knew his wound was on the inside. And I knew that balsam was mostly good for wounds on the outside. But what about the things I didn’t know? What about the possibility that all we had to do to make him well was try harder? Try anything. Try everything. And admit that there were things we didn’t understand.

—

Working with my mother to build the soap-fire, stirring the tallow into the kettle of lye water that hung over the flames, made me sorry for the silence between us, so I broke it.

“I saw a dog on the trail earlier today.”

In the golden firelight, my mother seemed softer, but there was nothing soft about the look she gave me.

“What dog?”

“That’s what I want to know. It was a big one, brindled, with ears that stood up. And it didn’t seem quite tame.”

My mother added a stick to the fire. “You sure it wasn’t a coyote?”

“Dog,” I said. “Come down the trail from above.”

“Maybe someone on the hill has a new one.”

I shook my head. “There wasn’t anything new about this dog. And Mr. Peterson didn’t know him.”

“I wonder if that could be the hag’s mutt. Except it’s never come down from her camp before.”

The hag. I hadn’t heard that name for a long time.

Not since a foggy morning long before, when I had been tempted by how the mountaintop disappeared into the mist, ignored my father’s warnings, and climbed beyond the last of the five families, where there were no trails except what the deer and moose made . . . and smelled a fire up above. I had run back down to warn my father. Wildfire, I had thought. And I hadn’t been entirely mistaken.

When I found him splitting wood and told him there was a fire above, he set his ax aside and said, “It’s all right, Ellie.” He wiped the sweat off his face with his hands. “That’s just the hag up there.”

“‘Just the hag’?” The only hags I knew were in storybooks. Gnarled old creatures who cast spells and ate children for supper. “What hag?”