I might have said any number of things to that. Always, at the end of every list, was the one answer I couldn’t give her: You were the one who was supposed to be watching Samuel the day Daddy got hurt.

“And why did you go fishing when we have venison?” she said.

“I’ll dry the fish so it will keep,” I said. “Or we can use it to make broth for Daddy.”

But she just shook her head. “You know Samuel can’t swim. You shouldn’t have taken him with you. And you should have told us.”

“He followed me. I didn’t mean to take him along.”

“And Mother didn’t mean to trade Maisie’s puppies to Mr. Anderson for one of his milk cows.”

“Esther!” my mother snapped. “That’s enough.”

But she was wrong. It was not enough. “You gave the puppies away?” I said in a voice that was far too small for the big thing that rose in my throat.

“Promised them, yes. As soon as they’re old enough,” my mother said. “We need that cow. She’s much younger than Jupiter and Venus. We can’t expect them to give milk forever.”

“But all the puppies?”

“Mr. Anderson is a hunter,” she said, churning so hard now that she was in danger of busting the dasher into kindling. “He’s the main reason we have meat on our plates. He needs new dogs, coming of age behind his old ones.”

“But all of them? You gave him Quiet?”

She didn’t look at me. “We have barely enough food to spare for Maisie. We don’t need another dog. Another cow, we need.”

“But you wouldn’t even have Quiet if it weren’t for Ellie,” Samuel said, close by my side. “She saved him.”

“And she’ll drink the milk we get from this new cow. And the cream. Eat the butter. The cheese.” My mother still wouldn’t look at me. And I had no desire to look at her. Or at Esther, who wasn’t smiling exactly but didn’t look the least bit sorry. “You can visit Quiet anytime you like,” my mother said.

But that was cold comfort. I had seen what became of a dog that lived in a pack. A dog that hunted for a living.

“This isn’t because one more dog will eat too much. Mr. Anderson would have left us one puppy if you’d asked. This is to punish me.” My voice was even harder than hers. “You can’t make me give him up.”

“We all give up things we love,” my mother said. “Whether we want to or not.”

I thought of the things she’d lost when we’d left our town life. I thought about my father, slowly thinning away. The sight of his hideous sores. And I thought about Quiet as he had struggled in that water, waking.