“That’s the rabbit I saw in your mouth, down-mountain, isn’t it?” I whispered to the dog. “You were trying to feed her, weren’t you, boy?”

He watched me without blinking.

The woman looked clean but gray. Whole but broken.

“Ma’am,” I said softly, and then again more loudly.

She didn’t respond.

I touched her hand. I had expected cold. I got hot instead. Too hot. And I was suddenly filled with a terrible sadness and such longing that I felt empty and stricken and poor.

I touched her old-apple face. Even hotter. Even more like the end of a sad tale.

Something was very wrong with her.

There was a small cloth doll tucked up in the crook of her neck. It was made out of rags. The kind my father used to polish things.

I spent a moment looking at that, thinking about that, and then I pulled the blanket slowly down, past the hem of her nightdress, and saw that one of her thighs was swollen and purple but also oddly white and . . . almost moving, though her leg was still.

I leaned closer in the dim light and realized that I was looking at a clot of maggots feasting on her leg.

I dropped the blanket and stepped back, gasping.

Ran out into the yard.

Bent over, my hands on my knees, and swallowed hard, again and again, but I couldn’t shake off the sight of that leg. The smell of it. The idea of her lying alone in that bed while her leg softened with rot and those hungry worms.

When I could, I stood up straight and wiped my face with my hands. Pushed my hair back and away. And went into the cabin again.

Into the terrible, raspy fizz of the flies.

I stood staring at the old woman. At the rabbit on her pillow.

What was I going to do?

I wanted her to wake up, but to what? The sight of her own leg rotting?

The dog lay down next to the bed and put his head on his forepaws, his eyes on me, his brows twitching.

“What am I supposed to do now?” I said to him.

But he didn’t answer.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Fire, I thought. I would make a fire.

There was plenty of dried grass and moss and leaf litter near the cabin, all of which I gathered for tinder, carrying it inside to pile near the cold hearth. I made a nest of the best bits, tucked it between some cooking bricks, and went to work with my knife and flint until the sparks caught.

I had fire in moments.

Carefully, I blew on the small flame until it consumed the nest and easily lit the thin twigs I fed it, then the larger twigs, then a stick and another and another and then a small log until I had a strong fire burning.