I had missed lunch, too. Had had none of the rabbit or the fish I’d fed to Cate and Captan. What was left, I’d left for them. Already today I had gone to the Petersons’ for the venison, and then fishing, climbed the mountain up and down, and searched for Samuel high and low—all with nothing but a little porridge in my belly.

“You gave away your lunch,” Esther said. “And your supper, as well.”

My mother looked at me over her shoulder. I could see her regret, but something else, too. The same thing I saw on her face when any wild thing came too close to the cabin. “You’ll spend the rest of the day doing chores, and you’ll sleep in the woodshed with Maisie. Maybe with a snake of your own.”

But she handed me a small bundle as I went out the door. A dried apple and a biscuit, folded up in a scrap of cloth. And a dish of cold venison scraps that I knew were for Maisie.

I felt a little better when she didn’t explain that the meat was for the dog.

But I didn’t say anything, either, as I left. My throat was too tight. And there was nothing to say that they should not have already known.

—

As it turned out, my punishment was exactly what I needed: the freedom to spend the rest of the afternoon collecting honey, and taking it to the top of the mountain, and looking for new ways to help my father come back to us.

I was sure that my mother had other chores in mind, but none of them was as important as those.

I took the venison to Maisie, fed her and gave her a drink, ate my own little lunch, and fetched the pack I’d hidden there. Then I made sure my flint was in my pocket and examined the jar with the soupy brew I’d made from river water and dew and balsam . . . and more than that.

The cold water I had thrown on my father had not been mine. It had belonged to the well, and before that the deep spring that fed the well, and before that the rain. I had come upon it by chance and seen in it a way to begin.

The snake had not been mine. It had been its own, entirely. A wild thing that came into our cabin without intending to serve any purpose at all. I had come upon it by chance, too, and seen in it a way forward.

But this brew: This was made from the river and cool night air drenching the grass in dew and the sap from an old, forgiving tree. But something of mine, too: my tears, which came from the memory of my father, hurt. And my own hurt, too.