But now her father was lying on his side in the snow, bleeding from his neck. His ax lay beside him with its blade dark, the handle still in his pale hand. His face was frozen in an off-kilter expression of terror, one beady eye bursting open, the other eyelid pulled closed like an awning on a storefront at the end of the day. The body was completely still. Nadav smelled liquor on the corpse and realized the man had probably fallen on his own ax—or had there been some sort of fight? The wind had blown away any footprints. It must have happened recently, though, Nadav reasoned. The wolves hadn’t found him yet. The pool of the peasant’s blood, soaking the snow, seemed to be spreading and deepening, becoming darker and darker.

The living boy and the dead peasant paused together in the dim starlight. Suddenly and shudderingly, Nadav saw the two of them as if from the outside, as in a photograph, watching himself crouch over the peasant’s bleeding wounds. In the distance he heard a howling. Maybe the wind, or maybe the wolves.

This was bullshit, Nadav decided. He couldn’t keep hunting for Isaac like this. Suddenly he didn’t care about Aunt Sarah or Isaac or any of them. No one was ever going to find Nadav lying in his own blood.

He wasn’t very far along on Isaac’s route to the study house. But after bending over the peasant’s bleeding body lying at his feet, checking once more to be absolutely certain the body wasn’t Isaac’s in disguise, he straightened up, spun around in the snow, and stumbled over the corpse’s arm. Nadav screamed a scream that was eaten alive by the howling winds and began running as fast as he could, faster than he had run before, back toward home, racing down his own invisible tracks.

Isaac could get home by himself, Nadav thought furiously as he pounded through the snow, rehearsing the words he might use to explain it to his family, his sides burning as he gulped the icy air. Isaac would have to be deaf not to have heard the alarm cries. He can run pretty fast, too, you know. Besides, he’s staying later and later with the books these days. Maybe this time he’ll just stay all night. Let the Torah protect him from the wolves.

It took Nadav much less time to make it home. He raced downhill, panting like an animal, thinking of nothing but wolves, huge roving packs of wolves feasting on human flesh. When he saw his own house in the distance, he ran even faster, forgetting all his excuses, bounding toward the door and pounding on it as if he were waiting at the gates of the world to come. At last his mother let him in.