I burned more fuel than I ever had before. Usually we would start in July, chopping wood for the coming winter. It was strange to think about cold when the sun was high and bright, when sweat pasted my hair to the back of my neck, and we drained iced nettle tea in jars. But that was the way of the work: to plan ahead, to be ready. What was coming would eventually come. Chopping a few days a week, a few hours a day, no more, we would have a decent supply of wood by October’s first frosts.

But now I couldn’t chop fast enough. I was neglecting my chores in the grow room. Meanwhile, the woodpile sank low. Mice scuttled into the house to keep warm. The farm was too much for anyone to manage alone, I thought as I shoved my ax into the truck. I needed more wood again.

I could take Lobo’s old truck anywhere, it didn’t matter: into the mud, off the road. We would drive it till it died, and leave it where it lay, probably at the bottom of a hill somewhere or in a timothy field, the rusting red hulk of a whale. There was a cutout through the lower field that led into the trees, which the neighbors used for hunting. I drove the truck there to find wood.

The deer were leaving. We had hunted them, we had hunted them a lot. We had finally, when spring didn’t come this year, panicked, and went after them with a desperation that knew no season.

People had always poached in the woods. But parking the truck and stepping out into the forest, I saw smaller skulls than I had ever seen before. Deer bones jutted out of the leaves. Does, which were good eating.

But maybe some fawns, too.

I didn’t wander too far from the truck; I wouldn’t be able to carry the wood. In the cold weather, in the bulky coveralls and coat I wore all the time now, hair stuffed up in my hat, not much marked me as female. But not much marked me as adult, either. I was small, a head shorter than Lisbeth and most of the women in the holler. I wasn’t as strong as I wanted to be, as Lobo always thought I should be. Runt, he called me. The weakling that came with the real woman he wanted. Good for nothing, he would say. He had told me I had to learn to defend myself. Because of the way I looked, because of who I was, men would come after me.

He was right about some things.