THEY WOKE AT INTERVALS, ALL OF THEM. SHUFFLING AMONG ONE ANOTHER. BUT more often, as time passed, they were there at the same time. Awake. Sitting around the table on cut-log stools. Sitting upright was hard, and Mara grew tired from it, so they propped pillows on the cots and sat there sometimes, too.

“When does he come?” Ashley asked. She meant the hunter who built the cabin. She had washed her hair, too, and she leaned against Mara, her head soft on Mara’s neck. They had both bathed from the bucket, and now they could see the colors of their own skin.

“September,” said Bullfrog. “If not sooner.” He had found hunting and trapping magazines under a box of headlamps, and he shuffled through them, selected one to read. He took his time before speaking. They all moved now in their own time.

“Someone’ll come,” he said. “Find us here. When the season opens. Gun deer season, or even bow.”

That’s when Mara knew what bothered her about the place.

“Nobody’s coming,” she said.

Bullfrog turned the page to an article about doe-in-heat urine.

“It’s not a hunting cabin,” said Mara.

Now it was fitting together. The layers of dust. The seeds. How the cabin was well hidden, but full of supplies. There was no road here, not even a trail. But the cabin had everything they needed. Everything they would need for a long time.

“It’s a getaway,” said Mara. “A bug out.”

“What’s that mean?” said Ashley.

“It means someone made this place for insurance. So he could come here and never get found.” She found herself speaking quickly, saying things she hadn’t known were true until she heard them aloud. “Maybe he built it for his family. His wife and his son. But he stopped coming. He never finished it, or there’d be medicine, a radio . . .”

“But for us,” said Ashley. “What’s that mean for us?”

“It means the world didn’t end,” said Bullfrog, rubbing a hand through his beard. “If it did, we’d have company.”

It meant that if they wanted to be rescued, they had to do it themselves.

And yet it seemed absurd to imagine leaving. Not when they had a place that fed and sheltered them, where they grew stronger rather than weaker by the day. A place that had what they needed. A place where they could live. What would they leave for? Where would they go, back into the wilderness that had killed Kyle?

And so they stayed. Bullfrog set a trapline on the mainland. He came back in the evenings with rabbits and once a spotted skunk, and he stretched the pelts on wooden frames. Mara dug an improvised outhouse in the privacy of the trees. They ate rabbit and green bean stew with salt, and pilot bread for dessert. They played cards and hangman. They found a plastic chess set, and though they only remembered half the rules, they played that, too, in the evenings, taking turns. More often than not, Mara won the chess games. “You’ve got the mind for it,” said Bullfrog, and though she hushed him, she was pleased.