It seemed embarrassing to want something so much, desperate and unselfconscious. Sometimes Mara felt she should look away.

Later the puppies grew older, and then they were fun. They sucked each other’s ears. They found their teeth and learned to use them. Mara’s mom said the puppies were becoming, and that that was the pleasure of babies, that you could watch them become themselves. Mara wasn’t sure she agreed. She wondered if the rest of the puppies’ lives were a distraction from their truest selves, the selves that were made of need.

That was how she felt now, being hungry: that all of life was secondary to need. Hunger was the sun that the survivors orbited. There were other discomforts: rashes, mosquito bites, the swellings left by plucked-off ticks, the air always too dry or too hot or too cold. But nothing else mattered like food.

Each night, Mara dreamed of the bar she would get from Tom in the morning. Even with that luxury, and with the regular supply of wild greens, she wasn’t eating more than four hundred calories a day.

It didn’t help that Tom seemed increasingly touchy. He complained about the other crew members, whom he deemed unserious, and he obsessed over getting caught. One morning he promised to bring Mara venison sticks, and all that day and night, she imagined the taste. But when she met him in the grove, he gave her a bar instead.

“I thought there might be meat,” she said, trying to act like she didn’t care. It was vulnerable, the need.

“I decided it would make you too strong,” Tom told her. “People might notice.” Mara nodded. It was only later, when she thought more about it, that it struck her as a strange thing to say.

Kyle’s traps were beautiful, intricate, but they didn’t work. He set them around camp, along what he called game trails but Mara suspected were just places water had run in the last rain. He weighted the wooden deadfalls with rocks, and pierced beetles on sharpened twigs for bait. The idea was that critters would crawl under the propped wood, knock the trigger, and get squashed. The problem was that nothing wanted to eat beetles, and also that the ground was soft, so that the one time a creature got pinned, a vole that would hardly be ten calories deep-fried, it simply tunneled its way out. Plus the traps were touchy, so they fell with thuds throughout the day and night, triggered by nothing at all. Each time, Kyle jolted upright, then walked toward the sound with feigned nonchalance, and each time he returned slower, more discouraged than before.

At first Kyle whined as if the animals themselves were at fault for his failure. It took all of Mara’s restraint not to point out that the goal of a trap is to catch prey, and the goal of prey is to live, so it is the trap’s failure and not the animals’ if they don’t get caught or don’t exist. But on the other hand, Kyle would probably have some philosophical argument as to why that wasn’t the case, and then he’d build some weird new trap he’d once gotten a badge for, and she just didn’t care enough to have that conversation. Anyway, as the days passed, he got better at hiding his frustration. Maybe he was humbled in a way that served his character. Mara noticed that he fetched supplies now for Bullfrog, and gathered wood from the forest with resigned diligence, even when no one was around to see.