I know it looked bad. The snow had begun. It was late afternoon. I stirred a pot of nettle stew over the campfire, hunched into Karen’s overcoat against the wind and the thickening flakes. The dice were against us that week, so I worked through our stores. I added dried nettles by the handful, doused the stew with soy sauce for flavor, a cup of acorn flour for texture, a half cup of lentils for protein. My ingredients were lined up on a cinder block, and I held my coat open to shield them from the weather. I know it looked bad. We should have strung a tarp.

The dice were against us, but inside the crammed house, Helen leaned against a heap of fiberglass insulation, processing a roadkill deer by candlelight. She’d made it down to the guts, which were folded into a bloody soup in a five-gallon bucket at her feet. She meant to make thread from the sinew, pudding in the stomach sack, she meant to boil the kidneys in milk when we could get some. On the range, the deer’s head simmered in the large canning pot. She meant to render the fat and save the skull. The whole mess reeked, swampy, warm iron, fat, shit, and wax, steaming up the windows.

After school, Perley had bolted straight out into the snowflakes. He wanted to check on some secret places he knew, wanted to see if the creek was frozen, barely allowed me to yank a blaze-orange hat over his ears. I’d told him to stay within whooping distance, but I’ll admit that I hadn’t whooped in a while. I’ll admit that if my boy had fallen down a sinkhole, say, or met a rabid animal, or met a pervert wandering in the snowy forest, I might not have known. Dignity of risk. That’s what Karen called it. I know it looked bad.

It might have looked worse if Karen had been home to get angry, but she had gone to answer a nickel ad for free scrap wood. It certainly would have looked worse if Rudy had been there to swagger and brag, but he was binge-drinking on the coal company land. Helen, Perley, and I were the only ones on the land that dark afternoon, and we fucked it up properly all on our own.