“We kept Rudy on the land overnight,” Karen said.

“Isn’t that against the Land Trust rules?” I asked.

“We drew the curtains, is all,” Karen said.

“Do you know where Shane is now?” asked Lily.

I could hear up to the tops of the beech and sycamore. I could hear the flapping of turkey vultures. I knew how to answer. “Somewhere that no one really knows him. Somewhere that he can be new,” I said. We gathered our clothes and headed back up through the forest.

Winter came hard, and tree work ended for the season. Rudy gave me my final pay and said, “I’ll see you in the springtime, if I still have a liver.”

“I probably won’t be here in the springtime,” I said.

“Don’t be so fatalistic,” he said. “Most people make it through.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” he said, starting up his truck. “I’m going to go dormant with whiskey.” I watched him drive away.

I told myself I could leave anytime. But first, I taped an extra layer of plastic in the windows of my camper. I sealed the door of the woodstove with new rope, and I cleaned creosote out of the pipe. I can get a bus ticket as soon as there’s a thaw, I thought. But when the thaw came I didn’t bike to the bus station. I didn’t even bike to the bar. I biked to the public library and checked out some books with pictures of local animals and trees, encyclopedias of primitive skills, accounts from old homesteaders that must have been scrawled when they were hungry or irritated. At night, alone in my camper with a headlamp, I hunched in my sleeping bag and read every page. I took notes in the margins. I never returned those books to the library.

By the end of December, I’d eaten my way through the drakes. I’d boiled the bones. I checked my notes and went outside. I took the .22 my boyfriend had left. I aimed. I shot. I missed. I dug roots from the frozen ground, ate bark, set snares. I began to recognize tracks. I began to follow them.

In January, I heard from the mailman that Lily climbed into the tub and gave birth to a boy, which meant that they would have to leave the Women’s Land Trust and start over someplace new. According to the mailman, boy children were only allowed on the Land Trust until the age of five. The mailman told me that Rudy celebrated the birth by inviting someone at the bar to punch him in the teeth. He spent one warm night in jail, the mailman said. But I didn’t see any of them that winter. I didn’t see anyone, really, unless you count the mailman.