In February, after not speaking one word out loud for two weeks, I wrote a letter to my aunt. I wrote that I’d be home soon. I crossed it out. I wrote it again. I meant to mail it, but I didn’t have stamps. Then the ducks began to lay small misshapen eggs. They tasted like wet feathers but still I wanted more. I was hungry. My aim with the .22 improved. Following shadowy diagrams, I took apart and cleaned small animals. Mostly what I could catch were raccoons and possums. One tasted much like the other.

By March, I was so lonely I considered eating snow until it drowned me. One cold day, I was looking a raccoon in the eye. Its eye was dead and I was skinning it, and I knew I should go visit Karen and Lily.

Those women had told me that my boyfriend had not left me, that he’d simply left, and I had stayed. I’d made it through the winter on the strength of it. You could say I was proud of myself. You could say, in fact, that I wasn’t myself, but someone new, someone newly ambitious, and if crazed, if disturbed, if hungry and desperate, then so much the better. I gave up pretending I was going back to Seattle. But I’d had enough of being alone. I looked at the dull raccoon eye and decided to remind Lily and Karen that I had twenty acres. There was a place for them and their boy if they wanted to try it.

2

LILY

Some people take to their life with joy, but not Helen. Instead, she was passionate. That’s how it looked to me. The winter had changed her, either back into what she was before Shane, before I’d known her, or into someone else again. She’d proved she could handle working for Rudy. She’d proved she could slaughter drakes. She’d proved she could make it on that piece of land on her own. Finally, when winter was nearly over, she set her sights on us.