LENI MANEUVERED THE SNOW MACHINE down the long white driveway toward the cabin. She kept a light hand on the throttle, moved slowly, aware of every dip and turn.

In the past four years, she had grown like everything grew in Alaska: wild. Her hair hung almost to her waist (she never saw any reason to cut it) and had turned a deep mahogany red. Her pudgy, little-girl face had thinned, her freckles had faded away, left her with a milky complexion that accentuated the aqua of her eyes.

Next month, her father would return to the cabin. For the past few years, Dad had followed the rules laid down by Tom Walker and Large Marge. Grudgingly, and with a bad attitude, he’d done as they “recommended.” After Thanksgiving every year (usually just as his nightmares were starting to increase and when he started muttering to himself and picking fights), he left for the North Slope to work on the pipeline. He made good money, which he sent home every week. Money they’d used to better their life up here. They now had goats and chickens, and an aluminum skiff for fishing, and a garden that thrived inside a domed greenhouse. The VW had been traded in for a reasonably good truck. An old hermit lived in the bus now, up in the woods around McCarthy.

Dad was still a hard man to live with, volatile and moody. He hated Mr. Walker with a dangerous intensity, and the smallest disappointment (or whiskey and Mad Earl) could still set him off, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew Tom Walker and Large Marge were watching him closely.

Mama still said, He’s better, don’t you think? and Leni sometimes believed it. Or maybe they’d adapted to their environment, like the ptarmigans who turned white in the winter.

In the darkening month before he left for the pipeline, and on the winter weekends when he came home to visit, they studied Dad’s moods like scientists, noting the tiniest twitch of an eye that meant his anxiety was rising. Leni learned how to defuse her father’s temper when she could and get out of the way when she couldn’t. Her interference—she had learned the hard way—only made things worse for Mama.

Leni pulled into the white yard, noticed Tom Walker’s big truck parked alongside Large Marge’s International Harvester.

Parking between the chicken coop and the cabin, Leni stepped off the snow machine, her booted foot sinking into the crusty, dirty snow. Down here, the weather was changing fast: warming. It was late March. Soon the icicles would start to drip water from the eaves in a constant patter, and snowmelt in the higher elevations would run downhill and turn their yard to mud.