When she got to the VW bus, Mama was already inside. Leni climbed into the backseat. In this cold, the bus took a long time to start and even longer for the windows to defrost. The vehicle was not good in this part of the world; they’d learned that the hard way. Dad put chains on the tires and tossed a gear bag in the well between the front seats. Leni sat in the back, her arms crossed, shivering, intermittently falling asleep and waking up.

On the main road, Dad turned right, toward town, but before the airstrip, he turned left onto the road that led to the abandoned chromium mine. They drove for miles on the hard-packed snow, the road a series of sharp switchbacks that seemed to be cut into the side of the mountain. Deep in the woods, high on the mountain, he parked suddenly, with a jarring stomp on the brakes, and handed them each a headlamp and a shotgun before hefting a pack and opening his door.

Wind and snow and cold swept into the bus. It couldn’t be much above zero up here.

She fit the headlamp over her head, adjusted the strap, and turned on the light. It provided a bright thin beam of light directly ahead.

No stars, no starlight. Snow falling hard and fast. A deep, abiding black full of whispering trees and crouching, hidden predators.

Dad took off in front, trudging through the snow in his snowshoes, forging a path. Leni let Mama go next and then fell in step behind her.

They walked for so long that Leni’s cheeks went from cold to hot to numb. Long enough that her eyelashes and nostril hairs froze, that she felt her own sweat accumulating under her long underwear, itching. At some point, she started to smell, and it made her wonder what else could smell her. It was easy to go from predator to prey out here.

Leni was so tired, just trudging forward, chin down, shoulders hunched, that it barely registered that at some point she began to see her own feet, her boots, her snowshoes. At first there was the gray, ambient glow, light that wasn’t quite real, bleeding up from the snow, and then the dawn, pink as salmon meat, buttery.

Daylight.

Leni finally saw her surroundings. They were on a frozen river. It horrified her to realize she had followed Dad blindly onto its slick surface. What if the ice was too thin? One wrong step and someone could have plunged into the icy water and been swept away.

Beneath her, she heard a cracking sound.