At eight years old Simon woke before the others. He rose shirtless in the blue light and listened to the stovepipe clink, contracting in the cold. The fire was reduced to a nest of dying coals sheathed in powdery ash inside the barrel stove. He stepped over the others, conscious always of the shifting human architecture that patterned the one-room cabin, a thief stealing a moment of privacy as he moved into the new day.

The plastic-coated window made the weather seem soft, the cold not so deadly, though the pine walls were spangled with frost, and the water bucket next to the door was skimmed with ice.

He lifted the pail, the handle sheathed in the tatters of an old shirt, and poked off the skim ice with his fingers before he tilted it, tinkling softly, into the bucket on the stove. He slid his feet into the oversized boots of his sleeping father and lifted the wooden catch to the door and in one motion he was outside, taking shallow breaths against the sharp sub-zero air, grainy with ice. The half-moon was bright enough to light the snow, casting shadows of the other cabins skyward, broken only by scattered trees. The frozen lake spread out unhurried and full between the jack pine. Simon went without a lantern. There was no wind and the pressure of his booted feet made the freshly blown snow crackle as he stepped past the mounds along the walk to where the high drifts lay unseeded with fur and the guts of snared rabbits. He dipped the bucket full. He stopped when he noticed holes punched in the snow. A jagged line of fist-sized craters zagged past the cabin, crossed the narrow road, leaped the bank and continued on the other side. He set the pail down, held his hands in his armpits and stalked out to where the tracks crossed the road. There, on the packed snow, he saw the perfect arrowhead shape of deer tracks, like marks on fine porcelain.

He stood and wondered down the tracks, knowing that with each step he was moving forward in the life of the deer, moving closer to its present. If he followed it long enough, he would catch up to it and be there at the time of its death, somewhere in the woods, impassable now because of the snow.

He walked back to where the bucket shone like lead in the moonlight and picked it up again. The coldness contained there should have weighed more, should have strained his boy shoulders. But the bucket was light. He packed it with his hand, scooped and packed until it was full, and carried it back inside, a boy holding a bucket of snow to melt on the stove for tea and oatmeal.