“Don’t get used to this rain.” He’s yelling, his voice half lost in the wind. “We had two feet of snow last week. Temperature’s already dropping again now.” To the side of the road, Maeve can see the ridge of dirty snow, plowed up and frozen and now melting again. The driver calls over his shoulder, “Can’t predict nothing anymore, not around here. Nothing’s the way it used to be.”

At the gate, there’s a rusty dead bolt that won’t give and he drops her bag again to work at it. Maeve stands to one side, stray hair now plastered to her neck. He’s hammering away at the lock with his fist when she hears another sound. Some kind of call. Something moving in the trees.

Apart from a few childhood weeks at a cabin, she’s unused to the wild. One reason for choosing this retreat, this place. To challenge herself. To shed old fears.

She takes a step toward the tree line, but her foot slips on an icy patch, and she pulls up quickly, saving herself a fall. The bear warning has left her wary, but this doesn’t sound like a bear. It’s a kind of blast. A high gripe.

No: a bleat.

At nine, she spent one long night listening to the screams of a far-off deer, run ragged and chased up against a fence by a pack of coyotes. In the morning, they found its remains, the bones still pink and raw and tangled in the tall pickets. Her mother using it as some kind of biology lesson, nudging Maeve forward, forcing her to look.

Now Maeve pulls up her phone and casts a light as she edges her way into the trees.

For a moment, she’s a child again, her mother’s hand at her back. Then she takes a breath.

It’s a fawn.

She can see it now, its leg caught high in the chain-link fence that extends from the gate, trying to follow its mother over. Not quite big enough yet to clear it at a leap. On the other side of the fence, two adult deer dance quietly back and forth in the rain. With her approach, they freeze. They’re both does, or anyway, deer without antlers. Maeve stops again and lowers her light, not wanting to frighten them further.

Can she get close? Should she? Try to help somehow, free the thing herself?

Maeve digs her fingernails into her palm.

But with its next yell, the fawn gives a good kick and it’s free. It lands, surprised, on the ground and staggers as the two females urge it forward, forcing it to make its joints work. Maeve exhales.

“Hey!”

The driver calling to her from the gravel road. Looking at her like she’s crazy.