Edith puts the violin under her chin. It feels to her that an unseen hand guides the bow across the strings and plays a tune so infectious that she begins to dance. She dances until she is too hot in her coat. She takes it off and dances herself wild. She stops suddenly. She’s heard something, someone. She puts down the bow and picks up the knife, her mind playing tricks in the dark. She waits and wonders if her playing might have brought the devil to her.

There is no one there. In the cupboard she finds plum brandy among some bottles and she pours a little into a cup. She takes a sip and then another.

This moment of consciousness is the beginning.

For a while, gifts are left for her – a pheasant, a hare, a partridge – and the snow always covers the tracks of whoever brought them. A part of her says Demetrius is beside her and she wonders at how he makes such magic happen. When the gifts cease to arrive she becomes a huntress. She makes a trap and catches a partridge; both she and the bird surprised at the audacity of her actions. Triumphant, she brings it home, kills it and plucks it. She saves the feathers to make a headdress.

She keeps the cabin warm; there are enough logs, enough food, and winter has bedded itself down. Edith wishes she could speak and tell Demetrius she isn’t frightened. She would say, ‘Whatever happens, I will be ready.’

She takes pieces of fur from the chest and makes a pattern for a hat. In the candlelight, close to the stove, she stitches.

Days fall into each other. The routine of life is ruled by the need for warmth and food. Sleep is a blessing. She has no concept of how much of winter has passed and how much is still to come. Some nights, curled up in the bed as the wind and snow whistle into the cabin, she sees herself hidden in a vast forest, part of a spinning world suspended in space. None of it matters and all of it matters. She becomes braver, stronger, growing into the unknown parts of herself that have always been there. It feels, she thinks, like finding your house has more rooms than you knew. She has become a hunter. She becomes a survivor.

The snow is falling and, wearing her hat, she builds a snowman and then a snowwoman to keep him company. In the forest she finds decoration for them until these visitors look almost real, then she silently addresses them as if they were her old friends.

‘When will he be here?’ she asks the snowwoman who wears an antler skull on her head.

‘I saw him when your back was turned,’ the snowwoman replies.

She asks the snowman with his rabbit hat, ‘Does he see me?’

‘He looked in your direction,’ the snowman says.