I went first, and Cally followed with the alien. This was your basic one-room hunting cabin. The walls were stacks of rounded logs. On each side, there was a small window. The place hadn’t been touched in a while.

“It feels colder in here than it was outside,” said Cally.

“Yeah.” I was already at the woodstove, pulling newspaper and kindling from the pile.

“Is there any heat?” she asked.

“You’re looking at it,” I said, loading the stove with firewood. I’d need to get more. “Matches?” I asked, as if Cally knew where things were. I found them in the kitchen and got the thing going. The cabin was about twenty by thirty. Double bed in one corner, small kitchen in another. Open shelves for pans and shit. Foldout sofa, small table, rocker. Simple, but it got the job done.

“Are there any lights?” Cally asked.

“Hold on,” I said, looking around. I’d been here many times with my uncles or brothers when we’d come to hunt or just come drink on a weekend. I lit a candle and the oil lamp. There was a battery-powered lantern, but the batteries were old.

Cally sat on the rocker and bobbed the baby. The fire caught and roared up nice.

“Will you bring the stuff in?” Cally asked.

I groaned but went along. It wasn’t much. Her duffel bag and backpack and five or six bags from the mini-mart. My backpack. After fifteen minutes, the place was warm enough. Cally got up and changed the baby’s diaper, then wrapped her in blankets and put her on the bed. Both of my older brothers had kids, but they didn’t visit much. Their kids were elementary-age. And bratty.

“Come here,” Cally said.

I walked over and stood by the bed. “What?” I looked at the kid.

“See how helpless and cute she is.”

Her walnut eyes were open again, and she was staring at the ceiling. “Sort of like a baby raccoon.”

“Digger!” Cally punched me, laughing. But it was true.

I went outside to the shed for more firewood. While I was out there, I shoveled the path to the outhouse. When I got back inside, Cally had swept the floor and was wiping down the kitchen and pans. She’d emptied a wooden crate and made it into a baby bed. I put another log in the stove. Cally emptied out her backpack and all the mini-mart bags. She put some stuff on the table and some on the floor. Then she explained it to me. Didn’t ask if I wanted to know. Which I didn’t.

“Okay, we have ten diapers, only nine now, so we’ll need more. One package of wet wipes. This is a bulb syringe.” She squeezed the blue ball. It made a puff of air on my face. “Kinda fun,” she said.

“Okay, okay,” I said, waving it away.