Prologue #3
Since last spring when the man had died, she thought that she ought to find her way back to the other life she sometimes remembered. Not today, and probably not tomorrow, but someday, when the work eased or the weather turned, or when some small, remembered thing told her where to go.
And yet, she went no farther into the forest than the man had gone, and no farther out of it than he ever had either.
The paths she walked were the paths he had made first, pressed into the ground by years of use and return.
Beyond them lay more trees, more land, more world, but she wasn’t brave enough to explore. Everything that was familiar was safe.
She checked the eastern line first. One snare lay empty, sprung by nothing. Another held a rabbit, already cold. She reset the wire before lifting the body free, wiping her hands on the grass instead of her pants.
At the stream she broke the skin of ice with a stone and filled the jug, then knelt and rinsed her hands and wrists.
Later, she would return and wash her clothes, working them against the small rocks as she did once every week or so, when smoke was not the only thing she smelled in her garments.
She did this more often in summer when the work left more sweat in the cloth.
She dreaded laundry in the winter, but never delayed or ignored the task, her patterns constant as the man’s had been.
The rabbit was skinned on the low table outside.
She worked cleanly, setting aside what would be used later and hanging the rest beneath the eaves.
A strip of meat went into the pot with dried roots and a handful of greens she’d foraged on her route.
She let it boil for a long time, because tough meat did better that way, then set it back to simmer while she finished her other work.
She ate standing, the bowl cradled in one hand, her back to the wall.
She missed bread most on mornings like this, when the air was cold and her hands were slow to warm.
Bread only came in summer, when the small patch of grain behind the house could be cut and threshed and ground.
The man had shown her how to save seed, and she had done it carefully, year after year.
This spring, she meant to break more ground and make the plot wider, so that there was more grain and she could make bread longer into the winter months.
When she finished, she rinsed the bowl and set it upside down to dry.
The middle of the day was for wood. She chose fallen branches rather than cutting live growth, tested each piece before splitting it, and stacked the pile so it would not shift when snow came again.
When her shoulders began to ache, she carried the smaller pieces inside and set them near the hearth.
When the light changed, she mended a tear in her sleeve with a strip of darker cloth that had once been something else. The bone needle slid easily through the worn fabric. She tied the knot small and bit off the end.
She checked the door, the latch, and the shelf where the salt was kept. She'd never been told and had never learned where the salt had come from and feared using up the small supply until she could figure out how to replenish it.
Before evening, she walked as far as the last familiar tree and no farther, looking out between the trunks. The forest beyond was possibly no different than the forest she knew, but she went no further.
By the time she returned, the air had cooled again.
She banked the fire for the night and hung the kettle where it would not tip.
She brought in the clothes she’d washed and laid them near the warmth to finish drying.
She’d since taken ownership of the man’s bed, many months after he was gone, and laid out the furs neatly as he’d done, and had added her old coat-pillow at the head.
She sat for a while after that, hands resting on her knees, listening for the sounds that told her all was as it should be. When she lay down, the bare firelight cast the front of her in shades of gold.
***
She first noticed the dog near the eastern line, along the path she took toward the rising sun, where the ground dipped and the brush grew thick enough to hide more than it showed.
At first, and from a distance, he was small enough to be mistaken for something else—a scrap of moving fur, any other forest creature that she sometimes had to fight with for her food.
He stood where one of her snares had been, his head lowered, his ribs showing through a coat that was thin and uneven.
She would remember later that there had been something in the way he held himself that made her stop and look twice.
She waited, squinting. It wasn’t a wolf pup. She and the man had seen those before. The man had warned her about the wolves, that they were to be avoided, all wolves, big and small.
This was clearly a dog—a very young, lanky dog.
When the dog didn’t run, she took another step, and then another, watching the way his weight shifted as if he were ready to bolt.
She made a small motion with her hand and told him to go, her voice not nearly as firm as it should have been in an effort to protect her next meal.
He looked at her hand, then at her face, then at the empty place in the snare where possibly a rabbit had been, but now only scattered fur remained, and finally he slipped back into the brush and made no more noise than soft wind moving through bare trees.
Frowning, she reset the snare and moved on.
Two days later, she saw the dog again, this time closer to the house, sitting where the trees thinned as if he sniffed her out or had followed her, and now watched her.
She didn’t think he was fully grown yet, but he seemed to move with some confidence, and she could see that his legs were going to be very long even when the rest of him caught up.
She threw a stone near him to advise that this space was hers and not his, and he moved away at once, though not far enough to be gone.
For weeks he came and went, sometimes seen and sometimes only guessed at by the sound of furtive tracking in her wake.
Over that time he began to change in small, steady ways.
His ribs showed less. His coat grew coarser and darker, losing the soft look of a puppy’s fur.
His body almost caught up to the size of his legs, though not entirely, just enough so that he didn’t appear to be in danger of toppling over.
More than once, she found a snare sprung and empty, the wire twisted where something had worked at it, and she fixed it without looking around, though she knew well enough what had taken her food.
One morning, when she lifted a rabbit free and felt the familiar weight of it in her hands, she became aware of the dog standing not ten paces away, his tail down, his eyes fixed on the body she held.
Considering the three other rabbits in her pouch, she sighed and tossed the one in her hand toward him. He didn’t lunge forward for it, but waited and watched her, as if testing to be sure it was not a trick, and then he stepped forward, took it, and was gone.
After that, he followed her more openly, though never close enough to be in the way.
He seemed to keep his distance while she moved through the forest but came closer day by day when she was near the house, and he never again took from her traps.
At night, she began to hear him outside the house, not whining or barking, just there.
Always with a mind that it was so much easier to provide food for one than two—as the man might have thought—she didn’t open the door.
But then, neither did she send him away. Come morning, he was always gone.
The first snow came early that year. She woke to air thick with cold and found the dog’s familiar tracks at the door, pressed deep and close together, as if he had turned in a small circle and settled there, but he, as usual, was gone.
She stood for a long moment with her hand on the latch and then went about her day.
That night, wind came along with the snow.
She lay awake, listening to the way it found every loose place in the walls, every thin seam in the roof.
At some point, she heard the dog settle in against the outside of the door before there was complete silence again, except for the wind.
She chewed her lip for several minutes before she rose and put on her boots and opened the door.
He was there, curled tight against the wall, his back to the wind, his nose tucked into his tail. He looked up when the small golden light reached him but otherwise did not move.
She stood in the doorway with the cold pouring in around her ankles and weighed the pros and cons before she stepped aside, holding open the door.
He stood, stiffly it seemed, but didn’t rush past her.
He gave himself a good shake, sending a bit of snow flying, and entered with enough hesitation that she urged him along by moving the door, wanting to shut out the cold now.
He circled the room once, and it seemed he was being careful not to touch anything, before he watched her climb back into bed, and then lay down between her and the fire.
He never spent a night outside again after that.