It was exhausting to worry all the time, to study Dad’s every movement and the tone of his voice.

It had obviously worn Mama down. Anxiety had pulled the light from her eyes and the glow from her skin. Or maybe the pallor came from living like mushrooms.

On an especially cold late November day, Leni woke to the sound of screaming. Something crashed to the floor.

She knew instantly what was happening. Her dad had had a nightmare. His third one this week.

She crawled out of her sleeping bag and went to the edge of the loft, peering down. Mama stood by the beaded door of their bedroom, holding a lantern high. In its glow, she looked scared, her hair a mess, wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt. The woodstove was a dot of orange in the dark.

Dad was like an untamed animal, shoving, tearing, snarling, saying words she couldn’t understand … then he was wrenching open boxes, looking for something. Mama approached him cautiously, laid a hand on his back. He shoved her aside so hard she cracked into the log wall, cried out.

Dad stopped, jerked upright. His nostrils flared. He was flexing and unflexing his right hand. When he saw Mama, everything changed. His shoulders rounded, his head hung in shame. “Jesus, Cora,” he whispered brokenly. “I’m sorry. I … didn’t know where I was.”

“I know,” she said, her eyes glistening with tears.

He went to her, enfolded her in his arms, held her. They sank to their knees together, foreheads touching. Leni could hear them talking but couldn’t make out the words.

She returned to her sleeping bag and tried to go back to sleep.

* * *

“LENI! GET UP. We’re going hunting. I’ve got to get out of the g-damn house.”

With a sigh, she dressed in the darkness. In the first months of this Alaskan winter, she had learned to live like one of those phosphorescent invertebrates that roamed the sea floor, their lives untouched by any light or color except that which they generated themselves.

In the living room, the woodstove offered light through a narrow window in the black metal door. She could make out the silhouettes of her parents standing beside it, could hear their breathing. Coffee gurgled in a metal pot on top of the stove, puffed its welcoming scent into the darkness.

Dad lit a lantern, held it up. In its orange glow, he looked haggard, tightly wound. A tic played at the corner of his right eye. “You guys ready?”

Mama looked exhausted. Dressed in a huge parka and insulated pants, she looked too fragile for the weather, and too tired to hike for much of a distance. In a week of rising nightmares and middle-of-the-night screaming, she wasn’t sleeping well.

“Sure,” Mama said. “I love to hunt at six A.M. on a Sunday morning.”

Leni went to the hooks on the wall, grabbed the gray parka and insulated pants she’d found at the Salvation Army in Homer last month, and the secondhand bunny boots Matthew had given her. She pulled down-filled gloves out of her parka pockets.

“Good,” Dad said. “Let’s go.”

This predawn world was hushed. There was no wind, no cracking branches, just the endless sifting downward of snow, the white accumulating everywhere. Leni trudged through the snow toward the animal pens. The goats stood huddled together, bleating at her arrival, bumping into each other. She tossed them a flake of hay and then fed the chickens and broke the ice on their water troughs.

When she got to the VW bus, Mama was already inside. Leni climbed into the backseat. In this cold, the bus took a long time to start and even longer for the windows to defrost. The vehicle was not good in this part of the world; they’d learned that the hard way. Dad put chains on the tires and tossed a gear bag in the well between the front seats. Leni sat in the back, her arms crossed, shivering, intermittently falling asleep and waking up.

On the main road, Dad turned right, toward town, but before the airstrip, he turned left onto the road that led to the abandoned chromium mine. They drove for miles on the hard-packed snow, the road a series of sharp switchbacks that seemed to be cut into the side of the mountain. Deep in the woods, high on the mountain, he parked suddenly, with a jarring stomp on the brakes, and handed them each a headlamp and a shotgun before hefting a pack and opening his door.

Wind and snow and cold swept into the bus. It couldn’t be much above zero up here.

She fit the headlamp over her head, adjusted the strap, and turned on the light. It provided a bright thin beam of light directly ahead.

No stars, no starlight. Snow falling hard and fast. A deep, abiding black full of whispering trees and crouching, hidden predators.

Dad took off in front, trudging through the snow in his snowshoes, forging a path. Leni let Mama go next and then fell in step behind her.

They walked for so long that Leni’s cheeks went from cold to hot to numb. Long enough that her eyelashes and nostril hairs froze, that she felt her own sweat accumulating under her long underwear, itching. At some point, she started to smell, and it made her wonder what else could smell her. It was easy to go from predator to prey out here.

Leni was so tired, just trudging forward, chin down, shoulders hunched, that it barely registered that at some point she began to see her own feet, her boots, her snowshoes. At first there was the gray, ambient glow, light that wasn’t quite real, bleeding up from the snow, and then the dawn, pink as salmon meat, buttery.

Daylight.

Leni finally saw her surroundings. They were on a frozen river. It horrified her to realize she had followed Dad blindly onto its slick surface. What if the ice was too thin? One wrong step and someone could have plunged into the icy water and been swept away.

Beneath her, she heard a cracking sound.

Dad walked confidently forward, seemingly unconcerned about the ice beneath his feet. On the other shore, he cut a path through stubby, snow-coated brush, stared down, tilted his head as if he were listening. His face above the snowy beard was red with cold. She knew he was following sign—droppings, tracks. Snowshoe hares did most of their feeding and movement at dawn and dusk.

He stopped suddenly. “There’s a hare over there,” he said to Leni. “At the edge of the trees.”

Leni looked in the direction he pointed. Everything was white, even the sky. Shapes were difficult to distinguish in this white-on-white world.

Then, movement: a plump white hare hopped forward.

“Yeah,” she said. “I see it.”

“Okay, Leni. This is your hunt. Breathe. Relax. Wait for the shot,” Dad said.