The Great Alone

Waited.

Then pulled the trigger.

The sheep didn’t make a sound. A perfect shot, right on target. No suffering. The sheep crashed to its knees, crumpled, slid down the rock face, and came to a stop at a snowy ledge.

She trudged through the snow toward her kill. She wanted to field-dress the animal and get the meat in her pack as quickly as possible. This was technically an illegal kill—the hunting season for sheep was in the fall—but an empty freezer was an empty freezer. She guessed that the animal would dress out at about one hundred pounds. It would be a long trek back to the snow machine, carrying all that weight.

* * *

LENI MANEUVERED THE SNOW MACHINE down the long white driveway toward the cabin. She kept a light hand on the throttle, moved slowly, aware of every dip and turn.

In the past four years, she had grown like everything grew in Alaska: wild. Her hair hung almost to her waist (she never saw any reason to cut it) and had turned a deep mahogany red. Her pudgy, little-girl face had thinned, her freckles had faded away, left her with a milky complexion that accentuated the aqua of her eyes.

Next month, her father would return to the cabin. For the past few years, Dad had followed the rules laid down by Tom Walker and Large Marge. Grudgingly, and with a bad attitude, he’d done as they “recommended.” After Thanksgiving every year (usually just as his nightmares were starting to increase and when he started muttering to himself and picking fights), he left for the North Slope to work on the pipeline. He made good money, which he sent home every week. Money they’d used to better their life up here. They now had goats and chickens, and an aluminum skiff for fishing, and a garden that thrived inside a domed greenhouse. The VW had been traded in for a reasonably good truck. An old hermit lived in the bus now, up in the woods around McCarthy.

Dad was still a hard man to live with, volatile and moody. He hated Mr. Walker with a dangerous intensity, and the smallest disappointment (or whiskey and Mad Earl) could still set him off, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew Tom Walker and Large Marge were watching him closely.

Mama still said, He’s better, don’t you think? and Leni sometimes believed it. Or maybe they’d adapted to their environment, like the ptarmigans who turned white in the winter.

In the darkening month before he left for the pipeline, and on the winter weekends when he came home to visit, they studied Dad’s moods like scientists, noting the tiniest twitch of an eye that meant his anxiety was rising. Leni learned how to defuse her father’s temper when she could and get out of the way when she couldn’t. Her interference—she had learned the hard way—only made things worse for Mama.

Leni pulled into the white yard, noticed Tom Walker’s big truck parked alongside Large Marge’s International Harvester.

Parking between the chicken coop and the cabin, Leni stepped off the snow machine, her booted foot sinking into the crusty, dirty snow. Down here, the weather was changing fast: warming. It was late March. Soon the icicles would start to drip water from the eaves in a constant patter, and snowmelt in the higher elevations would run downhill and turn their yard to mud.

She untied the field-dressed carcass from the red plastic sled that the snow machine towed. Hefting the bloody, white-bagged meat over her shoulder, she trudged past the animals—clucking, bleating at her arrival—and went up the now-solid stairs and into the cabin.

Warmth and light immediately enfolded her. Her breath, which she’d seen only seconds before, disappeared. She heard the hum of the generator, which powered the lights. The little black woodstove—the one that had always been here—pumped out heat.

Music blared from a big portable radio on the new dining room table. Some disco song by the Bee Gees was cranked up. The cabin smelled of baking bread and roasting meat.

You could always tell when Dad was gone. Everything was easier and more relaxed in his absence.

Large Marge and Mr. Walker sat at the big rectangular dining table Dad had made last summer, playing cards.

“Hey, Leni. Make sure they’re not cheating,” Mama yelled from the kitchen alcove, which had been redesigned piecemeal over the years—a propane oven had been hauled in, as well as a refrigerator. Mr. Walker had tiled the counter and put in a better dry sink. There was still no running water and no bathroom in the cabin. Large Marge had built a rack for the dishes they bought when they went to the Salvation Army in Homer.

“Oh, they’re cheating,” Leni said, smiling.

“Not me,” Large Marge said, popping a chunk of reindeer sausage in her mouth. “I don’t need to cheat to beat these two. Come on over, Leni. Give me a run for my money.”

Chuckling, Mr. Walker got up, his chair screeching across the plank floor. “Looks like someone bagged a sheep.” He pulled a big white plastic sheet out from underneath the sink and spread it out on the floor.

Leni thumped her load down onto the plastic and knelt beside it. “I did,” she said. “Up by Porter Ridge.” She opened the bag and pulled out the field-dressed carcass.

Mr. Walker sharpened an ulu, handed it to her.

Leni set about her task of cutting the haunch into steaks and roasts and tearing away the silvery skeins from the meat. Once it had seemed weird to butcher meat in the house, on a sheet of plastic. No more. This was life in the winter months.

Mama came out of the kitchen, smiling. In the winter, it seemed, she was always smiling. She had bloomed here in Alaska, just as Leni had. Ironically, they both felt safest in the winters, when the world was at its smallest and most dangerous. With Dad gone, they could breathe easily. They were the same height now, she and Leni. Their protein-heavy diet had made them both as lean and lithe as ballerinas.

Mama took her place at the table and said, “I’m shooting the moon this time. Just letting you get your strategy set.”

“All the way?” Mr. Walker said. “Or just most of the way, like usual?”

Mama laughed. “You’ll eat those words, Tom.” She started dealing.

Leni did some pretending in the winter, just as she did in the summer. Like now, she pretended not to notice how Mama and Mr. Walker looked at each other, how careful they were never to actually touch each other. How Mama sometimes sighed when she mentioned his name.