The Great Alone

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.

She lifted her gun. She’d been target-shooting for months, so she knew what to do. She breathed in and out instead of holding her breath; she focused on the hare, aimed. She waited. The world fell away, became simple. There was just her and the hare, predator and prey, connected.

She squeezed the trigger.

It all seemed to happen simultaneously: the shot, the hit, the kill, the hare slumping sideways.

A good clean shot.

“Excellent,” Dad said.

Leni slung her shotgun over her shoulder and the three of them set off single file for the tree line and Leni’s kill.

When they reached the hare, Leni stared down at it, the soft white body sprayed with blood, lying in a pool of it.

She’d killed something. Fed her family for another night.

Killed something. Stopped a life.

She didn’t know how to feel about it, or maybe she just felt two conflicting emotions at the same time—proud and sad. In truth, she almost wanted to cry. But she was Alaskan now, this was her life. Without hunting, there was no food on the table. And nothing would go to waste. The fur would be made into a hat; the bones would make a soup stock. Tonight Mama would fry the meat in home-churned butter made from goat’s milk and season it with onions and garlic. They might even splurge and add a few potatoes.

Her dad knelt in the snow. She saw the shaking of his hands and could tell by the grim set to his mouth that he had a headache as he turned the dead hare onto its back.

He placed his blade at the tail and cut upward, through the skin and bone, in a single, sweeping cut. At the hare’s breastbone, he slowed, positioned one bloody finger under the knife blade, and proceeded cautiously to avoid accidentally cutting any organs. He opened the animal, reached in and pulled out the entrails, which he left in a steaming red-pink pile on the snow.

He picked out the small, plump heart and held it up to Leni. Blood leaked between his fingers. “You’re the hunter. Eat the heart.”

“Ernt, please,” Mama said, “we’re not savages.”

“That’s exactly what we are,” he said in a voice as cold as the wind at their back. “Eat it.”

Leni’s gaze cut to Mama, who looked as horrified as Leni felt.