Chapter 11

June 27, 1997 · Gone Twenty-Two Hours

GEM HAD BEEN IN HER STATE OF EVERDREAMsince Luce was eight, just before they moved to the Red Grove, and it had, in the way loss does, locked an oversimplified, glorified, and therefore treacherous version of who Gem was into all of their lives. Gem never raised her voice, Luce would say when Gloria got mad. Gem loved history documentaries, Roo was fond of saying, and though nobody knew this to be true of Gem, nobody corrected him.

She became a kind of collective story they told together about someone more interesting, funnier, smarter than the rest of them, and her unchanging preferences—french fries dipped in vinegar, bright wrist bangles from India—gave them a fixed point against which their own fickle, changing selves were always measured. But their storytelling had its own waves, and every few months their collective adoration would reach a breaking point for Gloria, and after one of her children made a claim about something—Gem's favorite ice-cream flavor being mint chip or the unrivaled elegance of her hands—Gloria would snap. You didn't know her at all, she would hiss, you were a little kid, and besides, she wasn't so perfect. And there would be silence for a few weeks, after which they all grew independently lonely from the missing presence of their shared, perfect fourth unit, and slowly, carefully, the collective mythmaking would begin again.

As Luce got older, she began to understand these moments of outburst from her mother as something quite simple: jealousy. Here was a near-exact replica of herself, but one unable to make mistakes, adored and looked after by her children and community, kissed, tucked in, whispered to, sighed over, while she, Gloria, had to trudge through the muck of actually raising these children and caring for her sister and aging and paying the bills, all the while living in the Red Grove for, and because of, her sister.

Luce had gone quickly home after leaving Una's house, but her mother still was not there.

She leaned in close to Gem and wondered, not for the first time, whether it was possible that she had a sliver of her mom's abilities. Nothing had ever worked when she'd tried in the past, but she'd always given up so fast, frustrated, telling herself she didn't want to be like that anyway. But this was different. She focused all her energy on Gem, thinking, Please, can you help me? Was there anything Gem could tell her about where her mother had gone? She leaned in closer, straining. And then Gem made a tiny sound. She didn't make sounds. It came from the far back of her throat, very faint, not a hum exactly, but something more like a buzz. Yes, yes, Luce thought, where is my mom, and also, please—where are you? She felt like a little lost child in a storybook. But she was not the one who was lost.

Gem was silent. But there was the buzz again, though it was not coming from her. It was louder, a buzz out in the hallway. Luce followed the buzz into her bedroom. Something in there had changed. Something about the window at the far side of the room. It was the same size, same rectangular shape, a single rattly pane of glass behind the blue sarong hanging as a curtain, so she couldn't see the window, not exactly. What was different? It seemed farther away, somehow. And then there it was, that dim buzzing. It wasn't a chainsaw in the hands of a madman. She bit her lip. This was the Red Grove. No need to be scared.

But something was happening. On either side, the walls relinquished their pale, stained plaster hues, darkening into a shadowed tunnel to the window. The floor was shadow, her own hands just a trace of blackness, and she was walking closer to the buzzing. She was on some sort of conveyer belt toward the window, a few steps away even though she didn't feel like she was walking toward it, no, she wasn't, yet she kept getting closer. It had changed, was changing. She shouldn't look. She would not like to know what was on the other side of the blue sarong. The buzzing was in her head.

Or, no—the buzzing was an actual sound. She was nearly at the window, but the buzzing—yes, some toy Roo had left in here, its wheels spinning on and on. She was scaring herself. She spun around and scanned the room. There were no toys. No bees. The buzzing carried on, and yes, she was afraid, yes.

Back to the window. She didn't take a step, yet there she was, right in front of it, there was her arm, its skin and little hairs all standing straight up as her arm moved away from her body, as it reached for the fabric. She pulled it aside.

Outside the window, at eye level, was a black mass of flies. They hovered together in a loose hoard, though not like the clump she'd seen once around a dead deer up on the ridge. Then, the deer had been partially eaten by some animal, and the flies landed on the carcass, crawled across the pink and gray rotting flesh, flew, landed again.

Not these flies. These flies—a hundred or more, hundreds?—hovered, wings beating too fast to see, in one massive clump, all facing the window. Like they were looking at her. Spying. The buzz of their collective hovering was a constant, and that's when the first sharp sound came. A plunk, like hail falling on metal. One of the flies flew straight into the window. It was against nature—a kind of suicide. But then another followed. And another. They flew straight, hard, wild, right into the window.

Thwack. Straight into the glass.

Thwack.

Luce's hand was holding the fabric open. She could feel her pulse in that hand, her mad heart trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Thwack. She closed her eyes a moment. Thwack, like rain dripping into a bucket of water. Her eyes snapped open again. What was she doing? She watched a single black fly careen its body, fast, unambiguously, straight into the window.

Stunned or dead, she couldn't tell which, it fell to the windowsill below, onto what Luce first thought was a patch of dark mold on the painted wood but realized it was, instead, a heap of flies. What could cause this? Think. Think.

Flies were magnetized by waste, a pile of excretion, an animal deteriorating. They were creatures bent toward death. She became more aware of the hair standing straight up on her neck and down her arms; they were seeking something dead. Very slowly, she turned around and faced the room behind her. Pressure on her chest. Was there something rotting inside the house that the flies could sense? She could not help it—her brain flashed to her mother's corpse, hidden, rotting, inside their house. But no. Her car was gone. She had left. There was no chance, not even a sliver, that it was her mother. There was no way she was in here somewhere, calling the flies as some sort of flourish on a performance they couldn't understand, no, and what a thought, what a terrible thought.

And anyway, how could flies smell something through the window? What, then? Be rational. Most likely, an animal had died under the house, a raccoon or rat or possum. Probably that was drawing the flies.

She repeated it again. No reason to be afraid.

They wouldn't bore through the glass, hurting her as she might have led to her own mother's hurt. Her heart inside her mouth, pulsing her tongue. What she needed to do was let go of the blue fabric in her hand, let it fall across the window so that she could turn away, so that she could decide what she believed in and what she didn't, but her hand held tight, thunk, thwack, and she watched her arm, the free one dangling to her side, move toward the window latch. Was she moving it? Its fingers were taut and shaking and moving closer to the latch, crab-clawed. She shouldn't open the window. Her fingers were on the brass then, pulling up against the window's hardware.

With a rush, the flies flew inside. Dozens, hundreds, rushing past her in a buzzing mass. From outside, a draft of cooler air, the waft of roses, Where is my mother? And then, the buzzing gone, there she was—her mother's voice.

Low and forceful, her mother's voice, a laugh breaking through and emanating from the trees, her mother's voice as clear as cool spring water but seeming to come from the trunk of each tree, from the wounds, the ferns below, from the cascading needles above—her voice the forest's very air.

Luce had to follow the voice, quickly—no time to run through and around the house. She climbed out the window, dropping to the ground among the thick poison oak and ferns. Yes, it was her mother's voice, but not her voice right now, a younger voice, as if time had taken her backward and she was stuck in the trees. Luce closed her eyes and breathed in. Was this a thing that was really happening? When she turned to face the house, her mother's voice got louder. That's what it was. The window to her mother's office was open.

"Mom?" she said, peering inside. She was certain the office's door was locked. She'd tested. But here was the office, off-limits, forbidden, and yet. She listened for the office itself to clatter, for alarms to sound or books to fall off their shelves. Stillness. Her mother's voice, singing.

Something moved past her—a breeze? Or the warm air escaping from the house into the evening? She was close to the white-gray fuzz of the house's shingles. She pressed one hand against them, steadying herself. A hornet floated in front of her a moment, then dove away. She leaned closer still to the window, her face inches from the opening, to feel that wind, to see inside, and then she jumped straight into the air when she heard the sound of her name.

"What are you doing?" Roo yelled, leaning out of her bedroom window.

"Nothing," Luce said quickly. She spun toward him, dropping her arms. "I heard—"

"You're breaking in."

"I'm not."

"I'm telling."

"Roo. She's been gone two days." They looked at each other, not speaking the specifics of worry. The most she'd ever left for was a few hours. "She left the window open. It's weird. She's so careful to lock it."

"Mamma?" Roo was looking around, his eyes flashing between trees and sky and dirt. "I hear her."

"It's coming from the office. I'm going in," Luce said.

Roo was chewing on his lip, his hair nearly covering his eyes. "Don't do it, Luce," he said without conviction. Their mother's voice floated around them like golden pollen from the trees, moving and also everywhere.

"Stay inside," Luce said. "I'll be right there." He nodded, unsure, but retreated into the room.

She climbed into the office. Inside was an ordinary room. And then, Gloria's voice. She was singing—"Who's afraid of the big bad wolf, big bad wolf, big bad wolf?" The sound was coming from a table filled with electronic equipment—radios, a VCR, a small TV covered with fabric, a tape recorder, a microphone, headsets, and a few big black boxes with switches and outputs and flashing lights. Luce flipped a few switches, twisted a dial, readied for everything to turn on, spark, call out, but only one sound carried on. "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf, Tra la la la la." Through the orange fabric, light glowed from the TV. She yanked off the cover, and on the screen, close up, was her mother, elbows locked in unison with Gem. "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf," they sang together, their faces, nearly identical, filling up the screen. Luce couldn't tell who was who. They were laughing as they sang, though their faces weren't clear. The footage was black-and-white, grainy, but something in the way they moved together, little gestures of their chins, fingers coming into the frame, the ticktock of their heads back and forth as they sang, all of it was completely and absolutely in unison.

It was possible, Luce thought, that this video had been playing in a loop since their mother was last in the office. Or it was also possible, she thought, not knowing from where this thought arrived, that something had just turned it on.

Their song ended. The two small faces, smiling into the camera, turned to each other then and, though it was hard to tell in the blurred old video, something passed between them, a movement of the eyebrows and edges of the lips. And then, faces still turned toward each other in their own private universe, one made a buzzing sound with her lips. The other buzzed back. The camera jostled then, swinging away from their faces, and as it did, the strangest thing—surely a trick of the angle—it appeared as if the two of them rose, slightly, into the air.

The screen flicked to black. Luce had never seen footage of the twins when they were young, and it sent an arrowed ache into the soft gunk of her heart, how much she missed Gem, how much her mother must miss her too. She'd never felt zipped to another person in the way the girls were in this video. What a thing, Luce thought: to never, ever be lonely.

She took a breath, flicked on the radio, but no sound came out. No spinning of knobs or pressing of buttons yielded any other sounds, any other movement. She turned away from the electronics. There was more of the office to explore, and maybe, somewhere, the calling man's number. Had her mother really gone somewhere to meet him? Somewhere outside the grove? Could she really and truly be that foolish?

Move faster, then. Behind her was a chipped wooden bookshelf on which stood a row of old books, small statues of various deities—the Buddha, Ganesh, Jesus, a Princess Diana bobblehead. A few candles and incense clusters, dried sage wrapped in twine. A bag of MM's. A plastic panda. "Hello?" she said to the room, just to see. Nothing.

A deep purple velvet armchair sat beside the table of electronic equipment. On the other side, a small table held a telephone. It was an old rotary, with holes for your fingers, scuffed and plugged into nothing. No cords ran out from the back of the phone. She grasped the receiver in her hand, placed it to her ear, sure she would hear nothing, because there was nothing to hear, but some sliver of her thought—hoped—there would be a voice on the line. Whose? Her mother's. Gem's. Because—nerves firing—could the gift finally reveal itself here, in this room where her mother spent so much time? Was it perhaps the room itself that held the gift? She listened to the phone. But it was silent.

A bang somewhere deep in the house. She flinched. Luce knew these sounds, the continual stretching and breathing of the house around them, but she still held her breath, listened for her mother. But there were no other sounds. There was nobody here. She was alone. She thought about Roo, pouting, working his meaty little freckled fingers on whatever his current project was. Roo was not alone. He had a big sister to care for him. But Luce? She was nine, standing at the bedside of someone who had already traveled away from her, completely and forever after alone. "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf," the girls sang again, the video having started over, though louder this time, turned all the way up, how did it get so loud, faces smooshed into the camera, dark eyes and their conspiratorial laugh, louder and louder until Luce fumbled at the base of the TV to turn down the volume, and in doing so, her hand hit against the corner of something and knocked it down.

It was a folder. It had been tucked between the TV and VCR, and it fell to the ground, papers spilling out. Old newspaper articles folded in halves and quarters. Handwritten notes. She picked one up, scanning it quickly for a man's name and phone number, but it was a list of names of people in the Red Grove. Twelve names. Scanning down, she saw it: Luce Shelley.

There was no obvious connection between her and the other names on the list; some younger kids, a few, like Luce, in high school, some older who'd moved out of the Red Grove, some who'd stayed. At the bottom of the list, a few spaces after the last name, was a question mark, all of it in her mother's unmistakable handwriting, and then a few words messily scrawled and circled. Ask Juan.

Juan was their closest neighbor. Ask Juan what? There was a loud bang on the office door, Roo's voice from the hallway telling her to open up. She stuffed the list of names into her pocket and put everything else in the folder, slid it back where it had been tucked, and unlocked the door. There was Roo, arms crossed over his chest, his face a small storm.

He took a big breath, ready to scold her, but his eye caught something behind her and he stopped. He pushed past her then, worming inside. In front of the table of electronics, his chin barely taller than the tabletop, he reached his arm up into the air, spun a dial until it clicked, pressed a button, flipped two levers, and out of the speakers burst the sound of radio static.

"How did you know how to do that?" Luce asked. He didn't answer her, but spun on to the next thing, the microphone, small and rectangular and suddenly crackling alive in his hands, and Luce saw, from the side of his face, a wild, wet-eyed thrill that echoed the look the twins had on their faces in the video, something that was hooking him right into whatever was happening here. She felt a chill, something off about the air, "Enough, Roo," she said, but he didn't pay any attention. She raised her voice: "Stop it. Let's go."

He startled then, and spun to her. "I know how to do it."

"Out," she said, grabbing for his shoulder and pointing toward the door, back out of this strange room, into the ordinary hallway, the familiar kitchen, under the enormous shadows of their regular trees. She pushed him out the door. He stumbled, fell onto the floor, but she didn't say sorry.

Luce looked at her brother, whose indignant face had already transformed into something else as his eye caught an ant on the ground. Rapt, he was looking at the tiny creature carrying a crumb of something. He looked the same, didn't he? Or was there something of the faintest kind of glimmer around him? She squinted her eyes. No, of course not.

At least she had a place to start—Ask Juan. "I'll be right back," Luce said, Roo's cheek pressed to the floor as he reached out a finger to block the ant's path. "Don't light the house on fire." Just faintly, coming from inside the office, she heard two voices singing in unison: "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?"

Beneath the giant towering red trees, the valley floor had one wide creek that ran cold and fast with big, silvery fish, and Tamsen Nightingale dipped her toes into the water and thought of her sisters. The way they'd whisper and hug one another on winter nights, clinging to each other's heat. And then, their frozen naked bodies in the snow. Imagining their husbands, her husband, jamming any remaining food down their own throats, peeling the lovingly stitched dresses right off their bodies as they shook, flesh going blue. And her own teeth pulling apart her sister's husband's skin. She was surprised to feel no remorse. Didn't feel sick thinking of it. Just a burning in her chest that she hadn't been able to do anything to save her sisters. She had the bones. She kept them close. She let herself imagine her sisters' end as often as she needed to, because it filled her with a torrent of anger that nearly combusted, and the anger gave her energy. There was a lot to be done.

Along the banks, dense ferns and low, spindly bushes thrived in the shade of the giant trees overhead, and from one of the bushes she cut thin branches to bend and weave into a basket. The plants were different fromthose in her Wisconsin home, and one early day she grabbed at a leafless plant that, a few days later, blossomed boils and a red rash across her arms and hands that itched like summer mosquito bites and then bubbled into small blisters that wept clear, warm liquid when she scratched at them in her sleep.

Still, she twisted branches. The land was new, but the tasks were old, and so she wove pliable grasses into the baskets and dipped them into the water for fish. She gathered plants she could recognize from her years on the farm, testing others by first rubbing them along her skin—no reaction and she'd press them against her lips or nibble and spit—poisonous plants stung or tingled, were often bitter, or had shinier leaves; she knew to avoid yellow and white berries, and plants with sap those same colors.

Under her tasks there was always another hum, a tightness in her stomach, a flinch when a tree rustled and she could not identify the source. A shadowed movement over her shoulder, and she would spin, sure that her husband had finally found her. After what he had done to her in the cave, she no longer had any idea about whether he was the kind of man who would come find her to kill her, or whether he would let her be. It felt like a sickness, this unknowing, this fear. Festering.

Traders and travelers moved through the valley, but none stayed for long—it was far from gold country, far from the city on the bay, and the terrain of mountains and hills surrounding the valley made access difficult. She was staying in a cave between rocks, and she needed a more permanent shelter. For that, she'd need an axe, but she had nothing of enough value to trade, and she knew that sometimes someone took something whether or not you wanted to give it.

Back home, her mother's most precious object had been an ivory comb, its teeth thick and its handle carved into leaves and flowers and vines and orbs that wove and wound around one another. When Tamsen was small, she'd slowly run the teeth along her neck until goose bumps rose beneath each tooth and tingles shivered down the rest of her body. The sisters would sprawl across the grass and into one another's laps,letting the white clouds overhead fill their eyes while their skin pricked beneath the comb, and in this way, as in so many ways, they enchanted one another.

Here, she had no ivory. But she had bone.

One night, by the fire, she opened the bundle that held the bones and told her sisters what she was going to do. She knew not to be silly enough to ask permission and expect an answer, but she felt, clenching the thickest bone in one hand, a hastening as she lay the tip of her blade into her sister's femur. The bone did not give beneath the metal. She sharpened the knife then, using rocks she'd found on the hills and built into her fire ring, and tried again. The knife nicked the bone, one divot and then the next. She worked and worked, remembering the small summer wildflowers no bigger than her sisters' fingertips when they were babies, the knife digging out hollows to make vines, carving her memories right onto the bones.

And then, because nobody could resist the kind of beauty these combs radiated, she traded the bone-carved combs for goods from passing travelers. She acquired an axe. With the axe, she felled logs. She was amazed by the packs of turkeys and vultures and hares everywhere, coyotes who yipped, gophers who burrowed, and the occasional scat of something much bigger, though it didn't look like bear.

Tamsen climbed a short way up the most beautiful hill, which also had a creek running down its slope, and found a flat spot tucked beside red trees that were too big to put her arms around, and there, beside a spray of blue-berried bushes that were reaching their round heads into the sunshine, she built a wooden shelter. She felled small trees and, remembering shelters she'd passed on her way down the mountain, built this in their likeness. The work was hard and the days were long, but she felt her muscles growing stronger, loving the feeling that she could ask her body to do new things and it would respond, swinging the axe or rolling a log or hefting a basket of mud to fill in the cracks in the walls.

One night, she woke to the crunching of leaves and snapping of twigs outside her shelter. She heard snorting and sniffing up against the edgesof the logs, a pawing at the door. The pine branches she'd tucked between the logs for insulation shook as whatever was outside exhaled, and she shivered in her cabin although she wasn't cold. She listened. A fly buzzed nearby and, oh no, she remembered a strip of rabbit she'd smoked, hanging from a high pole—so stupid to keep it in here, not to hang it out somewhere away from her structure. The animal scratched at the door; Tamsen tensed, bared her teeth.

There was a scream, then, just outside the shelter. It was high, a woman's yell, a yowl, and suddenly Tamsen could hear nothing but the sounds each sister must have made as she watched the other die, naked and shivering in the snow. Margaret and Minnie, her heartstrings, her loves. She thought that her grief would stop the pumping of her heart right then, all dried up, shriveled, and it might've, except a fly landed on the tip of her nose and returned her here. There was an animal outside.

The fly buzzing around the meat, the scream. Tamsen was on her knees. The night was dark, no moonlight inside the shelter, just the sound of her hammering heart, her breath, the animal. The flies. Knife always sheathed to her side, even in slumber, she waited.

Waited. She waited, fingers taut around the knife, breath heavy, but no animal burst inside. It was quiet. At some point, hours later, or maybe minutes, long, panting minutes, she dropped back down to the ground, and eventually to sleep.

In the morning, the rabbit meat was gone.

For three nights, this sniffing and scratching and yowling continued, and so for three days, after having been up all night, terrified, she completed her tasks—mending the shelter and chopping firewood and gathering food and checking her traps and fishing in the creek—with a mind half gone, eyes half closed. And even though she kept no more meat inside her shelter, the same sounds kept on each night, and in the morning, a scramble of prints on the floor inside her cabin. They were smaller than her own handprints, though not by much, with a nail track up front—wolf maybe, coyote, small bear—they stepped over each other,impossible to make out, and yet, there was no sign that an animal had broken into the cabin. Like it had just appeared, inside, circling her.

On the morning of the fourth day, Tamsen was hunting up-creek, higher into the rock outcroppings on the highest hill she'd ever climbed, and there, she heard another strange sound. There were mewls coming from beneath an overhanging rock. She crept closer. Bending low, she saw that inside the den were small creatures. Mountain lion cubs. Their coats were covered with dark brown spots, their eyes half-open and their tails ringed with black. They were tiny, off-balance, could fit on her forearm. There was no mother inside. One of them let out a little scream—not unlike the sounds she'd been hearing at night.

Tamsen could see evidence of previous kills scattered around, big tufts of fur and a dried skull, its backbone still attached. She backed away, not wanting to surprise the returning mother but, also, with these little yowling cubs, wanting to be sure their mother returned and not some other predator first.

Not far from the den, Tamsen found a sturdy tree that had a view of the kittens. She climbed. Waited. She waited and watched and fell asleep, all those sleepless nights weighing like stones on her eyes, her head against the bark of the tree.

Suddenly, branches were swooshing nearby. She heard a wild hiss and growl and knew she was in trouble. Stuck in a tree, ready to be devoured by the angry mountain lion that had almost devoured her nightly, but this time she'd come to perch right above this mother's babies.

When Tamsen opened her eyes, she saw that though the mother mountain lion had returned, she wasn't growling at Tamsen. Not far from the mountain lion were two coyotes, black eyes shining, tails black-tipped. They were open-mouthed, panting. Breathing in the scent of babies. The lion's ears were pressed down tight, and she half-crouched, her body in front of the little den, growling, and the coyotes took a few steps forward.

The coyotes weren't as big as the mountain lion—maybe two-thirdsher size—but they started moving quickly, darting a few steps toward her and then away, some kind of complicated dance. The mountain lion bared her teeth and screamed, a high-pitched full-throated human scream, and then lunged as the coyotes came close, swiping. They retreated, light-footed and weaving between each other. The mother lion swiped at one as it came close on one side, and as she did, the other snuck in behind her, closer to the den. She hissed, swung to the other coyote, and the one behind her lunged again, grabbing the back of the lion's leg in its mouth.

Tamsen clung tighter and tighter to her tree, afraid for the lion, afraid of the lion, afraid of the consequence of nature's violence. The lion kicked backward, twisting to release the coyote from her leg, and as she did, the second coyote lunged toward the lion's neck. The coyote clamped down hard. There was a scream, again, from the mountain lion. She swiped at the coyote in front and missed, but it unclamped and backed away, and then she whirled around and dug in her claws, and the coyote attached to her leg let out a high-pitched yelp and let go. She had a new fury coiled in her movements, then, and she charged at the one she hadn't yet struck, and one coyote fled, followed by the other.

Tamsen clung to the branches of the tree, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, and thought about how she would tell the story of the fight to her sisters.You would not believe how brave, she'd say. Or,Once, there was a mother in trouble.

Finally, the mountain lion was alone. The tip of her black tail flicked back and forth against the gray rock opening of her den, her mouth still open, breathing hard to pull in any trace scents of approaching coyote or, Tamsen realized, startled, maybe even Tamsen herself. She held still in the tree, her muscles aching. Still, she could not look away from the mother. And that's when she noticed, on the rock at the lip of the den, small, dark pools. The lion was bleeding. There was nothing so dangerous as an injured, threatened mother. She'd stay where she was, up in the tree, for a while. She wedged herself more firmly between branches.

From her waistband she pulled out her knife, and from the bag on herback she pulled another of her sisters' bones. She went to work. Under the tip of the blade, the bone lost mass and gained curves, nicks, transforming itself into the muscled haunch of a back leg. She used the tip of her knife to carve notches, the side of the blade to smooth a rough cut, and there, under her fingers, her sister transformed into teeth and blood and a mountain lion.

It had been two days since the fight. After many hours, the mother had finally gone inside her den with the cubs and Tamsen had scrambled down from the tree, fled. She worried about the cubs, whether they had food, whether the mother's injuries were bad enough to keep her from hunting, or to invite the coyotes back.

She thought about them as she trapped squirrel and rabbit, as she pulled the silvery fish from the river. She thought about them and then decided that there was no reason nature had to take its course. With a freshly killed rabbit in her bag, Tamsen snuck back up the hill to the gulley between two high rises. Without getting too close, she lassoed the rabbit over her head and flung them toward the den. Quickly, she left.

Two days later, she did the same thing, hucking a salmon.

Three days after that, she was ready to hurl two squirrels but stopped when she heard a soft, persistent mewl. She held still, listening, waiting to see if the mother was nearby, but the mewl continued. A single voice echoing out of the cave, a note played across the strings. Going in closer was too dangerous—the injured mother would fight for her life, and Tamsen was fighting for her own life—better to keep safe. She began hiking back down the hill.

In her head, though, played the birdsong of her sisters' voices, laughing, fat babies with warm bellies. Her sisters, soft girlchicks, pulling in a bundle of baby mice from the barn on a night it was going to freeze, hiding them against their own warm bellies inside their shirts even though discovery would have earned them lashings.

Her sisters would go back and check on the kittens.

Tamsen turned around. She tried not to think about the sound of the yowling outside her shelter's door or the fight she'd seen in the mother lion, her teeth, her claws. Once she was within sight of the cave, she noticed, again, the dark bloodstains on the rock, the bones of the animals she'd thrown, and was glad to know they'd been eaten. The den was dark, but she took a few steps closer, and then closer still. The mewling had stopped.

When she was twenty feet away, she noticed the gleam of eyes. They were moving, coming out toward her. Tamsen tensed, ready to flee, but a cub tottered out. It was a few months old at best, with stubby legs and spots across most of its body, a little rounded head, eyes more open than they'd been last time, somehow so much like the barn kittens she and her sisters had played with. It didn't yet have any of the sleek movement she'd seen in the mother mountain lion—still a little, rounded squish of a baby, though it wasn't as fat as it'd been when she'd seen it before. The cub mewled again and walked cautiously toward her.

Tamsen took a step closer, reached a hand down toward the cub, and as she did, she noticed something else in the mouth of the den behind the little cub. It wasn't moving. She took another step forward, and then she could see: it was another cub on the ground, emaciated, with flies circling its face. The living cub mewled again, three feet away, and its eyes were as big and blue and bright as the clear sky outside, and where was its mother, how would she know if the mother was all right, and if she left this one little living cub here, would it survive? Probably the coyotes would be back tonight to kill and eat the little cat. And maybe that was right—nature taking its course, the world falling into order.

But then Tamsen imagined scooping up the soft cub into her arms and running. She'd bring the cub back to her cabin, make it a soft bed of rabbit furs and a deer pelt, let it warm itself by her fire. She would hunt for the both of them, trapping an extra squirrel and tossing it to the baby, whose teeth would grow sharp gnawing the bones and ripping through the ligaments she'd feed him.

She imagined passing travelers who would assume that she livedalone, how they'd approach the door believing they could take what they wanted from a woman by herself, then hear a growl and not even see as the lion pounced. That kind of safety. She imagined how the journey over the mountains might have gone if she and her sisters had had a lion—how the lion would have ripped open the flesh and slurped the spouting arteries of their husbands. Whose blood they would have fed to the lion cubs as the cubs turned their snouts to the sky and, like baby birds looking for the worm, drank in droplets of the warmth.

The kitten sat down, still looking at her, and yawned. Tamsen reached into her bag for another scrap of food to toss, wondering the best way to scoop up the cat, when suddenly, all the hair rose on the back of her neck as, from behind, she heard a deep, wild growl.