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.
“Are you going to make me ask again?” Dad said.
The quiet of his voice was worse than yelling. Leni felt a ridge of fear poke up, spread along her spine. She reached out, took the tiny blue-red organ in her hand. （Was it still beating or was she trembling?）
With her father’s narrowed gaze steady on her, she put the heart in her mouth and forced her lips to close. Instantly, she wanted to gag. The heart was slippery and slimy; when she bit down it ruptured in her mouth, tasting metallic. She felt blood trickle out of the side of her mouth.
She swallowed, gagged, wiped the blood from her lips, felt its warmth smear across her cheek.
Her father looked up, just enough to make eye contact. He looked ruined, tired, but present; in his eyes, she saw more love and sadness than should be able to exist in one human being. Something was tearing him up inside, even now. It was the other man, the bad man, who lived inside of him and tried to break out in the darkness.
“I’m trying to make you self-sufficient.”
It sounded like an apology, but for what? For being crazy sometimes or teaching her to hunt? Or for making her eat the hare’s beating heart? Or for the nightmares that ruined all their sleep?
Or maybe he was apologizing for something he hadn’t done yet but was afraid he would.
*
DECEMBER.
Dad was edgy, tense; he drank too much and muttered under his breath. The nightmares became more frequent. Three a week, every week.
He was always moving, demanding, pushing. He ate, slept, breathed, and drank survival. He had become a soldier again, or that’s what Mama said, and Leni found herself tongue-tied around him, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing.
With as hard as she worked after school and on the weekends, Leni should have slept like the dead, but she didn’t. Night after night she lay awake, worrying. Her fear and anxiety about the world had been sharpened to a knifepoint.
Tonight, as exhausted as she was, she lay awake, listening for his screams. When she did finally fall asleep, she landed in a dreamscape on fire, a place full of danger—a world at war, animals being slaughtered, girls being kidnapped, men screaming and pointing guns. She screamed for Matthew, but no one could hear one girl’s voice in a falling-apart world. And besides, what good would he be? She couldn’t tell Matthew this. Not this. Some fears you carried alone.