ground. He wasn’t wearing gloves either.
The snow wrapped around me like a frozen blanket. My head reeled. The gray of the sky waterfalled to the earth, then the earth to the sky—the pine trees dipped and jumped. I blinked and felt water fill my left eye where he’d struck. Then his weight was on me, firm and heavy, full of heat and iron.
“You’re dead, you asshole,” I said, gasping. “You’re a dead man.” My voice was weak and didn’t carry the anger I felt.
His hands pinned me down, his face inches from mine. I couldn’t move. I felt a panicked helplessness.
“You’re a stupid little girl.” He shifted his weight, his stomach pressing against my side. “You think you have a little community with rules? You don’t. Welcome to the new world. Your brother and uncle can’t do shit to me. They can try if they want, but I’ll fucking kill them.”
He turned his body again, his left elbow and forearm pushing against my chest, pinning me to the ground. Then his other hand slithered down to my thigh. “I can do whatever I want, whenever I want.”
“I don’t need my uncle; I’ll kill you myself!” I spat in his face and saw a small bead of spit land in his eyelashes, but he just blinked it away. His hand went higher up my thigh. I thrashed and tried to claw his eyeballs, but I couldn’t reach. He was too big, the fat fuck. Then his palm was between my legs. I clenched them, but I could feel his fingers on me. They pressed, dipping and rubbing as I squirmed, helpless as a caught fox. I felt my knife dig into my hip. My Hän knife. I kept it sharp. But my hand was pinned. I couldn’t reach it.
He leaned in even closer, trembling, his beard tickling my chin. I was going to be sick, was going to throw up in his face. Might have been a good thing if I had.
“Whatever I want,” he repeated.
Then it was over. The touching, the weight, the stink of his breath. He released me and stood. I took in quick, shallow gasps of air. My cheek throbbed. I got to my feet as quick as I could and thought about going for my knife or my bow, discarded in the snow beside me. Conrad watched with a pleased look on his face. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was making a statement. Claiming territory. Drawing lines. Letting us know that he wasn’t afraid of us.
Either way, he was a dead man. I decided to tell him again.
“You’re a dead man.”
“Run off to your uncle.”
I picked up my bow, then snagged the rope attached to my sled. The buck stared at me with his dead, marble eyes. Such an impressive creature, rotting on the front step of Conrad’s shit shack, waiting to be butchered by his careless knife. I gave Conrad one last glare before turning. But the fire didn’t burst out of my watering eyes. It didn’t burn him to charcoal.
“Bye bye, Gwendolynn,” he said as I walked away.
“Fuck you, Conrad.”
I’ve always hated my name. Gwendolynn. It’s too long and sounds stupid. It means something about the moon. Or maybe it just means moon. I can’t remember. And I hate Gwen too. Sounds like it’s from the Stone Age. So I go by Lynn. Only my mom calls me Gwendolynn, or my brother, Ken, when he’s being an ass, which is fairly often. Dad always called me Lynn because he knew I liked it. Whenever I complained about my name, he’d quote Walt Whitman. “I exist as I am, that is enough.” He loved Walt Whitman. Used to go to the river and read Leaves of Grass. He gave me a book of Walt Whitman’s collected poems, and I still have it. I read it often. I can’t say I really appreciate or understand it. Sounds like the rantings of a guy who may or may not think he’s a tree. But something about his poems is comforting. Probably because they remind me of Dad.
Our settlement was four buildings strung together in a narrow valley surrounded by hills. To the west rose a giant limestone ridge, mostly covered in snow now, but in the warm season, it was quite a thing to see. Beyond that were the white-capped Ogilvie Mountains, jutting up like the backs of giant beasts. To the east, over a spruce-dotted hill, was the Blackstone River—shallow and mostly frozen over this time of year. Mom and I lived in the biggest building, a log cabin. It was the first place we built, where we all stayed in the beginning. Me; Uncle Jeryl; Mom; my brother, Ken; and Ramsey—the son of Jeryl’s best friend, who was taken by the flu back in Alaska.
Thank God Jeryl was good with his hands. He and Dad built a cabin down the river a few miles out from our old home in Eagle. We went there in the summers until the powers that be came and tore it down because we didn’t own the land or have a license to build. I still have fond memories of that cabin. Our Yukon cabin was nothing like that one. It was merely functional, and then just barely. In the spring, the wind sluiced through it, but in the winter, when the daylight shriveled to nothing, when it got too cold, we packed the crevices with snow for insulation. When a good fire was burning, it didn’t take long to heat the small space.
Eventually, Jeryl and Ramsey built a log cabin next to ours. Smaller than ours, but when you stepped inside, it looked more or less the same. Same wooden walls, a fireplace, a single bedroom, and a loft overhead with another cot. Then, after the first two years, Ken decided to move out. He built an even smaller place. Yup. You guessed it. A log cabin. Four walls, fireplace, cot, and, of course, the poster. The stupid poster of two girls in bikinis next to a race car. They had huge, fake boobs and flat stomachs. Ken, at eighteen, had decided that the poster was worth dragging across the border into the Yukon. Mom said no of course, but he snuck it in his jacket. The corners of it were curved, and the whole thing was wrinkled and worn. I hated that poster. It was a reminder of the worst parts of the old world.
The fourth building was the animal shed, which doubled as an equipment shed and storage for firewood. We had two goats named Hector and Helen, and one musk ox named Stankbutt—everyone else called him Jebediah, but Stankbutt fit for obvious reasons. Hector and Helen were good for milk, cheese, and warning us with their incessant wails when wolves were about. They were also good for making kids that would one day replace them. Stankbutt, on the other hand, was good for nothing. He was old too. While the goats were only two when we left Alaska, he was five. And after seven years of freezing temperatures and crap food, he couldn’t have much more left in him. Both Jeryl and Ramsey had musk ox fur coats that they swore by, but other than that, the fat, hairy ox was more or less useless. Jeryl offered to make us coats of our own, but Mom had brought to the Yukon so many leggings, wool sweaters, and thick down jackets that we never took him up on his offer. One extra-lean winter was all it was going to take and good-bye, Stankbutt. You’ll taste delicious.
We grew crops behind the storage shed. There wasn’t much to our little family farm. Just a flat bit of land where we dug up the earth and planted carrots and potatoes. Like everything else, it was covered in snow now, but come spring, we’d tend to the softening ground. But that was spring. That was a long ways away. Not to mention the fact that last year’s spring was the shortest we’d had yet. Maybe, eventually, there wouldn’t be a spring left for potatoes to grow. But that wasn’t worth thinking about quite yet.
As I approached our little town-camp-settlement, I tried to get my story straight. I’d considered not telling my uncle Jeryl about what happened with Conrad. But what was I going to say about my puffy cheek, my swollen eye? Admitting that Conrad had gotten the best of me, that he’d held me down in the snow and done what he’d done, made me look weak. But saying that I tripped and fell made me look like an idiot. No, I had to come clean. I honestly didn’t know what Jeryl would
