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again.
    Week after Missy, when my hand was healing up nice, I came to the woodpile and found the ax sharp enough to shave a leg off a cricket afore it’d even notice.
    “People— women —are dangerous, Elka girl. Some are fierce as wolves, some are meek as deer, but you don’t figure out which till they’re in too close.”
    Never asked him right what he meant; Trapper didn’t take kind to back talk. He came and stood next to me at the woodpile.
    “Just you and me, Elka girl,” Trapper said to me, “it can only be you and me.”
    I never went searching for a momma again, ’cause I knew he was right. He’d never let me have no one else, and for another seven winters that’s how we stayed. He showed me how to shoot that rifle a’ his and how to break it down for cleaning. Every year we stocked up for winter and he kept that ax sharp for me. We built a bigger smokehouse as I was growing and we needed the space for more food and he got us a pressure cooker so we could can the meat in case a’ leaner times. That burn scar faded to silver then to nothing you’d notice if you didn’t know it was there. I forgot all ’bout the pain what put the scar on my arm, but the kindness that soothed it stuck with me. Missy didn’t have nothing but she gave me a piece a’ herself and she did it gladly. That’s something I kept inside me, secret from Trapper and anything else what might go looking.
    When I was tall as his shoulder he figured I was grown enough and took me on hunts. First it was just for skinning and hauling but as the years went on, he let me shoot all kinds a’ game like rabbits, bear, and even a moose. All ’cept deer. I’d turned seventeen few months past and less’n a week ago, Trapper let me take first shot at a buck—not more’n a few years old but enough to feed us for days with some left to trade for bullets and salt for curing. Deer was Trapper’s chocolate and he was precious ’bout it. That’s when I knew he trusted me all the way, that’s when we was closer’n we’d ever been. That’s when I weren’t afraid to call him Daddy out loud.

In Dalston, a scrap-and-shit mining town, one deerskin and three rabbit pelts got me a box of shotgun shells and bed and board in the Stonecutter’s Inn. Trapper had no worries in sending me to town by myself, not now I was grown. Ten years in the woods grows you quick. I never stayed long, never traded for drink or company and he knew I could handle a blade should any of the miners take a more’n passing interest.
    Dalston was one of them places that God and man both forgot at the same time. Two rows of buildings, half wood, half stone, all half-finished. Everyone in Dalston got a look of coal-soot fury on ’em. I don’t like people at the best of times, give me trees and wild things any day, but in Dalston, they were a special breed. They were full of grim luck them boys, ’specially then, coming to the end of summer when the air outside is chill but the mines are no more’n stone ovens. Like chipping stone in hell. Every time I came back from that pit town I washed twice.
    One hand on my deer-horn knife, other clutching the ammo, I stopped dead when I saw Trapper’s face tacked up outside the Stonecutter’s. Someone had drawn him in charcoal and written some kind of letters and numbers around him. They got his tattoos just right.
    “You know this man?” a woman asked me. Clean, sharp voice, cold like water lapped right out a frozen lake.

    Funny thing was, I didn’t hear her come near me, didn’t hear her stepping on the boards, didn’t catch her scent on the air. I can hear a bear farting on the other side of the mountain. Can smell it too, and follow it back to its den afore the beast has time to scratch.
    This woman crept up on me, and that set my bones shaking. I looked at her. All in black with a black ribbon tied tight around her neck and a silver chain dangling. Six-shooter on her belt. No need to hide it, best not to in a town