The Wolves of Winter. Tyrell Johnson

last long.

      Tools. Hammer, nails, hinges, saw, rope, twine, wire, and some steel wool.

      First aid kit. A small crappy one, next to useless.

      Clothes, clothes, clothes. Winter jackets, boots, pants, wool everything—socks, leggings, sweaters, shirts—and plenty of gloves.

      A few plates, two pots, and silverware.

      Books. Mom brought some textbooks and magazines to help keep me educated. I outgrew those fast enough.

      We brought some food, spices, and salt.

      Mom brought a picture of her, Dad, Ken, and me that she kept over the fireplace in our cabin. A trip to Disneyland. We all looked happy.

      I brought my bow, arrows, the knife Dad gave me, the book of Walt Whitman poems, and nothing else. I had to leave my goldfish in the tank. I called him Bear Cub. I dumped the rest of the food in there with him before we left. Maybe he rationed it.

      Jeryl hadn’t been gone for an hour when a gunshot rang in the distance. Conrad’s place was about three miles off, but in the deadened, empty terrain, a gunshot from three miles is easy to hear. I dropped the wire and stood. Ken burst out of his cabin, rifle slung over his shoulder.

      “I catch you following me, I’ll shoot you myself,” Ken said, running toward the noise.

      I almost grabbed my bow anyway because to hell with him. But I didn’t. I backed down like an obedient little girl, picked up my wire, and held it as I watched Ken bound toward the sound of the shot.

      I won’t say I was scared to go. Because I wasn’t.

      The sun had already rolled down behind the mountains, outlining them in a dull silver-yellow, when Jeryl and Ken finally came home. The hearth fire cast wavering shadows across their pink faces. Ken was hefting a brown sack over his shoulder—the one Conrad had used to carry some of his belongings into the Yukon. I immediately recognized the smell of raw meat. They’d brought back my kill. But the sack wasn’t big enough. A deer that size would have produced twice as much meat.

      “What happened?” I asked. Mom and I both rose from our chairs by the fire. We’d been staring into the flames, playing that game of who can say nothing the longest. We played it often.

      Ken looked to Jeryl, leaned his rifle against the wall, and started for the back door. “Got half the deer, gonna go put it in the freeze.”

      “Jeryl?” Mom said.

      Jeryl kept his gun cradled in his arms like a baby. He turned to me. “He won’t be bothering you again.”

      “And we’re just supposed to take Conrad’s word for it?” Mom asked.

      Jeryl ignored her, kept talking to me. “Best stay away from his house for a while.”

      “That’s it?” I said. “Half the deer, and I best stay away from him?”

      Silence. Heavy like a fresh blanket of snow. The fire snapped.

      Jeryl turned to the door. “I better make sure Ramsey came back from the river all right.”

      “Dammit, Jeryl,” Mom said. “We heard the shot. What happened?”

      “He’s not dead, if that’s what you’re asking.” He turned to her then, meeting her eyes. “But he won’t be bothering us anymore.”

4

      Things I miss about summer:

      The sun.

      Warmth.

      Wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

      Freezies from the corner store.

      Sandals.

      Swimsuits.

      Hot dogs.

      Hamburgers.

      Any food that isn’t moose, elk, deer, rabbit, goat cheese, goat milk, potatoes, and carrots.

      Flights to California.

      Watching movies.

      Dad teaching me how to fish.

      Dad reading Walt Whitman.

      Dad telling me to go to bed and that he knows that it’s still light out but it doesn’t matter. It’s nighttime.

      Dad singing in the shower.

      Dad laughing.

      Dad.

      Dinner was venison that night. I mean, why not? And potatoes and carrots. They tasted a lot like the potatoes and carrots we ate last night, the night before, the night before that, the night before that, and the night before that. Good old easy-growing, durable, freezable, nutritious potatoes and carrots. Thank God for them. Sometimes, I’d close my eyes and pretend that the potatoes were french fries and the carrots were deep-fried and covered in soy sauce. It didn’t make them taste any better. Ken ate with us, and Ramsey and Jeryl stayed at their place, maybe cooked up a few grayling if Ramsey had any luck at the river.

      Outside, large, flat UFO flakes had begun to fall. The fire popped, Mom’s fork clinked against her plate, Ken’s mouth made a sucking sound as his teeth gnawed at the rough meat, and I stared at the wall.

      Regular old dinner with our regular old family in a regular old world.

      I remember sitting by the fire drinking tea that Mom made from the rhododendron leaves she collected in the spring—didn’t taste very good, but it was a nice change from water and goat milk—when Ramsey asked Jeryl how the wars began. When everything started, Ramsey had been too young to have really known what was going on.

      Jeryl took a deep breath and launched into it. “Well, it wasn’t sudden, I’ll say that much. It wasn’t one event. No meteorite, earthquake, or tsunami. Those things you always hear about. The seeds of it started early in the century—you read about nine-eleven in school?—and the anger just sort of snowballed. I don’t think one person ever said to the other: ‘Is this it? Is this the apocalypse?’ You’d hear about the occasional bombing, shooting, but otherwise things were mostly calm, relatively speaking. You could watch the news and hear about the War on Terror mixed in with a feel-good bit about pandas being born in the zoo.”

      “So how did it start?”

      “The last attack. I remember sitting down with my coffee and flipping on the news. Every channel was the same. Explosion had gone off in the Pentagon. Bunch of nut jobs managed to hijack a drone and blow up half the building. Hundreds were killed. And that was the last straw. The US went kamikaze. We bombed the hell out of Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan. But it didn’t stop there. It spread. Countries got labeled as either enemies or allies. You were either pro- or anti-America. There were no other options. When North Korea and Mongolia were named terrorist countries, China started getting nervous. Started flexing its muscles. Started chumming with the wrong people. And we didn’t like it. We wanted China to break all trade, all ties with them. China refused.

      “It seemed nuclear war was inevitable. So we dropped the first one. Meant to take out China’s atomic bombs. Didn’t work. Either they had backups or their nukes weren’t in Beijing. Millions were killed, so they retaliated. They nearly took out New York with their own nuke. Luckily, we got it in time, and the bomb hit the water. Devastated the city either way—from the tidal waves and radiation sickness. Then everyone seemed to go nuke happy. North Korea nuked Japan. Russia sent nukes to Turkey. The world was