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all that was left. Up to a month or two before, I knew of at least three families scraping by in different sections of the city. But at that moment, looking down from the old tower, I couldn’t see a sign of any of them.
    The morning mist had lifted and it was a grey, frosty day of about twenty below, but there wasn’t so much as a curl of smoke from a household fire.
    This place had been my life for as long as I could remember. I thought of the time before I was born when my parents had come to that city, along with all the other pioneer families. And in half a lifetime or so, it had emptied out again. From where I was standing I could see trees growing out of the bleachers round the softball field, which itself was a maze of scrubby bushes. The billboards along Main Street had shrivelled in the weather. The drugstore where I used to drink malted milk was a hive of blackened glass and wood. The train station that the line had never reached remained half-built and now would never be finished. All those hours and days of human struggle, thousands, millions of them, spent building up this place, only to have it kicked down like an anthill by a spoiled child.
    This place had promised the first settlers everything. Now what was it? A ghost town, decaying back into wilderness.

     *
    There wasn’t a soul left in the whole place save us, I grew surer of it by the day. Imagine: a city of thirty thousand reduced to two women and a bump. And yet, the odd thing was, I liked it a whole lot better. I started going round it by foot. Something I hadn’t done for years. It made me feel closer to the place somehow, crunching the broken glass and paper underfoot, spying the discarded things – a filthy doll, some spectacles, broken shoes – that told the story of my city.
    The houses where the Challoners and the Velazquezes had been living were abandoned. I put a ladder up to their outside walls and had a look in. There was a pitiful scrawny tabby in the Challoners’ yard but no sign of a person. At the Velazquez house, I could see the place had been left orderly, with its furniture intact, and some sign that the garden had been dug, but there was no doubt they were elsewhere too. That killer Rudi and his brute of a son, Emil.
    With the last humans gone, it seemed like nature decided to reclaim everything. On Considine Avenue, I came upon a herd of wild pigs, at least twelve of them, rooting around the old garbage heaps. The adults were black and square, like steamer trunks. I emptied both pistols from horseback and managed to hit two of them while the rest of them ran off squealing. I butchered them then and there on the street and dragged them home, chucking the lights and offal into the Challoners’ yard for the tabby.
    Once I reached home and glanced back at the long smears of blood on the ice in the roadway, a strange feeling came over me. I unbuckled my empty guns and laid them on the kitchen table. It occurred to me that that was the first time in fifteen years I’d been anywhere in the city withVelazquezeloaded weapon.
    We ate to bursting for days, smoked a flitch for the summer, and tried not to think too hard about what they might have fattened on.
    I later regretted my generosity to the cat because Ping knew a way to make dried sausage with intestines.
    The other thing I noticed was the birds. By April, the birdsong was so raucous in the mornings that it was waking me up in the dark. And the types of them had got so various. I know my eating birds, but the smaller ones – I can name a sparrow and a robin, and that’s it. But I could see we had a whole new menagerie. The circumstances had changed so much. They had all the windfall and the berries to themselves. So many new places to roost.
    Ping and I were beginning to find ways to talk to each other. I never had much of an ear for her language, but we had ‘chai’ for tea, and ‘dinner’ for pretty much every mealtime, and a bunch of other words that helped simplify