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him.
    The dog thrashed in the old man’s arms and the feeling of the dog enlivened him. Walking around the tree, the old man could see the dog had worn a circular track and there were bones and the remains of the dog’s past owner scattered around it.
    The old man laughed then as he understood the dog to be a prize. Within the dog’s thrashing body was all that was fading inthe old man. Wretched though the dog appeared, here was a creature whose senses were still primed, a creature so intent on life he ate his owner to survive.

    W EAVING THROUGH the yellow grass the dog sniffed out my mother. He had caught the scent of her as surely as if she had dragged her bloodied trousers with a stick for a mile behind her.
    He tore across the sand and plunged his snout into her neck. She was in and out of consciousness still but she woke to it, to see teeth and saliva. The dog barked into her ear and her head rang with voices and the sound of other dogs barking. My mother was not a religious woman. She did not believe in heaven and she did not believe in hell, but at that moment she thought she had been wrong after all and that hell, finally, was the place she had found herself. The dog was in a fit, savaging the blanket to get to the source of her blood, and she thought,
This is what happens in hell. Dogs disembowel you.
    But what my mother took as other dogs of hell moving in on her was the old man and the old woman swinging down from their horses and grunting and croaking as they scrambled down the bank and then the sound of the old man lifting the yellow dog with his boot and the dog’s mournful howling.
    Soon their pale faces hovered over her. And with their strange eyes and mess of silvery hair my mother took them to be harbingers of death, as surely as she knew a frost was a harbinger of winter.
    You’re late
, she said. Because in truth she believed that death had already come to her.
    But she was not dead nor were they harbingers of death. They were old and they were human and they began quarreling about what to do with her.

M y mother had been set up. It began years before my birth. She was just five months out of prison. She was still in the land of hope then, and she hoped directly to the leaf and the dirt as much as to the sky and the mountain that things would get better. She buried herself in her work and tried to prove herself to Fitz through her efficiency and her talent for breaking in horses. But the only acknowledgment he had given her was a walloping when he found her petting the horses in the evening when she should have been preparing his dinner.
    She hated him already and it was only the beginning of her first autumn there.
    There was some reprieve. Mostly, Fitz disappeared during the day and returned to the house only just before sunset. That left her alone to do her work and enjoy the peace and challenge of the horses. Day by working day she could feel her balance and her strength returning. But with the turning of the season, she noticed the nights were coming sooner. And although there was a time she thought she would welcome every change of nature, she knew that soon there would be much less daylight to get things done and much less time to be free of him. She feared what a winter alone with him would bring.

    T HE NIGHT OF THE SETUP, it was just on dusk, the time she expected him. The sun was her clock and it had all but sunk and there was no sign of Fitz—or, rather, no ranging sound of him.
    She set the table as he had instructed her to do, with the forks lined up against the knife and the spoon and a napkin folded in a triangle. She wrapped the plates in a tea towel and put them on the stove top to warm. She sampled the stew. She waited, warding off an uneasy feeling.
    It was fully dark when she heard a cavalcade of horses and it was not the sound she expected to hear or the sound she was used to. She pulled at the wooden door of the gun cabinet and was thankful Fitz had forgotten