The Hunger

by Alma Katsu

There was no game to be had, and a restless hunger rippled through their movements, left barren camps full of black, scentless fire marks behind them like dark eyes in the earth.

Snow kept secrets. You’d think you were on solid ground, but it was just a matter of time before the ledge beneath you crumbled.

She’d known plenty of women like Harriet over the years, women who looked as if their faces had been slowly compressed between the pages of a Bible, all pinched and narrow.

In truth, he was alarmed to find how often he thought about Mary Graves lately, as if all of his other thoughts were fallen leaves easily scattered.

“I don’t believe in monsters,” Stanton said. “Only men who behave like them.”

Ounces, grains of sand, seconds falling through an hourglass: Life was all accounting, and at the end of it, the same tab for all.

would. For many people did not like the truth, it seemed—thought it was a dirty and distasteful thing, impolite and complicated. They didn’t have the patience for it—for numbers, liters, rations, portions, reasons. Many simply preferred the sweet, momentary pleasure of hearing whatever they wanted to hear.

He beat her to it, though, and his laugh was like water running over stones in the creek—fast and free and clear.

The Sierra Nevada, already holding open their arms to the first temptations of winter, were yet before them, looming in evergreen and rich purple, topped in white. She was continually shocked by the fact that the others seemed to forget the obvious: that the mountains, like most beautiful things in this world, were deadly.

Tamsen’s heart felt as if it might splinter in her throat, as if it might shatter like ice and cut her open from the inside out.

Stop, Mary wanted to say. But she didn’t want to speak, either. She couldn’t stand to hear her own voice, unchanged, carried on the stillness of a world that no longer held Charles Stanton.

He cleared his throat. She watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall. She thought how funny that word was—Adam’s apple. Hadn’t it been Eve’s?

It is always difficult to balance historical inclusion of the very real—and often very harmful—prevailing attitudes that existed at the time, in particular toward native peoples and their cultures, and at the same time not to in any way perpetuate or advocate for those views.