I had no idea whether Admiral Kolchak had broken through the Urals or what had become of the Ukraine or what was happening with the Volunteers under Denikin. Was Red Russia completely surrounded? Had we surrendered? Were the English in Petrograd? Out here, who would have told us? If what the Ionians believed was true, Mother would know. But if she hadn’t wanted to know these things when she lived in Petrograd, why would she pay attention now? How I itched to broach that door with its five inset panels. I tried to manage it periodically, even now, but one couldn’t be more closely observed if one were an invalid’s goldfish. And I was lucky to be here, lucky for the respite from the world’s convulsions. If I could make it to July, I’d have a baby to bring home to Kolya, or I could travel elsewhere, I could make up my mind, or perhaps the world would make up my mind for me.

In February, I turned nineteen. Only Avdokia knew—and conceivably Mother, though she’d made no effort to contact me. Avdokia, my angel, my savior, continued to take care of me, even more so once she learned about the baby. There was always more in my bowl at dinnertime than was strictly my share. The meat on my tongue, warm and necessary, was the product of my own dark handiwork. What a drive for life lay inside all this killing, feeding the life growing inside me. Though the whole program of Ionia was intended to quiet the body, my own was becoming more greedy, more desirous. There were times I thought I’d go mad with desire, for Bogdan, or Pasha. Even Ukashin started to look appealing. I almost succeeded in inveigling Bogdan down to the Practice hall in the middle of the night, full of energy from our evening’s exertions. But in the end he wouldn’t. He leaned against the wall, his fingers stroking a thick eyebrow. “Try to understand, Marina. It’s not the Laboratory anymore. Only us, you understand?” He left me there with my frustration like a pot of soup boiling over, the smell of scorch following me around in the air.

I missed Kolya, growling with a sweet roll in his teeth.

The suffocating closeness made me want to flee or start a fistfight. You could die from a thousand tiny cuts: hurt feelings, revenge, petty jealousy, jostling for favor. Who sat closer to Ukashin at dinner, whose dreams were chosen for a dance and whose overlooked. Whose question was considered seriously and whose mocked. You never knew. The safest thing was to lie low and not care too much. He liked keeping everyone guessing. Natalya was up, Katrina was down, Magda always on the lookout for a moment to attack. Bogdan the favorite, then it was Gleb.

I began taking refuge in the bathhouse after my trapping was done, to pass a private hour writing, dreaming, and just staying out of the house as much as I could. Natalya, mistress of the bathhouse, took to leaving small bundles of wood for me by the anteroom stove. These winter poems captured my sense of the life going on within the seemingly silent frozen landscape and the hidden life of the human heart. I wrote a poem about the animals in their dens, dreaming of their vague and shifting memories of spring. Only when the sun had lowered almost to setting did I venture home with a rabbit or two in my game bag and a new poem in my book.


It was when I was coming back in the sifting white of the afternoon after one such session that I again caught a glimpse of red through the trees. I hadn’t seen my ruddy friend for some time, and the sight cheered me more than a hundred rabbits. I marveled at how close he was letting me come, as if he was waiting for me. I left the path to edge even closer. Then I realized—he was too still. Bozhe moi, he had walked into one of my snares. One of my earliest traps, which I never checked anymore because it was so close to the house. Suspended in the little trap, all four legs on the ground, was one long frozen board of Reynard, his black nose lowered in shame. This clever fellow, caught in a snare just large enough for his head. I could see how he’d worn his neck hair bare trying to free himself from the wire, spinning around and around, trying to attack his enemy but unable to fight, unable to flee.

I knelt next to him, tears freezing to my face, stroking his pretty coat. “What were you doing here? This wasn’t for you.” The misery on that pointy face devastated me. Ukashin said that a fox could smell a mouse under three feet of snow, that he could run along the tops of logs and sniff out every danger, using his bushy tail to brush away his own scent. He wasn’t supposed to die! He was supposed to live and laugh at all of us as he stole our hens away.

The snow came down harder as I opened the noose, sliding my knife down the wire, freeing the fox. He was horribly light for his size, so thin, nothing but bone and fur. Nothing edible. His death was for nothing, taking that bit of light and joy from the world.

I returned to the house, threw my sad harvest of rabbit, hare, and fox onto the kitchen table, and though it was forbidden, went into Avdokia’s room, where I lay down on her bed, coat and all, and buried my nose in her quilt, inhaling her smell of yeast.


Magda eventually found me and shoved me out into the kitchen. Katrina Ionian stirred something on the stove, reluctant to witness our warden manhandling me. If I had not gotten my feet under me, surely she would have dragged me in by my hair. The furry pile of dead animals was right where I’d left it, the rabbits and the fox, waiting for me to skin them and cut them up. “You think you’re better than us? That you deserve special favors because you’re the Mother’s daughter? I see you.” She pointed at her eye and then at me in a strangely menacing gesture, as if she would cast a spell on me. “Now get to work.”

I picked up my knife and turned dully to my kill.

I skinned the hare and pulled it from its coat, still a moment that disgusted me. Opened its belly and pulled out the entrails, cut off its head, cut it into sections. The rabbit was smaller and, even worse, more infantlike as I drew it out of its skin. The fox lolled on the other side of the table, all the joy and mischief gone—from me as well. This wasn’t a prize, this Trud. I was the hangman, whom everyone respected but no one wanted to invite to the christening. I started to gut the rabbit only to discover a clutch of babies in its womb. I felt sick. I set down the knife, wiped my hands on a dishcloth, put on someone else’s quilted hat, and went back out into the snow.

I leaned against the house, taking great breaths of cold air in the twilight, shivering in jags, but I could not force myself to go back inside. That fox had been a messenger for me. I felt the noose around my own neck, the wire cutting into me. If I had been trying to ignore the message, the rabbit was the confirmation. What was I going to do?

The porch door opened. Footsteps on the stairs. A dirty dog jumping on me. I kneed the beast aside. “Marina,” the Master said. “You can’t stay out here forever.”

“I can’t do this anymore. Ilya wants to do the hunting. Give it to him.”

“Let’s go inside,” he said.

I was shivering, but I would not go back in.

A patient hunter himself, he lit one of his cigarettes and smoked it, threw a stick for his dogs. When he was done smoking, he took my elbow. I didn’t want to but it was too cold to resist. I let him lead me back into the house, into the warm kitchen. The hare was gone, the half-butchered rabbit. Either he or Katrina had finished my work for me. Only the fox remained. The girls had vanished, though the pot of borscht on the stove was fragrantly bubbling.

If I stayed here, I would end up as dead as that fox. That’s what it was telling me. As dead as the rabbits. If not in body, then in spirit. Gutted. The snare hadn’t been built for me, yet I was already caught in it. I saw.

The Master ran his fingers along the guard hair of the fox’s red tail—my secret rebel—its tragic pointed nose. He picked up the animal and draped it over my shoulder, the way a man gives a woman a fur scarf, placing it on her neck to see the color against her face.

“Please don’t,” I said, turning away.

“You are the hunter, Marina. This is your Trud. I didn’t make this up. It came to you in a dream. It’s for your good, not ours.”

I trembled, the way a horse shudders to rid itself of a fly. I wished he would take the fox off me. “Why? Ilya wants to do it. You took it away from him. Give it back to him.”

“But you are the one who is hunted. You must become the hunter,” he said, stroking the dead creature lying on my shoulder. “You must think like a hunter, Marina. Lie in wait, read the tracks. Notice where the trail narrows, when you’re being led to the noose.” He took the fox off my body, held it out to me. “You pity this fox? He was not supposed to die—is that what you think? But he was a greedy, foolish thing. He wasn’t paying attention. A ridiculous little person.”

Yes. Careless, ridiculous, greedy. And so easily—dead.

“He dropped his guard. But you must not follow suit.” Ukashin took my bloody hand in his. He studied my face, his dark eyes urgent. “You are the hunter, Marina Ionian. Say it.”

My mouth was so dry. “I am the hunter.” The fox thought it was clever, but it had been foolish and had paid the price. I could not fall prey to my own vanity. I must not think myself too clever. That was a fox’s snare, its downfall. Maybe Ukashin’s, too. “Again.” His dark eyes very serious. “Say it.”

“I am the hunter.” I could feel my trembling ebb. He laid his arm across my shoulder, let his strength flood into me. I bent my head, leaning on my hands against the table. Either I was the hunter or I was the prey. There was no third option.