With each blink she remembered the bark of her mother's cough, her pale cheek, the scrape of the spoon against the bottom of the medicine jar. Her father was away for a few weeks, like he went that time every year to trade tanned skins for winter food, and he put her in charge until his return. Looking at the ground, thinking about the fire wavering at the hearth, mistaking one tree for another in the darkening woods, she stopped walking. With every step and every shake of her head, the path seemed to hop around; it first snaked around that tree there and after she blinked it led into a different patch of dark. She had to admit it: she was lost.