As the woodcutter had said, the road to Bol Kokovichi followed the river, skirting mixed forest and open fields. It was definitely colder than the day before—below freezing, the trees glittering with frost—but I was well rested, and the map gave me heart. I was glad to see there would be a regularity of villages every few miles until I reached that forest. My luck was holding. If anything the sky was higher than it had been. I fell into step with myself, the aches and stiffening of yesterday’s walk at first almost ridiculously painful, but gradually my body warmed as the day went on. Pain subsided into a generalized ache that I could ignore in the rhythm of my tramp. Crows complained over the snowy, stubble-topped fields.

I grew confident about my choice and my abilities. It felt good to know that I could trust my instincts, responsible to no one but myself. The world wasn’t nearly as frightening as I’d been led to believe. And I was

not anyone’s lover,

      nobody’s wife,

not boy nor girl

not daughter, nor friend.

Just myself here

      mocking the crows.

Eighteen years old and full of why not.

But toward the end of the day, weariness came over me like a fog. In one village, I asked a woman where I might be able to spend the night. She said, “With your own people,” and slammed the door in my face. I had to approach five different souls before I found shelter with a sour but greedy old couple. They took my money and let me sleep in their shed. Later I discovered they’d locked me in. I went crazy—I couldn’t stand being locked up anymore. I pounded and yelled, and the old woman shrieked back through the door that they’d let me out in the morning, but they had chickens to protect. “Unless you want to sleep outdoors, you better stop that racket.” Luckily I was tired and soon slept. But my hopes of getting an early start in the morning were dashed—I felt sick and the oldsters took forever to pull themselves out of their rural torpor and open the door. The old witch thrust a crust of bread at me, and a boiled egg in the shell, which made me want to vomit. I warmed my hands with it and headed out toward Alekhovshchina.

Soon I found myself in the forest the woodcutter had described. The road deteriorated into a dismal wagon path through the lines of tall pines. The going was hard—branches and even tree trunks had fallen across the road and been left there. The ruts were deep and the darkness of the day and the closeness of the path sucked out my spirit like a chimney drawing smoke. After a few hours, my weariness deepened to pure misery. I stumbled along, a quarter mile at a time. I felt like I’d fallen into a nightmare, shuffling along through a forest without end. A line from a Longfellow poem my father liked haunted me: This is the forest primeval…

I concentrated on hating. I hated the endless identical trees, leaving only a strip of white sky overhead. I cursed those old people for the late start. I cursed Kolya and his endless seduction. I cursed the day I kissed him in the cloakroom at my parents’ New Year’s Eve party. I cursed the peasants and the speculators and God and the devil, cursed the revolution and the year 1918. I grew sweaty, then chilled. I felt weak and stupid. After a while I stopped cursing, stopped making a sound, and just stumbled along, without thought, moving out of inertia—not walking so much as falling forward.

To make matters worse, the snow that everyone had been waiting for began to fall. Now a sick, dull panic rose. No “Song of Myself” now, just the dawning realization that I might not make it to Alekhovshchina. The snow fell faster, big flakes whirling with an updraft. It gave me vertigo. Within minutes, up and down became confused, and all that whiteness made me seasick. I dropped a pinecone, just to see it fall. The sky gave no clue as to the time—it could have been noon or two or four. I stopped to rest and drink a bit of boiled water from my bottle. I’d felt sick when I left the shed that morning, and now I just wanted to lie down on the road and curl into a ball like a hedgehog. I looked back at my own footprints, filling with snow. Was it too far to go back to those horrible old people?

I should have been there by now. Surely I was well past the halfway mark. I had to press on, see if I could make Alekhovshchina before nightfall. I just had to. No one in this world had any idea where I was, and no one would ever come looking. I lurched blindly from rut to rut. The snow was sticking to the ground, my cheeks were freezing, and my nose felt like a piece of metal stuck into my face. I wrapped my woman’s woolen scarf over my sheepskin and up all the way to my eyes, though breathing through the wool made it wet, and then that froze, too.

I was a fool. I should have emptied my pockets in Tikhvin, found a wagon, paid someone to take me. I was a stupid girl wearing the clothes and bravado of a boy. I stumbled along, watching the white end of the forest road for the shape of rooftops and chimneys. Just beyond those trees, I told myself. About a day’s walk, he’d said. Damn that woodcutter. And damn me for trusting him. I would never get out of this forest. I could not stop shaking, though it was unclear whether it was from the cold or my exhausted state.

Finally I could walk no more. I stood in the center of a vast white world, between two endless walls of trees, and I was done. I was going to die here. I had come to the end of my luck. Even if Alekhovshchina was just beyond that clump of trees, I could not have made it. I imagined next summer, the woodcutter coming across my half-decayed body. Guess he never made Novinka, poor donkey. Maybe he wasn’t even a real woodcutter. Maybe he was some kind of devil, sending me off on a fool’s adventure. Well, I had supplied the fool. Death was watching now, sharpening his knives. I could feel his breath on my neck. I thought of Seryozha, dead in the snow in Moscow. I’ll see you soon, little brother. I stood there like an old horse, my head down, snow building up on my sheepskin.

For some reason, I thought of Volodya. Down in the Don with his men. Snow on the broad shoulders of his overcoat. He would understand this. Soldiers marched past exhaustion, out in all weather. Volodya always liked that sort of thing. The forts he used to build at Maryino—lean-tos, in which he imagined himself kidnapped by Indians or in Alaska with Jack London, hunting with bow and arrow, sledding with huskies. I could see that lean-to, its lichen-covered sticks, smelling of damp earth, its Volodyan mystery. Big boys and their forts.

A shelter.

I could build a shelter.

I didn’t know how, but if I wanted to live, that’s what I had to do. I needed to stop reeling with panic, and take some action before dark caught me and the cold cracked my bones. I couldn’t just stand here and cry, like an infant expecting someone’s large hands to come out of the sky and pick me up, pat my back, say, There, there.

I had to do something. Or at least try.

I mustered the energy to shuffle off the road into the trees. Before I did, I broke a branch and laid it as a crosspiece astraddle two narrow pines standing side by side at the road’s edge like children waiting for their nanny outside a sweet shop. I would look for that, and turn left when I came out. If I came out. Holy Mother, don’t let me die. I went along, marking my way at eye level every five feet or so by breaking a branch and leaving it hanging like an arm. I must not become lost. The idea was as dreadful as freezing to death. Worse than dying. I would go mad. I was already halfway there.

I crashed through the close-spaced trees, and the snowy boughs snapped back, lashing my face. I could barely see, and didn’t know quite what I was looking for until I saw a fallen pine snagged in the branches of another—the triangular shape of shelter. A frail hope kindled within me. If only I could summon the energy… I began to collect sticks and branches, fallen wood, everything I could see that I could move. My hands were clumsy with cold, my eyes watered and ice formed on the lash tips. My feet were frozen in my boots. How I wished I still had my long hair to cover my poor ears. I wrapped the scarf tighter around my head with hands that felt like bear paws. Luckily there was a good deal of fallen wood. Clumsily, I dragged lumber into a heap, resting with my hands on my knees, head down, gasping, before I began again.

I chose the straightest branches and leaned them at intervals against the fallen tree, awkwardly pressing them into the ground with my boot. The wind was quiet here in the trees, but every movement was hard. It was as if I were trying to build a hut on Jupiter. Now that I was building, though, slow and difficult as it was, I felt determination harden within me, pushing despair aside an inch or two so I could breathe.

Who are you kidding? This isn’t going to save you. Why bother?

“I’m not listening,” I said out loud. I knew it was the voice of death. Grimly I labored on. It was the hardest work I’d ever done, but every stick I pushed into the ground increased the possibility of surviving. I wrestled with a longish branch, trying to break it across my knee. I finally propped it in the snow and broke it with my boot, laying it on the growing skeleton of my hut. How I wished for a bit of cord, remembering how Volodya had lashed his shelter together, but I had not expected to become an Arctic explorer on this journey.

Now I had sticks on both sides of the center pole, low at the foot and higher at the top, the whole thing reminiscent of the spine and ribs of a fish on a plate. Not a very impressive structure, but night was the only thing on my mind. I broke boughs from limb after limb, layered them onto the skeleton until I’d got it fairly covered. I set aside boughs of springy fir for my bed—I couldn’t lie on frozen ground, it would leech out every bit of heat from my body in the night. Sticks to weigh down the boughs, boughs to fill in between the sticks. Toward the end, I was throwing anything and everything onto my construction.

I crawled inside to claw away the frozen leaves and snow, tossing the debris backward like a dog digging out a badger, then stuffed in the springy fir boughs, as many as I could cram inside, matting them down with my knees as I went. I lay on this green bed to see how it would be to spend the night there. It was dark and cold and smelled of must and sweet, aromatic evergreens.

I crawled back out and added another layer of boughs for good measure, even scooping frosty armloads of leaves and ferns and decomposing wood to seal over the whole mess like frosting on a cake. When I was done, it looked less like Volodya’s forts than like a rural brush pile waiting for a match. Did I really think this pile of twigs would keep me from freezing? I built my house of sticks, I built my house with leaves. And then the wolf he huffed, the wolf he puffed…

The sweat I’d worked up was beginning to freeze. I had to get a fire going. Wearily, I collected dead boughs from the underbranches of the pines. They seemed reasonably dry, though my frozen fingers could barely manipulate them. I was getting fuddled, my mind icing over like my gloves.

I piled up the kindling and stood, trying to remember what to do next, as snow fell onto my camp and the wind roared overhead in the pines. I dug out a spot a foot or two from the lean-to with the heel of my boot and made a little pile of kindling there, tenting it with sticks. It still didn’t look right. Rocks. I needed to circle it with rocks. At least that’s what Volodya did. Merde. I stomped around, irrationally furious that I had one more damned thing to do, kicked out some rocks, carried them to my pathetic pile of twigs, and laid them in a circle.

That was it, I could do no more.

I took out my matches from my jacket pocket, removing my gloves, and knelt to this rude altar. Saying a short prayer to the Virgin and one to Prometheus, I struck a match. It broke and flew off into the snow. Shit. Shitshitshit. How had Kolya managed to give me such lousy matches? And now I only had five. There could be no more mistakes. The second match I dropped twice just trying to hold it. It took all my effort to keep it between my blue fingers. My mind knew what it was doing, but my hands wouldn’t cooperate. My teeth were chattering hard enough to break one, and my hand was shaking so badly I had to stop, put the matches back in my pocket and stick my poor paws under my armpits to warm them. I rubbed them together and tried again, struck the match on the rock, gently, once, twice. It lit. I put it to the kindling, but it guttered out.