Excerpt from Winterkill by Karen Wunderman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When she picked her head up again she could see the dull orange sun glowing over the ridge of rounded mountains out the west-facing window. It was late, she had to get back, and quickly she put the tin away in the corner behind the log. Then, as always when leaving the shack, she took the three pieces of brown thread in the doorway and snagged them in the splintered wood on the opposite side. A precision accompanied this act, the same kind of care a person would give to locking up a precious house, and with the shack secured in this manner, she followed her long shadow eastward, to the center of the valley and home.

Finding her way home, even without the help of the sun, was easy. The mountains were her guide, good as a compass, and as long as she stayed within their circle she could tell which direction she was facing. Dull nubs of mountains lined the western rim, low and uninteresting. Higher mountains with trees all the way to the top rimmed the south, and there were no mountains at all stretching north into the Canadian wilderness. But on the eastern rim, those mountains were something to be reckoned with. One was a granite giant that sat square to the village, its silvery face lined with deep gullies and rivulets of mercury like so many lines in a cracked mirror. A smaller mountain grew out of the talus at this giant's feet, symmetrical and bald, a rocky dome surrounded by hardy pines that gradually mixed with and gave way to stately white birches and quaking aspens lower down in the valley.

The shack lay near the base of the southern mountains, and it was a good fifteen-minute walk, almost to the highway, before she could no longer feel their pull at her back. Finally she rounded the bend in the river where it crossed under the elevated portion of the interstate. A car was stopped up on the bridge at a strange angle, not quite on the shoulder. A man stood next to it, blood on his face. He'd seen her run under the high cement archway that supported the road, she was sure, and all the fantasies that had been triggered by the newspaper article sprang to life. Maybe that's what had happened to the Gunn family. Maybe they'd been kidnapped, stolen away, tortured. She emerged on the other side, still running, and she turned her head to see if the man was watching, but she tripped over something, fell hard to the ground, and whatever it was under her, it moved. She jumped up, a scream wedged in her throat, and saw that it was a deer she'd tripped over, a mangle of blood and broken bones, apparently hit by a car. She looked with revulsion at the blood on her arms and hands, spreading her fingers wide as if stretching the skin taut would keep the blood from sinking in. The deer shuddered several times and heaved a final gasp.

The animal's glazed eyes remained open and she could see her convex reflection in the milky brownness of the one that faced up. She was too scared about the man on the road to backtrack to the river and rinse off the blood. Run, now, she told herself, but her legs wouldn't obey the signal. Something else had to be done first. She reached deep into her pocket and pulled out a handful of small, hard, red berries she had gathered on the way home-always gathered. Survivor seeds. It took all her courage, but she forced herself to splay the deer's hooves and place some of the berries between them, as if it were holding them. Then, hands trembling, she stuck a few under the fold of its upper lip, still so warm and soft. Finally, she sifted the remaining berries--all but a few to keep in her pocket--through her bloodied fingers over the lifeless animal. A palsy set into her muscles and she stumbled the rest of the way home.

The dogs barked when they heard her open the wooden gate to the white clapboard farmhouse with the forest-green trim. Tangled masses of honeysuckle spilled over the picket fence, and she thought it was rude that this scene should appear to be so cheerful, like out of a storybook, when such an awful thing had just happened. She turned around to close the gate behind her, saw the bloody smudges on the newly painted white wood, the stains on her hands and clothes. She could see her father sitting on the front porch, and her mother, she knew, would be in the kitchen making dinner. Both entrances to the house were blocked, one parent at each, and she wondered if this were by design or default. Most things in this house seemed to happen by default, but it occurred to her that it really didn't matter. The dogs had already announced her arrival and there was no turning back. Her father seemed oblivious. He was often oblivious these days, a fact she resented, but now she was grateful for the opportunity to sneak around the back and wash off at the pump and maybe smear some mud on her clothes to try to cover the blood stains.

From Winterkill by Karen Wunderman. Copyright 2002 Karen Wunderman, all rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the author.