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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Cabin at the Edge of Everything
The Yukon in January was no place for a boy who wanted friends.
Noah Larsen pressed his nose against the frost-caked window and watched the world turn white. Snow had been falling since before dawn, thick flakes spiraling down from a sky the color of old wool. Beyond the glass, the spruce trees stood like dark soldiers in rows that went on forever, their branches heavy with ice. There was no road. No power lines. No sound at all except the pop and hiss of the woodstove behind him and the low whistle of wind finding cracks in the cabin walls.
He was twelve years old, and the nearest kid his age lived forty miles south in a town called Snowfall Ridge.
"Noah." His father's voice came from the back room, deep and steady as always. "Traps won't check themselves."
"Coming," Noah said. He pulled on his wool hat, his heavy coat, and his moose-hide mittens. The mittens had been his mother's project—she'd beaded a tiny blue star on each one the winter before she died. Noah touched the stars now, a habit he didn't think about anymore, the way you don't think about breathing.
Tom Larsen appeared in the doorway, tall and broad-shouldered, his dark beard streaked with gray that hadn't been there two years ago. He carried two pairs of snowshoes and handed the smaller set to Noah.
"Wind's picking up," Tom said. "We check the north line, come straight back. No wandering."
"I never wander."
His father gave him a look—the look that said he knew better—but didn't argue.
They stepped outside into cold that hit like a wall. Noah's nostrils stuck together on his first breath. Forty below, maybe colder. The thermometer on the porch post had stopped working last week, its red liquid shrunk down to nothing, as if even it had given up trying to measure this kind of cold.
The trapline ran north through a corridor of black spruce and birch, following a frozen creek bed. Tom had set the snares for snowshoe hare and marten—small furs that brought decent money when spring came and they could make the trip to the trading post. Noah's job was to carry the pack basket and reset any sprung traps while his father scouted for tracks.
They worked in silence. That was how Tom Larsen preferred things since Noah's mother had passed. He wasn't mean about it. He just didn't seem to have many words left, as if grief had used them all up.
Noah used to try to fill the quiet—telling jokes, pointing out animal tracks, asking questions about the stars. But talking to someone who only grunted back was like throwing snowballs at a stone wall. Eventually you stopped.
So Noah talked to himself instead, inside his head, narrating his life the way the characters did in the adventure books his mother used to read to him. *The brave explorer pushed deeper into the frozen wilderness, his loyal companions at his side.* Except there were no loyal companions. Just his father's broad back, always three steps ahead.
They found two hares in the snares, both frozen stiff. Tom tucked them into the pack basket without ceremony. At the sixth snare post, Tom frowned.
"Something tripped this one and got free. See the fur?" He pointed to a tuft of pale hair caught in the wire. "Too big for hare. Might be a young fox."
Noah looked at the fur. It was silver-white, almost glowing against the dark wire.
"Could be anything," he said.
Tom grunted. They moved on.
But Noah kept thinking about that tuft of silver fur all the way home.
