Archie awoke at dawn. Blanche had found her way back onto his chest. He cast her off in a hurry as he rushed to check their bags. As far as he could tell, everything was still there.

"Huh?" Blanche groaned.

"I thought I heard something last night."

Blanche sat up in a snap. "What?!"

"Yeah. Something small. I was thinking about what Barley said. The enukin."

"Did they steal our food?"

"No."

Blanche rubbed her eyes. "Are we going back to sleep or are we eating?"

Archie sighed. "Eating. Come on."

He crawled out of the tent. A fresh layer of snow had come in the night, but Archie swore he saw the remains of a few tiny footprints. He slid his foot to fill in the divots. He needed Blanche alert, but he didn't need her scared.

But the possible footprints weren't the only complication of the morning. After breakfast, Archie had Blanche double check their direction. After shoveling away the fresh snow and finding the green grass underneath, she foraged for the grove.

"Which way did I say it was yesterday?"

Archie pointed. "Northeast. That way."

Blanche clicked her tongue in deep thought. She scurried over to a new spot, digging down through the snow and placing her palms on the grass below.

"What is it?" Archie asked.

Blanche pointed northwest. "I feel it that way."

"Maybe we just got turned around."

"But it was the other way. It's like it moved."

Archie hefted his pack onto his back, the straps finding their familiar chafing lines around his shoulders. "As long as we're walking in the right direction."

They marched through the morning, speaking only to confirm they were going in the right direction. With each break, they took a bite of dried fruits and nuts, skipping lunch and continuing with grumbling bellies. The snow that danced high in the sky grew heavy and found its way to the ground in a light shower that made Archie speed up. With each passing hour, the snow fell thicker and thicker. By the time they stopped for the day, they could no longer see the distant mountain peaks through the flurry.

The trees became sparse. The best Archie and Blanche could do was to set up against a rock outcropping between two trees. There, the snow only slipped in between one of the trees and the cliff face, but occasionally a sturdy gust would knock snow down from the top of the evergreens. They barely managed to get a fire started, and they set up their tent as close as they dared to the flames.

"Can we leave the fire going tonight?" Blanche asked. She bundled herself up in blankets inside the tent, letting Archie stick his arms out to do the cooking.

"I don't think any fire is going to last long, Blanche." Archie put his face near the boiling water, his numb face stinging as it was brought back to life by the steam. "Besides, we don't want to draw attention to ourselves."

"I thought we wanted to be found."

"By the yetis. The Bhantla said they would find us. We have the antlers."

"It's so cold…"

Archie lowered his face even farther toward the steam. It clouded his vision as much as the distant snow, wispy grays and translucent whites dancing up his face. He closed his eyes.

"Since we found those cranberries earlier, can we have extra meat today?" Blanche asked from within the tent. "I barely had any."

Archie tried to let the question pass over him like the vapors, but she persisted.

"Archie?"

"You know we can't. If the snow keeps up, we might lose a day. We have to stick to our rations."

"But that's what I'm saying! We went under our rations today because the cranberries. So shouldn't we still eat our normal rations? It'll just help us be strong for tomorrow."

"Not tonight, Blanche."

"Fine."

A gust of wind slipped into their camp, diminishing the flame and stinging Archie's newly-feeling facing. He opened his eyes.

Behind a distant tree, something was staring back at him.

Archie's heart dropped and started beating twice as fast, surging a primal warmth into his body as it decided how to react. His hands moved together, a noodle forming in one, a blueberry in the other. He moved his face away from the flame to study the creature.

Through the snow, it was hard to make out exact details, but Archie got a sense of its proportions, and its proportions were all wrong. It looked to be a person of about half of Archie's height, but its head must have been bigger than his. He couldn't see its eyes, only its large nose. It wore an assortment of tattered clothes that were all too big for it, tufts of almost fur-like hair showing in the holes. Archie got the feeling that the clothes had been scavenged. Collected. Stolen.

Enukin enukin, little and meek. They take all your food and then you when you're weak.

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Archie fit his blueberry against the noodle and pulled it back. He wished the little creature would either charge or retreat. That would make things easier for Archie. But instead, it just stood there and watched. Archie hadn't thought twice about shooting the tariaksuq or the hare. But this thing was far too human-like for his comfort.

But he knew that the luxury of morality didn't exist in such a place.

He lifted his hand, taking aim at the enukin. He knew from the tariaksuq that he could shatter bone with blueberries, and the enukin's enlarged head made an easy target. The enukin seemed to realize the same. It backed away slowly, keeping its hands out in front of its body.

A branch broke behind Archie.

He whipped around just in time to see a branch crumble from the weight of the snow. No danger. He turned back to the enukin, but it was gone. He let his slingshot go slack and surveyed the area. He saw nothing but snow.

"Hey Blanche?"

"Yeah?"

"We're gonna start keeping watch. We'll sleep in shifts."

"Oh. Okay. I'm not sleepy, so I'll go first."

"Okay. Wake me when it gets dark. Or if you see anything."

Nothing came for them in the night, but they suffered nonetheless, terror causing them to overlap their waking shifts. The snow and wind picked up, bouncing off their tent with little prickling sounds that reminded Archie of fingers scratching the canvas. Even when day broke again, he felt unsettled. Blanche was happy to get a move on, even if it meant braving the worsening winds.

"Direction check," Archie said once they had repacked their tent.

Blanche had to kick away a foot of snow to get to the ground. Once again, she frowned as she foraged.

"It's back to being northeast," she said. "I checked last night and it was northwest."

"Okay. Okay." Archie tried to keep his cool. Blanche needed him to be strong. To be a leader. "Well, we know it's north, at least. Let's just go north as best we can. If we have to go around a peak, we'll go around the east side."

But walking north was harder than they thought. In the rare instances that the slopes parted to allow straightforward passage, that only meant the wind funneled directly into their faces. They spent hours walking in silence with their faces pointed at the ground, their collars collecting white wreaths of snow that melted against their skin and soaked their undershirts.

They stopped in a cave, relishing the dry ground and the cover from the wind. Finally, they could uncover their faces and breathe without inhaling snow. Archie looked as deep into the cave as he could see. As best as he could tell, they weren't sharing it with anything. He returned to the light of the entrance and looked out at the wilderness beyond as Blanche plopped down on a dry piece of ground twenty feet into the cave.

He looked at her with worried eyes.

She answered the question before he could ask it.

"We've already come this far," she said. "I didn't do all this suffering just to turn around."

Archie wiped his nose on his sleeve and sipped from his waterskin, recoiling at its iciness. He stared out at the snow that blew sideways in the wind. "If things get worse…"

"Hey," Blanche said, prompting Archie to look at her. She had peeled back her hood, and in the cold, her face had returned to the paleness of a year ago, her red lips standing out as if painted on a snowman. She grinned. "I can take it. I'm tough."

Archie laughed. "Yeah. I know you are. At some point, it's too much, though. I'm afraid of…I know I can get, uh…In the past, when I get focused on something—a mission—I get blind to anything else. So I don't know…"

Blanche patted the ground next to her. "What are you doing? Put your pack down. Come sit. Rest."

"Yeah. Yeah." Archie dropped his pack at the entrance and stretched his shoulders as he walked over to her. He sighed as he slid down the wall, happy to take the weight off his legs.

"When you get worked up like that, you also forget to relax."

Archie looked at Blanche with admiration. Her hair frayed at the ends, her lips were chapped beyond belief, and she had bags under eyes. She was exhausted, far from home, and worried. But despite all of that, there was a softness behind her eyes. A gentleness in her voice. A kindness in her lips.

He needed to protect her.

"Tomorrow, if it gets any worse, we turn around," he said. "Okay?"

"Okay. Now relax."

Archie laughed. "Teach me how?"

"Okay," she said with a big toothy grin. She slid her hand behind his neck, squeezing to get it between his head and shoulders. "You always pinch your shoulders up and your head back. Drop your shoulders. Straighten your head."

Archie did so, the muscles in the back of his neck stretching as he felt himself unwind. "Okay. What else?"

"You're pressing your thumbs down. Here." She pulled his thumb off of his pointer knuckle, sliding her hand in his to fill the space. "Relax your muscles."

In some ways, Archie relaxed. In other ways, he tensed. But he still only gave Blanche half of his attention, turning around and looking past her deeper into the cave to make sure nothing could sneak up on them.

"And you purse your lips," she continued, leaning over and reaching a finger toward his mouth.

And then she screamed.

As her shriek bounced around the walls of the cave, Archie turned to the entrance. Two enukin had pulled apart his pack, digging through it as they kept their sunken eyes fixed on Archie and Blanche. Up close, Archie finally saw the details of the enukin, and the details horrified him. Their eyes were wild and too wide, their ears sticking out too sideways, their cheeks and brow lumpy like unfired clay. One bared teeth that were twice as long on one side of its face than the other. The other's tongue flicked uncontrollably across its lips, matching the perpetual trembling shake of its body.

One screamed back at Blanche, the other adding to its cry as Archie shot a blueberry that shattered its elbow. Its cry reached a shrill shriek as its arm bent backward and it dropped one of the bags of rations. It dodged out of the way as Archie unleashed another blueberry that flew out into the snow.

The other enukin fled with a long rolled up cloth, a couple of biscuits spilling out of one end as the creature made its escape. The injured enukin scooped up the little bag with his good hand and ran out into the snow, another blueberry hitting the back of its shoulder with the crack! of stone on stone.

Archie rushed after them, but he could only track them five feet out of the cave before they disappeared in the snow. He stood at the entrance and stared out into the flurry beyond.

"I—I—I tried to summon vines," Blanche explained in a frantic frenzy. "But the ground. There's no essence."

Archie looked back at her. Her gentleness had been fractured by fear. He looked down at his torn-apart pack and dug through the wreckage, cataloguing what was left and what had been stolen.

"They didn't take the antler dust," he said with some relief, but his voice still carried the tension of what he said next. "They took at least two days' worth of rations."

"Archie, I'm sorry. I tried to stop them. But I couldn't—"

"It's okay, Blanche. I think at least one of them isn't coming back." He sighed as he scooped his things up and moved them deeper in the cave. "Can you summon vines in your hands?"

"Uh…" Blanche cupped her hands and winced. "Not really, no."

Archie kicked his handaxe toward her. "Keep that on you, then."

Blanche looked at the axe with horror. "You want me to…what? Chop one of them?"

"If they come back, yeah. It's either that or lose all our food."

Blanche took the axe in her hand and jostled it around, feeling the weight. She considered its edge with weary eyes. "You don't think they'd attack us, do you?"

Enukin enukin, little and meek. They take all your food and then you when you're weak.

"Not yet."

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