A girl—who was once called Zed, and once called Lamentations, and now perhaps has no name—flees the famine and violence of a starving colony in the Americas and enters the wilderness. She has a hatchet, a heavy cloak, boots she stole from a dead man, flint, the memory of a map of the river, and a small pewter cup. The story is one of individual survival, but told from the perspective of a woman—an inversion of the usual masculine wilderness tale, in which the challenge of survival makes a boy into a man. Here, a girl becomes something else: a waif, a witch perhaps, an offering to bear and wolf, a sacrament to the forest. Her survival doesn’t depend on dominating the wilds but on submitting to their awful and unending power.