In Alaska, the winters are long and dark, the land untamed. Tracy Petrikoff has always loved her family's remote home and her parents' business training and racing sled dogs. It seemed only a matter of time before Tracy's father won the Iditarod?and perhaps, not too long after, Tracy herself would win.

But now everything is different. With the death of Tracy's mother the year before, the family is mired in grief and struggling to keep the business alive. When a stranger knocks Tracy unconscious in the woods, she does not tell her father. She does not want to give him another reason to worry. But shortly thereafter, another stranger emerges from the woods, looking for a job, and Tracy's omission becomes the first strand in a web drawing tightly over her family. Now the isolation Tracy has always valued in her home has begun to seem like a threat, and Tracy must decide what she will do to protect those she loves best.

Born in Illinois, Jamey Bradbury has lived in Alaska for fifteen years, leaving only briefly to earn her MFA from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Winner of an Estelle Campbell Memorial Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters, she has published fiction in Black Warrior Review, Sou'wester, and Zone 3, and she has written for the Anchorage Daily News, TheBillfold.com, and storySouth. Jamey lives in Anchorage, Alaska.