Free Deer Season by Aaron Stander

to come back. The dream wasn’t new; it was a variation of one that he had had many times since discovering that he had fathered a daughter years before. In the dream Ray is trying to hold onto a relationship with the girl’s mother, a relationship that in reality had been a brief summer romance. He had been home on leave from the army; he was in his early twenties.
    In the dream he is a young man again and has prophetic powers. He is trying to persuade Ashleigh’s mother not to go back to California; if she will stay with him, their daughter will be protected from a horrible tragedy later in life. The dream always ends with him standing alone on a Lake Michigan beach just before the sun drops below the horizon, possessing prescient knowledge but powerless to change the future.
    It took Ray a long time to fall back asleep. Later he woke to the sound of the wind, a howling gale. As he opened his eyes he could see the snow being blown into the thick woods in the gray dawn. The storm had arrived.

14
Monday was preschool yoga morning, a salubrious respite that Marie especially enjoyed. Lynne and the twins seemed to enjoy it as much as she did. They would eat a light breakfast and drive to the yoga studio at the narrows, a strip of land where the shoreline of one of the largest lakes in the region is squeezed down to little more than a river for almost a mile.
    The yoga studio was in an old brick building with a stone foundation that dated from the lumber days. In its original iteration the structure had been a bank, the only masonry building in a thriving lumber town that once had two railroads and three mills. The mills closed, their equipment and most of the workers and their families moving up the coast to untouched stands of timber. Farmers settled in the verdant hills, and soon summer communities began to develop along the lakes, the cottagers first coming from the big cities to the south by lake steamer, later by rail, and finally in larger numbers by Mr. Ford’s Model T and the automobiles built by his competitors.
    And this morning, like many yoga mornings, they were running late. When they rushed out of the house, they discovered that Dirk had taken Lynne’s SUV, leaving his truck. They found the girls’ car seats tossed in the mudroom and secured them in the back seat of the crew cab. Marie could tell that Lynne was angry, but was doing her best to control her rage.
    Marie parked next to the building, and she and Lynne waited as the twins scrambled out of their car seats and collected their yoga mats. The girls knew and followed the routine of the class. They rolled out their mats between Marie and Lynne and settled into Savasana, corpse pose, and did their best not to look around and greet the other children who were entering the studio. They knew that they could socialize with the other kids after the class.
    Marie enjoyed watching the girls take various poses over the course of the hour, their pliable, petite bodies easily assuming some poses, yet usually having difficulty with the balance positions, often tumbling to their mats in a chorus of giggles.
    At the end of class, after the twins greeted the other children, Marie and Lynne herded them off to the truck and the next stop, a special treat following yoga, a visit to the Bayside Bakery. The twins had muffins and hot chocolate. Marie had tried the muffins early in the fall and found them too sweet and gooey. But she happily discovered that the bakery made acceptable croissants and offered strong, rich dark coffee, one bit of home that she found difficult to replace on the American frontier.
    Lynne, aware that Marie was still uncomfortable driving in heavy snow, took the wheel for the trip home. The strong winds were creating blizzard conditions, greatly reducing visibility, and a thick blanket of new snow made the still-unplowed back roads almost impassable.
    The last mile on the small country road that led to their house was the most difficult. Lynne had