Free Obsession Falls by Christina Dodd

protected hollow near a stream, Taylor found a small shack, a lean-to, really, built of logs and shingles with a steep, metal roof. It was dusty, primitive, appeared to be uninhabited: her perfect winter home. She hung around twelve hours, camping close, waiting for an occupant, if there was one, and when no one showed up, she finally gathered her courage and knocked.
    No response.
    Feeling much like Goldilocks, she pulled open the door and called, “Hello, is anyone here?”
    Something small and gray with a long tail scuttled across the floor.
    She used to be afraid of rodents. Now she paid no heed, but shone her flashlight around. One room, about eight feet square, with a low ceiling, a splintered wooden floor, and two tiny windows covered with oilcloth. The place was filthy. Old. Not fit for human habitants.
    “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Oh, God. Oh, God.” Her heart quickened with pleasure, with anticipation. In the corner, there was a stove. A cast-iron, fat-bellied stove. A stove that would heat this tiny area and keep her warm and safe throughout the winter.
    The place was clearly abandoned. The primitive bed of canvas and sticks was broken. Dirty rags were shredded in one corner. The hut would take two days of cleaning to make it habitable.
    But it had that stove. That beautiful, rusty, functional stove.
    The flashlight’s white beam picked up a glint on the wall. She walked over to a bronze plaque, rubbed off the worst of the grime, and read, Wayfarer’s cabin, built 1971 to help those lost in the woods. Welcome, stranger, make yourself at home.
    Nineteen seventy-one? No wonder the cabin was falling apart.
    In very small letters in the lower right-hand corner, she read, Young Americans to Help Preserve Wilderness and Fight the Oppressive Federal Bureaucracy.
    Oh-kay. She’d never heard of the organization, but she loved them with all her heart. She set to work to make the place habitable, a job that took weeks of hard labor: repairing the roof, bringing in wood, using one of her precious paper clips to make a hook to catch fish … and then, actually catching one.
    She went down to the valley and used a paper clip to pick the Renners’ front door lock. She gathered supplies, food, mostly. She left no trace of her stay, but she no longer worried quite so much whether the residents wondered at their loss of canned goods.
    She returned to the cabin and settled in for the winter—and six nights later, the rusty chimney caught the roof on fire. She grabbed her backpack, her sleeping bag, her flashlight, then stood in the clear, cold night and watched the cabin crackle and burn.
    She was in trouble. It was early October. Winter was here, not the nightly freezing temperatures of summer, not the early snows of autumn, but winter, and in a place that frequently recorded the coldest winter temperatures in the continental United States.
    Once more she descended into Wildrose Valley, and as she did, she marveled at how well she found her way now. She was becoming almost competent at survival. Once there, she scouted some of the smaller houses and chose the empty one with no security stickers on the windows. She climbed the porch roof, discovered an unlocked second-story window, and got inside. A well-ordered calendar on the kitchen counter made her hustle through the house; in four days, the family was returning from vacation. She found her cold-weather sleeping bag and portable can opener, but she had to be careful not to take too much. She might not have many scruples left, but she knew she wanted to leave each house in such a condition that the owners had no idea someone had been there.
    So she would take just enough food, gather just enough gear, to get her to the next place to gather more food, more gear. If she did this right, if she planned and schemed, she would survive long enough to figure out what to do, how to clear her name, how to escape the threat of imminent death before winter truly set in.
    In the