Mara Icehand had counted six missing neighbors since the first frost, and the town clerk still refused to open the ledger. She stood at the bulletin board outside the meeting hall with a folded paper in her mitten. On it she had written one name: the tanner who lived two doors from her own. He had not been seen in eleven days. She meant to pin the paper up and force the town to speak his name aloud. Then she stopped. She had no date of his disappearance, no last sighting, no witness. Without proof, the clerk would call her a widow chasing ghosts and tear the paper down before supper. Her husband had vanished in the spring. No one had believed her then either. She walked down to the ice shelf instead, where the butcher kept his winter stock. A bull walrus lay roped on the sled, freshly hauled, its nicked snout crusted with brine and its tusks scored from a long life at sea. The butcher was inland trading the hide. Mara knew what he kept under the belly straps: his tally book, where he logged every carcass by the day and by the buyer. The tanner had ordered a hide in October. If the order sat unclaimed, the date was proof the tanner had stopped coming to town. She unbuckled the strap, slid the book free, and turned the stiff pages until she found the tanner's name beside a date and an unmarked collection line. She copied four more matching gaps: the weaver, the ferryman's son, the widow from the north road, the boy who swept the mill. Five names, five dates, all written in a hand that was not hers. She tucked the book back under the strap and walked home with a record no one in Axepeak could dismiss. Tomorrow the paper on the bulletin would carry dates. Tonight she had to decide whose name to write first, and which neighbor would come for her once it was read.