by Eowyn Ivey
When Jack woke again it was late morning, the sun was up, and Mabel was in the kitchen. His body was tired and stiff, as if he had never slept at all but instead spent the night splitting wood or bucking hay bales. He dressed and in socked feet made his way to the table. He smelled fresh coffee and hot pancakes.
“I think it worked, Jack.”
“What?”
“The sourdough starter Esther gave me. Here, try them.”
Mabel set a plate of pancakes on the table.
“Did you sleep all right?” she asked. “You look positively worn out.” With a hand on his shoulder, she reached over him to pour coffee from the blue enamel pot into his cup. He picked up the cup, held it warm between his hands.
“I don’t know. I guess not.”
“It’s so cold out, isn’t it? But beautiful. All that white snow. It’s so bright.”
“You’ve been outside?”
“No. Not since I dashed to the outhouse in the middle of the night.”
He got up from the table.
“Aren’t you going to eat breakfast?” she asked.
“Just going to get some wood. Nearly let the fire go out.”
He put on his coat this time, and some gloves, before opening the door. The snow reflected sunlight so brilliantly he squinted. He walked to the woodpile, then turned back to the cabin and saw the snow child, or what was left of it. Still just a shapeless pile of snow. No scarf. No mittens. Just as it had been last night, but now exposed as truth in the light of day. And the footprints still ran through the snow, across the yard and into the trees. Then he saw the dead snowshoe hare beside the doorstep. He stepped past without pausing. Inside, he let the wood fall to the floor beside the stove in a clamor, then stared without seeing.
“Have you noticed anything?” he finally said.
“You mean the cold snap?”
“No. I mean anything out of the ordinary.”
“Like what?”
“I thought I heard something last night. Probably nothing.”
After breakfast Jack left to feed the animals. On the way to the barn, he scooped up the dead hare and held it close to his side, so Mabel wouldn’t notice out the window. Once in the barn, he looked at it closely. He could see where it had been strangled, most likely with a thin snare that cut into its white coat and soft underfur. It was frozen stiff. Later, after he had taken care of the animals, he went behind the barn and threw the dead hare as far as he could into the trees.
When he returned to the cabin, Mabel was heating water to wash.
“Did you see the tracks?” she called over her shoulder.
“What tracks?”
She pointed out the window.
“Those?” he asked. “Must have been a fox.”
“Are the chickens safe?”
“Fine. They’re all fine.”
Jack took his shotgun down from over the door and told her he would go after the fox. He knew now what unsettled him about the tracks. The trail began at the heap of snow and led in only one direction—away and into the woods. There were no prints coming into the yard.
The trail wove among the birch trees, over fallen logs and around bare, thorny wild rose branches. Jack followed the loops and turns. They didn’t seem like the tracks of a lost child. More like a wild animal, a fox or ermine. Dashing here and there, running across the top of the snow, circling back and around until Jack wasn’t sure if he was still following the original trail. If she were lost, why hadn’t she come to the door? Why didn’t she ask for help? And the tracks did not lead down the wagon trail, toward the south, toward town and other homesteads. Instead, they moved through the trees without direction, but when he looked back over his shoulder, he could no longer see the cabin, and he understood that the trail was winding north, toward the mountains. The boot prints were joined here and there by another, different set of tracks. Fox, crisscrossing the child’s footprints, then slipping away. He continued to follow the child’s trail. Why would a fox stalk a little girl through the trees? He looked down from time to time, then doubted himself. Maybe the girl was following the fox. Maybe that was why her trail was so erratic.
Jack stopped at a fallen cottonwood, leaned back against its thick trunk. He must have gotten off the trail. He wiped sweat from his forehead. It was cold, but the air was dry and calm, and he was overheating. He wondered if he hadn’t looked closely enough. Maybe he had been following fox tracks this entire time. He returned to the prints and stooped down next to them, half expecting to see pad and claw print. But no, they were still the smooth, child-sized footprints.
He followed the trail for a while longer, until it meandered down into a small ravine and a dense forest of black spruce. He could not easily fit through those trees. He had been gone for some time now. He turned back and felt a momentary rush of panic—so intently had he stared down at the footprints as he followed them, he had paid little attention to the landscape. The trees and snow were the same in all directions. Then he remembered his own boot tracks in the snow. It would be a long, looping way home, but it would get him there.
Mabel was anxious at the door when he returned. She wiped her hands on her apron and helped him take off his coat.
“I was beginning to worry.”
Jack warmed his hands at the woodstove.
“Well? Did you find the fox?”
“No, just more tracks, all over the place out there.”
He wouldn’t tell her about the child, or the dead hare on their doorstep. Somehow, he thought they might upset her.
CHAPTER 6
Mabel nervously eyed the trail across the snow as she returned from the outhouse. Never before had a fox come so close to their cabin. She knew they were small creatures, but all the same they frightened her. She stepped over the tracks, but then their smooth, oblong shape caught her eye. They weren’t animal tracks at all. Each was a perfect print of the sole of a small boot. She brought her head up and with her eyes followed the trail back to the snow child she and Jack had built the night before. It was gone.
She hurried breathless into the cabin.
“Jack? Someone’s ruined our snow child. Someone’s been in our yard.”
He was at the counter, sharpening his pocketknife on a steel.
“I know.”
“I thought you said it was a fox.”
“There are fox tracks, too, in the woods.”
“But those out there?”
“A child’s.”
“How can you know?”
“The size of the tracks. And I’m pretty sure I saw her. Last night. Running through the trees.”
“Her? Who?”
“A little girl. She was wearing your red scarf.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me? Did you go after her?”
“This morning, when I told you I was going to look for the fox, I tried to see where she went, but I lost the trail.”
“Last night… there was a little girl alone outside in the freezing winter and you didn’t see if she needed help? She must have wandered away from somebody’s cabin.”
“I don’t know, Mabel.”
She went back outside and stared at the little tracks. Just one trail, leading across the snow, away from their cabin and into the trees.
During the next several days the skies cleared, a deep cold settled on the valley, and the child’s tracks became edged in frost. They trailed sparkling and delicate through Mabel’s thoughts, and left her feeling as if she had forgotten something.
One evening she went to the shelf where a dozen of her favorite books were held in place by mahogany bookends—Emily Dickinson’s Poems, Henry David Thoreau’s Walking, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Queen Silver-Bell. As she absentmindedly ran her fingers across the spines, she thought of a fairy tale her father had often read to her. She remembered the worn blue leather of the cover and the golden hue of the illustrations. In one picture, she recalled, a child reached with her mittened hands down to the old man and woman who knelt
before her, the old man and woman who had formed her from snow.
The next day when Mabel went to feed the chickens in the barn, she passed the little boot prints.
She woke to a silent cabin and sensed the change before she looked out a window or opened the door. It was a muffled quiet, a dense cold pressing at the cabin walls, though it was warm inside. Jack had left her a crackling fire before going to hunt moose again. Her senses were confirmed when she looked out the window and saw a shining new landscape. The snow had come again, and this time it was a fine, driving snow that had accumulated quickly overnight and blanketed the cabin and outbuildings. It transformed boulders and stumps into soft, white lumps. It gathered in deep pillows on spruce boughs, it hung heavily over the cabin’s eaves, and it had erased the tracks across their yard.
She carried a basket of bread crumbs and dried apple bits left over from a pie to the barn for the chickens. The hens comforted her, the way they roosted along their spruce pole, their feathers ruffled against the cold. When she came in, they hopped to the straw-strewn ground and clucked like old women welcoming a neighbor. They bustled and stretched their wings. One of the black-and-white hens pecked a scrap from Mabel’s fingers, and she stroked its feathered back as it waddled away. She reached into each nesting box. Finally, beneath the soft belly of a red hen, she found two warm eggs.
Mabel put them in her basket as she left the barn. When she turned to pull the door closed, she glimpsed blue in the snow-laden spruce trees beyond the yard. She strained her eyes and no longer saw blue, but instead red fur. Blue fabric. Red fur. A child, slight and quick in a blue coat, passing through the trees. A blink, and the little coat was gone and there was slinking fur, and it was like the flipping black-and-white pictures she had seen in a coin-operated illuminated box in New York City. Appearing and disappearing motion, child and woodland creature each a passing flicker.
Mabel walked toward the forest, slowly at first and then more quickly. She watched for the girl but had lost sight of her.
When she neared the edge of the woods and peered through the snowy boughs, she was startled to see the child only a hundred yards or so away. The girl was crouched, her back to Mabel, white-blond hair fanned down her blue wool coat. Wondering if she should call out, Mabel cleared her throat, and the sound startled the child. The girl stood, snatched a small sack from the snow, and sprinted away. As she disappeared around one of the largest spruce trees, she looked back over her shoulder and Mabel saw her glancing blue eyes and small, impish face. She was no more than eight or nine years old.
Mabel followed, struggling through the knee-deep snow and bending to crawl beneath the boughs. Snow toppled onto her knit hat and trickled down the collar of her coat, but she pushed through the branches. When she emerged and wiped the snow from her face, she discovered a red fox where the child had been. Its muzzle was pressed into the snow and its back was hunched, like a cat licking milk from a bowl. It jerked its head to the side and tore something with its teeth. Mabel was transfixed. Never had she been so close to a wild animal. A few strides and she could have touched the black-tipped, auburn fur.
The creature looked up at her, its head still low, its long black whiskers brushed back along the tapered snout. Then Mabel saw the blood and fought the urge to gag. It was eating some dead thing, and blood splattered the snow and smeared the fox’s muzzle.
“No! You get! You get out of here!” Mabel waved her arms at the fox and then, feeling angry and brave, moved toward it. The animal hesitated, perhaps unwilling to abandon its meal, but then turned and trotted along the girl’s path into the trees.
Mabel went to the place in the snow and saw what she hoped she wouldn’t. A horrifying uncoiling—silvery intestines, tiny bones, blood and feathers.
She had not counted the chickens this morning. She looked more closely and saw it wasn’t one of her hens after all, but instead a wild bird of some kind with mottled brown feathers and its head small and torn away.
She left the half-eaten thing and followed the tangle of child and fox footprints into the trees. As she walked, a gust of wind knocked snow from the branches and blew cold into Mabel’s face. It made breathing difficult, so she turned her head and went on into the woods. The wind flurried again, churning snow from the ground and trees into the air. Then it began to blow steadily, and Mabel leaned into it, her eyes downcast, but she could no longer see where she was going. A small blizzard whipped out of nothing. Mabel turned her back to the wind and snow and set out for home. She wasn’t dressed for such an expedition, and surely the girl was too far away now. Even as she neared the barn, the blowing snow filled in her tracks, and those of the child and fox. She did not see the dead bird or flecks of blood as she passed by—they had vanished as well.
“I saw the child,” Mabel told Jack when he came in for dinner. “The girl you described from the other night—I saw her behind the barn.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Yes. There was a fox following her, and I thought it had killed one of our chickens, but it was something else, a wild bird.”
Jack squinted, as if cross.
“I did see her, Jack.”
He nodded and hung his coat on the hook beside the door.
“Have you heard anything about someone missing a child?” she asked. “When you were in town yesterday, did you hear any news?”
“No. Nothing at all.”
“Did you ask? Did you tell anybody about her?”
“No. I didn’t see much point. I figured she’d gone home or they would have gotten together a search party.”
“But she was here again today. Right near our barn. Why would she come here? If she is lost or needs help, why doesn’t she just come to the door?”
He nodded sympathetically, but then changed the subject. He said he hadn’t spotted anything but a cow moose with a calf. They would have to kill the chickens as soon as the sack of feed ran out; they hadn’t enough money to buy more. The good news, he went on, was that he’d run into George at the hotel restaurant yesterday and had invited the Bensons to dinner the coming Sunday.
It wasn’t until this last part that Mabel listened attentively. She was glad the Bensons were coming. Certainly Esther could tell her something about the child; she knew the families in the valley, and maybe she would know why a little girl would be wandering alone through the forest.
CHAPTER 7
At night when Jack closed his eyes to sleep, tree branches and game trails and snowy cliffs were imprinted on his eyelids so that sleep merged with his long days spent hunting. For days now he had risen most mornings before light and gone out with his rifle and pack to look for moose, feeling like an imposter every time. He wasted most of one afternoon stalking what turned out to be a porcupine chewing on a low-hanging branch. He’d hiked up and down the Wolverine River, into the mountains, back and forth over the foothills, and he was sick to death of it.
He lay in bed longer than usual and considered not getting up at all. But George was right—if he managed to get a moose, he and Mabel could live off meat and potatoes until harvest. They’d run out of coffee, sugar, dried apples, powdered milk, lard. They’d have to kill the chickens and let the horse go thin. There would be no bolts of new fabric or little trinkets from town. It would be a miserable winter, but they wouldn’t starve.
He got up and dressed and decided that tomorrow he would go to town to inquire about the mining job. It might be hard on his old body, but at least he would have something to show for it at the end of the day. Despite the snow, Betty had told him, the train was running and the mine was open. The Navy had upped its coal order, and the railroad had hired a crew of men to keep the tracks clear. No one knew how long the work would last, but for now they were still hiring.
Town was closed up on Sundays, though, so he might as well throw another day to the woods. He had until afternoon, when the Bensons would arrive for dinner. He left the cabin with his rifle and pack and walked the wagon trail toward the far field.
The snow was well over the tops of his boots. He had no intention of hiking up toward the mountains, where it would be even deeper. He’d stick close to home and hope the snow had forced the animals down along the river.
The sky was overcast and leaden, and Jack was weighed down by it. He walked through the field, the snow slowing his way, and entered the woods, but his heart was not in it.
He had never thought himself a city boy. He’d worked hard all his life on the family farm in the Allegheny River valley. He knew how to handle tools and work animals and plow the earth. But back home the land had been farmed for generations, and it showed in its soft curves and stately trees. Even the deer were half tamed, lazy and well fed as they grazed in the fallow fields. As a boy, he had strolled along the creek down by the family orchard. He picked stalks of grass and chewed on their tender ends. The very air had a soft greenness to it, not too cold, not too hot, a gentle breeze. He climbed the friendly branches of oaks and wandered along the backs of grassy knolls. Those aimless walks as a child were among his most peaceful memories.
This was nothing like back home. He didn’t enjoy his solitude in these woods but instead was self-conscious and alert, fearing most of all his own ineptness. When he worked the ground, he stumbled over sprawling roots, axed tree after tree to extend his clearing by a few feet, and uncovered boulders so large he had to use the horse to drag them from the field. How could this land ever be farmed?
Wherever the work stopped, the wilderness was there, older, fiercer, stronger than any man could ever hope to be. The spindly black spruce were so dense in places you couldn’t squeeze an arm between them, and every living thing seemed barbed and hostile—devil’s club thorns that left festering wounds, stinging nettles that raised welts, and at times swarms of mosquitoes so thick he had to fight panic. In the spring when he first began felling trees and turning over the soil, mosquitoes rose from the disturbed earth in clouds. He wore a head net; it was hard to see, but without it he couldn’t have endured. When he wiped the horse’s flank with his hand, his palm came away bloody with engorged insects.