by Eowyn Ivey
Mabel shifted her eyes back to the illustration. It was similar to a Russian lacquer painting, the colors rich and earthy, the details fine. It showed two old people, a man and a woman, kneeling in the snow at the feet of a young girl who seemed to be made of snow from the ground to her waist but to be a real child from her waist up.
The snow child’s cheeks glowed with life, and jewels crowned her blond hair. She smiled sweetly down at the old couple, her mittened hands held out to them. Her embroidered cloak spilled from her shoulders in a shimmer of white and silver, with no clear distinction between the cloak and the snow. Behind her the snowscape was framed by a stand of black-green spruce trees and, in the distance, snowy, sharp-peaked mountains. Between two of the trees stood a red fox with narrow, golden eyes like a cat’s.
She reached for her cup of tea to find that it had gone cold. How long had she stared at that single illustration? She sipped the cool tea and turned the page. It was night. The little girl ran into the trees. Silver stars glittered in the blue-black sky above her as the couple peered sadly out of their cottage door.
With each turn of the page, Mabel felt lightheaded and torn from herself.
She picked up the book and held it closer to her eyes. The next illustration had always been her favorite. In a snowy clearing, the girl stood surrounded by the wild beasts of the forest—bears, wolves, hares, ermines, a stag, a red fox, even a tiny mouse. The animals sat on their haunches beside her, their demeanors neither menacing nor adoring. It was as if they had posed for a portrait, with their fur and teeth and claws and yellow eyes, and the little girl gazed plainly out at the reader without fear or pleasure. Did they love the little girl, or did they want to eat her? All these years later, Mabel still could find no answers in the wild, gleaming eyes.
She closed the book and traced the embossed snowflake with her fingertips. She began to gather the brown wrapping, and it was then that she saw her sister’s letter tucked into the folds of paper and nearly discarded.
Dearest Mabel,
What a joy to read your letter, to see your lovely handwriting once again and know you are alive and well. It must sound terribly outlandish to you, but to all of us here it is as if you have been banished to the North Pole. It was a relief to know you are warm and safe and even have welcoming neighbors. They must be a rare blessing in that wilderness. I am pleased, too, to know you will once again pick up your sketchpad. I have always known you to be a talented artist. Won’t you send us some little drawings of your new homeland? We are anxious to share in your adventures.
As to your request for this book, it is a pure stroke of luck that I was able to send it to you. A student from the university, a Mr. Arthur Ransome, has been sorting through Father’s collections and was particularly enamored with this book. Of all subjects, he is studying fairy tales of the Far North. I had no attachment to the book, so allowed him to have it for his studies. When I received your letter, I was thrilled to recall that I knew precisely where it was. Of course, I practically had to pry it from the young man’s hands. He cautioned me that it was a rare find and should be treated with great care. He was appalled to learn that I would be mailing it to you in the farthest outreaches of civilization.
As I prepared to send the book to you, I happened to notice that it is all written in Russian. Unless you have learned the language while in Alaska, I was afraid you might be at wit’s end to discover the book is unreadable. Before I wrapped it, I asked the young man to tell me something of Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden.
Mr. Ransome says the story of the snow child is of similar import in Russia as Little Red Riding Hood or Snow White in our own country. Like many fairy tales, there are many different ways it is told, but it always begins the same. An old man and an old woman live happily in their small cottage in the forest, but for one sorrow: they have no children of their own. One winter’s day, they build a girl of snow.
I am sorry to say no matter which version, the story ends badly. The little snow girl comes and goes with winter, but in the end she always melts. She plays with the village children too close to a bonfire, or she doesn’t flee the coming of spring quickly enough, or, as in the version told in Father’s book, she meets a boy and chooses mortal love.
In the most traditional tale, according to Mr. Ransome, the snow child loses her way in the woods. She encounters a bear, which offers to help her find her way. But she looks at the bear’s long claws and sharp teeth, and fears he will eat her. She refuses his assistance. Then along comes a wolf, which also promises to lead her safely to the cottage, but he is nearly as ferocious looking as the bear. The child again refuses.
But then she meets a fox. “I will take you home,” he vows. The child decides the fox looks friendlier than the others. She takes hold of his fur scruff, and the fox leads her out of the forest. When they arrive at the old couple’s cottage, the fox asks for a fat hen in payment for her safe return. The old people are poor and so decide to trick the fox by instead giving him a sack with their hunting dog inside. The fox drags the sack into the woods and opens it. The dog lunges out, chases the fox, and kills it.
The snow child is angry and saddened. She bids the old couple farewell, saying that since they do not love her even as much as one of their hens, she will return to live with her Father Winter and Mother Spring.
When the old woman next looks outside, all that remains are the child’s red boots, red mittens, and a puddle of water.
What a tragic tale! Why these stories for children always have to turn out so dreadfully is beyond me. I think if I ever tell it to my grandchildren, I will change the ending and have everyone live happily ever after. We are allowed to do that, are we not Mabel? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow?
CHAPTER 16
Couldn’t we keep just one?” Mabel pleaded. “The red hen. She’s such a dear, and we could feed her table scraps.”
“Chickens aren’t solitary creatures,” Jack said. “They like a flock. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Won’t Mr. Palmer allow us a little more credit, just to buy some feed for the rest of the winter? It wouldn’t cost so much, would it?”
Jack’s shirt collar tightened at his throat, and the cabin was too warm and too small. Chicken feed, for Christ’s sake. What kind of man can’t afford chicken feed? They had already run out of coffee, and the sugar wouldn’t last much longer.
“It’s got to be done.” He went to the door and had nearly shut it on his way out when he heard Mabel.
“Esther says it’s best to dip them in boiling water to pluck them. Shall I heat a pot?”
“That’d be fine.” And he closed the door.
Jack took no pleasure in slaughtering the chickens. If he’d had his choice, he would have kept them alive and plump in the barn for all the days of their lives. During the summer, they were good layers, most of them, and he knew Mabel had some attachment. But you couldn’t let an animal starve under your care. Better to kill it and be done with it.
He eyed the ax by the woodpile as he walked to the barn. He wished now that he’d thought to ask George for some advice as well. His grandmother had been known to strangle a chicken with her bare hands, but mostly he’d heard of cutting their heads clean off and letting them bleed out. An unpleasant task, no matter how it was to be done.
A dozen headless chickens, and soon he would be bringing them into the kitchen to poor Mabel, who had doted on them. She would do it, though. She’d gut the birds and pluck the feathers and never once complain, just as she hadn’t complained about the dwindling supplies or the endless meals of moose meat and potatoes. The past few weeks, she had gathered frozen wild cranberries and rosehips and jarred some jam, and she’d figured out how to make an eggless cake that wasn’t all that bad. She was making do, and somehow it suited her. She had a rosiness to her cheeks and laughed more than she had in years, even as she served yet another plate of fried moose steak.
She’d picked up her books and pencils again, too. Jack
took note of that. The child was always bringing something new for her to draw—an owl feather, a cluster of mountain ash berries, a spruce bough with the cones still attached. The two of them would sit at the kitchen table, the cabin door propped open “so the child won’t get too warm,” their heads together as she drew. It was good to see.
But it also scared him how much the girl was growing on Mabel. On him, too. He could admit that. He might not watch out the window, but he waited just the same, and hoped for her. Hoped she wasn’t lonely or in danger. Hoped she would appear out of the trees and come running, smiling, to him.
Sometimes he wanted to tell Mabel the truth. It was a burden, and he wasn’t sure he carried it right. He wanted to tell Mabel about the dead man and the lonely place in the mountains where he had buried him. He wanted to tell her about the strange door in the side of the mountain. The knowledge of the child’s suffering sat heavy and cold in his gut, and sometimes he could not look at her small, wan face for fear of choking.
He had promised the girl, but maybe that was just an excuse. The awful truth of what the child had witnessed would wrench Mabel’s heart, and the last thing on earth he wanted to do was cause her any more sadness. Her capacity for grief frightened him. He’d wondered more than once if she had ventured onto the river ice in November knowing full well the danger.
Jack grabbed a hen by her feet and carried her, squawking and flapping her wings, out to the chopping block by the woodpile. The racket didn’t stop for some time, even well after the head was cut off. Only eleven more to go, Jack thought grimly as he laid the dead bird in the snow.
He hadn’t planned on helping with the plucking, but then he saw what a long, unpleasant chore it would be for a person alone. Side by side at the kitchen counter, covered in feathers and their sleeves rolled up, Jack and Mabel took turns dipping a chicken in the boiling water, then pulling handful after handful of feathers. They tried to gather the red and black and yellow feathers into burlap sacks, but soon more were stuck to the floor and floating around the cabin than in the bags.
“Maybe we should have done this outside,” Mabel said as she tried to wipe a wet feather from her forehead with the back of her hand.
Jack chuckled.
“I’d get that for you, but I’m afraid I’d only leave more,” he said and held up his feather-coated hands.
“And this horrid smell,” Mabel said. The steam that rose from the boiling water smelled of scalded feathers and half-cooked chicken skin.
“I was thinking—maybe we should have chicken for dinner,” Jack said, trying to keep his face stern.
“No, no. I couldn’t bear… Oh, you’re teasing me,” and she flicked a feather in his direction.
As he began plucking another bird, Mabel sighed beside him.
“What is it?”
“It’s dear, sweet Henny Penny,” she said and looked sadly down at the dead hen in her hands.
“Told you it was best not to name them.”
“It’s not the names. I would have known them no matter what I called them. Henny Penny used to follow me about while I gathered the eggs, clucking like she was giving me advice.”
“I am sorry, Mabel. I don’t know what else to do.” He flexed his hand, felt the tendons give and take, and wondered how he could again and again disappoint her.
“You think I blame you?” she said.
“Nobody else to. It’s on my shoulders.”
“How is it that you always arrive at that conclusion? That everything is your fault and yours alone? Wasn’t it my idea to come here? Didn’t I want this homestead, and all the hard work and failure that would come with it? If anything, I’m to blame, because I’ve done so little to help.”
Jack still looked at his hands.
“Don’t you see? This was to be ours together, the successes and the failures,” Mabel said, and as she spoke she gestured grandly as if to encompass everything, the plucked chickens, the wet feathers.
“All of this?” he said, and couldn’t help a smile.
“Yes, all of this.” Then she too smiled. “Every blasted feather. Mine and yours.”
Jack leaned over and kissed her on the tip of her nose, then stuck a chicken feather behind her ear.
“All right then,” he said.
When they had finished the last chicken, they attempted to sweep the feathers out of the cabin, but the impossibility of the task left them both laughing, until Mabel gave up and collapsed in a kitchen chair, legs stretched out in front of her. Jack used his forearm to wipe sweat from his forehead.
“Who would have thought it would be so much work, getting chickens ready to eat?” Mabel fanned herself with a hand. Jack nodded in agreement, then took the birds to hang in the barn with the moose meat. They would stay frozen until they could bring themselves to eat them.
When he returned, he saw that Mabel had set one aside.
“We were joking, weren’t we? About cooking one for dinner tonight?”
“It’s not for us.”
“Then what?”
Mabel put on her coat and boots.
“I’m taking it to a place in the woods.”
“What place?”
“Where you left her the treats and the doll.”
So she’d known all along.
“But a dead chicken?” he asked. “For the child?”
“Not for her. For her fox.”
“You’re going to feed one of our chickens to a wild fox?”
“I need to do this.”
“What for?” Jack’s voice rose. “How in God’s name does it make a bit of sense, when we’re just barely getting by, to throw a dinner out into the woods?”
“I want her to know…” and Mabel held her chin up, as if what she said took some courage. “Faina needs to know that we love her.”
“And a chicken will tell her that?”
“I told you, it’s for her fox.”
As Mabel carried the naked, dead bird into the night, Jack wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. Instead he found himself thinking of what Esther had said about a dark winter’s madness.
CHAPTER 17
As he neared the cabin, Jack heard the chatter of women’s voices, and when he came through the door with an armload of firewood, he found Esther with her feet propped indecorously on a chair in front of the woodstove. She wore men’s navy wool pants with the cuffs tucked into long red-striped socks. A big toe stuck out through a hole in one sock, and as Jack loaded more wood into the stove, she wiggled her toes toward the heat.
“I was just telling Mabel, I hope that boy of mine don’t pester you too awful much. I know he’s coming around a lot this winter, talking your ear off I’m sure,” she said.
Mabel handed her a cup of tea and she slurped at it.
“No. No.” He tried not to look at the bare toe. “Not at all. Truth be told, I kind of enjoy his company. I could learn a lot from him.”
“Don’t you dare tell him that. It’ll go straight to his head, and we’ll never hear the end of it. That boy knows a lot, but not half as much as he thinks he does.”
“Ah well. Suppose that was true about most of us at that age.”
“He’s taken a liking to you, though. He’s always talking about you. Jack says this and Jack says that.”
Mabel handed Jack a cup of tea. “There are johnnycakes, too. Esther brought them.”
The two women had spent most of the day sharing recipes and patterns, and even out in the yard he had heard their laughter. He was glad for Mabel to have the company.
Esther stood and stretched and took a johnnycake from the plate.
“I was also dispensing a little advice. I told Mabel here she’s got to get out of the cabin more. All this talk about little girls running around in the trees. Next thing you know she’ll be holding tea parties in the front yard, wearing nothing but her skivvies and a flowered hat.”
Esther nudged Mabel with an elbow and winked, but Mabel did not smile.
“Oh look
at you, white as a ghost. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. This is nonsense, all this talk about a little girl.”
“I’m not crazy, Esther.” Mabel’s voice was tight, and she caught Jack’s eyes with her own.
“So you do have some fight in you, my girl.” Esther hugged her waist. “You’ll need every bit of that to survive around here.”
Jack expected Esther to find some reason to leave then, but either she took no notice of Mabel’s cross silence or she had more strength in the face of it than he could ever muster. She plopped herself into a chair at the table and swished tea around in her mouth.
“Good tea. Real good tea,” she said. “Did I ever tell you about the grizzly tea?”
“No. Can’t recall that you did,” Jack said. He had intended to work outside for another hour or two, but he pulled up a chair across from her and Mabel and took another johnnycake.
“Danny… Jeffers? Jaspers? Ah hell, my mind’s going. Anyway, Danny carried around a nasty-smelling burlap bag filled with—well, let’s just say the less-than-desirable parts of grizzly bears. He swore you could brew a tea with it that would improve your love life.”
Esther’s eyes sparkled mischievously. “Soooo, you always knew who was having trouble in the sack, based on who was talking to old Danny.”
“Oh, you had to drink the stuff? How dreadful.” Mabel wrinkled her nose.
“I was thinking more about those poor grizzly bears,” Jack said. “Imagine enduring that!”
Esther laughed and held her belly.
“Now that would be a sight, wrestling a grizzly bear to the ground.”
“Well you don’t mean…” Mabel wore an appalled expression.
Esther could barely speak for laughing so hard. “No… no… The bears weren’t alive. He killed them first.”