Shelter

by Frances Greenslade

  “There’s not three feet of snow,” Bea called.

  “Come and see for yourself.” Jenny pulled the curtain wide as Bea came out of the kitchen, and she huffed in surprise to find the front steps buried. Jenny poked her in the side with her finger. “Told you,” she said.

  Bea actually laughed. “That’s not three feet, that’s drifted, that’s all.”

  But the wind whinnied and flung snow against the window screens all night and by morning the streets of Williams Lake were plugged, the snow was still falling, and no one was going anywhere.

  I tried to read one of Jenny’s Nancy Drew books, The Mystery of the 99 Steps, but I kept drifting into sleep. I wanted to be outside.

  Jenny sat with five bottles of nail polish lined up beside her on her bedspread. She started with frosty brown, carefully painted each fingernail, then blew them dry and surveyed them. “It matches my hair, don’t you think?” She was happy as long as I made some kind of noise of agreement. She reached for the nail polish remover and dipped a Q-tip into the bottle.

  “Jenny, you’re asphyxiating me,” I said.

  “I didn’t ask you to sit in here with me.”

  I left the book on the bed and went to the basement. There was a spot between the dryer and the furnace where a heating duct ended in a vent that could be opened. I opened it and sat on an old scrap of carpet with a blanket around my shoulders. Warm air blasted down on me. The small window above the dryer was drifted over and I listened as the wind whistled through the cracks and the snow shifted, piling into a peak against the glass.

  I wondered if the shelter Dad and I built could still be standing. In extreme weather, Dad said, it’s best to hole up and wait it out. People can die of fear, Dad told me. Once, when he was working up north, a man he knew drove his truck off a remote road in a snowstorm and got bogged down in several feet of snow in a wide ditch. There was no way he could budge and the weather was so bad, he knew he couldn’t expect anyone to come along to help. Huddled in the cab of the truck, sheltered from the wind by the ditch and snow, he should have been safe. The man told Dad later that he started to worry that he was going to starve. He had visions of hot turkey dinners, gravy, warm apple pie. After about three hours in the truck, cold, but not freezing, he left the shelter of the cab and set out walking in an irrational search for food. He lost all his toes and fingers, his face was scarred by frostbite, and he nearly died.

  “The last thing you need to worry about is starving,” Dad had said. “It’s not fun to be hungry, but it’ll take a long time before you have to worry about dying from it. Shelter first, then water, fire and food.”

  The snowstorm raged and Beatrice’s anxiety festered and bubbled in the confines of the house. She went from room to room picking things up and muttering, sometimes about the fact that Mom’s monthly payment was late. I pictured her day while we were away at school and wondered how she filled it. I could only see her in a dim cavern of smelly vacuum cleaner, dirty blue carpet, freezer-burned meat, mugs of Nescafé coffee, a stack of National Geographics.

  It used to be, when we were storm-stayed, Mom dropped her normal routine and we played games of rummy, drank sugary tea and roasted pieces of meat at the open door of the woodstove. We lit the lantern early in the afternoon; it was us against the elements and I loved the sound of the wind battering the house.

  Beatrice had started in at breakfast, saying to Ted, “The bills aren’t going to wait. I hope she didn’t forget to send it.”

  Ted said, “She’s not going to forget. Quit fretting about it.” And he winked at me.

  “Bea,” Jenny said, catching the wink. “Always buzzing about something.” Bea gave her a sharp look, but a smile played around her lips. I kept shovelling my corn flakes in, thinking it was amazing the things Jenny could get away with.

  I came up from the basement around one o’clock, the time the mail usually arrived. I was putting my boots and jacket on near the door when Bea pushed past me, opened the door and reached her hand out into the cold, fishing in the mailbox.

  “It didn’t come again today,” she announced.

  “Of course it didn’t come today. No mail came today,” I said. But I couldn’t manage the same light, teasing tone as Jenny had.

  Bea turned on me. “Don’t get smart with me, Margaret Dillon. If you think I do this for the good of my health, you’ve got another think coming.”

  Jenny had looked up from her reading. I could see her measuring how much magic her charm could work. She looked at me, then back at Bea and said, “Oh, Bea. Be honest. You’d keep us for free just for the pleasure of our company.”

  “One of you, I would,” Bea said, and stalked away from the door.

  Jenny’s eyes locked on mine with an expression that was a combination of warning and apology. She had tried; I should too. I couldn’t. What mechanism did Jenny use to sit there pleasantly like that? It was missing in me. I put my mittens on and left the house.

  I wore a pair of snow boots that I had found in the basement a few days earlier. They were army green with thick felt liners. I’d tried them on down there by the furnace. They were too big, but I could wear two pairs of woollen socks inside them.

  “Can I borrow these?” I’d asked Ted, dropping them on the living-room floor in front of him.

  “Borrow them? You can have them. They’re no good to me anymore.”

  I clumped along down the middle of the street, through the deep, powdery snow, pleased at how warm my feet were. A neighbour was out on his snowmobile, sending up a spray of snow in his wake, right in the middle of town. The storm shut down the normal order of things. If someone had to be rushed to the hospital or someone else was out of bread, no one could do anything about it.

  I had stuffed my pockets with cookies, matches, a short stub of candle, my jackknife and a wad of toilet paper. I didn’t bring water because I had nothing to carry it in. Dad had told me that out in the bush, people often lose their common sense. In fear, they follow stupid advice they heard somewhere, like rubbing snow on frostbitten skin or sucking the poison out of a snakebite. Across the deserted highway, with the wind snatching my breath from me, I walked face first into the storm. I thought that Dad would understand I wasn’t leaving shelter, but looking for it.

  I crossed the tracks and followed the river north. My hands were cold at first, but as I swung my arms, they warmed up so that they were almost hot. My face flushed warm against the biting air and snowflakes melted as they touched my skin. In the fresh snow, my footsteps went deep and I had to lift my legs high to step again. There was a smell to the snow that I loved, dry and metallic, like the taste of a smooth grey rock.

  In the open grassy areas, I was pummelled by the wind. At a tall stand of cottonwoods I headed off the trail and into the bush. The trees had snow stuck to one side of their trunks. The forest was deep white, soft and quiet, except for the sound of my own sharp breathing and my pants brushing together as I walked. A few yards in, I stopped. I stood still, held my breath and listened. Nothing. No wind, no birds, no traffic noise. The snow still fell and I watched the flakes coming down, sometimes in clumps, and I thought I could hear them making a tiny muffled tinkling.

  Farther along, I saw some tracks that had been lightly covered in snow. There was a fallen tree leaned against a huge fir stump and I climbed up and sat on the stump. I wasn’t cold at all; if I had food, I could walk for days. People do it, people who know the bush. I could do it, too, if I learned to trap.

  I climbed down and began to walk again, confidently. The brush beneath the snow had thickened and I struggled to lift my heavy boots through it. A sense of doubt crept over me and all at once I didn’t know which way to go. I looked up at the sky, but everything was white, no sign of where the sun was. I thought I should retrace my steps while I could still see them. The wind was gusting stronger and already the snow was smoothing over the tracks I’d made. Just about the moment that thought hit me, I realized my hands were cold because I hadn’t been
moving very fast. I turned and picked my way along what I thought was my trail, but the pattern began to dissolve in front of me. Dips and indentations that looked like a trail stopped, and then nothing looked like a trail, and there was just the quiet expanse of white, dipping and rising over deadfall.

  I stopped and whirred my arms around like helicopter blades, then shook out my hands to get rid of the numbness. I knew I hadn’t come too far off the river trail and if I kept calm, I should be able to find my way back. The wind had been coming from behind me, so I headed into it. I tried to walk more quickly to keep warm, stumbling over hidden deadfall and brush.

  Then the wind shifted and seemed to be coming from all directions and the trees looked thicker and the terrain unfamiliar, deadfall everywhere crisscrossing at knee level, almost impassable. I stopped again and listened, and this time, below the sound of the wind hissing, I heard a crunching, like an animal digging. I turned slowly in the direction of the sound and as I did, a head popped up from behind a mound of snow.

  “Hey!” I called, at the same moment he saw me.

  Vern George was kneeling in the packed snow at the entrance to a cave he was digging out with his mittened hands.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” he answered. He kept digging and I watched him for a minute.

  “That’s a good cave,” I said. I struggled over to him, and bent down to get a look inside.

  “I built a better one last year,” he said, without looking up. “Better snow.”

  “This snow is dry,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Do you know how far the trail is?” I asked.

  Vern stood up and brushed the snow off his knees. “Are you lost?” He smiled and the sweetness of it startled me again.

  “Not really. Maybe a bit. I’ve only been in this woods a few times, and there was no snow then.”

  “A bit lost.” He smiled again and so did I, in spite of myself. “Well, it’s a ways,” he said.

  I beat my arms against my sides, trying to pump blood into my hands. “Which way? My hands are freezing.”

  “It’s twenty below,” he said, watching my face for a reaction. I kept my eyes on his. “We better make a fire.”

  “I’ve got matches.”

  “If you collect some wood, I’ll make a pit.”

  I went off, flailing my arms against the cold and broke dead branches and dry fir boughs from standing trees. When I came back with a big armload of wood, Vern had dug a nice firepit in the snow, a few feet in front of the entrance to his cave. I broke up some little twigs and made a teepee. Vern held a lit match to it and we fed it the fir boughs, then bigger pieces, till the fire was roaring and I could take my mitts off and hold my hands close to the flames.

  Vern stood by the fire and, slipping off one boot at a time, held his feet to the heat.

  “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “In town,” I said. “Where do you live?”

  “With my uncle, at the trailer park up the road.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  He shrugged and I thought it was a shrug that meant he wouldn’t say, not that he didn’t know.

  “Me and my sister billet at these people’s house in town. My mom works in logging camps.”

  “She does?”

  “As a cook,” I added, feeling like a liar. “Do you know where Kleena Kleene is?”

  “Yeah, it’s on the way to Bella Coola. Is that where she works?”

  I shrugged.

  “Where’s your dad?”

  “He died last year.”

  “I can dry your mitts,” Vern said, picking up a long, forked stick out of what was left of the woodpile. I handed them over and he put one on each fork and held it above the flames. In a few minutes, steam rose from them.

  “I’m going to try the cave,” he said. He poked the branch with my mitts into the ground so that they hung near the fire. I watched him crawl in, feet first.

  “How is it?” I asked.

  “It’s great,” he grinned. “Warm. You can come in if you want. There’s room.”

  I edged in. There wasn’t much room, but we weren’t touching the walls.

  “If we had to spend the night, we’d have to close the entrance in better,” Vern said.

  “And maybe make the walls thicker,” I said. “In case it gets even colder.”

  “We’d need to find something to melt snow in for water. We could make fir needle tea.”

  “We’d want to find some food,” I said. “If we had to stay a few days.”

  “If our plane went down, way back in the wilderness. No towns around for hundreds of miles.”

  “Then we’d have to build something more permanent. We wouldn’t be able to walk out till spring. We could use pieces of the plane for things. Like a stove.”

  The stick holding my mittens shifted and they bent a little too close to the fire.

  “I have to get my mitts,” I told Vern and I crawled out. He followed me.

  “Want me to take you back now?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  We dumped snow on the fire and Vern marked his cave with a long branch. When we got back to town, it was almost dark.

  “Bye,” I said.

  “Bye,” he answered.

  When I got home my face was stiff with cold and my thighs were stinging between where my jacket ended and my boots began.

  “Holy moly, it’s a Mag-sicle!” Jenny called as I came in the door. “Twenty-five below and she’s out for a stroll.”

  Bea hurried to the door and helped me take my boots off. “You could freeze to death out there, you really could,” she said. “I’ll bring you some tea.” I knelt by the heat register, thawing my limbs. Bea’s kindness was as unpredictable as her rage. I accepted it, always wary.

  “Where’d you hike to?” Ted asked.

  “Up the river, the way you showed me.”

  “Come and play a game of Canasta with me. I’m about ready to go out of my gourd with boredom here.”

  We sat at the table and Ted shuffled the cards. Bea brought the teapot and cups.

  “Your dad liked to hike around the bush, too,” Ted said. “He’d go out in any weather. I met him back before he knew your mother. I was working as a faller with an outfit around Bella Coola and he came on as a bucker. Right away I could tell he was a good one. You see a lot of sunshine loggers come and go. They come in, big plans, big talkers, work harder than they need to right off the hop, something to prove, and then they peter out. A little bad weather, they’re grumbling and whining. But your dad was steady. Hard-working, quiet, nothing showy. He had a feeling for the bush. You could see the ease he had there.”

  Ted beat me twice, then he sat back in his chair and fell asleep.

  That night as Jenny and I lay in bed in the dark with the wind still humming outside, I said, “Do you think Mom is really a cook in logging camps?”

  Jenny didn’t say anything for a minute. “I don’t know.”

  “She never liked to cook. And it’s winter. Do they even have logging camps in winter?”

  Jenny didn’t answer and I turned towards the wall and pulled my blankets up.

  A little while later I heard Jenny crying, trying to stifle her sobs in her pillow.

  [ THIRTEEN ]

  THREE DAYS LATER, after streets had been ploughed, sidewalks cleared, cars jump-started and windows scraped, I arrived home from school and found an envelope on the dresser addressed to us in Mom’s hand. I held it to the light, smelled it, picking up a faint musty odour. Maybe this would be the letter telling us when she would come to get us and where we would go. Jenny hoped Mom would rent us a house in Williams Lake, or even an apartment in the building near Safeway. I wanted to go somewhere else, far from here. I couldn’t wait for Jenny to get back from work, so I opened the letter. A twenty-dollar bill fell out. I held the letter to my nose, too. Nothing familiar.

  Dear girls,

  The $20 is for Maggie’s bi
rthday. I can’t believe you’re 12! I hope you’ll buy something practical like new jeans. You needed them in the summer. You would like it here. The other night when the moon was full, a whole pack of wolves sat on a hill above the lake and sang all night long. One night I even saw a wolf down at the lake. He was crossing the ice and so was I. Jenny, I’ll send you some $$ before Christmas. I hope you like Williams Lake. Be good!

  Love Mom

  You need practice to be able to handle disappointment, and I didn’t have enough of it yet. I lay down on my bed and tried to breathe past the crushing heaviness on my chest. For some reason, I thought of Vern, pictured his lean brown hand as he held the lit match to our teepee of sticks. A flicker of comfort flared deep in my chest and was gone again.

  It took about fifteen minutes for the disappointment to brew into anger.

  “Do you have any scraps of denim?” I asked Bea. She was lying on the couch with her glasses resting precariously on her forehead. An open National Geographic lay across her chest. I didn’t care if she was sleeping. Today I didn’t fear her wrath.

  She opened her eyes. “Denim? What for?”

  “I need it to patch my jeans.”

  “I think I have some.” She pushed herself upright with a groan. I would never get old the way she was, I thought. “Would you like embroidery thread?”

  Bea found the denim and a sewing case with twelve colours of bright embroidery thread, still in their paper wrappers.

  “This shows you how to do different stitches,” she said, handing me an old book.

  From the denim, I cut out oval patches for the knees of my jeans and over the next few days, I stitched my own design: a campfire of orange and yellow flames, brown logs and white stars of snowflakes falling above it. Bea came by once in a while to watch over my shoulder, even saying once, “You picked that up pretty quickly.” As I stitched, my anger flared and sputtered and flared again, and finally formed into a kind of plan. If she wouldn’t come back to us, then we had to go and find her.