Kent and Jason were riding at a trot now along the far side of the herd, which ignored them, towards the truck. Mark pulled the truck to a stop, and the old cows, which were not far behind, caught up and kept going, ignoring it, too. They wanted to get home, and knew they were almost there.
Selena was greatly relieved to see Jason dismount and climb into the cab. Unless the weather improved—fat chance of that—Jason had ridden as far as he was going to today. One less person to worry about. She only hoped he hadn’t frozen his feet or hands. Kent was removing the bridle from Jason’s horse, replacing it with the halter Mark handed him through the window. He clipped on the halter shank, mounted holding it, and rode back toward her, leading Jason’s horse, while the truck speeded up and was soon in the lead again.
Kent had settled in to ride slowly on the left of the herd ahead of her. After a few minutes, her toes aching with the cold, she dismounted and began to walk in the path made by the cows, leading her horse. She had begun to shiver inside her heavy clothes, but she wasn’t worried, knowing she would soon warm up with the effort of walking. The trick was to not start sweating, because then you’d never get warm.
It must be at least four o’clock, she thought, judging by the light. That meant at this time of year there was only about an hour of good light left. By six it would be pitch dark and they’d have only the headlights to help them find the way.
Walking like this on uneven ground, stumbling now and then, sinking in up to her knees when she missed the path the cows had made, the occasional gust of wind swirling snow up into her face, she was warming up rapidly. But even with her parka hood pulled up and as far forward as it would go, so that it blocked her side vision, her face was cold, her nose especially, and she didn’t know how much more cold she could take. She didn’t want to let Kent down, to make him feel that there was nobody he could count on, that he had no help. But, she thought, he thinks that anyway.
It seemed to her that he would never let her share, not really, that in the end, no matter how hard she worked and tried to understand his feelings, he pulled it all in to himself and thought of it as his own—the work, the worry, the ownership, the suffering. She felt helpless whenever she confronted this masculinity in him, and useless, and occasionally a little angry too. All right, she would think, turning bitterly away, when he got that look in his eyes and lifted them over her as if she were no longer there. Let him. When he needed help with a cow in the chute or one that was calving out in the field, or somebody to bale hay, he called on her soon enough.
Behind her, her horse paused, tugging on her arm, and she turned her head, sliding back her hood a little to see what was bothering him. Nothing. She pulled on the reins till he started moving, then began to walk again.
She lifted her head and saw that Kent had ridden up to the truck again and that Mark had pulled it to one side of the line of cows and was waiting for something. Then Kent rode away and she realized that he had told Mark to spell her off. Mark’s man enough to spell me off, she thought, but not man enough to take Kent’s place. She had to laugh a little to herself, as she made her way to the truck, leading the horse. But she was grateful to get back in and drive. She handed Mark the reins without speaking. He would stay out there till he froze to death and nothing she said would make any difference. It would take Kent to chase him back inside.
Beside her, Jason was close to sleep. He had thrown back his hood and both cheeks were a bright, unnatural red. He kept sniffing.
“Want to drive?” she asked him. He shook his head.
“Naww.” He kept moving his feet and she knew that his toes were hurting as the circulation came back. She said nothing. He would have to learn to take it like a man, like I do, she thought, and she laughed at herself again.
Peering through the frosted windshield, trying to find the trail, checking around for the right direction, worrying, she couldn’t help but think that it would be nice to live a life where they didn’t have to do things like this. Like in the city, she thought, people just catch the bus to work every day, stay inside warm buildings all the time, never really feel the cold, never really have to be afraid of the weather. People in the city have never known what it’s like to have that thrill of fear that if you get careless, let your guard down, or have some bad luck like getting caught in an unexpected blizzard, you might actually die, right then and there.
She looked up at the sky again, leaning forward and scraping at the frost high up on the windshield. As high as she was able to see the sky was a deep blue, the indigo of a winter night. They were heading just about straight east. Behind them, she knew, the sky would be lighter toward the horizon. Far ahead of them in the dimness, sat their house and safety. Behind them were twenty or so miles of empty, open prairie, where nobody else lived, or even went very often.
A gust of wind swirled snow over the hood, blocking her vision. It could start to blizzard, she thought—right now—and we’d be caught out here, you can get lost in just minutes in a blizzard, there’s nothing out here for landmarks, and it’s so damn cold …
There it was. That thrill of fear, cutting down her backbone, for an instant stilling her heart, making her cold hands sweat against the steering wheel. She glanced at Jason. He was leaning forward, too.
“I sure hope it don’t storm,” he said, frowning, and he seemed like her child again, her youngest, her baby.
“It isn’t going to storm,” she said, her voice confident. “Anyway, we’ll be home before we know it.” She wondered how far they still had to go.
After a while Kent sent Mark back to the truck and she got out to let him get in. The tip of his nose looked too pale to her, and as he handed her the reins, she saw that he was shivering inside his heavy clothes.
“Quick, get in,” she said, fumbling to pull her own mitts back on and to flip her parka hood back up. “Let Jason drive till you get warm.” She said this firmly, into the open window, winding her scarf around her hood again. Mark didn’t argue. Jason got out and came around to the driver’s side while Mark slid over. Selena stood for a moment in the wind, feeling it reach like a knife inside her parka. She was studying Mark. He had bent over in the seat and was stamping his feet, shaking his bluish hands. “Take your boots off,” she told him. “Put your feet under Jason, or sit on them. Get them warm.”
She was afraid he had gotten too cold, that he wouldn’t be able to warm up under these conditions—the drafty truck cab, the uncertain heat from the heater, a long distance to go yet—that he would be sick. Any concern for Jason left her, knowing that his cold was only the kind that strikes children, easily dispelled, leaing behind a pleasurable, sleepy warmth.
“Jason, there’s an extra parka behind the seat. Get it out and put it over him.” Mark was shaking uncontrollably now. Jason unfastened the latch, pulled the seat forward far enough so that he could reach behind it, and pulled out an old ragged parka of his father’s. While Selena watched, beginning to shiver now herself from standing still too long, Jason threw it over Mark, then pulled it up so that it covered him from his knees to his shoulders. Selena was getting too cold to stand still any longer, and there was nothing more she could do anyway. Reluctantly, she struggled up onto Mark’s horse.
And that was another thing. It was far too cold for the horses. They were restless, angry, hard to manage. Mark’s horse kept stepping away from her as she tried to mount. She looked around for Kent, wanting to say, do something, it’s too cold, things are happening, there’s danger here. When she had finally settled into the saddle, she turned the horse—who kept tossing his head angrily, his ears back—and started back to the end of the herd. Kent was coming toward her, leading Jason’s horse.
“It’s only about a half-mile to that coulee of Albert’s,” he said to her before she could speak. “Can you hold out till then?” Fifteen, twenty minutes. She nodded. The rim of his parka hood was thick with frost and his collar, held tight around his face, had icicles hanging from it. His thin moustache and be
ard, which he had just begun to grow for protection during the winter, were both ice-covered. The lines in his cheeks and around his eyes had deepened so dramatically that he had taken on an eerie, frightening appearance. She was startled by this, for a second she couldn’t find the man she knew, under this steely countenance.
“Are you all right?” she asked him, although these were only words. Their eyes met and then they turned their heads straight ahead again, and began to ride side by side through the gathering darkness, the cattle now only a line of dark spots in front of them, their outlines barely distinguishable from the shadows growing along the snow-covered slopes and valleys.
“I’ll take your horse,” he said. “You get into the truck.” Surprised, she looked at him, pulling the edge of her parka hood back so she could see him.
“No,” she said. What could he be thinking of? His hands would freeze, leading two horses. Jason’s horse trotted up between them, blowing steamy air through its frosted muzzle. Icicles hung down from its halter and muzzle and she was tempted to lean forward and break them off, but refrained for fear of hurting him.
“Go on,” Kent urged her, but she stubbornly shook her head no again. If he can hold out, so can I, she was thinking. I won’t let him down.
A few minutes passed and he rode away, to the other side of the long, steadily plodding line of cows. She got down and began to walk again, leading the horse. If she walked on the lee side of him, he took the brunt of the wind and she got a little protection. Trudging along, her hood pulled well around her face, flexing her fingers inside her mitts, not looking up beyond the next footstep, she began to think of Diane. Or rather, she saw Diane in front of her, moving through the city with her brilliant eyes, her face flushed, trailing behind her an abandoned home, a lost husband. Not for Diane this kind of life. Struggling through the elements for a dubious cause. (But if we don’t move them, they’ll die.) Not for Diane a simple life like this, a life you could see and touch and hold onto. Who knows, Selena thought, pulling her scarf up over her nose, maybe she’s right. For at this moment, it seemed, to her that this was almost more than anybody ought to have to do.
Still, she had her family with her. This was a joint enterprise, not a fragmented, personal one like Diane’s. She couldn’t imagine Kent gone all day, doing things she wouldn’t even know about, meeting people she would never know, involved in a life completely separate from her now.
No wonder there were so many divorces and broken homes in the city. At least things haven’t come to that out here, she thought. At least out here families are still families.
The cold she felt had reached the point where it was merely pain, and it combined with a growing sense of urgency. It was nothing so trivial as a mere desire to run to the truck, get in and get warm. It was some underlying, barely controllable edge of emotion that she didn’t dare examine, which she had to keep forcing back so as not to let it take over. She knew what it was: it was a life instinct, they all had it.
Mark had held out as long as he could against his, she admired him for that and was a little in awe of him for what she saw as that masculine thing, whatever it was, taking over in her child, making a man of him. In Kent that control was immovable. He would ride till he fell off his horse, a frozen block of ice, his expression wouldn’t even change. Men are like that, she thought again, humbly.
She lifted her head from the footprints she was stumbling through, and looked ahead, surprised to find that she was climbing a hill. She made a mental adjustment, and the walking grew easier. Ten minutes. Five minutes. She wished she had a man’s strength. She wished she lived in the city and had an easy life. No, she didn’t wish that. At least here you know you are alive, she told herself, and was surprised at this, then, thinking about it, felt the utter, undeniable truth of it settle into her.
But wasn’t that exactly what Diane had claimed for her new life in the city? Wasn’t that what she had said was wrong with the way she and Kent and their neighbours lived? That it was mindless? Mindless … and dull … and disconnected from everything that matters. If she weren’t so frighteningly cold, she would laugh.
She had been struggling forward, holding her head down like the cattle, watching her feet, when a shout brought her to a stop. She realized then that there had been more than one, and she looked up, startled. Ahead of her, the herd was bunching as it gathered and moved down into Albert’s coulee bottom. The truck idled on the edge of the coulee beside them and there was Jason, on the back of the truck, helping his father break bales.
They had made it. They were still about three miles from home and it was almost fully dark, but they had made it to a place where the cattle would be safe for the night, and she could get into the truck. She started to back up to go around the end of the herd as it plodded toward the coulee, the more quickly to get to the truck’s warmth, then changed her mind. Kent is still outside, she thought. If he can stay outside all day in this weather, I can stay out a little longer, till the job is done, and so she walked behind the last of the cows and hurried them up, so that they went faster down into the coulee bottom.
With the snow so hard and slippery from the extreme cold, it was impossible to drive the truck down into the coulee bottom to feed the cows in the usual way. They would never get it back up again. She gave the reins to Mark to hold through the open window—he wasn’t shivering so hard anymore—and clambered up onto the back of the truck with Jason and Kent. There really wasn’t room for the three of them, but it felt good up there, and she began to help them break the bales and throw the chunks over the edge of the coulee down to the starving cattle.
“They’ll be only too glad to stay there till morning,’ Kent said, when they had finished and there was nothing but wisps of hay left on the truck deck. “We’ll be back here at first light and bring them the rest of the way home.” They got down gratefully out of the wind and Jason got into the truck while Selena stood looking up at Kent.
“You can’t lead the horses home,” she said. “It’s too cold. Why don’t you just chase them down into the coulee with the cattle and pick them up in the morning? Then you can ride home with us in the truck.”
“No,” he said. “They’ll only disturb the cows and they need the shelter at home. I can make it home easy in another twenty, thirty minutes.” She knew better than to argue with him. She got into the truck on the pasenger side, with Jason in the middle and Mark, who seemed all right now, driving, and waited while Kent unclipped Jason’s horse’s haltershank and tied his own horse’s tail through the halter and under the chin of Jason’s horse, then changed the bridle of Mark’s horse for a halter, and fastened the tail of Jason’s horse in a knot in Mark’s horse’s halter, so that the three horses were tied in a string, tails to halters. Then he mounted his own horse, and kicking him hard to get him to go, set out at a lope, the other horses following closely behind.
“Should I go ahead home?” Mark asked her.
“No,” she said. “Follow him. You never know.”
All the way home in the dark, Kent and the horses throwing unwieldy black, jagged shadows across the headlights, she and the boys kept their eyes on Kent, as if at any moment he might ride out of the sweep of their lights into that awful, frozen blackness.
By the time they drove into the ranchyard, the wind had died, the sky had cleared and the moon risen, showing the familiar buildings in clear, sharp outlines against the sparkling, unbroken field of snow. The silhouette of Phoebe’s head appeared at the kitchen window. So she had been worrying about them.
Silently they got out of the truck. The two boys went to the barn to help Kent with their horses and Selena gathered the remains of their lunch and the empty thermoses into her arms and started toward the house.
Her footsteps crackled on the packed snow of the path, and she could hear her own breathing in her ears, sounding ragged and forced in the silence of the winter night. She stopped in the middle of the path and turned slowly in a circle. The stars were brilliant, sil
ver flames in the black night sky behind them. To the north the northern lights tilled the sky, an eerie greenish colour waving, fading, growing brighter, dissolving, reforming, spreading, shrinking.
The lights had gone on in the barn. She thought she could detect the faint smell of roast chicken coming from the house, and imagined the cheery warmth of her kitchen. Yet she felt totally detached from all these small, homely things. We live our little lives down here, she thought, while up there, some mystery that none of us understands, is going on.
Diane’s inexplicable selfishness, her private vision that was so incomprehensible, Phoebe’s small tragedy and her struggle to understand what had happened to her, the strangling cosiness of her own family, her own failure to understand anything at all, stood in sharp relief. Yet under the dancing northern lights, the winter stars shining through them with a steady, flashing brilliance, all of this seemed trivial.
Behind her the barn door was being dragged open, screeching on its frozen iron runners. She turned and hurried to the house.
CHRISTMAS
When Tony had phoned yesterday to say that he was going to the city to pick up his family to bring them home for Christmas, Selena had felt a weight lifted from her. She had been worried, imagining her small nieces deprived of a family Christmas for the first time in their lives, imagining Tony spending Christmas with them (since he had refused to go with his parents to his younger sister’s in Edmonton), morose and lonely, imagining, with Diane not present, a confusion and sadness thrown over their own celebrations.
When she told Kent about Tony’s call, he had laughed, a sort of snort, and said, “That’s some separation—she gets to run around doing God-knows-what by herself, and then when she wants him, he comes running.”
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