SNOWFALL

by Mitchell Smith

  Torrey Monroe was a tough young man, short and stocky, who usually had a smile on his face. There was no smile now.

  "Hello, Sam." He nodded to Jim Olsen. "Jim.... What happened to William?" He said nothing to Jack Monroe.

  "Tribesmen," Sam said. "Looked like Crees to us."

  "Crees kill a Trapper?" Torrey said. "Why would they do that?—They didn't come after us?"

  "We saw five of them," Nathan Sorbane was staring at William's body. "—All they did was wave!" Nathan looked ready to cry. He and Wanda had taken William and Helen to live with them when they were little kids.

  "Where the hell were the rest of you?" Don Richardson was red in the face. He had a bad temper.

  "Nothing we could do, Don." Sam wanted to sit down, get off his leg. "They were waiting in the spruce lead off the mountain. William was hit, first thing."

  "You men," Nathan said, "—you take a kid out, and let a bunch of fucking people from Jesus knows where just kill him?"

  "There were ten or twelve of them, Nat."

  Torrey gestured to Jack Monroe. "And what about him, Sam? What's he doing back here?"

  "He saved our butts, Torrey," Chapman Olsen said.

  Jack Monroe stood, stretched the stiffness out of his muscles, then picked up his lance and started down to the sleds. He walked past Torrey and the others without saying a word.

  "You see that parka, Daddy? That silver fox?" Dummy Olsen stood staring after Jack with his mouth open.

  "Yes, son," Bobby Olsen said. "We see it."

  The copy-Webster word for Dummy was 'retarded,' but 'dummy' was in there too, under vulgarism, so people called him that, and he didn't mind.... The Olsens and Monroes were like the Richardsons—if a word wasn't in copy-Webster, they wouldn't say it. They never made up words, or talked with their hands the way the Auerbachs did sometimes.

  "Well, now," Torrey said, watching Jack walk away, "—this has turned into a shit day. To lose William, and have a killer come back after six years gone."

  "Your family," Jim Olsen said.

  "Let's get moving." Sam tried his leg and found he could use it, though the knee wouldn't bend. "People at home need to know about this trouble with the Crees."

  "Right," Torrey said. He and Nathan picked up William's body, and they all went down to the sleds, Sam limping, leaning on his bow-stave... . Jack Monroe was waiting by the lead dog of the first sled—and after Sam climbed aboard that one, and William's body was lashed to the second sled, Jack reached out as though he had the right, poked the lead dog with the butt of his lance, and called, "Musout!"

  That dog—known as Three-balls because he was always after the bitches—belonged to Torrey Monroe. Usually, he wouldn't run for anyone else, but the lance-butt persuaded him not to argue, and he led the team out with a lunge.

  The runners hadn't set on the glare ice, so as the dogs pulled out—buckled pair behind pair, not drawing in a spread like tribesmen's dogs—the sleds glided away free and easy in a jingle of harness bells.

  Except for Sam, and dead William, all the men stayed on their feet, running alongside the skimming sleds. Jack had started them so fast that Bobby Olsen had to sprint to catch up. Bobby grabbed the lead sled's curved grips, steadied the dogs, and leaned forward to talk to Sam, who was sitting back against the woven rawhide rest, wrapped against the cold in the sled's bearskin.

  "Going to be trouble with your brother coming back, Sam. Doesn't matter how good he did against those Crees."

  Sam looked up at Bobby's narrow face, reddened by the cold wind as he rode the back of the sled, hauling left or right to shift its weight, keep it running straight behind the team.

  "Maybe. We'll see what happens."

  "Something bad, Sam, is what'll happen."

  Sam settled back in the furs. The sore leg had become something separate from him—or almost separate—so he was able to consider other things, even when the sled bounced a little, and hurt it.... If Bobby thinks so about Jack, then for sure the others will. Bobby's gentle—most Trappers would have set a dumb child out into the snow to sleep. Or would have had the Doctor do it for them. Poor Catania.... But it hadn't turned out badly. Dummy was stupid, and a clumsy archer, but set him a simple task and he'd work till it was done, and no resting.

  The sun was well up, now, and the plains of snow blazed with reflected light. Sam dug under a fold of fur to his parka pocket for his goggles. He didn't like them, but truth was that after a while a man could see almost as much through those narrow slits as without them, though no one knew why.... He fitted them on, tied their rawhide string behind his head, and watched Jack— out in front and to the left of Three-balls ~ running over the sparkling surface of the snow.

  Good glare crust, but even so will you look at that man run! Runs like a lobo wolf, head down, those long legs just working away. Looks like he's never going to stop. The copybooks say, "I was never so glad to see somebody." That's in copybooks quite often. And it's true I was damn glad to see my brother—and not just for' his chasing those Cree away, either. I was glad to see him, killer or not, and gone the last six years, Jesus knows where.

  Sam closed his eyes behind the goggles and crossed himself. Thank you though, whichever, for bringing my brother back. Forgive him for what he did to Auerbach Olsen, though that fight was fair—and see to it we don't have to kill him to uphold the law.

  Sam bit the inside of his cheek until it bled. It was a secret thing he did when he wanted special attention paid to a prayer. Then he settled back and watched Jack run.

  As the sun rose into mid-morning, the sleds swept on, tracking behind the galloping dogs in a music of harness bells. They circled west around Alvin's foothills, running the flat open tundra snow-fields that lay between the mountains and the distant great evergreen forest said to be far to the south, in Map-New Mexico. That used to be mountain and desert country, they'd been told by Salesmen—but now, and for hundreds of years, deep forest, and poor hunting.

  The sun had begun to warm the Wall. The ice cliffs were muttering across the mountain range as falls and avalanches carved their towering faces. Those sounds would continue until evening and the setting sun left the Wall frozen and still again.

  ... An hour before midday, their dogs yelping greetings to those kenneled in dog-lines, the Trappers reached their home. Long Ledge. The Richardsons, Olsens, and Monroes had lived there from the first years they'd come to the Range, five long life-times ago. . .. Later, the Sorbanes, then the Weber-Edwards and Auerbachs had come.

  A long, winding creek-bed curved through stands of spruce and some sheltered birches, along a narrow field backed by a high granite cliff. Called the Gully, it was filled with a stretch of ice until mid-July, then ran with water until September. A long ledge ran across the face of the cliff, halfway up, and weather had notched shallow caves into the stone there. Only a narrow path wound up the rock to the ledge caves, and above them the cliff rose sheer to its wooded rim.

  The first families had started by living in those caves, high above the creek's valley. But after a while they had come down, made small round houses of elk hide and spruce-pole along the Gully's bank and then lived more like people in the copybooks, when those people were 'camping out.'

  The Sorbanes had come, and the Weber-Edwards, and built houses. But when the Auerbachs came to the Range, they climbed up to the ledge to live, and still had their homes in the caves there. Only Auerbachs—some of them not even taught to read—would have chosen to stay in a place so cold and wet, with only a steep and narrow stone path down to the Gully. One of every three of their babies died, but they kept to the cliff just the same.

  The made-houses along the Gully bank were small, with narrow fire-places in corner chimneys built of stone chinked with clay mud. The entrances were low, to keep heat in, and there was a saying on the Range: 'A great hunter still stoops to come into his house,' referring to the foolishness of too much hunting-pride—and to the mastery of women in their homes, as well.

  Ther
e were many of these small houses below the cliff—and hide huts also, for storing fire-wood, smoked meat, bud potatoes, spring onions, and fresh meat for winter freezing.

  ... Now, at almost noon, the hunting parties returned to their home, and found it untouched by the Cree.

  Young children were playing along the frozen creek-bed, and several older girls were bent, feeding the slow fires that warmed stones beneath rows of dirt-filled tubs of potatoes and onion sprouts. The hooped hide covers had been taken off the long plank tubs, for daylight sun.

  The children heard the harness bells and ran to welcome the sleds as they glided over Eight-log Bridge. Some Trappers and their wives gathered to see what luck the hunters had had. Philip Richardson, the oldest man on the Range at seventy-one—an extraordinary age for a Trapper—set his willow-basket work down and came over.

  When the sleds were parked beneath leafless birches, the hunters unhitched the dogs and stood silent as the Trappers came to them ... then saw dead William on the second sled.

  Where there'd been talk and greetings, silence fell even among the children—except for William's sister, Helen, who bent over him and tugged at his buckskins as if to wake him up. She called to wake him, then began to scream and cry until the Doctor, Catania Olsen, pushed through the crowd to her, and touched William to be certain he was gone.

  "Arrow wound," she said. "How?"

  "Cree," Sam said.

  Then the Trappers murmured among themselves, and a woman said, "Oh, Jesus ... oh, Jesus in the Mountains."

  "Cree?" a man, a Sorbane, said. "Those tribesmen have been coming down for years—come down hunting."

  "Only a few," another Trapper said. "And they always asked permission!"

  "Carry him to Michael's house," Doctor Olsen said, and put her arms around Helen to comfort her.

  Catania Olsen was a tall big-boned young woman with gray eyes and light brown hair she kept in one long braid. She had a scar on her face that made her ugly... . When she was a child, she had wandered into the dog-lines and they had dragged her down and torn at her. Part of her cheek, on the right side, had been ripped open, and though Doctor Monroe—who was the families' doctor then—had done his best, and sewn her up with a small steel needle and Salesmen's thread, she was left with that savage scar. It pulled the right corner of her mouth up slightly, as if she were beginning to smile.

  No man would marry a face like that, so Catania was apprenticed to the Doctor, to become a Doctor herself.

  She'd done well at it, and was liked, so even men who weren't her Sunday patients would do what they could to make her happy on holidays, and their wives said nothing against it.

  ... Catania started to lead William's sister away—and saw Jack Monroe sitting on a sled, looking at her. Her ruined face went white as Helen's. She stood staring until he smiled, got up, and walked away down the creek toward his brother's house.

  A big man with thick shoulders was cutting firewood at a smoke shed as Jack walked by. The man's dark-brown hair was cut short, and his face had been shaved clean with a knife. Blue dots were tattooed across his cheek-bones, four on one side, four on the other. He rested the ax and watched Jack go by, his eyes a bear's eyes, small, brown, and interested.

  At the sleds, Sam's wife, Susan, called to Catania to come back and look at his wounded leg. Susan was slight, and beautiful. She was carrying a child in an almost eight-month belly, and was pale and anxious about Sam and the mention of tribesmen, so Catania soothed her and sent her home to make a warm bed ready. Then the Doctor bent over Sam, sliced open his trouser-leg, and examined the wound.

  Around her, people talked about the Crees coming down... and the return of an exile who had beaten the brains out of Auerbach Olsen many years ago, by Butternut Creek.

  ... Jack Monroe is back. My heart hurt when I saw him.

  William Weber is dead. Arrow driven through lumbar process, abdominal aorta pierced. CD: internal bleeding and shock.

  Sam Monroe is injured. Arrow wound transfixing gastro-soleus tricep. Fibula nicked—no fracture. Prognosis positive.

  . .. When the men first came to me, on Christmas, when I was seventeen—three years before Old Doc died— they came all together to enjoy themselves. Well, to be fair, they came for my sake. But Jack didn't come with them. All during the night, while we were drinking potato-vodka and they took their gentle turns with me, I waited for Jack Monroe.

  He came to me alone, in the early evening, three days later. And the first thing I did was cry. I got tears and snot all over his shoulder. He kissed my eyes. He kissed my scar. When he went away in the morning, he carried my heart in his hands, and I never got it back.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF DOCTOR CATANIA OLSEN

  CHAPTER 3

  That night, Sam Monroe lay at ease on bear-skin robes before his home hearth. The pegged rawhide bed had been dragged close to a spruce-knot fire seething and cracking in the corner fireplace.

  Susan had a stew-pot on—chunks of caribou steak, bunches of sprouted onions, and last year's potatoes simmering in a Salesman-kettle. They'd eaten the last of the elk.

  Sam lay watching his wife as she worked, slight, pretty, big-bellied with their child—their first child—she bent to tend the food in ruddy firelight, her long black hair loose, and falling forward to shield her face.

  My little one.... Scared to death on our wedding night. Truth is, I was too old for her... am too old. God knows what she thought I was going to do to her. Susan absently tucked her hair back behind her ear, so her face was silhouetted by the flames.... Look at that little ear. A field mouse's ear. Truth is, I didn't do anything to her for two nights—three nights. She was so small, so pretty I was scared to do it.

  His leg felt better; Catania had cleaned the wound, poured vodka in it, and wrapped it in boiled cloth, the woven plant-stuff—linen—the Salesmen brought, and sold very dear.

  Jack came stooping through the entrance, back from the privy. He went over to Susan's strapped-hide chest, took out the leather vodka jug, and came to sit on the bed beside Sam.

  "How's the leg?" He pulled the stopper and tilted the jug up for several swallows, his adam's apple moving under the short black beard.

  "Leg's feeling pretty good." Sam leaned over and took the jug.

  "Not too much, Sam," Susan said. "... Dinner is going to take forever. These potatoes are frostbitten. Martha says her girls always watch the tub-fires, but they don't."

  Sam took a short drink and handed the jug back to Jack. "Now, you tell me how the hell you happened to come on us, yesterday."

  His brother sat looking at him for a moment before he answered. Sam was struck, not for the first time, how like a sled-dog's eyes Jack's were—the same bright cold light-blue gaze.

  "I didn't 'happen to,' Sam. I followed you people around for two days."

  "Like hell."

  "No surprise those tribesmen jumped you. You were careless travelers." Jack took another drink, wiped his mouth with his hand.

  Sam reached for the jug, but Jack held onto it.

  "—I picked you up at Keep-on, saw the other bunch go off, and followed you the rest of the way 'round the mountain. Thought I'd save some trouble and talk to you alone at the Spring—but you never came out of the spruce, so I went up to see." Jack smiled. "You and those Olsens...,. What's that copybook thing? 'Babes in the woods'?" He shook his head.

  "I know that was my fault," Sam said.

  "Oh, you have fewer faults than most," Jack said. "You were always a good brother to me." He sat staring into the fire for a while. "—What is a Boxcar-man doing on the Range?"

  "What?"

  "A Boxcar-man, Sam." Jack touched his cheekbones. "The one with the shaved face and tattoos."

  "Newton," Susan said. "His name's Newton."

  "I saw those Middle Kingdom people come up-river, sailing ice-boats," Jack said. "Big boats. Your Newton is an eight-dot man; likely important among them."

  "He came to the Range three years ago," Susan said. "He ma
rried Lucy Edwards, and stayed."

  "We knew where he came from," Sam said. "He causes no trouble."

  Jack said nothing to that, only sat beside Sam and looked into the fire.

  ... Later, Catania came visiting, and brought a jug and her willow-wood harp—a trade-instrument.

  "Dinner's going to be late," Susan said. It was more comfortable talking about dinner... talking about anything but the Cree, and dead William Weber. She felt her baby heavy within her, and still, as if it were listening for news of more trouble.

  "Don't need to feed me." Catania sat cross-legged on the floor furs and began to tune her harp.

  "Well, I will feed you," Susan said, and stirred the stew, "—but the potatoes aren't cooking."

  "Then leave them be," Catania said, "—and come and sing."

  She and Susan sang 'Alvin Mountain,' 'The Fisher-cat Hunt', and 'Sentimental Journey,' a very old copybook song. The four of them drank vodka and sang old songs together. Sam had a fine voice, deep and true, but Jack could hardly carry a tune. He sang out harsh and loud, but what he sang was always off—though it sounded fine to him, so he said "What?!" when the others made fun.

  Since Jack was a boy, singing had been the one body-thing he'd had no talent for.

  Watching her husband as they sang, watching Catania, Susan saw how dear they both found that single weakness in him.

  ... After a while, they stopped singing and sat on piled furs watching the fire, while Catania played softly on her harp. Susan wanted to ask Jack where he'd been the past six years, but felt that would be rude. She remembered Jack from when she was a young girl, and thought he looked bigger—and when they weren't singing, grim.

  She went to the fire to stir the stew. "I think the potatoes are getting done at last."

  Sam was dozing when someone whistled outside the entrance. Torrey Monroe pushed the door-hides apart and ducked in. "Sorry to bother you."