The Snow Child: A Novel (13 page)

A few days after the basket had appeared on their doorstep, Mabel decided to write to her sister, who still lived in the family home in Philadelphia. Perhaps the book was in the attic, along with the trunks of clothes and keepsakes that had accumulated there over the years. She sat down at the table, a loaf of bread baking in the oven, and was comforted by the act of writing. It gave her a rational purpose. Either the book was there or it wasn’t, but if her sister found it and sent it to her, Mabel was certain it would be of consequence. The book would tell her the fate of the old man and woman, and the child they had borne of snow.

“Dearest sister, I hope this letter finds you well. We are settling into winter here at the homestead,” she began.

She went on to describe the snow and mountains and their new friends the Bensons. She asked about her sister’s children,
now grown, and the family home. Then, as casually as she could, she inquired about the book.

“Do you remember it, dear Ada? It was one of my favorites for some years of my childhood. I believe it was bound in blue leather, but I remember little of the story—not even the title. I am sure it is an impossible task I am asking of you, but trying to recall the details of the book has become such a distracting nuisance to my mind. It’s like having a person’s name on the tip of your tongue, nearly remembered but not quite. I only hope by some chance you know the book I am thinking of, and better yet know where to find it in all that jumble of trunks in the attic.”

Mabel also asked if her sister could send some new pencils, as she intended to pick up her former pastime and had only a few stubs in her drawing box.

She sealed the letter, set it aside, and went to the stove. She pulled the loaf of bread from the oven, thumped it softly to see if it was done, then slid it back into the heat. She glanced toward the window and saw Jack at the woodpile. And then she saw the little girl.

She stood in the trees just beyond. Jack hadn’t noticed her. He had taken off his coat and was splitting log after log, swinging the heavy maul above his head and bringing it down with a loud crack into the wood. The girl watched and then crept closer, hiding behind a birch tree and peeking around it. She wore the same coat of blue wool trimmed in white fur. Beneath the coat, Mabel could now see, was a light blue flower-print dress that came to below her knees, and high boots or moccasins made of some kind of animal skin and fur.

Mabel paced at the window. Should she go to the door and call out to Jack, or wait until he saw the girl himself? She was so near she hated to frighten her away. Then she saw Jack raise his
head and look at the girl. The child was less than a dozen yards from him. Mabel held her breath. She could see Jack speaking but couldn’t hear his words. The child was motionless. Jack stepped closer, a hand extended toward her. The girl stepped back, and then Jack was speaking again. It was difficult to see from the window, but Mabel thought she saw the girl raise a hand in a red mitten and give a small wave. Mabel’s breath fogged the glass. She rubbed it with her hand just in time to see the girl turn and run into the trees. Jack stood with his arms at his sides, the maul at his feet, not moving. Mabel hurried to the door and pulled it open.

“Go, Jack! Go! Go after her!” Her voice was louder and shriller than she’d meant. He startled, then looked from Mabel to the woods and back again. At last he charged after the girl, first at a steady walk, then picking up his pace and trotting through the snow. His legs looked long and awkward as his big boots thumped beneath him. Nothing like the nimble sprint of the girl.

She waited at the window. Occasionally she went to the door, opened it, and looked out in all directions, but the yard and woods beyond were empty. Minutes went by, then an hour and another. She considered dressing in her winter boots and coat and going after them, but she knew that was not wise. Night came quickly on these short winter days.

As the cabin darkened, Mabel lit the oil lamps, put more wood on the fire, and tried to stop her rhythmic pacing. She thought of her mother, how often she had paced and wrung her hands when Mabel’s father didn’t come home from some late meeting at the university. She thought of the wives of soldiers, gold miners and trappers, drunks and adulterers, all waiting long into the night. Why was it always the woman’s fate to pace and fret and wait?

Mabel finally made herself sit by the woodstove with her sewing and tried to lose herself in the stitches. She didn’t know she had fallen asleep in the chair until Jack came in. His beard and mustache were caked with ice and his pant legs were stiff and snow-covered. He didn’t bother to take off his boots or stomp the snow from them but stumbled to the woodstove and held out his bare hands. He hadn’t been wearing gloves when she’d sent him after the girl. She took his hands in her own. Jack cringed at her touch.

“Are you frostbit?”

“I don’t know. Cold, that’s for sure.” His words slurred together, either from the ice in his mustache or from fatigue. Mabel rubbed his hands to move warm blood to the tips of the fingers.

“Did you catch up with her? What did you see?”

He slid his hands out of hers and pulled some of the ice from his mustache and beard. He took off his boots and then his coat and pants, which he hung from nails behind the woodstove to dry. The cabin smelled of warm, wet wool.

“Did you hear me? What did you find?”

He didn’t look up when he spoke, but instead turned from her and stumbled to their bedroom. “Nothing. I’m tired, Mabel. Too tired to talk.”

He climbed beneath the covers and was soon snoring softly, leaving Mabel alone again by the woodstove.

J
ack had always considered himself if not brave, then at least competent and sure. He was wary of true danger, of flighty horses that could break your back and farm tools that could sever limbs, but he had always scoffed at the superstitious and mystical. Alone in the depths of the wilderness, however, in the fading winter light, he had discovered in himself an animal-like fear. What shamed him all the more was that he could not name it. If Mabel had asked what terrified him when he followed the girl into the mountains, he could only have answered with the timid uncertainty of a child scared of the dark. Disturbing thoughts whirled through his brain, stories he must have heard as a boy about forest hags and men who turned into bears. It wasn’t the girl that frightened him as much as the strange world of snow and rock and hushed trees that she navigated with ease.

The girl had deftly jumped logs and scampered through the woods like a fairy. He had gotten close enough to notice the brown fur of her hat and the knee-high leather moccasins that bound her feet. By the woodpile, when he had spoken to her, he had even caught sight of her blond eyelashes and the
intensely blue eyes, and when he asked if she liked the doll, he saw her smile. The shy, sweet smile of a little girl.

But then she had become a phantom, a silent blur. As Jack tried to follow her, an icy fog moved through the forest. Minute crystals of ice filled the air and gathered as hoarfrost along the tree branches and on his lashes. He could see only a few feet into the mist. He stopped occasionally, bent with his hands on his knees while sweat froze at his brow. He tried to silence his heavy breathing, but then all he heard was the snow creaking beneath his boots. The child made no sound. He heard twigs crack, only to watch a snowshoe hare bound through the alders, and later, as night closed in, an owl hooted from far away. He never heard the girl. At times he wasn’t sure he was even following her anymore but instead blindly thrashing through the trees like a bewitched, crazy man. Then he would see her just ahead, as if she wanted to be seen.

He lost track of how far he had come or how long he had been gone, yet he kept on, past their 160-acre homestead, up into the foothills of the mountains where he had hunted moose and beyond, to where the trees dwindled to alpine birch shrubs and Labrador tea. He followed a ridge that looked down over the snowy river valley and followed her still higher, until he crested a rise and found himself in a narrow mountain gorge with steep shale cliffs.

An eerie gust of wind came down the gorge. Farther up he could see a waterfall of ice pouring off the mountain between the rocky cliffs. Below him, the creek trickled and bubbled beneath ice and wound its way through rock and willow. The girl, though, was nowhere to be seen.

He cautiously followed her tracks up the ravine, and then
they disappeared into the snowy hillside. It didn’t make sense, yet that is what he saw—her trail didn’t continue up the hill or along the creek; it ran into the side of the mountain. Then he noticed what looked like a small door set into the hillside beneath a rounded dome of snow. Jack crouched behind a boulder, a cold sweat on the back of his neck. He could go to that little door and call out to the girl, but he didn’t. What did he expect to find? A fairy-tale beast that holds young girls captive in a mountain cave? A cackling witch? Or nothing at all, no child, no tracks, no door, only insanity bared in the untouched snow? That is perhaps what he feared the most, that he would discover he had followed nothing more than an illusion.

Rather than face that possibility, Jack turned his back on the little door and set out for home. For a while, he followed the tracks. At times there were two sets—the child’s small prints and his larger ones. Other times there were just his own, and Jack knew he had probably destroyed the child’s with his big boots as he followed her. Still, the sight of his solitary tracks winding through the trees left him uneasy. As it grew darker he feared the meandering trail would keep him in the woods into the coldest, blackest hours of the night, so he left the trail and headed directly toward the riverbed below. From there he could follow the Wolverine back to their homestead and, he hoped, be at the cabin within an hour.

But the route proved difficult as it pulled him down into steep ravines where the snow was well over his knees and forced him through a dense forest of black spruce that threatened to disorient him. He didn’t recognize the river when he reached it, not until he had walked partway out onto the ice and heard the roar beneath him. He eased backward until he was
sure he was on firm ground, and then he walked downstream, relying on the vague outline of the riverbed to guide him toward their homestead.

He expected Mabel would be waiting for him and wanting answers. It was reasonable, and yet it grated on him. He was tired, aching, and surely frostbit, and he had nothing to offer her but a tired old man who quaked in his boots at a child’s door.

The next morning Jack woke to the sound of Mabel’s knocking about the cabin. Dishes clattered, a broom swished, bumps and thumps—these were the unmistakable sounds of her irritation. Jack eased himself out of bed.

They each went about their chores, but Mabel’s anger seemed only to grow, and her footsteps fell heavier and her sighs more audible. Eventually, she would relent, but the breach would become wider and deeper. Jack knew this, yet he could not find the strength to stop it. He escaped to the barn and the woodpile, and left Mabel with her sighs.