The Snow Child: A Novel (8 page)

After breakfast Jack left to feed the animals. On the way to the barn, he scooped up the dead hare and held it close to his side, so Mabel wouldn’t notice out the window. Once in the barn, he looked at it closely. He could see where it had been strangled, most likely with a thin snare that cut into its white coat and soft underfur. It was frozen stiff. Later, after he had taken care of the animals, he went behind the barn and threw the dead hare as far as he could into the trees.

When he returned to the cabin, Mabel was heating water to wash.

“Did you see the tracks?” she called over her shoulder.

“What tracks?”

She pointed out the window.

“Those?” he asked. “Must have been a fox.”

“Are the chickens safe?”

“Fine. They’re all fine.”

Jack took his shotgun down from over the door and told her he would go after the fox. He knew now what unsettled him about the tracks. The trail began at the heap of snow and led in only one direction—away and into the woods. There were no prints coming into the yard.

The trail wove among the birch trees, over fallen logs and around bare, thorny wild rose branches. Jack followed the loops and turns. They didn’t seem like the tracks of a lost child. More like a wild animal, a fox or ermine. Dashing here and there, running across the top of the snow, circling back and around until Jack wasn’t sure if he was still following the original trail. If she were lost, why hadn’t she come to the door? Why didn’t she ask for help? And the tracks did not lead down the wagon trail, toward the south, toward town and other homesteads. Instead, they moved through the trees without direction, but when he looked back over his shoulder, he could no longer see the cabin, and he understood that the trail was winding north, toward the mountains. The boot prints were joined here and there by another, different set of tracks. Fox, crisscrossing the child’s footprints, then slipping away. He continued to follow the child’s trail. Why would a fox stalk a little girl through the trees? He looked down from time to time, then doubted himself. Maybe the girl was following the fox. Maybe that was why her trail was so erratic.

Jack stopped at a fallen cottonwood, leaned back against its thick trunk. He must have gotten off the trail. He wiped sweat from his forehead. It was cold, but the air was dry and calm, and he was overheating. He wondered if he hadn’t looked
closely enough. Maybe he had been following fox tracks this entire time. He returned to the prints and stooped down next to them, half expecting to see pad and claw print. But no, they were still the smooth, child-sized footprints.

He followed the trail for a while longer, until it meandered down into a small ravine and a dense forest of black spruce. He could not easily fit through those trees. He had been gone for some time now. He turned back and felt a momentary rush of panic—so intently had he stared down at the footprints as he followed them, he had paid little attention to the landscape. The trees and snow were the same in all directions. Then he remembered his own boot tracks in the snow. It would be a long, looping way home, but it would get him there.

Mabel was anxious at the door when he returned. She wiped her hands on her apron and helped him take off his coat.

“I was beginning to worry.”

Jack warmed his hands at the woodstove.

“Well? Did you find the fox?”

“No, just more tracks, all over the place out there.”

He wouldn’t tell her about the child, or the dead hare on their doorstep. Somehow, he thought they might upset her.

M
abel nervously eyed the trail across the snow as she returned from the outhouse. Never before had a fox come so close to their cabin. She knew they were small creatures, but all the same they frightened her. She stepped over the tracks, but then their smooth, oblong shape caught her eye. They weren’t animal tracks at all. Each was a perfect print of the sole of a small boot. She brought her head up and with her eyes followed the trail back to the snow child she and Jack had built the night before. It was gone.

She hurried breathless into the cabin.

“Jack? Someone’s ruined our snow child. Someone’s been in our yard.”

He was at the counter, sharpening his pocketknife on a steel.

“I know.”

“I thought you said it was a fox.”

“There are fox tracks, too, in the woods.”

“But those out there?”

“A child’s.”

“How can you know?”

“The size of the tracks. And I’m pretty sure I saw her. Last night. Running through the trees.”

“Her? Who?”

“A little girl. She was wearing your red scarf.”

“What? Why didn’t you tell me? Did you go after her?”

“This morning, when I told you I was going to look for the fox, I tried to see where she went, but I lost the trail.”

“Last night… there was a little girl alone outside in the freezing winter and you didn’t see if she needed help? She must have wandered away from somebody’s cabin.”

“I don’t know, Mabel.”

She went back outside and stared at the little tracks. Just one trail, leading across the snow, away from their cabin and into the trees.

During the next several days the skies cleared, a deep cold settled on the valley, and the child’s tracks became edged in frost. They trailed sparkling and delicate through Mabel’s thoughts, and left her feeling as if she had forgotten something.

One evening she went to the shelf where a dozen of her favorite books were held in place by mahogany bookends—Emily Dickinson’s
Poems
, Henry David Thoreau’s
Walking
, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
Queen Silver-Bell
. As she absentmindedly ran her fingers across the spines, she thought of a fairy tale her father had often read to her. She remembered the worn blue leather of the cover and the golden hue of the illustrations. In one picture, she recalled, a child reached with her mittened hands down to the old man and woman who knelt before her, the old man and woman who had formed her from snow.

The next day when Mabel went to feed the chickens in the barn, she passed the little boot prints.

She woke to a silent cabin and sensed the change before she looked out a window or opened the door. It was a muffled quiet, a dense cold pressing at the cabin walls, though it was warm inside. Jack had left her a crackling fire before going to hunt moose again. Her senses were confirmed when she looked out the window and saw a shining new landscape. The snow had come again, and this time it was a fine, driving snow that had accumulated quickly overnight and blanketed the cabin and outbuildings. It transformed boulders and stumps into soft, white lumps. It gathered in deep pillows on spruce boughs, it hung heavily over the cabin’s eaves, and it had erased the tracks across their yard.

She carried a basket of bread crumbs and dried apple bits left over from a pie to the barn for the chickens. The hens comforted her, the way they roosted along their spruce pole, their feathers ruffled against the cold. When she came in, they hopped to the straw-strewn ground and clucked like old women welcoming a neighbor. They bustled and stretched their wings. One of the black-and-white hens pecked a scrap from Mabel’s fingers, and she stroked its feathered back as it waddled away. She reached into each nesting box. Finally, beneath the soft belly of a red hen, she found two warm eggs.

Mabel put them in her basket as she left the barn. When she turned to pull the door closed, she glimpsed blue in the snow-laden spruce trees beyond the yard. She strained her eyes and no longer saw blue, but instead red fur. Blue fabric. Red fur. A child, slight and quick in a blue coat, passing through the trees. A blink, and the little coat was gone and there was slinking fur, and it was like the flipping black-and-white pictures she had
seen in a coin-operated illuminated box in New York City. Appearing and disappearing motion, child and woodland creature each a passing flicker.

Mabel walked toward the forest, slowly at first and then more quickly. She watched for the girl but had lost sight of her.

When she neared the edge of the woods and peered through the snowy boughs, she was startled to see the child only a hundred yards or so away. The girl was crouched, her back to Mabel, white-blond hair fanned down her blue wool coat. Wondering if she should call out, Mabel cleared her throat, and the sound startled the child. The girl stood, snatched a small sack from the snow, and sprinted away. As she disappeared around one of the largest spruce trees, she looked back over her shoulder and Mabel saw her glancing blue eyes and small, impish face. She was no more than eight or nine years old.

Mabel followed, struggling through the knee-deep snow and bending to crawl beneath the boughs. Snow toppled onto her knit hat and trickled down the collar of her coat, but she pushed through the branches. When she emerged and wiped the snow from her face, she discovered a red fox where the child had been. Its muzzle was pressed into the snow and its back was hunched, like a cat licking milk from a bowl. It jerked its head to the side and tore something with its teeth. Mabel was transfixed. Never had she been so close to a wild animal. A few strides and she could have touched the black-tipped, auburn fur.

The creature looked up at her, its head still low, its long black whiskers brushed back along the tapered snout. Then Mabel saw the blood and fought the urge to gag. It was eating some dead thing, and blood splattered the snow and smeared the fox’s muzzle.

“No! You get! You get out of here!” Mabel waved her arms
at the fox and then, feeling angry and brave, moved toward it. The animal hesitated, perhaps unwilling to abandon its meal, but then turned and trotted along the girl’s path into the trees.

Mabel went to the place in the snow and saw what she hoped she wouldn’t. A horrifying uncoiling—silvery intestines, tiny bones, blood and feathers.

She had not counted the chickens this morning. She looked more closely and saw it wasn’t one of her hens after all, but instead a wild bird of some kind with mottled brown feathers and its head small and torn away.

She left the half-eaten thing and followed the tangle of child and fox footprints into the trees. As she walked, a gust of wind knocked snow from the branches and blew cold into Mabel’s face. It made breathing difficult, so she turned her head and went on into the woods. The wind flurried again, churning snow from the ground and trees into the air. Then it began to blow steadily, and Mabel leaned into it, her eyes downcast, but she could no longer see where she was going. A small blizzard whipped out of nothing. Mabel turned her back to the wind and snow and set out for home. She wasn’t dressed for such an expedition, and surely the girl was too far away now. Even as she neared the barn, the blowing snow filled in her tracks, and those of the child and fox. She did not see the dead bird or flecks of blood as she passed by—they had vanished as well.