The Snow Child (31 page)

“But bears don’t usually go after people,” Jack said with a glance toward Mabel.

“Oh, sometimes. You hear about that miner down toward Anchorage? Grizzly bear took his face right off.”

Jack frowned at the boy. Mabel was stiff and silent at the window.

“Oh, sure. I mean, that’s not real common, though,” the boy fumbled. “Most often a bear will hightail it in another direction.”

“But are you lonely?” Still Mabel did not face them as she spoke.

“Ma’am?”

“Lonely. When you are all alone in the wilderness, there must be something terrible about it.”

“Well, I don’t spend all that much time in the woods by myself. I’d like to. Longest I’ve been gone is a week, when I went salmon fishing downriver last summer. And I liked it just fine. I fished all day and sometimes all night ’cause the sun never went down. I dried and smoked the fish on alder poles. That was the first time I saw a mink. It came down a creek and tried to steal a whole salmon right from under my nose. I was laughing too hard to take a shot at it. It was tugging and dragging that salmon away as fast as it could go.”

“But if you have a safe, warm home with a family, why would you want to be out there?”

The boy hesitated and looked to Jack.

“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “I guess maybe I don’t want to be warm and safe. I want to live.”

“Live? Isn’t this living?” She let out a long sigh.

No one spoke again until she came to the table with the pot of coffee, and it was as if the boy had just arrived. “So now you’re here. And what’s this you’ve brought?” she asked.

Garrett’s face brightened, and he turned bashful.

“Well, I uh, well…” and he pushed it across the table toward her. “It’s for you.”

“Shall I open it, then?”

The boy nodded, and Mabel untied the string and folded back the leather. Inside, Jack saw fox fur. Silver and black.

Mabel was expressionless as she touched it with the tips of her fingers.

“It’s a hat. See?” And the boy took it from her and lightly punched it from beneath, so the crown stood up.

“Betty sewed it for you. It’s got earflaps you can tie on top, like this, or you can pull them down and tie it under your chin.”

He gave it back to Mabel, who turned it slowly in her hands.

“I hope it fits. We used my mom’s head to measure.”

“I can’t… I can’t accept this.”

The boy’s face fell.

“It’s all right,” he mumbled. “If you don’t like it.”

“Mabel.” Jack put a hand on her arm.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s too much.”

“It didn’t cost me a dime. I traded her out in furs.”

“It’s too fine. I have no place to wear it.”

“But it’s nothing fancy,” the boy said. “Trappers wear them. You don’t have to save it for trips to town or anything. It’s warm.”

“Try it on, Mabel,” Jack said quietly.

He wasn’t ready for the effect. As Mabel pulled it down and tied the strings beneath her chin, the dense black fur, tipped brilliantly in silver, framed her face, and her eyes shone gray-soft and her skin looked like warm cream. She was stunning. Neither he nor the boy said a word but only stared.

“Well! The way you two gawk, I guess it must not suit me,” she said and tugged off the hat in an angry fluster.

“It suits you fine,” Jack said.

“You could be in one of those fashion magazines from Back East,” the boy jumped in. “And I’m not just saying it, either.”

“He’s right. It suits you better than fine.”

“You’re not just flattering me?” She touched her hair with one hand.

“Put it back on, so we can see again,” Jack said.

“It does fit well,” she said, “as if it were tailored for me. And it is warm.”

Jack stood and showed her how to tie the flaps up so that it fit like a Russian fur hat.

“I guess I’ll be the finest-dressed farmer’s wife you ever saw,” she said.

Mabel sent the boy home with several books from her trunks. When he had gone, she sat by the woodstove reading. Jack came up behind her and softly touched the nape of her neck.

“You’re tickling me,” she said and brushed distractedly at his hand.

“I think the boy was smitten with you in that hat.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m an old woman.”

“You’re still beautiful. And you don’t seem to mind it being made of fox. I’d thought you’d object.”

“It is practical. I’ll be warmer with it.”

CHAPTER 32

W
here were you, child?

Just now? I was at the river. That’s where I found this.

In her hand, Faina held a wind-dried salmon skull. Mabel was trying to draw it, first this way, then that.

No. Not just now. Always. This past summer. Where did you go then?

To the mountains.

Why? What is there for you?

Everything. The snow and the wind. The caribou come. And little flowers and berries. They grow even on the rocks, near the snow, up by the sky.

You’re going to leave us again, aren’t you? This spring, you will go back to the mountains.

The girl nodded.

And tonight, when you leave, where will you go?

Home.

What kind of home can you have out there?

I’ll show you.

The next bright day, the child came for Mabel and led her away into the forest. Jack sent them with a knapsack of food but told Mabel not to worry. Faina knows her way. She’ll bring you back safely.

She followed the girl away from the homestead and along trails Mabel alone never could have seen or known—snowshoe hare runs beneath willow boughs, wolf tracks along hard-packed drifts. The day was cold and peaceful. Mabel’s breath rose around her face and turned to frost on her eyelashes and along the edges of the fox-fur hat. She stumbled in Jack’s wool pants and the snowshoes he had strapped to her feet; ahead of her Faina strode in ease and grace, her feet light on the snow.

They climbed out of the river valley and up toward the blue sky, until they were on the side of a mountain.

There, the girl said.

She pointed to the fanned impression of a bird’s small wings on the surface of the snow, each feather print perfect, exquisite symmetry.

What is it?

A ptarmigan flew.

And there?

Mabel pointed to a series of small dashes in the snow.

An ermine ran.

Everything was sparkled and sharp, as if the world were new, hatched that very morning from an icy egg. Willow branches were cloaked in hoarfrost, waterfalls encased in ice, and the snowy land speckled with the tracks of a hundred wild animals: red-backed voles, coyotes and fox, fat-footed lynx, moose and dancing magpies.

Then they came to a frightening place, a stand of tall spruce where the air was dead and the shadows cold. A bird wing was nailed to the trunk of a broad tree, a patch of white rabbit fur to another, and they were like a witch’s totems where dead animals ensnare passing spirits.

The child approached a third tree, and a stretch of brown fur squirmed. It was alive.

Mabel took in a breath.

Marten, the girl said.

The animal swiveled from a front paw, suspended by a steel trap on a pole. Its small black eyes were wet and shining like onyx. Unblinking. Watching.

What will you do with it?

Bemused or dissatisfied—Mabel couldn’t read Faina’s expression.

Kill it, the child said.

She took the writhing thing in her bare hands and pressed its thin chest into the tree trunk until the animal went limp.

How do you do it?

I squeezed its heart until it couldn’t beat any more.

It wasn’t the answer Mabel sought, but she didn’t know how else to ask the question. Faina released the paw from the trap.

May I?

Mabel removed her mittens and took the dead marten. It was warm and light, its fur softer than a woman’s hair. She put her nose to the top of its head and it smelled like a kitten in a barn. She studied its narrow eye slits and ferocious little teeth.

Faina reset the trap and put the marten in her pack.

Later they found a dead hare strangled by a loop of wire and later still, a white ermine in a trap, frozen open-eyed and stiff as if bewitched. All went in Faina’s pack.

The trail led across a frozen swamp where black spruce stood half dead and leaning, and then up a steep bank and back into a forest of broad white spruce and twisted, knotted birch. They came to another pole with a trap, but it held only an animal’s foot, ragged edge of bone and ripped tendon, brown fur frozen to steel. Faina put the trap to her knee, released its hold, and tossed the paw into the woods.

What was it?

A marten’s foot.

Where is the rest?

A wolverine stole it, the child said.

I don’t understand.

Faina pointed to tracks in the snow. Mabel wondered that she hadn’t seen them before, each clawed print as large as the palm of her hand. The wolverine tracks circled the tree in larger and larger gallops until they disappeared into the forest.

It ate the marten out of my trap, she said.

Faina seemed unburdened by this knowledge. She walked on, her steps as quick and easy as they had ever been. Mabel followed without speaking, eyes newly alert for tracks and her chest filled with the rhythm of her own heart and lungs. And then she realized they had come back around to the river and were traveling toward their homestead.

But wait—we can’t go back yet. You haven’t showed me your home.

It’s here. I’ve showed you.

Here? Mabel wouldn’t argue. Maybe the child was ashamed of her dwelling. Maybe the place where she slept and ate wasn’t worth seeing.

But she knew the truth. The snowy hillsides, the open sky, the dark place in the trees where a wolverine gnawed on the leg of some small, dead animal—this was the child’s home.

Can we stop here, just for a moment? Mabel asked.

It had been a long time since she had felt the urge to draw so strongly. They sat on a rise looking over the valley. She took her sketchbook and pencil from her pack and ignored her numb, cold fingers as she began to draw. Faina held the marten before her so she could again study its whiskered snout and angled eyes. Then she quickly drew the fur and claw of its brown, padded feet. She flipped the page and did a rough sketch of the snow-heavy spruce branches above them, and then the mountains looming up from the river. As the light dwindled, she tried to recall the bird wing nailed to the tree and the ermine tracks across the snow. She tried to remember it all and to think of it as home. Maybe here on the page she could reduce it to line and curve, and at last understand it.

She could see, now that she had been shown. The sun had disappeared behind them, and the girl pointed across the valley to the mountain slopes aglow in a cool purple-pink. Silhouetted against the sky, tendrils of snow unfurled from the peaks, whipped by what must have been a brutal wind. Here on the rise, though, the air was still. The colors were distant, impossible, untouchable.

That’s what my name means, Faina said, still pointing.

Mountain?

No. That light. Papa named me for the color on the snow when the sun turns.