The Snow Child (7 page)

Mabel didn’t want it to end. The quiet snow, the closeness. But her teeth began to chatter. She nodded.

Inside, Jack added several birch logs to the woodstove and the fire crackled. Mabel stood as close as she dared and peeled off wet mittens, hat, coat. He did the same. Clumps of snow fell onto the stovetop and sizzled. Her dress hung heavy and wet against her skin, and she unbuttoned it and stepped out of it. He unlaced his boots and pulled his damp shirt off over his head. Soon they were naked and shivering beside each other. She was unaware of their bare skin until he stepped closer and she felt his rough hand at the small of her back.

“Better?” he asked.

“Yes.”

She reached up over his shoulders where his skin was still cool to the touch, and when she pressed her nose into the crook of his neck, melted snow clung in droplets to his beard.

“Let’s go to bed,” Jack said.

After all these years, still a spot within her fluttered at his touch, and his voice, throaty and hushed in her ear, tickled along her spine. Naked, they walked to the bedroom. Beneath the covers, they fumbled with each other’s bodies, arms and legs, backbones and hip bones, until they found the familiar, tender lines like the creases in an old map that has been folded and refolded over the years.

After, they lay together, Mabel’s cheek against his chest.

“You won’t really go to the mine, will you?”

He put his lips to the top of her head.

“I don’t know, Mabel,” he whispered into her hair. “I’m doing the best I can.”

CHAPTER 5

J
ack woke to the cold. In the few hours he’d slept the weather had changed. He could smell it and feel it in his arthritic hands. He propped himself on an elbow and grabbed at the nightstand until he found a match and lit the candle. His back and shoulders were stiff as he eased his legs over the side of the bed. He sat on the edge of the mattress until the cold was unbearable. Not far from the pillow where Mabel slept, frost crept between the logs with its feathery crystals. He swore quietly and pulled the quilt up over her shoulder. A warm, secure home—he couldn’t even give her that much. He carried the candleholder into the main room. The heavy metal door on the woodstove clanged noisily as he opened it. A few coals smoldered in the ash.

As he reached for his boots, through the window he saw a flicker. He stood at the frost-edged glass and peered out.

Fresh snow blanketed the ground and glittered and glowed silver in the moonlight. The barn and trees beyond were muted outlines. There, at the edge of the forest, he saw it again. A flash of blue and red. He was groggy with sleep. He closed his eyes slowly, opened them again, and tried to focus.

There it was. A little figure dashed through the trees. Was that a skirt about the legs? A red scarf at the neck, and white hair trailing down the back. Slight. Quick. A little girl. Running at the edge of the forest. Then disappearing into the trees.

Jack rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Not enough sleep—that had to be it. Too many long days. He left the window and stepped into his boots, leaving the laces untied. He opened the door, and the chill air sucked the breath out of him. The snow crunched beneath his boots as he walked to the woodpile. It was only as he was returning with an armload of split birch that he noticed their little snow girl. He set the wood on the ground and with empty arms went to where it had stood. In its place was a small, broken heap of snow. The mittens and scarf were gone.

He pushed at the snow with the toe of his boot.

An animal. Maybe a moose had stumbled through. But the scarf and mittens? A raven or a whiskey jack, maybe. Wild birds had been known to snatch things. As he turned away, he caught sight of the tracks. Moonlight fell in the hollows. The prints ran through the snow, away from the cabin and into the trees. He bent over them. The silvery blue light was weak, so at first he didn’t trust his eyes. Coyote, or maybe lynx. Something other than this. He bent closer and touched the track with the tips of his bare fingers. Human footprints. Small. The size of a child’s.

Jack shivered. His skin prickled with goose bumps, and his bare toes ached cold inside his boots. He left the tracks and the pile of snow, stacked the wood in the crook of his arm, and went inside, quickly closing the door behind him. As he shoved each piece of wood into the stove, he wondered if the racket would wake Mabel. Just his eyes playing tricks. It would come to sense in the morning. He stayed beside the woodstove until the fire roared again, and then he closed the damper.

He eased himself beneath the quilt and against Mabel’s warm body, and she moaned softly in her sleep but did not wake. Jack lay beside her, his eyes wide and his brain spinning until finally he drifted into a kind of sleep that wasn’t much different than wakefulness, a mystifying, restless sleep where dreams fell and melted like snowflakes, where children ran soft-footed through the trees, and scarves flapped between black raven beaks.

When Jack woke again it was late morning, the sun was up, and Mabel was in the kitchen. His body was tired and stiff, as if he had never slept at all but instead spent the night splitting wood or bucking hay bales. He dressed and in socked feet made his way to the table. He smelled fresh coffee and hot pancakes.

“I think it worked, Jack.”

“What?”

“The sourdough starter Esther gave me. Here, try them.”

Mabel set a plate of pancakes on the table.

“Did you sleep all right?” she asked. “You look positively worn out.” With a hand on his shoulder, she reached over him to pour coffee from the blue enamel pot into his cup. He picked up the cup, held it warm between his hands.

“I don’t know. I guess not.”

“It’s so cold out, isn’t it? But beautiful. All that white snow. It’s so bright.”

“You’ve been outside?”

“No. Not since I dashed to the outhouse in the middle of the night.”

He got up from the table.

“Aren’t you going to eat breakfast?” she asked.

“Just going to get some wood. Nearly let the fire go out.”

He put on his coat this time, and some gloves, before opening the door. The snow reflected sunlight so brilliantly he squinted. He walked to the woodpile, then turned back to the cabin and saw the snow child, or what was left of it. Still just a shapeless pile of snow. No scarf. No mittens. Just as it had been last night, but now exposed as truth in the light of day. And the footprints still ran through the snow, across the yard and into the trees. Then he saw the dead snowshoe hare beside the doorstep. He stepped past without pausing. Inside, he let the wood fall to the floor beside the stove in a clamor, then stared without seeing.

“Have you noticed anything?” he finally said.

“You mean the cold snap?”

“No. I mean anything out of the ordinary.”

“Like what?”

“I thought I heard something last night. Probably nothing.”

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.

CHAPTER 6

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.”