The Snow Child

  Jack laughed, grabbed her feet, and buckled the blades onto her boots. Mabel sputtered indignantly.

  Quick, Faina, Jack said. Do you know what these are?

  The girl shook her head, her lips pinched tight in fear and excitement.

  They’re ice skates. You put them on your feet and slide on the ice.

  He showed her how to put them on and buckle the straps. Then he returned to Mabel and put his mouth to her ear.

  I’d never let anything happen to you. You know that, don’t you?

  Mabel’s eyes glittered in the moonlight.

  Yes. I do know, and she wobbled as she stood up.

  The river’s still frozen thick, he said. All this last thaw did was smooth the ice to a perfect shine. And even if we did fall through, this isn’t the main channel. The water’s only a foot deep. We’d just get cold and wet, but even that won’t happen. I promise.

  Jack put on his own skates and led them onto the ice.

  Mabel was hesitant, but soon her childhood came flying back to her and she slid confidently across the ice. The child, on the other hand, seemed to have left her braver self, the one who slew wild animals and slept alone in the wilderness, back on solid ground, and she surprised Jack by clinging to his arm like a toddler.

  It’s all right, he told her. Even if you fall, it only smacks your bottom a bit. No harm done.

  As if on cue, Mabel slipped and fell.

  Dash it all! she said.

  Before Jack could shake free of Faina and rush to her side, Mabel had eased onto her knees and stood again.

  I should have strapped a pillow to my back side.

  She laughed and dusted herself off.

  Jack skated faster, while Faina merely held on and let herself be pulled. Mabel joined them, and the three held hands and slowly skated in a circle. The riverbed echoed with the sound of their whoops and laughter and their blades carving into the ice.

  Mabel let go and skated farther up the channel.

  How far is it safe? she called back.

  All the way to that corner, and he watched as Mabel gained speed.

  Will she be all right? Faina whispered, still holding on to his arm.

  Yes. Yes she will.

  Eventually Faina grew comfortable on the skates, and Jack set the lantern in the center of the ice. Mabel returned to skate slowly but gracefully around and around the light, while Faina followed like a long-legged fawn learning to walk. Jack skated in the opposite direction and caught Mabel by a hand.

  We used to skate like this together when we were young, he said as they passed Faina. Do you remember?

  How could I forget? You were always trying to kiss me, but I could outskate you, so you never got the chance.

  She laughed, pulled her hand free, and skated upriver. Jack pursued her across the ice, the night-blackened trees and sky flying past him.

  Faster! Go faster! Faina called out, and Jack didn’t know who she was cheering on, but he skated as fast as he dared and prayed his blades wouldn’t catch in a crack or rough spot. Mabel stayed just out of reach, until she slowed and swung around to face him. Hand in hand they skated back to where Faina stood in her small circle of lantern light. Without a word, Jack and Mabel each took one of the child’s hands and skated up the river, following the curves of the bank. Faina squealed in delight. Even through the cushion of their thick coats, Jack could feel her small arm folded in his, and it was as if his very heart were cradled in those joined elbows. The ice was like wet glass, and they glided fast enough to create a breeze against their faces. He looked at Mabel and saw tears running down her cheeks and wondered if it was the cold that made her eyes water.

  As they neared the corner, where the small channel rejoined the main river, they slowed to a stop and the three of them stood arm in arm, Jack and Mabel gasping for breath. The moon lit up the entire valley, gleaming off the river ice and glowing on the white mountains.

  Let’s keep going, Faina whispered, and Jack, too, wanted to skate on, up the Wolverine River, around the bend, through the gorge, and into the mountains, where spring never comes and the snow never melts.

  As she gazed upon him, love… filled every fiber of her being, and she knew that this was the emotion that she had been warned against by the Spirit of the Wood. Great tears welled up in her eyes—and suddenly she began to melt.

  —“Snegurochka,” translated by Lucy Maxym

  CHAPTER 36

  He wasn’t always there. Some days Mabel crept through the snow and down to the creek behind the cabin, and the creature wouldn’t show himself. There’d be only the trickle of water through snow and ice. But if she sat, patient and silent, at the base of the spruce tree, eventually he might appear. His small brown head would peek up from a pool of open water in the creek, or his tail would disappear over a snowy hummock.

  This November day, the river otter did not keep her waiting. She heard ice splinter, a splash, and then he was just the other side of the small creek. She expected him to dash across a log or run humpbacked down the bank as he always did. Instead he paused at the water’s edge, turned toward her, and stood up on his hind legs. He was remarkably still, supported by his thick tail, his front paws dangling at his chest. For longer than Mabel could hold her breath, the otter stared at her with his eyes like deep eddies. And then he dropped to all fours and scampered down the creek.

  Farewell, old man, until we meet again.

  She had no way to know its age or gender, but there was something in the light-colored chin and long, coarse whiskers that reminded her of an old man’s beard. From a distance the otter gave a comical, mischievous impression, but when it slithered close Mabel could smell fish blood and a wet chill.

  She told no one of the otter. Garrett would want to trap it; Faina would ask her to draw it. She refused to confine it by any means because, in some strange way, she knew it was her heart. Living, twisting muscle beneath bristly damp fur. Breaking through thin ice, splashing in cold creek water, sliding belly-down across snow. Joyful, though it should have known better.

  It wasn’t just the river otter. She once spied a gray-brown coyote slinking across a field with his mouth half open as if in laughter. She watched Bohemian waxwings like twilight shadows flock from tree to tree as if some greater force orchestrated their flight. She saw a white ermine sprint past the barn with a fat vole in its mouth. And each time, Mabel felt something leap in her chest. Something hard and pure.

  She was in love. Eight years she’d lived here, and at last the land had taken hold of her, and she could comprehend some small part of Faina’s wildness.

  The seasons of the past six years had been like an ocean tide, giving and taking, pulling the girl away and then bringing her back. Each spring Faina left for the alpine high country where the caribou migrated and the mountains cupped eternal snow, and Mabel no longer wept, though she knew she would miss her.

  Homesteaders called that bittersweet season when the river ice gives way and the fields turn to mud “breakup,” but Mabel found something tender and gentle in it. She said goodbye to the girl just as the bog violets bloomed purple and white along the creeks and cow moose nuzzled their newborns, just as the sun began to push winter out of the valley.

  And then, when the days stretched long, the land softened and warmed and the farm thrived. Beyond the barn, beneath a cottonwood tree, there was the picnic table Jack and Garrett had built, and often on top of it during the summer there would be a moonshine jar filled with wildflowers. Most Sundays, they shared a meal with the Bensons, sometimes here, sometimes at their homestead. When the weather was fine and the bugs miraculously scarce, they ate outdoors. Jack and George would build an alder fire in a pit early in the morning and then roast a hunk of meat from a black bear Garrett had shot in the spring. Esther would bring potato-and-beet salad; Mabel would bake a fresh rhubarb pie and spread a white tablecloth. Then the two women would walk together arm in arm and pick fireweed and bluebells. In the background they would hear the men t
alking and laughing as the flames in the pit sputtered and flared with the bear-fat drippings. When Mabel went into the cabin to get plates and silverware, Jack would sometimes come up behind her, softly pull back the wisps of her hair, and kiss her neck. “You’ve never been more beautiful,” he would say.

  Harvest would come, and sometimes during those long, exhausting days, it would be as Mabel once imagined—she and Jack together in the field as they gathered potatoes into burlap sacks or cut cabbages from their stalks, and even as she wiped sweat from her face and tasted grit between her teeth, she tried to breathe in the sweetness of the moment. At night they would rub each other’s sore muscles and jokingly complain of their aches, Mabel always more than Jack, though she knew his pain was so much worse.

  Then, when the days shortened and the first frost came, they whispered their blessings and prayed for snow. Mabel would try to guess how much Faina had grown since they had last seen her, and she would sew wool stockings and long underwear and sometimes a new coat, always blue wool with white fur trim and snowflakes embroidered down the front.

  Each time the girl arrived, she was taller and more beautiful than they had remembered, and she would bring gifts from the mountains. One year it was a sack of dried fish, another it was a caribou hide, tanned supple and scented with wild herbs. She would hug them and kiss them and say she had missed them, and then she would run off into the snowy trees she called home.

  Mabel no longer shouted Faina’s name into the wilderness or tried to think of ways to make her stay. Instead, she sat at the table and by candlelight sketched her face—impish chin, clever eyes. Then she tucked these sketches into the leather-covered children’s book that told the story of the snow maiden.

  Winter after winter, Faina returned to their cabin in the woods, and in all that time, no one else ever saw her. It suited Mabel fine. Just as with the otter, she came to guard the girl as a secret.

  CHAPTER 37

  Garrett watched the fox through his iron sights. It was still a few hundred yards away, but its gait did not falter as it traveled up the river toward him. It wouldn’t be long before it closed the distance. Garrett leaned back into the cottonwood log, wedged his elbow against his knee, steadied his rifle. His finger rested lightly at the trigger.

  He knew it could be the one. For years, Jack forbade him from killing the red fox that hunted the fields and riverbed near their farm. He said it belonged to a girl who lived alone in the forest, hunted in the mountains, survived winters that killed grown men. A girl no one ever saw.

  Garrett’s rifle gently rose and fell with his breaths, but his eyes remained fixed on the animal. He couldn’t be sure. In the fading November light, it could almost be a cross fox, a mix of silver-black and red. It stopped and raised its nose to the air, as if it had scented something, then resumed its path up the snowy river. The sun sank a degree and the last golden rays disappeared down the valley.

  He let the fox come. When it was less than 150 yards away, Garrett sat forward, put his cheek to the rifle stock, shut his left eye, and lined the iron sights on the fox’s spine. But the fox veered, abruptly turned its tail toward Garrett, and passed behind a willow shrub, headed for the nearby poplars. It moved quickly. Garrett lowered the rifle. He’d hesitated a moment too long. It would soon be too dark to shoot, and the fox would be lost to the trees.

  Then he saw that the animal had stopped and sat watching him from the forest’s edge. Garret leaned again into his rifle, squinted down the barrel, and pulled the trigger.

  It took only the one shot. The impact was enough to flip the small animal onto its side, and it did not move again. Garrett ejected the shell, then got up from his position against the log. With his rifle at his side, he walked until he stood over the dead fox.

  The animal had thinned to a scruffy frame, and the fur along its muzzle and hackles had whitened with age so that perhaps, in poor light and at a distance, it could be mistaken for a cross. But there was no doubt. It was the one.

  All these years, Garrett had obeyed Jack’s command. The fox would dart across a field or cross his path in the forest, and Garrett would let it pass. Each time was an irritation. Nothing indicated that this fox was anything more than a ranging wild animal.

  But now that he had killed it, he regretted it. He was honor bound. He should take it to Jack and Mabel’s door. He should confess, apologize. Jack’s reproach would be stern. Mabel would be silent. She would smooth her apron with her hands, gently shake her head.

  He had to get rid of it. He could skin it out and try to sell the pelt, but it was shabby and practically worthless. His mom would ask where he got it. His dad would want to see the fur. Garrett would end up telling lies, and lies had a way of getting complicated.

  He shouldered his rifle, picked up the fox, and carried it into the trees. He was surprised at how thin and bony it felt in his arms, like an old barn cat.

  Beyond the poplars, in a dense stand of spruce, Garrett arranged the animal in the snow at the base of a tree. He broke off evergreen boughs and laid them over it. He hoped it would snow again soon.

  As he turned to walk home in the dusk, he no longer felt like a nineteen-year-old man but instead a shameful little boy.

  “Garrett. Glad you could come over.”

  Jack greeted him at the cabin door and shook his hand. “We were hoping you’d make it this evening.”

  At the kitchen table, Mabel smiled up at him.

  “Mom said you all wanted me to come over.”

  “Yes, it’s about time,” Mabel said.

  “What’s it about?” Garrett’s stomach turned.

  “Have a seat,” Jack said. He held out a chair.

  “All right.”

  Garrett sat and looked from Jack to Mabel and back to Jack again.

  “So this is how it is,” Jack began. “We’ve been wanting to talk to you about the farm…”

  “But maybe we should eat dinner first?” Mabel asked.

  “Nope. Business first. This is something we’ve been meaning to do for a long time.” He looked at Garrett. “You know we couldn’t have made a go of this place without you.”

  “I don’t know about that. Just been a hired hand. Could have been another one.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. These past years, we haven’t been able to pay you near what you’re worth.”

  “And you were never just a hired hand. You’ve been so much more, to both of us,” Mabel said. “What would I have done without you to discuss Mark Twain and Charles Dickens with?”

  Garrett’s shoulders relaxed some, and he let out a slow breath.

  “You know what this is?” Jack gestured toward some papers spread on the table in front of them.

  “No. Can’t say that I do.”

  “These are legal papers that make you a partner in this farm. And they also lay out that when we are both gone, this place will become yours. Now, hear us out before you start shaking your head. You know we don’t have a son of our own to leave this place to. And the truth is, you made it what it is today.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Now, we understand farming hasn’t always been your aim,” Jack went on, “but it seems to us that you take pride in what you’ve helped us do here. And maybe you’d be able to run this place, along with your trapping and such in the winters.”

  “Or,” Mabel added, “you would be free to sell the place. After we’re gone.”

  “I wouldn’t… I don’t know.”

  “Well, think it over, if you’d like,” Jack said. “We aren’t rushing off to the grave yet, are we, love?”

  “No. I hope not anytime soon. But Garrett, whatever you decide, we want you to understand how much you’ve meant to us. We are proud of the man you’ve become.”

  “Mabel, you’re embarrassing the boy.”

  “Please let me finish. It is true, what Jack said. We wouldn’t be here, this farm wouldn’t be here, if it weren’t for you and all your hard work. We don’t have much in
this world, but we want to offer you what little we do have.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, isn’t there anybody else, somebody from your family?” Garrett slid the papers back toward Jack.

  “Nope. You’re the closest we’ve got,” Jack said.

  “I was never expecting anything like this.”

  “We know. But it’s the right thing to do.”

  “I should talk it over with my folks,” Garrett said. “But I guess it’s mostly up to you two.”

  “We’ve never been more sure,” Jack said, and he reached across the table and shook his hand again.

  CHAPTER 38

  It was only the middle of November, but the snow lay heavy and deep across the land. Garrett went on foot to search for tracks. Wolf, marten, mink, coyote, fox—but it was wolverine he had his heart set on. He was a trapper of experience, and yet every winter this one animal eluded him. He couldn’t have put it to words, but he hungered after its bold will, its ferocious and solitary manner. To enter the wolverine’s territory, he would have to travel farther into the mountains than he ever had before.

  He hiked up from the riverbed into the foothills, and as the land steepened, he wished he had worn snowshoes. He carried a light pack with enough supplies to get him through the night if necessary, but in this weather he would be wet and cold. As the morning wore on, it began to snow again, and he considered turning back. But always the next ridge, the draw beyond, lured him on. Maybe just ahead he would find a rocky, narrow valley and wolverine tracks. When he crested a foothill dotted with spruce and saw spread before him a marsh, its hummocks of grass covered in snow, he turned to go back. There would be no wolverine here, and the fresh snow was burying any tracks.

  He was stopped by a sound like a woodstove bellows, air forced hard. He spun around and saw something at the other end of the marsh. He crouched low behind a birch log and squinted against the falling snow.