A Breath of Snow and Ashes

sneaked up on him unheard.

“Grandmother,” he said, and nodded in wry acknowledgment of her skill. Ancient she might be, but no one moved more softly. Hence her reputation; the children of the village lived in respectful dread of her, having heard that she could vanish into air, only to rematerialize in some distant spot, right before the guilty eyes of evil-doers.

“Come with me, Wolf’s Brother,” she said, and turned away, not waiting for his response. None was expected.

She was already out of sight by the time he had laid the half-made bow under a bush, taken up his fallen knife, and whistled for Rollo, but he caught her up with no difficulty.

She had led him away from the village, through the forest, to the head of a deer trail. There she had given him a bag of salt and an armlet of wampum and bade him go.

“And you went?” Brianna asked, after a long moment of silence. “Just—like that?”

“Just like that,” he said, and looked at her for the first time since they had left their campsite that morning. His face was gaunt, hollow with memories. Sweat gleamed on his cheekbones, but he was so pale that the dotted lines of his tattoos stood out sharp—perforations, lines along which his face might come apart.

She swallowed a few times before she could speak, but managed a tone much like his own when she did.

“Is it much farther?” she asked. “Where we’re going?”

“No,” he said softly. “We’re nearly there.” And turned to walk again before her.



HALF AN HOUR LATER, they had reached a place where the stream cut deep between its banks, widening into a small gorge. Silver birch and hobblebush grew thick, sprouting from the rocky walls, smooth-skinned roots twisting through the stones like fingers clawing at the earth.

The notion gave Brianna a slight prickle at the neck. The waterfalls were far above them now, and the noise of the water had lessened, the creek talking to itself as it purled over rocks and shushed through mats of cress and duckweed.

She thought the going might be easier above, on the lip of the gorge, but Ian led her down into it without hesitation, and she followed likewise, scrambling over the tumble of boulders and tree roots, hampered by her long gun. Rollo, scorning this clumsy exertion, plunged into the creek, which was several feet deep, and swam, ears clamped back against his head so that he looked like a giant otter.

Ian had recovered his self-possession in the concentration of navigating the rough ground. He paused now and then, reaching back to help her down a particularly tricky fall of rock, or over a tree uprooted in some recent flood—but he didn’t meet her eyes, and the shuttered planes of his face gave nothing away.

Her curiosity had reached fever pitch, but clearly he had done speaking for the moment. It was just past midday, but the light under the birches was a shadowed gold that made everything seem somehow hushed, almost enchanted. She could make no sensible guess as to the purpose of this expedition, in light of what Ian had told her—but the place was one where almost anything seemed possible.

She thought suddenly of her first father—of Frank Randall—and felt a small, remembered warmth at the thought. She would like so much to show him this place.

They had taken holidays often in the Adirondacks; different mountains, different trees—but something of the same hush and mystery in the shadowed glades and rushing water. Her mother had come sometimes, but more often it was just the two of them, hiking far up into the trees, not talking much, but sharing a deep content in the company of the sky.

Suddenly, the sound of the water rose again; there was another fall nearby.

“Just here, coz,” Ian said softly, and beckoned her to follow with a turn of the head.

They stepped out from under the trees and she saw that the gorge dropped suddenly away, the water falling twenty feet or more into a pool below. Ian led her past the head of the falls; she could hear the water rushing past below, but the top of the bank was thick with sedges, and they had to push their way through, tramping down the yellowing stems of goldenrod and dodging the panicked whir of grasshoppers rocketing up underfoot.

“Look,” Ian said, glancing back, and reached to part the screen of laurel in front of her.

“Wow!”

She recognized it immediately. There was no mistaking it, in spite of the fact that much of it was invisible, still buried in the crumbling bank on the far side of the gorge. Some recent flood had raised the level of the creek, undercutting the bank so that a huge block of stone and dirt had fallen away, revealing its buried mystery.

The raked arches of ribs rose huge from the dirt, and she had the impression of a scatter of things half-buried in the rubble at the foot of the bank: enormous things, knobbed and twisted. They might be bones or simply boulders—but it was the tusk that caught her eye, jutting from the bank in a massive curve, intensely familiar, and the more startling for its very familiarity.

“Ye ken it?” Ian asked eagerly, watching her face. “Ye’ve seen something like it?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and though the sun was warm on her back, she shivered, gooseflesh pebbling her forearms. Not from fear, but sheer awe at sight of it, and a kind of incredulous joy. “Oh, yes. I have.”

“What?” Ian’s voice was still pitched low, as though the creature might hear them. “What is it?”

“A mammoth,” she said, and found that she was whispering, too. The sun had passed its zenith; already the bottom of the creekbed lay in shadow. Light struck the stained curve of ancient ivory, and threw the vault of the high-crowned skull that held it into sharp relief. The skull was fixed in the soil at a slight angle, the single visible tusk rising high, the eye socket black as mystery.

The shiver came again, and she hunched her shoulders. Easy to feel that it might at any moment wrench itself free of the clay and turn that massive head toward them, empty-eyed, clods of dirt raining from tusks and bony shoulders as it shook itself and began to walk, the ground vibrating as long toes struck and sank in the muddy soil.

“That’s what it’s called—mammoth? Aye, well . . . it is verra big.” Ian’s voice dispelled the illusion of incipient movement, and she was able finally to take her eyes off it—though she felt she must glance back, every second or so, to be sure it was still there.

“The Latin name is Mammuthus,” she said, clearing her throat. “There’s a complete skeleton in a museum in New York. I’ve seen it often. And I’ve seen pictures of them in books.” She glanced back at the creature in the bank.

“A museum? So it’s not a thing ye’ve got where—when”—he stumbled a bit—“where ye come from? Not alive then, I mean?” He seemed rather disappointed.

She wanted to laugh at the picture of mammoths roaming Boston Common, or wallowing on the bank of the Cambridge River. In fact, she had a moment’s pang of disappointment that they hadn’t been there; it would have been so wonderful to see them.

“No,” she said regretfully. “They all died thousands and thousands of years ago. When the ice came.”

“Ice?” Ian was glancing back and forth between her and the mammoth, as though afraid one or the other might do something untoward.

“The Ice Age. The world got colder, and sheets of ice spread down from the north. A lot of animals went extinct—I mean, they couldn’t find food, and all died.”

Ian was pale with excitement.

“Aye. Aye, I’ve heard such stories.”

“You have?” She was surprised at that.

“Aye. But ye say it’s real.” He swung his head to look at the mammoth’s bones once more. “An animal, aye, like a bear or a possum?”

“Yes,” she said, puzzled by his attitude, which seemed to alternate between eagerness and dismay. “Bigger, but yes. What else would it be?”

“Ah,” he said, and took a deep breath. “Well, d’ye see, that’s what I needed ye to tell me, coz. See, the Kahnyen’kehaka—they have stories of . . . things. Animals that are really spirits. And if ever I saw a thing that might be a spirit—” He was still looking at the skeleton, as though it might walk out of the earth, and she saw a slight shiver pass through him.

She couldn’t prevent a similar shiver, looking at the massive creature. It towered above them, grim and awful, and only her knowledge of what it was kept her from wanting to cower and run.

“It’s real,” she repeated, as much to reassure herself as him. “And it’s dead. Really dead.”

“How d’ye know these things?” he asked, intently curious. “It’s auld, ye say. You’d be much further away from—that”—he jerked his chin at the giant skeleton—“in your own time than we are now. How can ye ken more about it than folk do now?”

She shook her head, smiling a little, and helpless to explain.

“When did you find this, Ian?”

“Last month. I came up the gorge”—he gestured with his chin—“and there it was. I near beshit myself.”

“I can imagine,” she said, stifling an urge to laugh.

“Aye,” he said, not noticing her amusement in his desire to explain. “I should have been sure that it was Rawenniyo—a spirit, a god—save for the dog.”

Rollo had climbed out of the stream, and having shaken the water from his fur, was squirming on his back in a patch of crushed turtlehead, tail wagging in pleasure, and clearly oblivious to the silent giant in the cliff above.

“What do you mean? That Rollo wasn’t afraid of it?”

Ian nodded.

“Aye. He didna behave as though there were anything there at all. And yet . . .” He hesitated, darting a glance at her. “Sometimes, in the wood. He—he sees things. Things I canna see. Ken?”

“I ken,” she said, a ripple of unease returning. “Dogs do see . . . things.” She remembered her own dogs; in particular, Smoky, the big Newfoundland, who would sometimes in the evening suddenly raise his head, listening, hackles rising as his eyes followed . . . something . . . that passed through the room and disappeared.

He nodded, relieved that she knew what he was talking about.

“They do. I ran, when I saw that”—he nodded at the cliff—“and ducked behind a tree. But the dog went on about his business, paying it no mind. And so I thought, well, just maybe it’s no what I think, after all.”

“And what did you think?” she asked. “A Rawenniyo, you said?” As the excitement of seeing the mammoth began to recede, she remembered what they were theoretically doing here. “Ian—you said what you wanted to show me had to do with your wife. Is this—” She gestured toward the cliff, brows raised.

He didn’t answer directly, but tilted his head back, studying the jut of the giant tusks.

“I heard stories, now and then. Among the Mohawk, I mean. They’d speak of strange things that someone found, hunting. Spirits trapped in the rock, and how they came to be there. Evil things, for the most part. And I thought to myself, if that should be what this is . . .”

He broke off and turned to her, serious and intent.

“I needed ye to tell me, aye? Whether that’s what it is or no. Because if it was, then perhaps what I’ve been thinking is wrong.”

“It’s not,” she assured him. “But what on earth have you been thinking?”

“About God,” he said, surprising her again. He licked his lips, unsure how to go on.

“Yeksa’a—the child. I didna have her christened,” he said. “I couldna. Or perhaps I could—ye can do it yourself, ken, if there’s no priest. But I hadna the courage to try. I—never saw her. They’d wrapped her already. . . . They wouldna have liked it, if I’d tried to . . .” His voice died away.

“Yeksa’a,” she said softly. “Was that your—your daughter’s name?”

He shook his head, his mouth twisting wryly.

“It only means ‘wee girl.’ The Kahnyen’kehaka dinna give a name to a child when it’s born. Not until later. If . . .” His voice trailed off, and he cleared his throat. “If it lives. They wouldna think of naming a child unborn.”

“But you did?” she asked gently.

He raised his head and took a breath that had a damp sound to it, like wet bandages pulled from a fresh wound.

“Iseabaìl,” he said, and she knew it was the first—perhaps would be the only—time he’d spoken it aloud. “Had it been a son, I would ha’ called him Jamie.” He glanced at her, with the shadow of a smile. “Only in my head, ken.”

He let out all his breath then with a sigh and put his face down upon his knees, back hunched.

“What I am thinking,” he said after a moment, his voice much too controlled, “is this. Was it me?”

“Ian! You mean your fault that the baby died? How could it be?”

“I left,” he said simply, straightening up. “Turned away. Stopped being a Christian, being Scots. They took me to the stream, scrubbed me wi’ sand to take away the white blood. They gave me my name—Okwaho’kenha—and said I was Mohawk. But I wasna, not really.”

He sighed deeply again, and she put a hand on his back, feeling the bumps of his backbone press through the leather of his shirt. He didn’t eat nearly enough, she thought.

“But I wasna what I had been, either,” he went on, sounding almost matter-of-fact. “I tried to be what they wanted, ken? So I left off praying to God or the Virgin Mother, or Saint Bride. I listened to what Emily said, when she’d tell me about her gods, the spirits that dwell in the trees and all. And when I went to the sweat lodge wi’ the men, or sat by the hearth and heard the stories . . . they seemed as real to me as Christ and His saints ever had.”

He turned his head and looked up at her suddenly, half-bewildered, half-defiant.

“I am the Lord thy God,” he said. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me. But I did, no? That’s mortal sin, is it not?”

She wanted to say no, of course not. Or to protest weakly that she was not a priest, how could she say? But neither of those would do; he was not looking for easy reassurance, and a weak-minded abnegation of responsibility would not serve him.

She took a deep breath and blew it out. It had been a good many years since she’d been taught the Baltimore Catechism, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you forget.

“The conditions of mortal sin are these,” she said, reciting the words precisely from memory. “First, that the action be grievously wrong. Secondly, that you know the action is wrong. And thirdly—that you give full consent to it.”

He was watching her intently.

“Well, it was wrong, and I suppose I kent that—aye, I did ken that. Especially—” His face darkened further, and she wondered what he was recalling.

“But . . . how should I serve a God who would take a child for her father’s sins?” Without waiting for an answer, he glanced toward the cliff face, where the remains of the mammoth lay frozen in time. “Or was it them? Was it not my God at all, but the Iroquois spirits? Did they ken I wasna really Mohawk—that I held back a part of myself from them?”

He looked back at her, dead serious.

“Gods are jealous, are they no?”

“Ian . . .” She swallowed, helpless. But she had to say something.

“What you did—or didn’t do—that wasn’t wrong, Ian,” she said firmly. “Your daughter . . . she was half-Mohawk. It wasn’t wrong to let her be buried according to her mother’s ways. Your wife—Emily—she would have been terribly upset, wouldn’t she, if you’d insisted on baptizing the baby?”

“Aye, maybe. But . . .” He closed his eyes, hands clenched hard into fists on his thighs. “Where is she, then?” he whispered, and she could see tears trembling on his lashes. “The others—they were never born; God will have them in His hand. But wee Iseabaìl—she’ll not be in heaven, will she? I canna bear the thought that she—that she might be . . . lost, somewhere. Wandering.”

“Ian . . .”

“I hear her, greeting. In the night.” His breath was coming in deep, sobbing gasps. “I canna help, I canna find her!”

“Ian!” The tears were running down her own cheeks. She gripped his wrists fiercely, squeezed as hard as she could. “Ian, listen to me!”

He drew a deep, trembling breath, head bent. Then he nodded, very slightly.

She rose onto her knees and gathered him tight against her, his head cradled on her breasts. Her cheek pressed against the top of his head, his hair warm and springy against her mouth.

“Listen to me,” she said softly. “I had another father. The man who raised me. He’s dead now.” For a long time now, the sense of desolation at his loss had been muted, softened by new love, distracted by new obligations. Now it swept over her, newly fresh, and sharp as a stab wound in its agony. “I know—I know he’s in heaven.”

Was he? Could he be dead and in heaven, if not yet born? And yet he was dead to her, and surely heaven took no heed of time.

She lifted her face toward the cliff, but spoke to neither bones nor God.

“Daddy,” she said, and her voice broke on the word, but she held her cousin hard. “Daddy, I need you.” Her voice sounded small, and pathetically unsure. But there was no other help to be had.

“I need you to find Ian’s little girl,” she said, as firmly as she could, trying to summon her father’s face, to see him there among the shifting leaves at the clifftop. “Find her, please. Hold her in your arms, and make sure that she’s safe. Take—please take care of her.”

She stopped, feeling obscurely that she should say something else, something more ceremonious. Make the sign of the cross? Say “amen”?

“Thank you, Daddy,” she said softly, and cried as though her father were newly dead, and she bereft, orphaned, lost, and crying in the night. Ian’s arms were wrapped around her, and they clung tight together, squeezing hard, the warmth of the late sun heavy on their heads.

She stood still within his arms when she stopped crying, her head resting on his shoulder. He patted her back, very gently, but didn’t push her away.

“Thank you,” he whispered in her ear. “Are ye all right, Brianna?”

“Uh-huh.” She straightened and stood away from him, swaying a little, as though she were drunk. She felt drunk, too, her bones gone soft and malleable, everything around her faintly out of focus, save for certain things that caught her eye: a brilliant patch of pink lady’s slipper, a stone fallen from the cliff face, its surface streaked red with iron. Rollo, almost sitting on Ian’s foot, big head pressed anxiously against his master’s thigh.

“Are you all right, Ian?” she asked.

“I will be.” His hand sought Rollo’s head, and gave the pointed ears a cursory rub of reassurance. “Maybe. Just . . .”

“What?”

“Are ye . . . are ye sure, Brianna?”

She knew what he was asking; it was a question of faith. She drew herself up to her full height, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“I’m a Roman Catholic and I believe in vitamins,” she declared stoutly. “And I knew my father. Of course I’m sure.”

He took a deep, sighing breath and his shoulders slumped as he let it out. He nodded then, and the lines of his face relaxed a little.

She left him sitting on a rock, and made her way down to the stream to splash cold water on her face. The shadow of the cliff fell across the creek and the air was cold with the scents of earth and pine trees. In spite of the chill, she remained there for a while, on her knees.

She could still hear the voices murmuring in trees and water, but paid no attention to them. Whoever they were, they were no threat to her or hers—and not at odds with the presence that she felt so strongly nearby.

“I love you, Daddy,” she whispered, closing her eyes, and felt at peace.

Ian must be better, too, she thought, when she made her way at length back through the rocks to where he sat. Rollo had left him to investigate a promising hole at the foot of a tree, and she knew the dog wouldn’t have left Ian, had he considered his master to be in distress.

She was about to ask him whether their business here was complete, when he stood up, and she saw that it wasn’t.

“Why I brought ye here,” he said abruptly. “I wanted to know about that—” He nodded at the mammoth. “But I meant to ask ye a question. Advice, like.”

“Advice? Ian, I can’t give you any advice! How could I tell you what to do?”

“I think ye’re maybe the only one who can,” he said with a lopsided smile. “You’re my family, you’re a woman—and ye care for me. Yet ye ken more even than Uncle Jamie, perhaps, because of who—or what”—his mouth twisted a little—“ye are.”

“I don’t know more,” she said, and looked up at the bones in the rock. “Only—different things.”

“Aye,” he said, and took a deep breath.

“Brianna,” he said very softly. “We’re no wed—we never shall be.” He looked away for an instant, then back. “But if we had been marrit, I should have loved ye and cared for ye, so well as I could. I trust you, that ye’d have done the same by me. Am I right?”

“Oh, Ian.” Her throat was still thick, raspy with grief; the words came out in a whisper. She touched his face, cool-skinned and bony, and traced the line of tattooed dots with a thumb. “I love you now.”

“Aye, well,” he said still softly. “I ken that.” He lifted a hand and put it over her own, big and hard. He pressed her palm against his cheek for a moment, then his fingers closed over hers and he brought their linked hands down, but