The Snow Child: A Novel (11 page)

“I know I’m going to talk your ear right off tonight. It’s just so good to have a woman to visit with. Those boys, they do their best, but really they’re happier if I keep quiet. Around the dinner table it’s always grunt, harrumph, give me some more of this and that. Me, I like to have a good sit-down and talk. That’s about all I really miss about town sometimes. Just a good conversation now and then. I don’t even care too much what we talk about.”

She then went on to talk about last year’s crops and the railroad’s plans to expand, how the bigwigs from back in Washington had come all the way to the Territory to inspect the tracks and pose for photographs, and how all of this mining and expansion would mean more demand for farm goods. Then she talked about the wolves that were running the river
and how their younger son wanted to trap a few for the bounty money.

“That boy of mine hasn’t showed up yet, has he? He’s supposed to meet us here, coming by horse on the river.”

Then Esther asked about the fox Jack had seen in the fields. “They’ll snatch your chickens as soon as they get a chance,” she said. “You ought to shoot him next time you see him.”

Never in her life had anyone suggested Mabel shoot something. She didn’t mention she had never picked up a gun. It seemed an embarrassing fact in front of Esther.

“Oh. Yes,” she said. “I suppose so.” She was preparing to say that she had indeed seen the fox, with a little girl, right near their barn, but just then the door burst open.

“Well, call it beginner’s luck,” George said. “Jack’s gone and shot the biggest moose in the entire valley. Gals, you’ve got to come and see this.”

Mabel tried to imagine what she would see in the barn as she followed George and Esther through the snow. She expected an entire animal, still in its skin and fur, still a moose. When she stepped into the lantern light and saw the disembodied antlers atop their bloody stump, she drew in a breath.

“Holy Moses!” Esther said.

“That’s exactly what I said, Mom. Isn’t it?” and the boy turned to Jack. “Ho-ly Moses.” His excited, youthful voice startled Mabel nearly as much as the scene before her.

“Those antlers got to go seventy inches across,” Garrett said, posing behind them like an African hunter with his trophy.

Suddenly Jack grabbed her about the waist from behind,
swung her around to face him, and for a second lifted her off her feet.

“I did it, love. I got our moose!” He kissed her quick and hard on the neck, like he was a much younger man, and she a younger woman. He smelled of wild animal and moonshine, and his eyes twinkled from drink. When he set her back down on the straw floor, she was disoriented.

“Oh,” was all she could manage.

The barn was a garble of talk and cheers while Jack told how he had heard something behind him, turned around, and here was this bull moose just a few strides from his own field, and he had shot it, and then Garrett came along and he couldn’t have done it without him. A bottle was passed none too discreetly among the men and the two older sons, and each held it up and called out “Cheers!” while Garrett begged in vain for a swig.

“Not just yet, sprout,” Esther said, and then she took a drink herself, and the men all laughed. Mabel kept quietly to herself. But Esther turned to her and held out the bottle.

“Oh come, come,” she said playfully. “Drink a toast to your hunter!” So Mabel took the moonshine and held the cold glass to her mouth. The vapor alone was enough to make her cough, but she tipped it back and let the icy-hot liquid splash against her lips, and then she coughed and coughed and handed the bottle back while everyone laughed merrily.

“So no coal mine for you this year, eh, Jack?” George asked.

“Suppose not. I guess we’ll have an old-fashioned Alaskan winter—moose and potatoes until we can stand them no more.”

Mabel smiled up at Jack and knew she should be glad, but she couldn’t rid her mind of the sawed edge of skull bone at her feet.

Just when her hands were going numb with cold, everyone decided to go back to the cabin for dinner. Jack took the lantern down from its hook on a beam and wrapped an arm around Mabel’s shoulders as they walked through the snow. Suddenly she was married to a northern hunter, a woodsman who gutted moose and toasted moonshine in a barn. Everything was topsy-turvy and unfamiliar.

The raucous party made its way into the cabin, all of them talking at once and shaking snow from their clothes. When Jack took off his coat, his arms were plastered with cracked, dried blood, and it was smeared across his shirt and pants. No one else noticed, but he looked at Mabel and down at himself. “Suppose I should wash up before dinner.”

Garrett brought in a gunnysack and set it on the kitchen counter. From it Esther took a veined, rounded muscle the size of a bread loaf and Mabel realized it was the animal’s heart. Esther began to slice it thinly with a knife.

“Heat up a pan, dear,” she said over her shoulder to Mabel. “We’ll have some of this with dinner. Fresh like this, there’s nothing better than moose heart.”

Before Mabel could think or move, Esther had a cast-iron pan heating on the woodstove. “Hand me one of those onions, will you? I’ll cut one up to throw in the pan.”

The next hour was a blur to Mabel, her head swimming in the smell of frying meat and onions and the noise of boisterous talking. Someone must have mashed the boiled potatoes. Someone must have put out the bread and sliced carrots and opened a jar of onion relish. Before she understood all that had happened, they were crowded at the table, Garrett with his
plate on his lap, and Mabel was cutting a piece of moose heart with a steak knife and taking her first bite.

“Tasty, isn’t it?” Esther asked.

Mabel nodded and chewed and tried not to think about the muscle contracting and beating inside a moose’s rib cage. She tasted seared flesh and blood like copper, and it wasn’t as awful as she had feared.

As the talk dwindled and everyone finished their meals, Esther looked across the table and said, “Weren’t you getting ready to tell me something? When George came busting through the door?”

“Oh, I can’t recall just now.”

“We were saying something about the fox…”

Mabel was flustered.

“I did mean to ask you… but it can wait until later,” she said.

“Oh, no one’s paying any attention. Out with it, then.” Esther waved impatiently. Mabel saw she was right, the men were telling hunting stories and oblivious to them.

“Well, I did mean to ask—do you know if there’s a little girl living anywhere near our place? A little blonde girl?”

“A little girl? Let me think. There are only a few families in the valley right now. Most of the homesteads are run by single men who struck out with gold and such. The Wrights have a couple of girls, but they’re redheads. Curly red hair, and cheeks like little apples. And they’re nowhere near here. They’re more the other side of us. Out your way here, well, there are a couple of Indian camps up the river, but they’re usually there only in the summer, when the salmon are running. And, of course, there’s not a single blonde among them.”

Esther rose and began gathering the dishes and stacking
them on the table. The men paused in their conversation to hand her silverware and knives, but went back to their talk.

“The reason I ask,” Mabel said, leaning toward Esther and speaking quietly, “is we had a child on our place the other night. Jack got up in the middle of the night and he saw a girl run through the trees. The next morning—we had built this little snowman, well, a little snow girl, actually—and it was knocked over and the scarf and mittens were gone. It sounds silly, but I think the child must have done it. It’s not that I mind, really. I would have given them to her if she needed them so. I’m just worried she was lost or something. Imagine, a little girl out in the woods in winter like that.”

Esther stopped gathering the dishes and focused on Mabel. “Here, at your place, you’re saying? You saw a little blonde child just sprinting about?”

“Yes. Isn’t that odd?”

“You’re sure about that? Sure it wasn’t just an animal or something?”

“No, I’m certain. We even saw her tracks. Jack tried to follow them for a while, but they just went around and around in the woods. Then the other day I saw her, in the trees beyond the barn.”

“That’s the dardnest thing. I mean there’s the Wright girls, but that’s a good ten miles off, probably more…” Esther’s voice trailed off as she sat down. Then she looked across the table into Mabel’s eyes and smiled gently.

“I don’t mean to speak out of turn, Mabel, but this isn’t an easy place to get along. The winters are long, and sometimes it starts to get to you. Around here, they call it cabin fever. You get down in the dumps, everything’s off kilter and sometimes your mind starts playing tricks on you.” Esther reached across
the table and put a hand over Mabel’s. “You start seeing things that you’re afraid of… or things you’ve always wished for.”

Mabel let Esther hold her hand for a moment, but then pulled away.

“No, you don’t understand. We saw her. And we both saw the tracks, and the mittens and scarf are gone.”

“Maybe it was an animal, or the wind. All sorts of explanations.”

The men had stopped talking. They were all looking at her.

“It’s true. Isn’t it, Jack? We saw her. In her little blue coat.”

Jack shifted in his chair and shrugged. “It could have been anything,” he said.

“No. No.” Mabel was angry. “It was a little girl. You saw her, too. And there were her footprints in the snow.”

“Well, maybe you could show us the tracks,” Esther said. “Garrett here is a good tracker. He’d be able to tell something.”

Mabel wanted to yell or cry, but she spoke each word carefully.

“The tracks are gone. The blizzard last week covered them all.”

“Blizzard? It hasn’t snowed in—” Esther stopped and pinched her lips together.

Mabel stood and took the dishes to the counter, glad to be free of the table. Jack avoided her eyes as he went to the woodstove and added another log. She busied herself with dessert—sourdough biscuits topped with Esther’s homemade jam. As Mabel worked, Esther came up behind her and gently squeezed her elbow. It was an expression of friendship and sympathy, but it left Mabel miserable.

Soon the cabin was again full of lighthearted talk about the seasons, working the land, and storing food for the winter. George and Esther had Jack and the boys laughing with their
wild stories of ill-mannered black bears, outhouse pranks, and stubborn horses. No one talked about the little girl, or the footprints that had vanished in the snow.

Darkness settled around the cabin, and Mabel glanced out the window occasionally with the thought that she might see the child, but there was only her own reflection in the lamplight.

J
ack started with a biscuit, one of Mabel’s sourdough biscuits.

He had risen early to haul the meat home in the wagon, and after he’d hung it from a beam in the barn and put away the horse, he went in for lunch. When Mabel wasn’t watching, he slipped a biscuit in his pocket and told her he was going out to work in the barn. Instead he went to the edge of the woods.

It seemed wrong to bait a child this way. As a boy he had enticed deer and raccoons with morsels of food, and his long patience often paid off. He once had a doe take a carrot right from his fingers before it fled to the trees. He never forgot the moment, after what seemed like hours of crouching and waiting, when the doe bent her long neck down to him and took the carrot. He’d felt the touch of her soft muzzle on his fingers.