The Snow Child: A Novel (33 page)

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.

Alpenglow, Mabel whispered.

She felt the awe of walking into a cathedral, the sense that she was being shown something powerful and intimate, and in its presence must speak softly, if at all. She stared into that color, trying to imagine a father who could name his child for such beauty and then abandon her.

We should go, Faina said. It will be night soon.

The child led Mabel back to the homestead, to the warm cabin where Jack waited with hot tea and bread he had baked in a Dutch oven.

So, he said. What did you see?

Dear Mabel,

Your letters and sketches have become quite an attraction at our home. Whenever one arrives, we host a dinner party and invite many of our closest friends and relatives. With your permission, I have read the letters aloud and your sketches have been passed from one hand to the next, along with exclamations of “Remarkable!” “Such beauty!” More than once I’ve been told that you are the frontier equivalent of an Italian master studying human anatomy. Your sketches of the sable’s snarling teeth and clawed feet were among the favorites this last night, as were your studies of the alder cones and winterkilled grasses. Your letters, too, catch glimpses of this wild place that has become your home. You always did have a talent for expressing yourself, and perhaps no other time in your life have you had such wondrous sights to express. Our only wish is that you would write more often. I do believe I will hold on to everything you send, and someday you should publish a book of your drawings and observations. There is something fanciful and yet feral about them.

Along with your interest in the tale of the snow maiden, I am reminded of the time you spent as a child chasing fairies in the woods near our home. As I recall, you slept more than one night
in those great oak trees, and when Mother found you the next morning you would swear you had seen fairies that flew like butterflies and lit up the night like lightning bugs. I remember with some shame that the rest of us teased you about seeing such spirits, but now my own grandchildren chase similar fancies and I do not discourage them. In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.

Your loving sister,

Ada

E
sther burst into the cabin like a friendly hen, flapping and chattering and nearly knocking Mabel over as she tried to open the door for her. In one hand she held a towel-covered cast-iron pot and with the other she hugged Mabel and kissed her on the cheek.

“So, is this what it takes to have dinner with you two?” she said and pushed past Mabel to set the pot on the woodstove. “George’s got the dessert. That is, if he doesn’t eat it on the way in here. Should be enough chicken and dumplings for all of us. Lynx and dumplings, I should say, but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Guess we could call it ‘kitten and dumplings.’ ” Esther laughed and flung her coat across the back of a chair.

“Lynx? You’ve cooked a lynx?”

“Oh, don’t make that face. Have you ever had it? Absolutely, positively the best meat you’ll ever taste. Garrett had it live in a snare, so he killed it clean and brought home the meat. Guess we raised him right after all.”

“Has he come, too?”

“Nope. That’s the only reason we might have enough food. That boy could eat a side of beef and then ask for seconds. But he’s out these next few nights, siwashing it on his long trapline.”

“Siwashing?”

“Like an Indian. No tent. No creature comforts. He packs light and travels hard.”

“Oh.”

“You got a spoon I can stir this with?”

Before she could help, Esther had found one, and Mabel watched with fond amusement as Esther once again took over her home. Within minutes she had tied one of Mabel’s aprons around her waist, taste-tested the lynx, set the table, and added another log to the fire, though Mabel had just stocked it.

“I want to hear all about what you’ve been up to. But first, you’ve got to take a nip of this.” Esther pulled a small glass bottle from the back pocket of her men’s work pants and set it on the table. “Cranberry cordial. Positively heavenly. Quick. Get us some glasses so we can finish it off before the men come.”

Mabel didn’t move from her seat, as Esther was already on her way to the cupboard. She came back with two of Mabel’s jelly jars and filled each half full with the deep red liquid. It was sweet and tart and thick on Mabel’s tongue, and it warmed her throat.

“It’s delicious.”

“Told you. Here, have a bit more. This is my last bottle, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let George have any of it. He polished off the last of my blueberry cordial without even asking!”